2: The Test
An unkindness of ravens flock behind my back, as though I am man-slaughtering Arēs himself. Their glossy plumage, an etiolation of black so profound it defines light by absence, a fine, fringed pétthalos cloak, beloved by the War God and the Murmidónes, who slaughter. The dark birds scatter, wheeling – raw-voiced rooks, a murder of crows squabbling, mobbing the sky as the mighty beasts who draw my wain strain every sinew, bearing me onwards to glory ...
Every whoreson, indolent God that ever plied lyre is laughing as I plough! Helpless with mirth, tears running down their cheeks as they smite their mighty thighs! The bloody-handed Gods, who disdain manual labour, as do the áristoi, men exalted by birth and the brazen metal they bear in battle.
The Gods! – who plough and sow only to cuckold, reaping the rewards of the labour of others! The Gods! – and lusty mortal men in their image, who covet and steal.
To plough. A fine euphemism for fucking! I find it but bitter jest as my adolescent strength is found unequal to a man's task. If sowing your wild oats required such Heraklean labour, no woman born would ever kindle from a callow boy's rutting efforts!
The furrow behind me, a meandering worm's cast, barely breaking earth, as I haul down savagely upon the oaken stock, trying to find purchase. The bronze share, uncomfortably phallic, mocks my pretensions at manhood as it scrapes and judders, refusing to bite down upon dry soil.
My calves ache. My shoulders. My arse! Naked to the waist, I have torn my fine tunic to rags to wrap my raw-scraped hands. Shutting the stable-door after the horse has bolted – my soft palms blistered, bloody. I dig into my bag of barley seed, and scatter from my numbed hand – glad of brief respite from the ceaseless bruising impact – and my left-hand ox, contrary, follows the hay on his horn, turning anticlockwise from proper path.
Broad-arsed bastard, I curse in my mind, as I wrestle him back with the goads. I no longer have the wind to waste on words. My sweat-soaked pilos, a rumpled farmer's cap of felt, keeps the searing worst of Aploun's burning brand from my brow, but my bare back is raw as bloody meat upon the butcher's block.
My neck aches with craning. It has been on a swivel since daybreak, for that pernicious sun is not my only adversary. My arms are piled beside my furrow – the cutting kopís, a man-tall dipylon shield – a coracle of tanned leather stretched over a wicker frame – and a khlamús, a crimson warrior's cloak that I have yet to earn the right to wear.
The enemy will come. A man with a burning brand and a sword. I await him. But it does no good to make watch and ward, leaning idle upon my long spear, no! Work still needs to be done, and that thankless task waits upon no man. Seed sown. Crops gathered in. Sheep sheared. All the mundane toil that a Man of Bronze eschews as the lot of lesser men, the dâmo and the slaves, doúlos, who serve.
Not this day. Today, I remember the way of life I protect, that my avid bronze transcends. This is a Lakonian test of manhood. The karpaia, time-honoured. A play of violence, old as child-devouring Krónos, where two men fight – a farmer, son of toil, and the robber, who comes to steal.
The man of violence does not work for his bread, staff of life. He snatches it from hand. He is a Man of Bronze – quick to acquaint others with point of spear or the edge of his sharp sword. A man without compunction – wont to rob, to take from a labourer all he has, even his very life, and carry off his wife into the bargain.
A bastard, beloved by Arēs of the Red Hands. A man of that rare, ruddy talent – his breast an empty carapace of bronze in which no human heart tolls.
My bastard is out there. I can feel his eyes upon my back. So close to the fallow earth as I am, it will be a thing of no moment for him to steal up on me, like the balm of an evening breeze.
My tongue is sharper than my bronze, a honed skiphos of two edges, excoriating him in three tongues. I have been out here since the crack of rosy-fingered Dawn, and I want – no, I need – this to be over.
To know my measure.
The karpaia is no game. It is a proving-ground for men. One of us is going to bleed, sanctifying sacred soil. Me or him. I am resolved upon it, though there are other ways the test can end.
Possibilities I refuse to contemplate. To yield, throwing myself craven upon another man's mercy – and find it wanting. To be hurled to the ground, my wrists tied behind my back by a stout cord of leather. Stripped naked, and yoked to the plough, to the shame of my father.
The men of Spártā respect only strength. The fate of those who yield, doryalotos, deplorable. Scorned by given word, forced to wear the dogskin cap, and the skins of wild animals. Spat and pissed upon. Beaten absent cause. Taken like a bitch in heat, should long-haired Lakonian master be so inclined.
Forced to drink neat wine, ákratos, and dance – salutary lesson to Spártān youths, those rough young cubs, of the end of drunken license. There are many ways to shame a man, and the Lakonians know them all.
Despite this, hard as it is to comprehend, most men cede in the contest, the ágōnos that defines, the crucible that refines that ruddy, martial metal. The soil saps his strength, and he stumbles in the strike, vigour leached from him by his sweat, and the long anticipation of deadly violence. He trembles, and grows pale to see the spigot of his life broached, like an old wine skin, blood welling as the bronze edge caresses flesh – that most horrible of intimacies! That man looks into Arēs' ghastly face, carved with bloodless wounds, and meets his own mortality as the eudaímōnia flees from fatigued limbs.
He throws down his arms, yielded. One man or the other – farmer or robber, finding himself outmatched. Thus, the world turns, and in this wise, men are made slaves, doryktetoi – captives of the spear.
Not me. I would liefer bleed. Take a proper man's portion – in wounds, given or received, it matters not.
This is the karpaia, the sword-dance of swarthy Lakonian men, of wild Makedones and Petthalians. It is how the Murmidónes train and are proved – to be of sound wind, and to be obdurate. To never yield. To become that man who has to be cut down.
It is how the Tamer of Horses was trained, and he learned that lesson well enough.
I look up – and the pitiless enemy has stolen a march on me. Agēsílaos has bided his time through the sweltering heat of the day. Now, finally, he makes his move, late, slanting across the ground with the shadows of evening. He waited until I reached the end of my row – my wandering attention preoccupied by turning my team – and the sere wind that kicks up dust to scatter muffles the sound of his sudden onset, such as it is.
For a man so old, he is deathly quiet in his stealth. He drifts across the ploughed land like chaff across a mill floor. His shadow, angular, leading with point of sword, bears no redress. This is not a man for second thoughts. Not a man given to reflection, for all that his days have been long upon the shield of earth.
His narrow face a terse, two-edged skiphos. Hair, white as salt, chiming late light. He has braided it for battle, karekomoontes – the adornment of a poor man and a proud, bound up above his brow. Mine is shaved to the scalp, en chroi keirontes, the mark of an éphēbos. My shame, gleaming naked for all to see. He has seen to that task himself, that hateful old man.
He is a living ideal. A sword and a man to wield it. No shield. No hóplon of bronze. Strength sacrificed for speed. Or perhaps this is the measure of the contempt this Killer of Men holds me in, that he thinks he needs no protection from my bronze.
Perhaps, it is done from love, that I might have a chance at life. I do not know. I cannot understand the motivations of the man who trained me. I cannot compass what makes him as he is. A weapon. He is alien, xennos – soft and seldom of speech but hardy and pitted as an olive tree.
I can only hope to survive him.
He angles towards my pitiful pile of weapons, and I curse. He is closer, though I am faster. I spring across the furrows to intercept, a nervous rabbit rousted from his drey amongst the tall marram grasses. I see no other option.
It is only after that I realise I could have fled before him. Young and fleet as I was, he would never have caught me.
As it is, I am barely in time to snatch up my sword – sacrificing a breath, a heartbeat of precious time to stoop and grasp hilt. It is an allotment of life that hangs in the balance as the Lakonian closes with me. I jerk upright, ungainly, as Agēsílaos makes his lunge – a jab off the front foot, intended to skewer my throat with the back-sharpened tip of his kopís.
A killing blow. Any doubts that I am in a fight for my life are cast to the crows.
With the kinetic acuity of youth, I load my legs – a split-step, and spring lightly aside. Or would have – the ploughed earth turns beneath heel, and I register the blow that will kill me.
At the last instant, I jerk my head aside – and feel the agony as his sword whispers into the space I barely vacated, nicking the tip from my ear.
Here. You see, paûs?
I feel no fear. There is no space for it. My own blood liberates me from the named fear – that I would freeze and fall – else, far worse, flee or yield.
I bring blade to bear – an ungainly hack in my last defence. His kopís meeting mine in those lateral, flowing strokes the Lakonians so love – a sinewy draw-cut, and we exchange three swift blows, an arm's span apart – all muscle memory. Blades flickering tongues of flame.
I watch his wintry eyes. Faded, pellucid blue. Not his sword. Here is truth.
I am swifter. My form is good. He has trained me well. I draw blood on my fourth stroke – binding his blade with a roll of the wrist, my blade plunging like a kingfisher's bill to score a furrow upon Agēsílaos's upper thigh. He does not even blink. But he is no autocthon. He bleeds. It heartens me.
I may yet live – and more. Sieze kléos, as flower from briar, and snatch my seemly prize away with gashed hand. If I remember my lessons, and cleave to them.
I dance upon the canting land, riding the heaving billows of the turned earth under foot as I force the issue. My athleticism makes the sapping exertion appear effortless, a deft white tern skimming over the streams of Ocean – the burden borne by my heaving lungs and aching limbs.
I have no alternative but to prosecute this fight in this manner. My adversary is deadly, but dread Father Krónos is a far more implacable foe. Agēsílaos is an old man – and in his fatigue lies my sole hope of victory.
I do not halt, nor falter. I will the fickle plough-turned earth to uphold me.
It is a straggling, awkward contest, without music or metre. No pyrrhikhe, this – the parsimonious old man begrudging me the measure of the dance.
There is this, too. In failure, death. Twice, I have the chance to thrust home. Opportunities I would have taken without hesitation in sparring. Chances I passed up, since my injured adversary would be able to strike me in his turn.
Still, I am prevailing, Agēsílaos having no answer to the indefatigable energy of youth. The old man's concentration unwavering in its intensity, but with every attack, I feel ever closer to landing a decisive blow.
If I can. If it is in me to strip life from a man I respect. Maybe even love.
The end is near. Proscribed, like a sacrifice to Posiedaōn, Earth-Shaker. Agēsílaos stumbles into a lagging lunge, his lead leg skating on soil, and I, favouring the move that won the bout with Héktōr, flow aside like water, whipping my blade inwards at Agēsílaos' unprotected torso.
It is the chance that Agēsílaos has been waiting to engineer, with pitiless, inhuman patience throughout the entire strength-sapping bout. The only chance he was ever likely to get. I am too swift and he, too old and slow. Deliberately, ignoring the terrible pain, he blocks my cut with his left forearm, feeling the blade rip through muscles, tendons and ligaments, embedding itself deep into the bone of his lower arm, trapping the blade.
I meet Agēsílaos' gaze. The old man's sword arm rock-steady as he levels his kopís at the hollow of my throat. Eyes that regard me with all the compassion a butcher holds for the carcase on his chopping-block.
Time is mine – a short-term loan from the left-handed gods. I spend it wondering how many others have died looking into the eyes of this terrible killer.
"Get it over with, then" I grit, forcing a smile, determined to die on my own terms.
Agēsílaos's aloof gaze dissects the depths of my soul. Searching for fear. Weighing my spirit on the scales.
After an age, he steps backwards, relinquishing hallowed sword from aged hand. The relic falls tip-first towards the parched ground. Shatters like an icicle.
The Lakonian favours me with that grudging nod which is his highest accolade: You will do, boy. My heart burns within me, even as it hammers in my breast, but I know well enough to keep my emotions to myself.
Ignoring the ruin of his sword and the ruin of his arm with equal dispassion, the old sweat speaks quietly and intimately, his eyes those of a younger man, clear and bright. "You have it in you to kill, and you know how to die like a man. The rest can be learned. But you know that which must not be forgotten."
With a straight back, evincing no sign of pain, the ruin of his shield-arm hanging limply by his side, Agēsílaos stalks away. His long khlamús, pale rose attar, faded and frayed, catches upon the breath of the War-God. One last time.
That was the last time I ever saw my Swordmaster in life.
The next day, the Spártān went missing, without giving notice. A search-party found him sitting on a hillside, staring unblinkingly into the sunrise. The scout hailed him, somewhat unnerved, and, upon receiving no reply, reached to shake the old man by the shoulder.
And recoiled upon finding Agēsílaos cold and dead, those unfathomable eyes sere.
Man died with the sword that was his soul. I will renew acquaintance in Rhadámanthus's domain, the fabled green fields where we butchers of men go when we die. There, we wheel the wind-shod wain. Compelled to slay, over and over again. To charge a wing. Stand fast, and make the stone-stacked wall of shields. Twist and turn in the War-God's deadly dance, with sleek sword and the ash-hafted lance.
This is a Mykēnē heaven. The dream and reward for men like Aías, son of Telamón. It is not my ideal. But since when do the fucking Gods care about my wants?
I will have what I have earned, at life's end – and no more. I am a Man of Bronze.