I had almost recovered from my wounds when I stepped wearily off my own gangplank like an old man and limped up the beach at Piraeus. The red wounds were closed and the bruises had faded, but the black hole where my guts had been was never going to close.
Herakleides landed me from Briseis, and he embraced me like a brother. To be honest, I'd never really forgiven him for selling the information of the value of our ransoms to Miltiades, but in his way he'd done me a favour, showing me who I worked for and what a life I'd come to. So when I limped down the plank, I turned and took his hand.
'Take this ship back to its owner, and she'll keep you as captain,' I said. 'You are too good a man to spend your life as a pirate and die face down on the sand. And you're not good enough with the bronze and iron to stay alive. Do you hear me, friend?'
He nodded.
'Take this ship to Briseis and we're quits, you and me – no blood price over a certain matter back on Lesbos. Fail to deliver, and I'll find you. Am I clear?' Behind me, Hermogenes and Idomeneus and a pair of Thracian slaves – men I'd taken as part of the booty – were carrying my goods down off the ship.
'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 leather 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.
'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.'
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 trial 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.