Killer of Men

by Christian Cameron

  At that age – the age you are now, honey – it is often hard enough to know which way the wind blows. Eh? And any betrayal is magnified by the heat of your blood, tenfold. Yes – you know whereof I speak.

  So my head was spinning when I went to the Persian camp. I was worried that Darius would spit me on sight – I had dared to cross blades with them. I was worried that my harsh message would result in my own execution. I was angry that my brave deed – and it was brave, honey, facing four of the Great King’s men in a dark corridor – had received no reward but curt thanks, because I loved my master and wanted his approval with all the passion of the young who want to be loved. I was desolate that Penelope was Archi’s, even though I knew inside my head that she had never really been mine.

  I ran up to the Persian camp, wearing only the green chlamys of a herald and a pair of ‘Boeotian’ boots. I’d never seen anything like them in Boeotia, but in Ionia they were called Boeotian. They were magnificent. They made me feel taller. I thought that, if I was going to die, I should look good.

  The gate guards sent me straight to the satrap’s tent with an escort. The escort halted before the tent-palace and while their officer fetched the palace guards, one of the soldiers whispered, ‘Cyrus wants to see you.’

  ‘I am at his service as soon as I have seen the satrap,’ I said. ‘If I am alive,’ I added. A keen sense of drama is essential to the young.

  Artaphernes was writing. I couldn’t read Persian then. I waited as his stylus scratched the wax. There was an army of scribes with him, some Persians, mostly Greek slaves.

  Finally he looked up. He smiled grimly when he saw me.

  ‘I had hoped Hipponax would send you,’ he said.

  I stood straighter.

  ‘You saved my life.’ Sweet words to hear from the satrap of Lydia.

  ‘I did, lord. It is true.’ I grinned in sudden relief.

  He leaned forward. ‘Name your reward.’

  ‘Free me,’ I said. ‘Free me, and I will hold the deed well done.’

  Abruptly he sat back and shook his head. ‘I have tried to buy you for three days, and now Hipponax sends you to my camp. What am I to think? That you are a guest? A gift?’

  The satrap had tried to buy me? That explained much that had passed in the last three days. But I was an honest young man, mostly. ‘He tests you, lord.’

  Artaphernes nodded. ‘Yes. I must be getting to know the Greeks. I, too, see it as a test. I must send you back, or break my master’s law and help cause the war I came to prevent. Name something else.’

  I shrugged. The only thing I wanted was my freedom. I had rich clothes and money. But some god whispered to me. Perhaps, like Heracles my ancestor, Athena came and whispered in my ear. ‘You owe me a life, then, lord,’ I said.

  Artaphernes sat on his stool, playing with his personal signet ring. He looked me over carefully, as if he was indeed going to purchase me. ‘If you are ever free, you will be quite the young man,’ he said. He took his ring from his finger. ‘Here. A life for a life. If you are ever free, come and return this to me, and I will make you great, or at least start you on that road.’

  See it? I still wear it. It is a beautiful ring, the very best of its kind, carved by the old people from carnelian and set in that red, red gold from the highlands. See the image of Heracles? The oldest I have ever seen.

  I fell to my knees and accepted his ring. ‘I have a message,’ I said.

  ‘Speak, herald.’ This was official business, and now I was a herald before a king.

  ‘The assembly of Ephesus decrees that your next messenger will be executed in the agora.’ I held my bronze wand over my head in the official pose of a herald.

  I waited.

  A look of pain passed over his features. He looked older. He looked like a man who had taken a wound.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Go with the gods, Doru.’

  ‘Thank you, lord,’ I said, and walked out of his tent. Slaves do not offer blessings to masters.

  The four Persians were waiting for me – Cyrus, Darius, Pharnakes and silent, dour Arynam, who was always, I thought, a little drunk.

  I was hesitant about approaching them, but Pharnakes came and embraced me – me, a foreign slave. And even Arynam, who had never been my friend like Darius or Cyrus, came and clasped hands as if I was a peer.

  ‘Cyrus was right about you,’ he said. ‘You saved our lord’s life. You are a man.’

  Well – that was good to hear.

  They all embraced me, and pressed me with gifts.

  ‘Come with us,’ Cyrus said. ‘You’ll be free as soon as we cross the river. You can ride – I’ll see to it that the Lydians take you as a trooper.’

  I was tempted. Honey, I’d like to say that I was a Greek, and they were Medes, and I wasn’t going anywhere with their army – but when you are a slave, freedom is the prize for which you will trade anything. To be free, and a soldier?

  But I knew that Artaphernes wouldn’t allow it. He wanted any scrap of credit with Hipponax, and sending me back offered him the hope of reconciliation, or so he thought.

  And so I found myself running back down the road to Ephesus. I had no message except my own return, which marked the subtlety of the satrap very well, I thought. I did have a leather bag full of gifts from the Persians.

  I came home to a silent house. I stopped in the courtyard, amazed by the silence, and my first thought was that Hipponax had murdered his family. Men do that, when they catch their wives in adultery.

  But they had merely gone – all of them, slaves and free – to the Temple of Artemis. The priestess had asked that all the people gather. I ran up the steps with a dozen other latecomers to find the whole of the people crammed like ants inside the temple precinct. Teams of priests and priestesses were going through the crowd, with purifying smoke and water, cleansing us.

  No one said, right out, that Euthalia had made us all unclean by having a Persian between her legs. But she was there, standing with Hipponax in a dark mantle, and she was surrounded by the smoke of a dozen braziers. When the ceremony was over, she smiled.

  I still wonder at that smile. What did she mean by it? Had she meant all along to be caught?

  At any rate, I saw Heraclitus and he motioned to me. It was odd to see him in public, without my young master nearby, but I approached, still in my herald’s cloak.

  ‘The satrap received you?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, teacher,’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘You have seen war, I think?’

  I inclined my head. ‘I have served as a hoplite,’ I said.

  Heraclitus looked around. ‘Your master is about to go to a different school from mine, lad. A harsher school, where the punishment for failure is death. Will you take an oath to protect him?’

  Heraclitus had no idea what my young master had done to me – no idea, I suspect, what had transpired on that night, except that he would have known that Mistress had been with the Persian. Or perhaps he knew everything. Young men told him all their secrets. In any case, he didn’t order me to swear.

  ‘I want to be free!’ I said. I was suddenly bitter. I had done great things for these people, and I was still a slave. Perhaps I’m a slow learner, but for the first time I began to consider that the greater my services were, the more valuable I made myself.

  Heraclitus looked into the purification smoke. ‘Do you believe that I can read the logos?’ he asked me.

  I nodded. I would have nodded if he had asked me if I thought he was Zeus come to earth.

  He smiled. ‘Doru, if you swear this oath and abide by it, you will be free.’

  I frowned. ‘Death is a form of freedom,’ I said.

  ‘Yes . . .’ he said. ‘Listen, lad. War is not the only thing that faces you and Archi. This will be a testing time. Stay and help him pass the test. It will help you, too. Will you swear?’

  I sighed. I had been toying with running – to the docks. It must have shown. I thought that perhaps I could wor
k an oar to Athens, or find Miltiades in Thrace. But it was a dream, and besides – besides, just at that moment, I caught sight of Briseis. An eddy of smoke revealed her, talking to her betrothed, my enemy Diomedes.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I will swear.’

  ‘Good man.’

  We swore together. He was a priest of Artemis, holding one of the hereditary roles. He led me into the inner sanctum and showed me the statues and gave me a branch from the sacred tree – just a pair of leaves, but a sign to show my master where I had been.

  Then I went home.

  Home was not normal. Days had passed and all our rhythms had changed. Mistress never left her room. Master drank. Archi took no exercise and that night he pulled me close and burst into tears.

  ‘Why has Mater done this to us?’ he asked me through his tears. ‘No one will speak to me!’

  It was true. I had seen it in action. Archi was effectively in exile in his own city. None of his classmates would meet his eye, and no one invited him to a symposium or a ramble or even a troll through the stews.

  ‘It will pass,’ I said. I thought of Heraclitus. ‘Listen, master. Our teacher made me swear an oath to support you. These will be tough times. I’m here.’

  Archi was holding me tight, and suddenly he sobbed. ‘I betrayed you as surely as Mater betrayed Pater!’ he said. ‘I knew she was yours. I wanted her. Oh, Doru, forgive me!’

  I sat on his couch and held him. I did not want to forgive him. In fact, now that he’d confessed that he knew what he was doing, I wanted to knock his head off. But Penelope’s face had not been the face of a slave being taken against her will. I had some experience with women by then. Women can pretend many things, but few of them pretend when they think no one can see them. All this went through my mind.

  ‘Penelope is a slave, but she is her own woman. She wanted you, not me. Why not?’ I said bitterly. ‘I am just a slave.’

  Pitying ourselves, we wept. Foolish boys! We were about to learn what tears are really for. But when our eyes were dry, we were better friends. And the next day, Archi called Penelope to him while I was in his room. He did it without warning. And when she came, he shrugged and left the room.

  She looked like a trapped animal – like a doe run down by dogs on the flanks of Cithaeron. Her eyes followed Archi as he walked out of the door, and that gave her away. She really liked him. Perhaps she loved him, or just saw him as a chance for liberty.

  ‘I’m sorry I almost got you killed,’ I said. I was stiff and formal. ‘I understand that you prefer my master. I won’t bother you again.’

  She turned her head away. Then she looked back. ‘You aren’t even really a slave,’ she said. ‘You’re like a man who plays at being a slave. You will die for it, and I will weep for you, but I won’t be your lover. Archi is kind, and I think he’ll free me when I’m pregnant.’

  None of that made much sense to me – although it does now. I said she was smart. She saw things I didn’t see, for all my reading and training. So I shrugged, and she bowed her head and left the room without speaking. We should have embraced, but we were too young to forgive and forget.

  I was still standing there when I heard a scream from the courtyard. I ran. I thought we were being attacked. Remember that apart from my life as a house slave and companion, I was already a man of violence, and that Diomedes seemed to have a bottomless purse when it came to sending men after me.

  When I reached the courtyard, Hipponax was standing stony-faced, staring at a man dressed in the same green chlamys I’d worn a few days previously. Briseis was screaming, her face contorted, all her beauty gone. Penelope was trying to drag her away.

  The herald backed out of the gate.

  Penelope looked terrified. Briseis’s face was the face of a fury, deep lines carved across her smooth brows as she wailed with screams of pain. Her father glanced at her and turned away. Poor man. He had nothing to offer her. Gods send that I never be in his place.

  Archi tried to hold her and she began to fight him, and she landed a blow – a foul blow. She was a good fighter, that girl. Down he went, and then she spat like a wild cat and raked her nails across Penelope’s chest – I thought they were her nails – and blood flowed.

  She screamed again.

  I thought she was having a fit. I took her down. I wasn’t her brother, and much as I thought I was in love with her, she was a danger to everyone in the yard. I swept her feet and held her arms and put her down on the ground hard enough to drive all the breath from her. She had the strength of a goddess but no palaestra skills, and on her way to the ground I rolled her in the end of her own peplos to pin her arms. She ripped her left arm free and her nails drew blood from my cheek and neck.

  But when she wrenched her head back with superhuman strength, a hand shot out and smacked her across the face – once and then again.

  ‘Silence, girl!’ her mother said.

  I had not seen Euthalia in days. She was neatly dressed in sombre colours, and she did not look as if her life had ended.

  Briseis sat back on her haunches and the daimon left her. I saw it leave her eyes. It takes one to know one. But then the bitterness exploded.

  ‘It’s your fault, you faithless bitch!’ she said to her mother. ‘He called me a whore! Diomedes called me a whore! In public! Now I’ll die barren. He’s broken the marriage contract.’ She didn’t cry. Crying would have been better than her imperious self-pity. ‘If you hadn’t been so busy riding the Persian’s cock-bird, I might be a matron.’

  Euthalia’s hand shot out and snapped her daughter’s head back again. ‘Be civil or take the consequences,’ she said.

  ‘I can’t even blame him!’ Briseis cried, and for the first time her voice cracked and she began to sob instead of scream. ‘My mother’s a whore! I’ll be a whore too! I should kill myself!’

  Penelope was cowering. She had a bad scratch across her breast and her Doric chiton was filling with blood. She was sitting on a step crying. I saw now that Briseis had a pin in her hand. She had ripped Penelope with it, and me too, I realized.

  Euthalia reached into her bosom and her right hand came out with a knife in it. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Get on with it.’

  This was the family that I had so envied when I joined them.

  Briseis picked up the knife and ran her thumb across it like a man getting ready for sacrifice. Then she stepped towards her mother, and I felt that her intentions were plain.

  I stepped in on her and raised my left hand as Cyrus had taught me. She tracked the hand with the knife and not the body, and I caught her wrist and disarmed her. She got the pin into my chest, but the gold bent and I only took a finger’s breadth. It was cold in my chest, and the pain made me want to kill her.

  Just for a moment, the pain and the urge to kill balanced against the knowledge that this was Briseis. She saw the daimon come into my eyes and her own widened. As I have said, it takes one to know one. But those eyes saved her, and I took control of my body with my left hand closed around her throat.

  Her mother was shaken. Close up, I could see that her hair was not dressed and she was not herself. But she would not relent. ‘Take the knife and finish it,’ she mocked. ‘You think your life is ruined, little princess? Perhaps it is time a dose of reality came into your life. You despised Diomedes when you had him. You are acting. There is a world bigger than that inside your head. Wake up.’

  Archi stepped in between them. I still had Briseis, and she had dropped her gold pin of her own volition.

  ‘Take her to her room,’ he said. He nodded to me. Suddenly, we were allies. I obeyed, lifting Briseis and carrying her. Penelope came after us. She was holding her side. She got ahead of me and led the way, which was as well, as I had no idea where Briseis’s room was.

  Briseis put her arms around my neck and let me carry her without struggle. She smelled of jasmine and mint. It was hard to imagine, while carrying her, that she had just intended to kill her mother with a knife.

  We
pushed though a curtain of glass beads into a room painted in scenes of gods and goddesses – fine work. Archi’s room was plain white, with a border of Hera’s eyes painted around the cornice. Briseis’s room had all the gods done as vignettes. Hera stood with mighty Zeus – a loving couple, painted as her mother and father. Her brother was Apollo with a lyre, and she was Artemis with a bow. Penelope was Aphrodite, and Darkar was a mighty Pluton. Diomedes was painted as a young and rather ambiguous Ares, and then I saw that I, too, was in the pantheon, as Heracles, a club on my shoulder and a lion skin draped over me. I didn’t know the rest of the figures, but it was good work. Excellent work. The figure of Aphrodite-Penelope was unfinished, and the paints were there along one wall. The room smelled of marble dust and ox-blood.

  Despite everything – adultery, betrayal, drama – I stopped and looked at the paintings on the wall. I took in the paint pots and the smell.

  ‘Your work?’ I asked Penelope, amazed.

  ‘Hers,’ Penelope said. ‘I need a bandage,’ she said, and fled.

  I laid Briseis on her bed. She was crying. I knew that sound. That was despair. The sound new slaves make when they are taken. The sound you make when your life is taken away from you.

  I actually pitied her. So I put a hand on her back.

  ‘It will get better,’ I said.

  She rolled over, and her eyes held anger, not sorrow. ‘Kill him for me!’ she said. ‘Kill Diomedes!’

  You have no idea what it is like to be alone with Briseis. I didn’t slap her or run from the room.

  But neither did I agree. ‘I cannot kill him for you, despoina,’ I said. I remember smiling. ‘But I could hurt him for you.’

  She brightened immediately. ‘You could?’ she asked. ‘Really hurt him?’

  She reached out and took my hand, and a flame licked me from my palm to my groin and up to my head.

  ‘If I hurt him, will you stop this foolishness of hating your mother?’ I asked. ‘Diomedes is a piece or horse shit. You lost nothing in losing him. Your mother did you a favour.’

  Her eyes widened. ‘I had never thought of that,’ she said. Her hand was still stroking mine. ‘I know Archi hates him. And he tried to hurt you, didn’t he? He bragged of it to me. And Penelope said you were too tough to be hurt by a thug.’ She smiled at me.