The New Achilles Page 3

  Alexanor was breathing the pine-scented air and watching the glow of the late sun on the marble below him. He felt …

  He took a deep breath.

  The old priest suddenly put a hand on his shoulder, and Alexanor almost collapsed as it all fell in on him. Without a conscious thought, he was weeping.

  Like a summer storm, it passed, and he backed away from the old priest, humiliated.

  The man in the white robe stepped off down the trail as if nothing had happened.

  The next morning, Alexanor awoke from the best sleep he had experienced in a year. He lay on his pallet for perhaps two hundred beats of his heart, thinking of nothing. It was all still there: the dead comrades, the loss of his love. All there, but a little farther away.

  A boy, a slave, knocked gently at the door to his cell.

  ‘The priest Sostratos says you are to serve this morning,’ the boy said, in the sing-song voice of a memorised message.

  Alexanor lay still, listening to the sound of the doves outside.

  He was trying to imagine a life here.

  Or, really, any life at all.

  The boy cleared his throat, obviously undeterred by late sleepers, and Alexanor rose, slowly, feeling every bruise and every cut anew.

  He put on a plain brown chiton that he found hanging on the back of the door and went out into the new day. He followed the boy along a curving path, past the Abaton with patients’ beds, and down the hill towards the great temples of Asklepios and Apollo.

  Chiron waited in a spotless white wool himation with another man in white, younger, short and broad.

  ‘You’re right,’ said the younger priest. ‘He looks like a soldier.’ The man smiled. ‘Greetings. I am Sostratos, priest of Asklepios.’

  Alexanor bowed and introduced himself.

  ‘Alexanor of Kos. I was a marine,’ he said. ‘A Rhodian marine. My citizen duty.’

  Sostratos nodded. ‘I was a mercenary. Strictly business.’ He grinned and showed a mouth full of missing and broken teeth.

  Chiron waited. ‘Let me see your hands,’ he said.

  Alexanor frowned. ‘They’re clean.’

  Chiron held out his hands. ‘Let me see.’

  Alexanor sighed and held out his hands. Chiron took them and sniffed.

  ‘Filthy. Never come to the god with your hands dirty. You must wash them at every opportunity.’

  I have fallen among madmen, Alexanor thought. You washed my hands yourself yesterday.

  ‘Go and wash,’ Chiron said. ‘And hurry.’

  When he returned, only Sostratos awaited him.

  ‘Come, we’ll make the morning sacrifice. Are you pious, lad?’

  Alexanor shrugged. ‘I worship the gods.’

  ‘You have to be a little more pious than that to be a priest, boy.’ Sostratos seemed to find him amusing, and Alexanor fought anger. ‘Have you made a sacrifice before?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Alexanor said, stiffly.

  ‘Don’t “sir” me – all men and women are equal before our god.’

  They were at the foot of the steps to the temple, and Sostratos led the way up.

  ‘Good morning, Bion,’ he called to an older slave who was cleaning moss out of the cracks in the marble.

  ‘Morning, Sostratos! May the light of the god shine on you!’

  Sostratos indicated the Rhodian. ‘This is Alexanor, from Kos. He’ll be joining us.’

  The slave rose, wiped his hands on his smock, and bowed.

  Alexanor returned his bow, vaguely pleased that the priest had said he’ll be joining us.

  They entered the outer sanctuary and Sostratos began to sing a prayer. Alexanor didn’t know it, so he waited.

  ‘We’ll sacrifice at the outside altar,’ Sostratos said.

  ‘Where is the animal?’ Alexanor asked.

  Sostratos smiled. ‘Barley cakes, my young soldier. Most of the priests here are Pythagoreans. We don’t kill animals unless we must. Some of us do not even eat meat.’

  ‘Pythagoreans?’ Alexanor asked.

  ‘Followers of Pythagoras. We have a dozen philosophers with us at any one time. You might do well to spend some time listening.’

  ‘I want to be a priest. To … heal.’

  ‘To heal instead of killing, you mean?’ Sostratos took a slim wick and began lighting oil lamps along the edge of the sacred space. ‘Here, you see how it’s done? You light these and I’ll fetch a censer.’

  Alexanor lit all the bronze lamps. There were a dozen silver lamps hanging suspended from the marble vault above him; he looked up and was again struck with an awe that snapped him out of his despair. A lattice of marble vaulting hung above him, imitating wood. The central panels were painted in lapis blue, decorated with carved rosettes magnificently gilded, and the silver hanging lamps were like stars in the heavens.

  A young man of his own age or a little older came up and inclined his head. He was tall and so thin that he looked as if his bones might come through his skin. He wore the same brown chiton that Alexanor wore.

  ‘May I help you lower the lamps?’ he said. His form of address indicated that he was a slave.

  ‘Thanks,’ Alexanor said. ‘I need all the help I can get.’

  The slave, if he was a slave, managed half a smile. Together they went to the wall, and the other man showed Alexanor where the chains that held the lamps were fastened, and how to lower them. There were cunning winches concealed in the walls. As he turned one, he could hear the sound of drums turning and ratchets taking the strain. When the lamp had descended fully and he went to light it, he discovered that it was very heavy.

  ‘I’m Leon,’ the other man said.

  Alexanor offered him a warrior’s handshake, which the other man accepted, a firm clasp hand to wrist.

  ‘Alexanor, son of …’

  Leon smiled. ‘No patronymics here.’

  Together they lowered and lit all the lamps before Sostratos returned, swinging a silver censer. The smoke billowing from the silver ball smelt of frankincense and spikenard and something even rarer, some hint that Alexanor could barely catch.

  He and Leon went around the altars with the incense, singing a hymn, and Alexanor began to learn the refrain as they walked. Then the three of them went outside, collected the slave Bion, and went to the altar, where they lit a ritual fire and burnt a dozen barley cakes. Leon and Bion excused themselves, and Alexanor was left alone with the priest.

  ‘Is Leon a free man or a slave?’ Alexanor asked.

  Sostratos nodded, as if a question had been answered.

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  He began to walk to a low wooden building.

  Alexanor was taken aback. In the world from which he had come, a man’s status – slave, freedman or citizen – was as important as gender. It was a definition.

  ‘Leon has been with us for almost five years. He has learnt a great deal. He can do amazing work on his own, and he reasons well, but he struggles with reading. He is a slave, but that has little meaning among us – men and women can rarely control their freedom, and much of what you might call “freedom” is illusory.’ The priest turned away, as if the subject wasn’t particularly interesting. ‘Now, this building is called the skeuotheke; our storehouse for sacred items and our sacristy. Almost all of the temple’s supplies are housed here.’

  He hung the censer from a hook that was clearly just for this purpose, and began putting away the ritual implements.

  ‘Leon will be freed in a year or two. With luck, and a patron, he will eventually be a priest.’

  ‘I have a great deal to learn,’ Alexanor said.

  ‘I’m glad you realise that,’ the former mercenary said. ‘How do you feel about work?’

  Alexanor smiled. ‘My … father would say I’m lazy,’ he admitted.

  Sostratos nodded. ‘We’ll soon fix that.’

  A week later, Alexanor knew ten of the hymns to Apollo and two of the hymns to Asklepios. He attended his first diagnosis, and he w
as taught to oversee the needs of the pilgrims at the baths. For a citizen from a rich family, it was degrading work: he was, in almost every way, a bath-house attendant, and the hours were long and the patients very demanding. He fetched hot water, carried towels, responded to demands from men who clearly imagined themselves his superiors, and fought the urge, every day, to put one in his place.

  ‘When I ask for a towel, I mean immediately, pais,’ said one older man with a pot belly and a red nose. Pais was a word usually reserved for very small children and slaves. No one had called Alexanor pais since he was eight years old.

  ‘Is this the cleanest you could make my kline?’ asked one woman. ‘Please, clean it again, pais.’

  After a week, he presented himself to Sostratos.

  ‘Am I being punished?’

  ‘Not really.’ The priest shrugged. ‘Well, perhaps a little.’

  ‘I am not a slave!’

  ‘You are, in fact, a slave of the god. Best to come to an understanding of this, or leave us. Let me add that you still don’t seem to understand how seriously we take cleanliness. Use the bath-house to learn about the goddess Hygeia.’ He smiled. ‘It’s just work. You want to heal people. People are often dull, rude and dirty. It’s our job to ignore the dull and the rude, and to heal the sick. Learn what you can.’

  Alexanor kept his back straight and went out into the sunlight. He spent the rest of the morning thinking of finding the high priest, Chiron, and quitting, but just when his sense of injustice was peaking, Leon came to the bath-house and began stacking towels.

  ‘I love working here,’ Leon said.

  Alexanor made a face. ‘You do?’

  ‘It’s clean,’ Leon said. ‘Would you rather be growing vegetables or cleaning chamber pots?’

  ‘Lord Apollo. I hadn’t even thought of chamber pots.’

  ‘Listen, the same fat old man who wants so many towels also eats too much, with the usual consequences.’

  ‘Thanks for that image,’ Alexanor said, and they both laughed, the first laugh he could remember in some time.

  But that night, as he lay on his narrow pallet, he thought of Aspasia: of her body in the moonlight; of kissing her in her father’s yard; of walking to the temple, hands touching as often as they dared … The hardness of her stomach under his hand, the touch of her cheek …

  ‘Stop it,’ he said aloud, to the gods.

  So instead he thought of home – his brothers, his sisters …

  And his dead. A dozen epheboi who had trained with him, their bodies fish-belly white in death. Even as his eyelids fluttered, a hand reached for him and he started awake.

  ‘Stop it!’

  He rose, and went out into the night to run. Running silenced all the voices – the betrayal, the death.

  He ran until his legs were too tired to go on, and the next day he worked silently, and was too tired to respond to patrons who made demands. He didn’t even have to bite back his retorts. And that evening, instead of staring at his dead friends in his mind’s eye, he began to help Leon with his reading.

  A month passed. By now he knew all the hymns. He sang them to himself when he could not sleep. He had moved from working in the bathhouse to the Xenon, or the Katagogion, sometimes at the Abaton itself; he emptied chamber pots and folded towels and sheets, and turned patients who needed to be turned. Some were model patients, some were touchingly thankful, and a few were difficult and surly.

  Some days he went running at the end of his day, or practised pankration in the palaestra. The priests of Asklepios had their own forms of pankration and they were different from the ones he knew on Kos. Alexanor found himself taking an interest. He learned to eat quickly; to listen for the call of any of the priests; he learnt to wash his own dishes, or everyone’s dishes, depending on need; he learnt to be clean whenever he was working. He learnt that Leon had a real problem in reading – that following words left to right and right to left could confuse him – but many of the texts had been copied by a scribe who worked them ‘as the ox ploughs’ and he needed to follow them wherever they led.

  Despite which, they made progress.

  But it was in his third month, when he was working in the fields where the temple grew both vegetables for feeding patients and many herbs and medicines, that a boy came and called his name. Sostratos came down into the field.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked, pointing at the white bulb with shooting green stalks at his feet.

  ‘Fennel,’ Alexanor said, glad that he’d been working on something he knew.

  ‘And this?’ Sostratos asked, stooping to pluck a sprig of something from the raised earth of an herb garden shaded by the taller fennel.

  ‘Mint,’ Alexanor said, but his voice betrayed his hesitation.

  ‘Specific to …?’ Sostratos asked.

  Alexanor frowned. ‘I don’t know. My mother said it was good for the stomach.’

  ‘Your mother is a clever woman. Go and bathe quickly and put on a clean chiton.’

  Sostratos turned and walked off down one of the paths beaten through the stony fields.

  Alexanor told the slave overseeing the fields that he had been called and went to bathe, and then went to his cell, where he found a spotless white wool chiton hanging on the back of his door.

  His heart beat faster. He slipped it on and went to the gate, and Sostratos waved him on, towards the Temple of Asklepios. There, for the first time since his arrival, he saw the high priest. Waiting by him was Leon.

  ‘We are raising Leon to the status of Initiate,’ Sostratos said. ‘You will be initiated together.’

  An hour later, he was an initiate, a novice healer. Sostratos and Leon both embraced him, as did several other novices with whom he’d worked.

  And then he went back to his patch of fennel in his sweat-stained brown chiton. He whistled the ancient paean of Apollo while he worked, and that night, he slept well enough.

  A year later, Alexanor was just beginning to learn the ways of physical healing. Priests of the god Asklepios were divided in their philosophies, and heated arguments could erupt over diagnosis and treatment. The more conservative priests both preached and practised that all healing flowed from the gods, and especially from Asklepios, hero and demi-god; that the best cure for a patient was to sleep in the Abaton and receive dreams that would themselves reveal to a priest the best path to healing.

  But many of the younger priests, and some of the professional doctors that trained with them, from the veteran midwives who served Asklepios and Artemis, to the surgeons who cut into living bodies to remove tumours or arrowheads, had begun to preach a different path: that the god guided training, and influenced his priests and every patient, yes; but that there were strictly empirical reasons that some drugs cured some illnesses – that willow bark and willow root alleviated pain, for example, whether administered by your mother or a priest. Alexanor learnt that radical healers in Alexandria and Athens even broke the very laws to cut up the corpses of criminals.

  Then a letter from home punctured his new life like a sword wound. It was not so much the news as the manner of it – the casual way his father described the happiness of Aspasia with her new husband. Filial piety warred with feelings of betrayal.

  Alexanor put the letter down, the fine Aegyptian papyrus fluttering in the lightest breeze.

  As I explained to you, a woman as young as Aspasia needs a steady hand and an older head. She has settled to her role now.

  Alexanor’s hands shook with anger, and the darkness he’d avoided for so long fell on him like a familiar blanket. His father had taken his love and given her away as an object to one of his business partners.

  Alexanor found that he had crumpled the papyrus. He struggled to breathe, aware from his training that he had flushed, his heart was racing, and all from an external impulse.

  He made himself breathe the way they were taught in pankration.

  Alexanor hadn’t even looked at a woman in a year. There were women in the sanc
tuary: pilgrims, even young, attractive patients; there were female slaves, and there were several female priests. And each day Alexanor expected his lust, at least, to reawaken. But nothing moved him: not the naked breasts of Sappho, the small African slave who handed towels to the female patients in the baths; not the fine figure of a young matron come to pray for sons.

  Nothing.

  He wondered if he had offended Aphrodite, or if Eros was lost to him. And he knew in his head that Aspasia had had no control over whom she married, that she would be trying to make the best of her lot. Just as he knew in his head that it was no fault of his that he was alive while a dozen of his fellow epheboi were dead. But his heart felt differently, and after a year of peaceful sleep, his nights were again haunted, and his days full of waking dreams of his lost love and his dead classmates. He ran with Leon, he worked and he did pankration, he read his texts, ate thin soup and worked his body as hard as he could, but sleep was elusive and his dreams were dark.

  Two weeks after his father’s letter arrived, he stood with Chiron and watched helplessly as his first real patient, a young man called Nikeas with an arrow wound in his leg, gradually grew worse. It was frustrating, and it had a nightmare-like quality, in that no matter what Alexanor did, the man grew worse. Alexanor washed the wound as often as he dared; he prayed until his knees and hips burned, he made incense, read entrails, and went to the altar with his invocations.

  None of it mattered.

  After three days, the leg had to be amputated to prevent the spread of the infection. After the amputation, performed by Philomenes the surgeon, removed the poisonous limb, the young patient turned his face to the wall and refused food.

  ‘Talk to him,’ Sostratos said. ‘This is the crisis.’

  ‘And tell him what?’ Alexanor demanded bitterly. ‘That the leg will grow back?’

  ‘Without hope, he will surely die. And the crisis is the moment when the patient decides if he lives or dies. Oh, I’m sure the gods play a role. But if that young man decides …’

  ‘I have no hope to give him,’ Alexanor said. ‘I’m not really a man who believes in hope.’

  Sostratos raised an eyebrow. ‘Best learn some, then. We rely more on hope than any other medicine.’