They nodded. We all understood him.
'So I watch out for the good of Athens,' he went on. 'Athens needs Plataea. Plataea needs Athens. Sparta will take your alliance – and later he'll shove it up your arse.' His crudity hit them hard. He was a brilliant speaker, capable of using all words, big and small, rough and elegant, and he could modify his text to his audience, a wonderful talent. But most of all, he was a charismatic man. Later I saw him in an assembly of thousands, and his words carried an army. At close quarters, he was as deadly in argument as he was in combat.
Epictetus frowned. 'What do we do, lord? We did not seek to displease you.'
Miltiades shook his head. 'My fault for not voicing my desire openly. I shouldn't have made you guess. I'm not usually so coy. I want this alliance. I want Plataea welded to Athens with bonds of bronze and iron.' He grinned his infectious grin. 'Well, we'll see. Your embassy will be back soon enough. Doubtless the Spartans will accept and shaft you later, but perhaps I can speak sense into you before that.' He laughed. 'I'll go and visit the old soldier on the hill. Calchas. Do you know him?'
Pater glanced at me. 'He was my son's tutor,' he said.
Miltiades gave me an appraising glance. 'Really? Old Calchas took you on? What did he teach you?'
'Reading,' Pater said quickly.
'Hunting,' I said, before I knew what I was saying.
Pater frowned, but Miltiades smiled. 'You hunt? Take me in the morning, lad. We'll have a fine time.'
'He is my son,' my father said carefully.
'I understand,' Miltiades answered. We went up the mountain together. I rode his horse, my arms around his waist and a bundle of javelins in my fists. I showed him my prize spear and he looked it over carefully and admitted that it was a fine one for a lad my age. I realized that I was striving for his approbation with every breath. I never wondered why his slave had stayed on the farm, or why he didn't lend me his slave's horse, although, in truth, I probably couldn't have ridden her.
It took us less than an hour to cross the valley and mount the slopes to the shrine. We rode into the green meadow and dismounted. I ran to the door of the hut, but Calchas didn't answer my knock. The sun was just rising, and Miltiades was fully active – he was never a sluggard, even with a skinful of wine.
He had a fine canteen, covered in leather, and he spilled a libation to the hero. Then he tethered his horse and we went up the trails behind the tomb at a run. He was in magnificent shape – I've seldom seen a man with a better command of his body – and we ran six or seven stades without stopping, until we were high in the oak forest.
'I thought we might catch up with the old bastard,' Lord Miltiades said. He was scarcely panting.
'No tracks on the trail,' I said. I was breathing hard.
Again, the lord looked at me carefully. 'Good eye,' he said. 'Can you find me a buck, lad?'
So we moved quietly across the mountainside. It took me an hour to get the spoor of an animal, and another hour – the sun was getting too high – to put the small buck between us. I charged it, yelling hard, and it broke away from me, running for its life right at the Athenian.
But I hadn't seen the other buck. He was a magnificent animal, as big as a small horse, and in autumn he'd have carried a rack of antlers big enough to sell. Even in high summer he had started his horns. He rose out of a tangle of brush, crashed shoulder to shoulder with the younger buck, spilling him and saving his life, and sprang. His leap was so high and so hard that Miltiades stood with his mouth open, his javelin cocked and forgotten in his hand, as the buck sailed over his head.
We didn't touch either animal. Miltiades slapped me on the back. 'You can stalk,' he said. 'Not your fault I missed my throw, boy. And what an animal! Artemis held my hand – I felt her cool fingers on my wrist, I swear. That beast must be her special love.'
We walked down the mountain together. The sun was too high to try again. I potted a rabbit foolish enough to sit in the middle of the trail eating a leaf, and Miltiades praised my throw, sweet praise such as I never received at home.
Yet he was not just a flatterer. He made me throw for him six or seven times, and he adjusted my body each time, correcting my tendency to advance my right foot too much, and there was none of the urgency to his touch that I'd felt with Calchas. He taught well, and when he threw his own spear, a heavy longche that I would be hard-pressed to toss across the meadow, he threw it as Zeus on high throws a bolt of lightning.
I was worshipping him by the time we returned to Calchas's hut and the shrine.
'I wanted to see him,' Miltiades said.
'I'll fetch him out,' I said, bold as brass. 'Lord, he may be a little drunk.'
Miltiades laughed. 'You fetch him out of there,' he said. 'I'll sober him up – or give him some decent wine, better than the piss you peasants drink.'
It was the first time I'd heard Miltiades speak ill of us. He could only guard his tongue so long.
Ah, listen, honey. He was not a bad man, as powerful men go. He saved Greece. He was good to me. But he was used to the finest horses, the most beautiful women. It was our foolishness that made us think he was happy to drink sour wine with peasants in Boeotia.
I climbed in through the window of horn. I'd done it dozens of times – once to steal the bow. I told you that story.
As soon as I got it open – the stick I'd whittled to prise the window open was still leaning where I'd left it – flies came out, buzzing like some evil thing. In Canaan, men call the lord of the dead the 'Lord of the Flies'. It was just like that – as if all the flies made a single creature and moved with one will.
I dropped from the sill into the room, and it smelled of old leather and bad food. At first I thought he had gone, leaving a rotten haunch of venison and an old brown cloak on the deer's carcass in the middle of the floor.
But, of course, he was there.
The details came to me one at a time, although I think I understood as soon as the flies buzzed past me in the window. The odd shaft of light over the deer carcass was shining on the sword. The sword was stuck, hilt first, into the floorboards. There was no deer carcass.
Calchas had wedged his sword into the floor and fallen on it. He had done it so long before that the brown cloak was just his hair and the last of his skin over his bones.
How long since I had crossed the valley and left a sacrifice at the tomb? How many times had I come when he already lay here, dead? I wonder, in a way, if I had already known, because I had said my goodbyes and I didn't weep. I went to the door, unbarred it and found the bronze-shod shovel Pater had made for him with his athlete's pick. I carried them out into the yard and went straight to the tomb. Miltiades called something but I didn't listen. Instead, I began to dig.
I didn't see Miltiades go to the hut, but I know that before the sun rose much higher, he was at my side, his lord's hands digging in the earth with mine. We did a proper job.
'Not much to burn,' Miltiades said, when I began to pile up the winter's supply of wood in the yard. It was old wood, and a little rotten. He hadn't cut more, nor had he burned much, last winter. This was the wood I had cut while training.
I piled it high. I was tempted to burn the cottage, but I knew that another man would come to mind the tomb. Why ruin it for him?
Then I went in and spread my cloak on the floor. I lifted his corpse and put it gently on the good wool. Some pieces of him fell away. I was not squeamish. I filled my cloak and carried him into the yard. I put copper coins in the empty sockets of his skull and set the bag of my cloak and his bones on top of the woodpile, then Miltiades got a flame going with his fire kit.