Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [31]
‘Many men care about the shrine!’ I said. There were tears in my eyes.
Pater dusted his hands. ‘Come,’ he said.
We walked to the shrine. I argued, and Pater was silent. When we arrived, Pater ordered me to collect my things. And he went and spoke to Calchas alone.
I still know nothing of what they said to each other, but I never saw a frown or a harsh word. I collected my javelins, my spear ‘Deer Killer’, my scrolls and my bedroll. I put them on the donkey and went to kiss Calchas goodbye. He embraced me.
‘Time for you to go out into the world,’ he said. ‘Your father is right, and I have probably filled your head with nonsense.’
I knew that he would be drunk before we walked to the base of the mountain. But I smiled and kissed him on the lips – which I had never done.
On the way down the path, I stopped. ‘He will die without me,’ I said. I was eleven going on twelve, and the world was much less of a mystery to me than it had been. ‘By leaving, I am killing him!’
Pater embraced me. I think it is the only embrace that I remember. He held me for a long time. Finally, he said, ‘He is killing himself. You have your own life to lead.’
We walked home, Pater silent, me crying.
I went back to working the forge, although I now lagged far behind my brother. I read to my mother, who fussed over my hands and bellowed abuse at Pater about how his noble son was being forced to peasant work.
Pater ignored her.
I lose track of time, here. I think it was the same summer as I left Calchas, but it might have been the next. They were golden summers, and the wealth of Plataea came in with the grain. We sold much of our grain in the markets of Attica, and now that we were the richest peasants in Boeotia, our fathers plotted how to spend our wealth on the greatest Daidala in history.
Men came to the yard of the smithy and leaned against the new sheds, or sat on the stools that now littered the yard, drank Pater’s excellent wine served by a pair of pretty slaves and planned the Daidala. There was no other discussion that summer, for the next spring was the moment when we would watch the ravens on the hillside, choose our tree and set in motion all the traditions and customs and dances and rituals that would lead us to a successful festival – a festival that would cause other men across Boeotia to envy our wealth and curse us. Or rather, that was the plan.
For before the summer was old enough for the barley to lose its green, the word came to our valley that the men of Thebes were preparing the Great Daidala, and had ordained that Plataea was but a community of Thebes and not a free city. What’s more, Thebes had voted a great tax to be placed on us to ‘support the festival’.
I had missed two years of talk in the courtyard, but little had changed. The speakers wore a better quality of cloth, but they were the same men – solid men, who were a little richer but had no toleration for fools. Myron was not the richest, but he tended to speak for Pater’s friends in the assembly, and there was talk of making him archon instead of the old basileus. The old basileus was now poorer than Pater. The world was turning on its head.
The word of the Theban tax goaded them even more than the word that we would not host the festival. Peasants hate it when other men take their money. I know that hate. Steal the money of a slave and look at his eyes. That is the look of a peasant who is taxed.
Simon had joined the men in the yard. I wasn’t there when he moved back into our lives. It seems odd, after all that happened, but peasants quarrel as much as aristocrats and then settle their differences or simply move on. Simon came back, and