Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [204]
When I walked away from the ship in Piraeus, I walked away from myself – my reputation, my riches. All gone. I was going home to avenge my father’s killing against a man whose face I couldn’t hold in my mind. Not because I wanted to, but because I could think of nothing else to do.
I think it was the loss of Briseis most of all. I think that I had been certain I would have her – that I would bring her up this pass to the foot of Cithaeron, lie with her in the grass by Leitos’s tomb and carry her over the threshold into my father’s stone house.
Without her, it seemed an empty exercise. I cared nothing.
I promised when I started this story that I would tell the truth. So here’s a truth for you – I didn’t care much about avenging my father. Oh – I see the shock. Listen, honey – listen, all of you. When you are young, and you listen to the poet, you take in the rules of life – the laws of all Hellenes. Oaths, gods, laws of gods and men.
When I sat with my back to the stone fort at Oinoe, I had probably killed a hundred men. My love had chosen another life over me, and I had turned my back on the only calling I had ever felt.
Every time you kill a man, the doubt grows. Every time you take a ship, empty it of valuables and enrich yourself with the blood and sweat of other men, every time you make another man a slave, every time you buy a woman for sex and discard her when she’s pregnant, you have to wonder – are there any laws? Are there any gods?
There weren’t any laws for me just then. No rules. Perhaps no gods. Nothing mattered.
The darkness of that night is absolute, even in memory, and I was afraid to go to sleep.
I don’t remember much more than that, until we came to the foot of Cithaeron. The next day, I hadn’t slept, and I was morose and ill-tempered, and yet curiously happy to be walking the southern slopes where I could see my home mountain. Cithaeron is an old god, and he reached out to me and touched the blackness.
The cart slowed us, and it was nightfall when we came to Pedeis.
Pedeis was the typical border town, with high prices and crap for wine. Dionysus first preached just over the mountains at Eleutherai, and the grape grew there first, and my money says that his worship never spread to Pedeis. The girls were ugly and there was a wooden Temple of Demeter that was a disgrace to gods and men. I snarled at my men to keep moving, and we rolled through the streets and camped in the stony fields north of town.
The border garrison, if they existed, were so slipshod that we passed without a road tax, almost without comment. We climbed the pass to Eleutherai, up and up in switchbacks, and our cart filled the road so that the faster traffic of men walking and men with packs on donkeys ended up in a long queue behind us like the baggage train of an army. Men chatted to Idomeneus or Hermogenes. I walked on in silence.
We found the body near the summit of the pass. The corpse was that of a young boy, probably a slave, about twelve years old. He’d been killed in a bad way, with a series of hacks to his face and neck from a dull, heavy knife. He lay in his own blood in the middle of the wide space near the summit where wagons turn to begin the descent, and where polite men pull to the side to let the faster traffic pass. There are deep ruts in the rock where the old men cut a road for their chariots, and he lay across the stone tracks like a botched sacrifice.
He looked so pitiful. He was just about the age I had been when I stood in the phalanx for the first time. Frankly, from the ripe old age of twenty-two, he looked too small to have died by violence. Had he tried to fight? I would