Killer of Men

by Christian Cameron

  Calchas sidestepped the thief’s clumsy advance. Suddenly the thief had his back to the tomb. ‘Just give me—’ he asked, and he sounded as if he was begging.

  Calchas raised his sword. ‘I dedicate your shade to the hero Leitos,’ he said. And then the thief’s head fell from his shoulders, and blood sprayed.

  I had seen Calchas kill animals, and I knew how deadly he was. So I didn’t flinch. I watched him arrange the corpse so that the rest of the blood poured out on to the beehive of the tomb. A man has even more blood than a deer.

  I went in and put some clothes on and my hands shook.

  Later we buried the corpse. Calchas didn’t pray over it. ‘I sent him to serve the hero,’ Calchas said. ‘He needs no prayers. Poor bastard.’ He and I buried the thief by digging with a pick and a wooden shovel, and in the process of burying him I realized that there was a circle of graves around the tomb.

  Calchas shrugged. ‘The gods send one every year,’ he said.

  That night he got very drunk.

  Next day I ran and played all day, because he didn’t get up except to warm some beans.

  But the third day, when I came back from running, I asked him if he’d teach me to use the sword.

  ‘Spear first,’ he said. ‘Sword later.’

  I’m telling this out of order, but I have to say that the only problem I had with Calchas and lessons was that, once I had my nine-year-old growth spurt, he wanted me. As soon as he put his hands on me, that first day, teaching me the spear, I knew what he wanted.

  I didn’t want it. There are boys who do, and boys who don’t. Right? Girls the same, I imagine. So I kept away from his hands. He could have forced himself on me, but he wasn’t that way. He just waited, and hoped, and whenever he touched my hips or my flanks, I’d either flinch or go still. He got the message and nothing had to be said.

  It was a shame, in a way. He was a good man and an unhappy one. He needed friends, drinking companions and a life. Instead, he taught a boy who didn’t love him and listened to the sins of wandering mercenaries. I have no idea what he had done or where, but he had condemned himself to death.

  Sometimes good people do sad things, honey. And when a person decides to die, they die. I believe that Calchas lived a little longer to teach me. Or maybe I just like to think that.

  Summer came, and I went home to help bring in the barley. I could read, and Calchas sent me home with a scroll to follow while I was away from him – the ship list from the Iliad. And I told him that Mater had scrolls of Theognis, and he asked me to borrow them for him.

  My house was different.

  Pater was rich. No other way to put it. We had three slave families tilling. I was almost superfluous to reaping, although I put in one hard day setting the sheaves. Mostly I read aloud to Mater, who was the friendliest I can ever remember her. She was drunk when I arrived, and ashamed of her state. But she sobered up by the next morning and bustled about the place. The irony of it was that she could, by then, have acted like a lady. There were six or seven slave women – I didn’t even know their names. There was a new building in the yard – a slave house.

  My sister had changed. She was seven, and sharp-tongued, busy teaching her elders their business. She had a fine pottery-and-cloth doll from the east that she treasured. She sat in the sun and told me stories of her precious doll Cassandra, and I listened gravely.

  My brother worked the forge and resented it, but his body was filling out. He already looked like a man – or at least, he looked like a man to me. He wasn’t interested in anything I could tell him, so I left him alone. But on my second evening, he gave me a cup he’d made – a simple thing with no adornment, but the lip was well turned and the handle well set.

  ‘Pater put in the rivets,’ he admitted. Then, with a shrug, ‘I can probably do better now.’ He frowned, and looked away.

  I loved it. I imagined drinking with my own bronze cup by a stream, up on the mountain. ‘Hephaestus bless you, brother!’ I said.

  ‘So you like it?’ he asked. Suddenly he was my brother again. The next day was like the old days and the resentment was gone, so that I was able to show him a better way to fling a javelin and he loved it, and he took me into the shop and showed me how he raised a simple bowl. We’d come a long way as a family, when my brother could work a sheet of carefully pounded-out copper without permission from Pater. In fact, Pater came in, looked at his work and ruffled his hair. Then he turned to me.

  ‘How are your letters, boy?’ he asked. ‘Your mother claims you can read.’

  Odd how fast the mind works when fear comes in. For one moment, I thought that I would impress him – and then I thought that perhaps that would be an error, because my days on Mount Cithaeron would end, and there would be no more rabbit hunts in the dawn. And in that one burst of thought, I understood how much I had become separated from the world of the forge.

  But, of course, the desire to please Pater won out.

  ‘I can read the Iliad, Pater,’ I said. ‘And write all my letters.’

  Pater handed me a piece of charcoal and a flat board he whitewashed and used for designs. ‘Write for me. Write, “This cup is of Miltiades and Technes made him”.’

  I thought for a moment, and then, somewhat daring, I changed the words so that I needed only two.

  I wrote in a clear hand, like a good craftsman. I knew that Pater would engrave the words if mine were good enough. Two words – Greek is a splendid language for ownership. ‘OF-MILTIADES BY-TECHNES’, I wrote.

  Pater examined it. He could read, albeit slowly. Then he smiled.

  My brother winked at me, because we could count those smiles on our fingers, they were so few and so valuable.

  ‘Mmm,’ he said. He nodded, then scribed it on copper – twice, to be sure. Then he put it on a cup he had, around the base. He used a very small chisel – a new tool, and clearly expensive, with a fine handle – to work the letters deeply. Chalkidis and I watched together until he was done.

  ‘Chalkidis pounded the bronze to sheet,’ Pater said. ‘I made the cup. You provided the letters.’ He nodded, obviously satisfied. ‘He will like this.’

  Pater had a standing commission, making armour and fancy tableware for Miltiades. Pater wasn’t alone – Miltiades bought Draco’s wagons almost as fast as he could build them. They might have asked themselves why an Athenian aristocrat didn’t buy these things closer to home, but they didn’t.

  Mater did. She mentioned it at least twice a day.

  ‘Your father is rushing to his doom,’ she said. ‘Miltiades is as far beyond your father as he is beyond – me.’

  Sober, Mater’s intelligence was piercing and cruel. Sadly, the gods made her so that she was only happy when she was lightly drunk – witty, flirtatious, clever and social. But sober she was Medea, and dead drunk she was Medusa.

  I read to her, and she lent me her book of poems and said that she would come and visit. ‘I like what I hear of your Calchas,’ she said. ‘Has he made love to you yet?’

  She was born of aristocrats, you see. And that was the way, even in Boeotia – men with boys, and women with girls. At least, in the aristocracy.

  I blushed and stammered.

  ‘So he hasn’t. That’s good. You wouldn’t like it, would you?’ She said this stroking my cheek – scary itself, in a way. She never touched us.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘No.’ She was sitting on her kline, a low bench like a bed. She reclined, pulling her shawl about her. ‘When that urge comes on you, tell me, and I’ll buy you a slave for it.’

  I had no notion what she was talking about, any more than I understood what Calchas wanted, except as a vague fear. And in many ways, I liked Calchas better than I liked Mater.

  I found that I was eager to get back to the shrine. I said my goodbyes with more relief than longing. Hermogenes came back with me. We had a good walk.

  ‘I’ll be free next year,’ he said wistfully.

  ‘Let’s pretend you’
re free now,’ I said. ‘You can use the practice.’

  He looked at me. ‘How do I pretend to be free?’ he asked.

  I laughed. ‘Calchas tells me that we all pretend to be free,’ I said, a typical boy trying to sound as adult as his teacher. ‘But you can meet my eyes when you talk, and tell me to fuck off when I make you angry. Come on – pretend!’

  Hermogenes shook his head. ‘You’ve never been a slave, Arimnestos,’ he said. ‘No one pretends to be free. And I guarantee you that no free man pretends to be a slave.’

  We arrived at the shrine near nightfall. Hermogenes stayed the night and we took him hunting in the morning. He was an excellent rabbit killer, trained by hunger, and he quickly won Calchas’s praises. I was jealous. Names flew, and some nine-year-old punches. In the midst of a flurry of blows, I called him a slave and he stopped moving.

  I never saw the blow from Calchas. It caught me in the ear and knocked me flat.

  ‘Are you a gentleman?’ he asked me, from the advantage of six feet of height. ‘You invited him to be a free man. You asked him to trust you. Then – you called him a slave. Can you keep your word?’

  I was resentful, but I wasn’t a fool. Pain has a remarkable effect on boys. I sat up. ‘I apologize, Hermogenes,’ I said formally. ‘I meant it – only as a hateful word, like “bastard”.’ I tried to grin it off.

  Calchas shook his head. ‘That’s a worthless apology, young man. You must never call a bastard “bastard” or a slave “slave” unless you want to fight to the death. Trust me – I’m a bastard. I know.’

  We ended up apologizing to each other, very formally. There was some silence and some walking apart.

  Calchas laughed, called us girls and led us up the mountain after a deer. It was late, but the Lady of Animals sent us a good buck, and Hermogenes and I ran him down with javelins, Calchas working carefully through the trees to push the deer back on our weapons, and we killed when the sun was almost in the treetops. Then Calchas made Hermogenes cut the buck’s throat and anointed him with blood on his face, as he had with me.

  ‘Arimnestos says you are to be a free man,’ Calchas said. ‘You must learn to look other men in the eye. And to think of them like this,’ and he pointed at the corpse of the deer. ‘Slave or free, a man is nothing but a pile of bones and flesh with blood in the middle.’

  Hermogenes didn’t say anything, but he embraced me and when he went to leave, we clasped hands as if we were men. We sent Hermogenes home with a haunch of venison and a couple of rabbits, which no doubt made him a hero to his family. Hermogenes and I date our friendship from that morning. But I had to be a slave before I learned how true Calchas’s words were.

  In the Boeotia of my youth, we were poor men, and though we thought we knew the world, we knew little of what passed beyond our town and our mountain and our river. These were the borders of our lives.

  Festivals came and passed, and sowing, and reaping, and I was getting older. Hard men came to the shrine and Calchas sat up the night with them. The second year, one tried to rape me, and Calchas killed him. I was well-nigh paralysed with fear, although I managed to bite his hand so hard he screamed. After that, I was more wary of the hard men.

  I spent more and more time practising for war. Calchas was a warrior – I had realized that, although I couldn’t put a day to the thought. All the men who came were fighters, too. It was as if they belonged to a guild, just like the smiths or the potters, which was odd, because in the Boeotia of my youth, every free man had to be a warrior, but no man I knew actually liked it. Like sex and defecation, it was something every man did but only boys talked about.

  What a pretty blush.

  So I trained with him. I wasn’t always aware that he was training me. He had exercises for every hour of the day, and many of them were remarkably like work – gathering firewood, breaking it in the breaking tree, chopping the bigger pieces into firewood lengths for the hearth with a sharp bronze axe and then splitting them. This task could consume as much time as Calchas wanted it to consume – we needed wood, come winter. And the use of the axe taught me many things – that, just as with smithing, precision was more valuable than raw strength, for instance. That the ability to hit twice in exactly the same place was better than hitting once in two different places. Ah, my dear – you will never fight a man wearing bronze. But you must accept the word of an old man – you can kill a man right through his expensive bronze helmet if you can hit the very same place often enough.

  Calchas was no hoplomachos – not just a fighting master. He didn’t have a special dance to teach, nor were his lessons about the sword as organized as his lessons in writing. Rather, we’d be deep in a passage of the Iliad, and he would look up and make such a comment as I just made.

  ‘Arimnestos?’ he’d say. ‘You know that if you hit a man often enough in precisely the same place in the helmet, his helmet will give way? And you’ll spill his brains?’

  I’d look at him, trying to imagine it. And then we’d go back to the Iliad.

  There is a passage, late in the poem, when Achilles is still sulking and Hector rages among the Greeks. And several of the lesser heroes form a line, lock their shields and stop Hector’s rush. I remember him singing that whole passage softly. The autumn light came in strongly through our horn window and dust motes floated in the shaft of light. When this happened, I liked to imagine that the gods were with us.

  Calchas looked up, into the shaft of light, and his eyes were far away. ‘That’s how it is, when the lesser men seek to stop the better. You must lock your shield with your neighbour’s, put your head down and refuse to take chances. Let the better man wear himself out against your shield. Poke hard with your spear to keep him at arm’s length and refuse to leave the safety of the shield wall.’ He shrugged. ‘Pray to the gods that the killer finds other prey, or trips and falls, or that your own killers come and save you.’

  ‘But you were one of the better men,’ I said. ‘You werea – a killer.’

  Suddenly his eyes locked with mine and I could see him in his high-crested helm, his strong right arm pounding a lesser man’s shield down, down, until he made the killing cut. I could see it as if I was there.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I was a killer of men.’ Then his eyes slipped away. I knew where he was – he was on a battlefield. ‘I still am. Once you have been there, you can never leave.’

  4

  A sowing and a reaping, and another year. Animals died under my spear. I read all of Theognis from Mater’s book and came to appreciate that grown men had sex with boys and grew jealous when they took other loves. And that aristocrats could be ill-tempered and avaricious like peasants.

  You should read Theognis, my sweet. Just to understand that being well-born is a thing of no value.

  I read Hesiod, too. I knew much of him by heart by now, of course. In Boeotia, he is our own poet, and we spurn mighty Homer so that we can love Hesiod better. Besides, his poems are for us – farmers. Is Achilles really a hero? He’s as much of a bitch as Theognis, to my mind. Hector is the hero. And even he would not have made much of a farmer – well, perhaps I do mighty Hector wrong. Given a month of rain, Hector would not surrender or sulk in his barn.

  I was bigger. I was stronger. I could throw a javelin farther and better than any boy my age in the valley, and Calchas was talking about the boys’ games at places like Olympia.

  Across the river, the farm grew richer. Every grape vine was trellised and trimmed, the apple trees had supports on the branches and all the new growth was excised in spring by what seemed to me to be a phalanx of slaves.

  Miltiades’ money could be seen everywhere in our community. Myron had two ploughs. Epictetus’s younger son, Peneleos, went with the great man to fight, and his father bought a second farm for his older son. There was talk of his older son wedding Penelope when she turned twelve or thirteen.

  Hermogenes was freed and joined his father as a man who worked for wage. All their family was freed now, and Bion
made himself a helmet and a great bronze shield and was welcomed into the taxis. Not all freed men were so welcomed – but Bion was a special case.

  I went with my brother and Hermogenes to watch the men dance at the festival of Ares. All of them had practised the dances since they were old enough to learn – twelve or thirteen, in most cases. And my father had done well by Bion, teaching him – something that I knew Pater did only with the quickest of learners. So Bion did not humiliate himself, although as a newly freed and enfranchised man, there were farmers eager to see him fail.

  That’s how men are, honey. Don’t you know? With peasants, it is the same in Asia and Aegypt and Boeotia. They think there is much evil in the world and little good, and that one man’s gain is another’s loss. If Bion was free, then a free man would become a slave. So they whispered.

  I watched them dance. I had seen it before – it was magnificent and made my blood run fast, two hundred men in bronze and leather, swaying in line, turning around, thrusting with their spears, parrying with their shields.

  Two years and more on the mountain and I knew those moves better than the dancers. I watched with a critical eye – and, honey, there is nothing more critical than a boy of eleven.

  It was also my brother’s first year in the dance. He was well kitted, with a fine Corinthian helmet and a big shield to keep him safe in the storm of bronze. I watched him dance and thought he did it well enough, but the boy in me couldn’t avoid criticism, so that night I asked him why he didn’t change the weight on his feet when he went from defence to attack.

  Of course he had no notion of what I was talking about, but only heard his younger brother finding fault. We wrestled in the barn – to a draw. I was weaker, but I knew quite a bit more. There’s a lesson there, too. All my skill – and I had quite a bit of skill already – was not enough to match his longer reach and his smith’s strength.

  And even with my blood up, I wasn’t fool enough to put a finger in his eye.