and they roared and charged us.
An Illyrian charge is a fearful thing, and not very Greek. Or rather, perhaps it is exactly what we looked like at Marathon, when we ran at the Persians. But there were a lot of them, and they came at us screaming, and their front rank men had armour and big spears — they were big men, too.
Exactly opposite me was a towering figure, like a giant. A head taller than me, with shoulders like an ox and a giant aspis the size of a table in a taverna.
I hate fighting big men.
But my daimon was there, too. And as they roared and ran at us, I was Arimnestos of Plataea and no man’s slave or chattel. And this was my fight.
When he was three paces away, I threw my heavy spear. He was running. Try to run with your aspis covering you.
He took it in the chest. He had a bronze thorax, and his last thought was the shock that my spear went through it.
Second to last thought, I guess. He stood and looked at it for long enough that I stabbed him in the throat with my second spear, ripped it clear and stepped up onto his back to kill my second man, a roaring madman all teeth and rage. He seemed to be trying to embrace my shield. I gave him my spear tip, instead, and my spear broke, and while I drew my sword, my line gave a great roar and pushed forward. We had the hill. We were four deep, a forest of skilled spearmen, and a great many Illyrians died in the first seconds of that meeting. The line gave a push, and suddenly we were ten paces down the hill, and men were stumbling back.
Epidavros roared for his men to stand. He was a few feet from me, faced half away, and Neoptolymos shoved Brasidas aside, took his uncle’s thrust on his shield and thrust back, but the well-armoured man fell back a step and made a good shield parry.
Fair fights are for fair men.
I reached out with the tip of my sword and slapped his sauroter so that his spear turned in his hand. He half turned — the panic obvious in his open-faced helmet — as Neoptolymos’s second thrust took him in the cheek, carving through his teeth and jaw and into the back of his throat.
I knew, in some trained portion of my mind, that I had left the enemy to my left for too long, and I turned my head and thrust with my shield just in time to catch a thrust coming from that direction, but Gaius, bless him, was there, and he powered forward, shield-cut the man, forcing him to raise his aspis, and then cut beneath it into the man’s leg And we had won.
War is chaos, and a battlefield is so much a piece of the outer night that no man can really tell you exactly what happened in any one place, but from what I saw, it appeared that Neoptolymos’s Illyrian cousins cut into the back of the attempted charge at Daud’s cavalry, panicking the enemy left, which then became a mob of frightened men and not part of an army. Daud’s charge — foolish under other circumstances — passed into the gap, killing few enemies but sewing despair. And Neoptolymos killed his uncle, our front broke their front and they ran.
I doubt the fighting lasted as long as it takes a man in armour to run the hoplitodromos. We didn’t win because of my brilliant plan; or discipline, or armour, or the hill behind us, or our cavalry. All contributed a little, but the will of the gods and a healthy draught of luck won us the day.
And the furies, their wings and claws beating at Epidavros. May he rot.
22
I’d like to say that Neoptolymos forgave his uncle’s relatives and retainers, but he didn’t, and there was a lot of blood in the next few hours. His cousins gathered around him, shouting out each indignity that they had endured at Epidavros’s hands, and they mutilated the man’s corpse. Then they started to execute the prisoners — slave and free, noble and peasant.
I could have stopped it.
But I didn’t.
I suppose that I had secretly wanted Dagon to be in the harbour. He wasn’t. But there were three Carthaginian ships, all small coasters, and we took them from the land while Dionysus closed the harbour mouth, and as the storm came up at sunset, our triremes came onto the harbour beach, safe from the storm, which raged for three days with Adriatic ferocity while the streets of the stronghold ran with blood.
I know philosophers who praise the Illyrians and the other barbarians for the purity of their way of life — the honesty of a world where a man’s strength is in his hands and his weapons. As a warrior, I realize that this may sound hopelessly pious, but as the rain-thinned blood ran down the cobbled streets of Dyrachos, and Epidavros’s relatives, retainers and womenfolk were hunted, raped and executed, I could only think of them all as barbarians. It can happen in Greece. It has happened in Greece. But by the gods, we do what we can to avoid it.
Dionysus took Epidavros’s daughters as slaves to sell in Syracusa. In brothels.
Neoptolymos sat on an ivory chair in the citadel. He had blood under his nails.
I have blood on my hands, too. I embraced him and wished him well, but I wanted no more of Illyria. He loaded me with gifts: gold cups, an Aegyptian ostrich egg, a silk cloak from Cyprus — he was open-handed with his uncle’s riches. Which was as well, as all of us had oarsmen to pay.
On the first fine day, I piled all of our loot, our plunder and our gifts on blankets on the beach, with silver ingots and bronze kettles, helmets, swords, spearheads We began the division of the spoils. I sat on my stool to adjudicate arguments. Will that girl clean up well when she stops crying? Can she weave? Compare her value to the value of that silver inlaid helmet — what’s between her legs is softer, but a moment of fever and she’s a stinking corpse, and the helmet will protect your head.
Ah, thugater, you hide your head. What do you think those scenes in the Iliad are about, when men divide the spoils?
It took two days.
There were the Carthaginian prisoners. By then, we had learned from them that Dagon had escaped us by less than two weeks. But at sea, two weeks is an eternity, and his ship had been clear of the Adriatic before our sails nicked the horizon. At any rate, I took the prisoners, as I was determined to send the bastard a message.
Men made their marks on everything. And there was some rearranging of crews. Most of my oarsmen wanted to go home to Massalia. Not Leukas the Alban, or some of the others. And Daud and Sittonax were done: we’d sworn oaths, and now they were satisfied. They would be going home. Doola and Seckla would return to our little town under the mountains.
I was going back to Plataea.
We loaded the spoils on different ships, and we exchanged oarsmen.
We drank together, one last time. It is odd, I think, and speaks directly to the power of the gods and of our oath, that of the seven who swore one day on a beach in Etrusca, we all lived to go to Alba, and six of us gathered on a beach in Illyria to say goodbye, despite slavery, war, betrayal and murder. We sacrificed an ox, sent his thigh bones to Zeus and asked the King of the Gods to witness that we had fulfilled our oaths to each other. Gaius and I made all of them swear to be guest friends, and each of us swore to visit the others again.
Giannis took the pentekonter for the oarsmen who were bound for Massalia. Megakles just shrugged. ‘I’ll go where you go,’ he said simply. ‘As long as I never have to serve under that fuckhead again.’ By whom he meant Dionysus.
Doola and I had a long conversation the last night at Dyrachos. Perhaps someday I’ll tell you what we said. He felt I was making a terrible mistake in going home.
‘Violence burns you like fire,’ he said.
‘You sound like Dano,’ I said.
He shrugged. ‘I no longer eat meat. And now that I have fulfilled my oath, I will go back to Croton and become an initiate,’ he said. ‘You should, too.’
I am a man of war. Sometimes, when one man wrongs another, only violence will settle the matter. We argued.
But we embraced.
