Killer of Men

by Christian Cameron

  ‘You are mad,’ Idomeneus said. He laughed again. ‘Let’s hear the bronze sing!’ he shouted. ‘Who gives a fuck about philosophy?’

  ‘You are the mad one,’ I said, and went back to the road.

  We climbed and climbed. I wasn’t worried that they would attack us on the hillside. Bandits are lazy men. They would want the wagon at the top, and I knew this mountain like I knew the calluses on my sword hand. There was the crest of the road and then a slight dip that would be full of mud and water in late autumn, and they would be in the big trees around the sinkhole.

  Just short of the top, I stopped the wagon like a man who was too tired to go on. My sandals were full of mud and the oxen looked as miserable as we all felt.

  Idomeneus made a face. ‘I wouldn’t rob anyone on a day like this,’ he said. ‘I’d be on a nice soft couch with a cup of wine in my hand.’

  Hermogenes chucked him with an elbow. ‘Why aren’t you, then? Eh? I know why I’m here, and I know why Arimnestos is here. And I don’t think the slaves have any choice. And the tinker thinks there’s a meal in it. You, you mad Cretan?’

  ‘Arimnestos is my lord,’ the Cretan proclaimed. ‘Besides – wherever he goes, there’s blood, oceans of it. Never a dull moment. You’ll see. I doubted it the first days out of Athens – but here we are.’

  I winced at his description of me.

  But I recognized it.

  ‘Leave the wagon now,’ I said. I turned to the tinker. ‘Stay here with the beasts. We’ll do the work.’

  The peddler was looking at Idomeneus. I put my fist in the peddler’s ear and he fell like a sacrifice.

  You see it, don’t you, thugater?

  The tinker turned white, put his back to a tree, and drew his sword.

  ‘Don’t fret,’ I said. I took the peddler’s pack and dumped it. It was full of rags and nothing else. ‘He’s the spotter for the bandits,’ I said. ‘Tie him, and don’t let him go. We’ll be back.’

  He didn’t protest, and I led my little band off the road, uphill. The slope increases above the road and we took our time. The deer trails had changed, of course, but I got us up to the little meadow where Calchas had once killed a wolf, and cocked an ear for sounds from below. The only real weak point in my plan was the tinker and our wagon.

  From above, we could see the ambushers, even through the rain. The gods love irony, and in the best tradition of their laughter, the wagon and the ambushers were only a stade apart or less, so that we could see Tiraeus pacing nervously and we could see the bandits in the trees, waiting for a wagon that was not coming.

  ‘I’ll go right down the hillside,’ I said. ‘You drive them.’

  Perhaps it seems foolish that I was going to take on all the bandits myself, using my men as beaters. I was in an odd place – I wanted the fight. I told myself that I’d let this make my decision for me – thief against thief, so to speak. If I fell, that was that.

  Another voice said that in fact there was no need for gods, because there were few men in Greece who could stand before me. Perhaps none.

  And as I began to kick down the hill, the wet leaves flying from under my boots, I felt old Calchas at my side. How many times had we raced through these woods together, he and I, in pursuit of some quarry?

  The bandits saw Idomeneus first, as I had intended. They took too long to realize that this wasn’t a chance-met farmer – this was real. The end man rose from his concealment and called a warning and then he was down, his agony a better warning than his shouts.

  Hermogenes appeared from behind a boulder, running hard, and he threw a javelin.

  Then I was on them. The bandit closest to me was a fool and he neither saw me nor heard me, his whole attention on the crisis at the other end of the ambush.

  They had no armour, and they looked more like escaped slaves than mercenaries, although the line between the two can be faint. I put my spear point between his kidneys and ran on.

  The whole band broke from cover then. There were about a dozen of them, and they ran for the road, just as a frightened deer might, but I was on the road first, between them and the wagon, and the two Thracians were on the other side of the road. We were five against twelve, but the issue was never in doubt.

  When two more of them were dead on my spear, they fell back into the mud-filled hollow where they had intended to take my wagon.

  I stopped and wiped my spear blade on a scrap of oily cloth from my pouch. ‘Surrender,’ I said. ‘Surrender, or I’ll kill all of you.’

  ‘You can’t kill us all,’ one scarred wretch said. He had a proper sword – a kopis.

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘My friends would have to kill a couple of you.’

  They trembled like sheep.

  ‘Surrender!’ I said. ‘I am Arimnestos of Plataea. If you drop your weapons, I will spare your lives, by Zeus Soter.’

  The man with the kopis threw his spear at Hermogenes and bolted, running right up the face of the dip and away downhill. Hermogenes ducked the spearhead but got the tumbling shaft across his temple and went down. Another bandit broke downhill, but the nearest Thracian speared him like a fisherman on a Thracian river, and the rest dropped their weapons.

  ‘Hold them here,’ I said. Calchas was in my head, and I knew what was going to happen as if I had read it on a scroll.

  I ran downhill after the man with the sword. He had a long start. But I knew where he was going, and I wanted him to get there.

  I ran easily, following the contour of Cithaeron, staying high on the hillside, and after two stades of bush-running, I came to the trail I had used to climb the mountain as a child, and I ran down it, swifter than an eagle.

  It was odd, but at first I felt Calchas beside me, and then I felt him in me. I was Calchas. Or perhaps I had become Calchas.

  I passed the cabin, running silently on the leaf-mould, and I had just time to slow at the verge of the tomb when my prey burst out of the woods in front of me, eyes wild with panic from whatever ghosts rode him through the woods – I hope that boy was on him. And the panic on his face exploded like a hot rock drenched in water when he saw me. He raised the sword – the same sword he’d used to kill the boy at the top of the pass – and cut at me. I parried high and refused to give ground, so that he slammed into my hip – I turned him, our bodies pressed close by his momentum, and my hip pushed him ever so slightly, and he went sprawling across the stones of the precinct of the hero’s tomb. His head hit a stone and his sword hand hit another so hard that the kopis fell from his hand, as if taken by the hero himself.

  He tried to rise, coming up on all fours like a beast, and I caught his greasy hair in my left fist and sacrificed him, cutting his throat so that his life flushed out across the cool wet stones, and the hero drank his blood as he had with every bad man that Calchas sent into the dark.

  I wiped my sword on his chiton and went to the cabin, such as it was. The years had not been kind, and the bandits had slaughtered a deer badly and left the hanging carcass to rot by the window of horn, the fools.

  The wreck of a door was open. Inside, there were two women clinging to the priest. They flinched away from me.

  ‘Empedocles?’ I asked gently. And then, when he still looked wild and afraid, I tried a smile. ‘It’s a rescue,’ I said.

  ‘They took my cup,’ he said weakly, and fainted.

  We were quite a crowd by the time the rain stopped. We had nine prisoners and six of us, the two women and the priest. He wasn’t in a good way – he had a fever and they had abused him – he had burns – but he was a strong man and he smiled at me.

  ‘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.’