The New Achilles Page 2

  The man in the oars obeyed.

  As soon as the turn began, the nearest pirate boat surged forward. As the merchant turned, the pirates were racing to catch the merchant amidships and board.

  ‘Belay!’ the navarch roared, and the men at the rails let go their ropes.

  Instantly, the masthead leant out to port with the sudden turn. The men holding the tall monster were pulled forward, and the swell under the turning ship heeled her over still farther.

  The pirate galleys didn’t have rams; they were lembi, coastal boats for fishing or routine trade. Or rape and murder. The men in the bows had leather armour and spears. They were close enough that men were getting ready to leap aboard.

  ‘Now!’ The navarch’s voice was like a trumpet.

  The mast fell like an axe. Smashing the low railing of the Arktos and descending on the pirate like a Scythian’s axe. The end of the falling mast went through the lead boat’s side; the force of the blow broke her back, and suddenly the seawater was full of men, some swimming and some already going down.

  The merchant’s turn had slowed her, and the mast over the side turned her again, so that her bow pointed up into the wind, due south.

  ‘Here they come,’ called Kephalos.

  ‘Cut the mast free!’ called the navarch.

  Alexanor had time to put his pelta on his left arm. He had two javelins, and he ran to the port side of the merchant ship, near the bow, and leant out, even as, deep in his mind, he thought here we go. Again. The pirates were coming up both sides now, but they were going too fast; the merchant’s sudden turn had caught them by surprise, and they were racing past.

  The first javelin went into a man standing in the bow. An arrow shattered against the rail next to Alexanor, and then a sling stone buzzed by like a wasp. The pirates were throwing grapnels on ropes, but the merchant sailors were cutting them as fast as they came aboard. The mast was cut free and the ship seemed to come alive, no longer bound to the mast or the sinking pirate vessel.

  A man was drowning beneath Alexanor’s feet, sinking away into the depths as though being pulled by a hand. His eyes were open and his mouth, too, as if he were screaming as his lungs filled with salt water.

  Alexanor leant further over the rail, his eyes on the dying man, and then he made himself raise his head to the fight, and caught sight of the enemy steersman. As the enemy stern came even with the merchant’s bow, Alexanor threw with a step and the full power of his hips.

  The javelin went into the man’s belly, and he doubled forward, hands clutched to the wound. He fell to his knees, and the oars fell with him, and suddenly the pirate boat was turning to port, away from the merchant – turning, turning …

  ‘Ware!’ roared Kephalos.

  Alexanor turned to find that the pirates on the port side were boarding. He drew his father’s sword straight up into a parry, using the strong steel spine of the xiphos to turn a spear before stepping in close to finish his man with a thrust, exactly like a drill on the deck of the Asklepios.

  Exactly like the other fight.

  He pushed the dying man back into the arms of his mates. A spear licked out of the enemy mass and caught him in the shin. He had no armour, and the needle point hurt, but the leg held, and the spearman whipped his weapon back. Alexanor held his shield out at arm’s length, strapped against his left arm, so the little shield was edge-forwards, almost invisible to his enemies, and he went forward into their spears, regardless of numbers, because that’s what he’d been trained to do.

  They flinched. Only one blow came at him, a hasty spear thrust that he caught on his shield. Then it was just fighting, close and terrible – and he had no helmet and no armour. He was hit, who knows how many times. He didn’t really feel the pain, and his father’s sword left a red path to death written across half a dozen foes until it broke in his hand, and all he had was a stump of iron. His right arm was red to the elbow and his head throbbed.

  Exactly like the other time. Bodies like gutted fish. The stench of everything inside a man; the terror, the animal rage, the animal fear. Black, and deep, and horrible.

  And then he was standing against the bulkhead of the bow, panting like a smith’s bellows, and Kephalos was handing him a clay flask full of fresh water.

  The redhead had as many cuts on his arms as Alexanor had himself. Indeed, he was bleeding from a dozen wounds – some just dull aches from spear-shaft blows which had not broken a bone – but he had three cuts in his right forearm, a gouge taken out of his shin, and a puncture in his right thigh that was leaking blood. His father’s beautiful sword, stolen in anger from its place on his father’s wall in the andron at home, pattern welded by the expert sword-smiths of Colchis, was a stump, stuck to his hand by sticky, congealing gore.

  How symbolic, he thought, bitterly.

  His vision tunnelled, and he thought he might be sick.

  ‘By Zeus above and all his thunder,’ the redhead spat. ‘Oh fuck, here they come again.’

  Those were his last words, as a thrown javelin caught him in the back of the neck and he went down like a sacrificial ox. The boat that had lost its steersman had now returned to the fight, but her crew seemed less willing, less ferocious. Alexanor put a man down with the javelin that had felled Kephalos, and then he made himself stand with the navarch and the other sailors on the command platform, watching the vessel approach. The sailors pushed him into the front rank.

  He was next to the navarch, flexing his right hand, trying to get feeling to return to it.

  ‘If we kill five of them, they’ll run,’ the navarch said in a matter-of-fact voice.

  ‘My king has a treaty with Knossos!’ the young Spartiate said petulantly, though he sounded less sure of himself. He had a fine breastplate on, an aspis on his arm and his sword was red-brown.

  ‘Where’s Kephalos?’ the navarch asked.

  ‘Dead,’ Alexanor said.

  The navarch turned, and his grey eyes looked old inside the bronze of his helmet.

  ‘Damn.’ He shrugged his shoulders, as if indifferent to his mate’s fate, or perhaps he was just settling the weight of his armour on tired shoulders.

  Alexanor bent down to collect two javelins. He also killed two wounded pirates while he was about it.

  Black.

  The pirates came up both sides, all together, at a horn call. But they stopped just as the spears crossed, hesitant to close. Alexanor had to make himself stand tall. His knees wanted to fold. He felt as if he’d run thirty stades. And it was all happening again. The deaths. The waste.

  ‘Give us your grain and we’ll leave you to go,’ called a voice.

  ‘Come here and die,’ growled the navarch.

  ‘If you are men of Knossos—’ called the Spartiate.

  ‘Shut up,’ the navarch spat. ‘Rhodes makes no deals with these scum.’

  ‘Maybe …’ muttered one of the oarsmen.

  A sailor shuffled back. The pressure on Alexanor’s back lessened, as if the rear rank was considering flight.

  There’s nowhere to go, he thought.

  Alexanor ignored the pain in his right arm and the fatigue and his near despair. The last thing he wanted to do was to kill, but training held, and his hand went back, almost without his willing it. He threw like Zeus flinging lightning from heaven, and one of the pirates – one of the few with a breastplate – fell screaming, the iron point lodged in his belly right through the bronze.

  The pirates, despite odds of three to one, hesitated.

  And then, as if pulled by unseen strings, they turned, all together, and fled into their boat.

  The woman who had hauled on the ropes put a hand on his arm. Her hand was covered in blood, and he realised she had been fighting too.

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ he said dully. She flinched away.

  He sat suddenly, in his own blood, and then …

  Two days later, as dawn raced across the surface of the sea, the merchant galley, running lightly west with a jury-rigged mainmast and
just ten oars in the water, crept past the rocky crags of the island of Agistri like a wounded water bird and then wallowed slowly onto the beach of Epidauros.

  Alexanor thought that he was ready to go ashore on his own legs, but he was still exhausted, and his hands gripped the ship’s rail just to keep him upright as the oarsmen manoeuvred towards the beach. He had a wound like an angry mouth in his thigh, and his shin still leaked blood. He still had encrusted gore under his fingernails.

  The other passengers left him alone at the rail.

  The town rose on the promontory to the right, with fine red-glazed tile roofs, white buildings and a magnificent Temple of Apollo on the headland.

  The navarch was braver than his passengers, and he came and stood with the scarred passenger.

  ‘What will you do here?’ the navarch asked. ‘Your wounds aren’t that bad.’

  Alexanor knew that the older man intended to help, but he had no interest in a conversation.

  ‘I’ve come to take my vows,’ he said. ‘I’m going to be a priest. We’re hereditary priests, in my family. Priests of Asklepios.’

  The navarch was watching as a bale of dyed Carthaginian hides came out of the maw of his ship.

  ‘You? A priest?’ He laughed. ‘You’re a killer.’

  ‘Yes.’ Alexanor shrugged, aware that the other man had meant his comment as praise, not damnation. ‘I’m not interested in being a killer any longer,’ he said, with more vehemence than he’d intended.

  He thought of the deck when the pirates broke; and his mind flashed back to the other time, when the men he’d trained with had died. Corpses like gutted fish, white in death.

  The elder of the two women, a matron of perhaps thirty, came forward and put a daring hand on his arm.

  ‘Why study here, so far from home?’ she asked. ‘Kos has a fine Asklepion, if you want to be a doctor.’

  ‘I come from Kos, despoina. Kos is too close to Rhodes.’ He turned away from her.

  ‘Perhaps—’ she began.

  He turned a little too suddenly, as if he meant to attack her. She started back, but he merely bowed.

  ‘I’m sure that you only mean to help,’ he said. ‘But I do not intend to go back to Kos, or to Rhodes. For any reason.’

  The woman backed away as if he’d stung her.

  And later, when he’d gone cautiously over the side with his bag and the hilt of his father’s broken sword and splashed ashore in the warm water, she glanced at the navarch.

  He was watching the young man as he walked up the beach. A tall, white-haired man in a long white robe came down and spoke to him, and then a slave came and took his pack.

  The navarch looked back at her.

  ‘What a waste,’ he said.

  The woman had her veil back over her head, and a straw hat over that, but she met his eyes.

  ‘I agree,’ she said softly. ‘Someone has hurt him.’

  The navarch shrugged. ‘That’s the world. Right, you lubbers! Corinth! Get the anchor stones in!’

  Alexanor bowed to the older man. ‘Alexanor, son of Philokles of Kos,’ he said.

  ‘I am Chiron,’ the priest said. ‘You may call me by my name, or you may call me “Hierophant”.’ He gave the Rhodian a little grimace, as if the title amused him. ‘Let me see your arms. You are injured. Your hands are filthy. You smell of death.’ The older priest’s voice was impersonal. ‘This is not the way aspirant priests usually appear. Come with me.’

  They walked to a booth at the top of the beach, where two other younger priests were greeting pilgrims from a Corinthian trader. Inside the wicker construction were two stools, four low beds, and a variety of phials and clay containers neatly labelled on shelves. An overweight man lay on one of the beds, deeply asleep.

  ‘Sit down,’ Chiron said, brusquely.

  ‘I’m …’ Alexanor began. I’m not here as a patient. ‘I’m here to study to be a priest.’

  ‘Are you?’ Chiron said. ‘Please sit down.’

  ‘I assure you …’ Alexanor hated the petulant tone he took. The tone he used when arguing with his father …

  ‘Do you always find obedience this difficult?’ Chiron asked. ‘Sit down. I’m going to look at your arms. You were fighting?’

  ‘We were attacked by pirates.’

  ‘You have fought before,’ Chiron stated.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Alexanor returned. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘If you stay with us, you will learn to read a man’s body like a scroll. Who dressed this arm?’

  ‘A lady of Kos,’ Alexanor replied.

  ‘Well trained,’ Chiron said. ‘And yet she didn’t wash the blood from under your nails. What was her name?’

  Alexanor knew a moment of shame as he realised he had never asked the woman her name.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted.

  Chiron paused for a moment in his examination. He sniffed.

  ‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘You are a very lucky young man. Raise your forearm. Like this. Over your head.’

  Alexanor did as he was told.

  Chiron shook his head. ‘This cut should have severed the tendon. You would have been crippled for life. As it is, it will take a long time to heal. The tendon is like a rope on which you pull to move the arm. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ Alexanor said. ‘I have read Aristotle and some Polybius.’

  The older man’s eyebrow twitched. ‘Interesting. Do you realise that we ask for a gift, a fairly sizeable gift, before we allow you to enter as an initiate novice?’

  ‘Yes,’ Alexanor said.

  His family was rich; he had the gift in his bag, a gold lamp worth as much as the rest of the ship’s cargo.

  He allowed his impatience to show, but really …

  Chiron nodded. ‘This will hurt,’ he said, his tone sharp.

  By the time Alexanor emerged from the booth, the sun was high in the sky, and the sound of the doves had died away. The old priest had washed and scrubbed his arms until they both bled again, and then wrapped them in clean white linen after applying a salve that smelt of roses.

  ‘What’s in the salve?’ Alexanor asked. Roses reminded him of Aspasia.

  Her hair smelt of roses, and her neck. Kissing her neck, the taste of her salt sweat, the smell of roses.

  Oh, Aphrodite, let me be.

  Chiron looked at him for a moment, and then shrugged.

  ‘Four drachmae of rose petals. Dry them and then grind them to powder and mix with two drachmae of saffron, with a small measure of spikenard – that particular oil is best – and a quarter drachma of powdered opium. A little gum acacia, carefully warmed. Add rainwater until the mixture becomes a paste.’ He indicated the road. ‘You will have to walk to the sanctuary. It’s a long walk.’

  ‘I’ll manage,’ Alexanor said.

  ‘I’m sure you will.’ The priest seemed amused. ‘But I’ll come with you, nonetheless.’

  Once they were clear of the port and climbing the hills, Alexanor glanced at the priest.

  ‘It must be expensive,’ he said. ‘Rose petals, saffron, spikenard … opium. All rare.’

  ‘You are from Rhodes,’ Chiron replied. ‘I suppose you would know.’

  ‘Spikenard comes from India,’ Alexanor said. ‘Which is beyond Persia. My father is a merchant.’

  Just speaking of his father brought it all to mind, and he paused for a moment. Aspasia. His father.

  Lord Apollo, let me be free of what is past.

  Chiron stopped on the path.

  ‘It is all very expensive,’ he said. ‘We ask pilgrims to make a donation. But mostly we depend on the extravagant donations of the very rich – the Ptolemies, the Agiads, the Antipatrids. You have been to Kos?’

  ‘I am from Kos,’ Alexanor said. ‘My family lives in Rhodes now. I was educated on Kos and I was healed at the Sanctuary there.’

  He remembered the columns, the magnificent temple, and the calm. It is the calm I seek.

  ‘Why didn’t you stay on
Kos to be trained?’ the priest asked.

  ‘That is my business,’ Alexanor snapped.

  ‘Interesting,’ Chiron said.

  They walked on for perhaps half a stade, and Alexanor was surprised how well the older man dealt with the steep hills and rocky ground, moving like a man much younger. They topped a ridge, the priest slightly ahead, and suddenly the ground fell away, and they had a vast vista before them.

  The sun was beginning to set in the west, over the Peloponnese, and the mountains of Arkadia showed in the distance, like temples built by the gods themselves. The beauty of it penetrated Alexanor’s fatigue and his boredom and his despair.

  He stopped, and he had to make himself take a breath.

  ‘Oh, gods,’ he said aloud.

  Chiron smiled broadly, for the first time that Alexanor had seen.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘But, young man, if you plan to stay among us as a patient, much less as a priest, let me tell you that everything is my business.’

  They started down the ridge. At their feet, glowing pink and white in the late afternoon sun, was the temple complex of Epidauros, the healing Asklepion famed throughout the world. The older priest pointed out the buildings as they walked down towards the formal gateway: closest, the portico of Kotys, where the priests were housed; then the central Altar of Asklepios by the Abaton, the sacred dormitory, where pilgrims were sent to receive dreams from the god; the Temple of Artemis and the magnificent tholos tomb of Asklepios, and then, in the distance, the palaestra and the stadium, the magnificent Hestiatorion in which pilgrims were fed, and the four square courtyards and stoae of the pilgrim hostel, the Katagogion. Beyond lay the baths, and then, set in the hillside, the largest theatre that Alexanor had ever seen.

  ‘It’s not the largest theatre,’ Chiron said with humour, as if reading his mind. ‘Merely the best.’

  Alexanor felt himself moved, despite everything, by so much beauty.

  ‘Building in marble is also very expensive,’ the priest said. ‘And money leads us quickly into politics, at least the politics of patrons. Patrons and politics lead us to rivalries – Illyria and Rome, Sparta and Achaea, Aegypt and Macedon. This is not a place for one man, one city, one country. This is a place for all people. Do you understand?’