yo ho ho

if they want people to stop pirating music, they should give it a less sexy name, like audio rape.

The long night of Othryades the Spartan

Othryades the Spartan was having a hard time telling where his blood stopped and where the blood of his fallen comrades began. 299 of them lay at his feet. That was more sets of cold eyes than he could count staring at him expectantly. Brothers, friends, lovers, fathers, sons, uncles, nephews. Another 298 of the enemy were there too. Broken bodies stretched out around him in a jagged reef as if their stiffening limbs grew from the muddy ground. The silence of the twilight flowed through everything. The collected final breath of 597 men muted all sounds, and devoured the air with its loaded hush.
Old Othryades felt it in his chest and throat – a dull weight that clamped down on him, replaced his blood with quicksilver, froze his heart, numbed his skin and turned it cold. Funny thing, this silence. It was more deafening than the roar of their charge: the furious bellow of 600 voices becoming one to herald the slaughter.
The last man standing had not joined in the cry. Couldn’t remember the last time he did. He knew the silence that it presaged; even as the fighting raged he felt the hush slipping in to replace the honesty of death with the ambiguity of life. A spirit cannot escape such silence once touched, can never return fully to the glorious abandon of the war cry.
Sensitive guy, this Othryades, no? Not really cut out for the soldiering life – probably should have gone to meet his makers long ago…yet…there he stood, once again, listening to the sound of his own breath and the whistle of the wind awash with the colours of the approaching night. Years ago he had lain awake at night on barren, quiet expanses much like this one asking the God’s “why?” Luck, fate, divine providence…now it hardly seemed to matter. There would always be another battle. Kings and conquests came and went, but employment for killers was pretty dependable. If Othryades didn’t fall today, another chance would come tomorrow, or the day after, regular as the sun rising over the hills. He knew the certainty of the system, this devourer of men, even without knowing he knew. It was comforting in its way – being part of the leviathan. It gave him life and it would one day take it away.
Off in the distance, two figures walked away from him. Chromios and Al…Aldede? Alsomething. Two Argives, two enemies, who had stood at a distance and considered him and whispered between themselves.
“Looks like the day is ours, Spartan.” One of them had said after they had conferred.
Othryades squinted back, glanced down at the ground, swampy with blood and entrails, then back up and shrugged. What could he say that would matter in the face of that silence?
“Since we hold the majority of survivors and must therefore be considered the victors, we have beatifically decided to let you live on the condition that you not try to pursue us as we head back to our camp.”
Orthyades reached up and scratched a bug bite on his neck with the point of a knife he held in one swollen and scabby hand.
“We will interpret your silence as acquiescence and congratulate you on showing honour in your most ignominious defeat.” They hurried off as best they could through the tangle of their fallen comrades glancing back every so often to see that the lone Spartan had not moved. He watched them leave.
No point in wasting energy on meaningless debate. He had a long night ahead of him. Going back to camp had entered his mind, but only briefly. He didn’t want to hear the adulation of those who had not gone to battle and especially not their concern. Was he all right? Did he need anything? Come rest, have a drink…
He preferred the company of the dead. Plus, the fallen Argives had to be stripped. That was the right of the victors, to pick over the fallen like so much carrion and take from them those things that they would not need in the next life. Quite a right for one man. Orthyades looked around and wondered where to start. By this point, almost everything he owned had once belonged to men who were now long dead. Clothes, armour, jewellery, weapons. He took these memento mori everywhere he went, combining and accumulating, hoarding and abandoning. Sometimes, he would try to remember the stories of how these things had come to him, but mostly they were lost in battle.
298 men would take all night. Not just their valuables, everything would have to be taken off and piled so that those who came later would know who the winning side had been. That was what really mattered right? That all of this meant something to someone. Maybe his life didn’t, or the lives that seeped into the ground around him, but combined, it all meant something. He couldn’t fathom what that meaning might be but felt sure that it existed just the same.
That dark, dark night his limping figure moved slowly, deliberately through the tangle of the dead, stopping to unhook breast plates, slip off boots, ease sword and spear from stiff fingers, and even close glassy eyes, weighing them down with small rocks because he had no coins to give them for Phlegyas’ toll. There was no moon in the cloudless sky and the stars swirled and swam on the cold currents infused with far off night smells.
He was tired, but would have been unable to sleep had he tried. His body moved mechanically, searching bodies for valuables, then stripping them down to their ruined flesh and bone. Some were mangled horribly, some almost perfect except for a clean stab wound that had bled them dry or a little dent in their skull that had sent them straight to Hades. He found rings, lockets of hair, good luck charms like chicken feet or shark’s teeth strung in a necklace. On one handsome youth, whose head now clung to his stiff body by only a few tendons, he found a rolled up piece of parchment – a love note saying:

I dream every night of your return when we can leave our wives and escape to Crete where we can live together in peace.

Ixion

He rolled it back up and tucked it in his breastplate to add later to his collection. Love notes were common plunder that no one besides Crazy Old Othryades cared to keep. He had scores of the things that formed a strange little mosaic of regret.
Death was a void, he realized. The absence of things like love and hate and laughter and taste and warmth. It was the darkness that swallowed the light of the candle. The hungry silence. And even if he still drew breath, he could feel the void growing inside of him as sure as the tide rolled in. Could he rightfully say that he was not already dead? If only he could take a life, Othryades, mused. Take someone’s life and live it as his own while this broken, tainted body fell to the killing fields as another part of the grizzly scenery. He would run away with Ixion, or go home to another man’s wife and children, embrace a mother not his own or toast a brother he had never met.
But men didn’t take lives, they simply ended them and Othryades for all his good intentions, could only collect those things that reminded him that life had once existed where the silence now pooled. And collect he did. All night, his crooked figure limped back and forth across the shadows of the battlefield stripping cold bodies of the memories of life. As he work, he inspected the dead men’s belongings and tried to remember the feelings associated with them. A lock of hair made him think of a lover’s embrace. A blue ribbon brought to mind the clear ring of a child’s laughter. None of these things stirred anything in him any more, so long had it been since he had known them. He did not even trust his own memories of what they had been like, feeling sure that he had forgotten some important element over time, but unable to grasp what that might have been.
Back and forth all night until the final body lay naked. Othryades knelt down, too tired to sleep and waited for Apollo’s chariot to appear on the horizon. Who knows how long he waited, quietly, patiently, with only dead men for company? Just when it seemed the gods had forsaken him, the darkest night began to lighten from black ink, to timid yellow then deepened to reds and oranges that sprang up from the distant hills to fight back the abyss.
Othryades watched all of this and felt nothing, knowing full well that the rays could not reach inside of him to burn away the silence.
On the horizon, under the wash of glittering orange and gold, appeared a unit of men. His men. They marched quickly and authoritatively, covering the distance to the battlefield before Apollo had even ascended completely from his stables. They came to a clattering halt near Orthyades and considered his handiwork.
“Ye, God’s soldier…is this your doing?” Barked a general.
Orthyades stood up slowly and felt his muscles not quite un-knot.
“Are you the only survivor?” the General demanded.
Orthyades nodded, leaning heavily on the shaft of a broken spear.
A mirthless smile spread across the man’s face. “Then we have taken the day! Victory is ours!” A cheer went up from his company that caused birds to fly off distant trees. The General dispatched his fastest messengers to report the good news and ordered the rest of his men to start moving the salvaged amour and weapons back to camp as well as to attend to the solitary hero. When he turned back to get the soldiers name, Othryades was gone, limping slowly back towards the camp, a dark silhouette against the splendour of the dawn.