Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [212]
His father understood. ‘You going to kill him?’ he asked. Epictetus didn’t even care where I’d been, how we’d broken the bandits – none of that mattered. He had my right hand in his, and the calluses on my palm told him all he needed to know.
His question returned the courtyard to silence.
I helped his son lift the priest down from the wagon. ‘I came to talk to you about that,’ I said.
‘You want to call him before the assembly?’ Epictetus asked later, over bean soup.
I nodded.
Hermogenes shrugged. ‘I thought we were just going to kill him,’ he said apologetically.
‘And then what?’ I asked. ‘Start a bandit gang? This is Boeotia, not Ionia. What would the archon say if I butchered him and moved into the farm. And hasn’t he married my mother? He has sons – do I kill them all?’
‘Yes,’ Peneleos said. ‘Bastards every one. Sorry, Ma.’
I shook my head. ‘Law,’ I said.
Empedocles was sitting up and taking broth. He saw through me as if I was a pane of horn. ‘You could do it,’ he said. ‘Buy a few judges with that trinket around your neck. Men around here remember you and your father. He died fighting for the city – everyone knows that. Hades, I’m from Thebes and I know it. Kill the bastard – and his brood, if you must. No one will hold it against you.’
I was stunned. ‘You’re the philosopher.’
Empedocles shook his head. ‘I’m interested in how the world works,’ he said. ‘And heed the words of Pythagoras – there are no laws but these, to do good for your friends and to do harm to your enemies.’
Epictetus the Elder looked at me as if I was a good milk cow on the auction block. ‘You plan to live here?’ he asked. ‘Or will you go away again?’
‘Live here,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘Assembly, then.’ He looked around his table, absolute master in his own house. ‘No talk of this until the assembly. I’ll arrange it. The archon was your father’s friend, after all.’
‘Myron?’ I asked.
Epictetus nodded. ‘His son is married to my second,’ he said. He looked at Peneleos, and the young man flushed.
‘Of course I’ll go,’ he said. His father drafted a message in heavy-fisted letters, and Peneleos was off across the fields in the fading light.
‘You really going to stay?’ Epictetus asked as we watched his son run.
‘Of course he is,’ Hermogenes said.
Myron summoned the assembly on the pretence – really the truth – that there was news from Athens. In a city with fewer than four thousand citizens, you can summon the assembly before sunset and expect the majority of your citizens to be standing under the walls in the old olive orchard when the sun rises.
I didn’t sleep much, and when I did, Calchas visited me from the dead and told me in a raven’s voice that I was no farmer.
I knew that.
I woke in the chilly time before dawn, plucked my face carefully by lamplight with a woman’s mirror and took Hermogenes over the hill. We waited among the olive trees by the fork, as we had as children, and we waited until we saw his father come down the hill, alone, walking quickly with a staff. And then behind him, raucous as crows following a raven, came Simon and his sons, four of them.
I risked my whole future by laughing aloud. How much easier it would have been, having crushed the bandits, to cross the valley, slaughter this foul crow and all his people, and blame the criminals? Men might have suspected the truth – men would have known it for vengeance.
But, ‘If you would master the killer in you, you must accept that you are not truly free. You must submit to the mastery of the laws of men and gods.’ Heraclitus said it to me. It took me a few years to see it. I didn’t want to be a landless man or a pirate king.
And yet I remember thinking – even now, I could leave them in a heap before the sun rises another finger’s breadth.
Simon started at the sound of the laugh, but then he kept walking to town and for the first time I hated him as deeply as he deserved to be hated. He had killed my father, and he walked like a man who has a hard life. The useless bastard.
We let them lead us by a couple of stades, and then we followed them. I wanted