Killer of Men by Christian Cameron

Epictetus asked.
    ‘Less an eighth for cartage,’ Pater said.
    Epictetus nodded, and they both spat on their hands and shook, and the thing was done. Then the hired men loaded all the work of a summer and the big wagons rolled away down the hill.
    I was old enough to know that all of Pater’s stock of bronze was rolling away in those carts. He had nothing left but scraps to make repairs. If robbers took Epictetus on the roads, we were finished. I knew it.
    And I felt it over the next weeks. Pater was a fair man, but when he was dark, he hit us, and those weeks were dark. One afternoon he even hit Bion – savagely. And I dropped a fine bowl and he beat me with a stick. He beat my brother when he caught him watching the girls bathe, and he raged at us every day.
    Mater was sober. It has an odd sound to it, but it was as if she knew she was needed. So she stopped drinking and did housework. She read aloud to us every day from a stool by her loom, and she was very much like the aristocratic lady she’d been born to be.
    I loved her stories. She would tell us the myths of the gods, or sing pieces of the Iliad or other stories, and I would devour them the way my brother devoured meat. But when she was done, and the magic of her voice faded, she was just my dull and drunken mother, and I couldn’t like her. So I went back to the fields.
    It was in those weeks that I went into Plataea with Bion and pledged the family’s credit to an iron knife. Only the gods know what I was thinking – a little boy with an iron knife? Who had a perfectly good bronze one on a thong round his neck? Children are as inscrutable as the gods.
    Pater beat me so badly that I thought I might die. I see it now – I had pledged money he didn’t have. And we were at the bottom. All our harvest and all our work was off at Athens, or lost on the road. I see it now, but at the time, it hurt me far more than just a beating. I decided that night, tears burning down my face, that he wasn’t really my father. No man could treat his son that way.
    That was a deeper pain than any blow. I still bear it.
    The next day he apologized. In fact, he all but crawled to me, making false jokes and wincing when he touched my bruises, alternating with making light of my injuries. It was a strange performance, and in some way it was as confusing as the heavy beating.
    And then he recovered. Whatever daimon was eating his soul, he rose above it. It was three weeks or more after Epictetus had left, and he was a week overdue. Pater came out into the vineyard with us and started building trellises – work he never did – as if it was the most natural thing in the world. He didn’t complain, and he didn’t hit anyone, and we worked steadily all day under the high, blue skies of autumn. The grapes were almost ripe and the trellises creaked. Bion and I were both physically wary of him – we had bruises to prove that we had the right – but he passed no reproof harder than a look. My brother fell on a vine and wrecked an hour’s work, but Pater merely shook his head and took up his light bronze axe. He went off to the wood to cut more supports, and sent my brother to the river to cut reeds.
    It was an autumn day, but hot. Beautiful – you could see the stream glinting, and the line of the Oeroe river down the valley. I sweated through my chiton and stripped it off to work naked, which meant a slap from Mater if she caught me, but she wasn’t likely to come out to the vineyard.
    Bion had brought a bucket of water from the well. He offered me the first dipper – I was the only free man on the hilltop. But I’d learned some things, even at that age.
    ‘I’ll drink last,’ I said.
    I saw a spark in Bion’s eye, and knew I’d hit that correctly.
    I remember that, and the beauty of the day, but most of all I remember that Pater came for us. He didn’t have to, you see – he was down at the wood, and he’d have seen Epictetus’s wagons turn off the road. He might even