And this is the lesson. Remember that I said, when I sat at Oinoe, that I had learned that you could kill, and rape, and force others to your will?
Perhaps you can, for a time. But the gods are there. They do watch. Simonalkes needed no punishment from me. He wore his failure, his cowardice, his alienation, on his face. He was no Plataean, though he had occupied my house while I was a slave. AndI – I was welcome back. He lived an exile in his own house – and if I was a poet, I might say that I'd carried Plataea with me wherever I wandered.
I would submit to the mastery of the laws of men and gods.
I went back to Epictetus's house, and slept well. In the morning, none of Simon's Corvaxae came to the trial. The jurors sent two men to find them.
They came back to say that Simon was hanging by a leather rope from the rafters of the bronze shop, and the sons were gone, and my mother was too drunk to speak.
And so, about noon, on a beautiful day, I walked up that long hill, past the olive trees, past the byres and the grape vines. Bion and Hermogenes walked with me, and Empedocles, moving slowly, and Epictetus, and their sons, and Myron and his sons, and Draco and his sons.
I could hear the swarm of flies on the corpse in the shop.
I was numb.
But the men around me held me up, the way men do in the phalanx when you are wounded. The shields of their friendship covered me. The spears of their humour kept the furies at bay. They were there – the furies, baying for his blood, revelling in the accomplishment of their task – I could feel them on the air.
We walked up into the yard, and then my sister was in my arms, saying my name over and over.
I held Pen a long time, and then I put her down.
'You are all my neighbours and my friends,' I said. 'But I need to clean my own house.'
Every man there nodded, even the youngest. Some things you have to do yourself.
I never promised you a happy story, Honey. It has glad parts, and sad parts, like life.
I went upstairs to Mater. She was drunk – but she knew me. She had a knife – a good bronze knife. Pater's work. She'd tried it on her wrists a few times, and there was blood on her linen and on her arms and, incongruously, some on her feet. Her skin was old, and the blood found folds to run in.
She burst into tears when she saw me.
'Oh!' she wailed. 'I meant to be dead when you came, and now I am a coward as well as everything else.'
I took the knife from her, my strength against her weakness. And then I took the water from her table and washed her, and I bound up the slashes – the inadequate slices – on her wrists.
'He killed Pater,' I said.
'I know,' she said. She raised her head, and a touch of her pride came back. 'I never let them have Pen,' she said. Not an excuse. Just a statement.
So many types of strength, and so many types of weakness, too.
When she was clean, I got Pen to help me get her dressed, and then I went to my next task.
I went into the shop, and I climbed the rafters alone and cut Simon down. He smelled like a new-killed deer, all blood and meat and ordure. It was the smell of hunting and battlefields. The smell that attracts ravens.
I took the corpse to the wagon, and I drove it – scarcely a thought in my head, to tell the truth – across the valley and up the ridge. I spent that night at the tomb, with Idomeneus. In the morning, we burned Simon on the pyre with the dead thief, and sprinkled their ashes across the tomb. Broken men, sacrificed. But what broke them?
Later, Idomeneus had the criminals scrubbing the tomb's round stones with brushes he had them make themselves. I fed my oxen and turned both wagons for home.
A man came up the road from Eleutherai with an aspis on his back and a beaten Thracian cap on his head. I didn't know him, but I knew the look. He came up the hill like a man doing a serious job, and when he reached the tomb, he took a canteen from under his arm and poured a libation. Then he hung his aspis on the great oak tree by the cabin.
'Is the priest here?' he asked. His eyes were a little wild. His hands shook a little.
I let the oxen stand. I sat him on the cabin's step and fed him some wine.
He was still telling about the campaign in Caria when Idomeneus came and sat with us. The mercenary's name was Ajax, and he'd known Cyrus and Pharnakes. He told us how Pharnakes died, and his hands shook. He'd served with the Medes against the Carians. Sitting at the hero's tomb in Boeotia, that didn't matter a fart. We were brothers, all of us, in an ugly brotherhood of spilt blood and terror.
When I left, they were weeping together. Neither cared when the oxen clumped out of the clearing. I took the wagon over Asopus, and when I reached the fork, I stopped and just breathed.
I took my time going up the hill. Over our gate was a wreath of laurel, and there were men in the courtyard, and there was a fire outside the smithy, and the old priest stood with Pen and Peneleos.
I laughed. 'I'm home,' I said.
Epilogue
My voice is gone, and I've talked enough – your stylus hand must hurt like a swordsman's after a long fight, lad. And you, lady – I must have run you out of blushes by now. And you, honey – you've yawned more than a child at lessons. Although you were kind enough to weep for your grandmother.
Aye, there's more. Come again after the feast of Demeter, and I'll tell you of how I next met Briseis – how I lost the farm, and won it back – how the men of Plataea stood against the Medes at Marathon.
Now there's a story.