'Arm,' I said to Idomeneus and Hermogenes.
The tinker watched us as if we were performing a miracle play, his eyes as wide as a young girl's. The two Thracians were slaves, of course. But I took them aside, handed each of them a heavy knife and a javelin. 'Stand by me, and you will be that much closer to being free men.' It's easy with Thracians – they arm their own slaves, and a bold slave can expect to be freed faster than one who hangs back. They took the weapons as if they were going to a party.
'Swords in your belt, spears in the top of the wagon and a cloak over everything,' I said.
I went over to the peddler and the tinker. 'You two might want to walk away,' I said. I looked pointedly at the peddler. 'You especially. '
He wouldn't meet my eye. 'Oh – I can look after myself,' he said.
'Hmm,' I said. I turned to Tiraeus the tinker.
He looked around. 'You'll – let me go?'
I remember laughing. We must have been a grim band when we changed into our armour, because he was terrified. 'We're not the thieves,' I said. And then it hit me – we weren't the thieves here. It actually took my breath away. These thieves – these men on Cithaeron who stole from travellers – were only doing what we'd been doing to Phoenician ships for years.
Except that they preyed on their own, and they weren't very good at it.
Tiraeus watched me.
I must have made a face, because he flinched. But then I opened my hands. 'I intend to rescue the old priest and rid the pass of thieves,' I said.
The peddler made a noise.
Tiraeus opened his chlamys and revealed a short sword, or a long knife. 'I am a servant of the god,' he said. 'And – perhaps it will change my luck.'
Maybe he had decided that following me might get him a job.
'Everyone made up his mind?' I said.
We went up the road, the oxen plodding along. The sky went from blue to leaden grey in the time it took to climb half the ridge, and it began to rain, a slow, cold rain.
'What if they have bows?' Idomeneus asked. 'I should scout ahead.'
I shook my head. 'They won't have bows,' I said. 'That boy was hacked down by a kopis.' I shrugged. 'They're mercenaries. They're using the old shrine as a headquarters, because all the hard men used to come there when Calchas was priest.' In my head, the rule of law was reasserting itself, and the gods themselves, and I thought that it must have been too long since the hero had had his sacrifice.
Since Oinoe, I had thought about the logos. How Heraclitus said that men could only come to wisdom through fire. How strife was the master of all, and change was the way. But most of all, I thought of what he said to me when he chided me for beating Diomedes.
'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.'
So I trudged through the ever-increasing rain, and I thought about fire.
Hermogenes stepped up beside me. 'What are we going to do?' he asked.
'Find the bandits and teach them some philosophy,' I said.
Idomeneus laughed.
I shook my head. I had a Boeotian cap, a heavy felt one purchased that morning from a stall, and it was more like a sponge than a hat, so I pulled it off and wrung it out. 'I mean it,' I said.
'You are mad,' Idomeneus said. He laughed again. 'Let's hear the bronze sing!' he shouted. 'Who gives a fuck about philosophy?'
'You are the mad one,' I said, and went back to the road.
We climbed and climbed. I wasn't worried that they would attack us on the hillside. Bandits are lazy men. They would want the wagon at the top, and I knew this mountain like I knew the calluses on my sword hand. There was the crest of the road and then a slight dip that would be full of mud and water in late autumn, and they would be in the big trees around the sinkhole.
Just short of the top, I stopped the wagon like a man who was too tired to go on. My sandals were full of mud and the oxen looked as miserable as we all felt.
Idomeneus made a face. 'I wouldn't rob anyone on a day like this,' he said. 'I'd be on a nice soft couch with a cup of wine in my hand.'
Hermogenes chucked him with an elbow. 'Why aren't you, then? Eh? I know why I'm here, and I know why Arimnestos is here. And I don't think the slaves have any choice. And the tinker thinks there's a meal in it. You, you mad Cretan?'
'Arimnestos is my lord,' the Cretan proclaimed. 'Besides – wherever he goes, there's blood, oceans of it. Never a dull moment. You'll see. I doubted it the first days out of Athens – but here we are.'
I winced at his description of me.
But I recognized it.
'Leave the wagon now,' I said. I turned to the tinker. 'Stay here with the beasts. We'll do the work.'
The peddler was looking at Idomeneus. I put my fist in the peddler's ear and he fell like a sacrifice.
You see it, don't you, thugater?
The tinker turned white, put his back to a tree, and drew his sword.
'Don't fret,' I said. I took the peddler's pack and dumped it. It was full of rags and nothing else. 'He's the spotter for the bandits,' I said. 'Tie him, and don't let him go. We'll be back.'
He didn't protest, and I led my little band off the road, uphill. The slope increases above the road and we took our time. The deer trails had changed, of course, but I got us up to the little meadow where Calchas had once killed a wolf, and cocked an ear for sounds from below. The only real weak point in my plan was the tinker and our wagon.
From above, we could see the ambushers, even through the rain. The gods love irony, and in the best tradition of their laughter, the wagon and the ambushers were only a stade apart or less, so that we could see Tiraeus pacing nervously and we could see the bandits in the trees, waiting for a wagon that was not coming.
'I'll go right down the hillside,' I said. 'You drive them.'
Perhaps it seems foolish that I was going to take on all the bandits myself, using my men as beaters. I was in an odd place – I wanted the fight. I told myself that I'd let this make my decision for me – thief against thief, so to speak. If I fell, that was that.
Another voice said that in fact there was no need for gods, because there were few men in Greece who could stand before me. Perhaps none.
And as I began to kick down the hill, the wet leaves flying from under my boots, I felt old Calchas at my side. How many times had we raced through these woods together, he and I, in pursuit of some quarry?
The bandits saw Idomeneus first, as I had intended. They took too long to realize that this wasn't a chance-met farmer – this was real. The end man rose from his concealment and called a warning and then he was down, his agony a better warning than his shouts.
Hermogenes appeared from behind a boulder, running hard, and he threw a javelin.
Then I was on them. The bandit closest to me was a fool and he neither saw me nor heard me, his whole attention on the crisis at the other end of the ambush.
They had no armour, and they looked more like escaped slaves than mercenaries, although the line between the two can be faint. I put my spear point between his kidneys and ran on.
The whole band broke from cover then. There were about a dozen of them, and they ran for the road, just as a frightened deer might, but I was on the road first, between them and the wagon, and the two Thracians were on the other side of the road. We were five against twelve, but the issue was never in doubt.
When two more of them were dead on my spear, they fell back into the mud-filled hollow where they had intended to take my wagon.
I stopped and wiped my spear blade on a scrap of oily cloth from my pouch. 'Surrender,' I said. 'Surrender, or I'll kill all of you.'
'You can't kill us all,' one scarred wretch said. He had a proper sword – a kopis.
'You're right,' I said. 'My friends would have to kill a couple of you.'
