Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [108]
I won’t go on and on about this, friends, but before I killed Cleisthenes, I was one man. Briefly, I was a victor, a man men admired. That might have been my life, however brief.
But the fates, the gods and my own daimon said otherwise. And when Cleisthenes fell face forward into the sand black with his own blood, I was another man. Some men admired me.
But aside from a few, the rest feared me.
12
I was wearing my new armour the next morning as we began to load the ships. Armour is a silly thing to wear for work, but by the gods it was good to look like a nobleman, and I was young and arrogant. My shoulder still hurt from the pounding of my shield against it in the fight and the race.
I noted that men were careful how they spoke to me.
Stephanos was closer, if anything. He wasn’t afraid of me, and he was overjoyed that Cleisthenes was dead. In fact, I earned his friendship with that blow. And when I was maudlin that first night, Melaina told me stories of Cleisthenes and the local girls until I felt like a public benefactor.
I felt like less of a benefactor as the ships were loaded. There I stood, sparkling in a scale corslet worth a farm, a good helmet and a fine aspis. Other men were loading the ships – we had no discipline, and so every ship loaded at its own speed – and we were so late leaving the beach that we saw Lord Pelagius and the women of his household with the body, building a pyre. And the older woman, whose tears seemed pulled from her as you’d pull the guts from a dead boar, she must have been his mother.
Only then did I find fully what it is to be a killer of men. When you kill, you take a man’s life. You take it. He can never have it back. When the darkness comes to his eyes and he clutches his guts, he is done. And you don’t rob just him but his parents and his family, his sisters and brothers, his wife and children, his lovers, his debtors, his master and his slave – all robbed.
Cleisthenes was a bad man, I have no doubt, but all his people were on that beach, and it was like a scene in a play in Athens – not that they came at me like furies, just that they were all there: his horses and hounds, his women, his slaves, his son. All there in one place, for me to see.
I killed him because I didn’t like him. Let’s not lie. So – I stood there, coming to terms with the consequences. Most killers are dull men. I truly think they never see the funeral pyre. They never think. I walked down the beach, and every one of them saw me, and they looked at me as if I was some kind of beast.
I think too much. So I drink. Here – you. Blush for me and make me happy. There – ahh! My world is brighter for your presence, lady.
I never promised you a happy story.
We landed in Ephesus and all the lords of the fleet met with the lords of the city, but I stayed on our ship. I was afraid of being taken. Afraid of being a slave again. Afraid of what I’d done with Briseis. Afraid that she had already forgotten me.
And I dreamed of Cleisthenes and his funeral pyre. I still do. He’s the only one. I’ve killed enough men to make a phalanx, and he’s the only one who haunts me.
Archi was distant when he went ashore, but he came straight back to the ship with word that Diomedes’ father had sent his son to a farm in the country to recover, and nothing had been said.
Typical. The things you most fear never come to pass. Diomedes and his father might seek revenge, but they had not gone to law.
I left the ship and entered the house as a free man, wearing armour. I felt odd – everything was odd. Food tasted wrong, and I longed to go and eat in the kitchen, but I didn’t, just as I wanted one of the slaves to tell me how bold I looked in my magnificent shirt of scale armour, but none of them even met my eye.
Not even Penelope, who threw her arms around Archi when we returned and didn’t even look at me.
Briseis looked at me, an enigmatic half-smile at the corner of her mouth. I found that I couldn’t really breathe. I felt as if I’d been gone ten years, and I found that I’d forgotten