'Who then?' I asked. 'I could protect your children.'
'And make them tyrants of Miletus?' she asked. 'Lords of Ephesus?' She came and put her arms around my neck, and I had no hatred for her in my body. 'Go! Let me hear of you in songs of praise, and perhaps we will meet again.'
We kissed. It cannot have helped her reputation much, since every woman in that hall could see us, but it did me a world of good. That kiss had to hold me for many years. Part VI Justice Citizens must fight to defend the law as if fighting to hold the city wall. Heraclitus, fr. 44
For gods on the one hand, all things are beautiful, good, and just; but men, on the other, suppose some things to be just and others to be unjust. Heraclitus, fr. 102
22
I had almost recovered from my wounds when I stepped wearily off my own gangplank like an old man and limped up the beach at Piraeus. The red wounds were closed and the bruises had faded, but the black hole where my guts had been was never going to close.
Herakleides landed me from Briseis, and he embraced me like a brother. To be honest, I'd never really forgiven him for selling the information of the value of our ransoms to Miltiades, but in his way he'd done me a favour, showing me who I worked for and what a life I'd come to. So when I limped down the plank, I turned and took his hand.
'Take this ship back to its owner, and she'll keep you as captain,' I said. 'You are too good a man to spend your life as a pirate and die face down on the sand. And you're not good enough with the bronze and iron to stay alive. Do you hear me, friend?'
He nodded.
'Take this ship to Briseis and we're quits, you and me – no blood price over a certain matter back on Lesbos. Fail to deliver, and I'll find you. Am I clear?' Behind me, Hermogenes and Idomeneus and a pair of Thracian slaves – men I'd taken as part of the booty – were carrying my goods down off the ship.
'Aye, lord,' he said. 'I swear it by all the gods, and may the furies track me down and rip my guts from me-'
'Stop!' I said. 'You're hurting me. And never, ever swear by the furies.'
And so it was done. I embraced him, and he sailed away.
Idomeneus and I watched that ship until it vanished around the great promontory.
He had tears in his eyes.
I laughed bitterly. 'I didn't ask you to come with me,' I said.
Hermogenes grunted. 'Some people would be nostalgic about torture,' he said. 'I'm going to hire a wagon. You can afford it, lord.' He had a wicked glint in his eye. 'Best forget about anyone calling you that – ever again.'
I traded some silver for copper and tin in the city at Athens, and got bitten by bedbugs in a horrible tavern, lower than anything I'd seen since I had become a slave. And then we started walking home.
A day on the roads of Attica, and I remembered all too well – Greece, land of farmers. Every man was equal and surly farmers cared nothing for swagger. I could put my hand on my sword hilt and they would just glower the more. We came to Oinoe, and I looked up at the tower in the sunset. We camped within easy walk of the place where my father and his friends had stopped the Spartans. Hermogenes and I told the story to Idomeneus – and the two slaves, who were already becoming part of the household. They were decent men, not too smart, tough as nails. I told how my brother died.
That night I wept. Look at me – even now, I blubber.
Listen, honey. May you never know the loss of love. But you will. I loved Pater, for all his ways, and he died. And my brother. And those losses will never be redeemed. You will lose me, and your mother, and your brothers, too. And if the gods don't favour you, you will lose a child. No – I don't mean to be cruel. But that night, with the watch tower at our backs, while I sat watching our cart, I wept for Briseis, and for Pater, and for Archi, and for Hipponax, and for Lekthes. I wept for the man who I killed in the dark on the battlefield at Ephesus. Most of all, like most people, I wept for myself.
When I walked away from the ship in Piraeus, I walked away from myself – my reputation, my riches. All gone. I was going home to avenge my father's killing against a man whose face I couldn't hold in my mind. Not because I wanted to, but because I could think of nothing else to do.
I think it was the loss of Briseis most of all. I think that I had been certain I would have her – that I would bring her up this pass to the foot of Cithaeron, lie with her in the grass by Leitos's tomb and carry her over the threshold into my father's stone house.
Without her, it seemed an empty exercise. I cared nothing.
I promised when I started this story that I would tell the truth. So here's a truth for you – I didn't care much about avenging my father. Oh – I see the shock. Listen, honey – listen, all of you. When you are young, and you listen to the poet, you take in the rules of life – the laws of all Hellenes. Oaths, gods, laws of gods and men.
When I sat with my back to the stone fort at Oinoe, I had probably killed a hundred men. My love had chosen another life over me, and I had turned my back on the only calling I had ever felt.
Every time you kill a man, the doubt grows. Every time you take a ship, empty it of valuables and enrich yourself with the blood and sweat of other men, every time you make another man a slave, every time you buy a woman for sex and discard her when she's pregnant, you have to wonder – are there any laws? Are there any gods?
There weren't any laws for me just then. No rules. Perhaps no gods. Nothing mattered.
The darkness of that night is absolute, even in memory, and I was afraid to go to sleep.
I don't remember much more than that, until we came to the foot of Cithaeron. The next day, I hadn't slept, and I was morose and ill-tempered, and yet curiously happy to be walking the southern slopes where I could see my home mountain. Cithaeron is an old god, and he reached out to me and touched the blackness.
The cart slowed us, and it was nightfall when we came to Pedeis.
Pedeis was the typical border town, with high prices and crap for wine. Dionysus first preached just over the mountains at Eleutherai, and the grape grew there first, and my money says that his worship never spread to Pedeis. The girls were ugly and there was a wooden Temple of Demeter that was a disgrace to gods and men. I snarled at my men to keep moving, and we rolled through the streets and camped in the stony fields north of town.
The border garrison, if they existed, were so slipshod that we passed without a road tax, almost without comment. We climbed the pass to Eleutherai, up and up in switchbacks, and our cart filled the road so that the faster traffic of men walking and men with packs on donkeys ended up in a long queue behind us like the baggage train of an army. Men chatted to Idomeneus or Hermogenes. I walked on in silence.
We found the body near the summit of the pass. The corpse was that of a young boy, probably a slave, about twelve years old. He'd been killed in a bad way, with a series of hacks to his face and neck from a dull, heavy knife. He lay in his own blood in the middle of the wide space near the summit where wagons turn to begin the descent, and where polite men pull to the side to let the faster traffic pass. There are deep ruts in the rock where the old men cut a road for their chariots, and he lay across the stone tracks like a botched sacrifice.
He looked so pitiful. He was just about the age I had been when I stood in the phalanx for the first time. Frankly, from the ripe old age of twenty-two, he looked too small to have died by violence. Had he tried to fight? I would have.
I was already low, and the sight of the dead boy almost moved me to tears again. I knelt by him and cursed because his sticky blood got on my chiton. But I determined to bury him – no idea why, either. In general, I leave corpses for the ravens.
I got him on my sea cloak, which had seen worse than blood, and men from the rest of the caravan behind our slow wagon came up and joined me, quite spontaneously. In fact, my opinion of men went up, right there. I was reminded of why Greeks are good men. We cleared a space, and every man, slave and free, gathered rocks, and we
