The evening before we marched, I walked upon the Lower Terrace, and looked out across the wrestling ground to the mountains of Attica, fading into the dim eastern sky. Standing there in the dusk, with the Companions not far away, I thought of those who claimed to love me, and whether there was one to whom I dared say, “If I fall in battle, take my sword to Athens and give it to the King.” But there was none I dared trust so far. “Better so,” I thought. “Hope never hurt men yet, so why should I send him grief?” So I went back to the others, and joined in the laughing and horseplay. Their keenness was good to see.
The Queen rose early that night from supper. When I followed her up, not many words were spoken; but we did not forget there were lonely nights ahead. After our last embrace, it touched me to feel her eyelids wet. I told her to keep that for my death day, and not to go before the gods.
The trumpet woke me too soon, and the shouts of men assembling. I got up to arm myself, while she lay watching with half-shut eyes. The civetskin cover with its purple lining lay heaped on the painted floor. Her hair looked as dark as red porphyry in the glimmer of daybreak.
I strapped on my loin-guard and clipped my greaves, and put on a white quilted tunic, for the air was frosty. I wore my armbands too and my royal necklace; I have never cared to go into battle looking like a man who would rather not be singled out. When I had put up my hair, I fitted on my new helmet made of Phaia’s hide, and looked at her smiling, to remind her how we had made up our quarrel. But she only lay still and heavy, her mouth smiling without her eyes. The window lightened; the white bird whistled softly, and said, “Kiss me again.”
From the Great Court out of sight I heard my chariot clattering from the stables. As I turned to pick up my shield, I thought within myself, “Why be angry? I am a wolf in a dog-pack here. A Minyan would not be angry. Among the Earthlings, no man would hope to be higher than I am lifted. Men come and go, they say, but the belly carries the child. I should know no good to strive for beyond this, to be chosen for the Mother, to quicken a woman and to die; I should not ask to outlive the height of my fortune. Why am I angry, then? Is it because I am a Hellene that the blood about my heart says to me, ‘There is something more’? Yet what it is I do not know, nor whether there is a name for it. It may be there is some harper, the son and the son’s son of bards, who knows the word. I only feel it about my heart; it is a brightness, and it is a pain.”
But as everyone knows, it is neither good nor wise for a man to go off to war bad friends with his wife, and least of all for a king. So I did not ask why she lay there, when she should have been dressed to see me off. I bent to kiss her; she lifted her head like a wave drawn up by the spring moon, and her mouth as if of itself took hold of mine; then she sank down again without a word. I paused; it was in my heart to ask her if she had conceived by me; but I did not know if her silence was sacred, and unlucky to break. So I said nothing, and went away.
Across the border we joined with the Megarians, and marched to the end of the guarded road. After that it passed on into the Isthmus, where no one mended it, and the weeds grew over; and instead of the guard-towers that stand where a king’s law runs, there were only the holds of the robbers, squatting in the rocks above. Some were nameless, some had both name and fame. The first of these was the castle of Sinis.
It stood on a pine-grown hillside, a square tower built by Titans, no man knows when, of gray-black limestone. Sinis had made his den in it, as the hyena does in an old burned city. Its walls were steep; we needed ladders and ramps to take it. When we came to hew the pines, we found that the tales were true. Tied into them were pieces of men’s bodies, sometimes a limb, sometimes a trunk. It had been his custom to bend down two strong saplings, bind the man between them, and let them fly asunder. The ropes were still on the trunks, some of them great trees now, forty feet high; he had been at the game for years. And, in case you wonder whether some god he served demanded such a sacrifice, I may say he did it for pleasure, and had never pretended anything else.
We took the tower on the third day. He had not enclosed the spring within the walls, so sure of himself he had grown, offering victims to himself in his accursed grove. He fought in his courtyard like a cornered rat, after we had stove the gate in; and it was thanks to me we took him alive, for I remembered his face in the ambush, when I passed through before.
What we could get down from the trees, we gave a decent funeral; but there were things we could not reach, besides what the ravens must have carried off. The wood was alive at evening, like a cave of bats, with souls of unburied men keeking and flittering. We gave them what they were thirsty for. When he saw the saplings bent for him, he did not even face the reckoning like a man; he knew something of pain, who had made it so long his study. He should have been left to hang, as those others had, till life bled out of him. But when he did not die, and the greater part of him hung aloft crying, it made me feel sick, not having a stomach as strong as his had been. I was ashamed to let anyone see me give an enemy the best of the bargain, so I put my young men to shoot at him for sport. Before long a bad shot finished him. We had dispatched his men already. When we had taken his stuff and the women from the castle, we set fire to the grove. The beard of the flame hid the hilltop from us; and the smoke was seen at Eleusis.
We camped to windward of it, and then it was time to divide the spoil. Xanthos and Pylas split it fairly, as they were bound to; but when Xanthos came to give out our half, the share my young men got was more than mean; it was a slight to my standing. I should have liked to tell him what I thought of him; but though his troops did not love him much, at least they knew him, and I was a stranger. So I said to the Guard, for everyone to hear, “This is what Xanthos thinks of the way you fought today. Well, a War Leader, who has everything to see to, can’t be everywhere at once. Perhaps he was not watching you as I was. But I will show you what I think myself.” And I divided all my own share among them, not keeping as much as a girl to lie that night with, only the arms of the men I had killed with my own hand. They were much pleased, and Xanthos not at all; so both sides got what they deserved.
In three or four more days of war all the big holds were cleaned out and burned; but there were many small bands left, whose lairs were in caves and rock-clefts. I remembered, and showed the others, their marks beside the road, a cairn, or a rag tied to a thorn-bush, marking off their run for the next troop to see. And now the peasants, who had lived in dread of them and had to feed them when travellers failed, began to trust in our strength and tell us where they were. Then we would beat the coverts, or smoke them out.
Between two such, hunts, the army was moving on along the road, up where it skirts the cliffs. I was leading in my chariot, going at a walk with my Guard behind me. Suddenly there was a great rattling and thudding on the hillside above, and down came two or three great stones, as big as your head. They were coming straight for me, but glanced off a ridge and struck the road in front, leaving deep dents in it and bounding on over the cliffs. My horses reared, and laid back their ears. I could feel them getting away from the charioteer, who ought to have held them since he was bigger than I, and grabbed the reins from his hands. Two of my lads risked hard knocks to run up and hold their heads, and among us we got them quiet. As for the driver, though we had had to carry him, there was no use in getting too angry, seeing there was no one else. Shore People are not much good with horses. Besides, he had had his lesson when he saw over the cliff ahead; it turned him white, and his teeth were rattling. Dexios and Skiron had died thereabouts.