‘Aye, lord,’ he said. ‘I swear it by all the gods, and may the furies track me down and rip my guts from me—’
‘Stop!’ I said. ‘You’re hurting me. And never, ever swear by the furies.’
And so it was done. I embraced him, and he sailed away.
Idomeneus and I watched that ship until it vanished around the great promontory.
He had tears in his eyes.
I laughed bitterly. ‘I didn’t ask you to come with me,’ I said.
Hermogenes grunted. ‘Some people would be nostalgic about torture,’ he said. ‘I’m going to hire a wagon. You can afford it, lord.’ He had a wicked glint in his eye. ‘Best forget about anyone calling you that – ever again.’
I traded some silver for copper and tin in the city at Athens, and got bitten by bedbugs in a horrible tavern, lower than anything I’d seen since I had become a slave. And then we started walking home.
A day on the roads of Attica, and I remembered all too well – Greece, land of farmers. Every man was equal and surly farmers cared nothing for swagger. I could put my hand on my sword hilt and they would just glower the more. We came to Oinoe, and I looked up at the tower in the sunset. We camped within easy walk of the place where my father and his friends had stopped the Spartans. Hermogenes and I told the story to Idomeneus – and the two slaves, who were already becoming part of the household. They were decent men, not too smart, tough as nails. I told how my brother died.
That night I wept. Look at me – even now, I blubber.
Listen, honey. May you never know the loss of love. But you will. I loved Pater, for all his ways, and he died. And my brother. And those losses will never be redeemed. You will lose me, and your mother, and your brothers, too. And if the gods don’t favour you, you will lose a child. No – I don’t mean to be cruel. But that night, with the watch tower at our backs, while I sat watching our cart, I wept for Briseis, and for Pater, and for Archi, and for Hipponax, and for Lekthes. I wept for the man who I killed in the dark on the battlefield at Ephesus. Most of all, like most people, I wept for myself.
When I walked away from the ship in Piraeus, I walked away from myself – my reputation, my riches. All gone. I was going home to avenge my father’s killing against a man whose face I couldn’t hold in my mind. Not because I wanted to, but because I could think of nothing else to do.
I think it was the loss of Briseis most of all. I think that I had been certain I would have her – that I would bring her up this pass to the foot of Cithaeron, lie with her in the grass by Leitos’s tomb and carry her over the threshold into my father’s stone house.
Without her, it seemed an empty exercise. I cared nothing.
I promised when I started this story that I would tell the truth. So here’s a truth for you – I didn’t care much about avenging my father. Oh – I see the shock. Listen, honey – listen, all of you. When you are young, and you listen to the poet, you take in the rules of life – the laws of all Hellenes. Oaths, gods, laws of gods and men.
When I sat with my back to the stone fort at Oinoe, I had probably killed a hundred men. My love had chosen another life over me, and I had turned my back on the only calling I had ever felt.
Every time you kill a man, the doubt grows. Every time you take a ship, empty it of valuables and enrich yourself with the blood and sweat of other men, every time you make another man a slave, every time you buy a woman for sex and discard her when she’s pregnant, you have to wonder – are there any laws? Are there any gods?
There weren’t any laws for me just then. No rules. Perhaps no gods. Nothing mattered.
The darkness of that night is absolute, even in memory, and I was afraid to go to sleep.
I don’t remember much more than that, until we came to the foot of Cithaeron. The next day, I hadn’t slept, and I was morose and ill-tempered, and yet curiously happy to be walking the southern slopes where I could see my home mountain. Cithaeron is an old god, and he reached out to me and touched the blackness.
The cart slowed us, and it was nightfall when we came to Pedeis.
Pedeis was the typical border town, with high prices and crap for wine. Dionysus first preached just over the mountains at Eleutherai, and the grape grew there first, and my money says that his worship never spread to Pedeis. The girls were ugly and there was a wooden Temple of Demeter that was a disgrace to gods and men. I snarled at my men to keep moving, and we rolled through the streets and camped in the stony fields north of town.
The border garrison, if they existed, were so slipshod that we passed without a road tax, almost without comment. We climbed the pass to Eleutherai, up and up in switchbacks, and our cart filled the road so that the faster traffic of men walking and men with packs on donkeys ended up in a long queue behind us like the baggage train of an army. Men chatted to Idomeneus or Hermogenes. I walked on in silence.
We found the body near the summit of the pass. The corpse was that of a young boy, probably a slave, about twelve years old. He’d been killed in a bad way, with a series of hacks to his face and neck from a dull, heavy knife. He lay in his own blood in the middle of the wide space near the summit where wagons turn to begin the descent, and where polite men pull to the side to let the faster traffic pass. There are deep ruts in the rock where the old men cut a road for their chariots, and he lay across the stone tracks like a botched sacrifice.
He looked so pitiful. He was just about the age I had been when I stood in the phalanx for the first time. Frankly, from the ripe old age of twenty-two, he looked too small to have died by violence. Had he tried to fight? I would have.
I was already low, and the sight of the dead boy almost moved me to tears again. I knelt by him and cursed because his sticky blood got on my chiton. But I determined to bury him – no idea why, either. In general, I leave corpses for the ravens.
I got him on my sea cloak, which had seen worse than blood, and men from the rest of the caravan behind our slow wagon came up and joined me, quite spontaneously. In fact, my opinion of men went up, right there. I was reminded of why Greeks are good men. We cleared a space, and every man, slave and free, gathered rocks, and we built a cairn as fast as you can tell the story. I put coins on his eyes and another man poured wine over the grave. More and more men came up – they must have been cursing my wagon all the way up the pass – and every one joined in.
There was a small man, a pot-mender, and he had a pair of donkeys and a young slave of his own. He came up when the cairn was half-finished. He looked more angry than sad. I caught his eye, and he looked away.
‘You know him?’ I asked. A pair of korai from Thebes who were travelling to the Temple of Artemis at Athens were washing his face under their mother’s direction. They were good girls, conscious of so many men around them and yet aware of their duties as women.
He shrugged. ‘He looks like the pais of Empedocles, the chief priest of the smith god.’ He made the sign automatically – even a pot-mender is at least an initiate.
I gave him my sign – it was the Cretan version, and probably a little different, but he knew that I was an initiate and more, and he stepped closer. ‘I know Empedocles,’ I said. It was like remembering another life. Empedocles the priest, and his magic lens. I looked at the pot-mender. ‘You sure?’ I asked.
He nodded and swallowed. But he wasn’t afraid of me or much else – no travelling man can afford to be scared on the road, and he called out to the other men. ‘Anyone heard of thieves in this pass?’
Other men nodded – a farmer, and a wool merchant, and a man with a load of fine wine, still in cheap amphorae used at sea, loaded carefully on a big wagon. He wasn’t the owner but a trusted slave, and his manner suggested that he used this route often.
‘There’s a gang of them,’ he said, ‘off towards the east.’
‘Took the priest for ransom?’ I asked.
The slave spat. ‘Who knows what they want? They’re killers. They’re like animals.’
An old peddler with a l
eather sack full of goods put his sack down and rubbed his chin. ‘I heard they were west of Eleutherai,’ he said. ‘Always best to just give them the money,’ he said, to no one in particular.
We finished the cairn, covered the boy’s face and sang a hymn to Demeter, the girls’ voices carrying sweet and high. I wept again, although I wasn’t sure why. And then we let the other men pass, and we waited while another caravan coming up out of Boeotia climbed past the turn-around. The tinker and the peddler waited with us. The tinker’s name was Tiraeus, and he was shifty and unwashed but not, I think, a bad man. The peddler was Laertes.
He looked wistfully at my entourage. ‘You are a rich man,’ he said.
‘Hmmm,’ I said, sounding too much like Pater for my own peace of mind. But I had the lapis and gold necklace from Sardis at my throat and a belt of heavy gold links around my waist under my chiton – in my experience, that’s the safest way to carry a fortune. ‘I have money,’ I said.
He shrugged. ‘It never sticks to me,’ he said. ‘Thanks for the wine.’
Tiraeus, the tinker, was emboldened by the peddler. ‘You a smith?’ he asked suddenly. ‘You don’t – look like a smith,’ he said. ‘Apologies, master. Too often, I say what comes into my head.’
I shrugged. ‘I can bang out a good flat sheet,’ I said. ‘I can repair a helmet. I make a nice simple cup.’ I grinned, thinking of my latest attempt at a helmet in Hephaestion’s shop on Crete – my first grin in a day, I think.
‘Looking for an apprentice?’ he asked eagerly, mistaking my statement of fact for false modesty.
‘No,’ I said. ‘But if you help get the wagon down the pass, I’ll stand you both a good dinner.’
He shrugged. Laertes grinned wolfishly. I gathered that he lived life a day at a time. ‘Deal!’ he said.
And we turned the wagon, yoked the pair of oxen backwards and started down, the six of us braking the wagon, leaving the new grave under the afternoon sun.
Sweaty, back-breaking work, but many hands made it lighter, and my mood had changed. So I made jokes, praised the two Thracians when they worked, and we were a different crew entering Eleutherai than we had been at Pedeis. We were faster, too, and there was still plenty of light in the sky. Eleutherai is in Boeotia, honey. Men speak the right way there, and women look right and the barley is sweeter. What can I say? I’m a Boeotian, honey. Eleutherai felt like home, and my mood rose again. Men told us that Eleutherai was so named because runaway slaves from Boeotia were free when they got there – and I felt like a freer man, drinking the wine. If I’d been a slave close to home, instead of across the ocean in Asia, I like to think I’d have run the first night I wasn’t watched.
I took the seven of us into the biggest taverna, summoned the owner and put a gold daric on the table. Then I used my sword to split it in two and gave him half. ‘I want a dinner,’ I said. ‘A really good dinner, and wine that’s not like cow piss, and sweet almonds with honey. I want clean straw, food for my beasts and no crap.’
Half a gold daric should have bought his whole village, but it did get us a passable meal, a pretty girl to wait on us and some seriously obsequious service. And the wine was the wine of home – not the wonders of Chian wine, but good, strong stuff. The tinker was thankful and pleasant, but the peddler was sullen. I didn’t like him.
My gold half-daric brought the basileus in the morning. He was an old man, and not really the power of the town – the Athenians owned Eleutherai to all intents and purposes by then, and he was a puppet.
He was an old aristocrat, and he was waiting for us in the courtyard of the wine shop. He looked me over, saw the blood stains on my chiton and drew the wrong conclusions. ‘Where do you come from?’ he demanded. He had two men with him, and they had spears.
I shrugged. ‘Here and there, sir,’ I said.
‘Answer,’ he demanded.
He made me angry and I liked that, because the blackness had been so heavy. ‘I serve Miltiades,’ I said. ‘Does that mean anything to you?’
It certainly did. His whole demeanour changed. He stepped forward and offered his hand, and we clasped. ‘My apologies, sir,’ he said. ‘I have a plague of bandits to deal with.’ He pointed to the blood stains on my chiton. ‘I thought—’
I nodded. ‘A boy was killed by bandits in the pass yesterday,’ I said, and told him what I knew. Tiraeus added what he knew and the basileus shook his head. ‘They are bad men,’ he said. ‘Old soldiers, or so I hear.’ He looked at my men, then at the two fellow travellers, and then at my necklace – I could see him taking it all in. ‘Are you a local man, sir?’ he asked politely.
Suddenly, I thought that I knew just where the bandits would be. But I held my tongue, only glancing at the two travellers with sudden interest. And the old basileus disconcerted me. I’d been away for ten years and my first day in Boeotia, an aristocrat mistook me for one of his own.
‘Plataea,’ I said.
‘Ah!’ he said, as if a mystery was solved. ‘And these bandits are operating from south of Plataea. You are going to deal with them? Miltiades sent you?’ His relief was palpable. A problem passed on is a problem solved, and all that.
Idomeneus brightened. The prospect of violence restored his faith in the logos, or whatever passed for the logos in the Cretan’s world.
You know, thugater, sometimes the fates speak loudly, and sometimes we have to be the men that other men expect us to be. And Old Empedocles – if indeed it was he – deserved something from me.
Frankly, it was good to have a simple mission. It allowed me to put off going home for another day or two.
Even Hermogenes nodded. Bandits were bandits.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That is, it is not what I’m here for, but I’ll deal with the bandits.’
Everyone smiled, except the tinker, who looked confused, and the peddler, but sullen was pretty much his only mood.
We got our oxen hitched and started up the long road to Plataea. There’s a short road, down the valley of Asopus, and a long road up along the skirts of the mountain. The long road would pass the hero’s shrine and come down past my father’s farm. The short road was faster. I wasn’t surprised when both of the other travellers stuck with us at the fork towards the mountain, however. Not surprised at all.
‘You said that you were a smith!’ the tinker said when we were clear of Eleutherai.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘But he thinks you’re some sort of aristocrat,’ the peddler said, as if I was intentionally deceiving him.
‘Hmm,’ I said. We crossed the Asopus in silence, and started up the long ridge towards the hero’s shrine. When we reached the first copse of big oaks, I pulled the wagon off to the side.
‘Arm,’ I said to Idomeneus and Hermogenes.
The tinker watched us as if we were performing a miracle play, his eyes as wide as a young girl’s. The two Thracians were slaves, of course. But I took them aside, handed each of them a heavy knife and a javelin. ‘Stand by me, and you will be that much closer to being free men.’ It’s easy with Thracians – they arm their own slaves, and a bold slave can expect to be freed faster than one who hangs back. They took the weapons as if they were going to a party.
‘Swords in your belt, spears in the top of the wagon and a cloak over everything,’ I said.
I went over to the peddler and the tinker. ‘You two might want to walk away,’ I said. I looked pointedly at the peddler. ‘You especially. ’
He wouldn’t meet my eye. ‘Oh – I can look after myself,’ he said.
‘Hmm,’ I said. I turned to Tiraeus the tinker.
He looked around. ‘You’ll – let me go?’
I remember laughing. We must have been a grim band when we changed into our armour, because he was terrified. ‘We’re not the thieves,’ I said. And then it hit me – we weren’t the thieves here. It actually took my breath away. These thieves – these men on Cithaeron who stole from travellers – were only doing what we’d been doing to Phoenician ships
for years.
Except that they preyed on their own, and they weren’t very good at it.
Tiraeus watched me.
I must have made a face, because he flinched. But then I opened my hands. ‘I intend to rescue the old priest and rid the pass of thieves,’ I said.
The peddler made a noise.
Tiraeus opened his chlamys and revealed a short sword, or a long knife. ‘I am a servant of the god,’ he said. ‘And – perhaps it will change my luck.’
Maybe he had decided that following me might get him a job.
‘Everyone made up his mind?’ I said.
We went up the road, the oxen plodding along. The sky went from blue to leaden grey in the time it took to climb half the ridge, and it began to rain, a slow, cold rain.
‘What if they have bows?’ Idomeneus asked. ‘I should scout ahead.’
I shook my head. ‘They won’t have bows,’ I said. ‘That boy was hacked down by a kopis.’ I shrugged. ‘They’re mercenaries. They’re using the old shrine as a headquarters, because all the hard men used to come there when Calchas was priest.’ In my head, the rule of law was reasserting itself, and the gods themselves, and I thought that it must have been too long since the hero had had his sacrifice.
Since Oinoe, I had thought about the logos. How Heraclitus said that men could only come to wisdom through fire. How strife was the master of all, and change was the way. But most of all, I thought of what he said to me when he chided me for beating Diomedes.
‘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.’
So I trudged through the ever-increasing rain, and I thought about fire.
Hermogenes stepped up beside me. ‘What are we going to do?’ he asked.
‘Find the bandits and teach them some philosophy,’ I said.
Idomeneus laughed.
I shook my head. I had a Boeotian cap, a heavy felt one purchased that morning from a stall, and it was more like a sponge than a hat, so I pulled it off and wrung it out. ‘I mean it,’ I said.
Killer of Men Page 47
