'Myron?' I asked.
Epictetus nodded. 'His son is married to my second,' he said. He looked at Peneleos, and the young man flushed.
'Of course I'll go,' he said. His father drafted a message in heavy-fisted letters, and Peneleos was off across the fields in the fading light.
'You really going to stay?' Epictetus asked as we watched his son run.
'Of course he is,' Hermogenes said. Myron summoned the assembly on the pretence – really the truth – that there was news from Athens. In a city with fewer than four thousand citizens, you can summon the assembly before sunset and expect the majority of your citizens to be standing under the walls in the old olive orchard when the sun rises.
I didn't sleep much, and when I did, Calchas visited me from the dead and told me in a raven's voice that I was no farmer.
I knew that.
I woke in the chilly time before dawn, plucked my face carefully by lamplight with a woman's mirror and took Hermogenes over the hill. We waited among the olive trees by the fork, as we had as children, and we waited until we saw his father come down the hill, alone, walking quickly with a staff. And then behind him, raucous as crows following a raven, came Simon and his sons, four of them.
I risked my whole future by laughing aloud. How much easier it would have been, having crushed the bandits, to cross the valley, slaughter this foul crow and all his people, and blame the criminals? Men might have suspected the truth – men would have known it for vengeance.
But, 'If you would master the killer in you, you must accept that you are not truly free. You must submit to the mastery of the laws of men and gods.' Heraclitus said it to me. It took me a few years to see it. I didn't want to be a landless man or a pirate king.
And yet I remember thinking – even now, I could leave them in a heap before the sun rises another finger's breadth.
Simon started at the sound of the laugh, but then he kept walking to town and for the first time I hated him as deeply as he deserved to be hated. He had killed my father, and he walked like a man who has a hard life. The useless bastard.
We let them lead us by a couple of stades, and then we followed them. I wanted to make sure that they were at the assembly. I rehearsed my speech as I walked and I feasted my revenge on the sight of Simon's back.
Someone had talked. I know that, because by the time I reached the assembly, most of the men of Plataea were already there, and the silence was like a living thing. I was closer behind Simon as he and his sons trudged up the acropolis to the meeting place. The sun was up, and the world was beautiful with autumn splendor. Demeter and Hera had made a perfect day, the sky was blue and justice was close to my hand.
Myron was dressed in white, and he stood on the little rise where the archon always stood. He waited until Simon walked into the crowd. Even Simon noticed that the crowd parted around him, and no man went to stand close to him. But he was a surly man, he had few friends, and perhaps he expected no more. He crossed his arms and his loutish sons stood around him.
I remember that there was one voice that went on and on – Draco. He was trying to sell a man a wagon, and he hadn't noticed the silence. He was hidden by the crowd, but after a while, he understood, or perhaps a neighbour caught him with an elbow.
I meant to be the last, and I waited by a cowshed, watching the latecomers, some hurrying down from the heights through the gated wall, others trotting up the lanes from outlying farms. Myron's sons were both late, still chewing bread. And then Epictetus and his sons came in a group, with Empedocles on a litter. I fell in with them, and we walked into the middle of the assembly and stood before the archon.
Men looked at me, because I had a spear. Perhaps five other men in the crowd had spears, and they were over sixty. And my spear was fine – in a way that farmers seldom decorate a weapon.
A murmur started.
Myron raised his arms, and silence returned. And then, with two other men, priests, he sacrificed a ram.
'You owe me for that,' Epictetus said in a hoarse whisper.
Then the archon raised his hands, wiped the blood and faced the assembly. 'Men of Plataea!' he said. 'I call you to order, the assembly of the men of the city, to make law.'
We gave him three short cheers, and then the whole assembly sang the Paean.
I had imagined that my moment would come immediately, but however long you wait for revenge, there's always delay. In this case, an existing boundary dispute had to be read into the record. I didn't even know the men involved.
While old Myron's voice droned on, I saw Bion spot his son. I saw the change come to his face. And then I saw him look at me.
His grin was wide enough to split his face. He looked away, hiding his reaction from Simon who was not far from him, and then he began to move through the crowd – not towards us, but to stand behind Simon.
Simon took no notice, but other men had marked Bion – he was a popular man – and they followed his eyes, and men began to point and stare, first at Hermogenes – and then at me.
Draco saw me. He threw back his head and laughed.
Myron got to the end of his boundary dispute. 'New business,' he said. 'News from Athens.' He looked out over the assembly. 'Where is the messenger?'
I stepped forward, and men cleared a path for me.
'I have come from Athens,' I said. 'And before that, from Asia, where I was a slave. I have come to accuse Simon son of Simon of the murder of my father – and of selling me into slavery.' I turned, and pointed my spear at Simon, and a path cleared from me to him.
'What can the punishment be,' I asked into the silence, 'for a man who stole my father's farm, his land, his tools and his wife? After stabbing him from behind in the face of the enemy?'
Simon was so surprised that one of his hands clawed the air, as if to push away the words I said.
'Who here does not know Simon the Coward? How many of you stood against the Spartans when my brother died at Oinoe? Who was it who ran from the rear of the phalanx? And when we went against the Thebans? Who shirked, and stood in the rear? Is there a man here who remembers Simon standing his ground? And when we faced the Eretrians – I saw him stab Pater. I saw it.'
'You!' he spluttered. It was nigh on the worst thing he could have said, because his shock and his guilt were writ on his face.
'I am Arimnestos of Plataea!' I roared in my storm-cutter voice. 'I accuse this man of murder!'
He lost his case there, before he opened his mouth to plead.
Mind you, the law doesn't work like an avenging titan. The assembly voted to hear the case, and appointed a jury. And on the spot we argued our cases – this wasn't Athens, and we had no paid orators.
Nor did we have a prison, or guards, or Scythians to take a man and bind him.
The jurors heard our evidence. I had some – and I was determined to use what I had learned in Ephesus and from Miltiades, so I summoned witnesses about Pater's courage and Simon's cowardice, and Simon writhed and his sons glowered. But when the sun began to set in the sky, the jurors went to their dinners and the crowd wandered away, and Simon and his sons headed back up the road to the farm.
I followed them. All of Epictetus's sons were with me, and Hermogenes and his father, and Myron's sons. In every way but the decision of the jurors, the trial was over. We followed them up the road, and hounded them until they reached my lane.
'Stop,' I said.
They cringed.
'Simon,' I said, and he turned. He was shaking. His sons stood away from him – I think in revulsion.
'Take your chattels and go,' I said. 'Or the law will kill you.'
He turned away from me, a shadow of the angry man he'd once been in my father's andron. Honey, I think what he had done had eaten him, until he had nothing left but an angry shell, like the outside of a thorn apple eaten by worms.