Killer of Men Read Free Page B

the whole weight of his fist. I cried for a day from the shame.
    He had the raising of us all to himself, you see. My mother was drunk from the time I first remember her – drinking away the forge, Pater would say when the darkness was on him. She’s your grandmother, lass – I shouldn’t speak ill of her, and I’ll try to tell her true, but it’s not pretty.
    She was the daughter of a lord, a real lord, a basileus from down the valley in Thespiae. They met at the Great Daidala in the year of the Olympics, and the rumour of my youth had it that she was the wildest and the most beautiful of all the daughters of Apollo, and that Pater swept her up in his great arms and carried her off in the old way, and that the basileus swore a curse on their marriage.
    I respect the gods – I’ve seen them. But I’m not one to believe that Hera comes to curse a woman’s womb, nor Ares to push a spear aside. The gods love them that love themselves – Mater said that, so she wasn’t a total failure as a mother, I reckon. But she never did aught to love herself, and her curse was her looks and her birth.
    She had three children for Pater. I was the middle one – my older brother came first by a year, and he should have had the smithy and maybe the farm besides, but I never faulted him for it. He had red hair and we called him ‘Chalkidis’, the copper boy. He was big and brave and all a boy could want in an older brother.
    I had a sister, too – still do, unless Artemis put an arrow into her. My mother gave her the name of Penelope, and the gods must have been listening.
    I know nothing of those first years, when Pater was as handsome as a god, and Mater loved him, and she sang in the forge. Men say they were like gods, but men say a great many things when an event is safely in the past – they tell a lot of lies. I’ll no doubt tell you a few myself. Old man’s prerogative. I gathered that they were happy, though.
    But nothing ended as my mother expected. I think she wanted something greater from my father, or from herself, or perhaps from the gods. She began to go up in the hills with the maenads and ran wild with other women, and there were words in the forge. And then came the first of the Theban years – when the men of Thebes came against us.
    What do you know of Thebes? It is a name in legend to you. To us, it was the curse of our lives – poor Plataea, so far from the gods, so close to Thebes. Thebes was a city that could muster fifteen thousand hoplites, while we could, in an emergency and freeing and arming our most trustworthy slaves, muster fifteen hundred good men. And this is before we made the Great Alliance with Athens. So we were a lonely little polis with no friends, like a man whose plough is broken and none of his neighbours have a plough to loan.
    They came at us just after the grain harvest, and the men went off to war. Whenever I hear the Iliad , thugater, I weep when I hear of mighty Hector’s son being afraid of his father’s shining helmet. How well I remember it, and Pater standing there in his panoply, the image of Ares. He had a bronze-faced shield and a splendid helmet he had forged himself from one piece of bronze. His horsehair plume was black and red for the smith god. He wore a breastplate of solid bronze, again of his own making, and thigh guards and arm guards of a kind you scarcely see any more – aye, they were better men. He carried two spears in the old way, and long greaves on his legs, and when he stood in the courtyard with the whole panoply he gleamed like gold.
    Mater was drunk when she poured the libation. I can see it in my head – she came out in a white chiton , like a kore going to sacrifice, but the chiton had purple stains. When she went to bless his shield she stumbled and poured wine down his leg, and the slaves murmured. And she wept, and ran inside.
    So Pater went off to fight Thebes, and he came back carried by two men on his chlamys and his spears, and his shield