Marathon: Freedom or Death

was hard to speak to him. He felt the guilt that I did not feel. He felt that he had killed his son and deserved the wrath of the god, while I felt that I had acted hastily — selfishly — but that I had now learned my lesson and did not deserve the wrath of Apollo. Yet I had enough sense to see that I had far more culpability than this Cretan lord.

In fact, he was mistaking sorrow for guilt. I sat with him, night after night, held his hand and spoke to him of hunting, and of Crete, a place I knew well. I could get him to listen, and I could make him smile, and then some chance of speech would cast him back into the pit.

‘I am cursed,’ he said. ‘I have killed my son, and now my wife is barren.’

‘Take a concubine,’ I said, with all the arrogance of youth.

‘I cannot replace eighteen years of my life and his, just by making another squawking babe,’ he shot back — with more spirit than I’d seen so far.

‘Lord, you can. And then you must toil for as many years again, until he comes to manhood, so that your patronage is secure.’ I spoke carefully, for I felt I might be speaking wisdom.

He sighed. ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘You are young. When you have seen fifty winters, tell me how you feel about lasting through another fifteen seasons of war and the hunt. My joints hurt just lying here.’

The other man was a blasphemer. I could tell this because he swore by various gods every hour on the hour, and cursed the gods for setting him on Delos. He was a little man — in mind, not stature — and a lesson to anyone who would listen about the vices men can get into through idleness and superstition. I might have been a foolish young man, but I was the very king of piety next to Philocrates.

‘If you care so little for the gods, why did you come here and confess?’ I asked him.

He shrugged. ‘I swore an oath — nothing big — just part of a business deal. I never meant to pay the bastard — he was cheating me. But the priest of Zeus in Halicarnassus will not let me do any business in the agora until I atone.’ He shrugged. ‘All mummery. No greater liars or thieves than those priests.’ And grunted. ‘And now I have to put up with this. My money is as silver as everyone else’s. Fuck the gods. Why am I singled out? Because they think I should pay more.’ He spat.

I didn’t like his attitude, but I had to agree with the sense of his complaint. ‘You are hardly repentant,’ I said.

‘What are you, some kind of aspiring priest?’ he asked. ‘Fuck off. I’ll eat my bread and water for a week, and if they don’t take my sacrifice, I’ll sail away and let them dance for the money.’

‘But the god?’ I asked.

‘How much of a bumpkin are you?’ he asked me. ‘Listen, there’s a pair of bellows behind the altar — they manipulate them to decide which sacrifices are accepted and which rejected. Right? You understand, boy, or are you too thick? There are no gods. All you get is what you take.’

I felt the sort of shock that a man feels when lightning strikes too close at sea. I had thought of myself as a man of the world — I was a hardened killer, a soldier of fortune, a former pirate. But that men would manipulate the sacrifices of the gods? Or that this man would claim there were no gods?

Heraclitus told us that such men were contemptible, but very brave. ‘Only small men are incapable of seeing something greater than themselves,’ my master once said.

So I shook my head at Philocrates. ‘You are a sad case,’ I said.

He just smirked. ‘Bumpkin,’ he shot back.

The week was hard. I drank water and watched the sun, and I sang a hymn to Apollo every day. I set myself a task — to remember all the men I had killed. Of course, there were men I couldn’t remember — the Carians at Sardis and Ephesus had died in the anonymity of their armour, and the Phoenicians I’d killed on my ship during the mutiny didn’t even have faces in my memory — but I was able to conjure up fifty men in the theatre of my head, and that seemed a great many. And I had probably killed twice that, or even three times.

A week of consideration, and it seemed to me that the god was right to refuse my sacrifice. I killed too easily, I decided. It wasn’t a hard decision to reach. After all, Heraclitus had said as much most of the days of my youth.

When old Dion came for me, he was leading another black ram. ‘Did you dream?’ he asked.

I shrugged. ‘I had dreams,’ I said. ‘I dreamed once of a man I killed — a boy I put out of his misery on a battlefield. And I dreamed of a woman I love.’

Dion led me to the highest headland on the island — ten stades or more from our hut. The ram followed along obediently. Then he sat me down on a seat carved from the living rock.

‘And why do you think the god refused your sacrifice?’ he asked.

I looked out over the sea. There were a dozen ships on the beach below me. Two of them I knew, and I sat up with a start.

‘That’s my ship!’ I said. It was Storm Cutter, and he still had the raven of Apollo on his sail, the first ship I had ever owned, spear-won from the Phoenicians. Even now, his navarch was likely to be one of my chosen men.

Dion raised an eyebrow. ‘Men have been asking for you for three days,’ he said. ‘But you are in the god’s hands. Answer my question.’

‘The god refused my sacrifice because I kill to easily, and for little things,’ I said. ‘And yet, even as I say this, I wonder what the god asks of me. I am a warrior.’

Dion nodded. ‘I thought you were a farmer and a bronze-smith?’

Dion was a decent priest. So I said what came to mind. ‘The sight of that ship raises my heart in a way that my anvil never does,’ I confessed.

‘So,’ Dion said. Now he smiled. ‘So now you are confused?’

I laughed. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Answer me a question, priest.’

He shrugged. ‘It is my place to ask. But I’ll answer one question, if I can.’

I pointed at the temple. ‘Is there a pair of bellows mounted in the altar of ash to control the flame of the sacrifices?’

Dion nodded. ‘When you work bronze, do you use bellows?’ he asked.

I nodded.

‘And do you pray to Hephaestus to guide your hand when you work?’

‘Of course!’ I said. ‘Before I started my helmet, I omitted the prayer, and my work failed.’

Dion nodded again. ‘And yet you had bellows and a hammer and an anvil, I expect.’

‘I did,’ I said, seeing his point.

‘And if you sought to work bronze, and you prayed, and yet had neither bellows nor an anvil?’ he asked.

‘I’d be a fool,’ I agreed.

‘Some of us here are fools,’ Dion said. His eyes narrowed. ‘I am not one of them. Are you?’

‘I’m still not sure I understand what the god asks of me,’ I said.

‘The confession of confusion is often the beginning of wisdom,’ he said, and slapped my knee. ‘Let’s make sacrifice.’

My ram died well, and the god accepted him in a blast of fire, and I walked down the steps of the altar, my bare feet treading on the burnt remnants of thousands of animals sent to the heavens here, so that I wondered for a moment what a herd they’d make, and what the first animal to die here had been.

Let me also note that the god accepted the sacrifice of the impious trader and rejected the sacrifice of the Cretan lord who had killed his son. My confusion deepened.

‘There is more to god than a pair of bellows and an altar,’ Dion said. ‘He’s a good man, and the god will send him home when he is. . ready.’

The next morning, in the first blush of dawn, I waited in the cleft at the base of the altar, clad in simple white linen without so much as a stripe woven in. The cleft smelled of almonds and honey, and I was afraid. Hard to say why, exactly.

Dion held my shoulder while the first supplicant crawled up and into the cleft. He was gone for a long time, and when he returned he was as white as a corpse and couldn’t stand up, so that three acolytes had to carry him. When he was able to speak, priests gathered around him like sharks around a kill, demanding to know what words the god had spoken.

Then it was my turn.

Men were known to die confronting the god in the cleft. No amount of spear-craft on my part could avoid