ἐπιτάφιος λόγος

α

We ran the same routes on different soil.

Dip had the looks, I had the ‘admirable work ethic’. But our numbers were the same. We were the top two performers in the company, and beyond that it’s really just a popularity contest. I have been working for the company for almost seventeen years now, and Dip, fifteen. Two more years experience on my end due to my adept early-years prioritisation. Still, our routes are the furthest out of everyone else in the team by a long way. Stadions and stadions of territory that only get trusted in the feet of either me or Dip. Sure, he gets the scenic routes, the messages from the higher rollers, but no one trudges out the multi-day cattle runs like I do. If it wasn’t for me our farmers would be sinking in a warring pit of ignorance, and if it wasn’t for Dip then the family and friends of our leaders would not be privy to cultural shifts in the manufactured trends of the moment. As I said, virtually the same, the numbers don’t lie.

We grew up together, you know? Dip and I. He’d never really say anything about it, but we did. Our village at the time was thriving. We were known for our bustling end of week markets and singing goats. I always thought they sounded more as though they were screaming, but everyone else seemed to get a kick out of it. I still hear them sometimes on my longer routes, moving solo along earth trodden down by beasts, the screams singing through the wind. Sounds dreadful.

Dip’s Father and my Father worked together as goat herders. Once the first war broke out all the fighters left in the first few days. The rest of the men by the end of the week. I’ll always remember the first market day of the year: just women, children, and goats.

Gradually, people started to waft out of the village towards Athens. It was only fifty stadions from the town, a few days walk if that. My family, as well as Dip’s, stuck around until the first harvest failed. There was smoke in the air when we began packing our possessions. My mother buried the clay. I buried a small carving of a dog. See, I didn’t want to walk that day, my feet hurt, I had not

been sleeping well without my Father, and the increasingly deserted place I used to call my home seeped into my dreams at night revealing spirits and monsters my waking mind had not seen. Needless to say the suggestion of a fifty stadia hike did not sit well within my young soul. I did not even have sandals yet. So, naturally, I kicked dirt at my Mother and hid behind a screaming goat pen.

The dust from the disturbed ground lingered in the air, gently melding with the clouds. My eyes were caught by the movement of it, a charcoal rubbing revealing the hidden image underneath, it was alive. It thinned, retreating into the atmos. The revealed image: a steadily approaching man with wrapped sandals and a soldier's uniform. The messenger jogged into town, kicking up more dust behind him. Finding my mother’s eyes, he pulled a small sling round from where it was tied to his back, rummaged around within, then produced a small scrap of paper with a wax seal. Everyone was dead.

As he ran off towards the next town along, my unmoving hazy eyes found Dip’s. He stood with his mother on the other side of the goat pen. Despite our fathers’ proximity we had never spoken save for one morning where we were both made to milk the goats and he had asked me to “pass the bucket”, which I did (dropping it in the process). I was always scared of him due to his larger frame and confidence in talking with adults. He drew my attention on market days. This was the first time we made eye contact.

We were the only children left in the village. On my right was Athens, on the left the cloud of dust. I ran right. Dip ran left.

β

Athens at that time was not like how it is today. Things felt slower. People smiled more, even with the war on. The theatres were as full as the markets, and I couldn’t hear a single goat screaming even stumbling home in the dead of night. I took a bed in a shared quarters with seventeen other boys of a similar age. I had made a decision identical to my bedmates: I was to be a soldier. The days were long and hard and overwhelmingly unenjoyable. I spent most of my time being knocked down into mud, or kicked into fruit stands as I stood back up.

The only true moment of calm I was gifted from that mountain above was in the mornings. I still wasn’t sleeping well; if anything my dreams had twisted themselves into a deeper pit as my waking mind grew used to a harsher existence. The monsters in my head were now competing with the monsters I shared a room with. I would wake up just before the sun, the first ekes of daylight cutting through the room in blue ribbons. From my bed, I would listen for movement, ensuring the regular breathing of seventeen raw and broken men remained just that. Once the ribbons licked at my toes, I would slowly slide my way out of the covers and onto the floor. From here, I would crawl over to Helios’ bed - a balding, angry teen - and reach my hand under his mattress for the container of wine I knew he stashed away. I would never take much. Just a small cup. I would then top the container up with water so the weight felt the same. Nothing about Helios’ character led me to suspect that he would catch on to this ruse. And if he did, what would he do? Kick me into a fruit stand? I would continue to crawl across the room and out the door to the stairway, the dusty wood shifting to mercifully cool stone marking my escape. The recycled breath of seventeen brutes cleansed, the wafting cloud of dirt dispersing into clear, crisp morning air.

The cut of the stone pillar made it easy to climb, even with my cup of wine. The tall, cylindrical structure intended for water transportation, now abandoned, would take maybe half a minute to scale. Once I was at the top I felt like an old bird, completely free. Peace. The city gates slept soundly in the distance, the first moments of the day’s sun beginning to burn away at the stone. A sip of Helios’ wine and an empty city; I was a man.

I did this every sunrise for cycles and cycles until the morning dust cloud returned.

The Runner was beaten down. Legs sliced a thousand times with bramble and thorns, grazes on his knees and elbows, and a face that had seen the full extent of the night before. I had never been greener. Another soldier came out to greet them, just in time too; as soon as they embraced the knees of the runner buckled beneath him, knocking the helmet off the soldier to reveal a familiar face.

Seeing the running soldier again quickened my breath to the point that my vision briefly hummed out. I put my half empty cup of wine down on the cold stone and leapt down from where I sat. At the same time the familiar running soldier was wrapping up his sandals and stuffing his sling with messages. How many told of the deaths of a father? A mother? A village? Before me, the rope had been outstretched across the olympic track I had not been aware I was running along. My vision

hummed back in as my feet started to surge with tiny bolts of lightning. For the second time in his life, the unknown soldier made me run from home. Only this time, I ran in the right direction.

Helios would find my half full cup on the stone later that morning and swear to the gods a vicious revenge; I remain unconcerned.

γ

My first few years with the company were exhausting. Gloriously exhausting. I wasn’t getting beaten into the mud by barely cognitive boys, I was spending day after day running through hills and farmland, gradually increasing my distance and speed to a point where I was greatly valued within the company. Who would have thought, I was greatly valued. The familiar runner, the soldier, Orion, was a stray. A hidden son of a nearby General. He had refused to fight so instead made to run between battles as punishment. With most of Hellas realising how useful this was, Orion now outranked his father. He ran a loose company, with no drills or direct orders, instead trusting us to train as we felt necessary. I started with smaller deliveries - only twenty to forty stadions, eventually moving to more pressing, dangerous work. Battlegrounds.

Orion had me scampering through warring fields and coastlines for nearly two years. Some runs short, some longer, all with the risk of a violent end. My most memorable battle run was near the end of my second year. There were two of us on one run, —sometimes the generals demanded it to ensure a higher likelihood of the message being delivered. This run was myself and Amaltheia. A runner who had started at a similar time as me, under very different circumstances. She had been training independently as a runner in her hometown, dreaming of this job I had divinely stumbled into. Arriving at Hellas on a horse guided by her mother, she knocked on the front door of Orion’s home and challenged him to a race. Knowing no one else, we had grown close. We trained together. Shared a roof. Talked of our lives outside of running. I don’t think I loved her, and she didn’t love me, but our souls were intertwined like nothing I had experienced before. An immediate understanding of the movements of each other’s lungs. A Persian sword made light work of this tether, like a hand through a cobweb. I delivered the message on time. Followed by a new message to Amaltheia’s mother. I then spent a month on rest to repair my knee, which had been damaged carrying Amaltheia’s body for eighty-six stadions. Orion took me off battle runs after that.

I was back to running before the seasons changed. Work was endless in these times. We were the glue to the mis-communicating cracks in the empire and everyone knew it. I had returned to the work physically the same, better even, but mentally broken. My steps felt less purposeful, louder; I was acutely aware of my aloneness.

On a particularly long run from Athens to a local official in Mycenae, I was taking a break from the relentless sun in the shade of a large fig tree when a fog of dust invaded my eye. At first I thought it was my own. Spluttering, I cursed my speed, worked up a large, bitty glob of saliva and hawked it blindly to the ground.

“My feet were getting hot.”

“Gods!” I yelped in surprise. My eyes traced my recent spit from the foot of the man it landed on, up their well toned calves, quadriceps, hips, stomach, shoulders, neck, face. All covered in sweat and dirt, but not enough to obscure their soul.

“Pheidippides,” I said, not quite trusting what I saw.
“Thought I heard the goats,” he replied, wiping his foot on the fig tree. “The goats?”
“Where have you come from?” he asked.
“Athens.”
He nodded, eyes scanning the hills I had just passed through.
“And you?” I enquired.
The eyes of children in the bodies of men.
“Sparta.” The city fell out of his mouth in a low whisper.

I think back on that day regularly. The way Dip’s eyes stared so firmly with nothing behind them. Like marble. His eyebrows were buried so low they acted more as lids. I would later find out that he had been running, having cut away from his battalion early that morning, with nowhere particular in mind. Just away. He had not made up his mind about whether he was returning until—

“I saw a cloud.” His voice was dry, croaking.
Wiping the remaining grime from my eyes, I looked up at the burning blue sky. And smiled. “Do you know the way to Mycenae?” I asked.

δ

It took ten years for Dip to return to the topic of Sparta. Orion took him on without faltering. A man with a familiarity of the southern region and its tough-to-relax-around people along with a generally unphased nature toward cross-country travel? To Orion, Dip had stepped right off the Mount, gift wrapped by Hermes himself. In a little over two weeks, Dip moved off of the short routes I was trapped with for over a year. He completely skipped the battlegrounds. I had honed my agility darting past swords for years and he didn’t see a single one. Within a month he was partnering on runs with me: full country, multi-day messenger hauls. And after a month of that, he was out on his own. It was hard to not feel bitter about his progress. Why had I cut my teeth between Scylla and Charybdis and he floated through unscathed? Orion favoured him, I could tell. An impossible cocktail of Spartan athleticism and human warmth. I didn’t stand a chance.

During most of our interactions the man retained a quiet, gruff demeanour. Our conversations were short, efficient, and methodical. Like he was inspecting the grain of a fence post. I received this Spartan side of him while the rest of the world got a burning hearth. Yet, after five years of lingering animosity, I enacted a plan to wrestle him into friendship.

It was not uncommon to hallucinate during overnight runs. Amaltheia saw wolves stalking her. Orion’s path would fall away beneath him. I would see great cities through the clouds, or have full conversations with impossible people.

Dip would go blind.

On one such occasion I ran with him on his delivery, acting as his eyes, as his vision had not returned from the previous day’s run. I was happy to do this, but noted that he did not seem to need it, gladly darting along well-trodden paths without incident. I always wondered how honest he was about the longevity of his sight problems. He allowed me to act as eyes this one time, but there were

month-long periods where he would only take jobs in areas he knew. Was he functionally blind for these entire periods? Had I not paid attention? A hand gently grazing the corridor walls as he moved through them, lingering on a post a little longer than needed, waiting for me to start training runs before following...

“Rock!” I said as we ran through a technical section of mountain trail. Dip avoided it with ease, not missing a step as he manoeuvred around the large stone in the path. Dip allowed me on this run as it was a new area for both of us. We were crossing a border and the recipients had asked for Dip by name. I didn’t mind. The run was almost 1000 stadions there and back - the longest the company had ever seen - which I thought would be enough time to crack Dip’s skull and mould the brain into a shape that liked me. The first 500 stadions were completely silent save for these occasional “rock”, or “sharp turn”, maybe a “goat”. We stopped for meals, I poured water over his eyes, even re-wrapped his sandals. Not a peep.

We made it across the northern border and into the army barracks in stony silence. The place was heaving with soldiers. Slowing to a walk, I began to ask around for our recipient, ‘Leonidas’, a young general at the time. We were directed towards a small hill where a small man was brows deep in a large map. These were Greeks. What were they doing way out here?

“Leonidas?” I called out.

The man stood up slowly, eyes finding the pair of us within the crowd of men with ease. A tiny nod. We approached. For some reason my knees felt loose. Echoes of my past injury.

“Pheidippides,” Leonidas said coldly.

Dip nodded. Blind eyes locked on the General’s.

“Welcome back,” Leonidas continued. I looked around and mentally beat myself in the head; shields emblazoned with Lambdas, the tufted helmet weighing down the General’s map. Spartans. He stretched out a hand, palm up.

Dip produced a small scroll from his sling and handed it over.

“Good boy.” Leonidas took it, cracked it, read, nodded, dropped it to the floor. “Two man job is it?,” he smirked. “Do you know how to send them back as well?”

Nothing from Dip. I began to turn us around to leave.

“Hold it.” He scrawled a quick note on a scrap of paper and tossed it to Dip. It hit his shoulder and fell into the mud. I quickly bent over to pick it up—

“Down boy,” Leonidas snapped. “Not for you.”

I froze in a crouch. Leonidas took a step forward, his face inches from Dip’s. “You,” he snarled. Holding a low crouch for a prolonged period is ropey at the best of times. Holding a low crouch after five hundred stadions of running? I could hear my quadriceps calling for my death.

Dip slowly sank to his knees and ran his hand through the mud in search of the note. Leonidas watched closely, his boot covering the fallen paper. “Yes,” he said with a sigh, “just what I thought.” As he turned to walk back to his map I - as the courts will attest - was forced to leap from my crouch due to unpreventable quadricep cramping, smacking the crown of my head into the nose of Leonidas. His face exploded in Spartan red and my brain swirled around in Charybdis’ murky kitchen. Eyes spinning in their sockets. There is a small dent in my skull to this day.

With Leonidas swearing for all kinds of godly interference, Dip’s hand came up and found my shoulder - not before securing the fallen note in his sling - and we stumbled our way out of the camp as fast as our aching legs, blind eyes, and spinning head would allow us. Confused and panicked Spartans flowed in the opposite direction in a sea of muscular red and gold. They did not look at us.

A few stadions out of the camp I was about to board Charon’s ferry. Everything hurt, we had not drank or eaten in hours, and I was beginning to see the cities in the sky. Dip was setting an aggressive pace for no reason at all which was beginning to piss me off. I was here to help him and here I was getting towed along like a three legged goat. I was not sure if I was about to collapse, fight, or run up the stairs and knock on the front gate of my glowing city in the sky before Dip began to slow his pace. He loosened his sling and pulled out the muddy note, running his fingers slowly over the wet paper.

“That’s the nicest I’ve seen him in years.” He handed the paper over to me. “Shall we stop for the night? My vision is coming back. I want to see the stars.” With this, he leant back against a tree and slowly sank towards the ground. It was rare to see him so visibly tired. “You ran the right way,” he said, “I should have followed you.”

I looked at the stained note in my hands. The city in the sky was beginning to fade away, replaced by the startling cold of the night and a loud ringing in my ears.

“Here,” Dip searched through his sling and pulled out a large sack of figs, “Swiped this from the camp.” He threw a fig into his mouth. “Bad people, but they do great figs”. One soared through the air towards me; in a panic I dropped the note and flailed both hands in front of me, missing the fig entirely. As the note landed on the ground, it opened up to reveal Leonidas’ message.

It was completely empty.

“What do you see?” My eyes darted from the empty paper to the happily chewing Dip. He continued: “When you reach the crux of it? I’ve always been jealous. Orion falls into incredibly deep pits, you know?” He laughed. “Sometimes, when it’s just me and the blindness has fully set in, I hear things. Crazy things. Deep grumbling machines. Huge. All around. It sounds like an army is behind me, an army of metal heaving its way towards me. Everything else shuts off. Even when my eyes come back, the noise is still there. And everyone else seems fine! Surely they can hear it, they just don’t care!” He made a quiet, gurgling noise in his throat. I thought he was choking on a fig.

“You know what it’s like,” he continued, “do you remember the goats? The screaming goats from the village that everyone said could sing? It’s just like that. Everyone telling you the sound was beautiful as it grinds against your bones.”

“Are you hearing it now?”

Dip shrugged, “Eh, you get used to it. I actually quite like it now.” He laughed a little before munching another fig. “There’s a song in there.” He tosses a fig. What do you see?”

“Cities.” I, again, failed to catch the fig. “Cities in the sky.” “Like Athens?”

“Nothing like Athens,” I remember saying. “Ten times bigger, buildings impossibly high, made of glass, light everywhere, people, great crowds of people, and smoke. Clouds I think. Olympus.”

Dip’s mouth hung open, “You’ve been to Olympus?” “No. I can’t get there. It’s just above me.”

“Have you ever tried?” Dip pushed.
“I- Well- I have my deliveries.”
Dip screamed, throwing a fig at me, “And I get the blind metal monsters!” I didn’t catch that one either.
We had a really nice run back. Talked the whole way.
As Dip’s sight returned, mine began to spin.

ε

Over the following years my spinning head grew increasingly worse up until the point where I could not stand up in the daytime. A crack that had let something in, or perhaps something out — the doctors were not sure. No more running, they told me. I laughed at the joke. Orion did not. Restricted my work to local nighttime routes I could comfortably walk. Dip would accompany me on these deliveries. Making sure I stayed steady and on track. Keeping conversation lively to keep my brain firing. Re-wrapping my shoes. Ensuring I ate and drank. I’m fine, I kept insisting, often while walking in a slight circle. Dip would nod his head, gently guide me in the right direction and say nothing of it. He would tell me about growing up in Sparta, the severity, the loneliness. How Leonidas had befriended him and Dip failed him, unable to live up to expectations. How he often ran all night just to be somewhere else, returning with the sunrise for morning drills. Neither of us had been back to our village, what was left of it. His mother had joined him in Sparta but died soon after. I was lucky enough to have secured a home in the surrounding hills of Athens for mine. He was welcome anytime, I told him. He’d like that, he had replied. I told him about Amaltheia, my first friend, but did not tell him how I felt about him. I did not tell anyone. Instead, I took him to my seat atop the stone pillar, cup of wine in hand, to watch the dawn sun burn the Acropolis. Thankfully Helios was not in sight. I had never anticipated returning to the spot on the pillar, but I had never anticipated meeting Dip. I think that, maybe, in this moment, he understood his importance to me as we took in the rarified air from up high. Filling our lungs with the same beat, just the two of us. The sun broke free from the Acropolis and lit Dip’s body aflame. A golden statue sipping shared

wine. I can still feel his heat. Despite this turtling lifestyle, no medical progress had been made in my broken skull. I was not sure if I wanted any.

The Persians landed at Marathon not long after that.

Orion needed someone to run to Sparta for aid. Then to Marathon. The longest run the company had ever received. I could get to Sparta, I was sure of it. Neither Orion, the doctors, nor Dip would let me run that far with my head as it was. Even if I snuck out, I doubt Leonidas would let me through the gates. I was too valuable. So was Dip, I argued. Moreso. But the Spartans knew Dip. Had a history with Dip. Had a formative grip on his mind like no one else. I didn’t want him to go: no one should, it was too far, too dangerous. I told Orion he should decline the job, it wasn’t worth it. I could see something behind his eyes, a hollow glint of understanding that he knew I was right.

Not that any of this mattered, because I could see something else in Orion’s eyes. Reflected in his cloudy blue iris was Dip: he had already started running.

I chased after him blindly, harder than I had ever run, following dust trails cutting through the sky. Screaming his name, I saw the flick of his sandals as he turned into the hills. I passed out just before the city border.

ζ

Pheidipedes ran 1920 stadions just for the Spartans to say no. Then through a battle ground to tell the Athenians no.

Then to Athens to tell the people we won anyway.

And then he died.

η

“Did ya win?” “What?”

“Against the Persians... Did ya win?” “I- ‘OI!” “I wasn’t involved.” “But the Greeks won?” “The Greeks won, yes. Dip arrived just as the battle ended. Ran all the way to Athens to tell

everyone-” “Then died.” ‘Yes. Then he died.” “Probably shouldn’t have run that last bit, should he?” I did not reply to this. “OI!” The large metal statue persisted. “It wasn’t his decision” “Did he not have autonomy of will? Was he not a man? A Spartan trained soldier hardened by

mountains?” “I-“ “And what are you doing then?” “What am I-“

“Matter of fact, why are ya telling me any of this? Do I look like I give a rat’s-ass? You familiar with rats and their asses? Ever delivered any rats on your little jollies? Matter of fact, why did you stop right here? Delivering something to me? Better not be a damn bottle I’ll tell ya that for free.

Can’t tell me you’ve run all the way here to yap on about some old dead Greek fella before throwing a damn bottle at me, what’s the point in that?”

Olympus was louder than I thought. My feet were black with dirt, nose bombarded with sickly fumes, and skin hot under the sun. It felt warmer up here. The large metallic statue was beginning to frustrate me.

“Run from Ancient Greece? Ridiculous. Can’t be dealing with time wasters like you. The amount of hoops I had to shit through for a visa and still you people are fucking me around. Maniacs. Just throw the damn bottle at me and take a hike,” the large metal statue complained.

“The bottle?”

“Just like everyone else. Sick of it I am. Have you felt how hot it is? Try to imagine how I feel! Wait, you’re not in Roman armour are you?

“In what?!” “Oh stop riding me, I failed history.” “I’ve had enough of you.” “Brother, you think YOU’VE had enough?” “Take me to Olympus.” “Is that on the L?” “What are you saying?” “Upstate?” “Are you mocking me?” “Oh buzz of ya Greco-roman freak.” The large metal statue flapped open and slammed shut with a

terrific clang. “What’s a Roman?!” But the large metal statue did not say another word.

Olympus was filthy. A small dog scurried past me and relieved itself on a similar metal statue of a different colour. A thin piece of brown board was sticking from the top of it. I pulled it out. Felt it in

my hand. Light, malleable, too thick for a scroll or parchment, was it armour? I stuffed it in my sling which I then fastened tight to my back. A large crowd of people dressed in remarkable attire had their backs to me, all heading in one direction.

Olympus. I thought. I’m going, Dip, I’m finally going. Deep into my run I had taken the leap, I had turned towards my

city in the sky, just as you wanted me to. Now here I was. The gates.

A huge machine screamed overhead, faster than anything I have ever seen. The noise, the metal, the goats, I think I hear it, Dip, the noise, the relentless noise; there is a melody in the eternal screams.

No soil here. To Olympus. I run.