Like You'd Understand, Anyway

I laid myself beside him, grateful for his presence. He always doubted my judgment but thought my leadership to be worth my blunders. We awoke some hours later to find the horse gone and twilight coming on. More sleep, Browne in a half-conscious state and making small gesticulations. It was as if he had been submerged in a kind of gloaming of the mind, an infant's fatalism. Near daybreak the moon rose in the E and the sun followed, warming us both. It was not possible to tell how long my friend had been dead. I eased my arms from around him and stood, then turned round myself and cried. I squatted beside him. When the sun was full on my head I found a flint and scratched onto the rock face beside where he lay J. A. BROWNE S.A.E. DEC 251840. I sat with my back to his side for another full day, taking only a little water at sunset. In the blue moonlight the stars seemed to multiply and wheel. I gazed upward full of grievance and self-justification. I called out that we should be done justice to. The canyon walls gave back their response. In the moonlight they became a luminous cerulean. I heard the slosh and slap of water in a great bay. I knew I had had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was. The wind picked up. My ears filled with sound. The blackness of a sandstorm dropped over the canyon rim like a cloak. Its force turned my friend onto his side. Its force turned my face to the rock. I saw strange wraiths. Wormlike, coiling figures. Terrible faces. My eyes clogged with grit. I hoped they would fill with everything they needed. While my throat filled with what poured over the canyon rim. And my heart filled with the rest.

My Aeschylus

I am Aeschylus son of Euphorion of Eleusis and I've come this day with my brother to take my place in the line with my tribe to meet the invader where he disembarks and drive him back into the sea. We've rested and waited six days in the Herakleion sanctuary on the plain of Marathon, with the Median fleet filling half the shoreline of the bay, even with their ships anchored eight deep. More men-at-arms are assembling before the Great Marsh than any of us have ever seen. We're told that their word for commander means “Leader of the Hosts.”

At the eastern end of the marsh is a lake, which enables them to water their horses. A stream flows out of it to the sea. It's fresh enough to be drunk by cattle where it issues from the lake, but at its mouth turns brackish and fills with saltwater fish.

Who knows me better than my brother Kynegeiros? Who's looked after me with more care? Whom have I disappointed as intensely? Who's been as terrible a household presence?

Who's trained me? Who's pruned my independence? Who's stopped my mouth? Who's set my feet on the path of understanding, and shown that knowledge comes in suffering? Whose hard hand gave me this scar across my scalp, just because it could?

We've spent six days checking and rechecking our kit and avoiding idlers and gossips. He's tried to interest me in his surgeon's packet: here's how you start the needle with the catgut twine; here's how you grip the narrow-nose to extract an arrowhead, as opposed to a sword shard. I don't need to be reminded that battlefield surgery can save a life. Yesterday to please him I sewed up some oxhide as practice.

We marched all night through Pallene, skirting Mount Pelikos to the southeast, and arrived here on the plain at first light. The plain, empty of trees and left fallow for grazing, smells of the wild fennel that gives it its name.

I'm all aches and pains. My brother has a month-old sprain that he aggravated on a gravely downhill track. I'm forty-four and he's forty-nine. We're no longer young men. We have families.

Here is our country's situation as we understand it: the Persian has come in response to our support of the Ionian revolt and the burning of his citadel at Sardis. He has come with the combined nations of Media, Sakai, Ethiopia, Egypt, Dacia, Scythia, Bactria, Illyria, Thessalia, and India. He has come through Rhodes, Kos, Samos, Naxos, Paros, Karystos, and Eretria, subjugating each as he went. Everywhere his fleet has put in, he has demanded and received hostages and men-at-arms. He has come in such numbers that the disembarking alone has taken, according to the local farmers, nine days.

We are of the deme Eleusis and the tribe Aiantis, and when our strategos draws us up in battle order, we will be in the place of honor on the right flank, the sea off our shoulders. We will with our other Attic demes and allies form a rank facing the invader that is sufficiently long but insufficiently deep. Our leaders call it Stretching the Soup. The rest of us call it, with quiet irony, Our Challenge.