The Great King (23 page)

So I had a week sailing home and another four days crossing the mountains to listen to Draco and Styges and all the other Plataeans tell me about how I should handle my family.

The long and short of it is that my cousin Simonalkes – you may recall him, as he murdered my father and sold me into slavery – took our family farm. When I returned in the year after the sack of Sardis, he hanged himself rather than face justice – or my spear. In Marathon year, his eldest son teamed with my Athenian enemies – actually, not my enemies but those of Miltiades – and came and sacked our farm and killed my mother. Simon, son of Simonalkes, died with Teucer’s arrow in his eye, and we reaped his mercenaries like ripe barley, and I thought that was the end of them, but Simonalkes had other sons – three more, in fact, and Simonides, his second son, had come with Achilles, his third, and Ajax, his fourth, and occupied our farm. They came with force and money, and the archon, Myron, denied them citizenship at first, but they paid fines and went to the shrines and were, for the most part, forgiven.

I was, after all, dead, as far as anyone knew.

Styges, born a Cretan, wanted me to go back, collect some of my men and his master Idomeneaus, and go and wipe them out like a nest of hornets in a vineyard.

Draco wasn’t so sure. I think we were in Attica, near my father-in-law’s estate east of Oinoe, and camping in a sheepfold – the ship was left under Megakles and Leukas and Sekla in Piraeus, with orders to take a cargo no farther than Corinth and run it, and return to Piraeus. I’d wasted a day filling out paperwork for a number of men – such as Sekla, and Megakles – to hold Metic status in Athens, and I had Alexandros and a dozen oarsmen with me crossing the mountains – and Brasidas and Sittonax, who was as delighted to chase Greek girls as he was to chase Gaulish maidens. Giannis went off with Cimon – with the best will in the world I couldn’t employ every young man. He was eager for adventure, and Cimon was pointing his bow for Thrace.

Draco sat on a folding stool and shook his head. ‘You have become a lord,’ he said. He smiled, but his tone was sad. ‘Armed men at your tail, and ships, and cargoes. Like a little Miltiades. And all the great men know you – Cimon and Aristides and Themistocles and even the King of Sparta.’ He drank some good Attic wine and frowned. ‘I’m not sure I should have told you to come home. What can little Plataea offer you?’

In truth, I was thinking of Apollonasia, if that was her true name, whom I’d bedded against the very stone on which I was perched and who had, as far as I can remember, turned into a raven and flown away. My thoughts were not on Plataean politics, but I tore myself from her imaginary arms to listen to the old man speak, and when he asked what Plataea could offer me, I said, ‘A home?’ or something similar.

I wasn’t so surprised, either. Listening to some of the younger men who had competed – Antimenides, son of Alcaeus of Miletus, for example, who had placed in the final heat in the diaulos and whose javelin throw had soared like a falcon – or Teucer’s son Teucer, whose boxing was very good indeed – listening to them told me that my cousins were neither universally hated nor really very bad men. And listening to all the Plataeans reminded me – prompting a smile – that I had lived out in the wide world for a very long time. Plataeans can be ignorant hicks with the best of them, and Teucer’s views on men loving other men would have made him a laughing stock among his father’s friends – young Teucer flinched every time he saw men embrace. Sekla rolled his eyes.

But the next day, after we passed around the flank of Kitharon and rode down through the narrow streets of Eleutheras, none of that mattered, because I was home. Home is where all the fields look right and the grass has
that
smell and girls . . .

For an old man of thirty-five, my mind ran to women a great deal. And to farms.

Boeotia is beautiful. It is a different beauty to that of Attica or Italy or Sicily.

We rode over the last arm of Kitharon. I did not stop to make sacrifice at the peak. Perhaps I should have, but I did not want to see black offerings there from my cousins. I had begun to flirt with the idea of reconciliation.

Does that give you pause? But consider. I have been a warrior all my life, and I have killed many men, but then, returning from Sicily – and Alba – I was tired of blood. I had killed Simonalkes and I had killed Simon – killed them, or caused them to die. One for Pater and one for Mater. Little Plataea – a town of five thousand citizens when it is at its very strongest – is not big enough for a blood feud. To my mind, I had two choices.

I could collect Idomeneaus at the shrine, walk down the road, and kill them to a man – men and children and possibly their women, too. That would end it. Leave none alive to grow to manhood and come back to wreak revenge. Nor did I doubt that I could do it – in my head, or with my arm.

That is who I am, child.

But if you have been listening, you know that for years I had been trying – really, since I went to speak to the god at Delos – trying to reduce the blood on my hands.

We came over the little ridge, then, and past the little mud-hole in the road where I had trapped the bandits. And we could see the low beehive tomb where old Leitos lay enshrined, and Styges ran ahead to warn his former master – and sometime lover – Idomeneaus, who had once been a kohl-eyed catamite and was now one of the deadliest men in Greece. Or the world. And who young Teucer thought a great man . . .

I roll my eyes, too.

Draco waved goodbye and headed down the road, but all the young men stayed at the shrine with me for the night, and before the afternoon was many hours older, we had other men I knew coming up the ridge from the town – Ajax, who had fought
against
us in Asia, but was now a friend, and Bellerophon, who had been with us at Marathon, and Lysius, a veteran who had stayed and watched the town walls while we went to glory at Marathon. Idomeneaus hugged me until my ribs were threatened, and then demanded my whole story.

Before I got done saying that I had thrown myself into the sea, he raised his hand.

‘We never thought you were dead,’ he said. ‘A man came – oh, two years ago – and asked a great many questions about you. I didn’t kill him. He said his master knew you.’

I shrugged. ‘Did this master have a name?’ I asked.

Idomeneaus’s mad eyes glittered. ‘Who could forget a name like Anarchos?’ he said, and I knew. I had shot my mouth off, and Anarchos sent a slave to check up on me – and all that information went straight to the tyrant of Syracusa.

Before I could begin again, a horse – an actual horse – trotted up, its hooves crisp against the stones of the road by the tomb. I felt as if I’d seen a ghost – it was Gelon.

‘You – here?’ I asked.

He laughed. ‘Well – you made me a citizen,’ he said. Gelon had been a mercenary – one of my cousin’s men. I’d enslaved him, but freed him for Marathon. He was Sicilian. He laughed to find that I’d been a slave and a mercenary for years – in Sicily.

‘I’m a farmer,’ Gelon said. ‘I married Hilarion’s daughter.’ He shrugged.

So I told my story – again. It was getting more polished with each telling, but I still couldn’t hide that I’d mistreated Lydia, and men shifted or looked away. Heroes are supposed to be better than that. I left a few things out, but I told the whole of my recent meetings with Briseis and the Medes. Many of the men around the fire had lived through all my early days, and they deserved to know.

It grew quite late – we digressed a great deal. In the end, it was not Idomeneaus, but Gelon, who put the question.

‘What will you do about your cousins?’ he asked.

I shrugged. ‘What do you think I should do?’ I asked.

Idomeneaus spat. ‘Kill them all. Right now, before dawn. Every man here will carry a sword.’ He grinned his mad grin, and his teeth shone in the firelight. ‘Listen, lord, we never stopped having the training just because you were . . . gone. We still have hunts on the mountainside. We’ve poured wine on the tomb for you – and every man here is one of ours. The Epilektoi.’

‘You have not changed,’ I said to him, and I smiled in case the mad bastard took it as an insult.

He wagged his head. ‘Is there any other answer?’

I looked at Gelon. He looked away. ‘You could try talking to them,’ he said.

Idomeneaus spat in contempt.

‘Would they talk?’ I asked.

‘They are not bad men, and they have brought money and work,’ Gelon said, and Lysius nodded.

‘They are not like Simon,’ he said simply. ‘They work hard.’

‘By now they know you are alive, and here,’ Idomeneaus said. ‘Strike now, before it is too late. Plataea has politics, now. Myron is not what he was. Strike, and remind all these peasants what you are – who you are. Above the law. A lord.’

Bellerophon winced. ‘Lord, I’ll stand by you,’ he said. ‘But . . .’ He met Idomeneaus’s eye. And held it. ‘Glare all you like, priest.’

They all looked at me – even Hector.

I remember how clearly I saw what I would do. ‘Tomorrow, I will go and visit my brother-in-law over by Thespiae. All of you go home.’ I smiled at Idomeneaus. ‘It’s good to see you, you mad bastard, but I won’t stage a bloodbath just to assuage your boredom. Go to sea with me if you need blood – we have buckets of it. I intend to try conversation. If that fails . . .’ I nodded. ‘Then I’ll kill them all. Not before.’

Almost everyone nodded. Idomeneaus simply got up, collected his spear, and walked off into the darkness. But I saw on his face that I had disappointed him. He paused. ‘The sea is making you soft,’ he said. ‘These men have insulted you, and you must exterminate them, or be held weak.’

I remember that I shrugged. ‘Only a fool thinks me weak,’ I said. It was not a brag. It was true.

No one rose with the dawn. We’d sat up too late and there were hard heads. I looked around the clearing – now with a fine house and a small tilled field behind the tomb – and thought of Calchas and his cabin and his black broth. The exercises he made me do. I went to the smaller clearing among the great oaks where he used to drill me on my spear fighting, and I stood in the early morning sun and lifted weights and then practised the sword-draw I’d seen the Spartans do. I knew it, but the idea of practising it until the draw, the cut and the return to the scabbard were second nature – that was a very Spartan idea, and yet I liked it.

When everyone was up, we rode west, across the Asopus, skirting the town. I saw our farm. It was odd to see it without the tower I’d built, and with a new stone house stuccoed white in the sun. It was quite a pretty house, and already had a grape arbour.

My cousins had done well, and they’d been there a few years.

We took the road north and west, over the low hills, seventy easy stades to Thespiae, and we arrived at my brother-in-law’s house in the late afternoon to find my sister Penelope waiting in the yard.

She had her hands on her hips, and she started telling me what she thought of my five-year absence as soon as we were inside her gate. And then she burst into tears and threw her arms around me, and I confess I joined her in tears.

‘Don’t you ever!’ she cried, and other things that, when related, sound foolish, but at the time are very painful to hear.

My oarsmen and Brasidas had the good grace to vanish. Antigonus, who had met the Spartan at the Olympics, had beaten us home by a day by the land route, and he led my gentlemen into his elegant courtyard while admiring our horses and shouting for wine – really a superior display of aristocratic social skills, especially as he ruthlessly failed to save me from my sister’s righteous anger.

Pen went on for a bit, describing what she thought of a man who tried to kill himself – she suggested that slavery at a Phoenician oar was
better
than what I deserved. I hung my head in shame.

Then she embraced me again, calling my name and praising the gods.

‘And you don’t even
ask
about your daughter,’ she spat.

‘Daughter?’ I asked – rather automatically. I thought of Apollonasia again – a slave girl.

‘My niece,’ Penelope shot at me. Then she put a hand to her mouth.

It must have been on my face.

And then – well, then it all came out.

Euphonia died in childbirth. That I knew. But what I didn’t know – in my post-battle blackness, in the soul-crushing horror that afflicted me when my wife died before I could reach her – what I didn’t know was that she’d borne me a healthy daughter – as it turned out, perfectly healthy, even though she’d had the cord wrapped around her throat and almost died with my poor wife.

And they called the little thing Euphonia. We often do, in Boeotia, when a child takes its mother’s place – that’s a nice way of putting it, anyway.

Suddenly, my hands were shaking.

I had a child?

I do not remember walking into Penelope’s house and into the women’s quarters – only standing by a handsome pine table with a beautiful young girl bowing to me, and Penelope saying, ‘This is your father, child.’

My little blond daughter smiled like an imp, hugged my outstretched hands and let herself be embraced without reserve.

‘Oh!’ she said. ‘I’ve always wanted a father!’

Well.

Call me a fool if you like, but to my mind Euphonia – and her unreserved love, instantly given – was the gift of the gods to me for sparing my cousins. That’s how I saw it then, and time has not changed my mind. Had I exterminated them in a night of blood, I promise you I would have found her cold and indifferent.

Believe what you will!

I’m not sure I had been so happy in all my life as I was that day, and I carried my daughter up and down stairs and hugged her and talked to her. She laughed and talked – and talked and talked – and I learned that she had two dolls, that she could read and write, that she was going to memorise all of the Iliad and the Odyssey and that she hoped to make a pot herself on the potter’s wheel in Thespiae and . . .

And suddenly she looked at me. ‘May I go to Brauron, Pater?’ she asked me.

No one had ever called me ‘Pater’.

I swallowed.

My sister stepped in. ‘Your father has a dozen friends to manage,’ she said. ‘Back to the exedra with you, my dear.’