The years passed as if being lived by another. I glance back upon enlistments and discharges, pay vouchers and correspondence, bronze heads extracted from my own flesh and cached as souvenirs at the bottom of my pack; I dig out trinkets and mementos, the names of men and women, lovers indeed, jotted upon the felt of my helmet cawl and scratched with a blade edge into the straps of my rucksack. I remember none.
The season transited as in a single night, that species of slumber from which one awakens at intervals, fitful and feverish, and can reclaim by morning nothing save the sour smell of his own tortured bedding. It seemed I came to myself again before Potidaea, besieging the place a second time seven years after the first. I cannot say now if it was dream or real.
For two winters after my wife's death, I felt no call to passion.
This was neither virtue nor grief, only despair. Then one night I entered the whores' camp and never left. You understand the reckoning of accounts, my friend. Tote this up for me. How much in wages, and don't fail to include mustering bonuses and dividends of discharge, may a soldier accrue who remains upon campaign, retiring not even in winter except to recover from wounds, for a decade entire? A tidy sum, I'd imagine. Enough to buy a handsome little farm, with stock and hands and even a comely wife.
I fucked away every farthing. Screwed it or drank it, and in the end could not credit even my own recall that I had once harbored aspirations for myself.
Peace came, the so-called Peace of Nicias, whereunder both sides, exhausted from years of strife, contracted to retire until they could recover breath, scratching in the interval lines beyond which each vowed not to trespass. I came home. Alcibiades was thirty now, elected to the chief executive of the state, the Board of Ten Generals, the same post his guardian Pericles had held. But his star had not yet gained preeminence. Nicias held sway, his elder and rival, who had negotiated peace with the Spartans, or been appointed by them to do so, to deprive Alcibiades, whose enterprise they feared, of the recognition and prestige. My friend employed me, at captain's wages paid from his own purse, as a sort of private envoy to the Lacedaemonians, or those individual Spartans-Xenares, Endius, Mindarus-with whom he conspired to wreck the Peace. I am no diplomat. I missed the action. I needed it.
One comes to the mercenary's calling in this way, as a criminal to crime. For war and crime are twin spawn of the same misbegotten litter. Why else does the magistrate present his perennial offer to errant youth: servitude or the army. Each inducts into the other, war and crime, and the more monstrous the felony, the deeper the criminal must plunge to reclaim himself, disremembering kin and country, forgetting even crime, so that in the end the only riddle the soldier kens is that most occult of alclass="underline" why am I still living?
Peace for me was war under another name. I never stopped working. Absent license to soldier for my country, I hired out to others. At first only to allies, but when times got tight, well…one's former foes proved the more eager employers. Thebes had got a taste for power, whipping Athens at Delium. War had brought into her fold Plataea, Thespiae, and half the towns of the Boeotian League; she saw no profit in buying into a Spartan peace. Corinth stood equally apart and aggrieved. The treaty had restored neither Anactorium nor Sollium; she had lost her influence in the northwest, not to mention Corcyra, whose revolt had started the war in the first place. Megara chafed to behold her port of Nisaea garrisoned by Athenian troops, and Elis and Mantinea, democracies, had lost all patience with life beneath the Spartan heel. In the north, Amphipolis and the Thraceward region defied the treaty. I worked for all of them. We all did.
Under the peace, states favored mercenaries over popularly drafted troops. Such lives lost did not haunt the politician; their acts could be disavowed when inconvenient; if they rebelled, you held their pay; and if they were killed, you didn't pay them at all.
You have observed the mercenary's life, Jason. Of a year's campaign there totals what, ten days of actual fighting? Boil it down to moments when one stands within hazard's jaws and the tally condenses to minutes. All a man need do is survive that and he's earned another season. Indeed the mercenary holds more in common with the foe, to preserve their lives and livelihoods, than with his own officers, seeking glory. What is glory to the soldier for hire? He prefers survival.
The mercenary never calls himself by that name. If he owns armor and hires out as a heavy infantryman, he is a “shield.”
Javelineers are “lances,” archers “bows.” A broker, called a pilophoros after his felt cap, will say, “I need one hundred shields and thirty bows.”
No shield for hire tramps alone. Peril of robbery makes him seek a mate; it's easier to hire on as a pair or even a tetras. There are sites in each city where soldiers congregate seeking employment. In Argos a taverna named the Anthem, in Astacos a brothel called Knucklebones. In Heracleion are two hiring plazas; one beside the dry spring called Opountis, the other on the rise east of the Shrine of the Amazons, called by the locals Hyssacopolis, Pussy Town.
The countryside holds sites of custom as well. A chain of bivouacs called “coops” runs from Sounium to Pella. “Coop” serves as noun and verb. “I need a dozen shields.” “Try the Asopus, I saw a mob cooping there.” Some sites are little more than dry slopes beside streams; others-one called Tritaeia near Cleonae, another along the Peneus near Elis simply Potamou Camps is, Where the River Bends-are quite commodious, shaded copses with part-time markets, even the rude linen shelters called hourlies, where a soldier packing a woman may obtain an interval of privacy before vacating for the next pair.
Abandoned hunting lodges are favored sites for shields overnighting on the road. One recognizes these haunts from the surrounding slopes, logged down for firewood. An informal but remarkably efficient postal service covered the country then.
Soldiers packed letters among their kit, parcels and “sticks” thrust into their fists by wives and lovers or the odd mate encountered on the tramp. Each arrival at a coop would be encircled eagerly while he ran through his packet. If a man heard an absent mate's name called, he took the letter for him, often packing it half a year before at last completing delivery.
Hiring notices, called show rags, were posted at coops and brothels, even upon landmark shade trees or beside favored springs. Learning of work, an entire coop will tramp off, electing their officers on the march. Mercenary rank is less formal than that of a state army. A captain is called by the number of men he brings.
He is an “eight” or a “sixteen.” Officers are “grade-men” or
“pennants,” after the service sashes they mount upon their spearpoints, as guidons in assembly and dressing the line. A good officer never lacks for men eager to serve under him, nor a good man for commanders keen to sign him on. You find a crew you can count on and stick with them.
One sees the same faces in the profession. They all make the rounds. I ran into Telamon twice, on a ferry out of Patrae and at a coop on the Alpheus, before signing on with him the first fight at Trachis. Few use their real names. Nicknames and war names abound. Macedonians, “macks,” make up the main of the soldiery, hazel-eyed and orange-haired. I never served with a unit that didn't have a Big Red, a Little Red, and a gang in between.
No man unblooded or unvouched for is taken on for pay. He must serve free, and none shares food or fire till he has held his ground in a fight. Later on the rallying square, the grade-man approaches. “When did you last draw wages?” “Never yet, sir.” The officer takes his name and slips him a coin or two. “Start tomorrow.” That's it. He's in.