Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [34]
So we moved quietly across the mountainside. It took me an hour to get the spoor of an animal, and another hour – the sun was getting too high – to put the small buck between us. I charged it, yelling hard, and it broke away from me, running for its life right at the Athenian.
But I hadn’t seen the other buck. He was a magnificent animal, as big as a small horse, and in autumn he’d have carried a rack of antlers big enough to sell. Even in high summer he had started his horns. He rose out of a tangle of brush, crashed shoulder to shoulder with the younger buck, spilling him and saving his life, and sprang. His leap was so high and so hard that Miltiades stood with his mouth open, his javelin cocked and forgotten in his hand, as the buck sailed over his head.
We didn’t touch either animal. Miltiades slapped me on the back. ‘You can stalk,’ he said. ‘Not your fault I missed my throw, boy. And what an animal! Artemis held my hand – I felt her cool fingers on my wrist, I swear. That beast must be her special love.’
We walked down the mountain together. The sun was too high to try again. I potted a rabbit foolish enough to sit in the middle of the trail eating a leaf, and Miltiades praised my throw, sweet praise such as I never received at home.
Yet he was not just a flatterer. He made me throw for him six or seven times, and he adjusted my body each time, correcting my tendency to advance my right foot too much, and there was none of the urgency to his touch that I’d felt with Calchas. He taught well, and when he threw his own spear, a heavy longche that I would be hard-pressed to toss across the meadow, he threw it as Zeus on high throws a bolt of lightning.
I was worshipping him by the time we returned to Calchas’s hut and the shrine.
‘I wanted to see him,’ Miltiades said.
‘I’ll fetch him out,’ I said, bold as brass. ‘Lord, he may be a little drunk.’
Miltiades laughed. ‘You fetch him out of there,’ he said. ‘I’ll sober him up – or give him some decent wine, better than the piss you peasants drink.’
It was the first time I’d heard Miltiades speak ill of us. He could only guard his tongue so long.
Ah, listen, honey. He was not a bad man, as powerful men go. He saved Greece. He was good to me. But he was used to the finest horses, the most beautiful women. It was our foolishness that made us think he was happy to drink sour wine with peasants in Boeotia.
I climbed in through the window of horn. I’d done it dozens of times – once to steal the bow. I told you that story.
As soon as I got it open – the stick I’d whittled to prise the window open was still leaning where I’d left it – flies came out, buzzing like some evil thing. In Canaan, men call the lord of the dead the ‘Lord of the Flies’. It was just like that – as if all the flies made a single creature and moved with one will.
I dropped from the sill into the room, and it smelled of old leather and bad food. At first I thought he had gone, leaving a rotten haunch of venison and an old brown cloak on the deer’s carcass in the middle of the floor.
But, of course, he was there.
The details came to me one at a time, although I think I understood as soon as the flies buzzed past me in the window. The odd shaft of light over the deer carcass was shining on the sword. The sword was stuck, hilt first, into the floorboards. There was no deer carcass.
Calchas had wedged his sword into the floor and fallen on it. He had done it so long before that the brown cloak was just his hair and the last of his skin over his bones.
How long since I had crossed the valley and left a sacrifice at the tomb? How many times had I come when he already lay here, dead? I wonder, in a way, if I had already known, because I had said my goodbyes and I didn’t weep. I went to the door, unbarred it and found the bronze-shod shovel Pater had made for him with his athlete’s pick. I carried them out into the yard and went straight to the tomb. Miltiades called something but I didn’t listen. Instead, I began to dig.
I didn’t see Miltiades go to the hut, but I know that