The final libations have been poured, the omens scrutinized and teased forth. There's that pause, as at a banquet when the tables are cleared and the floors swept of shells and bones. We take our places in the lines, neighbors holding out their hands as they pass, touching fingers like boys sliding palms along fence posts.
Now it's just men waiting in the heat. Squires circulate with water. My brother stands to my right. To my left is a neighbor we call Crayfish because he loves them and because his eyes unmoor from their pairings. The felt of his undercap is already soaked. Clouds like islands of migratory air sail by.
I've prayed. Now I must bring my prayers to flower. My brother beside me marks his place for my father, mother, and brother who died. If I weep my love for the chambered dead, will those tears restore me? The dead's grievances live on and on. I stand shoulder to shoulder with those I love while a flood tide of self-hate beats the prow of my ship. For Kynegeiros, one brother's loss and the other's shame is a grief past bearing, a tether ring that tears against all pulling. We must heal ourselves. Our cure is blood for blood. The ability to live with ourselves must be earned with the spear. We're the corks that lift the nets and the lines that rise from the depths.
He's the man who instructed me in bivouac and foraging, dress and parade rest. He taught me how to balance a pack animal's load. Where in the kit bag to stuff the oil lamp. The usefulness of a hand-mill for grain.
Any contact he's had with me has been a mercy. Orestes after the murder of his mother was given his own table and drank separately from a cup touched by his mouth alone.
After we had carried my brother's body outside the walls of the town, after the pyre, after the ashes and bones had been gathered in his cerecloth and consigned to the urn, after the last libations had been poured, our clothes and house purified with sea water and hyssop, his cult was inaugurated with sacrifice on the third, ninth, and thirtieth days after the funeral, and then on all subsequent anniversaries.
The night after the purification our father, drunk, quoted to us Hesiod's advice about families: “Try, if you can, to have only one son, to care for the family inheritance: that's the way wealth multiplies in one's halls.”
He then added that it was a great deal to have been granted even a few years' happiness by the deity.
I found Kynegeiros in the hills above our house some hours later. He was on a slope near a cluster of dead-nettle and mint. He stayed bent-backed, and I stood about. We were like an old man and a soft-boned child. I wanted to say to him: You will not wear me down. All can still be well. I wanted to say to him: How can an infant explain his hunger or thirst or need for his pot? Aren't his insides a law unto themselves? But I knew better than to voice my self-pity.
The past enters and floods our present while we wait. I've labored to the top of this hill, and it's taken half my life to get here and the other side slopes down. Today once again we'll trust in the way heaven's law compels but not always protects its human allies. Today he'll teach me even more about the war between the self and the world, the self divided into soul and body, the body usually acting as the traitor within the gates. He'll lead me to that magic which we recognize in dreams that make the face of the sleeper relax. He'll show me how my shame could rise like a glad bird and vanish over the shoulder of the hill. I can wish us united in good feeling and in hate, with a cure for every injury, though I know there's no regaining what's gone. We'll act so that something better can be rendered in the days to come.
Medes, Egyptians, Dacians, Illyrians: they're all drawn up now, in full panoply, their marshaling positions invisible against the sheer mass. The marsh behind them is a stretch of searing sun where the air goes hazy with mosquitoes. Nothing moves on the hillside up above them to our left. Braced planks arrest the spill of a wall down the slope in the distance.
They wear trousers. Boots dyed purple or red. Quilted linen tunics. Cuirasses with metalwork like the meshings of a net. Open-faced helmets and animal skin headdresses. Bowcases of leopard skin. Here they come, eager for combat, packed man on man: spear-tamers, horse-breakers, endurance and malice and fear on their faces, in horizon-crowding lines, with their curved Scythian swords and double-ended pig stickers, the flower of the wide world's earth stepping forward while their parents and wives and younger brothers in their cold beds back in Asia count the days they've been gone.
At the signal from our strategos, we hammer our spear shafts on the outer curve of our shields. When we cease, he gives the order to swing down and fit snug the bronze facing of our helmets, and then to advance.
In the sun we will seem an endlessly wide threshing machine of blades and unyielding surfaces. Our paean will be Zeus Savior, spare us who march into your fire. They'll hear a roar, a windhowl, our singing together. We will find that bright vibration, that pitch at which the spirit oscillates. We will march through their archers' bolts like covered wagons in a hailstorm. They will see, as we close, the spears of our first four ranks swing down to the horizontal. They will discover how far beyond our shields the blades of those shafts can extend. We will break into a run. We will hit them like a bull. We will savage them of all they have. Our collision with the wood and wicker of their shields will be like the sound of kindling underfoot. After the shock of impact, our ranks behind will seat their shields into our backs, hoist their shoulder bones under the upper rims, and, splaying dust as they scrabble for footing, push and shove with all their force. The invader's wicker will have no purchase against the implacable smoothness of our bowl-shaped bronze. Their front ranks will be left trampled in the gleaning-ground that will spool out behind us as the butchery rolls forward, where they'll meet the spiked clubs and gutting knives and bone-breakers of our light infantry. Our churning feet will continue the push even slipping on their blood, like boys' soles on river rocks. We will hit them like a wave, the wild water seething into seaside homes; we will leave them like a tidal pool after a storm, with its clamor of blasted lives.
All of this is sent to me, or generated in me: visceral shadows instead of words, turning and turning in my imagination. In the cattle-stunning light before we step off, I can see it, my head that open gate. They will be cut down, body on body. They will endure being god-overturned in war. Their slaughter will extend all the way back to their ships at anchor, where we, the right wing, the tribe of Aiantis, will be like the gods jumping both feet into their ranks, about to learn the whole reach of pain, our sandals piercing the shallows and the breakers' roil, our thighs surging back and forth in the water's wilderness of spumy sand, our bodies wading in full armor into the surf, our weapons slashing at the back-watering oars and cable ropes sliding in the waves' retreat, and gaffing the wounded like fish, and there my brother will lay hands on the backsliding deck of a trireme, and there, while I watch, a Persian's boarding axe will chop through one of his wrists, and there on the beach his life will stream out of him and cover us in the river mouth of his blood, with his last words to me that their ships are getting away; their ships are getting away.
They will find out: all that begins well can come to the worst end. Having done evil, no less will they suffer. And more in the future. In their pride and self-deception they will have led themselves to the disasters of this day and more coming on. As I am for my family, with my friends and neighbors I'll be their sorrow, a sad hollow son born to bring home misfortune, to initiate the roll of grief.