Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [29]
I spent more and more time practising for war. Calchas was a warrior – I had realized that, although I couldn’t put a day to the thought. All the men who came were fighters, too. It was as if they belonged to a guild, just like the smiths or the potters, which was odd, because in the Boeotia of my youth, every free man had to be a warrior, but no man I knew actually liked it. Like sex and defecation, it was something every man did but only boys talked about.
What a pretty blush.
So I trained with him. I wasn’t always aware that he was training me. He had exercises for every hour of the day, and many of them were remarkably like work – gathering firewood, breaking it in the breaking tree, chopping the bigger pieces into firewood lengths for the hearth with a sharp bronze axe and then splitting them. This task could consume as much time as Calchas wanted it to consume – we needed wood, come winter. And the use of the axe taught me many things – that, just as with smithing, precision was more valuable than raw strength, for instance. That the ability to hit twice in exactly the same place was better than hitting once in two different places. Ah, my dear – you will never fight a man wearing bronze. But you must accept the word of an old man – you can kill a man right through his expensive bronze helmet if you can hit the very same place often enough.
Calchas was no hoplomachos – not just a fighting master. He didn’t have a special dance to teach, nor were his lessons about the sword as organized as his lessons in writing. Rather, we’d be deep in a passage of the Iliad, and he would look up and make such a comment as I just made.
‘Arimnestos?’ he’d say. ‘You know that if you hit a man often enough in precisely the same place in the helmet, his helmet will give way? And you’ll spill his brains?’
I’d look at him, trying to imagine it. And then we’d go back to the Iliad.
There is a passage, late in the poem, when Achilles is still sulking and Hector rages among the Greeks. And several of the lesser heroes form a line, lock their shields and stop Hector’s rush. I remember him singing that whole passage softly. The autumn light came in strongly through our horn window and dust motes floated in the shaft of light. When this happened, I liked to imagine that the gods were with us.
Calchas looked up, into the shaft of light, and his eyes were far away. ‘That’s how it is, when the lesser men seek to stop the better. You must lock your shield with your neighbour’s, put your head down and refuse to take chances. Let the better man wear himself out against your shield. Poke hard with your spear to keep him at arm’s length and refuse to leave the safety of the shield wall.’ He shrugged. ‘Pray to the gods that the killer finds other prey, or trips and falls, or that your own killers come and save you.’
‘But you were one of the better men,’ I said. ‘You werea – a killer.’
Suddenly his eyes locked with mine and I could see him in his high-crested helm, his strong right arm pounding a lesser man’s shield down, down, until he made the killing cut. I could see it as if I was there.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I was a killer of men.’ Then his eyes slipped away. I knew where he was – he was on a battlefield. ‘I still am. Once you have been there, you can never leave.’
4
A sowing and a reaping, and another year. Animals died under my spear. I read all of Theognis from Mater’s book and came to appreciate that grown men had sex with boys and grew jealous when they took other loves. And that aristocrats could be ill-tempered and avaricious like peasants.
You should read Theognis, my sweet. Just to understand that being well-born is a thing of no value.
I read Hesiod, too. I knew much of him by heart by now, of course. In Boeotia, he is our own poet, and we spurn mighty Homer so that we can love Hesiod better. Besides, his poems are for us – farmers. Is Achilles really a hero? He’s as much of a bitch as Theognis, to my mind. Hector is the hero. And even he would not have made much of a farmer – well,