They trembled like sheep.
'Surrender!' I said. 'I am Arimnestos of Plataea. If you drop your weapons, I will spare your lives, by Zeus Soter.'
The man with the kopis threw his spear at Hermogenes and bolted, running right up the face of the dip and away downhill. Hermogenes ducked the spearhead but got the tumbling shaft across his temple and went down. Another bandit broke downhill, but the nearest Thracian speared him like a fisherman on a Thracian river, and the rest dropped their weapons.
'Hold them here,' I said. Calchas was in my head, and I knew what was going to happen as if I had read it on a scroll.
I ran downhill after the man with the sword. He had a long start. But I knew where he was going, and I wanted him to get there.
I ran easily, following the contour of Cithaeron, staying high on the hillside, and after two stades of bush- running, I came to the trail I had used to climb the mountain as a child, and I ran down it, swifter than an eagle.
It was odd, but at first I felt Calchas beside me, and then I felt him in me. I was Calchas. Or perhaps I had become Calchas.
I passed the cabin, running silently on the leaf-mould, and I had just time to slow at the verge of the tomb when my prey burst out of the woods in front of me, eyes wild with panic from whatever ghosts rode him through the woods – I hope that boy was on him. And the panic on his face exploded like a hot rock drenched in water when he saw me. He raised the sword – the same sword he'd used to kill the boy at the top of the pass – and cut at me. I parried high and refused to give ground, so that he slammed into my hip – I turned him, our bodies pressed close by his momentum, and my hip pushed him ever so slightly, and he went sprawling across the stones of the precinct of the hero's tomb. His head hit a stone and his sword hand hit another so hard that the kopis fell from his hand, as if taken by the hero himself.
He tried to rise, coming up on all fours like a beast, and I caught his greasy hair in my left fist and sacrificed him, cutting his throat so that his life flushed out across the cool wet stones, and the hero drank his blood as he had with every bad man that Calchas sent into the dark.
I wiped my sword on his chiton and went to the cabin, such as it was. The years had not been kind, and the bandits had slaughtered a deer badly and left the hanging carcass to rot by the window of horn, the fools.
The wreck of a door was open. Inside, there were two women clinging to the priest. They flinched away from me.
'Empedocles?' I asked gently. And then, when he still looked wild and afraid, I tried a smile. 'It's a rescue,' I said.
'They took my cup,' he said weakly, and fainted. We were quite a crowd by the time the rain stopped. We had nine prisoners and six of us, the two women and the priest. He wasn't in a good way – he had a fever and they had abused him – he had burns – but he was a strong man and he smiled at me.
'Come a long way, eh, apprentice?' he said, when I gave him the sign of the journeyman. He was lying on the cot. We had cleaned the cabin and I had found his cup – the fine cup my father had made him – in the leather bag of the leader. The Thracians were amusing themselves rebuilding the door while Hermogenes and Idomeneus hunted for meat. He frowned. 'Where did you learn that sign?'
I knelt by him. 'Crete, father,' I said.
He coughed. 'Crete? By the gods, boy – you'd have done better in Thebes!' He coughed again. 'Here – give me your hand. That's the sign for Boeotia.'
Then he lay still so long I thought he was asleep, or dead. But when I threw my cloak over him, he managed a smile. 'I saw you,' he said.
'Father?' I asked.
'Sacrificed the bastard,' he said. 'Zeus, you frightened me, son.'
We fed the lot of them on deer meat and barley from our wagon. I let the prisoners stew in their fear. The tinker stayed with me and was enough of a help that I wanted him to stay.
I left the body of their leader across the threshold of the precinct, so that his end was clear to all of them. Let them wonder how it had happened. Divine justice takes many forms. I had just learned that lesson, and it was steadying me; the blackness of three days before was already a memory. And seeing Empedocles – even older, and badly hurt – was a tonic. It reminded me that this life – Boeotia, a world with ordered harvests and strong farmers, a cycle of feasts, a local shrine – it was real. It was not a dream of youth.
Idomeneus wanted to kill the lot of them. Of course, that's what we'd have done at sea. My reluctance puzzled him.
'Different places have different rules,' I told him.
He nodded, happy that there was some reason. 'Wasn't much of a fight,' he said.
'I'm not here to fight,' I said. 'I may go back to smithing. And farming.'
He had finished his deer meat, and we were sharing wine from his mastos cup. He winced, as if I had cut him. 'That's not you, lord,' he said. 'You're no farmer! You are the Spear! Arimnestos the Spear! Men shit themselves rather than face you. You can't be a smith!'
'I'm tired of killing,' I said. In the morning, I sat on a log with all the prisoners. They were a useless lot, beaten men in every way, but they'd behaved like animals when they had the chance – raping the women they'd taken, burning Empedocles, and only the gods knew how many more victims were in the shallow graves behind the tomb.
'You are broken men,' I said.
They stared at me dully, waiting for death.
'I will try to fix you,' I said.
One man, a dirty blond, smiled. 'What will you have us do?' he asked, already aiming to ingratiate with the conqueror.
'We'll start with work,' I said. 'If you displease or disobey, the punishment will be death. There will be no other punishment. Do you understand?'
'Will you feed us, master?' another man said.
'Yes,' I said. They were ugly, those men. As far from the virtue that Heraclitus taught as Briseis was from an old hag in Piraeus. But I understood that the principal difference between us was that my hand still held a sword.
Their first task was to dig up all the shallow graves. There were fifteen – ten men and five women. None of the corpses was very old, and the task horrified them. That pleased me.
We made a pyre and purified the bodies, and then we sent their spirits to the underworld avenged, the old way, at least in Boeotia, and their ashes went into the hero's tomb, where they could share in the criminal's blood, or that's how I understood it from Calchas. The women wept as we poured the oil we had over the bodies. The two who survived had known some of the others.
I didn't ask them any questions.
It took us three days to restore the cabin and to dispose of the victims. We raked the yard, and we cut firewood, and we cleaned the tomb. I poured wine on Calchas's grave each day.
Each night, I lay awake, thinking.
On the third day, Empedocles' fever broke and he began to recover quickly.
That night, Hermogenes came and sat by me as I looked at the stars shining down into the clearing by the tomb.
'I understand,' he said.
I put my hand on his. 'Thanks,' I said.
'But it has to be done,' he said.
'I had to put my own house in order,' I said, 'before I go to my father's.'
'This is not your house,' he said. Hermogenes lived in a very literal world.
'Yes,' I said. 'This is my house.' The two women had been farm slaves across the river. After some conversation, and some halting answers, I set on a course of action with Hermogenes.
I left Idomeneus at the shrine. Ah, thugater, you smile. Well might you smile. I left him with the Thracians as helpers, and I told the Thracians that they were halfway to their freedom. They both nodded like the serious men
