Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [177]
‘You sent me fifty darics?’ I asked. ‘I thought that Kylix came from Archi!’
Without moving the knife, she put her mouth down over mine and kissed me.
At some point, the knife vanished and she pushed herself back up and dusted sand from her chiton. ‘Walk with me,’ she said. ‘You still love me. That is all I required to know.’
She looked at Paramanos and he froze. ‘My husband is in league with the men you are ransoming,’ he said. ‘He communicates with the Persians, and the Phoenicians. And he has paid them to kill you.’
Paramanos gave me a look – oh, such a look. The look that older men use when they are laughing at younger men, but when she said paid them to kill you he became alert.
‘I’ll watch,’ he said.
I nodded and followed Briseis, and the two of us walked off into the first light of dawn.
She was wearing only a linen chiton – I felt that while she was kissing me. She had light sandals and a wreath of flowers in her hair, the yellow flowers of Lesbos, and she walked with her usual grace, but I could see she was just pregnant.
‘Your first?’ I asked.
She shrugged. ‘Second,’ she said. She smiled at me. ‘You live!’
‘You were closer to killing me than any man since I was a slave,’ I joked.
‘When you didn’t come to meet me, I thought I would kill you.’ She stopped, put her hips against a big rock and tossed her head. ‘Aristagoras wants you dead. Miltiades made him swear to keep you alive, but he’s a liar, and his oaths are worthless.’
‘Why does he want me dead?’ I asked, and she smiled like the dawn.
‘Every time he fucks me, I call your name,’ she said. And she laughed.
‘But—’ Briseis always scared me, as much as I thought that I loved her. ‘But you are married.’
‘Feh!’ Her contempt was palpable. ‘I am married to Aristagoras. If a fart could become a man, it would be Aristagoras.’ She looked at me. ‘And I thought you were going to kill Diomedes – eh? But he has gone over to the Medes and taken all our property in Ephesus. My brother is all but a pauper.’
I had forgotten what she could be like. Three years had made her more like herself, not less.
‘I thought of you – every day,’ I said.
She sighed. ‘You might benefit from reading Sappho,’ she said. ‘“Some men say a squadron of cavalry is the most beautiful thing, and some say a band of hoplites, and some think that a squadron of ships is the most beautiful.”’
‘But I say it is whomsoever I love,’ I said to her, deliberately warping my Sappho, and she laughed.
‘I hear that you are a great hero,’ she added, and smiled her approval. ‘I hear that you killed more Medes at Amathus than any other Greek. I love to hear men talk of you.’ She rose on her toes and kissed me, and pregnant or not, only Kylix’s heavy cough stopped us from making love right there. I was hard before her mouth was open and her hands – never mind, ladies.
‘There is a party of armed men coming down the beach from the Phoenician galley,’ Kylix said. ‘The guard is being summoned in the town.’
I had my sword, and was otherwise naked except for my chiton. My feet were bare. I had been asleep.
‘Take your mistress and run,’ I said.
‘Run where?’ Briseis asked. ‘There is no entrance to the town from the sea.’
I remember shaking my head. She wanted to stay and see the blood. ‘Just run,’ I said, and turned back towards my own boat.
‘He wants me dead, too,’ Briseis said. ‘He dares not do it openly, but on a beach, where you can be blamed?’
‘And you thrust yourself into this lion’s mouth?’ I asked.
She laughed. ‘You’ll save me,’ she said. ‘Or we’ll die together.’
Paramanos wasn’t caught napping. As I watched, he bundled the prisoners aboard the fishing boat and put to sea. The Phoenicians came down the beach to find the birds flown.
They were all in armour and I was unarmed, which gave me an advantage – I knew that I could outrun any of them, and they didn’t appear to have a bow among them. I hailed Paramanos and he ran the fishing boat down the beach to us. I put my love in the boat and pushed it off, then walked up the beach