Killer of Men (53 page)

‘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.