Read Online Killer of Men by Christian Cameron - Free Book Online

the spring and the tomb as home . From the edge of the tomb I could see our hill rising thirty stades away, and when I was homesick I would climb the round stones to the top, lie on the beehive roof and look across the still air to home. And often enough he would send me back on errands – because we paid him in wine and olive oil and bread and cheese, and because he was a kind man for all that his eyes were dead. He’d wait until I cried myself to sleep a few nights, and then he’d send me home on an errand without my asking.
    That whole first autumn, I learned my letters and nothing else. For hours every day, and then we’d scour his wooden dishes and his one bronze pitcher, a big thing that had no doubt been a donation in the ancient past. He didn’t speak much, except to teach. He simply taught me the letters, over and over again, endlessly patient where Pater would have been screaming in frustration.
    I’d like to say that I was a quick learner, but I wasn’t. It was early autumn, and everything was golden, and I was an outdoor boy caught in his lessons. I wanted to watch the eagles play in the high air, and the woods around the shrine fascinated me, because they were so deep and dark. One day I saw a deer – my first – and then a boar.
    I felt as if I had fallen into the land of myth.
    Travellers sometimes came over the mountain to the shrine. Not many, but a few. They were always men, and they often carried weapons, a rare sight down in the valley. Calchas would send me away, then he’d sit with the men and drink a cup of wine.
    They were soldiers, of course. Soldiers came to the shrine from all over Boeotia, because the word was that the shrine and the spring provided healing to men of war. I think it was Calchas who healed them. He talked and they listened, and they went away lighter by a few darics and some care. Sometimes he’d get drunk afterwards, but mostly he’d go and say some prayers at the shrine of the hero, and then he’d make us some barley gruel.
    His food was terrible, and always the same – black bread, bean broth without meat, water. I’ve lived in a Spartan mess group and eaten better. At the time I cared little. Food was fuel.
    Calchas had fascinating things in his hut. He had an aspis as fine as Pater’s – a great bowl of bronze and wood, with a snake painted in red and a hundred dents in the surface. He had a sword – a long sword with a narrow blade, nothing like Pater’s long knife. He had a dull helmet – a simple one, not a fancy Corinthian like Pater’s – and his cuirass consisted of layers of white leather scarred and scuffed and patched a hundred times without a scrap of bronze to brighten it. He had a fine hunting spear, beautifully made by a master, with a long tapering point of steel, chased and carefully inlaid in the Median style, and a bow of foreign work with a quiver of arrows.
    He was content to let me touch it all, which I was never allowed with Pater’s kit. All except the bow.
    So naturally, I had to steal the bow.
    It wasn’t hard. His hut had one piece of ornamentation – a window made from panes of horn pressed thin and flat. It let light in, in the winter, and it was beautifully crafted, the gift of some rich patron. It was made to pivot on a pair of bronze pintles cunningly fashioned. Calchas used to laugh about it. He called it the ‘Gate of Horn’ and said all his dreams came through it – and he also called it the ‘Lord’s Window’. ‘A foolish thing to have in a peasant’s hut,’ he said, although that window alone allowed me to read in the winter.
    I had soon learned that I could get in and out of that window. I whittled a stick with my sharp iron knife so that I could prise the window open from outside. I waited till he was drunk, then got in and took the bow and quiver and ran off up one of the hundreds of paths that led from the clearing by the spring. I found my way to a small meadow with an old stump, spotted on an earlier