Killer of Men (9 page)

‘So I watch out for the good of Athens,’ he went on. ‘Athens needs Plataea. Plataea needs Athens. Sparta will take your alliance – and later he’ll shove it up your arse.’ His crudity hit them hard. He was a brilliant speaker, capable of using all words, big and small, rough and elegant, and he could modify his text to his audience, a wonderful talent. But most of all, he was a charismatic man. Later I saw him in an assembly of thousands, and his words carried an army. At close quarters, he was as deadly in argument as he was in combat.

Epictetus frowned. ‘What do we do, lord? We did not seek to displease you.’

Miltiades shook his head. ‘My fault for not voicing my desire openly. I shouldn’t have made you guess. I’m not usually so coy. I want this alliance. I want Plataea welded to Athens with bonds of bronze and iron.’ He grinned his infectious grin. ‘Well, we’ll see. Your embassy will be back soon enough. Doubtless the Spartans will accept and shaft you later, but perhaps I can speak sense into you before that.’ He laughed. ‘I’ll go and visit the old soldier on the hill. Calchas. Do you know him?’

Pater glanced at me. ‘He was my son’s tutor,’ he said.

Miltiades gave me an appraising glance. ‘Really? Old Calchas took you on? What did he teach you?’

‘Reading,’ Pater said quickly.

‘Hunting,’ I said, before I knew what I was saying.

Pater frowned, but Miltiades smiled. ‘You hunt? Take me in the morning, lad. We’ll have a fine time.’

‘He is my son,’ my father said carefully.

‘I understand,’ Miltiades answered.

We went up the mountain together. I rode his horse, my arms around his waist and a bundle of javelins in my fists. I showed him my prize spear and he looked it over carefully and admitted that it was a fine one for a lad my age. I realized that I was striving for his approbation with every breath. I never wondered why his slave had stayed on the farm, or why he didn’t lend me his slave’s horse, although, in truth, I probably couldn’t have ridden her.

It took us less than an hour to cross the valley and mount the slopes to the shrine. We rode into the green meadow and dismounted. I ran to the door of the hut, but Calchas didn’t answer my knock. The sun was just rising, and Miltiades was fully active – he was never a sluggard, even with a skinful of wine.

He had a fine canteen, covered in leather, and he spilled a libation to the hero. Then he tethered his horse and we went up the trails behind the tomb at a run. He was in magnificent shape – I’ve seldom seen a man with a better command of his body – and we ran six or seven stades without stopping, until we were high in the oak forest.

‘I thought we might catch up with the old bastard,’ Lord Miltiades said. He was scarcely panting.

‘No tracks on the trail,’ I said. I was breathing hard.

Again, the lord looked at me carefully. ‘Good eye,’ he said. ‘Can you find me a buck, lad?’

So we moved quietly across the mountainside. It took me an hour to get the spoor of an animal, and another hour – the sun was getting too high – to put the small buck between us. I charged it, yelling hard, and it broke away from me, running for its life right at the Athenian.

But I hadn’t seen the other buck. He was a magnificent animal, as big as a small horse, and in autumn he’d have carried a rack of antlers big enough to sell. Even in high summer he had started his horns. He rose out of a tangle of brush, crashed shoulder to shoulder with the younger buck, spilling him and saving his life, and sprang. His leap was so high and so hard that Miltiades stood with his mouth open, his javelin cocked and forgotten in his hand, as the buck sailed over his head.

We didn’t touch either animal. Miltiades slapped me on the back. ‘You can stalk,’ he said. ‘Not your fault I missed my throw, boy. And what an animal! Artemis held my hand – I felt her cool fingers on my wrist, I swear. That beast must be her special love.’

We walked down the mountain together. The sun was too high to try again. I potted a rabbit foolish enough to sit in the middle of the trail eating a leaf, and Miltiades praised my throw, sweet praise such as I never received at home.

Yet he was not just a flatterer. He made me throw for him six or seven times, and he adjusted my body each time, correcting my tendency to advance my right foot too much, and there was none of the urgency to his touch that I’d felt with Calchas. He taught well, and when he threw his own spear, a heavy
longche
that I would be hard-pressed to toss across the meadow, he threw it as Zeus on high throws a bolt of lightning.

I was worshipping him by the time we returned to Calchas’s hut and the shrine.

‘I wanted to see him,’ Miltiades said.

‘I’ll fetch him out,’ I said, bold as brass. ‘Lord, he may be a little drunk.’

Miltiades laughed. ‘You fetch him out of there,’ he said. ‘I’ll sober him up – or give him some decent wine, better than the piss you peasants drink.’

It was the first time I’d heard Miltiades speak ill of us. He could only guard his tongue so long.

Ah, listen, honey. He was not a bad man, as powerful men go. He saved Greece. He was good to me. But he was used to the finest horses, the most beautiful women. It was our foolishness that made us think he was happy to drink sour wine with peasants in Boeotia.

I climbed in through the window of horn. I’d done it dozens of times – once to steal the bow. I told you that story.

As soon as I got it open – the stick I’d whittled to prise the window open was still leaning where I’d left it – flies came out, buzzing like some evil thing. In Canaan, men call the lord of the dead the ‘Lord of the Flies’. It was just like that – as if all the flies made a single creature and moved with one will.

I dropped from the sill into the room, and it smelled of old leather and bad food. At first I thought he had gone, leaving a rotten haunch of venison and an old brown cloak on the deer’s carcass in the middle of the floor.

But, of course, he was there.

The details came to me one at a time, although I think I understood as soon as the flies buzzed past me in the window. The odd shaft of light over the deer carcass was shining on the sword. The sword was stuck, hilt first, into the floorboards. There was no deer carcass.

Calchas had wedged his sword into the floor and fallen on it. He had done it so long before that the brown cloak was just his hair and the last of his skin over his bones.

How long since I had crossed the valley and left a sacrifice at the tomb? How many times had I come when he already lay here, dead? I wonder, in a way, if I had already known, because I had said my goodbyes and I didn’t weep. I went to the door, unbarred it and found the bronze-shod shovel Pater had made for him with his athlete’s pick. I carried them out into the yard and went straight to the tomb. Miltiades called something but I didn’t listen. Instead, I began to dig.

I didn’t see Miltiades go to the hut, but I know that before the sun rose much higher, he was at my side, his lord’s hands digging in the earth with mine. We did a proper job.

‘Not much to burn,’ Miltiades said, when I began to pile up the winter’s supply of wood in the yard. It was old wood, and a little rotten. He hadn’t cut more, nor had he burned much, last winter. This was the wood I had cut while training.

I piled it high. I was tempted to burn the cottage, but I knew that another man would come to mind the tomb. Why ruin it for him?

Then I went in and spread my cloak on the floor. I lifted his corpse and put it gently on the good wool. Some pieces of him fell away. I was not squeamish. I filled my cloak and carried him into the yard. I put copper coins in the empty sockets of his skull and set the bag of my cloak and his bones on top of the woodpile, then Miltiades got a flame going with his fire kit.

‘He was a great warrior,’ Miltiades said. ‘Twice he saved my life in the haze of battle. Once he saved my ship. And he could sing poetry like a bard. He was a gentleman like the heroes of old. May his shade go with theirs, to the island of the blessed, for he was all the old virtues together in one man.’

Then I wept. I said a few halting words, and the flames rushed up and consumed him.

But he lives in my words, honey. Honour him. He made me. In a way, he made you. Because he put the skill of arms in me, and because of him, I am not dead.

His death was the beginning of everything that went wrong.

Miltiades and I went back home. You might think that I’d have shouted at Pater, but I didn’t. Pater knew – that is, he knew when we were riding away, the day he took me from Calchas. He knew what would happen, and he told the truth. We didn’t kill him. We were like a sword left lying in a tavern, and then used in a murder. We were the instruments of his death.

I think some of Calchas passed through the skin of my hands and into my heart. I think I became a man while I carried his body, light as dried bone, out to the yard to burn him on his pyre. Is that just memory playing tricks?

Mater had never met him, but she wept for him, nonetheless – odd, in a way. He had no use for women, and yet a woman who had never known him mourned him. Somehow, it was fitting.

We kept a three-day vigil at our home, as if he’d been family, and Miltiades joined in – or led us – and that bound him to us even more, and us to him. He sat with Mater and read to her and told her she was beautiful. She drank a little and flirted harmlessly.

Then Draco and Theron came back, riding donkeys.

They came into the yard, failure written on their bodies like words on papyrus. Draco dismounted first and he didn’t meet Miltiades’ eyes, but told the story simply and quickly. The Spartans had derided the three of them, called them peasants and rebels, and told them to take their petty attempts at democracy to Athens, where such things are welcome.

Draco wasn’t a broken man, but he was changed by the experience. He was used to being taken seriously, and he’d been treated like a boor and a dolt. He complained long and hard. Indeed, for the rest of his life, he complained of the treatment he received in Sparta.

Myron came later. He complained less, but his resentment was hotter. Perhaps, as a farmer and not a craftsman, and as a member of an old family that claimed descent from the gods, he actually thought of himself as an aristocrat. Anything is possible. But the insults of the Spartans made his blood boil. The difference was that he never spoke of it again. Neither did Theron. For other reasons, as you shall see.

Epictetus followed, and then the archon himself. He had a horse, although it looked like a sorry beast beside the fine mounts Miltiades had brought.

Mater wanted to know who had arrived, and I went up to the women’s quarters to tell her.

‘Your father is about to find out why a man like Miltiades has cooled his heels for five days in our house,’ she said. ‘Will you grow to be a man like him? Like Miltiades? Or just another good craftsman like your father? Poor man. I led him to this. I couldn’t just be the wife of a smith, and now we’re about to be part of a political game.’ She gulped wine. ‘I should fall on a sword like your teacher. He knew what he was about.’

I sighed and left her.

I served the wine that night, when they decided to send the ‘salt tax’ to Athens. Miltiades sent his slave with them and stayed with us, well over the border from his home city.

We didn’t have to wait long.

The events of that summer were like one of the storms that roll down the valleys of Boeotia. First you see the storm – the black clouds rising like the strongest towers, spiralling up over the mountains – and then you hear the thunder. And when the thunder comes, honey – you run, or you get wet. At first it seems very far away – a murmur on the far horizon, and perhaps a prayer to the storm god. Then, before you know it, unless you are in the barn or house, you’ll be wet through your cloak and chiton in an instant, as the lightning flashes every few heartbeats and crashes to earth – sometimes all around you – and the wind rips branches from the trees and the end of the world seems just one bolt away.

When the men of Plataea sent Myron to Athens, the storm was still a tower of darkness on the horizon, and we were blinded by our own desires. But the desires of men are nothing when the gods send a storm. The first drops of rain were falling, and only Miltiades knew how big the storm was. And he didn’t tell us.

Athens sent a deputation back in a week, riding on horses over the trade road. They brought a decree welcoming Miltiades back and they brought us a treaty. The men of Plataea signed the treaty, promising to stand by Athens, and Athens promised the same. The men of the city went to the Temple of Hera and swore together in the sacred precincts. Pater went, and my brother. I was too young.

It was a magnificent summer. I remember them coming back from the temple, all the men of our valley in their long clothes – chitons and the big cloaks we wore then. They made a beautiful procession. I thought that this must be how the king of Persia looked.

The sun was high and the sky had the magnificent blue that is so hard to remember on a rainy day like this. We were all proud that Athens wanted us. And the men from Athens acted as if we were men of worth.

I remember that time as happy. Perhaps it is just by contrast with what came after.

The men of Athens went home and Miltiades went with them. Pater went back to work on an order for spear points. Draco went up the mountain with both his sons to cut oak for wheel rims. Myron went home to watch his slaves reap his barley.

I began to form my first cup.

It wasn’t going badly when the Athenian herald rode up the valley, summoning us to war.

Two weeks. That’s how long we had before the storm broke.

I never doubted that I would go with the men. I went as a shield-bearer, of course – a hypaspist – I was too young to fight as a hoplite. These days men take slaves, but in those days, it was more acceptable to take boys just short of manhood to carry your equipment.

Hermogenes went for his father and I went for my brother. My father took a slave.

We never thought to refuse the Athenians. And aside from my mother, who wept and railed against the fates, there were few who saw how completely the Athenians had duped us. They were not saving us. We were marching to protect them. But no one said so.