Killer of Men

by Christian Cameron

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 come 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 tri
al was over. We followed them up the road, and hounded them until they reached my lane.

  ‘Stop,’ I said.

  They cringed.

  ‘Simon,’ I said, and he turned. He was shaking. His sons stood away from him – I think in revulsion.

  ‘Take your chattels and go,’ I said. ‘Or the law will kill you.’

  He turned away from me, a shadow of the angry man he’d once been in my father’s andron. Honey, I think what he had done had eaten him, until he had nothing left but an angry shell, like the outside of a thorn apple eaten by worms.

  And this is the lesson. Remember that I said, when I sat at Oinoe, that I had learned that you could kill, and rape, and force others to your will?

  Perhaps you can, for a time. But the gods are there. They do watch. Simonalkes needed no punishment from me. He wore his failure, his cowardice, his alienation, on his face. He was no Plataean, though he had occupied my house while I was a slave. AndI – I was welcome back. He lived an exile in his own house – and if I was a poet, I might say that I’d carried Plataea with me wherever I wandered.

  I would submit to the mastery of the laws of men and gods.

  I went back to Epictetus’s house, and slept well.

  In the morning, none of Simon’s Corvaxae came to the trial. The jurors sent two men to find them.

  They came back to say that Simon was hanging by a leather rope from the rafters of the bronze shop, and the sons were gone, and my mother was too drunk to speak.

  And so, about noon, on a beautiful day, I walked up that long hill, past the olive trees, past the byres and the grape vines. Bion and Hermogenes walked with me, and Empedocles, moving slowly, and Epictetus, and their sons, and Myron and his sons, and Draco and his sons.

  I could hear the swarm of flies on the corpse in the shop.

  I was numb.

  But the men around me held me up, the way men do in the phalanx when you are wounded. The shields of their friendship covered me. The spears of their humour kept the furies at bay. They were there – the furies, baying for his blood, revelling in the accomplishment of their task – I could feel them on the air.

  We walked up into the yard, and then my sister was in my arms, saying my name over and over.

  I held Pen a long time, and then I put her down.

  ‘You are all my neighbours and my friends,’ I said. ‘But I need to clean my own house.’

  Every man there nodded, even the youngest. Some things you have to do yourself.

  I never promised you a happy story, Honey. It has glad parts, and sad parts, like life.

  I went upstairs to Mater. She was drunk – but she knew me. She had a knife – a good bronze knife. Pater’s work. She’d tried it on her wrists a few times, and there was blood on her linen and on her arms and, incongruously, some on her feet. Her skin was old, and the blood found folds to run in.

  She burst into tears when she saw me.

  ‘Oh!’ she wailed. ‘I meant to be dead when you came, and now I am a coward as well as everything else.’

  I took the knife from her, my strength against her weakness. And then I took the water from her table and washed her, and I bound up the slashes – the inadequate slices – on her wrists.

  ‘He killed Pater,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ she said. She raised her head, and a touch of her pride came back. ‘I never let them have Pen,’ she said. Not an excuse. Just a statement.

  So many types of strength, and so many types of weakness, too.

  When she was clean, I got Pen to help me get her dressed, and then I went to my next task.

  I went into the shop, and I climbed the rafters alone and cut Simon down. He smelled like a new-killed deer, all blood and meat and ordure. It was the smell of hunting and battlefields. The smell that attracts ravens.

  I took the corpse to the wagon, and I drove it – scarcely a thought in my head, to tell the truth – across the valley and up the ridge. I spent that night at the tomb, with Idomeneus. In the morning, we burned Simon on the pyre with the dead thief, and sprinkled their ashes across the tomb. Broken men, sacrificed. But what broke them?

  Later, Idomeneus had the criminals scrubbing the tomb’s round stones with brushes he had them make themselves. I fed my oxen and turned both wagons for home.

  A man came up the road from Eleutherai with an aspis on his back and a beaten Thracian cap on his head. I didn’t know him, but I knew the look. He came up the hill like a man doing a serious job, and when he reached the tomb, he took a canteen from under his arm and poured a libation. Then he hung his aspis on the great oak tree by the cabin.

  ‘Is the priest here?’ he asked. His eyes were a little wild. His hands shook a little.

  I let the oxen stand. I sat him on the cabin’s step and fed him some wine.

  He was still telling about the campaign in Caria when Idomeneus came and sat with us. The mercenary’s name was Ajax, and he’d known Cyrus and Pharnakes. He told us how Pharnakes died, and his hands shook. He’d served with the Medes against the Carians. Sitting at the hero’s tomb in Boeotia, that didn’t matter a fart. We were brothers, all of us, in an ugly brotherhood of spilt blood and terror.

  When I left, they were weeping together. Neither cared when the oxen clumped out of the clearing. I took the wagon over Asopus, and when I reached the fork, I stopped and just breathed.

  I took my time going up the hill. Over our gate was a wreath of laurel, and there were men in the courtyard, and there was a fire outside the smithy, and the old priest stood with Pen and Peneleos.

  I laughed. ‘I’m home,’ I said.

  Epilogue

  My voice is gone, and I’ve talked enough – your stylus hand must hurt like a swordsman’s after a long fight, lad. And you, lady – I must have run you out of blushes by now. And you, honey – you’ve yawned more than a child at lessons. Although you were kind enough to weep for your grandmother.

  Aye, there’s more. Come again after the feast of Demeter, and I’ll tell you of how I next met Briseis – how I lost the farm, and won it back – how the men of Plataea stood against the Medes at Marathon.

  Now there’s a story.

  Acknowledgements

  On 1 April 1990, I was in the back right seat of an S-3B Viking, flying a routine anti-submarine warfare flight off the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower. But we were not just anywhere. We were off the coast of Turkey, and in one flight we passed Troy, or rather, Hisarlik, Anatolia. Later that afternoon, we passed down the coast of Lesbos and all along the coast of what Herodotus thought of as Asia. Back in my stateroom, on the top bunk (my bunk, as the most junior officer), was an open copy of the Iliad.

  I will never forget that day, because there’s a picture on my wall of the Sovremenny-class destroyer Okrylennyy broadside on to the mock harpoon missile I fired on her from well over the horizon using our superb ISAR radar. Of course, there was no Homeric deed of arms – the Cold War was dying, or even dead – but there was professional triumph in that hour, and the photo of the ship, framed against the distant haze of the same coastline that saw battles at Mycale and Troy, will decorate my walls until my shade goes down to the underworld.

  I think that Killer of Men was born there. I love the Greek and Turkish Aegean, and the history of it. Before Saddam Hussein wrecked it in August, my carrier battle group had a near perfect summer, cruising the wine-dark sea where the Greeks and Persians fought.

  But it may have been born when talking to various Vietnam veterans, returning from that war – a war that may not have been worse than any other war, but loomed large in my young consciousness of conflict. My grandfather and my father and my uncle – all veterans – said things, when they thought I wasn’t around, that led me to suspect that while many men can be brave, some men are far more dangerous in combat than others.

  Still later, I was privileged to serve with various men from the Special Operations world, and I came to know that even among them – the snake-eaters – there were only a few who were the killers.
I listened to them talk, and I wondered what kind of a man Achilles really was. Or Hector. And I began to wonder what made them, and what kept them at it, and the thought stayed with me while I flew and served in Africa and saw various conflicts and the effects that those conflicts have on all the participants, from the first Gulf War to Rwanda and Zaire.

  Killer of Men is my attempt to understand the inside of such men.

  This book was both very easy and very hard to write. I have thought about Killer of Men since 1990 in some way or other; when I sat down to put my thoughts into the computer, the book seemed to write itself, and even now, when I type these final words, I am amazed at how much of it seemed to be waiting, prewritten, inside my head. But the devil is still in the details, and my acknowledgements are all about the investigation and research of those details.

  The broad sweep of the history of the Ionian Revolt is really known to us only from Herodotus and, to a vastly lesser extent, from Thucydides. I have followed Herodotus in almost every respect, except for the details of how the tiny city-state of Plataea came to involve herself with Athens. That, to be frank, I made up – although it is based on a theory evolved over a hundred conversations with amateur and professional historians. First and foremost, I have to acknowledge the contribution of Nicolas Cioran, who cheerfully discussed Plataea’s odd status every day as we worked out in a gymnasium, and sometimes fought sword to sword. My trainer and constant sparring partner John Beck deserves my thanks – both for a vastly improved physique, and for helping give me a sense of what real training for a life of violence might have been like in the ancient world. And my partner in the reinvention of ancient Greek xiphos fighting, Aurora Simmons, deserves at least equal thanks.

  Among professional historians, I was assisted by Paul McDonnell-Staff and Paul Bardunias, by the entire brother- and sisterhood of RomanArmyTalk.com and the web community there, and by the staff of the Royal Ontario Museum (who possess and cheerfully shared the only surviving helmet attributable to the Battle of Marathon), as well as the staff of the Antikenmuseum Basel und Sammlung Ludwig, who possess the best-preserved ancient aspis and provided me with superb photos to use in recreating it. I also received help from the library staff of the University of Toronto, where, when I’m rich enough, I’m a student, and from Toronto’s superb Metro Reference Library. Every novelist needs to live in a city where universal access to JSTOR is free and on his library card. The staff of the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, Maryland – just across the street from my mother’s apartment, conveniently – were cheerful and helpful, even when I came back to look at the same helmet for the sixth time. And James Davidson, whose superb book, Greeks and Greek Love helped me think about the thorny issues of ancient Greek sexuality, was also useful to a novelist with too many questions.