Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [87]
None of that made much sense to me – although it does now. I said she was smart. She saw things I didn’t see, for all my reading and training. So I shrugged, and she bowed her head and left the room without speaking. We should have embraced, but we were too young to forgive and forget.
I was still standing there when I heard a scream from the courtyard. I ran. I thought we were being attacked. Remember that apart from my life as a house slave and companion, I was already a man of violence, and that Diomedes seemed to have a bottomless purse when it came to sending men after me.
When I reached the courtyard, Hipponax was standing stony-faced, staring at a man dressed in the same green chlamys I’d worn a few days previously. Briseis was screaming, her face contorted, all her beauty gone. Penelope was trying to drag her away.
The herald backed out of the gate.
Penelope looked terrified. Briseis’s face was the face of a fury, deep lines carved across her smooth brows as she wailed with screams of pain. Her father glanced at her and turned away. Poor man. He had nothing to offer her. Gods send that I never be in his place.
Archi tried to hold her and she began to fight him, and she landed a blow – a foul blow. She was a good fighter, that girl. Down he went, and then she spat like a wild cat and raked her nails across Penelope’s chest – I thought they were her nails – and blood flowed.
She screamed again.
I thought she was having a fit. I took her down. I wasn’t her brother, and much as I thought I was in love with her, she was a danger to everyone in the yard. I swept her feet and held her arms and put her down on the ground hard enough to drive all the breath from her. She had the strength of a goddess but no palaestra skills, and on her way to the ground I rolled her in the end of her own peplos to pin her arms. She ripped her left arm free and her nails drew blood from my cheek and neck.
But when she wrenched her head back with superhuman strength, a hand shot out and smacked her across the face – once and then again.
‘Silence, girl!’ her mother said.
I had not seen Euthalia in days. She was neatly dressed in sombre colours, and she did not look as if her life had ended.
Briseis sat back on her haunches and the daimon left her. I saw it leave her eyes. It takes one to know one. But then the bitterness exploded.
‘It’s your fault, you faithless bitch!’ she said to her mother. ‘He called me a whore! Diomedes called me a whore! In public! Now I’ll die barren. He’s broken the marriage contract.’ She didn’t cry. Crying would have been better than her imperious self-pity. ‘If you hadn’t been so busy riding the Persian’s cock-bird, I might be a matron.’
Euthalia’s hand shot out and snapped her daughter’s head back again. ‘Be civil or take the consequences,’ she said.
‘I can’t even blame him!’ Briseis cried, and for the first time her voice cracked and she began to sob instead of scream. ‘My mother’s a whore! I’ll be a whore too! I should kill myself!’
Penelope was cowering. She had a bad scratch across her breast and her Doric chiton was filling with blood. She was sitting on a step crying. I saw now that Briseis had a pin in her hand. She had ripped Penelope with it, and me too, I realized.
Euthalia reached into her bosom and her right hand came out with a knife in it. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Get on with it.’
This was the family that I had so envied when I joined them.
Briseis picked up the knife and ran her thumb across it like a man getting ready for sacrifice. Then she stepped towards her mother, and I felt that her intentions were plain.
I stepped in on her and raised my left hand as Cyrus had taught me. She tracked the hand with the knife and not the body, and I caught her wrist and disarmed her. She got the pin into my chest, but the gold bent and I only took a finger’s breadth. It was cold in my chest, and the