Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [28]
I blushed and stammered.
‘So he hasn’t. That’s good. You wouldn’t like it, would you?’ She said this stroking my cheek – scary itself, in a way. She never touched us.
‘No,’ I said.
‘No.’ She was sitting on her kline, a low bench like a bed. She reclined, pulling her shawl about her. ‘When that urge comes on you, tell me, and I’ll buy you a slave for it.’
I had no notion what she was talking about, any more than I understood what Calchas wanted, except as a vague fear. And in many ways, I liked Calchas better than I liked Mater.
I found that I was eager to get back to the shrine. I said my goodbyes with more relief than longing. Hermogenes came back with me. We had a good walk.
‘I’ll be free next year,’ he said wistfully.
‘Let’s pretend you’re free now,’ I said. ‘You can use the practice.’
He looked at me. ‘How do I pretend to be free?’ he asked.
I laughed. ‘Calchas tells me that we all pretend to be free,’ I said, a typical boy trying to sound as adult as his teacher. ‘But you can meet my eyes when you talk, and tell me to fuck off when I make you angry. Come on – pretend!’
Hermogenes shook his head. ‘You’ve never been a slave, Arimnestos,’ he said. ‘No one pretends to be free. And I guarantee you that no free man pretends to be a slave.’
We arrived at the shrine near nightfall. Hermogenes stayed the night and we took him hunting in the morning. He was an excellent rabbit killer, trained by hunger, and he quickly won Calchas’s praises. I was jealous. Names flew, and some nine-year-old punches. In the midst of a flurry of blows, I called him a slave and he stopped moving.
I never saw the blow from Calchas. It caught me in the ear and knocked me flat.
‘Are you a gentleman?’ he asked me, from the advantage of six feet of height. ‘You invited him to be a free man. You asked him to trust you. Then – you called him a slave. Can you keep your word?’
I was resentful, but I wasn’t a fool. Pain has a remarkable effect on boys. I sat up. ‘I apologize, Hermogenes,’ I said formally. ‘I meant it – only as a hateful word, like “bastard”.’ I tried to grin it off.
Calchas shook his head. ‘That’s a worthless apology, young man. You must never call a bastard “bastard” or a slave “slave” unless you want to fight to the death. Trust me – I’m a bastard. I know.’
We ended up apologizing to each other, very formally. There was some silence and some walking apart.
Calchas laughed, called us girls and led us up the mountain after a deer. It was late, but the Lady of Animals sent us a good buck, and Hermogenes and I ran him down with javelins, Calchas working carefully through the trees to push the deer back on our weapons, and we killed when the sun was almost in the treetops. Then Calchas made Hermogenes cut the buck’s throat and anointed him with blood on his face, as he had with me.
‘Arimnestos says you are to be a free man,’ Calchas said. ‘You must learn to look other men in the eye. And to think of them like this,’ and he pointed at the corpse of the deer. ‘Slave or free, a man is nothing but a pile of bones and flesh with blood in the middle.’
Hermogenes didn’t say anything, but he embraced me and when he went to leave, we clasped hands as if we were men. We sent Hermogenes home with a haunch of venison and a couple of rabbits, which no doubt made him a hero to his family. Hermogenes and I date our friendship from that morning. But I had to be a slave before I learned how true Calchas’s words were.
In the Boeotia of my youth, we were poor men, and though we thought we knew the world, we knew little of what passed beyond our town and our mountain and our river. These were the borders of our lives.
Festivals came and passed, and sowing, and reaping, and I was getting older. Hard men came to the shrine and Calchas sat up the night with them. The second year, one tried to rape me, and Calchas killed him. I was well-nigh paralysed with fear, although I managed to bite his hand so hard he screamed.