Killer of Men Page 5

  They talked more, but that’s how I remember it – the day the idea was born. In fact, it was just grumbling. We all hated Thebes, but they weren’t hurting us any.

  Epictetus stayed to dinner, though. And he offered to carry the cream of Pater’s work over the mountains to Athens – and back, if it didn’t sell. And Pater agreed. Then Epictetus commissioned a cup. He’d clearly seen the priest’s cup and wanted one for himself.

  ‘A cup I can drink from, in the fields or at home,’ he said.

  ‘What do you want on it?’ Pater asked.

  ‘A man ploughing a field,’ Epictetus said. ‘None of your gods and satyrs. A good pair of oxen and a good man.’

  ‘Twenty Athenian drachmas,’ Pater said. ‘Or for nothing, if you carry my goods to Athens.’

  Epictetus shook his head. ‘Twenty drachmas is what you’re worth,’ he said. ‘And I’ll carry your goods anyway. If I take it as a gift, I owe you. If I pay you, you owe me.’ That’s the kind of man he was.

  Pater worked like a slave for the rest of the summer, making finer things than were his wont. He made ten platters, the kind gentlemen served feasts on, and he made more cups, including the fanciest of the lot, with a ploughman, for Epictetus. And he made a Corinthian helmet – simple in design but perfect in execution. Even in the summer of my seventh year, I knew perfection in metal when I saw it.

  Pater had no patience in him to teach the young, but he let me put it on my head. He laughed. ‘You’ll be a big man, Arimnestos,’ he said. ‘But not yet.’

  He made bronze knives for me and for my brother, fine ones with some work on the backbone of the blade and horn scales on either side of the grip.

  I worked like a slave that summer, because we were poor and we had just Bion’s family as slaves – and Bion was far too skilled to waste his time putting air on the fire or punching holes in leather, or any of the other donkey work. And though my brother was too small to plough, he ploughed anyway, with help from Bion’s son Hermogenes. Together they made a man.

  Occasionally men like Myron would appear out of the air and take a turn at the plough, or repair a wheel, or perhaps sow a field. We had good neighbours.

  When I wasn’t in the forge, I was in the fields too. I loved that farm. Our land was at the top of a hill – a low hill, but it gave a view from the house. In the paved yard, where men stood to talk, you could see mighty Cithaeron rising like a slope-shouldered god, and you could see the walls of our city just across a little valley. Up on Cithaeron, we could see the hero’s tomb and the sacred spring, and if we looked towards Plataea, we could see the Temple of Hera clear as a lamp in a dark room. The trees of Hera’s grove were like spears pointing up the hill at our little acropolis, even though they were stades away. We had an apple tree at the top of the olive grove, and I went up and trimmed the new growth in the spring and again in the autumn. We had grapes on the hillside, and when we had no other work to do, Hermogenes and Chalkidis and I would build trellises to carry the vines.

  There was a small wood by the stream at the base of the hill, and the old people had dug a fish pond. I could pretend that we were great lords, with our own hill fort and our own woods for hunting, although we didn’t have an animal larger than a rabbit to hunt. But there’s no memory dearer to me than walking home from the agora in Plataea with Bion – we must have just sold some wine, or perhaps some oil, and I was allowed to go to town – walking home past the turning where our road went down to the stream and then up the hill to our house, and thinking, this is my land. My father is king here.

  Most nights, unless Mater was raving drunk, we’d meet in the courtyard after dinner and watch the sun set. We had a swing in the courtyard olive tree. Pater showed me the grooves in the branch that bore it, sunk into the wood the way chariot wheels will cut ruts even in stone. The swing had been on that tree for many lives of men.

  It may sound dull to you, dear, but to watch a sunset from a swing on your own land is a very good thing.

  It must have been after the festival of Demeter – because all the harvest was in – that Epictetus arrived with his wagons. He had two. No one else we knew had two wagons.

  ‘Well?’ he said, when his wagons were in the yard.

  Pater and Bion had all the bronze laid out, so that our courtyard looked as if it had been touched by King Midas.

  Epictetus walked around, handled everything and finally nodded sharply. He picked up his cup – snatched it up – and then looked at Pater for confirmation that it was, indeed, his.

  ‘Don’t get many requests for a plough and oxen,’ Pater said.

  Epictetus looked at it, then hefted it in his hand.

  Bion stepped forward and poured wine into it. ‘You have to feel it full,’ he said with a smile.

  Epictetus poured a libation and drank. ‘Good cup,’ he said. ‘Pay the man, boy,’ he said to his son.

  ‘I’d rather have it in bronze, from Athens,’ Pater said.

  ‘Less a quarter for cartage?’ Epictetus asked.

  ‘Less an eighth for cartage,’ Pater said.

  Epictetus nodded, and they both spat on their hands and shook, and the thing was done. Then the hired men loaded all the work of a summer and the big wagons rolled away down the hill.

  I was old enough to know that all of Pater’s stock of bronze was rolling away in those carts. He had nothing left but scraps to make repairs. If robbers took Epictetus on the roads, we were finished. I knew it.

  And I felt it over the next weeks. Pater was a fair man, but when he was dark, he hit us, and those weeks were dark. One afternoon he even hit Bion – savagely. And I dropped a fine bowl and he beat me with a stick. He beat my brother when he caught him watching the girls bathe, and he raged at us every day.

  Mater was sober. It has an odd sound to it, but it was as if she knew she was needed. So she stopped drinking and did housework. She read aloud to us every day from a stool by her loom, and she was very much like the aristocratic lady she’d been born to be.

  I loved her stories. She would tell us the myths of the gods, or sing pieces of the Iliad or other stories, and I would devour them the way my brother devoured meat. But when she was done, and the magic of her voice faded, she was just my dull and drunken mother, and I couldn’t like her. So I went back to the fields.

  It was in those weeks that I went into Plataea with Bion and pledged the family’s credit to an iron knife. Only the gods know what I was thinking – a little boy with an iron knife? Who had a perfectly good bronze one on a thong round his neck? Children are as inscrutable as the gods.

  Pater beat me so badly that I thought I might die. I see it now – I had pledged money he didn’t have. And we were at the bottom. All our harvest and all our work was off at Athens, or lost on the road. I see it now, but at the time, it hurt me far more than just a beating. I decided that night, tears burning down my face, that he wasn’t really my father. No man could treat his son that way.

  That was a deeper pain than any blow. I still bear it.

  The next day he apologized. In fact, he all but crawled to me, making false jokes and wincing when he touched my bruises, alternating with making light of my injuries. It was a strange performance, and in some way it was as confusing as the heavy beating.

  And then he recovered. Whatever daimon was eating his soul, he rose above it. It was three weeks or more after Epictetus had left, and he was a week overdue. Pater came out into the vineyard with us and started building trellises – work he never did – as if it was the most natural thing in the world. He didn’t complain, and he didn’t hit anyone, and we worked steadily all day under the high, blue skies of autumn. The grapes were almost ripe and the trellises creaked. Bion and I were both physically wary of him – we had bruises to prove that we had the right – but he passed no reproof harder than a look. My brother fell on a vine and wrecked an hour’s work, but Pater merely shook his head and took up his light bronze axe. He went off to the wood to cut more supports, and sent my brother to t
he river to cut reeds.

  It was an autumn day, but hot. Beautiful – you could see the stream glinting, and the line of the Oeroe river down the valley. I sweated through my chiton and stripped it off to work naked, which meant a slap from Mater if she caught me, but she wasn’t likely to come out to the vineyard.

  Bion had brought a bucket of water from the well. He offered me the first dipper – I was the only free man on the hilltop. But I’d learned some things, even at that age.

  ‘I’ll drink last,’ I said.

  I saw a spark in Bion’s eye, and knew I’d hit that correctly.

  I remember that, and the beauty of the day, but most of all I remember that Pater came for us. He didn’t have to, you see – he was down at the wood, and he’d have seen Epictetus’s wagons turn off the road. He might even have seen them three stades away, or farther. And as the master, and the man with so much to lose, it would have been natural for him to take his axe and go down to the yard and leave us to work on the hilltop. But he didn’t. He came up the hill, hobbling quickly.

  ‘Come with me,’ he said. He was terse, and all of us – even Bion – thought that there might be trouble.

  We put our tools down and followed him through the vineyard to the house.

  Pater said nothing, so we didn’t either. We came into the yard and only then could we see the hillside and hear the wagons in the lane.

  I couldn’t see my face, but I could see Hermogenes. He flashed his father a smile of utter joy. He said, ‘You’ll be free!’, which meant nothing to me at the time.

  Epictetus was driving his own oxen on the wagon. His son was beside him, and he had two of his hired men in the box, but the second wagon was gone – and the smiles must have been wiped from every face in the oikia. Even the women were leaning over the rail of the exhedra.

  Epictetus the Younger leaped down and ran to the heads of the oxen, and he flashed Pater a smile – and then we knew.

  As old Epictetus got down, he couldn’t keep the smile off his own face.

  Then the hired men got down, and they threw heavy wool sacks on to the ground. They made a noise – like rock, but thinner – copper, I knew from the sound. And then tin wrapped in leather from far, far to the north.

  Epictetus came forward with his thumbs in his girdle. ‘It was cheaper to buy copper and tin than to buy ingots of bronze,’ he said. ‘And I’ve watched you do it. If you don’t like it,’ he raised an eyebrow, ‘I’ll lend you the wagon to get it back.’

  ‘Cyprian ingots,’ Pater said. He had the heavy wool bags open. ‘By Aphrodite, friend, you must drive a fair bargain if all this copper and tin is mine for twenty drachmas less an eighth for cartage.’

  Epictetus shrugged, but he was a happy man – a man who’d done another man an unanswerable favour. ‘Fifty drachmas of silver less an eighth cartage,’ he said. ‘I spent thirty of your profits on new material. It seemed like sense.’

  Pater was kneeling in the copper like a boy playing in mud. ‘I owe you,’ he said.

  Epictetus shrugged. ‘Time you made some money. You’re too good a man to starve. You know how to work, but not how to be rich.’ He held out a bag. ‘Three hundred and seventy-two silver drachmas after my cartage and all that copper.’ He nodded. ‘And there’s a man coming to see you about a helmet.’

  ‘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.