Christian Cameron - Marathon - Freedom or Death

Glaucon looked at the ground. ‘I apologize.’

I liked him for that. The young are superb at disavowing responsibility — Hades, I was myself, so I know what I speak of. But this one was a better man.

We walked east into the morning sun and I lightened the atmosphere between us with tales of Miltiades. I was beginning the tale of the fighting in the Chersonese, and the Tearless Battle, where we took all the enemy boats with the loss of a dozen men and smashed the Phoenicians, when we crossed the festival road and found ourselves in the midst of a forest of brothels and taverns and free men’s houses. Only Athens could so hopelessly over-commercialize something as simple as sex. I remember losing the thread of my story as I contemplated — well, I’ll gloss over what I was contemplating, as you virgins would probably expire on the spot.

‘So we took fishing boats,’ I remember saying. ‘There was a fair fishing fleet at Kallipolis-’

The dagger punched into my back just above the kidney. The blow was perfectly delivered and had a great deal of force behind it. I staggered, fell to my knees and felt the blood leak out over my arse.

I should have been dead.

But I wasn’t. So I rolled through the fall and rose, my chlamys already off my throat and around my arm. As I came up, I had my knife in my right hand. Glaucon was down, but Sophanes was holding his own, his stick against two bullies with clubs. Even then, at seventeen, he was a foe to reckon with.

My man was big — titanic, in fact. I hate fighting big men — they don’t feel pain, they have a natural confidence that is hard to break and they are strong .

My man was still trying to figure out why I wasn’t dead. I shared his confusion, but I wasn’t going to dwell on it.

It crossed my mind that I probably didn’t want to kill him. Legal troubles, and all that.

I sidestepped, got down in my stance and flicked my chlamys at his eyes.

Behind him, Sophanes landed a blow with a crack that must have been heard at the peak of Cithaeron, and his man went down. The other backed away.

My opponent had a club and a knife. He cut at me with the gross ineptitude of the professional bruiser.

I killed him. It was no big deal — he was big, not skilled, and as the club rose I put my knife in between the shoulder muscles and the throat. Interesting point — I can remember that I had been planning a much more complicated feint when he left himself wide open from sheer folly and I took him. That’s single combat.

I threw my chlamys over Sophanes’ second opponent. It had corner weights and the gossamer wool settled like a net. Sophanes stepped in with his stave in two hands and broke the man’s head as if we’d planned the move for weeks in the palaestra . That was the fight.

I felt much better. When you are enraged at injustice and humiliated by your helplessness in the face of towering bureaucracy, killing a couple of thugs is deeply satisfying. At least, it is to me. Sophanes must have felt the same, as he flashed me a grin and we embraced. Then he went to his friend, who was starting to stir. I stripped the bodies of cash. Each had a little purse with a dozen silver owls — quite a sum.

The daimon of combat was wearing off, and suddenly I thought: Why am I alive ?

The first blow should have been the last. I never saw it coming. And I was bleeding — just a little — from a deep puncture above my hip. A prostitute fetched water and cleaned my wound and said a prayer for me. Meanwhile, I cast around the ground, trying to find the dagger. All I could think was that the blade must have snapped.

The dagger was under the dead titan — lost things are always in the last place you look, I find. Glaucon was getting colour back in his face, and a pair of local girls were stroking him while a doctor felt his skull. Sophanes helped me roll the dead man over, and there was the dagger — a single finger of bright steel sticking out of Aristides’ wax tablet.

Sophanes whistled and made a sign of aversion. ‘The gods love you, Plataean.’

I’d fought with pleasure, but the sight of the tablet with the dagger right through it made me shake for a moment — just a moment.

That close.

I gave the girls five owls — a fortune — to make the body vanish. Sophanes was, I think, both appalled and thrilled.

The morning was young, and I found a brothelkeeper and had him take the other two thugs and lock them in his cellar, which was cut straight into the rock of the hillside. I paid him, too. The free-spending habits of a life of piracy instantly conquered a few months’ attempt to be a farmer. Kill people, take their money, spend it recklessly.

Yet I had changed — because another part of me registered that I’d just spent the value of thirty-five medimnoi of grain at current prices — merely to get rid of a body.

We left Glaucon to recover — ostensibly to watch the prisoners. I went and bought a wine krater. It’s that one, right there — Achilles and Ajax playing polis. It tickles my fancy, that it wasn’t all war. Men had time to gamble at Troy.

The sun was high, but not yet noon, when we got back to the brothel. Glaucon looked like a dog with too many bones — he’d had his flute played, I could tell — but the two men were both in the cellar. One was dead. Blows to the head can have that effect. Sophanes didn’t like that — that he’d killed a man.

I shrugged. ‘If you fight, you will kill,’ I said.

The other was terrified. He wasn’t a citizen and the punishment for his crime would be the silver mines until he died. Nor was he brave. But all he knew was that some men and women, all veiled, had paid the titan to find me and kill me. They’d been paid at sunrise, in the grove of Pan.

That’s all he knew.

I looked at him, tried a few more questions, listened to his tears — and cut his throat. Sophanes was shocked. I stepped back to avoid the flow of blood, and then handed the brothelkeeper five more drachmas.

He nodded to me, as one predator to another.

The two boys who had been sent to ‘guard’ me were spluttering.

‘Listen, lads,’ I said. I caught their arms and held them. ‘All he had coming was to be worked to death as a slave. Right?’ I looked at both of them. ‘And now the only story that will ever be heard is ours. Hard to cook up a lie if none of your witnesses can speak.’

‘You. . killed him!’ Glaucon got out, after some muttering.

‘He tried to kill you,’ I pointed out.

‘That was in the heat of battle,’ Sophanes said. ‘By Zeus Soter, Plataean, this was murder. It’s different.’

I shrugged. ‘Not when you’ve killed as many men as I have,’ I said. ‘Console yourself that he was a foreign metic, probably an escaped slave, and a man of no worth whatsoever. He wasn’t even brave.’ I wiped my knife on the dead man’s chiton, poured a little olive oil from my aryballos to keep it bright, sheathed it and headed up the rock-carved steps.

We were a silent crew as we walked to my murder trial. I was pretty sure that my two companions were no longer in the grips of hero worship.

Athenian justice is swift. I arrived a little early, but most of the Areopagitica was already on the hill, and the last of the old men made their climb just behind me. Aristides was there. He had a bruise on one shoulder that he hadn’t had that morning.

‘Tried to kill you?’ I said quietly.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And you, I take it?’

I handed him the tablet with the dagger through it. Heads turned all over the summit.

He was angry. ‘This is not Athens,’ he spat. ‘What are we, some court of Medes? Some soft-handed Lydians? Next, men will turn to poison.’ But then he calmed. ‘This will tell in your favour. I’ll hand it around. The symbolism is so clear, it’s like an augury — the dagger through the law!’