Killer of Men by Christian Cameron

Author:Christian Cameron
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Historical, Fiction
ISBN: 9780752898582
Publisher: Orion Books Limited
Published: 2010-01-01T10:00:00+00:00

For weeks the ships came up the river and dropped soldiers – Greeks – on our shores, and we gathered a mighty army. At least, we thought it was an army. Aristagoras promised us an easy fight. He said that the Persians had short spears and no shields and that their riches were there for us to take.

It is the dark comedy of men that every Ionian knew that he was full of shit. Many of them had faced Persians – or run from them – and they knew how good they were. And yet this disease, this mania, swept them as if the deadly archer had shot them with arrows of inflammation and disease – failure to fear the Persians.

There’s a name for this disease in all the tragedies. We call it hubris, and all men and all women are subject to it.

So they debated and planned. No one drilled, though, and no one appointed a commander, although all but the Athenians took orders, or at least suggestions, from Aristagoras. He went to dinner at the house. I wasn’t excluded, but I wasn’t comfortable attending formal dinners. Oh, my manners were up to it – I had learned the manners of aristocrats. But to lie on a couch and be served by Kylix?

I went and ate in taverns by the water. Which proved to be a good choice, because I found Epaphroditos in one and Stephanos in another, and learned to play knucklebones like an islander. Stephanos’s victory as a wrestler had promoted him off the oar bench and into the ranks of his lord’s retinue, and now he was a hoplite. He and Epaphroditos and I had the games in common, and that was enough. And when we found Heraklides, we were four, which is a good number for men.

Four weeks of dicing in taverns and drinking cheap wine, exercising in the gymnasium – all the allied soldiers were welcome there, and no one knew me – and four weeks of sitting at Heraclitus’s feet. Indeed, I took my friends to hear him speak. They were pleased but mystified, and all three agreed that he was a great man, but they never went with me again.

Heraklides spoke for the other two. He was in the agora, fingering a plain bronze camp knife. The vendor was a slave for the smith who made it. It was mediocre work.

‘I’ll pay you in obols what you ask in owls,’ Heraklides said to the slave. I had just asked him to come with me a second time to hear Heraclitus. ‘By the gods, man – three obols, then!’

He turned to me with a grin. ‘Yon philosopher is a little above the likes of me, Doru. I could see he was a great man – it was a pleasure to hear him. But I scarcely understood a word he said.’ He whirled back on the slave. ‘Four obols – take it or leave it.’

Heraclitus sat with me every day after the other boys walked away, and we talked about laws – laws of men and laws of gods.

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