'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.'
They trembled like sheep.
'Surrender!' I said. 'I am Arimnestos of Plataea. If you drop your weapons, I will spare your lives, by Zeus Soter.'
The man with the kopis threw his spear at Hermogenes and bolted, running right up the face of the dip and away downhill. Hermogenes ducked the spearhead but got the tumbling shaft across his temple and went down. Another bandit broke downhill, but the nearest Thracian speared him like a fisherman on a Thracian river, and the rest dropped their weapons.
'Hold them here,' I said. Calchas was in my head, and I knew what was going to happen as if I had read it on a scroll.
I ran downhill after the man with the sword. He had a long start. But I knew where he was going, and I wanted him to get there.
I ran easily, following the contour of Cithaeron, staying high on the hillside, and after two stades of bush-running, I came to the trail I had used to climb the mountain as a child, and I ran down it, swifter than an eagle.
It was odd, but at first I felt Calchas beside me, and then I felt him in me. I was Calchas. Or perhaps I had become Calchas.
I passed the cabin, running silently on the leaf-mould, and I had just time to slow at the verge of the tomb when my prey burst out of the woods in front of me, eyes wild with panic from whatever ghosts rode him through the woods – I hope that boy was on him. And the panic on his face exploded like a hot rock drenched in water when he saw me. He raised the sword – the same sword he'd used to kill the boy at the top of the pass – and cut at me. I parried high and refused to give ground, so that he slammed into my hip – I turned him, our bodies pressed close by his momentum, and my hip pushed him ever so slightly, and he went sprawling across the stones of the precinct of the hero's tomb. His head hit a stone and his sword hand hit another so hard that the kopis fell from his hand, as if taken by the hero himself.
He tried to rise, coming up on all fours like a beast, and I caught his greasy hair in my left fist and sacrificed him, cutting his throat so that his life flushed out across the cool wet stones, and the hero drank his blood as he had with every bad man that Calchas sent into the dark.
I wiped my sword on his chiton and went to the cabin, such as it was. The years had not been kind, and the bandits had slaughtered a deer badly and left the hanging carcass to rot by the window of horn, the fools.
The wreck of a door was open. Inside, there were two women clinging to the priest. They flinched away from me.
'Empedocles?' I asked gently. And then, when he still looked wild and afraid, I tried a smile. 'It's a rescue,' I said.
'They took my cup,' he said weakly, and fainted. We were quite a crowd by the time the rain stopped. We had nine prisoners and six of us, the two women and the priest. He wasn't in a good way – he had a fever and they had abused him – he had burns – but he was a strong man and he smiled at me.
'Come a long way, eh, apprentice?' he said, when I gave him the sign of the journeyman. He was lying on the cot. We had cleaned the cabin and I had found his cup – the fine cup my father had made him – in the leather bag of the leader. The Thracians were amusing themselves rebuilding the door while Hermogenes and Idomeneus hunted for meat. He frowned. 'Where did you learn that sign?'
I knelt by him. 'Crete, father,' I said.
He coughed. 'Crete? By the gods, boy – you'd have done better in Thebes!' He coughed again. 'Here – give me your hand. That's the sign for Boeotia.'
Then he lay still so long I thought he was asleep, or dead. But when I threw my cloak over him, he managed a smile. 'I saw you,' he said.
'Father?' I asked.
'Sacrificed the bastard,' he said. 'Zeus, you frightened me, son.'
We fed the lot of them on deer meat and barley from our wagon. I let the prisoners stew in their fear. The tinker stayed with me and was enough of a help that I wanted him to stay.
I left the body of their leader across the threshold of the precinct, so that his end was clear to all of them. Let them wonder how it had happened. Divine justice takes many forms. I had just learned that lesson, and it was steadying me; the blackness of three days before was already a memory. And seeing Empedocles – even older, and badly hurt – was a tonic. It reminded me that this life – Boeotia, a world with ordered harvests and strong farmers, a cycle of feasts, a local shrine – it was real. It was not a dream of youth.
Idomeneus wanted to kill the lot of them. Of course, that's what we'd have done at sea. My reluctance puzzled him.
'Different places have different rules,' I told him.
He nodded, happy that there was some reason. 'Wasn't much of a fight,' he said.
'I'm not here to fight,' I said. 'I may go back to smithing. And farming.'
He had finished his deer meat, and we were sharing wine from his mastos cup. He winced, as if I had cut him. 'That's not you, lord,' he said. 'You're no farmer! You are the Spear! Arimnestos the Spear! Men shit themselves rather than face you. You can't be a smith!'
'I'm tired of killing,' I said. In the morning, I sat on a log with all the prisoners. They were a useless lot, beaten men in every way, but they'd behaved like animals when they had the chance – raping the women they'd taken, burning Empedocles, and only the gods knew how many more victims were in the shallow graves behind the tomb.
'You are broken men,' I said.
They stared at me dully, waiting for death.
'I will try to fix you,' I said.
One man, a dirty blond, smiled. 'What will you have us do?' he asked, already aiming to ingratiate with the conqueror.
'We'll start with work,' I said. 'If you displease or disobey, the punishment will be death. There will be no other punishment. Do you understand?'