Before Lord Pelagius gave the word, he came at me again, and he almost caught me, because, in fact, he cheated. His sword hammered my shield and we were shield to shield. The sword went back and he cut at my head. His blow clipped the rim of my shield and then my helmet, and it hurt.
'I'm going to kill you,' he crowed.
I could tell you that the pain of his blow made me do what I did, but I promised not to lie much when I told these tales. I knew from the moment we crossed swords. I always meant to kill him. Honey, I'm a killer. A little more wine. Your friend is blushing.
I danced away and he came after me, sure that he had me. And I let him come. He came in to hammer my shield, and I cut his sword hand off his arm as easy as making your friend blush.
See, he'd over-extended a little more with each cut, trying to get the biggest part of his blade into my shield rim. I just led him by the nose until I had his arm where I wanted it. And I could have simply given him a cut to remember.
He fell to his knees. He couldn't get the shield off his shield arm and he couldn't get a hand on his wrist to staunch the blood, and it was pumping out, almost like a neck wound.
If he'd had a friend in that circle, perhaps that man would have stepped up and stopped the blood. Or maybe not. What's a man worth with no right hand, like a criminal?
His grandfather stepped forward – and then paused.
That was the awful part. His own grandfather let him bleed out. And the other men in the circle – a conspiracy of two hundred.
He was gone quickly, but his eyes went to mine near the end, and suddenly he wasn't a bad man, a rapist, a tax-taker, a bully. He was a deer under my spear, and he didn't understand the darkness that was coming, or why it had to come to him. And in his eyes I saw the reflection of that god who comes to every man and every woman, and I also saw myself – the killer.
I didn't look away. I held his eye until he fell forward and everything was gone.
But as his soul left his body, I think something of me went with it.
I killed him because I didn't like him.
And when my eyes met Aristides', I could see that other men knew it as well as I did.
I won't go on and on about this, friends, but before I killed Cleisthenes, I was one man. Briefly, I was a victor, a man men admired. That might have been my life, however brief.
But the fates, the gods and my own daimon said otherwise. And when Cleisthenes fell face forward into the sand black with his own blood, I was another man. Some men admired me.
But aside from a few, the rest feared me.
12
I was wearing my new armour the next morning as we began to load the ships. Armour is a silly thing to wear for work, but by the gods it was good to look like a nobleman, and I was young and arrogant. My shoulder still hurt from the pounding of my shield against it in the fight and the race.
I noted that men were careful how they spoke to me.
Stephanos was closer, if anything. He wasn't afraid of me, and he was overjoyed that Cleisthenes was dead. In fact, I earned his friendship with that blow. And when I was maudlin that first night, Melaina told me stories of Cleisthenes and the local girls until I felt like a public benefactor.
I felt like less of a benefactor as the ships were loaded. There I stood, sparkling in a scale corslet worth a farm, a good helmet and a fine aspis. Other men were loading the ships – we had no discipline, and so every ship loaded at its own speed – and we were so late leaving the beach that we saw Lord Pelagius and the women of his household with the body, building a pyre. And the older woman, whose tears seemed pulled from her as you'd pull the guts from a dead boar, she must have been his mother.
Only then did I find fully what it is to be a killer of men. When you kill, you take a man's life. You take it. He can never have it back. When the darkness comes to his eyes and he clutches his guts, he is done. And you don't rob just him but his parents and his family, his sisters and brothers, his wife and children, his lovers, his debtors, his master and his slave – all robbed.
Cleisthenes was a bad man, I have no doubt, but all his people were on that beach, and it was like a scene in a play in Athens – not that they came at me like furies, just that they were all there: his horses and hounds, his women, his slaves, his son. All there in one place, for me to see.
I killed him because I didn't like him. Let's not lie. So – I stood there, coming to terms with the consequences. Most killers are dull men. I truly think they never see the funeral pyre. They never think. I walked down the beach, and every one of them saw me, and they looked at me as if I was some kind of beast.
I think too much. So I drink. Here – you. Blush for me and make me happy. There – ahh! My world is brighter for your presence, lady.
I never promised you a happy story. We landed in Ephesus and all the lords of the fleet met with the lords of the city, but I stayed on our ship. I was afraid of being taken. Afraid of being a slave again. Afraid of what I'd done with Briseis. Afraid that she had already forgotten me.
And I dreamed of Cleisthenes and his funeral pyre. I still do. He's the only one. I've killed enough men to make a phalanx, and he's the only one who haunts me.
Archi was distant when he went ashore, but he came straight back to the ship with word that Diomedes' father had sent his son to a farm in the country to recover, and nothing had been said.
Typical. The things you most fear never come to pass. Diomedes and his father might seek revenge, but they had not gone to law.
I left the ship and entered the house as a free man, wearing armour. I felt odd – everything was odd. Food tasted wrong, and I longed to go and eat in the kitchen, but I didn't, just as I wanted one of the slaves to tell me how bold I looked in my magnificent shirt of scale armour, but none of them even met my eye.
Not even Penelope, who threw her arms around Archi when we returned and didn't even look at me.
Briseis looked at me, an enigmatic half-smile at the corner of her mouth. I found that I couldn't really breathe. I felt as if I'd been gone ten years, and I found that I'd forgotten what she looked like. She stood in the courtyard to welcome us because her mother never left her room any more and Briseis was, in effect, the lady of the house.
'Well,' she said. That was all.
I didn't see her again for days. I took baths and thought guiltily of our love-making – if that's what it was. And I found that I thought of Melaina – which seemed like treason, except that she was more my speed, if you take my meaning. I wondered why I hadn't even tried to kiss her.
Archi went to the conferences, and met with men like Aristides and Aristagoras, plotting a campaign against the Medes for the freedom of Ionia.
I found myself a lonely man in a city that had been my playground. I couldn't exactly go and sit by the Fountain of Pollio, could I?
I met my Thracian girl in the back alley, almost by accident, and tried to get her to go for a walk with me, but she ran. That hurt.
So after two days of failing to be the returning hero, I went up the hill to the Temple of Artemis. And there I found boys sitting in front of Heraclitus. I wasn't a boy, but I sat at his feet.
He nodded to me. He was laying out the rules of triangles. There were three new boys. I had been gone just two months, and even that world had changed. But I listened, and my mind went down the paths of numbers and figures in the sand, instead of death and war and sex, and I took a little healing, as I always have from the wise.
When he was done with the other boys, he came and sat next to me.
'What you did to Diomedes was cruel,' he said.
'The logos speaks through strife,' I said, quoting him.
'Don't give me that shit,' he said. His gaze met mine and ground mine down like stone against iron. 'You hurt that boy.'
