Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [208]
‘You are mad,’ Idomeneus said. He laughed again. ‘Let’s hear the bronze sing!’ he shouted. ‘Who gives a fuck about philosophy?’
‘You are the mad one,’ I said, and went back to the road.
We climbed and climbed. I wasn’t worried that they would attack us on the hillside. Bandits are lazy men. They would want the wagon at the top, and I knew this mountain like I knew the calluses on my sword hand. There was the crest of the road and then a slight dip that would be full of mud and water in late autumn, and they would be in the big trees around the sinkhole.
Just short of the top, I stopped the wagon like a man who was too tired to go on. My sandals were full of mud and the oxen looked as miserable as we all felt.
Idomeneus made a face. ‘I wouldn’t rob anyone on a day like this,’ he said. ‘I’d be on a nice soft couch with a cup of wine in my hand.’
Hermogenes chucked him with an elbow. ‘Why aren’t you, then? Eh? I know why I’m here, and I know why Arimnestos is here. And I don’t think the slaves have any choice. And the tinker thinks there’s a meal in it. You, you mad Cretan?’
‘Arimnestos is my lord,’ the Cretan proclaimed. ‘Besides – wherever he goes, there’s blood, oceans of it. Never a dull moment. You’ll see. I doubted it the first days out of Athens – but here we are.’
I winced at his description of me.
But I recognized it.
‘Leave the wagon now,’ I said. I turned to the tinker. ‘Stay here with the beasts. We’ll do the work.’
The peddler was looking at Idomeneus. I put my fist in the peddler’s ear and he fell like a sacrifice.
You see it, don’t you, thugater?
The tinker turned white, put his back to a tree, and drew his sword.
‘Don’t fret,’ I said. I took the peddler’s pack and dumped it. It was full of rags and nothing else. ‘He’s the spotter for the bandits,’ I said. ‘Tie him, and don’t let him go. We’ll be back.’
He didn’t protest, and I led my little band off the road, uphill. The slope increases above the road and we took our time. The deer trails had changed, of course, but I got us up to the little meadow where Calchas had once killed a wolf, and cocked an ear for sounds from below. The only real weak point in my plan was the tinker and our wagon.
From above, we could see the ambushers, even through the rain. The gods love irony, and in the best tradition of their laughter, the wagon and the ambushers were only a stade apart or less, so that we could see Tiraeus pacing nervously and we could see the bandits in the trees, waiting for a wagon that was not coming.
‘I’ll go right down the hillside,’ I said. ‘You drive them.’
Perhaps it seems foolish that I was going to take on all the bandits myself, using my men as beaters. I was in an odd place – I wanted the fight. I told myself that I’d let this make my decision for me – thief against thief, so to speak. If I fell, that was that.
Another voice said that in fact there was no need for gods, because there were few men in Greece who could stand before me. Perhaps none.
And as I began to kick down the hill, the wet leaves flying from under my boots, I felt old Calchas at my side. How many times had we raced through these woods together, he and I, in pursuit of some quarry?
The bandits saw Idomeneus first, as I had intended. They took too long to realize that this wasn’t a chance-met farmer – this was real. The end man rose from his concealment and called a warning and then he was down, his agony a better warning than his shouts.
Hermogenes appeared from behind a boulder, running hard, and he threw a javelin.
Then I was on them. The bandit closest to me was a fool and he neither saw me nor heard me, his whole attention on the crisis at the other end of the ambush.
They had no armour, and they looked more like escaped slaves than mercenaries, although the line between the two can be faint. I put my spear point between his kidneys and ran on.
The whole band broke from cover then. There were about a dozen of them, and they ran for the road, just as a frightened