Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [214]
‘You!’ he spluttered. It was nigh on the worst thing he could have said, because his shock and his guilt were writ on his face.
‘I am Arimnestos of Plataea!’ I roared in my storm-cutter voice. ‘I accuse this man of murder!’
He lost his case there, before he opened his mouth to plead.
Mind you, the law doesn’t work like an avenging titan. The assembly voted to hear the case, and appointed a jury. And on the spot we argued our cases – this wasn’t Athens, and we had no paid orators.
Nor did we have a prison, or guards, or Scythians to take a man and bind him.
The jurors heard our evidence. I had some – and I was determined to use what I had learned in Ephesus and from Miltiades, so I summoned witnesses about Pater’s courage and Simon’s cowardice, and Simon writhed and his sons glowered. But when the sun began to set in the sky, the jurors went to their dinners and the crowd wandered away, and Simon and his sons headed back up the road to the farm.
I followed them. All of Epictetus’s sons were with me, and Hermogenes and his father, and Myron’s sons. In every way but the decision of the jurors, the trial was over. We followed them up the road, and hounded them until they reached my lane.
‘Stop,’ I said.
They cringed.
‘Simon,’ I said, and he turned. He was shaking. His sons stood away from him – I think in revulsion.
‘Take your chattels and go,’ I said. ‘Or the law will kill you.’
He turned away from me, a shadow of the angry man he’d once been in my father’s andron. Honey, I think what he had done had eaten him, until he had nothing left but an angry shell, like the outside of a thorn apple eaten by worms.
And this is the lesson. Remember that I said, when I sat at Oinoe, that I had learned that you could kill, and rape, and force others to your will?
Perhaps you can, for a time. But the gods are there. They do watch. Simonalkes needed no punishment from me. He wore his failure, his cowardice, his alienation, on his face. He was no Plataean, though he had occupied my house while I was a slave. AndI – I was welcome back. He lived an exile in his own house – and if I was a poet, I might say that I’d carried Plataea with me wherever I wandered.
I would submit to the mastery of the laws of men and gods.
I went back to Epictetus’s house, and slept well.
In the morning, none of Simon’s Corvaxae came to the trial. The jurors sent two men to find them.
They came back to say that Simon was hanging by a leather rope from the rafters of the bronze shop, and the sons were gone, and my mother was too drunk to speak.
And so, about noon, on a beautiful day, I walked up that long hill, past the olive trees, past the byres and the grape vines. Bion and Hermogenes walked with me, and Empedocles, moving slowly, and Epictetus, and their sons, and Myron and his sons, and Draco and his sons.
I could hear the swarm of flies on the corpse in the shop.
I was numb.
But the men around me held me up, the way men do in the phalanx when you are wounded. The shields of their friendship covered me. The spears of their humour kept the furies at bay. They were there – the furies, baying for his blood, revelling in the accomplishment of their task – I could feel them on the air.
We walked up into the yard, and then my sister was in my arms, saying my name over and over.
I held Pen a long time, and then I put her down.
‘You are all my neighbours and my friends,’ I said. ‘But I need to clean my own house.’
Every man there nodded, even the youngest. Some things you have to do yourself.
I never promised you a happy story, Honey. It has glad parts, and sad parts, like life.
I went upstairs to Mater. She was drunk – but she knew me. She had a knife – a good bronze knife. Pater’s work. She’d tried it on her wrists a few times, and there was blood on her linen and on her arms and, incongruously, some on her feet. Her skin was old, and the blood found folds to run in.
She burst into tears when she saw me.
‘Oh!’ she wailed. ‘I meant to be dead when you came, and now I am a coward as well as everything else.’
I took the knife