Free Killer of Men by Christian Cameron Page B

was getting a chill. It wasn’t summer, and I was naked. And the man with the sword had the same desperation in his voice I had heard from Simon.
    Calchas backed away to the tomb and the thief followed him. ‘Just give me the money!’ he shouted.
    Calchas sidestepped the thief’s clumsy advance. Suddenly the thief had his back to the tomb. ‘Just give me—’ he asked, and he sounded as if he was begging.
    Calchas raised his sword. ‘I dedicate your shade to the hero Leitos,’ he said. And then the thief’s head fell from his shoulders, and blood sprayed.
    I had seen Calchas kill animals, and I knew how deadly he was. So I didn’t flinch. I watched him arrange the corpse so that the rest of the blood poured out on to the beehive of the tomb. A man has even more blood than a deer.
    I went in and put some clothes on and my hands shook.
    Later we buried the corpse. Calchas didn’t pray over it. ‘I sent him to serve the hero,’ Calchas said. ‘He needs no prayers. Poor bastard.’ He and I buried the thief by digging with a pick and a wooden shovel, and in the process of burying him I realized that there was a circle of graves around the tomb.
    Calchas shrugged. ‘The gods send one every year,’ he said.
    That night he got very drunk.
    Next day I ran and played all day, because he didn’t get up except to warm some beans.
    But the third day, when I came back from running, I asked him if he’d teach me to use the sword.
    ‘Spear first,’ he said. ‘Sword later.’

    I’m telling this out of order, but I have to say that the only problem I had with Calchas and lessons was that, once I had my nine-year-old growth spurt, he wanted me. As soon as he put his hands on me, that first day, teaching me the spear, I knew what he wanted.
    I didn’t want it. There are boys who do, and boys who don’t. Right? Girls the same, I imagine. So I kept away from his hands. He could have forced himself on me, but he wasn’t that way. He just waited, and hoped, and whenever he touched my hips or my flanks, I’d either flinch or go still. He got the message and nothing had to be said.
    It was a shame, in a way. He was a good man and an unhappy one. He needed friends, drinking companions and a life. Instead, he taught a boy who didn’t love him and listened to the sins of wandering mercenaries. I have no idea what he had done or where, but he had condemned himself to death.
    Sometimes good people do sad things, honey. And when a person decides to die, they die. I believe that Calchas lived a little longer to teach me. Or maybe I just like to think that.

    Summer came, and I went home to help bring in the barley. I could read, and Calchas sent me home with a scroll to follow while I was away from him – the ship list from the Iliad . And I told him that Mater had scrolls of Theognis, and he asked me to borrow them for him.
    My house was different.
    Pater was rich. No other way to put it. We had three slave families tilling. I was almost superfluous to reaping, although I put in one hard day setting the sheaves. Mostly I read aloud to Mater, who was the friendliest I can ever remember her. She was drunk when I arrived, and ashamed of her state. But she sobered up by the next morning and bustled about the place. The irony of it was that she could, by then, have acted like a lady. There were six or seven slave women – I didn’t even know their names. There was a new building in the yard – a slave house.
    My sister had changed. She was seven, and sharp-tongued, busy teaching her elders their business. She had a fine pottery-and-cloth doll from the east that she treasured. She sat in the sun and told me stories of her precious doll Cassandra, and I listened gravely.
    My brother worked the forge and resented it, but his body was filling out. He already looked like a man – or at least, he looked like a man to me. He wasn’t interested in anything I could tell him, so I left him alone. But on my second evening, he gave me a cup