I went one street and turned into an alley. I saw a big ceramic rain-cistern under a house gutter and leaped to it at full stride. I got a leg over the roof edge and I was up. I lay flat on the roof. I was unable to breathe, and my two wounds had burst into pain the way a flower opens with the dawn, and it was all I could do not to cry out.
I heard men run by — they were an arm’s reach away — and meet with other men in the next street.
I looked around the roof. It was a low building, the sort of cheap private residence that filled the south slope of the hills before Pericles rebuilt the city. One storey, mud brick on a stone foundation with beams holding a roof that was also a place to cook, sleep in warm weather — make love, when privacy was required. The couple wrapped in blankets and furs had various naked limbs sticking out, and the man pulled the blankets closer, as if blankets would protect him.
I ran to the centre of the roof and looked. South was the high wall of the brothel and east was the wide Panathenaic Way, but north, uphill, the next roof beckoned. I had to keep moving — the men below were not fools.
I ran, leaped and my feet came down badly, punching straight through the seagrass of the roof so that my groin landed on the beam, and for a moment it was all I could do to curl my legs around the beam and moan. In the building underneath me, people screamed — and their screams were answered by running feet.
Sometimes the initial pain is worse than the resulting injury. I got a knee up on the beam and the blow to my groin wasn’t as debilitating as I had feared. I sidestepped north as men gathered around the building, and north again, and this time I stepped over the roof barrier on to the next roof — slate, thank the gods! — and I ran across the firm surface. I could smell a fire that burned charcoal and I could smell hot metal, and I realized I was crossing the roof of a smithy — a big one.
There was an alley at the northern edge of the smithy, and I leaped it without pausing to reflect — and my arms just caught the edge of the higher roof — much higher, because the alley was like a giant step up. I hung there for long heartbeats, trying to gain control of my legs over the pain — and I swung my right leg over the roof edge and rolled.
My hips hurt and my groin hurt and my left shoulder screamed as if I’d been scalded with boiling water. This roof had an outdoor kitchen and a small shed where the owner stored his brazier and spare pots. I got myself into it — a counsel of desperation, let me tell you. If they found me there, I was dead — no more retreat. But I wasn’t thinking well, and my instinct was the instinct of the wounded animal. I pulled the door closed and lay there, panting.
I listened to the men in the street as they searched the houses — broke in, beat people or threatened them. But actions have consequences, and the fates were not blind to my predicament. As they went from house to house, causing mayhem, men — and women — turned against them. Greeks don’t take happily to the invasion of their homes, however poor.
I heard the smith roar with rage as his dinner crashed to the floor when the thugs overturned his table, He had weapons and the strength to use them, and he hit a thug so hard that the blow had that telltale sound of a broken melon — and then the wounded man started calling for his fellows.
The smith roared for the watch. His voice carried, and other voices — housewives, prostitutes and the patrons from the brothel — joined in.
Athens was a mighty city then — but not so big that the uproar of throaty thugs and fifty citizens didn’t carry quickly.
The Scythian archers — the city police since the time of the tyrants — came just as a party of thugs were breaking into the house where I hid. I could follow their progress on the street by the sudden change in sound — the babble of citizens telling the Scythians what had happened.
My breathing was better, although the pain was still there. I lay still, my eye pressed to the door of the shed.
A man’s head came up the ladder from the main room below. I didn’t know him, but his ragged haircut and his expression told me he was one of my pursuers. He looked around the roof quickly, and then I heard him say that the roof was clear.
‘Fucking Scythians!’ came a voice from below, over the shouts of the householder, an older man with a shrill voice.
‘Villains! Out of my house, you scum!’
I heard the man take a blow — a blow so sharp that his voice was cut off in mid-imprecation.
‘We’ve got to get out of here!’ a man said.
‘Fuck that — this bastard is worth a hundred drachmas. Beat the Scythians and make them clear out. He’s hiding — right here. Somewhere.’ I knew the voice — my man from the alley.
‘You fight the cops, you mad bugger.’ The man who’d checked the roof was not having any of it. ‘I’m off.’
‘Coward,’ the leader hissed, but by then, there were Scythians pounding on the door.
Then both of them came up the ladder and on to my roof. Beneath our feet, the Scythians were breaking in the door.
My two would-be attackers slowed briefly at the roof edge, then they dropped over the edge, heading south.
I just lay there, unable to do much to change my fortunes. I saw the Scythians check the roof — they spoke in their barbaric tongue, glanced around carefully, one man by the ladder with an arrow on his bow while another man poked around with his sword, but they didn’t check the little shed.
I waited a long time after they vanished — I waited until the whole quarter was silent. Then I limped down the ladder, picked the householder up and put him on his bed, and sneaked out of the door.
I made it to Phrynichus’s house under my own power. His poor wife was terrified at my appearance.
Phrynichus got me into bed — his own bed, as his apartment was too small for such luxuries as guest chambers. I lay there, trying to frame something polite to say — and then, finally, my psyche released its hold on my body, and I went away.
The next day, I limped about escorted by half a dozen oarsmen. I told all my people to lie low, and I made myself look afraid — and abashed — when Cleitus pushed past me in the Agora.
‘Done meddling?’ he asked with a smile. ‘You don’t look well, foreigner. Perhaps you should stop playing with fire and go home.’
‘Yes, lord,’ I breathed, exaggerating my injuries. In fact, my paid informants were bringing me titbits by the hour. All my plans and preparations took time, and I warned my people — the oarsmen, the informants and some paid thugs — that I wanted no violence until I said the word. And money — some Miltiades’ and some mine — flowed like blood in a sea-fight.
Some of my new friends disliked being made to lie low. There were a few defections, but I was careful with my plans and no one — except Cleon, Paramanos and Herk — knew what I had planned. The informants were blind — each of them had a particular task — and given the scale of reward offered, I expected results, and got them.
Let me interject here. A man who’s been free all his life might struggle at all this — but a man who’s been a slave knows all about how and where to get information. How and where to buy violence. And how to plan revenge. Remember that the world of Athens ran on slaves, and slaves, at some level, dislike being slaves.
A week after my arrival in Athens, I knew where my girl was. She was working in a slave brothel by the Agora. I was tempted to grab her — but to do so would have given the game away. Shortly after my informers found her, the best pair — Thracians, former slaves who ran an ‘inquiry service’ — brought me the names of the men Cleitus had hired to beat Sophanes and Themistocles. I paid them a small fortune, and they left the city for a while — they guessed what I had in mind. Smart lads. Another informer — a woman, a prostitute with a quick mind — located my attacker, the smaller man in the alley, based only on my description. He was a big man in the lower-class neighbourhoods, a wine-shop owner and a money-lender. I paid the woman well and sent her to Salamis, too. My desire to send these people out of the city when they had served my needs was not altogether altruistic — I trusted none of them, and this way my prostitute could not counter-inform to Cleitus. Perhaps I wronged them — many were happy to help, just to strike a blow against the oppression of the aristocrats — but talk is cheap and informing can become a habit. So I sent them away, and Miltiades’ money paid and paid.