Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [60]
He looked at me a long time, and I wondered if he was fooled. ‘Let me see your thigh,’ he said. I raised my chiton, and he looked at the wound. It looked then much as it does now – a red fish hook.
After a few moments, he frowned. ‘Is there pain?’ he asked.
‘Just before the weather changes,’ I said. ‘Otherwise, none.’
He nodded. ‘Tomorrow we will go to the city. Say your goodbyes and finish your tasks.’
‘Yes, master,’ I said. I thought I would never settle Grigas, and the thought made me feel like a failure, but the gods had other ideas.
Sometimes chance – Tyche – is better than any plan of men. I was ordered by the head cook to run to the village market for some rue. I had good legs by then – I think I was a foot taller than I had been at the battles – and I could run. So I set off into the late afternoon with a few obols clutched in my fist.
I got the rue from a peasant woman in a stall covered in hide. Then I turned and ran back to the farm, my legs eating the stades.
I doubt that I was even winded as I passed the barn. And then I heard the sound of a woman crying.
I ran into the barn. I was moving fast. Tyche sat at my shoulder, and there were furies at my back.
Grigas was up in the loft with a girl. He was making the smallest kitchen slut blow his flute. He had her hair—Anyway, that’s not a thing to tell you, honey. I ran straight to the ladder and climbed, and I suspect he never heard me. She was doing what she had been made to do, and was crying.
I pushed her aside, broke his neck and threw him from the loft. His head made the sound a wooden mallet makes as it hits the cow’s head when the butcher is slaughtering – he hit the stone floor of the barn, but he was dead before he left my hands.
I was eating dinner when they found his body. I laughed. ‘Good riddance, ’ I said, and Amyntas looked at me. I met his eye.
The next day, I drove Master’s chariot from the farm up the mountain to Ephesus, proud as a king. I had learned three lessons from the murder – lessons I’ve kept with me all my life. First, that older people are wise, and you should listen to them. Second, that dead men tell no tales. And third, that killing is easy.
8
Hipponax’s son was Archilogos. I see you smile, honey. It’s true. He was my master and I was his slave. The gods move in mysterious ways.
Archilogos was a boy of twelve years when I was fourteen. He was handsome, in the Ionian way, with dark curly hair and a slim build. He could vault anything, and he had had lessons in many things – sword-fighting, chariot-driving and writing among them.
He was the most Medified Greek I had ever met. He worshipped the Persians. He admired their art, their clothes, their horses and their weapons. He practised archery all the time, and he had a religious regard for the truth, because his father’s friend, the satrap, had told him that the only two requirements for being a Persian were that a boy should shoot straight and tell the truth.
I should speak of the satrap. In the sixty-seventh Olympiad, when I was young, Persia had conquered all of Lydia, although they’d effectively had the place many years before – almost fifty. So Ephesus, like Sardis, was part of their empire. They ruled their Greeks with a light hand, despite all the cant you hear these days about ‘slavery’ and ‘oppression’.
Their satrap was Artaphernes. He is so much a part of this story that he will vie with Archilogos for the number of times I mention him. He was a handsome man, tall and black-haired, with a perfectly trimmed beard and bronze skin. His carriage was wonderful – he was the most dignified man I’ve ever known, and even men who hated him would listen respectfully when he spoke. He had the ear of the King of Kings. Great Darius. He never lied, as far as I know. He loved Greeks, and we loved him.
He was a fearsome enemy, too. Oh, honey, I know.
He was a good friend to Hipponax. Whenever he came to Ephesus – and that was at least once a year – he would stay with us. And he was a ‘real Persian’, not a mixed-blood. A noble of the highest sort.
My