Free Killer of Men by Christian Cameron Page A

the winter with Calchas. He made me a bow. It wasn’t a very good bow, but with it I learned to shoot squirrels and threaten songbirds. And he took me hunting when the winter was far enough along.
    I still love to hunt, and I owe it to that man. In fact, he taught me more than Miltiades ever did about how to be a lord. We went up the mountain, rising before the sun and running along the trails through the woods after rabbit or deer. He killed a wolf with his bow, and made me carry the carcass home.
    The thing I remember best from that winter is the sight of blood on the snow. I had no idea how much blood an animal has in it. Oh, honey, I’d seen goats and sheep slaughtered, I’d seen the spray of blood at sacrifice. But to do it myself . . .
    I remember killing a deer – a small buck. My first. I hit it with a javelin, more by luck than anything. How Calchas laughed at my surprise. And suddenly, from being big , at least to me, it seemed so small as it lay panting in the snow with my javelin in its guts. It had eyes – it was alive.
    At Calchas’s prompting, I took the iron knife that I’d earned with a beating, and I grabbed the buck’s head and slashed at its throat. It must have taken me eight or ten passes – the poor animal. May Artemis send that I never torment a creature like that again. Its eyes never left me as it died, and there was blood everywhere . It flowed and flowed over me – warm and sticky and then cold and cloying, like guilt. When you get blood under your nails, you can only scrape it out with a knife, did you know that? There’s a moral there, I suspect.
    And I was kneeling in snow – cold on bare knees. The snow filled with the blood like a brilliant red flower. It transported me. It seemed to me to carry a message. There’s a philosopher teaching at Miletus these days who says that a man’s soul is in his blood. I have no trouble seeing it.
    Yes – the story.
    I learned letters, day by day and week by week. When I could make out words on papyrus, the rhythm of our days changed. We would hunt until the sun was high in the sky – or just walk the woods – climbing up and up on Cithaeron until my legs burned as if the fire of the forge was flowing in my ankles, and then back down to the hut to read by the good light of day. And every day we did the dance – the Pyrrhiche . First naked, and then in armour when I was older.
    It was a good life.
    By spring, I was bigger and much stronger, and I could go out in snow wearing a chiton and come back with a rabbit. I understood the tracks animals made in the snow and what they meant, and I understood the tracks men made on paper and what they meant. Once I got it, I got it – I may have been the slowest starter in the history of reading, but after the first winter, I had Hesiod down pat and was off on the Odyssey . Of course it is easier to read a thing when you’ve listened to the story all your life – of course it is, honey. But I loved to read.
    When the snow had gone from the hills and the sun grew warm, Calchas stopped hunting. We’d eaten more meat than I’d ever had in my life, but he said that spring was sacred to Artemis, when animals came down from the high places to mate. ‘I won’t kill again till the feast of Demeter,’ he said. And his lip curled. ‘Unless it’s a man.’
    Oh, yes.
    The man he killed came to rob us. It was six months since I’d been home and Calchas had me running every morning before the sun was up, running and running on the trails behind the shrine. So I was running when the thief came, and the first I knew was when I came back into the clearing, naked and warm, and found Calchas with a sword in his hand. The thief had a machaira , a big knife or a short sword, depending on how you saw it. From where I stood, it was huge.
    ‘Stay well clear, boy,’ Calchas called out to me.
    So I ran around the man. He sounded desperate. ‘Just give me the money ,’ he said.
    ‘No,’ Calchas said. He laughed.
    I