Killer of Men lw-1

by Christian Cameron

  'Come a long way, eh, apprentice?' he said, when I gave him the sign of the journeyman. He was lying on the cot. We had cleaned the cabin and I had found his cup – the fine cup my father had made him – in the leather bag of the leader. The Thracians were amusing themselves rebuilding the door while Hermogenes and Idomeneus hunted for meat. He frowned. 'Where did you learn that sign?'

  I knelt by him. 'Crete, father,' I said.

  He coughed. 'Crete? By the gods, boy – you'd have done better in Thebes!' He coughed again. 'Here – give me your hand. That's the sign for Boeotia.'

  Then he lay still so long I thought he was asleep, or dead. But when I threw my cloak over him, he managed a smile. 'I saw you,' he said.

  'Father?' I asked.

  'Sacrificed the bastard,' he said. 'Zeus, you frightened me, son.'

  We fed the lot of them on deer meat and barley from our wagon. I let the prisoners stew in their fear. The tinker stayed with me and was enough of a help that I wanted him to stay.

  I left the body of their leader across the threshold of the precinct, so that his end was clear to all of them. Let them wonder how it had happened. Divine justice takes many forms. I had just learned that lesson, and it was steadying me; the blackness of three days before was already a memory. And seeing Empedocles – even older, and badly hurt – was a tonic. It reminded me that this life – Boeotia, a world with ordered harvests and strong farmers, a cycle of feasts, a local shrine – it was real. It was not a dream of youth.

  Idomeneus wanted to kill the lot of them. Of course, that's what we'd have done at sea. My reluctance puzzled him.

  'Different places have different rules,' I told him.

  He nodded, happy that there was some reason. 'Wasn't much of a fight,' he said.

  'I'm not here to fight,' I said. 'I may go back to smithing. And farming.'

  He had finished his deer meat, and we were sharing wine from his mastos cup. He winced, as if I had cut him. 'That's not you, lord,' he said. 'You're no farmer! You are the Spear! Arimnestos the Spear! Men shit themselves rather than face you. You can't be a smith!'

  'I'm tired of killing,' I said. In the morning, I sat on a log with all the prisoners. They were a useless lot, beaten men in every way, but they'd behaved like animals when they had the chance – raping the women they'd taken, burning Empedocles, and only the gods knew how many more victims were in the shallow graves behind the tomb.

  'You are broken men,' I said.

  They stared at me dully, waiting for death.

  'I will try to fix you,' I said.

  One man, a dirty blond, smiled. 'What will you have us do?' he asked, already aiming to ingratiate with the conqueror.

  'We'll start with work,' I said. 'If you displease or disobey, the punishment will be death. There will be no other punishment. Do you understand?'

  'Will you feed us, master?' another man said.

  'Yes,' I said. They were ugly, those men. As far from the virtue that Heraclitus taught as Briseis was from an old hag in Piraeus. But I understood that the principal difference between us was that my hand still held a sword.

  Their first task was to dig up all the shallow graves. There were fifteen – ten men and five women. None of the corpses was very old, and the task horrified them. That pleased me.

  We made a pyre and purified the bodies, and then we sent their spirits to the underworld avenged, the old way, at least in Boeotia, and their ashes went into the hero's tomb, where they could share in the criminal's blood, or that's how I understood it from Calchas. The women wept as we poured the oil we had over the bodies. The two who survived had known some of the others.

  I didn't ask them any questions.

  It took us three days to restore the cabin and to dispose of the victims. We raked the yard, and we cut firewood, and we cleaned the tomb. I poured wine on Calchas's grave each day.

  Each night, I lay awake, thinking.

  On the third day, Empedocles' fever broke and he began to recover quickly.

  That night, Hermogenes came and sat by me as I looked at the stars shining down into the clearing by the tomb.

  'I understand,' he said.

  I put my hand on his. 'Thanks,' I said.

  'But it has to be done,' he said.

  'I had to put my own house in order,' I said, 'before I go to my father's.'

  'This is not your house,' he said. Hermogenes lived in a very literal world.

  'Yes,' I said. 'This is my house.' The two women had been farm slaves across the river. After some conversation, and some halting answers, I set on a course of action with Hermogenes.

  I left Idomeneus at the shrine. Ah, thugater, you smile. Well might you smile. I left him with the Thracians as helpers, and I told the Thracians that they were halfway to their freedom. They both nodded like the serious men they were. Tiraeus came – he was already oikia by then. One of mine.

  I left my armour and all my weapons, except my good spear. A serious man in Boeotia may walk abroad with a spear. I wore a good wool chiton, and my only concession to my recent life was the necklace.

  We put Empedocles in the wagon with the two women and walked down the mountain, across the valley and up the hill.

  I stopped at the fork where one lane ran up the hill – the lane of my childhood. And another ran down and away, into the flat lands by the river – Epictetus's lane. Even alone, or with Hermogenes, I knew I could go up that golden lane to my father's house, drench it in blood and make it mine in an hour. I stood there long enough, despite my resolve, that Hermogenes cleared his throat nervously, and I found that I was standing with my hand on my sword hilt.

  Then I turned my back on my father's lane and walked downhill.

  Coming into Epictetus's farmyard, I felt remarkably like Odysseus, especially when a farm dog came and smelled my hand, turned and gave a friendly bark – not a cry of joy, but a bark of acceptance.

  Peneleos – the old man's younger son – came down into the courtyard from the women's balcony. His face was reserved. He admitted later that he had no idea who I was. But he knew Hermogenes.

  'There's a friend!' he called. I saw a bow move in another window, and I realized that the bandits must have preyed on all these farms. I can be a fool.

  'Peneleos!' I called. 'It's me – Arimnestos.'

  He started as if he'd seen a ghost, then we embraced, although we'd never been that close. And his brothers came to the yard, the eldest carrying a bow.

  'You're alive!' he said. 'Your sister will go wild!'

  And then the old man himself came into the yard. 'They don't sound like thieves!' he said in an old man's voice.

  It was hard to see Epictetus as an old man. Of course, I'd thought that he was older than dirt as a child, but I'd seen differently at Oinoe. He was starting to bend at the waist, and he had a heavy staff, but his back straightened when he saw me, and the arms he put around me were strong. 'You came back,' he said, as if he'd just made a hard bargain, but a good one. He reached up and fingered my necklace. 'Huh,' he said. But he gave me the lower half of a grin to take the sting out of the grunt. 'What kept you?' he asked.

  'I was taken as a slave,' I said.

  'Huh!' he said in a different voice. He had started as a slave. Then he put his head over the edge of the wagon bed. 'Say!' he said.

  'We broke the bandits,' Hermogenes said. He was still being embraced, now by a bevy of Boeotian maidens – Epictetus's daughters. The eldest, who had once been offered to me, was a matron of five years' marriage to Draco's eldest, and she had a fair-haired boy just five years old and a daughter of four.

  Looking at her stopped me in my tracks, because seeing her was like living another life. Not that I'd ever loved her – simply that in another one of Heraclitus's infinite worlds, I might have wed her, and those would have been my children, and I would have had no more blood on my sword than I got at the yearly sacrifice. That other world seemed real when I looked at her, and her children.

  Epictetus the Younger, now
a tall man with a heavy beard, lifted the two slaves down from the wagon.

  'Thera's,' he said. 'The bandits killed her and took all her women – and her slaves joined them.' He looked at me. 'I guess they're yours, now.'

  That stopped all conversation.

  'Simon has my father's farm,' I said into the silence.

  'Aye,' Epictetus the Elder said.

  I nodded. 'He killed my father,' I said. 'A blade in the back while you fought the men of Eretria.'

  All the men present winced. The silence stretched on and on, and then old Epictetus nodded.

  'Thought so,' he said, and spat.

  'What're you going to do?' Peneleos asked.

  'You broke the bandits?' Epictetus the Younger asked. 'You and – who?'

  His father understood. 'You going to kill him?' he asked. Epictetus didn't even care where I'd been, how we'd broken the bandits – none of that mattered. He had my right hand in his, and the calluses on my palm told him all he needed to know.

  His question returned the courtyard to silence.

  I helped his son lift the priest down from the wagon. 'I came to talk to you about that,' I said.

  'You want to call him before the assembly?' Epictetus asked later, over bean soup.

  I nodded.

  Hermogenes shrugged. 'I thought we were just going to kill him,' he said apologetically.

  'And then what?' I asked. 'Start a bandit gang? This is Boeotia, not Ionia. What would the archon say if I butchered him and moved into the farm. And hasn't he married my mother? He has sons – do I kill them all?'

  'Yes,' Peneleos said. 'Bastards every one. Sorry, Ma.'

  I shook my head. 'Law,' I said.

  Empedocles was sitting up and taking broth. He saw through me as if I was a pane of horn. 'You could do it,' he said. 'Buy a few judges with that trinket around your neck. Men around here remember you and your father. He died fighting for the city – everyone knows that. Hades, I'm from Thebes and I know it. Kill the bastard – and his brood, if you must. No one will hold it against you.'

  I was stunned. 'You're the philosopher.'

  Empedocles shook his head. 'I'm interested in how the world works,' he said. 'And heed the words of Pythagoras – there are no laws but these, to do good for your friends and to do harm to your enemies.'

  Epictetus the Elder looked at me as if I was a good milk cow on the auction block. 'You plan to live here?' he asked. 'Or will you go away again?'

  'Live here,' I said.

  He nodded. 'Assembly, then.' He looked around his table, absolute master in his own house. 'No talk of this until the assembly. I'll arrange it. The archon was your father's friend, after all.'

  'Myron?' I asked.

  Epictetus nodded. 'His son is married to my second,' he said. He looked at Peneleos, and the young man flushed.

  'Of course I'll go,' he said. His father drafted a message in heavy-fisted letters, and Peneleos was off across the fields in the fading light.

  'You really going to stay?' Epictetus asked as we watched his son run.

  'Of course he is,' Hermogenes said. Myron summoned the assembly on the pretence – really the truth – that there was news from Athens. In a city with fewer than four thousand citizens, you can summon the assembly before sunset and expect the majority of your citizens to be standing under the walls in the old olive orchard when the sun rises.

  I didn't sleep much, and when I did, Calchas visited me from the dead and told me in a raven's voice that I was no farmer.

  I knew that.

  I woke in the chilly time before dawn, plucked my face carefully by lamplight with a woman's mirror and took Hermogenes over the hill. We waited among the olive trees by the fork, as we had as children, and we waited until we saw his father come down the hill, alone, walking quickly with a staff. And then behind him, raucous as crows following a raven, came Simon and his sons, four of them.

  I risked my whole future by laughing aloud. How much easier it would have been, having crushed the bandits, to cross the valley, slaughter this foul crow and all his people, and blame the criminals? Men might have suspected the truth – men would have known it for vengeance.

  But, 'If you would master the killer in you, you must accept that you are not truly free. You must submit to the mastery of the laws of men and gods.' Heraclitus said it to me. It took me a few years to see it. I didn't want to be a landless man or a pirate king.

  And yet I remember thinking – even now, I could leave them in a heap before the sun rises another finger's breadth.

  Simon started at the sound of the laugh, but then he kept walking to town and for the first time I hated him as deeply as he deserved to be hated. He had killed my father, and he walked like a man who has a hard life. The useless bastard.

  We let them lead us by a couple of stades, and then we followed them. I wanted to make sure that they were at the assembly. I rehearsed my speech as I walked and I feasted my revenge on the sight of Simon's back.

  Someone had talked. I know that, because by the time I reached the assembly, most of the men of Plataea were already there, and the silence was like a living thing. I was closer behind Simon as he and his sons trudged up the acropolis to the meeting place. The sun was up, and the world was beautiful with autumn splendor. Demeter and Hera had made a perfect day, the sky was blue and justice was close to my hand.

  Myron was dressed in white, and he stood on the little rise where the archon always stood. He waited until Simon walked into the crowd. Even Simon noticed that the crowd parted around him, and no man went to stand close to him. But he was a surly man, he had few friends, and perhaps he expected no more. He crossed his arms and his loutish sons stood around him.

  I remember that there was one voice that went on and on – Draco. He was trying to sell a man a wagon, and he hadn't noticed the silence. He was hidden by the crowd, but after a while, he understood, or perhaps a neighbour caught him with an elbow.

  I meant to be the last, and I waited by a cowshed, watching the latecomers, some hurrying down from the heights through the gated wall, others trotting up the lanes from outlying farms. Myron's sons were both late, still chewing bread. And then Epictetus and his sons came in a group, with Empedocles on a litter. I fell in with them, and we walked into the middle of the assembly and stood before the archon.

  Men looked at me, because I had a spear. Perhaps five other men in the crowd had spears, and they were over sixty. And my spear was fine – in a way that farmers seldom decorate a weapon.

  A murmur started.

  Myron raised his arms, and silence returned. And then, with two other men, priests, he sacrificed a ram.

  'You owe me for that,' Epictetus said in a hoarse whisper.

  Then the archon raised his hands, wiped the blood and faced the assembly. 'Men of Plataea!' he said. 'I call you to order, the assembly of the men of the city, to make law.'

  We gave him three short cheers, and then the whole assembly sang the Paean.

  I had imagined that my moment would come immediately, but however long you wait for revenge, there's always delay. In this case, an existing boundary dispute had to be read into the record. I didn't even know the men involved.

  While old Myron's voice droned on, I saw Bion spot his son. I saw the change come to his face. And then I saw him look at me.

  His grin was wide enough to split his face. He looked away, hiding his reaction from Simon who was not far from him, and then he began to move through the crowd – not towards us, but to stand behind Simon.

  Simon took no notice, but other men had marked Bion – he was a popular man – and they followed his eyes, and men began to point and stare, first at Hermogenes – and then at me.

  Draco saw me. He threw back his head and laughed.

  Myron got to the end of his boundary dispute. 'New business,' he said. 'News from Athens.' He looked out over the assembly. 'Where is the messenger?'

  I stepped forward, and men cleared a path for me.

  'I have c
ome from Athens,' I said. 'And before that, from Asia, where I was a slave. I have come to accuse Simon son of Simon of the murder of my father – and of selling me into slavery.' I turned, and pointed my spear at Simon, and a path cleared from me to him.

  'What can the punishment be,' I asked into the silence, 'for a man who stole my father's farm, his land, his tools and his wife? After stabbing him from behind in the face of the enemy?'

  Simon was so surprised that one of his hands clawed the air, as if to push away the words I said.

  'Who here does not know Simon the Coward? How many of you stood against the Spartans when my brother died at Oinoe? Who was it who ran from the rear of the phalanx? And when we went against the Thebans? Who shirked, and stood in the rear? Is there a man here who remembers Simon standing his ground? And when we faced the Eretrians – I saw him stab Pater. I saw it.'

  'You!' he spluttered. It was nigh on the worst thing he could have said, because his shock and his guilt were writ on his face.

  'I am Arimnestos of Plataea!' I roared in my storm-cutter voice. 'I accuse this man of murder!'

  He lost his case there, before he opened his mouth to plead.

  Mind you, the law doesn't work like an avenging titan. The assembly voted to hear the case, and appointed a jury. And on the spot we argued our cases – this wasn't Athens, and we had no paid orators.

  Nor did we have a prison, or guards, or Scythians to take a man and bind him.

  The jurors heard our evidence. I had some – and I was determined to use what I had learned in Ephesus and from Miltiades, so I summoned witnesses about Pater's courage and Simon's cowardice, and Simon writhed and his sons glowered. But when the sun began to set in the sky, the jurors went to their dinners and the crowd wandered away, and Simon and his sons headed back up the road to the farm.

  I followed them. All of Epictetus's sons were with me, and Hermogenes and his father, and Myron's sons. In every way but the decision of the jurors, the trial was over. We followed them up the road, and hounded them until they reached my lane.