dark, with a heavy cloak, no one would say anything about it. The smaller man laughed again. The odds were bad — one against four is insanity, unless you have no choice. The street I was in — an alley, really — was no wider than a man lying on his back full length, and I was at an elbow where someone’s semi-legal building crowded the street and made it bend.
One of the men behind me stubbed his toe on a cobblestone and cursed. I heard the curse and felt the movement of his arms as he windmilled them to save himself — and I turned on the ball of my foot and punched the point of my sword into his side. I wasn’t as clever as I’d wanted to be, and my blade skidded over his arms and the point caught in his ribs, and his fist connected with my face — not hard enough to stun me, but hard enough to rock me back.
Worst of all, as he fell away from me the point of my sword remained lodged in his ribs and the hilt was wrenched from my hand.
I pulled my cloak off by yanking it against the fine silver pin — which popped open and tinkled as it landed in the street, a nice find for the first child to look out of his door in the morning. The cloak weights slammed the smaller of the two men in front of me in the face — luck and training there — and made him duck back when he could have gutted me.
There’s no conscious thought in a fight like that. There were no openings, no holds, no attacks that were going to get me free. I had no weapon. I kicked at the bigger of the men in front of me as I changed my stance, and then I leaped through the unshuttered window to my left, my back foot catching the oil lamp on the sill so that it landed behind me and exploded, lamp oil on my cloak and on the floor and fire spreading up my cloak.
But I had a wall between me and my attackers. I threw my burning cloak at them and turned to find three young men staring at me as if I was an apparition from the heavens — perhaps I was, with all the fire running along the floor behind me.
The fire — not a very big fire, I have to add — kept my attackers back for the space of three or four heartbeats, and by that time I was through the room curtain of wooden beads. This was not a brothel or a wine shop. It was a private house, and I passed through a room with four looms against the four walls, through another door as men shouted behind me and out into a courtyard. There were two slaves standing by the gate, and they looked as confused as men usually look in a crisis. I went past them — between them — without slowing, and I was in another street.
I ran up the hill. I could see the Pisistratids’ palace on the Acropolis as a landmark. I remember offering my prayers to Heracles that I had so easily averted an ambush that should have killed me — really, if they hadn’t stopped to talk to me, I’d already have started to rot, eh?
My prayers may have called the god to my aid, but they were otherwise premature. At the next corner I ran full tilt into the larger of the two men who’d confronted me in the alley. I bounced harder than he did, and he landed most of a blow with something in his left hand — a club, I suspect.
It caught me on the outside of my left bicep — hard — and numbed my arm. I stumbled back into a closed door and he recovered his balance, grinned in the feeble light and came to finish me.
But he paused to yell ‘I’ve got him!’ to his mates, and as he did that, the door under my numb hand opened and I fell through it, my legs pumping frantically to keep me upright, so that I carried the young man who’d opened the door right back into the room and knocked him flat.
He was quite small, pretty, and had make-up on his eyes — which were wide with sudden terror. I’d hurt him, no doubt.
There was a cloak hanging on a wooden stand at the edge of the bed — probably the boy’s own, or forgotten by a client. I snatched it as the big man came through the door. I got it on my left arm, which was numb but not useless, and got my feet under me — this was moving so fast that the pain of the blow from his cudgel was just hitting me. The big man was coming in for the kill and I swirled the cloak, which seemed to fill the tiny room, and my right arm moved behind the cloak, lost in it, and my attacker flinched back.
It is a thing known to any trained man that men will flinch from a cloak or a stick, when neither can do them any real harm, even with a direct blow to the face. But my cloak and my fist were both feints, and my right-foot kick caught him in the knee before he could shift his weight off it, and I heard the joint pop. He roared and went down. The hand with the cudgel swept past me, and it was as if he’d decided to hand me his cudgel — despite the dark and the confusion, his left hand brushed against my right, and the club was in my hand.
There were men in the alley outside. By the sound of it, there were quite a few of them — not just the initial four.
My recent opponent was thrashing on the floor and roaring. As he made no move to harm me, I took a deep breath and hit him behind the ear with his own cudgel, and he went out.
The painted boy squeaked and ran through a doorway I’d missed. I followed him, eager to avoid the men on the street. We went straight into the building’s central courtyard, which was full of men and boys on couches. My hip caught a table of pitchers of water and wine, and the whole thing fell with a crash. Then I was across the room, through a door that seemed to me the biggest and into the building’s
By the flickering light, I could see men coming for me from the downhill end of the street — a dozen, at least.
So I turned and ran, uphill. There is no fighting a dozen men at the edge of darkness.
I went one street and turned into an alley. I saw a big ceramic rain-cistern under a house gutter and leaped to it at full stride. I got a leg over the roof edge and I was up. I lay flat on the roof. I was unable to breathe, and my two wounds had burst into pain the way a flower opens with the dawn, and it was all I could do not to cry out.
I heard men run by — they were an arm’s reach away — and meet with other men in the next street.
I looked around the roof. It was a low building, the sort of cheap private residence that filled the south slope of the hills before Pericles rebuilt the city. One storey, mud brick on a stone foundation with beams holding a roof that was also a place to cook, sleep in warm weather — make love, when privacy was required. The couple wrapped in blankets and furs had various naked limbs sticking out, and the man pulled the blankets closer, as if blankets would protect him.
I ran to the centre of the roof and looked. South was the high wall of the brothel and east was the wide Panathenaic Way, but north, uphill, the next roof beckoned. I had to keep moving — the men below were not fools.
I ran, leaped and my feet came down badly, punching straight through the seagrass of the roof so that my groin landed on the beam, and for a moment it was all I could do to curl my legs around the beam and moan. In the building underneath me, people screamed — and their screams were answered by running feet.
Sometimes the initial pain is worse than the resulting injury. I got a knee up on the beam and the blow to my groin wasn’t as debilitating as I had feared. I sidestepped north as men gathered around the building, and north again, and this time I stepped over the roof barrier on to the next roof — slate, thank the gods! — and I ran across the firm surface. I could smell a fire that burned charcoal and I could smell hot metal, and I realized I was crossing the roof of a smithy — a big one.
There was an alley at the northern edge of the smithy, and I leaped it without pausing to reflect — and my arms just caught the edge of the higher roof — much higher, because the alley was like a giant step up. I hung there for long heartbeats, trying to gain control of my legs over the pain — and I swung my right leg over the roof edge and rolled.
My hips hurt and my groin hurt and my left shoulder screamed as if I’d been scalded with boiling water. This roof had an outdoor kitchen and a small shed where the owner stored his brazier and spare pots. I got myself into it — a counsel of desperation, let me tell you. If they found me there, I was dead — no more retreat. But I wasn’t thinking well, and my instinct was the instinct of the wounded animal. I pulled the door closed and lay there, panting.
I listened to the men in the street as they searched the houses — broke in, beat people or threatened them. But actions have consequences, and the fates were not blind to my predicament. As they went from house to house, causing mayhem, men — and women — turned against them. Greeks don’t take happily to the invasion of their homes, however poor.
I heard the smith roar with rage as his dinner crashed to the floor when the thugs overturned his table, He
