Killer of Men (8 page)

‘Arimnestos says you are to be a free man,’ Calchas said. ‘You must learn to look other men in the eye. And to think of them like this,’ and he pointed at the corpse of the deer. ‘Slave or free, a man is nothing but a pile of bones and flesh with blood in the middle.’

Hermogenes didn’t say anything, but he embraced me and when he went to leave, we clasped hands as if we were men. We sent Hermogenes home with a haunch of venison and a couple of rabbits, which no doubt made him a hero to his family. Hermogenes and I date our friendship from that morning. But I had to be a slave before I learned how true Calchas’s words were.

In the Boeotia of my youth, we were poor men, and though we thought we knew the world, we knew little of what passed beyond our town and our mountain and our river. These were the borders of our lives.

Festivals came and passed, and sowing, and reaping, and I was getting older. Hard men came to the shrine and Calchas sat up the night with them. The second year, one tried to rape me, and Calchas killed him. I was well-nigh paralysed with fear, although I managed to bite his hand so hard he screamed. After that, I was more wary of the hard men.

I spent more and more time practising for war. Calchas was a warrior – I had realized that, although I couldn’t put a day to the thought. All the men who came were fighters, too. It was as if they belonged to a guild, just like the smiths or the potters, which was odd, because in the Boeotia of my youth, every free man had to be a warrior, but no man I knew actually liked it. Like sex and defecation, it was something every man did but only boys talked about.

What a pretty blush.

So I trained with him. I wasn’t always aware that he was training me. He had exercises for every hour of the day, and many of them were remarkably like work – gathering firewood, breaking it in the breaking tree, chopping the bigger pieces into firewood lengths for the hearth with a sharp bronze axe and then splitting them. This task could consume as much time as Calchas wanted it to consume – we needed wood, come winter. And the use of the axe taught me many things – that, just as with smithing, precision was more valuable than raw strength, for instance. That the ability to hit twice in exactly the same place was better than hitting once in two different places. Ah, my dear – you will never fight a man wearing bronze. But you must accept the word of an old man – you can kill a man right through his expensive bronze helmet if you can hit the very same place often enough.

Calchas was no
hoplomachos
– not just a fighting master. He didn’t have a special dance to teach, nor were his lessons about the sword as organized as his lessons in writing. Rather, we’d be deep in a passage of the
Iliad
, and he would look up and make such a comment as I just made.

‘Arimnestos?’ he’d say. ‘You know that if you hit a man often enough in precisely the same place in the helmet, his helmet will give way? And you’ll spill his brains?’

I’d look at him, trying to imagine it. And then we’d go back to the
Iliad
.

There is a passage, late in the poem, when Achilles is still sulking and Hector rages among the Greeks. And several of the lesser heroes form a line, lock their shields and stop Hector’s rush. I remember him singing that whole passage softly. The autumn light came in strongly through our horn window and dust motes floated in the shaft of light. When this happened, I liked to imagine that the gods were with us.

Calchas looked up, into the shaft of light, and his eyes were far away. ‘That’s how it is, when the lesser men seek to stop the better. You must lock your shield with your neighbour’s, put your head down and refuse to take chances. Let the better man wear himself out against your shield. Poke hard with your spear to keep him at arm’s length and refuse to leave the safety of the shield wall.’ He shrugged. ‘Pray to the gods that the killer finds other prey, or trips and falls, or that your own killers come and save you.’

‘But you were one of the better men,’ I said. ‘You werea – a killer.’

Suddenly his eyes locked with mine and I could see him in his high-crested helm, his strong right arm pounding a lesser man’s shield down, down, until he made the killing cut. I could see it as if I was there.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I was a killer of men.’ Then his eyes slipped away. I knew where he was – he was on a battlefield. ‘I still am. Once you have been there, you can never leave.’

4

A sowing and a reaping, and another year. Animals died under my spear. I read all of Theognis from Mater’s book and came to appreciate that grown men had sex with boys and grew jealous when they took other loves. And that aristocrats could be ill-tempered and avaricious like peasants.

You should read Theognis, my sweet. Just to understand that being well-born is a thing of no value.

I read Hesiod, too. I knew much of him by heart by now, of course. In Boeotia, he is our own poet, and we spurn mighty Homer so that we can love Hesiod better. Besides, his poems are for us – farmers. Is Achilles really a hero? He’s as much of a bitch as Theognis, to my mind. Hector is the hero. And even he would not have made much of a farmer – well, perhaps I do mighty Hector wrong. Given a month of rain, Hector would not surrender or sulk in his barn.

I was bigger. I was stronger. I could throw a javelin farther and better than any boy my age in the valley, and Calchas was talking about the boys’ games at places like Olympia.

Across the river, the farm grew richer. Every grape vine was trellised and trimmed, the apple trees had supports on the branches and all the new growth was excised in spring by what seemed to me to be a phalanx of slaves.

Miltiades’ money could be seen everywhere in our community. Myron had two ploughs. Epictetus’s younger son, Peneleos, went with the great man to fight, and his father bought a second farm for his older son. There was talk of his older son wedding Penelope when she turned twelve or thirteen.

Hermogenes was freed and joined his father as a man who worked for wage. All their family was freed now, and Bion made himself a helmet and a great bronze shield and was welcomed into the
taxis
. Not all freed men were so welcomed – but Bion was a special case.

I went with my brother and Hermogenes to watch the men dance at the festival of Ares. All of them had practised the dances since they were old enough to learn – twelve or thirteen, in most cases. And my father had done well by Bion, teaching him – something that I knew Pater did only with the quickest of learners. So Bion did not humiliate himself, although as a newly freed and enfranchised man, there were farmers eager to see him fail.

That’s how men are, honey. Don’t you know? With peasants, it is the same in Asia and Aegypt and Boeotia. They think there is much evil in the world and little good, and that one man’s gain is another’s loss. If Bion was free, then a free man would become a slave. So they whispered.

I watched them dance. I had seen it before – it was magnificent and made my blood run fast, two hundred men in bronze and leather, swaying in line, turning around, thrusting with their spears, parrying with their shields.

Two years and more on the mountain and I knew those moves better than the dancers. I watched with a critical eye – and, honey, there is nothing more critical than a boy of eleven.

It was also my brother’s first year in the dance. He was well kitted, with a fine Corinthian helmet and a big shield to keep him safe in the storm of bronze. I watched him dance and thought he did it well enough, but the boy in me couldn’t avoid criticism, so that night I asked him why he didn’t change the weight on his feet when he went from defence to attack.

Of course he had no notion of what I was talking about, but only heard his younger brother finding fault. We wrestled in the barn – to a draw. I was weaker, but I knew quite a bit more. There’s a lesson there, too. All my skill – and I had quite a bit of skill already – was not enough to match his longer reach and his smith’s strength.

And even with my blood up, I wasn’t fool enough to put a finger in his eye.

But the next day, he cut two poles and asked me to show him what I meant. So I showed him as Calchas showed me – how the movement of your hips reinforces the push of the spear or the rise of the shield. Chalkidis was no fool. No sooner did he see, than he was asking questions. And he took his questions to Pater. Pater came and watched us.

His eyes narrowed. ‘I sent you up the mountain to learn to read and write,’ he said. ‘What is this?’

I was proud of my martial skills, so I showed him. I showed him the guards that Calchas taught and the spear attacks. I could hit my brother at will, although when I had the weight of a real aspis on my shoulder, I could barely move.

Pater shook his head. ‘Foolishness,’ he said. ‘All you should do is keep your place in the shield wall. The rest is madness. The moment you lunge, the enemy to your right plunges his spear in your thigh. Or your neck. Every attack you make leaves your shield side uncovered. ’ He shook his head. ‘Calchas must stop teaching you this nonsense.’

‘He is a great warrior,’ I said hotly.

Pater looked at me as if really noticing me for the first time. ‘There are no great warriors,’ Pater said. ‘There are great craftsmen, great sculptors, great poets. Sometimes, they must put a spear on their shoulder. But nothing about war is great.’ Pater looked across the valley, towards the shrine. ‘Your teacher is a broken man who keeps a shrine about which no man cares a whit. He teaches boys to read and he nurses old hatreds. I think that it is time I brought you home.’

‘Many men care about the shrine!’ I said. There were tears in my eyes.

Pater dusted his hands. ‘Come,’ he said.

We walked to the shrine. I argued, and Pater was silent. When we arrived, Pater ordered me to collect my things. And he went and spoke to Calchas alone.

I still know nothing of what they said to each other, but I never saw a frown or a harsh word. I collected my javelins, my spear ‘Deer Killer’, my scrolls and my bedroll. I put them on the donkey and went to kiss Calchas goodbye. He embraced me.

‘Time for you to go out into the world,’ he said. ‘Your father is right, and I have probably filled your head with nonsense.’

I knew that he would be drunk before we walked to the base of the mountain. But I smiled and kissed him on the lips – which I had never done.

On the way down the path, I stopped. ‘He will die without me,’ I said. I was eleven going on twelve, and the world was much less of a mystery to me than it had been. ‘By leaving, I am killing him!’

Pater embraced me. I think it is the only embrace that I remember. He held me for a long time. Finally, he said, ‘He is killing himself. You have your own life to lead.’

We walked home, Pater silent, me crying.

I went back to working the forge, although I now lagged far behind my brother. I read to my mother, who fussed over my hands and bellowed abuse at Pater about how his noble son was being forced to peasant work.

Pater ignored her.

I lose track of time, here. I think it was the same summer as I left Calchas, but it might have been the next. They were golden summers, and the wealth of Plataea came in with the grain. We sold much of our grain in the markets of Attica, and now that we were the richest peasants in Boeotia, our fathers plotted how to spend our wealth on the greatest Daidala in history.

Men came to the yard of the smithy and leaned against the new sheds, or sat on the stools that now littered the yard, drank Pater’s excellent wine served by a pair of pretty slaves and planned the Daidala. There was no other discussion that summer, for the next spring was the moment when we would watch the ravens on the hillside, choose our tree and set in motion all the traditions and customs and dances and rituals that would lead us to a successful festival – a festival that would cause other men across Boeotia to envy our wealth and curse us. Or rather, that was the plan.

For before the summer was old enough for the barley to lose its green, the word came to our valley that the men of Thebes were preparing the Great Daidala, and had ordained that Plataea was but a community of Thebes and not a free city. What’s more, Thebes had voted a great tax to be placed on us to ‘support the festival’.

I had missed two years of talk in the courtyard, but little had changed. The speakers wore a better quality of cloth, but they were the same men – solid men, who were a little richer but had no toleration for fools. Myron was not the richest, but he tended to speak for Pater’s friends in the assembly, and there was talk of making him
archon
instead of the old basileus. The old basileus was now poorer than Pater. The world was turning on its head.

The word of the Theban tax goaded them even more than the word that we would not host the festival. Peasants
hate
it when other men take their money. I know that hate. Steal the money of a slave and look at his eyes. That is the look of a peasant who is taxed.

Simon had joined the men in the yard. I wasn’t there when he moved back into our lives. It seems odd, after all that happened, but peasants quarrel as much as aristocrats and then settle their differences or simply move on. Simon came back, and I continued to hate him, but Pater treated him with courtesy and all was well.

It was Simon who said the words on everybody’s mind.

‘We should fight,’ Simon said.

Every man in the yard sipped his wine and nodded.

‘We should ask the Spartans for an alliance,’ Draco said.

Epictetus the Younger spent more time in the yard than he should have, but he was rich enough already that slaves did all the farm work for him, and he wandered about with a body slave like a lord. It made his father frown, but his farm ran well enough and he was growing into a big man who spoke well and would fight in the front rank. He stood up. ‘We should offer alliance to Athens,’ he said. ‘Miltiades is a friend of every man here.’

Draco shook his head. ‘Miltiades is our friend, but he’s almost an exile this year. They refused to let his ships land last autumn. Men say he’ll make himself tyrant of Athens. He’s no help to us. Besides,’ and Draco looked around as if expecting enemies to leap from behind the forge, ‘Sparta is ready to make war on Thebes.’

‘Once we take it to the assembly, Thebes will know what we are about,’ Myron said.

Pater stood forward. I remember him from that afternoon, how dignified he was and how proud I was that he was my father. He looked around the circle of men. ‘What if we decide on a thing, here in this yard,’ he said, ‘and then Myron travels around and talks quietly to other men of substance?’ He paused, and fell silent. He was never a man for big talk.

Myron nodded. ‘We might call it something different. We might call it the “salt tax”.’

It took a moment to explain to Draco, who could be slow, and to my brother, who had no notion of the duplicity an assembly could practise.

But that’s what they did. They called the alliance with Sparta the ‘salt tax’ and Myron went from oikia to oikia around the whole polis, so that when they went to the assembly where the Thebans waited, and voted for a salt tax, the Thebans were suspicious but nothing could be proven.

Then the farmers sent Draco, Myron and Theron, son of Xenon, one of our richest men, and he sold his leather armor as far away as Peloponnese. His son began to wear Spartan shoes and Myron’s son began to puff out his chest and speak of buying himself a horse. Epictetus came by and frowned.

‘We owe Miltiades better than this,’ he said. ‘We should send him word.’

Pater shrugged. ‘He is an exile in a barbarian land,’ he said.

Epictetus looked around the yard. ‘His money bought everything here.’

‘Send word to your son, then,’ Pater said. ‘Miltiades has a factor at Corinth. I have a shipment of armour for him. I’ll send word to him. But Draco has the right of it. Miltiades is our friend and our benefactor, but he has no power in Boeotia.’

‘Uhh,’ Epictetus grunted.

Pater sent my brother with the armour to Corinth. He came back with some fine pottery and a new donkey and a small pile of silver coins. He was proud of himself – he’d been far from home, over the mountains, and returned without incident.

Pater nodded, and sent him back to the forge. I suppose it was a form of compliment that Pater always assumed that we would succeed at anything he assigned us. But an actual compliment would have gone a long way.

The message must have carried, though, because just after the feast of Demeter, the great man himself came up the lane, riding another magnificent horse. He wore a golden fillet in his hair and he looked even more like a god.

The thing that made him stand out to me this time was that I could see he’d been trained the same way I had. I could see it in how he stood and how he walked. I still did the exercises that Calchas had taught, and twice I’d gone deer hunting alone, and once killed a deer. I’d taken Calchas wine. He ruffled my hair and said little. I left offerings at the shrine when he wasn’t there – or perhaps he was there, lying drunk on his pallet and waiting for me to go away.

At any rate, Miltiades came and stayed the night, and Pater invited Epictetus, along with Myron’s son Dionysius and my brother. I was too young for the
andron
, but I served the wine.

They spoke of politics, about Athens and Sparta and Thebes.

‘Our friend Draco has it wrong,’ Miltiades said. ‘Sparta is not going to make war on Thebes. Sparta is making an alliance with Thebes to isolate Athens.’

I thought that the red-haired man was angry, but hiding it well.

Dionysius was braver, or more foolish, than the older men. ‘What do you care, sir?’ he asked. ‘Athens has exiled you.’

Miltiades leaned back on his kline. I was filling his cup and he put a hand on my hip. ‘You fill out well, boy,’ he said. ‘Who taught you to move like a gymnast? You make the other boys look like farm workers.’

I froze. I knew that touch.

Pater laughed. ‘He’s as much a farm worker as the rest,’ he said, and Miltiades laughed with them, aristocrat that he was. Then he shrugged. ‘City politics can’t be so different in Plataea and Athens,’ he said. ‘I’m an exile, but I will always be a man of the city. I have a settlement of my own, and colonists, every man of whom is a citizen somewhere else – by the gods, I have some of your own young men! And we are still loyal to our homes. Would you want me to convince your sons to be my citizens rather than Plataeans?’

They nodded. We all understood him.