Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [202]
They all embraced me again, and then I headed downhill, to the sally port from which Aristagoras had come.
Paramanos came with me. When I turned to look at him in the moonlight, his eyes sparkled. ‘You need a keeper,’ he said.
A party of Aristagoras’s men was carrying his body through the gate. A young man had his shield over his shoulder. We followed them.
If there were Thracians, we didn’t see them, although we could hear screams and occasional sounds of fighting from lower in the town. We followed the body up two narrow alleys and a long staircase set into an outer wall, and then we were at a torch-lit gate. It was a small place, compared with Kallipolis. There were two sentries, and they were too young and raw to have gone with the sortie.
I don’t know what I expected, honey. I think that I thought that she would throw herself into my arms and weep. It wasn’t that way at all, of course.
The hall was small, and she was waiting to receive the body. Her handmaidens were around her, and they took his body – the man I’d beheaded an hour before – and they washed it. She caught my eye and started. She raised an eyebrow – that was all the greeting I got – and then went back to her task. Her role. Like a priestess, she had her part to play, and she played it well.
An old woman sewed the head back on. While that happened, I stepped up next to Briseis. She bowed.
‘Lord Arimnestos,’ she said. ‘We are honoured.’
She bowed to me – imagine, Briseis the untouchable bowing to Doru the slave. It was all like a dream.
‘I am a poor hostess,’ she said, and led the way out of the hall, on to a balcony over the sea.
I still expected an embrace.
‘I killed him,’ I said quietly, and I think I smiled.
She nodded. ‘I know that,’ she said. ‘And I thank you. Now – go. You should not be here.’
‘But—’ I couldn’t believe it. She was pregnant again, I could tell – about three months. But her beauty was unchanged, and her power over me. ‘But I came – to rescue you.’
Such things, once said, sound very weak indeed.
‘Why do you think I need rescuing?’ she asked. Then she laughed. She stood on tiptoe and kissed me. He tongue darted in and out of my mouth, and then she stepped back and licked her lips. ‘Blood in your mouth and all over you,’ she said and she smiled. ‘Achilles. Now be gone, before people talk. I’m a widow and my reputation will matter.’
‘I don’t care,’ I said. ‘I’m your next husband.’
Then she looked – hurt. Not proud, and not angry, and not sad, but as if some deep pain had touched her. She reached out and touched my bloody right hand. ‘No, my love,’ she said. ‘I will not marry you.’ She shook her head. ‘I have children to protect – beautiful children. And where would we go?’
I felt as if the Persian’s axe had got me. ‘I want to take you home,’ I said.
‘To Ephesus?’ she asked.
‘To Plataea,’ I said. ‘To my farm.’
She smiled then, and I knew that my dreams were foolish. The gods must have laughed at me all autumn.
‘Listen, my love,’ she said gently. ‘I am not called Helen by other men for nothing. It is not my fate to be a farm-wife in Boeotia, wherever that may be.’ Her smile became bitter – the bitterness of self-knowledge. ‘That is not my fate. Nor would I want it. I will be the lady of a great lord.’ Her hand remained on mine. ‘I love you, but you are a killer. A pirate. A thief of lives.’
‘You seem to need me from time to time,’ I said, and my bitterness was too close to the surface.
She looked past me, into the room where her husband’s body was being washed. She had things that she needed to be doing, she said with her eyes. ‘Be glorious, so that I may hear of you often, Achilles,’ she said softly.
‘Come with me,’ I pleaded.
She shook her head.
Well, I had my pride, too – and that was my foolishness. When Archi walked away from me, I should have wrestled him to the ground, and when Briseis chose another life, I should have put her over my shoulder and taken her. We’d both have been happier.
But I was proud.
‘In the harbour, there will be a ship in ten days,