Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [209]
When two more of them were dead on my spear, they fell back into the mud-filled hollow where they had intended to take my wagon.
I stopped and wiped my spear blade on a scrap of oily cloth from my pouch. ‘Surrender,’ I said. ‘Surrender, or I’ll kill all of you.’
‘You can’t kill us all,’ one scarred wretch said. He had a proper sword – a kopis.
‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘My friends would have to kill a couple of you.’
They trembled like sheep.
‘Surrender!’ I said. ‘I am Arimnestos of Plataea. If you drop your weapons, I will spare your lives, by Zeus Soter.’
The man with the kopis threw his spear at Hermogenes and bolted, running right up the face of the dip and away downhill. Hermogenes ducked the spearhead but got the tumbling shaft across his temple and went down. Another bandit broke downhill, but the nearest Thracian speared him like a fisherman on a Thracian river, and the rest dropped their weapons.
‘Hold them here,’ I said. Calchas was in my head, and I knew what was going to happen as if I had read it on a scroll.
I ran downhill after the man with the sword. He had a long start. But I knew where he was going, and I wanted him to get there.
I ran easily, following the contour of Cithaeron, staying high on the hillside, and after two stades of bush-running, I came to the trail I had used to climb the mountain as a child, and I ran down it, swifter than an eagle.
It was odd, but at first I felt Calchas beside me, and then I felt him in me. I was Calchas. Or perhaps I had become Calchas.
I passed the cabin, running silently on the leaf-mould, and I had just time to slow at the verge of the tomb when my prey burst out of the woods in front of me, eyes wild with panic from whatever ghosts rode him through the woods – I hope that boy was on him. And the panic on his face exploded like a hot rock drenched in water when he saw me. He raised the sword – the same sword he’d used to kill the boy at the top of the pass – and cut at me. I parried high and refused to give ground, so that he slammed into my hip – I turned him, our bodies pressed close by his momentum, and my hip pushed him ever so slightly, and he went sprawling across the stones of the precinct of the hero’s tomb. His head hit a stone and his sword hand hit another so hard that the kopis fell from his hand, as if taken by the hero himself.
He tried to rise, coming up on all fours like a beast, and I caught his greasy hair in my left fist and sacrificed him, cutting his throat so that his life flushed out across the cool wet stones, and the hero drank his blood as he had with every bad man that Calchas sent into the dark.
I wiped my sword on his chiton and went to the cabin, such as it was. The years had not been kind, and the bandits had slaughtered a deer badly and left the hanging carcass to rot by the window of horn, the fools.
The wreck of a door was open. Inside, there were two women clinging to the priest. They flinched away from me.
‘Empedocles?’ I asked gently. And then, when he still looked wild and afraid, I tried a smile. ‘It’s a rescue,’ I said.
‘They took my cup,’ he said weakly, and fainted.
We were quite a crowd by the time the rain stopped. We had nine prisoners and six of us, the two women and the priest. He wasn’t in a good way – he had a fever and they had abused him – he had burns – but he was a strong man and he smiled at me.
‘Come a long way, eh, apprentice?’ he said, when I gave him the sign of the journeyman. He was lying on the cot. We had cleaned the cabin and I had found his cup – the fine cup my father had made him – in the leather bag of the leader. The Thracians were amusing themselves rebuilding the door while Hermogenes and Idomeneus hunted for meat. He frowned. ‘Where did you learn that sign?’
I knelt by him. ‘Crete, father,’ I said.
He coughed. ‘Crete? By the gods, boy – you’d have done better in Thebes!’ He coughed again.