'Will you feed us, master?' another man said.
'Yes,' I said. They were ugly, those men. As far from the virtue that Heraclitus taught as Briseis was from an old hag in Piraeus. But I understood that the principal difference between us was that my hand still held a sword.
Their first task was to dig up all the shallow graves. There were fifteen – ten men and five women. None of the corpses was very old, and the task horrified them. That pleased me.
We made a pyre and purified the bodies, and then we sent their spirits to the underworld avenged, the old way, at least in Boeotia, and their ashes went into the hero's tomb, where they could share in the criminal's blood, or that's how I understood it from Calchas. The women wept as we poured the oil we had over the bodies. The two who survived had known some of the others.
I didn't ask them any questions.
It took us three days to restore the cabin and to dispose of the victims. We raked the yard, and we cut firewood, and we cleaned the tomb. I poured wine on Calchas's grave each day.
Each night, I lay awake, thinking.
On the third day, Empedocles' fever broke and he began to recover quickly.
That night, Hermogenes came and sat by me as I looked at the stars shining down into the clearing by the tomb.
'I understand,' he said.
I put my hand on his. 'Thanks,' I said.
'But it has to be done,' he said.
'I had to put my own house in order,' I said, 'before I go to my father's.'
'This is not your house,' he said. Hermogenes lived in a very literal world.
'Yes,' I said. 'This is my house.' The two women had been farm slaves across the river. After some conversation, and some halting answers, I set on a course of action with Hermogenes.
I left Idomeneus at the shrine. Ah, thugater, you smile. Well might you smile. I left him with the Thracians as helpers, and I told the Thracians that they were halfway to their freedom. They both nodded like the serious men they were. Tiraeus came – he was already oikia by then. One of mine.
I left my armour and all my weapons, except my good spear. A serious man in Boeotia may walk abroad with a spear. I wore a good wool chiton, and my only concession to my recent life was the necklace.
We put Empedocles in the wagon with the two women and walked down the mountain, across the valley and up the hill.
I stopped at the fork where one lane ran up the hill – the lane of my childhood. And another ran down and away, into the flat lands by the river – Epictetus's lane. Even alone, or with Hermogenes, I knew I could go up that golden lane to my father's house, drench it in blood and make it mine in an hour. I stood there long enough, despite my resolve, that Hermogenes cleared his throat nervously, and I found that I was standing with my hand on my sword hilt.
Then I turned my back on my father's lane and walked downhill.
Coming into Epictetus's farmyard, I felt remarkably like Odysseus, especially when a farm dog came and smelled my hand, turned and gave a friendly bark – not a cry of joy, but a bark of acceptance.
Peneleos – the old man's younger son – came down into the courtyard from the women's balcony. His face was reserved. He admitted later that he had no idea who I was. But he knew Hermogenes.
'There's a friend!' he called. I saw a bow move in another window, and I realized that the bandits must have preyed on all these farms. I can be a fool.
'Peneleos!' I called. 'It's me – Arimnestos.'
He started as if he'd seen a ghost, then we embraced, although we'd never been that close. And his brothers came to the yard, the eldest carrying a bow.
'You're alive!' he said. 'Your sister will go wild!'
And then the old man himself came into the yard. 'They don't sound like thieves!' he said in an old man's voice.
It was hard to see Epictetus as an old man. Of course, I'd thought that he was older than dirt as a child, but I'd seen differently at Oinoe. He was starting to bend at the waist, and he had a heavy staff, but his back straightened when he saw me, and the arms he put around me were strong. 'You came back,' he said, as if he'd just made a hard bargain, but a good one. He reached up and fingered my necklace. 'Huh,' he said. But he gave me the lower half of a grin to take the sting out of the grunt. 'What kept you?' he asked.
'I was taken as a slave,' I said.
'Huh!' he said in a different voice. He had started as a slave. Then he put his head over the edge of the wagon bed. 'Say!' he said.
'We broke the bandits,' Hermogenes said. He was still being embraced, now by a bevy of Boeotian maidens – Epictetus's daughters. The eldest, who had once been offered to me, was a matron of five years' marriage to Draco's eldest, and she had a fair-haired boy just five years old and a daughter of four.
Looking at her stopped me in my tracks, because seeing her was like living another life. Not that I'd ever loved her – simply that in another one of Heraclitus's infinite worlds, I might have wed her, and those would have been my children, and I would have had no more blood on my sword than I got at the yearly sacrifice. That other world seemed real when I looked at her, and her children.
Epictetus the Younger, now a tall man with a heavy beard, lifted the two slaves down from the wagon.
'Thera's,' he said. 'The bandits killed her and took all her women – and her slaves joined them.' He looked at me. 'I guess they're yours, now.'
That stopped all conversation.
'Simon has my father's farm,' I said into the silence.
'Aye,' Epictetus the Elder said.
I nodded. 'He killed my father,' I said. 'A blade in the back while you fought the men of Eretria.'
All the men present winced. The silence stretched on and on, and then old Epictetus nodded.
'Thought so,' he said, and spat.
'What're you going to do?' Peneleos asked.
'You broke the bandits?' Epictetus the Younger asked. 'You and – who?'
His father understood. 'You going to kill him?' he asked. Epictetus didn't even care where I'd been, how we'd broken the bandits – none of that mattered. He had my right hand in his, and the calluses on my palm told him all he needed to know.
His question returned the courtyard to silence.
I helped his son lift the priest down from the wagon. 'I came to talk to you about that,' I said.
'You want to call him before the assembly?' Epictetus asked later, over bean soup.
I nodded.
Hermogenes shrugged. 'I thought we were just going to kill him,' he said apologetically.
'And then what?' I asked. 'Start a bandit gang? This is Boeotia, not Ionia. What would the archon say if I butchered him and moved into the farm. And hasn't he married my mother? He has sons – do I kill them all?'
'Yes,' Peneleos said. 'Bastards every one. Sorry, Ma.'
I shook my head. 'Law,' I said.
Empedocles was sitting up and taking broth. He saw through me as if I was a pane of horn. 'You could do it,' he said. 'Buy a few judges with that trinket around your neck. Men around here remember you and your father. He died fighting for the city – everyone knows that. Hades, I'm from Thebes and I know it. Kill the bastard – and his brood, if you must. No one will hold it against you.'
I was stunned. 'You're the philosopher.'
Empedocles shook his head. 'I'm interested in how the world works,' he said. 'And heed the words of Pythagoras – there are no laws but these, to do good for your friends and to do harm to your enemies.'
Epictetus the Elder looked at me as if I was a good milk cow on the auction block. 'You plan to live here?' he asked. 'Or will you go away again?'
'Live here,' I said.
He nodded. 'Assembly, then.' He looked around his table, absolute master in his own house. 'No talk of this until the assembly. I'll arrange it. The archon was your father's friend, after all.'