Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [21]
I walked with Pater. It was thirty stades to the shrine of our hero of the Trojan War, and I wasn’t used to sandals.
Pater was silent. I was amazed that he hadn’t sent Bion or someone else, but he took me himself, and when we had climbed high enough up the flank of the mountain to be amidst the trees – beautiful straight cypress and some scrubby pine – he stopped.
‘Listen, boy,’ he said. ‘Old Calchas is a worthy man, for a drunk. But he – that is, if you want no part of him, run home. And if he hurts you, I’ll kill him.’
He held my shoulders and kissed me, and then we walked the rest of the way.
Calchas was not so old. He was Pater’s age, and had a fuller beard, with plenty of white in it, but he had the body of an athlete. He didn’t look like a drunk. I fancied myself an expert – after all, I knew every stage of Mater’s drinking, from red-rimmed eyes and foul breath to modest bleariness. Calchas didn’t show any of that. And he was still. I saw that at once. He didn’t fidget and he didn’t show anxiety.
But it was his eyes that held me. He had green eyes – as I do myself – and I’d never seen another pair. They also had a particular quality – they seemed to look through you to a place far beyond.
I know, dear. My eyes do the same. But they didn’t then.
I don’t think most of the farmers of the valley of the Asopus knew what Calchas was. They thought him a harmless priest, a drunk, a useful old man who would teach their sons to read.
It is almost funny, given what Plataea was to become, that in all the valley, there wasn’t a man hard enough to look the priest in the eye and see him for what he was.
A killer.
I lived with Calchas for years, but I never thought of his hut beside the spring and the tomb as home. From the edge of the tomb I could see our hill rising thirty stades away, and when I was homesick I would climb the round stones to the top, lie on the beehive roof and look across the still air to home. And often enough he would send me back on errands – because we paid him in wine and olive oil and bread and cheese, and because he was a kind man for all that his eyes were dead. He’d wait until I cried myself to sleep a few nights, and then he’d send me home on an errand without my asking.
That whole first autumn, I learned my letters and nothing else. For hours every day, and then we’d scour his wooden dishes and his one bronze pitcher, a big thing that had no doubt been a donation in the ancient past. He didn’t speak much, except to teach. He simply taught me the letters, over and over again, endlessly patient where Pater would have been screaming in frustration.
I’d like to say that I was a quick learner, but I wasn’t. It was early autumn, and everything was golden, and I was an outdoor boy caught in his lessons. I wanted to watch the eagles play in the high air, and the woods around the shrine fascinated me, because they were so deep and dark. One day I saw a deer – my first – and then a boar.
I felt as if I had fallen into the land of myth.
Travellers sometimes came over the mountain to the shrine. Not many, but a few. They were always men, and they often carried weapons, a rare sight down in the valley. Calchas would send me away, then he’d sit with the men and drink a cup of wine.
They were soldiers, of course. Soldiers came to the shrine from all over Boeotia, because the word was that the shrine and the spring provided healing to men of war. I think it was Calchas who healed them. He talked and they listened, and they went away lighter by a few darics and some care. Sometimes he’d get drunk afterwards, but mostly he’d go and say some prayers at the shrine of the hero, and then he’d make us some barley gruel.
His food was terrible, and always the same – black bread, bean broth without meat, water. I’ve lived in a Spartan mess group and eaten better. At the time I cared little. Food was fuel.
Calchas had fascinating