Kineas, who had seen a great deal of bad behaviour on the night before battle, punched the Spartan in the arm. ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘He keeps his eyes so tightly closed to the horror. He wants war to be like the poem — he doesn’t see how often they crash to the dusty earth clutching their guts.’ Philokles’ voice was soft. ‘It is easy to kill a man, or a city, yes?’
‘Too damned easy,’ Kineas said.
Philokles nodded, talking to himself as much as to Kineas. ‘If you train your whole life to be a warrior — offering nothing to the gods, learning no poet, perhaps even illiterate — you might make a superb killing man. Yes?’
Kineas nodded, unsure where the Spartan was going with his argument.
‘You might be the finest fighter in the world. Deadly with a sword, deadly with a spear, mounted, on foot, with a rock, with a club, however you chose to fight. And you might spend all of your money on equipment for it — armour, shields, swords, the best of everything. Yes?’
‘I’m sure you’re going somewhere with this,’ Kineas said, but his attempt to lighten the tone failed.
Philokles grabbed him by both shoulders. ‘Just so that you could protect yourself, because it is so easy to be killed. You could imagine every threat that might come against you — every man who wanted your purse, every man who sought to steal your horse, or your armour. You might live your life in a wilderness, to be able to see the enemy coming — or perhaps you would fight for power, so that you could bid other men to protect you.’
‘Like a tyrant,’ Kineas said, because he thought he understood.
‘Perhaps,’ Philokles said dismissively. ‘Because my point is that you can live like that — you can spend your entire life on security, either as a man or as a city. And a child with a sling stone can kill you dead in a moment. There you are — dead — and you have lived a life without a single virtue, except possibly courage — you are illiterate, brutish, and dead.’
Kineas began to see. ‘Or?’
Philokles looked out over the water. ‘Or you can live a life of virtue, so that men seek to protect you, or emulate you, or join you.’
Kineas thought about it for a moment, and then said, ‘And yet we killed Socrates.’
Philokles turned back to him, his eyes sparkling. ‘Socrates killed himself rather than relinquish virtue.’ He made a rhetorical gesture, like a man about to speak before the assembly. ‘The only armour is virtue. And the only excuse for violence is in the defence of virtue, and then, if we die, we die with virtue.’
Kineas allowed a slow smile to creep over his face. ‘Now I think I know why I haven’t heard of other Spartan philosophers.’
Philokles nodded. ‘We’re a violent lot. And it’s always easier to die defending virtue than to live virtuously.’
Kineas had heard a great deal of philosophy in the hours before battle-dawns, but Philokles made more sense than the others. He gripped his hand. ‘I think you and Ajax have more in common than you would have me believe.’
Philokles grunted.
‘He’s an ass, too. Listen to me, brother. I have a favour to ask.’ Kineas’s voice was light, but he put an arm around Philokles — a gesture he seldom made.
‘Of course.’
‘On the night before battle, I like to listen to Agis, and then I like to hear the voices of my friends. Because you are right — but tonight, we are not beasts. We are men. Come with me, back to the fire.’
Philokles had tears in his eyes that glittered like jewels in the moonlight. He wiped his eyes, and his fist brushed against the wreath in his hair. ‘Why did you give me this thing?’ he asked. ‘I am no hero.’
Kineas pushed him off the rock, and the two climbed up the hill, their feet loud on the hard turf, so that Philokles might never have heard Kineas’s reponse.
‘Yes, you are,’ Kineas said, but very softly.
23
And later that night before battle, they circled back round to the same again. Ajax couldn’t leave war alone. Kineas, who had commanded men for too many years, knew that Ajax sought to justify on the eve of battle, the death he would face, and wreak, with the dawn.
‘If we are beasts,’ he said, after brooding for an hour, while the others spoke, and sang, and Lykeles danced a Spartan military dance to Philokles’ astonishment. ‘If we are beasts, how do we plan so carefully? ’
Kineas leaned past Philokles, determined to avert disaster. ‘Which plan of mine have you known to carry through the battle?’ he asked.
Niceas laughed with the other veterans. Nicomedes glanced at Ajax as if embarrassed for his friend’s bad manners — and kicked his outstretched ankle.
Ajax shook his head. ‘We plan,’ he began again, and something exploded in Kineas.
‘It’s a fucking shambles!’ he said, too loud, silencing other conversations. ‘Madness! Chaos!’ He pointed at Ajax. ‘You know better! You have seen the animal, night and day, for months. A man has to be in the grip of delusion to believe that order can be imposed on war!’
Philokles put his hand on Kineas’s shoulder. Ajax was recoiling, leaning away from Kineas as if his commander might strike him. Philokles spoke softly. ‘We plan for war — to mitigate the chaos. We train so that our muscles will move in a certain sequence when our minds fall to panic and we become as beasts. In Sparta we perfect the making of men into automata.’
Nicomedes rose to his friend’s defence. ‘A dance troupe does the same, and so does a chorus — they train and train, so that they will automatically do what is right. But they are not beasts.’
Ajax was almost pleading. ‘You,’ he said, pointing across the fire at Niceas and Antigonus, at Lykeles and Coenus and Andronicus, and all the old comrades. ‘You are all men of war. Do you truly hate it?’
Philokles began to stand, but Antigonus rose to his feet — Antigonus, who never spoke in public, because he was ashamed of his bad Greek. He was a big man, covered in scars. He had fought his whole life, and he looked the part.
He liked Ajax — loved him, as they all did — and he gave the young man a smile that no one could resent. ‘Somewhere,’ he said in his bad Greek, ‘there is a man so bestial that on the eve of a great battle, he proclaims his love for war.’ Antigonus gave a rueful smile. ‘I fear death too much to love war. But I love my comrades, so I will not flinch. That is all I can give, and all any comrade can ask.’ He held aloft a skin, and shook it so that they could hear it slosh. ‘No good will come if we talk of war tonight. I have wine. Let’s drink.’
Memnon, who most often professed his love of war, smiled, took a drink, and stayed silent.
Later, Kineas, who wanted no anger on his conscience on his last night, went and flopped on the ground by Ajax. ‘I snapped at you,’ he said, ‘because I, too, am afraid of death, and you seem immune.’
Ajax embraced him. ‘How can they say such things?’ he asked. ‘When they are so like the heroes themselves?’
Kineas’s eyes were suddenly hot with tears. ‘They are better than the Poet’s heroes,’ he said. ‘And they speak the truth.’
Wine and song, and the company of his friends, kept thoughts of death and the absence of Srayanka at bay until they went to their cloaks. Kineas walked among the fires, saying a few words to men who lingered awake, and then, spent, circled back to his own. As it chanced, Kineas chose not to lie in his tent alone, but threw his cloak next to Philokles, and found Ajax on his other side, as if a year had vanished from their lives and they were crossing the plains north of Tomis. He smiled at the warmth of his friends, and before death could haunt him, he was asleep.
But death caught him later, in his dreams.
He was wet with blood, and beneath him flowed a river of the stuff, and it smelled like every festered wound he had ever known, septic and evil, and he climbed to drag his body clear of the corruption. His hands were on the tree, his feet clear of the roots, and he climbed, wishing to take the form of an owl and fly free, but the blood on his hands prevented him somehow, and all he could do was climb. He thought that if he climbed high enough, he might see across the river, count the fires of the enemy, or see the worm, and know.. He couldn’t remember what he wanted to know. He climbed, bewildered, and the blood on his hands ran down his arms, and from his arms down his sides, and it burned where it touched fresh skin, burned like saltwater on sunburn.