Killer of Men (52 page)

The hall was small, and she was waiting to receive the body. Her handmaidens were around her, and they took his body – the man I’d beheaded an hour before – and they washed it. She caught my eye and started. She raised an eyebrow – that was all the greeting I got – and then went back to her task. Her role. Like a priestess, she had her part to play, and she played it well.

An old woman sewed the head back on. While that happened, I stepped up next to Briseis. She bowed.

‘Lord Arimnestos,’ she said. ‘We are honoured.’

She bowed to me – imagine, Briseis the untouchable bowing to Doru the slave. It was all like a dream.

‘I am a poor hostess,’ she said, and led the way out of the hall, on to a balcony over the sea.

I still expected an embrace.

‘I killed him,’ I said quietly, and I think I smiled.

She nodded. ‘I know that,’ she said. ‘And I thank you. Now – go. You should not be here.’

‘But—’ I couldn’t believe it. She was pregnant again, I could tell – about three months. But her beauty was unchanged, and her power over me. ‘But I came – to rescue you.’

Such things, once said, sound very weak indeed.

‘Why do you think I need rescuing?’ she asked. Then she laughed. She stood on tiptoe and kissed me. He tongue darted in and out of my mouth, and then she stepped back and licked her lips. ‘Blood in your mouth and all over you,’ she said and she smiled. ‘Achilles. Now be gone, before people talk. I’m a widow and my reputation will matter.’

‘I don’t care,’ I said. ‘I’m your next husband.’

Then she looked – hurt. Not proud, and not angry, and not sad, but as if some deep pain had touched her. She reached out and touched my bloody right hand. ‘No, my love,’ she said. ‘I will not marry you.’ She shook her head. ‘I have children to protect – beautiful children. And where would we go?’

I felt as if the Persian’s axe had got me. ‘I want to take you home,’ I said.

‘To Ephesus?’ she asked.

‘To Plataea,’ I said. ‘To my farm.’

She smiled then, and I knew that my dreams were foolish. The gods must have laughed at me all autumn.

‘Listen, my love,’ she said gently. ‘I am not called Helen by other men for nothing. It is not my fate to be a farm-wife in Boeotia, wherever that may be.’ Her smile became bitter – the bitterness of self-knowledge. ‘That is not my fate. Nor would I want it. I will be the lady of a great lord.’ Her hand remained on mine. ‘I love you, but you are a killer. A pirate. A thief of lives.’

‘You seem to need me from time to time,’ I said, and my bitterness was too close to the surface.

She looked past me, into the room where her husband’s body was being washed. She had things that she needed to be doing, she said with her eyes. ‘Be glorious, so that I may hear of you often, Achilles,’ she said softly.

‘Come with me,’ I pleaded.

She shook her head.

Well, I had my pride, too – and that was my foolishness. When Archi walked away from me, I should have wrestled him to the ground, and when Briseis chose another life, I should have put her over my shoulder and taken her. We’d both have been happier.

But I was proud.

‘In the harbour, there will be a ship in ten days,’ I said. ‘Unless Poseidon takes him. His name is your name, and he is your ship. I took him from Diomedes of Ephesus. The rowers are yours until the end of autumn.’

Then she threw her arms around my neck. ‘Oh, thank you!’ she said. ‘Now I am truly free.’

I turned to leave – but then it struck me. ‘You will marry Miltiades!’ I said, and there was death in my tone.

Her lip curled in disgust. ‘You are worth ten of him,’ she said. ‘And if it were my fate to be a pirate queen, I would be yours.’

‘Who then?’ I asked. ‘I could protect your children.’

‘And make them tyrants of Miletus?’ she asked. ‘Lords of Ephesus?’ She came and put her arms around my neck, and I had no hatred for her in my body. ‘Go! Let me hear of you in songs of praise, and perhaps we will meet again.’

We kissed. It cannot have helped her reputation much, since every woman in that hall could see us, but it did me a world of good. That kiss had to hold me for many years.

22

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.