they were. Tiraeus came – he was already oikia by then. One of mine.
I left my armour and all my weapons, except my good spear. A serious man in Boeotia may walk abroad with a spear. I wore a good wool chiton, and my only concession to my recent life was the necklace.
We put Empedocles in the wagon with the two women and walked down the mountain, across the valley and up the hill.
I stopped at the fork where one lane ran up the hill – the lane of my childhood. And another ran down and away, into the flat lands by the river – Epictetus's lane. Even alone, or with Hermogenes, I knew I could go up that golden lane to my father's house, drench it in blood and make it mine in an hour. I stood there long enough, despite my resolve, that Hermogenes cleared his throat nervously, and I found that I was standing with my hand on my sword hilt.
Then I turned my back on my father's lane and walked downhill.
Coming into Epictetus's farmyard, I felt remarkably like Odysseus, especially when a farm dog came and smelled my hand, turned and gave a friendly bark – not a cry of joy, but a bark of acceptance.
Peneleos – the old man's younger son – came down into the courtyard from the women's balcony. His face was reserved. He admitted later that he had no idea who I was. But he knew Hermogenes.
'There's a friend!' he called. I saw a bow move in another window, and I realized that the bandits must have preyed on all these farms. I can be a fool.
'Peneleos!' I called. 'It's me – Arimnestos.'
He started as if he'd seen a ghost, then we embraced, although we'd never been that close. And his brothers came to the yard, the eldest carrying a bow.
'You're alive!' he said. 'Your sister will go wild!'
And then the old man himself came into the yard. 'They don't sound like thieves!' he said in an old man's voice.
It was hard to see Epictetus as an old man. Of course, I'd thought that he was older than dirt as a child, but I'd seen differently at Oinoe. He was starting to bend at the waist, and he had a heavy staff, but his back straightened when he saw me, and the arms he put around me were strong. 'You came back,' he said, as if he'd just made a hard bargain, but a good one. He reached up and fingered my necklace. 'Huh,' he said. But he gave me the lower half of a grin to take the sting out of the grunt. 'What kept you?' he asked.
'I was taken as a slave,' I said.
'Huh!' he said in a different voice. He had started as a slave. Then he put his head over the edge of the wagon bed. 'Say!' he said.
'We broke the bandits,' Hermogenes said. He was still being embraced, now by a bevy of Boeotian maidens – Epictetus's daughters. The eldest, who had once been offered to me, was a matron of five years' marriage to Draco's eldest, and she had a fair-haired boy just five years old and a daughter of four.
Looking at her stopped me in my tracks, because seeing her was like living another life. Not that I'd ever loved her – simply that in another one of Heraclitus's infinite worlds, I might have wed her, and those would have been my children, and I would have had no more blood on my sword than I got at the yearly sacrifice. That other world seemed real when I looked at her, and her children.
Epictetus the Younger, now a tall man with a heavy beard, lifted the two slaves down from the wagon.
'Thera's,' he said. 'The bandits killed her and took all her women – and her slaves joined them.' He looked at me. 'I guess they're yours, now.'
That stopped all conversation.
'Simon has my father's farm,' I said into the silence.
'Aye,' Epictetus the Elder said.
I nodded. 'He killed my father,' I said. 'A blade in the back while you fought the men of Eretria.'
All the men present winced. The silence stretched on and on, and then old Epictetus nodded.
'Thought so,' he said, and spat.
'What're you going to do?' Peneleos asked.
'You broke the bandits?' Epictetus the Younger asked. 'You and – who?'
His father understood. 'You going to kill him?' he asked. Epictetus didn't even care where I'd been, how we'd broken the bandits – none of that mattered. He had my right hand in his, and the calluses on my palm told him all he needed to know.
His question returned the courtyard to silence.
I helped his son lift the priest down from the wagon. 'I came to talk to you about that,' I said.
'You want to call him before the assembly?' Epictetus asked later, over bean soup.
I nodded.
Hermogenes shrugged. 'I thought we were just going to kill him,' he said apologetically.
'And then what?' I asked. 'Start a bandit gang? This is Boeotia, not Ionia. What would the archon say if I butchered him and moved into the farm. And hasn't he married my mother? He has sons – do I kill them all?'
'Yes,' Peneleos said. 'Bastards every one. Sorry, Ma.'
I shook my head. 'Law,' I said.
Empedocles was sitting up and taking broth. He saw through me as if I was a pane of horn. 'You could do it,' he said. 'Buy a few judges with that trinket around your neck. Men around here remember you and your father. He died fighting for the city – everyone knows that. Hades, I'm from Thebes and I know it. Kill the bastard – and his brood, if you must. No one will hold it against you.'
I was stunned. 'You're the philosopher.'
Empedocles shook his head. 'I'm interested in how the world works,' he said. 'And heed the words of Pythagoras – there are no laws but these, to do good for your friends and to do harm to your enemies.'
Epictetus the Elder looked at me as if I was a good milk cow on the auction block. 'You plan to live here?' he asked. 'Or will you go away again?'
'Live here,' I said.
He nodded. 'Assembly, then.' He looked around his table, absolute master in his own house. 'No talk of this until the assembly. I'll arrange it. The archon was your father's friend, after all.'
'Myron?' I asked.
Epictetus nodded. 'His son is married to my second,' he said. He looked at Peneleos, and the young man flushed.
'Of course I'll go,' he said. His father drafted a message in heavy-fisted letters, and Peneleos was off across the fields in the fading light.
'You really going to stay?' Epictetus asked as we watched his son run.
'Of course he is,' Hermogenes said. Myron summoned the assembly on the pretence – really the truth – that there was news from Athens. In a city with fewer than four thousand citizens, you can summon the assembly before sunset and expect the majority of your citizens to be standing under the walls in the old olive orchard when the sun rises.
I didn't sleep much, and when I did, Calchas visited me from the dead and told me in a raven's voice that I was no farmer.
I knew that.
I woke in the chilly time before dawn, plucked my face carefully by lamplight with a woman's mirror and took Hermogenes over the hill. We waited among the olive trees by the fork, as we had as children, and we waited until we saw his father come down the hill, alone, walking quickly with a staff. And then behind him, raucous as crows following a raven, came Simon and his sons, four of them.
I risked my whole future by laughing aloud. How much easier it would have been, having crushed the bandits, to cross the valley, slaughter this foul crow and all his people, and blame the criminals? Men might have suspected the truth – men would have known it for vengeance.
But, 'If you would master the killer in you, you must accept that you are not truly free. You must submit to the mastery of the laws of men and gods.' Heraclitus said it to me. It took me a few years to see it. I didn't want to be a landless man or a pirate king.
And yet I remember thinking – even now, I could leave them in a heap before the sun rises another finger's breadth.
Simon started at the sound of the laugh, but then he kept walking to town and for the first time I hated him
