looked almost as good — Bion was armoured like Ares, as was Hermogenes, and Tiraeus, Idomeneus and Styges — all of us in full panoply, with thigh guards and arm guards, too.
Fifteen years of peace may rob a town of the fine cutting edge of war practice, but it does give a town the riches to spend on armour.
I had asked every man to have his wife make him a red cloak. I didn’t expect them to be dyed Tyrian red, like the Spartans, although a few rich men did. Most were brick red, from madder, and striped in white or black, as is our way in Plataea. But most men had done it — even those who had no armour — and with those cloaks and our new dog-caps of bronze in every rank, we made a fine show in the agora, and many women stopped to watch and older men clapped to see us.
Myron wore his armour, but he watched. I intended to put him in the fourth rank, dead centre in the phalanx — because he was too important to risk, even though he was a decent fighter and a brave man and owned good armour. He stood at the edge, swapped jokes with men, and finally came up and slapped me on my scaled back.
‘Very good, Arimnestos.’ He pointed at the three Theban heralds, who stood silently off to the side, watching as our men laughed, joked and shone.
Then I called out the epilektoi — most of them eighteen or nineteen years old, although not all, by any means. And while the phalanx sang the Paean of Apollo, we danced our Pyrrhiche.
It is one thing to dance for the war god when musicians play and men sing. It is another to dance in the full light of day, when a thousand men beat the time with their spear-butts and sing from inside their helmets, and the song rebounds from the bronze and rises like a pure offering to the war god and the Lord of the Silver Bow.
Idomeneus and I had changed our dance many times by then. It had been a simple dance that allowed men to learn their place in the ranks and not much more. Our new dance exchanged ranks, taught spear-thrusts and parries, and had men duck to the ground, leap in the air over a thrust, even fight to the rear. My young men danced with unbated weapons, and more than once a sharp spear ripped a furrow across a new-painted shield — but the rhythm went on, and as we sang of the deep-breasted nymphs who served Apollo, we stomped with our left feet and pivoted together, ducked, clashed our spears and exchanged ranks again.
When the hymn was finished, we stood silently for some heartbeats, and then all the women and old men and boys raised a howl of joy to the heavens.
Myron went over to the heralds and handed them a scroll.
‘Tell your masters that we seek no quarrel with mighty Thebes,’ he said. ‘But if Thebes seeks a quarrel with us. .’ He did nothing grand or dramatic, merely flicked his glance down our ranks and over the new towers, one half-built and the other with its foundations complete. He looked back at the heralds. ‘If Thebes seeks some quarrel, she may find us a tougher vine to hack away than ever she imagined.’
My wife loved that I was polemarch, and when I donned my armour for the muster, she embraced me, sharp scales and all. She had come to terms with her husband the smith, but her husband the polemarch was perhaps the figure she had expected in her maiden dreams.
She wove me a new cloak with her own hands, a fine red one dyed scarlet with some rare dye from the east, and with her own hands she dyed a new crest for my new helmet, so that mere days after I finished the helmet, the horsehair and the cloak appeared on my worktable in my forge. That chlamys was as thick as a fleece and as warm as a mother’s embrace. It hangs just there, and moths have troubled it, but any woman among you can see how well woven it is.
The day I found it, I put it on and wore it for her, and then I carried her up to her room and we made love on it. I wore it proudly when I mustered the phalanx before the Theban heralds, and I wore it whenever I wore my armour, for many years after.
I came straight back to the farm after the muster, with all the epilektoi at my heels. I kissed Euphoria, patted her belly, which now had the smallest, sweetest swelling, and gathered a pair of my shop boys to carry my gear. Then in full armour, my picked men and I ran and walked by turns all the way up the mountain to the shrine of the hero. There, Idomeneus and Ajax said the words, and we sacrificed a couple of big steers and ate like kings, and then we lay in our cloaks like real soldiers and woke with the first light to run along the flank of Cithaeron to Eleutherai.
By noon on the second day, I had them all tired and surly, with the cockiness of the muster sweated out of them, and by the fourth day of the hunt even the Milesians were flagging, and my veterans were watching them with a certain callous satisfaction.
I was tired too — try wearing armour for five days! It chafes on your ribs, rubs your hips, weighs on your shoulders. Your helmet becomes a ring of fire on your head, and greaves — greaves become your enemy, not your ally. But the only way to become accustomed to armour is to wear it. There is no other way. I made my picked men run in it, cut firewood in it, gather brush in it, skin deer in it.
My name was taken in vain — often.
‘Curse me now,’ I said. ‘When you fight the Medes, you’ll praise me.’
The sixth day I let them rest. The complaining increased — this is the way with men, slave or free, soldier or priest. Real carping requires breath and time.
The seventh day was supposed to be the last, and we had games. Or rather, we were supposed to have games. The sun was up in the sky, and we had made the sacrifices, and Idomeneus was staring at the guts of a rabbit he had sacrificed. He had the oddest look on his face.
‘I’ve never seen a liver like this,’ he said.
I looked — not that I’d know one liver from another — and past him I saw two things to give me unease.
Over towards Eleutherai, I could see a pair of men on horses, riding the hill road, flat out.
And down in the valley in the direction of my farm, I saw a column of smoke rising.
In Boeotia, fires happen. Woods catch fire in the dry of summer, and men start fires to open up new farmland or simply to get a better view. Men burn off their fields. Houses catch fire when lamps are left unattended.
So I had no need to panic, except that the juxtaposition of the riders and the fire worried me. It was a big fire. And Idomeneus was not happy with the animal he had just sacrificed.
Bion came up next to me. ‘That’s our place,’ he said, and my stomach flipped.
‘How can you be sure?’ I asked.
‘I’m sure,’ he said. ‘Did you bank your forge fire?’
‘By Hephaestus,’ I said, ‘of course I did.’ You are always a feckless young man, to people older than you.
‘Hmm,’ he said.
Idomeneus killed a lamb, slit it open and cursed. ‘I don’t really know much about divination,’ he said from the growing pool of blood at our feet. He was kneeling in the dead lamb’s entrails. ‘But something is wrong. Dead wrong.’
So I ordered the epilektoi to muster, instead of preparing for the games. They cursed at being so early into their armour, but by then they were cursing anything I ordered. Even the young feel pain, or so we old men joked. Our muscles had had years to harden, and theirs were still soft.
About the time the first files were falling in, another column of smoke leaped to the heavens.
‘That’s our beacon fire!’ Tiraeus shouted.
It was true. It was lit in the right place, and it let out smoke in a thick column and then stopped — and then started again. I watched two repeats.
It was the will of the gods that we were already assembled — and that we had armour, and that we were so high up that we could read the signal clearly and see, too, the very moment it burned into life.
But fear reached icy fingers down my throat. If it was Simon, then he had struck at my home and I was not there.
But Euphoria was. Lovely, pregnant Euphoria.
I didn’t scream. I was a good soldier, and a man who had seen a few fights, but I drank a cup of wine to steady my nerves and told myself the truth — that if she was dead, raped or stolen, I was forty stades distant and there was
This is what it is to be a veteran, honey bee. You see too clearly. I counted her dead, or brutalized, and went on with my business. Because war is serious, and I was the commander, and my rage was not yet to be
