Killer of Men (27 page)

I laughed. ‘Come and catch me, arse cunt.’

Some men heard me. Others didn’t. He heard me, and he should have paused to consider that if I had the breath to insult him, I wasn’t afraid. But he was a fool.

But his grandfather had heard
him
and threw down his staff. ‘Stop!’ he roared.

He picked up his staff and prodded his grandson in the stomach. ‘Boys talk like that,’ he said. ‘Men respect their opponents. One more jibe and I will throw you from the lists.’

Cleisthenes didn’t even pretend to obey. He did not fear the gods, and they knew him for what he was.

Before Lord Pelagius gave the word, he came at me again, and he almost caught me, because, in fact, he cheated. His sword hammered my shield and we were shield to shield. The sword went back and he cut at my head. His blow clipped the rim of my shield and then my helmet, and it
hurt
.

‘I’m going to kill you,’ he crowed.

I could tell you that the pain of his blow made me do what I did, but I promised not to lie much when I told these tales. I knew from the moment we crossed swords. I always meant to kill him. Honey, I’m a killer. A little more wine. Your friend is blushing.

I danced away and he came after me, sure that he had me. And I let him come. He came in to hammer my shield, and I cut his sword hand off his arm as easy as making your friend blush.

See, he’d over-extended a little more with each cut, trying to get the biggest part of his blade into my shield rim. I just led him by the nose until I had his arm where I wanted it. And I could have simply given him a cut to remember.

He fell to his knees. He couldn’t get the shield off his shield arm and he couldn’t get a hand on his wrist to staunch the blood, and it was pumping out, almost like a neck wound.

If he’d had a friend in that circle, perhaps that man would have stepped up and stopped the blood. Or maybe not. What’s a man worth with no right hand, like a criminal?

His grandfather stepped forward – and then paused.

That was the awful part. His own grandfather let him bleed out. And the other men in the circle – a conspiracy of two hundred.

He was gone quickly, but his eyes went to mine near the end, and suddenly he wasn’t a bad man, a rapist, a tax-taker, a bully. He was a deer under my spear, and he didn’t understand the darkness that was coming, or why it had to come to him. And in his eyes I saw the reflection of that god who comes to every man and every woman, and I also saw myself – the killer.

I didn’t look away. I held his eye until he fell forward and everything was gone.

But as his soul left his body, I think something of me went with it.

I killed him because I didn’t like him.

And when my eyes met Aristides’, I could see that other men knew it as well as I did.

I won’t go on and on about this, friends, but before I killed Cleisthenes, I was one man. Briefly, I was a victor, a man men admired. That might have been my life, however brief.

But the fates, the gods and my own daimon said otherwise. And when Cleisthenes fell face forward into the sand black with his own blood, I was another man. Some men admired me.

But aside from a few, the rest feared me.

12

I was wearing my new armour the next morning as we began to load the ships. Armour is a silly thing to wear for work, but by the gods it was good to look like a nobleman, and I was young and arrogant. My shoulder still hurt from the pounding of my shield against it in the fight and the race.

I noted that men were careful how they spoke to me.

Stephanos was closer, if anything. He wasn’t afraid of me, and he was overjoyed that Cleisthenes was dead. In fact, I earned his friendship with that blow. And when I was maudlin that first night, Melaina told me stories of Cleisthenes and the local girls until I felt like a public benefactor.

I felt like less of a benefactor as the ships were loaded. There I stood, sparkling in a scale corslet worth a farm, a good helmet and a fine aspis. Other men were loading the ships – we had no discipline, and so every ship loaded at its own speed – and we were so late leaving the beach that we saw Lord Pelagius and the women of his household with the body, building a pyre. And the older woman, whose tears seemed pulled from her as you’d pull the guts from a dead boar, she must have been his mother.

Only then did I find fully what it is to be a killer of men. When you kill, you take a man’s life. You
take
it. He can never have it back. When the darkness comes to his eyes and he clutches his guts, he is
done
. And you don’t rob just him but his parents and his family, his sisters and brothers, his wife and children, his lovers, his debtors, his master and his slave – all robbed.

Cleisthenes was a bad man, I have no doubt, but all his people were on that beach, and it was like a scene in a play in Athens – not that they came at me like furies, just that they were all there: his horses and hounds, his women, his slaves, his son. All there in one place, for me to see.

I killed him because I didn’t like him. Let’s not lie. So – I stood there, coming to terms with the consequences. Most killers are dull men. I truly think they never see the funeral pyre. They never think. I walked down the beach, and every one of them saw me, and they looked at me as if I was some kind of beast.

I think too much. So I drink. Here – you. Blush for me and make me happy. There – ahh! My world is brighter for your presence, lady.

I never promised you a happy story.

We landed in Ephesus and all the lords of the fleet met with the lords of the city, but I stayed on our ship. I was afraid of being taken. Afraid of being a slave again. Afraid of what I’d done with Briseis. Afraid that she had already forgotten me.

And I dreamed of Cleisthenes and his funeral pyre. I still do. He’s the only one. I’ve killed enough men to make a phalanx, and he’s the only one who haunts me.

Archi was distant when he went ashore, but he came straight back to the ship with word that Diomedes’ father had sent his son to a farm in the country to recover, and
nothing
had been said.

Typical. The things you most fear never come to pass. Diomedes and his father might seek revenge, but they had not gone to law.

I left the ship and entered the house as a free man, wearing armour. I felt odd – everything was odd. Food tasted wrong, and I longed to go and eat in the kitchen, but I didn’t, just as I wanted one of the slaves to tell me how bold I looked in my magnificent shirt of scale armour, but none of them even met my eye.

Not even Penelope, who threw her arms around Archi when we returned and didn’t even look at me.

Briseis looked at me, an enigmatic half-smile at the corner of her mouth. I found that I couldn’t really breathe. I felt as if I’d been gone ten years, and I found that I’d forgotten what she looked like. She stood in the courtyard to welcome us because her mother never left her room any more and Briseis was, in effect, the lady of the house.

‘Well,’ she said. That was all.

I didn’t see her again for days. I took baths and thought guiltily of our love-making – if that’s what it was. And I found that I thought of Melaina – which seemed like treason, except that she was more my speed, if you take my meaning. I wondered why I hadn’t even tried to kiss her.

Archi went to the conferences, and met with men like Aristides and Aristagoras, plotting a campaign against the Medes for the freedom of Ionia.

I found myself a lonely man in a city that had been my playground. I couldn’t exactly go and sit by the Fountain of Pollio, could I?

I met my Thracian girl in the back alley, almost by accident, and tried to get her to go for a walk with me, but she ran. That hurt.

So after two days of failing to be the returning hero, I went up the hill to the Temple of Artemis. And there I found boys sitting in front of Heraclitus. I wasn’t a boy, but I sat at his feet.

He nodded to me. He was laying out the rules of triangles. There were three new boys. I had been gone just two months, and even that world had changed. But I listened, and my mind went down the paths of numbers and figures in the sand, instead of death and war and sex, and I took a little healing, as I always have from the wise.

When he was done with the other boys, he came and sat next to me.

‘What you did to Diomedes was cruel,’ he said.

‘The logos speaks through strife,’ I said, quoting him.

‘Don’t give me that shit,’ he said. His gaze met mine and ground mine down like stone against iron. ‘You hurt that boy.’

I shrugged. ‘He had it coming.’

Heraclitus sat and leaned on his staff. I can’t remember another time that he sat with me. Finally he looked at me. ‘I have so many things I want to say to you. You can all but see the logos – and yet you are so far from true understanding, aren’t you? You understand me when I talk, and yet you can hurt a boy like that – for a child’s reasons.’

I blinked tears. I had been blinking tears since he sat with me. Hah! I feel them in my eyes even now. No one else had cared, except Stephanos and Archi. He sat there, and listened.

‘I did it because he broke his engagement with Briseis,’ I said. ‘He hurt her. I did the right thing!’

Heraclitus’s eyes rested on me, and you could almost see the sparks as his gaze ground away at mine.

Finally, I hung my head. ‘No, I did not.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Tell the truth, at least to yourself. I knew the truth as soon as I heard that the boy had been hurt. You hurt him. Cruelly. Is that who you are? A man who hurts for his own satisfaction?’

I couldn’t meet his eyes. And I began to weep. I sat on the steps and told him the tale of Cleisthenes. He shuddered when I cut off the hand. But he smiled when I told him, through my own tears, of the funeral pyre.

‘It is the pity of the world that we must come to wisdom through fire,’ he said. ‘Why can no man learn wisdom from another?’

I couldn’t answer him. Perhaps no one can. After a while he went on, ‘You have discovered one of the secrets of the world of men.’

‘What’s that?’ I asked. Those boys – most of them knew me – were wondering why the teacher was sitting with me, and why I was pouring tears the way a mended pot leaks water.

‘The secret is that men are easy to kill. That if you are brave and have a steady hand and a cold heart, you can have whatever you desire.’ He looked away. ‘This city is about to go to war with Persia, and then it will learn a lesson that I think you already know. War is the king and father of all, my son. Some men it makes lords, and others it makes slaves. Do you understand?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Ah!’ he said, and laughed – at himself. ‘The strife I preach – some men master it without knowing why, and use it for themselves, without a thought to consequence. War makes them lords and kings. But they are not good men. The killer lies in every man – closer to the surface in some than others, I think. I saw the killer in your eyes when first your master led you up the steps.’ He nodded. ‘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.’

‘Men fight wars!’ I protested.

‘And men return from them, confused as to what the laws of men and gods ask of them.’ He looked at a raptor, climbing in the distance over the mountains. ‘That bird can kill twenty times a day and never be the agent of evil – merely change. But men are not animals. What they mate and what they kill becomes who they are.’ He looked at me. ‘You are a warrior. You must find yourself a path that keeps you among men and not among animals. Avoid the confusion. Law is better than chaos.’

It doesn’t sound like a helpful speech, although I think I can remember every word. And yes, that line about strife and war – he said it all the time, and it’s in his book. Don’t think I was the first to hear it, either. But it stuck.

Listen, all of you. There are men and women – you’re old enough to know – who discover what their nether parts are for and go mad with it. It is the same with killing. Turns out that killing is easy. Inflicting pain is easy. Cleisthenes learned that. And when I gave him the other half of the lesson, he never got to benefit from it. Perhaps if he’d had a teacher like my teacher . . .

For weeks the ships came up the river and dropped soldiers – Greeks – on our shores, and we gathered a mighty army. At least, we thought it was an army. Aristagoras promised us an easy fight. He said that the Persians had short spears and no shields and that their riches were there for us to take.

It is the dark comedy of men that every Ionian knew that he was full of shit. Many of them had faced Persians – or run from them – and they knew how good they were. And yet this disease, this mania, swept them as if the deadly archer had shot them with arrows of inflammation and disease – failure to fear the Persians.

There’s a name for this disease in all the tragedies. We call it hubris, and all men and all women are subject to it.

So they debated and planned. No one drilled, though, and no one appointed a commander, although all but the Athenians took orders, or at least suggestions, from Aristagoras. He went to dinner at the house. I wasn’t excluded, but I wasn’t comfortable attending formal dinners. Oh, my manners were up to it – I had learned the manners of aristocrats. But to lie on a couch and be served by Kylix?

I went and ate in taverns by the water. Which proved to be a good choice, because I found Epaphroditos in one and Stephanos in another, and learned to play knucklebones like an islander. Stephanos’s victory as a wrestler had promoted him off the oar bench and into the ranks of his lord’s retinue, and now he was a hoplite. He and Epaphroditos and I had the games in common, and that was enough. And when we found Heraklides, we were four, which is a good number for men.

Four weeks of dicing in taverns and drinking cheap wine, exercising in the gymnasium – all the allied soldiers were welcome there, and no one knew me – and four weeks of sitting at Heraclitus’s feet. Indeed, I took my friends to hear him speak. They were pleased but mystified, and all three agreed that he was a great man, but they never went with me again.

Heraklides spoke for the other two. He was in the agora, fingering a plain bronze camp knife. The vendor was a slave for the smith who made it. It was mediocre work.

‘I’ll pay you in obols what you ask in owls,’ Heraklides said to the slave. I had just asked him to come with me a second time to hear Heraclitus. ‘By the gods, man – three obols, then!’

He turned to me with a grin. ‘Yon philosopher is a little above the likes of me, Doru. I could see he was a great man – it was a pleasure to hear him. But I scarcely understood a word he said.’ He whirled back on the slave. ‘Four obols – take it or leave it.’

Heraclitus sat with me every day after the other boys walked away, and we talked about laws – laws of men and laws of gods. You’ve heard it all from your tutors, I’m sure. Aye, I’ll have his head if you haven’t heard it, honey! That most laws are men’s laws for men’s reasons. In Sparta, every man takes a boy as a lover, and in Chios, it is death for a man to lie with a boy. These are the laws of men.

But the gods hate hypocrisy and hubris, as any history that is true will show. And murder – and incest. These are the laws of the gods. And there are laws we can only guess at – laws of hospitality, for example. They seem like god-given laws, but when we meet men who have different guest-laws, we have to wonder.

Bah – I talk too much. I should have been a philosopher, as the priest of Hephaestus said.

And then there was Briseis.

I can’t remember how long I had been in that house before I saw her again. I was in her father’s room, with her father’s permission – he was formal and polite to me, but a little cold – reading his scrolls. He had the words of Pythagoras and some of Heraclitus and Anaxagoras, too. And I was reading them. I was also helping him and Darkar do sums. I would have carried water to the well at this point, I was so bored and felt so under-used. Archi didn’t want me when he went to the daily conference, and so I seemed to have no duties at all except to match him in the gymnasium, at the palaestra and on the track.

I was reading, as I say, when Briseis came in. She smiled at me – quite a happy smile – and took a scroll from my basket.

‘Have you read Thales?’ she asked. ‘For all that he sounds like a soothsayer, he seems the wisest of the lot. Or perhaps he just hated women less.’

‘Heraclitus doesn’t hate women,’ I answered hotly.

‘Oh!’ she said, and her eyes flashed. ‘Wonderful! I’ll ask him to accept me as a student straight away.’

I had to smile. I raised my hand the way a swordsman does at practice, when he acknowledges a hit. ‘Well struck,’ I said.

‘I was happy at Sappho’s school,’ she said. ‘I wish I could go back, but I’m too old.’ Old at sixteen.

Her father glared at us. ‘I’m working,’ he growled.

‘May we read in the garden?’ Briseis asked sweetly, and he kissed her hand – absently – his eyes on his work.

We picked up the scroll baskets and walked into the garden together.

‘Why don’t you read to me?’ she said. There was very little question to it.

And that was that. I read to her every day. We read Thales’ book on nature – really just an accumulation of his sayings. We read our way through Pythagoras, and laughed over what we didn’t understand, and Briseis asked questions and I taught her what I knew of the geometry, which was not inconsiderable, and I took her questions to Heraclitus, and he answered them. He was contemptuous of women as a sex, but friendly to them as individuals, which Briseis said was a vast improvement on the reverse.