Killer of Men (6 page)

‘From Athens?’ Pater didn’t seem to know what was being said, so he fixed on the idea that the man from Athens was coming. ‘Three
hundred and seventy drachmas
?’ he said.

He and Epictetus embraced.

That night, Mater and Pater sang together.

They were a remarkable couple, when sober and friends to each other. You’ll never credit this, Thugater, but you’ll find it hard enough when you are my age to look back and see your father and mother clearly, and if Apollo withholds his hand and Pluton grants fortune enough that I live to see you with children at your knee – why, then you’ll remember me only as an old man with a stick. Eh? But I love to remember them, that day. In later years – when I was far away, a slave – I would think of Pater dressed in his best, a chiton of oiled wool so fine that every muscle in his chest showed, and his neck, like a bull’s, and his head – he had a noble head – like a statue of Zeus, his hair all dark and curled. He always wore it long, in braids wrapped around the crown of his head when he was working. Later I understood – it was a warrior’s hairstyle, braids to pad his helmet. He was never just a smith.

And Mater, when sober – it is hard for a child to see his mother as beautiful, but she was. Men told me so all my childhood, and what is more embarrassing than other men finding your mother attractive? Her eyes were blue and grey, her nose straight, her face thin, her cheekbones high and hollow – I often wonder how many Mother Heras in the temple were carved to look like Mater. She would come down in a dress of Tyrian-dyed wool with embroidery – not her own, Athena knows – and she was trim and lithe and above all, to me, sober.

The next day, Pater freed Bion. He offered him a wage to stay, and sent for the priest from Thebes to raise Bion to the level of a free smith. Bion and Pater dickered over the price of his family and Pater settled on two years’ work at the forge. Bion accepted and they spat on their hands and shook.

The following day, Pater came to me where I was sweeping. ‘Time to go to school,’ he said. He didn’t smile. In fact, he looked nervous. ‘I’m – sorry, boy. Sorry I beat you so hard for a drachma knife.’ He handed it back to me – he’d confiscated it
and
the bronze one he’d made for me. ‘I made you a scabbard,’ he said.

Indeed he had. A bronze scabbard with a silver rivet decoration. It was a wonderful thing – finer than anything I owned. ‘Thank you, Pater,’ I mumbled.

‘I swore an oath that if we made it through the summer . . .’ He paused and looked out of the forge. ‘If we made it through the summer, I’d take you up to the hero’s shrine and pay the priest to teach you.’

I nodded.

‘I mean to keep my word, but I want you to know that – you’re a good – worker.’ He nodded. ‘So – put your knife round your neck. Let’s see it. Now go and put on a white chiton as if you were going to a festival, and kiss your mother.’

Mater looked at me as if I’d been dragged in by the dogs, but then she smiled. Today she looked to me like a queen. ‘You have it in you to look like a lord,’ she said. ‘Remember this.’ She held up her mirror, a fine silver one that hadn’t been sold while we were poor, with Aphrodite combing her hair on the back. I saw myself. It wasn’t the first time, but I still remember being surprised at how tall I was, and how much I really did look like my idea of a lord – fine wool chiton, hair in ringlets and the knife under my arm. Then she offered me her cheek to kiss – never her lips and never a hug – and I was away.

I walked with Pater. It was thirty stades to the shrine of our hero of the Trojan War, and I wasn’t used to sandals.

Pater was silent. I was amazed that he hadn’t sent Bion or someone else, but he took me himself, and when we had climbed high enough up the flank of the mountain to be amidst the trees – beautiful straight cypress and some scrubby pine – he stopped.

‘Listen, boy,’ he said. ‘Old Calchas is a worthy man, for a drunk. But he – that is, if you want no part of him, run home. And if he hurts you, I’ll kill him.’

He held my shoulders and kissed me, and then we walked the rest of the way.

Calchas was not so old. He was Pater’s age, and had a fuller beard, with plenty of white in it, but he had the body of an athlete. He didn’t look like a drunk. I fancied myself an expert – after all, I knew every stage of Mater’s drinking, from red-rimmed eyes and foul breath to modest bleariness. Calchas didn’t show any of that. And he was
still
. I saw that at once. He didn’t fidget and he didn’t show anxiety.

But it was his eyes that held me. He had green eyes – as I do myself – and I’d never seen another pair. They also had a particular quality – they seemed to look through you to a place far beyond.

I know, dear. My eyes do the same. But they didn’t then.

I don’t think most of the farmers of the valley of the Asopus knew what Calchas was. They thought him a harmless priest, a drunk, a useful old man who would teach their sons to read.

It is almost funny, given what Plataea was to become, that in all the valley, there wasn’t a man hard enough to look the priest in the eye and see him for what he was.

A killer.

I lived with Calchas for years, but I never thought of his hut beside the spring and the tomb as
home
. From the edge of the tomb I could see our hill rising thirty stades away, and when I was homesick I would climb the round stones to the top, lie on the beehive roof and look across the still air to home. And often enough he would send me back on errands – because we paid him in wine and olive oil and bread and cheese, and because he was a kind man for all that his eyes were dead. He’d wait until I cried myself to sleep a few nights, and then he’d send me home on an errand without my asking.

That whole first autumn, I learned my letters and nothing else. For hours every day, and then we’d scour his wooden dishes and his one bronze pitcher, a big thing that had no doubt been a donation in the ancient past. He didn’t speak much, except to teach. He simply taught me the letters, over and over again, endlessly patient where Pater would have been screaming in frustration.

I’d like to say that I was a quick learner, but I wasn’t. It was early autumn, and everything was golden, and I was an outdoor boy caught in his lessons. I wanted to watch the eagles play in the high air, and the woods around the shrine fascinated me, because they were so deep and dark. One day I saw a deer – my first – and then a boar.

I felt as if I had fallen into the land of myth.

Travellers sometimes came over the mountain to the shrine. Not many, but a few. They were always men, and they often carried weapons, a rare sight down in the valley. Calchas would send me away, then he’d sit with the men and drink a cup of wine.

They were soldiers, of course. Soldiers came to the shrine from all over Boeotia, because the word was that the shrine and the spring provided healing to men of war. I think it was Calchas who healed them. He talked and they listened, and they went away lighter by a few darics and some care. Sometimes he’d get drunk afterwards, but mostly he’d go and say some prayers at the shrine of the hero, and then he’d make us some barley gruel.

His food was terrible, and always the same – black bread, bean broth without meat, water. I’ve lived in a Spartan mess group and eaten better. At the time I cared little. Food was fuel.

Calchas had fascinating things in his hut. He had an aspis as fine as Pater’s – a great bowl of bronze and wood, with a snake painted in red and a hundred dents in the surface. He had a sword – a long sword with a narrow blade, nothing like Pater’s long knife. He had a dull helmet – a simple one, not a fancy Corinthian like Pater’s – and his cuirass consisted of layers of white leather scarred and scuffed and patched a hundred times without a scrap of bronze to brighten it. He had a fine hunting spear, beautifully made by a master, with a long tapering point of steel, chased and carefully inlaid in the Median style, and a bow of foreign work with a quiver of arrows.

He was content to let me touch it all, which I was never allowed with Pater’s kit. All except the bow.

So naturally, I had to steal the bow.

It wasn’t hard. His hut had one piece of ornamentation – a window made from panes of horn pressed thin and flat. It let light in, in the winter, and it was beautifully crafted, the gift of some rich patron. It was made to pivot on a pair of bronze pintles cunningly fashioned. Calchas used to laugh about it. He called it the ‘Gate of Horn’ and said all his dreams came through it – and he also called it the ‘Lord’s Window’. ‘A foolish thing to have in a peasant’s hut,’ he said, although that window alone allowed me to read in the winter.

I had soon learned that I could get in and out of that window. I whittled a stick with my sharp iron knife so that I could prise the window open from outside. I waited till he was drunk, then got in and took the bow and quiver and ran off up one of the hundreds of paths that led from the clearing by the spring. I found my way to a small meadow with an old stump, spotted on an earlier ramble, and my adventure came to an end when I tried to string the bow. I spent the afternoon striving against the power of a man’s weapon and I failed.

So I carried the bow and quiver back down the mountain and sneaked them into his hut, returning the bow to the peg where it hung.

After lessons the next day, I said, ‘Master, I took your bow.’

He was putting away the stylus and the wax sheets he made. He turned so fast that I flinched.

‘Where is it?’ he asked.

‘On its peg,’ I said. I hung my head. ‘I couldn’t string it.’

I never saw his hand move, but suddenly my ear hurt – hurt like
fire
. ‘That’s for disobedience,’ he said calmly. ‘You want to shoot the bow?’

‘Yes!’ I said. I think I was crying.

He nodded. ‘I’m sending you for more wine,’ he said. ‘When you come back, perhaps we’ll make a bow you can shoot.’ He paused. ‘And we’ll do the dances. The military dances. Now, what letter is this?’ he drew one, and I said ‘Omicron.’

‘Good boy,’ he said.

My ear still hurt, all thirty stades home.

My brother was working in the forge, and he didn’t like it. It’s odd, being brothers. We were alike in so many ways – and we were always friends, even when we were angry – but we wanted different things. He wanted to be a warrior, a nobleman with a retinue and deer hounds. He wanted the life Mater wanted for him. And all I wanted to be was a master smith. Irony is the lord of all, honey. I got what he wanted, and he got a few feet of dirt. But he was a good boy, and he was in the forge doing the job that I would have sold my soul to do. That’s the way of it when you are young.

I showed Mater my letters and sang her the first hundred lines of the
Iliad
, which Calchas had also taught me, and she nodded and kissed my cheek and gave me a silver pin.

‘At least one of my sons will grow up a gentleman,’ she said. ‘Tell me of this Calchas.’

So I did. I told her all I knew about him, which proved, under her Medusa-like glare, to be little enough. But she smiled when I said he ate black bread and bean soup.

‘An aristocrat, then,’ she said happily. Not my idea of an aristocrat, but Mater knew some things better than her eight-year-old child.

I stayed at home for two days while Pater gathered some wine. I helped in the forge and saw that my brother had already learned a few things. He’d made a bowl from copper and he was scribing it with a stylus – just simple lines, but to me it looked wonderful.

He pulled it from my hand, threw it across the forge and burst into tears. And we embraced, and swore to swap when Pater and Calchas wouldn’t know. It wasn’t an oath either of us meant – we knew we’d never fool an adult – and yet it seemed to comfort us, and I’ve long wondered about which god listened to that oath.

There were changes. Mater was better – that was obvious. The house was clean, the maids were singing and my sister smiled all the time. We had a new slave family – a young man, a Thracian, and his slave wife and their new baby. He didn’t speak much Greek, and Bion didn’t like him, and the man had a big bruise on his face where someone had knocked him down
hard
. His wife was pretty, and men in the forge yard watched her when she served them wine. Not that Pater allowed anything to happen. That’s where you
really
betray your slaves, thugater. But I get ahead of myself.

The talk in the forge yard was louder than when I’d left, even two months before, and it was cold outside, so there was a fire in the pit. Skira – the Thracian’s wife – served wine with good grace, and her husband worked the bellows while Bion made a pot. The men in the yard talked about Thebes and plans for the coming Daidala. It was just three years away. Pater was suddenly an important man.

We had a donkey. We’d never had a donkey before, and Pater said he’d send Hermogenes with the donkey to carry the wine for me. That sounded good.

But the donkey and the wine and Hermogenes took time to prepare, and it became clear that I wasn’t going back to Calchas on the second day, either. Which was fine by me. The ‘loafers’ were all gathered. Draco had built Epictetus a new wagon, and had it standing by the gate ready for delivery. It was even taller, broader and heavier, the wheels just narrow enough to fit in the ruts of the road. We were all admiring it when a stranger turned into our lane from the main road. He was riding a horse, as was his companion.

I think, honey, because you know a world where every man of substance has a horse, that I have to stop here and say that though I’d seen horses by the age of eight, I’d never touched one. No one I knew had a horse. Horses were for aristocrats. Farmers used oxen. A rich farmer might have a donkey. Horses did nothing but carry men, and farmers had legs. I don’t think ten families in Plataea owned a horse, and there were two of them coming up our lane.

They had cloaks and boots, both of them. They were clearly master and man – the master had a chlamys of Tyrian red with a white stripe, and a chiton to match, milk white with a red stripe at the hem. He had red hair like my brother but even brighter, and a big beard like a priest. He wore a sword that you could see, even at the distance of a horse’s length, was mounted in gold.