Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [22]
He was content to let me touch it all, which I was never allowed with Pater’s kit. All except the bow.
So naturally, I had to steal the bow.
It wasn’t hard. His hut had one piece of ornamentation – a window made from panes of horn pressed thin and flat. It let light in, in the winter, and it was beautifully crafted, the gift of some rich patron. It was made to pivot on a pair of bronze pintles cunningly fashioned. Calchas used to laugh about it. He called it the ‘Gate of Horn’ and said all his dreams came through it – and he also called it the ‘Lord’s Window’. ‘A foolish thing to have in a peasant’s hut,’ he said, although that window alone allowed me to read in the winter.
I had soon learned that I could get in and out of that window. I whittled a stick with my sharp iron knife so that I could prise the window open from outside. I waited till he was drunk, then got in and took the bow and quiver and ran off up one of the hundreds of paths that led from the clearing by the spring. I found my way to a small meadow with an old stump, spotted on an earlier ramble, and my adventure came to an end when I tried to string the bow. I spent the afternoon striving against the power of a man’s weapon and I failed.
So I carried the bow and quiver back down the mountain and sneaked them into his hut, returning the bow to the peg where it hung.
After lessons the next day, I said, ‘Master, I took your bow.’
He was putting away the stylus and the wax sheets he made. He turned so fast that I flinched.
‘Where is it?’ he asked.
‘On its peg,’ I said. I hung my head. ‘I couldn’t string it.’
I never saw his hand move, but suddenly my ear hurt – hurt like fire. ‘That’s for disobedience,’ he said calmly. ‘You want to shoot the bow?’
‘Yes!’ I said. I think I was crying.
He nodded. ‘I’m sending you for more wine,’ he said. ‘When you come back, perhaps we’ll make a bow you can shoot.’ He paused. ‘And we’ll do the dances. The military dances. Now, what letter is this?’ he drew one, and I said ‘Omicron.’
‘Good boy,’ he said.
My ear still hurt, all thirty stades home.
My brother was working in the forge, and he didn’t like it. It’s odd, being brothers. We were alike in so many ways – and we were always friends, even when we were angry – but we wanted different things. He wanted to be a warrior, a nobleman with a retinue and deer hounds. He wanted the life Mater wanted for him. And all I wanted to be was a master smith. Irony is the lord of all, honey. I got what he wanted, and he got a few feet of dirt. But he was a good boy, and he was in the forge doing the job that I would have sold my soul to do. That’s the way of it when you are young.
I showed Mater my letters and sang her the first hundred lines of the Iliad, which Calchas had also taught me, and she nodded and kissed my cheek and gave me a silver pin.
‘At least one of my sons will grow up a gentleman,’ she said. ‘Tell me of this Calchas.’
So I did. I told her all I knew about him, which proved, under her Medusa-like glare, to be little enough. But she smiled when I said he ate black bread and bean soup.
‘An aristocrat, then,’ she said happily. Not my idea of an aristocrat, but Mater knew some things better than her eight-year-old child.
I stayed at home for two days while Pater gathered some wine. I helped in the forge and saw that my brother had already learned a few things. He’d made a bowl from copper and he was scribing it with