But I obeyed her, and my world filled with darkness. I went to my bed with Darkar at my heels. He spoke, and I have no idea what he said. I took the wool bag with my armour, and I took my sword and my spears. I rolled my heavy cloak and my sleeping pad inside my aspis.
Darkar was still talking at me when I got to the gate.
Archi was there.
'How could you?' he asked.
'I love her,' I said. He had a naked blade in his hand, and I drew my blade. 'Loved her,' I spat.
'Never come back,' he said. We faced each other with blades in our hands. I found Aristides on the beach in the morning.
'Will you take me as a hoplite?' I asked him, straight away.
He looked around. 'Tell me why,' he said. 'You served with Archilogos of this city, last I heard.'
'I serve him no longer,' I said.
Aristides nodded. 'More fool he.' He smiled. 'Will you stand in the seventh rank?'
The lowest place. An eighth-ranker was a file-closer – a form of officer. But a seventh-ranker was a man either too young or too small to fight.
'I'm better than that,' I said, with all the anger gathered in the last few hours.
Aristides was only a couple of years older than me, but he had a way about him, and he gave me his famous half-smile. 'I know that you can kill,' he said. 'I don't know you otherwise. Seventh rank, or stay on the beach.'
So when we marched on Sardis, I marched with the Athenians, the wings of betrayal beating about my head, the furies at my back and all of Persia before me.
In the seventh rank.
13
As it turned out, I had Herk as my file-leader. Of course, as helmsman, he was an officer – I was unused to taking orders, which may seem a foolish comment from a former slave, but it was true. Still, I did well enough, and the men in my file were all veterans, at least of some raids and a siege or two, and I had plenty to learn about camping and eating and keeping clean. I was amazed at how much time the Athenians spent on their gear – polishing and cleaning with pumice and tallow and scraps of tow, every spare moment.
Agios was my file-closer in the eighth rank. He was a well-known man, and at sea he was a helmsman – far too important to serve in the front rank and get killed, or so I understood. He and Herk were peers, and good friends. Later, they were my friends, but on the march to Sardis, Agios had few good words for me. Even as I was amazed at how hard the Athenians worked on their gear, so Agios was disgusted with how careless I was with mine. It was there – marching to Sardis – that I learned how much of the business of war was in maintenance.
My mood was black – so black that I have no memory of marching upriver to Sardis. We crossed the mountains through the pass, I assume, but I don't remember it. I had to carry my own gear because I had no slave. I don't remember anything of that, either, although I must have sweated like a pig and been the laughing stock of the Athenian taxeis.
I had a hard time with Briseis in my head. I hated her, and yet, even then, I knew that I was lying to myself. I didn't hate her. I understood her. But I also knew that my life had been smashed – again – as thoroughly as my enslavement had smashed it.
I was locked inside the prison of my head for the whole march. It rained and I was wet and at the top of the pass it was cold. I know that my friends talked to me – Stephanos and Epaphroditos and Heraklides, because they all referred to it later. But I remember nothing but a waking nightmare of the loss of Hipponax and Archi – and Briseis.
Hipponax and Archi were in the same army I was in – there were only eight or nine thousand of us, all in, and I saw both of them every day, at a distance. They must have known that I was with the army, marching just a stade or two from them. I do remember wanting to go to them, every day – a yearning to face them, to receive blows or embraces. I think I believed that they would commiserate with me. Now, I shake my head.
We were fifteen days marching on Sardis, and despite our long delay at Ephesus, we caught the city unawares. Which will give you an idea of how badly prepared the Medes were for us. I think that Artaphernes never really believed that men he had counted as friends and guest-friends – men like Aristagoras and Hipponax – would actually march on him. And so great was the name of Darius, King of Kings, that no man had ever dared to strike at him. Amongst the Ionians, they talked openly of conquering Persia. Amongst the Athenians, they laughed and talked about increasing their trade with Ionia. No man so much as mentioned Persia. I remember that, too.
At any rate, the Persians were unprepared.
When we came down the pass, the scouts told us that the gates of the great city – one of the richest in Asia – were open.
We lost all order. The whole army broke into a mass of sprinting soldiers racing for the gates. At least, that's how it seemed to me, and I was close to the front. Aristides roared like a bull to make us stand our ground, and we ignored him and raced for the nearest gates.
I followed Herk. He was fast, but nothing like me, and I loped easily, keeping pace. The rest of our file fell behind – Herk wasn't the fastest, but he had stamina. Other men caught us, and a few passed us, but the upshot was that a dozen of us came to the Ephesus Gate of Sardis, just around the hour men leave the agora, and the gates were open.
Even as we ran up, the Lydian gate-guards finally decided that they were in peril and began to close the great wooden doors – or perhaps they closed them every day in late afternoon.
Herk threw himself at the nearest door and men joined him. I flashed through the narrowing gap and my spear caught a Lydian and killed him, and the other guards broke and fled and the gates were ours, and I was the first man in the city.
Then I saw men behave as animals, and men treated as animals, and it was amidst the slaughter that I awoke from my nightmares of the loss of Hipponax and family and Briseis. I found myself in the wreckage of the agora, watching a trio of Eretrians raping a girl while others looted the stalls in an orgy of destruction, like animals let loose from cages. Oh, you haven't seen what men are until you see them let loose inside a city.
I did nothing to stop it. It was happening all about me. And my sword was red, and blood dripped down my hand.
The storming of a city is the grimmest of man's acts, and the one most likely to draw the wrath of the gods. Sardis was defenceless, and the men and women of the city had never resisted us, or done us any hurt greater than taking some of our money in their trades. But we butchered them like lambs.
Some fools set fire to the Temple of Cybele, and that sacrilege was repaid a hundredfold later. But worse was to come.
The initial assault took the city, but we had no officers and no enemy to fight, so we all became looters and rapists, roving criminal bands. The men of the town gathered, first to fight the temple fire and then to resist us, and as the flames spread, they were driven towards the central agora.
Because we had no leadership and no order, we didn't storm the citadel. I was no better than the rest – I assumed that the city had fallen. I stood in the agora, watching the city burn, refusing to rape and contemptuous of the looters, and I watched the other side of the market fill with men – panicked men, I assumed.
And then Artaphernes was there. His armour glittered in the fires, and he led the Lydians of the town and his own picked men of the citadel straight at us, and the Greeks were scattered the way sheep are scattered by wolves.
I saw Artaphernes coming. Greeks ran past me and some were already casting aside their shields. That's how bad we were. We must have outnumbered the Lydians three or four to one, and they scattered us.
When the attack came, Herk was stripping a gold-seller's stall like a professional sea wolf, which he was. 'Fuck,' he said. 'I knew this was too easy.'