Before I got done saying that I had thrown myself into the sea, he raised his hand.
‘We never thought you were dead,’ he said. ‘A man came — oh, two years ago — and asked a great many questions about you. I didn’t kill him. He said his master knew you.’
I shrugged. ‘Did this master have a name?’ I asked.
Idomeneaus’s mad eyes glittered. ‘Who could forget a name like Anarchos?’ he said, and I knew. I had shot my mouth off, and Anarchos sent a slave to check up on me — and all that information went straight to the tyrant of Syracusa.
Before I could begin again, a horse — an actual horse — trotted up, its hooves crisp against the stones of the road by the tomb. I felt as if I’d seen a ghost — it was Gelon.
‘You — here?’ I asked.
He laughed. ‘Well — you made me a citizen,’ he said. Gelon had been a mercenary — one of my cousin’s men. I’d enslaved him, but freed him for Marathon. He was Sicilian. He laughed to find that I’d been a slave and a mercenary for years — in Sicily.
‘I’m a farmer,’ Gelon said. ‘I married Hilarion’s daughter.’ He shrugged.
So I told my story — again. It was getting more polished with each telling, but I still couldn’t hide that I’d mistreated Lydia, and men shifted or looked away. Heroes are supposed to be better than that. I left a few things out, but I told the whole of my recent meetings with Briseis and the Medes. Many of the men around the fire had lived through all my early days, and they deserved to know.
It grew quite late — we digressed a great deal. In the end, it was not Idomeneaus, but Gelon, who put the question.
‘What will you do about your cousins?’ he asked.
I shrugged. ‘What do you think I should do?’ I asked.
Idomeneaus spat. ‘Kill them all. Right now, before dawn. Every man here will carry a sword.’ He grinned his mad grin, and his teeth shone in the firelight. ‘Listen, lord, we never stopped having the training just because you were. . gone. We still have hunts on the mountainside. We’ve poured wine on the tomb for you — and every man here is one of ours. The Epilektoi.’
‘You have not changed,’ I said to him, and I smiled in case the mad bastard took it as an insult.
He wagged his head. ‘Is there any other answer?’
I looked at Gelon. He looked away. ‘You could try talking to them,’ he said.
Idomeneaus spat in contempt.
‘Would they talk?’ I asked.
‘They are not bad men, and they have brought money and work,’ Gelon said, and Lysius nodded.
‘They are not like Simon,’ he said simply. ‘They work hard.’
‘By now they know you are alive, and here,’ Idomeneaus said. ‘Strike now, before it is too late. Plataea has politics, now. Myron is not what he was. Strike, and remind all these peasants what you are — who you are. Above the law. A lord.’
Bellerophon winced. ‘Lord, I’ll stand by you,’ he said. ‘But. .’ He met Idomeneaus’s eye. And held it. ‘Glare all you like, priest.’
They all looked at me — even Hector.
I remember how clearly I saw what I would do. ‘Tomorrow, I will go and visit my brother-in-law over by Thespiae. All of you go home.’ I smiled at Idomeneaus. ‘It’s good to see you, you mad bastard, but I won’t stage a bloodbath just to assuage your boredom. Go to sea with me if you need blood — we have buckets of it. I intend to try conversation. If that fails. .’ I nodded. ‘Then I’ll kill them all. Not before.’
Almost everyone nodded. Idomeneaus simply got up, collected his spear, and walked off into the darkness. But I saw on his face that I had disappointed him. He paused. ‘The sea is making you soft,’ he said. ‘These men have insulted you, and you must exterminate them, or be held weak.’
I remember that I shrugged. ‘Only a fool thinks me weak,’ I said. It was not a brag. It was true.
No one rose with the dawn. We’d sat up too late and there were hard heads. I looked around the clearing — now with a fine house and a small tilled field behind the tomb — and thought of Calchas and his cabin and his black broth. The exercises he made me do. I went to the smaller clearing among the great oaks where he used to drill me on my spear fighting, and I stood in the early morning sun and lifted weights and then practised the sword-draw I’d seen the Spartans do. I knew it, but the idea of practising it until the draw, the cut and the return to the scabbard were second nature — that was a very Spartan idea, and yet I liked it.
When everyone was up, we rode west, across the Asopus, skirting the town. I saw our farm. It was odd to see it without the tower I’d built, and with a new stone house stuccoed white in the sun. It was quite a pretty house, and already had a grape arbour.
My cousins had done well, and they’d been there a few years.
We took the road north and west, over the low hills, seventy easy stades to Thespiae, and we arrived at my brother-in-law’s house in the late afternoon to find my sister Penelope waiting in the yard.
She had her hands on her hips, and she started telling me what she thought of my five-year absence as soon as we were inside her gate. And then she burst into tears and threw her arms around me, and I confess I joined her in tears.
‘Don’t you ever!’ she cried, and other things that, when related, sound foolish, but at the time are very painful to hear.
My oarsmen and Brasidas had the good grace to vanish. Antigonus, who had met the Spartan at the Olympics, had beaten us home by a day by the land route, and he led my gentlemen into his elegant courtyard while admiring our horses and shouting for wine — really a superior display of aristocratic social skills, especially as he ruthlessly failed to save me from my sister’s righteous anger.
Pen went on for a bit, describing what she thought of a man who tried to kill himself — she suggested that slavery at a Phoenician oar was better than what I deserved. I hung my head in shame.
Then she embraced me again, calling my name and praising the gods.
‘And you don’t even ask about your daughter,’ she spat.
‘Daughter?’ I asked — rather automatically. I thought of Apollonasia again — a slave girl.
‘My niece,’ Penelope shot at me. Then she put a hand to her mouth.
It must have been on my face.
And then — well, then it all came out.
Euphonia died in childbirth. That I knew. But what I didn’t know — in my post-battle blackness, in the soul-crushing horror that afflicted me when my wife died before I could reach her — what I didn’t know was that she’d borne me a healthy daughter — as it turned out, perfectly healthy, even though she’d had the cord wrapped around her throat and almost died with my poor wife.
And they called the little thing Euphonia. We often do, in Boeotia, when a child takes its mother’s place — that’s a nice way of putting it, anyway.
Suddenly, my hands were shaking.
I had a child?
I do not remember walking into Penelope’s house and into the women’s quarters — only standing by a handsome pine table with a beautiful young girl bowing to me, and Penelope saying, ‘This is your father, child.’
My little blond daughter smiled like an imp, hugged my outstretched hands and let herself be embraced without reserve.
‘Oh!’ she said. ‘I’ve always wanted a father!’
Well.
Call me a fool if you like, but to my mind Euphonia — and her unreserved love, instantly given — was the gift of the gods to me for sparing my cousins. That’s how I saw it then, and time has not changed my mind. Had I exterminated them in a night of blood, I promise you I would have found her cold and indifferent.
Believe what you will!
I’m not sure I had been so happy in all my life as I was that day, and I carried my daughter up and down stairs and hugged her and talked to her. She laughed and talked — and talked and talked — and I learned that she had two dolls, that she could read and write, that she was going to memorise all of the Iliad and the Odyssey and that she hoped to make a pot herself on the potter’s wheel in Thespiae and. .