Killer of Men by Christian Cameron Page B

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.
    ‘He was a great warrior,’ Miltiades said. ‘Twice he saved my life in the haze of battle. Once he saved my ship. And he could sing poetry like a bard. He was a gentleman like the heroes of old. May his shade go with theirs, to the island of the blessed, for he was all the old virtues together in one man.’
    Then I wept. I said a few halting words, and the flames rushed up and consumed him.
    But he lives in my words, honey. Honour him. He made me. In a way, he made you. Because he put the skill of arms in me, and because of him, I am not dead.

    His death was the beginning of everything that went wrong.
    Miltiades and I went back home. You might think that I’d have shouted at Pater, but I didn’t. Pater knew – that is, he knew when we were riding away, the day he took me from Calchas. He knew what would happen, and he told the truth. We didn’t kill him. We were like a sword left lying in a tavern, and then used in a murder. We were the instruments of his death.
    I think some of Calchas passed through the skin of my hands and into my heart. I think I became a man while I carried his body, light as dried bone, out to the yard to burn him on his pyre. Is that just memory playing tricks?
    Mater had never met him, but she wept for him, nonetheless – odd, in a way. He had no use for women, and yet a woman who had never known him mourned him. Somehow, it was fitting.
    We kept a three-day vigil at our home, as if he’d been family, and Miltiades joined in – or led us – and that bound him to us even more, and us to him. He sat with Mater and read to her and told her she was beautiful. She drank a little and flirted harmlessly.
    Then Draco and Theron came back, riding donkeys.
    They came into the yard, failure written on their bodies like words on papyrus. Draco dismounted first and he didn’t meet Miltiades’ eyes, but told the story simply and quickly. The Spartans had derided the three of them, called them peasants and rebels, and told them to take their petty attempts at democracy to Athens, where such things are welcome.
    Draco wasn’t a broken man, but he was changed by the experience. He was used to being taken seriously, and he’d been treated like a boor and a dolt. He complained long and hard. Indeed, for