Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [211]
I left my armour and all my weapons, except my good spear. A serious man in Boeotia may walk abroad with a spear. I wore a good wool chiton, and my only concession to my recent life was the necklace.
We put Empedocles in the wagon with the two women and walked down the mountain, across the valley and up the hill.
I stopped at the fork where one lane ran up the hill – the lane of my childhood. And another ran down and away, into the flat lands by the river – Epictetus’s lane. Even alone, or with Hermogenes, I knew I could go up that golden lane to my father’s house, drench it in blood and make it mine in an hour. I stood there long enough, despite my resolve, that Hermogenes cleared his throat nervously, and I found that I was standing with my hand on my sword hilt.
Then I turned my back on my father’s lane and walked downhill.
Coming into Epictetus’s farmyard, I felt remarkably like Odysseus, especially when a farm dog came and smelled my hand, turned and gave a friendly bark – not a cry of joy, but a bark of acceptance.
Peneleos – the old man’s younger son – came down into the courtyard from the women’s balcony. His face was reserved. He admitted later that he had no idea who I was. But he knew Hermogenes.
‘There’s a friend!’ he called. I saw a bow move in another window, and I realized that the bandits must have preyed on all these farms. I can be a fool.
‘Peneleos!’ I called. ‘It’s me – Arimnestos.’
He started as if he’d seen a ghost, then we embraced, although we’d never been that close. And his brothers came to the yard, the eldest carrying a bow.
‘You’re alive!’ he said. ‘Your sister will go wild!’
And then the old man himself came into the yard. ‘They don’t sound like thieves!’ he said in an old man’s voice.
It was hard to see Epictetus as an old man. Of course, I’d thought that he was older than dirt as a child, but I’d seen differently at Oinoe. He was starting to bend at the waist, and he had a heavy staff, but his back straightened when he saw me, and the arms he put around me were strong. ‘You came back,’ he said, as if he’d just made a hard bargain, but a good one. He reached up and fingered my necklace. ‘Huh,’ he said. But he gave me the lower half of a grin to take the sting out of the grunt. ‘What kept you?’ he asked.
‘I was taken as a slave,’ I said.
‘Huh!’ he said in a different voice. He had started as a slave. Then he put his head over the edge of the wagon bed. ‘Say!’ he said.
‘We broke the bandits,’ Hermogenes said. He was still being embraced, now by a bevy of Boeotian maidens – Epictetus’s daughters. The eldest, who had once been offered to me, was a matron of five years’ marriage to Draco’s eldest, and she had a fair-haired boy just five years old and a daughter of four.
Looking at her stopped me in my tracks, because seeing her was like living another life. Not that I’d ever loved her – simply that in another one of Heraclitus’s infinite worlds, I might have wed her, and those would have been my children, and I would have had no more blood on my sword than I got at the yearly sacrifice. That other world seemed real when I looked at her, and her children.
Epictetus the Younger, now a tall man with a heavy beard, lifted the two slaves down from the wagon.
‘Thera’s,’ he said. ‘The bandits killed her and took all her women – and her slaves joined them.’ He looked at me. ‘I guess they’re yours, now.’
That stopped all conversation.
‘Simon has my father’s farm,’ I said into the silence.
‘Aye,’ Epictetus the Elder said.
I nodded. ‘He killed my father,’ I said. ‘A blade in the back while you fought the men of Eretria.’
All the men present winced. The silence stretched on and on, and then old Epictetus nodded.
‘Thought so,’ he said, and spat.
‘What’re you going to do?’ Peneleos asked.
‘You broke the bandits?’ Epictetus the Younger asked. ‘You and – who?