The New Achilles Read online

  Five men downed in five deep breaths. Alexanor had never seen anything to equal it, even from the famous Rhodian marines.

  ‘Achilles! ACHILLES!’

  The survivors were running, but the Illyrians were on them like wolves on a fawn, and the Exile horse rode clear, their wedge intact, if slightly more open.

  ‘Well,’ Prince Alexander said. ‘Spartan cavalry never were worth shit.’ He looked at Alexanor. ‘I ought to kill the bastard.’

  He watched the Achaeans headed diagonally towards the crest of Olympos, clearing the hillside as they went with their Illyrian allies.

  ‘Of course, he’s won the fucking battle,’ Alexander said with an odd smile. ‘And man to man, he’s like a fucking Titan. So maybe I’d do better to thank him.’ He laughed. ‘He is like fucking Achilles, except he never sulks.’

  Alexanor looked up the left-hand hill, where Philopoemen’s red-crested figure was disappearing into the press. The Macedonian phalanx was still helmet to helmet with the Spartiates, but now, their flanks finally clear, they surged. For the embattled Spartans, the sudden loss of their cavalry and the sight of the Achaean horse coming up their flank rattled them and they began to give way.

  Alexander was grinning. ‘I’ll just deliver the killing blow. Otherwise the Achaean bastard will think he’s important.’

  Alexanor bowed, and rode for the hospital.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Sellasia and central Peloponnese

  222 BCE

  It was getting to be too dark to see. Men said it was a great victory, but there were always more wounded being brought in from the field, and Alexanor was in demand, first extracting arrows from Macedonian pikemen, and then looking at broken skulls. Eventually he was faced with an endless series of the same wound: skulls broken by heavy sling stones.

  ‘Don’t these men wear helmets?’ he asked.

  He had more than a dozen men whose skulls were actually broken. He was covered in blood. The light was bad for detailed examination.

  ‘They have helmets,’ Antigones said. ‘The bronze doesn’t stop a heavy stone.’

  Alexanor just wanted to go to sleep. The man under his hands was very young: brown haired, with pale eyes made shallow by pain. The boy’s breathing was bad.

  ‘I could try a trephine,’ he said.

  Antigones shrugged. ‘Maybe tomorrow,’ he said callously, turning away and beckoning for the Rhodian to follow him. ‘The light is going. I need you to look at another case anyway, before I …’ He looked back.

  Alexanor had stopped. He was looking at two dim figures carrying a third.

  ‘Dinaeos!’ he called out.

  ‘It’s the priest!’ the Achaean said, as if he’d just found a new-minted gold piece. ‘Alexanor, it’s Philopoemen. Please have a look at him. He …’

  They had the cavalry commander sitting on a spear between them. They put him gently on a blood-smeared table.

  The big Achaean had spear wounds in both thighs. The wounds were torn and one bled heavily.

  ‘He cut the head and pulled the shaft through,’ Dinaeos said. ‘With some gods-damned notion of returning to the fighting.’

  The Achaean hipparchos’ face was very pale in the last light of day.

  Alexanor turned to the Macedonian doctor. ‘What case did you want me to look at?’ he asked.

  ‘Another arrow wound,’ the Macedonian said, ‘but—’

  ‘No, I’ll do that first,’ Alexanor said. ‘Philopoemen, can you hear me?’

  ‘Yes.’ The Achaean tried to smile, but his lips only trembled.

  ‘Get me a six-wick oil lamp,’ Alexanor snapped. ‘There’s one in the hetaera’s tent. She has four … No, wait. Dinaeos? Ask her if I can operate in her tent. Be quick.’ He turned back to Kleostratos, the Thracian. ‘Put your thumb right there,’ he said, placing the man’s thumb on a gurgling vein. ‘See how it stops the bleeding? Good. And on this leg? Right there. Good. I need you to keep him just like this for … a few minutes.’

  The Thracian nodded. ‘Yes, lord.’

  ‘Good. I’m not a lord.’ Alexanor turned back, snapped up his roll of arrow spoons, and hurried to the new patient. ‘Leon?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Carry him outside,’ he said.

  Leon was a big, strong man. He lifted the wounded Illyrian as gently as he could, but the man gave a scream.

  The tent was full of screams. Alexanor shut them out and followed his patient out into the last light of day.

  He knelt by the Illyrian, who was blond and green-eyed and smooth-skinned. He had an arrow deep in his left thigh. His eyes met Alexanor’s and they were full of pain and trust. He knew he was safe.

  ‘This is our high-priced help,’ the Macedonian doctor joked to the mercenary. ‘He costs more than you do. He’ll get that shaft out.’

  Alexanor ran a hand down the back of the young man’s thigh. Someone had cut the shaft to save the man from the vibration of the shaft in the wound; but the shortened shaft made it more difficult for Alexanor to work out the path of the wound.

  He prayed. The arrowhead was right against the artery that ran along the bone. Usually arrowheads were dull enough, except at their points. He tugged a little at the arrow.

  The man screamed, a shocking noise.

  ‘Barbed,’ Alexanor said.

  Antigones shrugged as if to say, ‘I could’ve told you that.’

  Alexanor opened the two halves of the spoon and began to work them into the wound on either side of the shaft. Leon put a piece of cane between the patient’s teeth. The man bit down so hard he splintered the cane. Then he whimpered.

  Alexanor knew better than to hesitate.

  He pushed. The spoon would not budge, and then there was an elasticity. And then it gave; there was a gout of blood …

  And then more blood. Blood everywhere. A massive flow of blood, like a sack emptying.

  Alexanor sat suddenly, as if his tendons had been cut.

  Out loud, he said, ‘I killed him.’

  Antigones was already cleaning the spoons. The Illyrian was already dead – bled out in a few beats of his heart.

  ‘Damn it!’ Alexanor said.

  ‘Yes,’ the military doctor said.

  Dinaeos came up. ‘She has cleared her tent,’ he said. ‘It’s much brighter.’

  ‘Asklepios,’ Alexanor said softly. ‘Oh, Apollo. Oh, fuck.’

  He couldn’t make his limbs move. He was sitting in the grass, and he had the dead Illyrian’s blood all over him. Some had spurted onto his face and the warmth was horrible.

  He was sitting on the deck, and his chiton was red with blood. Philip’s head was in his lap. They were all white and dead, like gutted fish.

  ‘Come on,’ Antigones said. ‘Come on, man. Your friend needs you.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll kill him, too,’ Alexanor’s self-disgust was evident in his voice. ‘You do it.’

  The Macedonian physician grabbed his hand and levered him to his feet.

  ‘I don’t even know what you plan to do,’ he said. ‘I didn’t even know there were pressure points to stop bleeding in the thigh. So, I suggest you get your shit together and go and save your friend.’

  Alexanor frowned. ‘Very well.’

  He shook himself, and followed Dinaeos to the women’s tents.

  Phila, the hetaera, was looking at Philopoemen, who lay across four low benches, bleeding on a white linen coverlet. The Thracian had done his best, but blood had flowed.

  ‘Will you use fire?’ Antigones asked.

  Alexanor felt he was seeing it all from very far away.

  The hetaera was looking at him with unconcealed horror and she flinched, and then stood her ground.

  ‘Thais!’ she said. ‘Warm water and a towel for Master Alexanor.’

  Alexanor stood over the Megalopolitan hipparchos, trying to sort his thoughts: the foolishness of men’s attempt to heal; the utility of taking no action against the almost certain death the Achaean faced if he did not attemp
t … attempt …

  ‘Linen thread, well waxed with beeswax,’ he said. ‘And water to wash. My hands are filthy.’

  ‘You will sew the wound?’ Antigones asked.

  Dinaeos, so bluff, so confident, looked at him with a trust that Alexanor knew he did not deserve. It made him feel like a fake. The Illyrian had had the same trust.

  ‘No.’ Alexanor took a breath.

  Phila appeared with an ivory cross wound round with linen thread. She uncoiled a length and ran it through a piece of wax and then bit it off.

  Alexanor snatched it. He made a noose of the end and laid it over the wounded man’s chest.

  Thais appeared with a bowl of hot water. Alexanor took the time to wash his hands and face, to dry his hands on the towel, to sing a hymn to Asklepios and another to Apollo while he washed. His voice grew steadier.

  ‘Now,’ he said, with a confidence he didn’t really feel. ‘We need to find the source of all the blood. Yes?’

  Antigones nodded. ‘You don’t work in a field hospital all your life without learning about blood vessels,’ he said.

  ‘You may know more than I do,’ Alexanor said. ‘We are forbidden dissection.’

  Antigones shrugged. ‘I hear we too are forbidden dissection,’ he agreed. ‘But the gods send me an infinite supply of barbarian bodies, already dead.’ He washed his hands in the same bloody water. ‘Let me try this leg. There – I have it. I didn’t know the pressure point, but surely this is the vessel.’ He turned, as if they were alone. ‘You should try dissection. Really.’

  Alexanor ignored him. ‘See the flow of blood? Timed with the beat of his heart? So slip the little noose over the end and pull it tight,’ he ordered. ‘Excellent. See the bleeding stop?’

  ‘Won’t this whole leg die?’ Antigones asked.

  ‘This is purely empirical, but so far, I’ve never seen it happen. I think it is like … It is like the countryside. There are many roads to carry the blood. This leg is not nearly so badly damaged, and I’m going to guess that if I wrap this well … My dear, may I have some very clean linen? Splendid,’ he said as the slave-woman presented him with a strip of white linen. He began to wrap the leg. He coated the wound in honey and Leon drove off the flies. Then he examined Antigones’ work, put wine and honey on the wound, and wrapped it. ‘Well done,’ he said.

  The Achaean had uttered no more than a moan.

  ‘Are you awake, my friend?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ the Achaean whispered.

  ‘Can you take nourishment? You have lost a great deal of blood.’

  ‘I …’ The Achaean paused.

  ‘I’ll give him food,’ Dinaeos said.

  ‘Broth,’ Alexanor said. ‘Full of meat.’

  The hetaera waved her hands and slaves ran.

  ‘I swear …’ Philopoemen said.

  Alexanor bent low to hear him.

  ‘I swear I don’t get wounded every fight,’ the Achaean whispered. He smiled.

  His eyes closed.

  ‘Yes, he does,’ Dinaeos said. ‘Every gods-damned fight. Fuck, doc. Is he going to die?’

  Alexanor was looking at his hands, newly coated in blood. All he could see was blood. He had been working on broken bodies for eight hours. When he closed his eyes, he saw blood, and wounds. Torn skin. Death.

  ‘Did we win?’ he asked.

  Dinaeos sighed. ‘Oh, yes. We won. Cleomenes is broken, if he’s not dead. The Spartiates were wiped out. Our hero had to dismount to fight them.’ He sounded bitter. ‘We were done. We won the fucking battle, but he had to dismount, to do more.’

  ‘The king,’ Thais said from the doorway of the tent, and there was the king of Macedon and Prince Alexander.

  ‘Is he dead?’ the king asked.

  ‘No, my lord,’ Alexanor said.

  ‘I understand this young man saved the centre,’ the king said. ‘Pray the gods he lives – he has the head of a great commander. I will make him famous.’

  The king nodded to all and turned to Phila with a bow.

  ‘My lady, thanks for letting your tent be used for the wounded. You … That is …’ He shrugged. ‘Thanks.’ He looked at Antigones. ‘How many dead and wounded?’

  The Macedonian doctor shook his head. ‘My lord, I’m sorry – I have no count yet. The Illyrians lost heavily. The phalanx, perhaps two hundred.’

  ‘A dead Illyrian is an Illyrian I don’t have to pay,’ the king said. ‘I feel for the boys from Pella more.’

  Alexanor thought of the trust in the dying Illyrian’s eyes, so like the trust in Dinaeos’ eyes – and how easily the highlander had bled out.

  Outside, in the warm summer air, Alexanor took a deep breath.

  ‘How do you do it? How do you handle it? When it is so fucking pointless?’ he asked, expecting Antigones, but it was Phila who stood behind him.

  She handed him a flask of unwatered wine.

  ‘I drink too much,’ she said. ‘I recommend it.’

  He took the flask and Thais, the slave, handed him a light cup, Athenian ware, he noticed in a detached way. Phila was more than a porne; everything was beautiful, from the linens to the cups. Her tent was like the well-appointed home of a very rich, very accomplished Athenian, and even through the curtain of blood before Alexanor’s eyes, the care she lavished managed to penetrate, steadying him.

  He poured the cup full and drank it off.

  ‘I haven’t really had anything to eat,’ he said. ‘That was ungracious,’ he muttered unsteadily. ‘I only mean—’

  ‘Fetch our heroic doctor some food. Meat. Some of the broth we’re making for the Achaean cavalryman. Bread.’

  She waved at Thais, and then fetched him bread with her own hands.

  Alexanor shook his head. ‘I should go. I must pray, and wash …’

  ‘I say you will not go until you are fed.’

  She took an iron pot, worth a small fortune, off the brazier and poured water into a deep bowl.

  Alexanor, who felt that he was moving in a fog, wondered how a deep ceramic bowl made it over the passes and across the Isthmus unbroken. He washed his hands like an automaton, but there was always more blood. Up his arms, past the elbow …

  He was standing with his weight forward. Like he had fallen. His arms were on the low table that held the hot water, and he couldn’t move, and the red, red blood had tainted the clean water, so that the bowl seemed to sparkle with blood. He gagged.

  Her hand, warm and confident, touched his bare chest under his chiton. She opened the pins at his shoulder and the buttons and pulled it away, leaving him naked. And then she began to wash him. She sang a little, and the song, a hymn to Demeter, seemed to run all around his head and leave room for nothing else. Demeter, the Mother. Demeter, who lost her child. Demeter, who brought peace and not war to men.

  She sang the hymn in a light voice, and he, unbidden, began to hum the tune, which he knew. Thais came in, put down a tray that smelt of lamb and broth, and went out, to return in a few heartbeats with more hot water, another bowl.

  Phila washed him as if he was a child. At some point he took a linen towel from her and completed the task himself – as if at some point his mind returned to being master of his body – and he took the bowl of soup and drank it off like wine. There was bread, and he ate it, more animal than man, and he felt his body take the nourishment like a drug, so that aches in his shoulders and legs from riding, from a day of cutting men’s flesh, vanished.

  Phila was gone; he could hear her in another portion of the tent, issuing orders. Thais came in, nodded to him, and refilled his soup bowl.

  Phila came back in. ‘Your Achaean is sleeping. Unless dying men snore.’

  ‘Snoring is not always a healthy sign …’ Alexanor said automatically.

  He rose and went through the curtain of wool to the next room of the tent. But on inspection, the hetaera was correct; the young Achaean was deeply asleep, and he, too, had been washed clean of blood.

  Alexanor took a deep breath
, aware that some nameless apprehension had hung over him, and was dispelled. He followed Phila back into the other room. Almost without his volition, his right hand took the refilled bowl of lamb broth and he drank it off, greedily, like a small boy.

  Phila laughed. ‘Really? Do men require a woman to make them eat?’

  Alexanor was embarrassed by his poor manners.

  ‘Despoina, I am sorry. I can only plead … fatigue. My manners are terrible – my mater would have me flogged. You have been so kind – your tent …’

  He wanted to say something elegant about how it was like a beautiful home, not some dreadful brothel, but nothing came to him that wouldn’t offend.

  Her smile broadened and she stepped up close to him.

  ‘I’m not done with you yet,’ she said. ‘I, too, am a healer.’

  He was still naked – a natural state to a priest of Asklepios. But this time, as she stepped close and put a hand on his chest, his whole body responded. The response was explosive, and as involuntary as the second bowl of soup. He held her so hard she might have cried out. Her long peplos overgown fell to the floor, and her linen underdress was so fine as to be transparent in the brazier light; but Alexanor noticed none of this. He was urgent, immediate, hungry.

  She laughed, exposing her throat to his kisses. She wrapped her legs around him as if she meant to climb him, and they were entwined, standing, and he walked to the long kline and laid her down.

  ‘We’re going to need more towels,’ she said, a little later. She laughed and climbed over him. He watched her body …

  ‘Who is Aspasia?’ the hetaera asked. ‘Don’t be embarrassed. In my profession, we’re used to being called other names.’

  Alexanor tried to relax, but he was flushed and his breathing was too fast.

  ‘My … first love.’

  ‘Was she wonderful? What happened?’

  She was sitting on the edge of the kline. Naked. Alexanor was transfixed.

  Thais appeared with a pair of linen towels. Alexanor was watching the hetaera – as a physician, as a priest, as a man. Her body was fine – thin and muscular, not lush. He could see that she had borne a child, and that she danced and exercised regularly. He could see that she had taken a bad wound in her youth, a cut up her side that left a scar from her hip to her breast. Her breasts were those of a maiden, high and small; her throat and shoulders those of an Amazon, her back packed with subtle muscle.