Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [7]
Mater was drunk when she poured the libation. I can see it in my head – she came out in a white chiton, like a kore going to sacrifice, but the chiton had purple stains. When she went to bless his shield she stumbled and poured wine down his leg, and the slaves murmured. And she wept, and ran inside.
So Pater went off to fight Thebes, and he came back carried by two men on his chlamys and his spears, and his shield was gone. We lost. And Pater lost most of the use of his left leg, where Mater spilled the wine, and after that there was nothing between them but silence.
I suppose I was five. Chalkidis was six, and we lay in the loft of the barn and he whispered to me about Pater’s part in the battle and about our cousins – the grandsons of Pater’s father’s brother. Aye, thugater, we count such relations close in Boeotia. Pater had no brothers – his father must have read Hesiod one too many times – and this batch of surly cousins were the nearest relations I had on Pater’s side. On Mater’s side they scarcely allowed that we were kin – until later, and that’s another tale, but a happier one.
My brother said that Pater was a hero, that he’d stood his ground when other men ran, and he saved many lives – and that when the Thebans took him, they hadn’t stripped him, but ransomed him like a lord. I was young and I knew nothing of ransom, only that Pater, who towered over me like a god, was unable to walk and his mood was dark.
‘The other Corvaxae were the first to run,’ Chalkidis whispered. ‘They ran and left Pater’s side open to the spears, and now they slink through the town and fear what Pater will say.’
We were the Corvaxae – the men of the Raven. Apollo’s raven. Look up, lass – there’s the black bird on my aspis, and may the gods send I never feel it on my arm again! You know what the sage says – count no man happy until he is dead. I pour a libation in his memory – may his shade taste the wine.
The black bird is also on our sails and on our house. I was five – I knew little of this, except that I knew that Pater told me it was a good omen when a raven landed on the roof of the smithy. And our women were Corvaxae, too – black-haired and pale-skinned, and clannish. No man in our valley wanted to cross my mother, or my sister, in their day. They were Ravens of Apollo.
And the truth is that my story starts in that fight. It is from that day that the other Corvaxae turned against Pater, and then against me. And from that day that the men of Plataea decided to find a new way of keeping their little town free of Thebes.
It took Pater almost a year to get to his feet. Before that year, I reckon we were rich, as peasants in Boeotia measured riches. We had a yoke of oxen and two ploughs, a house built of stone with a tower, a barn that stood all weather and the smithy. Pater wore the full panoply when the muster was called, like a lord. We ate meat on feast days and we had wine all year.
But I was old enough to understand that at the end of that year we were not rich. Mater’s gold pin went, and all our metal cups. And my first bad memory – my first memory of fear – is from that year.
Simonalkes – the eldest of the other branch of the Corvaxae, a big, strong man with a dark face – came to our house. Pater had to walk with a crutch, but he rose as fast as he could, cursing the slaves who helped him. My brother was in the andron – the men’s room – pouring wine for Simon like a proper boy. Simon put his feet up on a bench.
‘You’ll be