Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [18]
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