Christian Cameron - Killer of Men

Pater laughed and the moment passed, but I would have died for Miltiades then. Of course, I almost did. Later.

And the next day I went back to my priest on the mountain, and it seemed as if all hope of glory was lost.

I spent the winter with Calchas. He made me a bow. It wasn't a very good bow, but with it I learned to shoot squirrels and threaten songbirds. And he took me hunting when the winter was far enough along.

I still love to hunt, and I owe it to that man. In fact, he taught me more than Miltiades ever did about how to be a lord. We went up the mountain, rising before the sun and running along the trails through the woods after rabbit or deer. He killed a wolf with his bow, and made me carry the carcass home.

The thing I remember best from that winter is the sight of blood on the snow. I had no idea how much blood an animal has in it. Oh, honey, I'd seen goats and sheep slaughtered, I'd seen the spray of blood at sacrifice. But to do it myself…

I remember killing a deer – a small buck. My first. I hit it with a javelin, more by luck than anything. How Calchas laughed at my surprise. And suddenly, from being big, at least to me, it seemed so small as it lay panting in the snow with my javelin in its guts. It had eyes – it was alive.

At Calchas's prompting, I took the iron knife that I'd earned with a beating, and I grabbed the buck's head and slashed at its throat. It must have taken me eight or ten passes – the poor animal. May Artemis send that I never torment a creature like that again. Its eyes never left me as it died, and there was blood everywhere. It flowed and flowed over me – warm and sticky and then cold and cloying, like guilt. When you get blood under your nails, you can only scrape it out with a knife, did you know that? There's a moral there, I suspect.

And I was kneeling in snow – cold on bare knees. The snow filled with the blood like a brilliant red flower. It transported me. It seemed to me to carry a message. There's a philosopher teaching at Miletus these days who says that a man's soul is in his blood. I have no trouble seeing it.

Yes – the story.

I learned letters, day by day and week by week. When I could make out words on papyrus, the rhythm of our days changed. We would hunt until the sun was high in the sky – or just walk the woods – climbing up and up on Cithaeron until my legs burned as if the fire of the forge was flowing in my ankles, and then back down to the hut to read by the good light of day. And every day we did the dance – the Pyrrhiche. First naked, and then in armour when I was older.

It was a good life.

By spring, I was bigger and much stronger, and I could go out in snow wearing a chiton and come back with a rabbit. I understood the tracks animals made in the snow and what they meant, and I understood the tracks men made on paper and what they meant. Once I got it, I got it – I may have been the slowest starter in the history of reading, but after the first winter, I had Hesiod down pat and was off on the Odyssey. Of course it is easier to read a thing when you've listened to the story all your life – of course it is, honey. But I loved to read.

When the snow had gone from the hills and the sun grew warm, Calchas stopped hunting. We'd eaten more meat than I'd ever had in my life, but he said that spring was sacred to Artemis, when animals came down from the high places to mate. 'I won't kill again till the feast of Demeter,' he said. And his lip curled. 'Unless it's a man.'

Oh, yes.

The man he killed came to rob us. It was six months since I'd been home and Calchas had me running every morning before the sun was up, running and running on the trails behind the shrine. So I was running when the thief came, and the first I knew was when I came back into the clearing, naked and warm, and found Calchas with a sword in his hand. The thief had a machaira, a big knife or a short sword, depending on how you saw it. From where I stood, it was huge.

'Stay well clear, boy,' Calchas called out to me.

So I ran around the man. He sounded desperate. 'Just give me the money,' he said.

'No,' Calchas said. He laughed.

I was getting a chill. It wasn't summer, and I was naked. And the man with the sword had the same desperation in his voice I had heard from Simon.

Calchas backed away to the tomb and the thief followed him. 'Just give me the money!' he shouted.

Calchas sidestepped the thief's clumsy advance. Suddenly the thief had his back to the tomb. 'Just give me-' he asked, and he sounded as if he was begging.

Calchas raised his sword. 'I dedicate your shade to the hero Leitos,' he said. And then the thief's head fell from his shoulders, and blood sprayed.

I had seen Calchas kill animals, and I knew how deadly he was. So I didn't flinch. I watched him arrange the corpse so that the rest of the blood poured out on to the beehive of the tomb. A man has even more blood than a deer.

I went in and put some clothes on and my hands shook.

Later we buried the corpse. Calchas didn't pray over it. 'I sent him to serve the hero,' Calchas said. 'He needs no prayers. Poor bastard.' He and I buried the thief by digging with a pick and a wooden shovel, and in the process of burying him I realized that there was a circle of graves around the tomb.

Calchas shrugged. 'The gods send one every year,' he said.

That night he got very drunk.

Next day I ran and played all day, because he didn't get up except to warm some beans.

But the third day, when I came back from running, I asked him if he'd teach me to use the sword.

'Spear first,' he said. 'Sword later.' I'm telling this out of order, but I have to say that the only problem I had with Calchas and lessons was that, once I had my nine-year-old growth spurt, he wanted me. As soon as he put his hands on me, that first day, teaching me the spear, I knew what he wanted.

I didn't want it. There are boys who do, and boys who don't. Right? Girls the same, I imagine. So I kept away from his hands. He could have forced himself on me, but he wasn't that way. He just waited, and hoped, and whenever he touched my hips or my flanks, I'd either flinch or go still. He got the message and nothing had to be said.

It was a shame, in a way. He was a good man and an unhappy one. He needed friends, drinking companions and a life. Instead, he taught a boy who didn't love him and listened to the sins of wandering mercenaries. I have no idea what he had done or where, but he had condemned himself to death.

Sometimes good people do sad things, honey. And when a person decides to die, they die. I believe that Calchas lived a little longer to teach me. Or maybe I just like to think that. Summer came, and I went home to help bring in the barley. I could read, and Calchas sent me home with a scroll to follow while I was away from him – the ship list from the Iliad. And I told him that Mater had scrolls of Theognis, and he asked me to borrow them for him.

My house was different.

Pater was rich. No other way to put it. We had three slave families tilling. I was almost superfluous to reaping, although I put in one hard day setting the sheaves. Mostly I read aloud to Mater, who was the friendliest I can ever remember her. She was drunk when I arrived, and ashamed of her state. But she sobered up by the next morning and bustled about the place. The irony of it was that she could, by then, have acted like a lady. There were six or seven slave women – I didn't even know their names. There was a new building in the yard – a slave house.

My sister had changed. She was seven, and sharp-tongued, busy teaching her elders their business. She had a fine pottery-and-cloth doll from the east that she treasured. She sat in the sun and told me stories of her precious doll Cassandra, and I listened gravely.