way among the corpses. I didn't know it, but it wasn't so bad there, because the worst of the kills happen after one side runs – and we didn't run, and neither did the Carians, so there were not as many dead as there might have been.
It was down in the valley that the corpses became thick, and they were all Greek. Hades, but they were thick, honey. The darkness hid the worst of it, except for the sounds, but I still had to stop and retch when I saw a dog rooting inside the chest cavity of a man and his eyes seemed to move. The slaves saw and dropped the body. When I had finished retching I put my spear in the man's throat to make sure.
I think the slaves wanted to run away.
I didn't blame them, but I wiped the spear and then myself. 'If you won't carry him to the ships, I'll run you down and add you to the pile of bodies,' I said.
Neither of them met my eye. They picked up the spear-poles and we started off again, stumbling and cursing.
There were pinpoints of light in the dark, most of them in a clump to the west. We made to skirt around them, and ran into our first patrol.
I had assumed that the battlefield was empty except for scavengers and mourners, but of course the Persians, who organized everything in their lives, had patrols to keep the scavengers from the corpses of their own slain until the sun should rise again. I heard them in time, and the three of us lay flat. There was some moonlight, just enough to make the whole scene hazy and hard to see, like a foul dream. I lay there, the pale circle of my face hidden in my cloak, and listened.
All I could hear was a dying man at my side grunting. He tried to grab my elbow.
'Please?' he managed. The poor bastard had lain there for six hours or more. No water. I could smell his guts.
I elbowed him. Now I could hear footsteps.
'He-eh? He-eh?' the dying man said. And little grunts and mewls, like those a toddler makes.
'Camel-fuckers!' a Persian voice said. They were close. 'Come to loot our dead, the cowards. Effeminate boy- fuckers! I hate the Greeks. Run from a battle and come back to steal from the dead!'
The man ranted on and on, as men do after battles. I didn't know his voice.
'Shush, brother,' another voice said. 'Shush. Ahriman walks the dark. No man should curse here.'
'Heh-eh,' the dying man cried. He gave a convulsive jerk.
'What was that?' the first Persian said.
'Men take a long time to die. Come, brother. Keep walking. If I stop, I will have to start getting water for these poor bastards.' The second Persian sounded familiar. Was he someone I knew?
It didn't matter, because even Cyrus and Pharnakes would kill me if they took me, or so I thought.
'Boy-fuckers,' the man who was angry spat, and they walked off. I heard him stumble on a corpse, and he fell. 'Ah!' he cried. 'I am foul with the juices of his body.' His voice shook. 'I am unclean!'
The second Persian spent half the night reassuring him. He was a good man, that one. While he talked to his frightened brother, he emptied his canteen into two wounded men, and then he started killing them. I heard him, and though it sounds foul, I knew that he was no murdering fury, but a bringer of peace.
'Eh-eh-eh…' said the dying man at my elbow.
I looked at him, and he was younger than me – and kalos, even at the point of death, with big, beautiful eyes that wanted to know how his world had turned to shit. His skin, where it was not smeared with sweat and puke, was smooth and lovely. He was somebody's son.
I drew my short dagger, really my eating knife, from under my scale shirt where I keep it, and I put my lips by his ear.
'Say goodnight,' I said. I tried to sound like Pater when he put me to bed. 'Say goodnight, laddy.'
'G'night,' he managed. Like a child, the poor bastard. Go to Elysium with the thought of home, I prayed, and put the point of my eating knife into his brain.
Give me some fucking wine.
Oh, war is glorious, thugater. I dream of him. I never saw his face in the dark, you see. He could have been anyone. Any one of hundreds of men I've put down myself. Battlefields, sieges, duels, ship fights – all leave that wastage of dead and near dead, and every one of them was a man, with all of a man's life, before the iron or the bronze ripped the shade from him.
It's funny. I have killed so many men, but that one comes back to me in the dark, and then I drink more and try to forget.
Here, fill it. The Persians lingered and lingered, but at last the older one got his brother to walk away into the dark, and I picked myself up, found the two slaves and we headed west to avoid more Persian patrols.
West brought the sound of mourning. Here the Persians and the Lydians had reaped the Ionians like weeds at the edge of a field, cutting them down from behind as they fled. Now local women were out looking for their men, and fathers and children, with torches. The Persians didn't disturb them, and they thought we were more of the same – which we were, or close enough.
As the moon climbed, we could see the curved line of corpses like sea-wrack on a beach, and men and women desperately turning them, pushing torches down to look into a face. Grim work.
I knew Heraclitus by his voice. He was talking to a boy and the boy was weeping by his side. I couldn't help myself. I walked up to him in the dark and he raised his torch.
'Doru!' he said. 'You live!'
I threw my arms around him. I wept. I was no different from the younger Persian – I was unmanned by my reaction to the fight and then to the battlefield.
He let me cry for as long as my heart beat a hundred times – no longer. 'You are searching for him too?' he asked.
'I – I came for Eualcidas. Of Euboea.' My voice shook. 'Searching for who?'
Heraclitus nodded. He had a torch and it made his face look like a statue's. His eyes were pools of darkness. 'Hipponax fell here, trying to keep the line from breaking,' he said.
'Ah.' I choked. I remember that suddenly I couldn't breathe. The weeping boy was Kylix, the slave. 'Is Briseis here?' I asked.
'Don't be a fool,' Heraclitus said. 'News won't even be in the city yet.' More softly, he asked, 'Will you help me find him?'
'Put the body down and rest,' I said to the slaves. 'These are friends.'
Lekthes came and touched my arm to get my attention. He pointed to the river, which was clear, just a stade away in the moonlight. 'We are close, master,' he said.
He didn't want to risk his soon-to-be-accomplished freedom, he meant.
'Stow it,' I growled. I came back to Heraclitus. 'You fought?' I asked. I had a hard time picturing him in the phalanx.
'Do I look like a slave?' he asked. 'Of course I fought.' He reached out and touched my sword. 'This is a bitter night for me, Doru. And for you – I know.' His eyes were shadowed, but I knew he was looking over my shoulder. 'Help me find him,' he said quickly.
'Of course, master,' I said.
I found him in a matter of moments. I knew his bronze-studded sandals. I had put them on his feet often enough.
I sobbed to see that alone of the men at that part of the line, he lay with his face to the foe and he had a great wound in his side where a spear had gone in under his armpit where his rank-mate should have protected him. A Mede lay by his head, and Hipponax's spear point was stuck in the man's ribs.
I assumed that Hipponax was dead, but that was not his fate, or mine. I touched him to roll him over and be sure, and he flinched and then screamed.
That scream was the worst sound I had ever heard.
It happens sometimes, that a man will go down on the field – a blow to the head or a sudden cut, and the shock of it puts him under. But later he awakens to the awful truth – that he is almost a corpse, lying amidst pain, waiting to die.
That was Hipponax's fate. He had a second wound, a cut that had gone right into his leather thorax, so that his guts glistened in the torchlight and lay hidden under his body, and when he moved, the pain must have been
