Like You'd Understand, Anyway

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.