Marathon: Freedom or Death

your father’s son.’

‘Laugh while you can, Plataean,’ he shouted back. ‘I left your wife dead in your dooryard and burned your fucking house, and there is nothing you can do but cry like a boy. And next time, I’ll get you — and all the men who stand between me and what is mine.’

In that hour, my fate dangled in the wind — along with the battle we were about to fight, and perhaps the fate of Athens, too. With the words ‘dead in your dooryard’, I think that most of my sense of reason left me. Not that I hadn’t expected it, after the sacrifices went foul and the riders appeared and the column of smoke.

I never promised you a happy story, thugater.

Simon taunted me again — something about what he’d done to her body, and how ugly she was. I started forward at him. Had I reached him, he and his two hundred friends would have cut me down, and then what might have happened?

Teucer didn’t flinch, or ask permission. He shot my cousin down, right there, in cold blood. His arrow flew true, and Simon died with a look of complete disbelief on his hateful face and an arrow coming out of the top of his chest, just above his breastplate. And that changed everything. Suddenly, the hired men knew that their paymaster was dead — and I was alive.

My boys charged without a word from me. We sang no Paean, and we were not in any proper formation, but we went over that stream, up the bank, into trained men.

I remember none of it. Oh, that’s a lie — I remember going up the bank, almost losing my footing, the jar of a spear on my aspis and another ringing off my beautiful new helmet. And then I was into them, killing.

After a while, we pushed them off the stream bank, and then they must have known that they’d had it. I remember Teucer at my back, shooting men in the face or foot when they troubled me. Apollo guided his hand, and he was like death.

They were hired men, and their employer was already dead. After a while they broke. I suppose I killed my share of them, but there were far more alive than down when they broke. It is always the way. Men only die when they turn their backs to run.

Our light-armed men were not tired; most of them hadn’t got engaged, except perhaps to lob a few javelins on the unshielded flank. My rage communicated itself to them — and they followed the hired men.

Anyone can kill a man who turns his back.

I followed on wings of rage and revenge, so that when I surfaced from my flood tide of blood, I was far down the road to Thebes. I had no spear, just a sword — my shield was cast aside. Beside me was Idomeneus, and at my back was Teucer, and around us were thirty freedmen and slaves, all busy stripping the corpses.

We were ten stades into Theban territory. My body would scarcely obey me — I couldn’t have raised my sword arm to defend my poor Euphoria.

I looked down the road to Thebes, and it was empty.

Idomeneus laughed aloud.

‘We fucking killed them all!’ he said.

I’ve heard since that over two dozen survived. So we didn’t, in fact, kill them all.

But close enough.

I don’t remember much after that, except that I made my way back to the stream, and men tried to talk to me, and I ignored them. I stripped my armour and left it on the ground with my helmet and my weapons, and I ran — naked — back up the road. I was exhausted, but I ran anyway.

I remember nothing, except that I made the run all the way. Perhaps I walked. Perhaps I lay down and slept. But I doubt it.

The column of smoke from the burning barn rose over all of Plataea, mingling high up with the smoke of three signal fires. I ran across fields, ripping my legs on briar and my feet on the small, hard, spiky nuts that litter our fields at high summer. Not that I noticed.

I ran until I could not see, until my breath came like fire into a bellows, and sweat flew from me. I had run thirty stades in armour, fought a battle, and now I was running another thirty stades. My right arm was all blood to the elbow, sticky and brown, and there were wounds on my thighs and ankles and a deep cut on my left bicep — no idea how it came there — and still I ran.

Did I think that I could save her if I ran far enough?

Perhaps I wanted to burst my heart.

I remember seeing that I had run all the way to the fork at the foot of the hill, and what I remember best was the strange temptation I had to keep going — over the stream and up to the hero’s tomb. And perhaps away over the mountain to Attica, and over the sea to Aegypt. To keep going and never go home, and never know.

Perhaps I lost my wits.

But I turned my feet, lengthened my stride and ran up the dusty lane, sharp gravel under my hard feet.

Halfway up the hill, the road turns just a little, and you can see straight to the gate in the wall that surrounds my house.

The house itself was burning. Although it was stone and mortar, and solidly built, they’d fired the floorboards and the roof beams, and the stone was cracking and falling, and the whole thing had become a chimney, carrying my riches to the skies in an intended sacrifice.

I didn’t give it more than a glance.

My great wooden gate, for which my father had forged the straps and hinges and cut the oak, was broken and twisted. On the ground was a heavy beam from one of the sheds — Tiraeus’s shed, as it later proved. They’d used it to break the gate.

Around the gateway, women lamented. They keened, high wails like the cries of bloody-handed furies tearing to the heavens, demanding revenge. Well — they had their revenge, but as usual, it brought no child born of woman back to life.

I pushed through them. The gateway was packed with corpses, some of them black with fire.

My farm had not fallen lightly, and my people had not died alone.

Bion lay across the threshold, his spear broken in his hand, his body ripped asunder.

Cleon lay by him, throat ripped and with ten great wounds in his body and a broken axe clutched in his hands.

They lay across the woman they had died defending, and even she had a sword in her hand, and the edge of the blade was bloody. She had not gone down easily. She had not been raped. She was dead before such thoughts could occur to any man, however evil.

She was not pregnant, and as I stood there, I realized that her hair was not blonde.

It was not Euphoria. It was Mater. Mater had died in the gateway, sword in hand.

My mind couldn’t accept it — couldn’t take in the loss of the three of them in one blow. In truth, all my being had been aimed at Euphoria, and I had forgotten how many people I loved were in this farm.

Mater.

I lifted Bion off her legs and laid him down with dignity, although his intestines trailed behind him as I dragged him across the yard.

I lifted Cleon too, and now I was weeping, because he had died like a great man, and there were dead enemies at his feet.

And Mater — how I had hated her for so many years. Yet here she was, sword in hand, like any hero you might name. Ares, she died well. And sober.

I rolled her corpse over, and she had that smile on her face — that smile she wore when she saw that I could say the verses of Theognis, or when I brought Euphoria under the roof, or when she met Miltiades.

That she wore that look with a spear in her guts made her seem very great to me.

But when I went to lift her, two other hands reached beneath her shoulders — bloody hands, but smaller.

Euphoria’s hair was wild, her chiton was unpinned at one shoulder, so that one breast showed on the right, and there was blood on her feet. She took Mater’s shoulders and lifted, and we laid her down with the other heroes who fell defending the dooryard.

‘She locked me in the basement,’ Euphoria said. She wasn’t crying. ‘She said it was my duty to live.’

Tiraeus and Styges had held the door to the forge. The hired warriors had given up after they lost two men,