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.Listen, honey – listen, all of you.When you are young, and you listen to the poet, you take in the rules of life – the laws of all Hellenes.Oaths, gods, laws of gods and men.When I sat with my back to the stone fort at Oinoe, I had probably killed a hundred men.My love had chosen another life over me, and I had turned my back on the only calling I had ever felt.Every time you kill a man, the doubt grows.Every time you take a ship, empty it of valuables and enrich yourself with the blood and sweat of other men, every time you make another man a slave, every time you buy a woman for sex and discard her when she’s pregnant, you have to wonder – are there any laws? Are there any gods?There weren’t any laws for me just then.No rules.Perhaps no gods.Nothing mattered.The darkness of that night is absolute, even in memory, and I was afraid to go to sleep.I don’t remember much more than that, until we came to the foot of Cithaeron.The next day, I hadn’t slept, and I was morose and ill-tempered, and yet curiously happy to be walking the southern slopes where I could see my home mountain.Cithaeron is an old god, and he reached out to me and touched the blackness.The cart slowed us, and it was nightfall when we came to Pedeis.Pedeis was the typical border town, with high prices and crap for wine.Dionysus first preached just over the mountains at Eleutherai, and the grape grew there first, and my money says that his worship never spread to Pedeis.The girls were ugly and there was a wooden Temple of Demeter that was a disgrace to gods and men.I snarled at my men to keep moving, and we rolled through the streets and camped in the stony fields north of town.The border garrison, if they existed, were so slipshod that we passed without a road tax, almost without comment.We climbed the pass to Eleutherai, up and up in switchbacks, and our cart filled the road so that the faster traffic of men walking and men with packs on donkeys ended up in a long queue behind us like the baggage train of an army.Men chatted to Idomeneus or Hermogenes.I walked on in silence.We found the body near the summit of the pass.The corpse was that of a young boy, probably a slave, about twelve years old.He’d been killed in a bad way, with a series of hacks to his face and neck from a dull, heavy knife.He lay in his own blood in the middle of the wide space near the summit where wagons turn to begin the descent, and where polite men pull to the side to let the faster traffic pass.There are deep ruts in the rock where the old men cut a road for their chariots, and he lay across the stone tracks like a botched sacrifice.He looked so pitiful.He was just about the age I had been when I stood in the phalanx for the first time.Frankly, from the ripe old age of twenty-two, he looked too small to have died by violence.Had he tried to fight? I would have.I was already low, and the sight of the dead boy almost moved me to tears again.I knelt by him and cursed because his sticky blood got on my chiton.But I determined to bury him – no idea why, either.In general, I leave corpses for the ravens.I got him on my sea cloak, which had seen worse than blood, and men from the rest of the caravan behind our slow wagon came up and joined me, quite spontaneously.In fact, my opinion of men went up, right there.I was reminded of why Greeks are good men.We cleared a space, and every man, slave and free, gathered rocks, and we built a cairn as fast as you can tell the story.I put coins on his eyes and another man poured wine over the grave.More and more men came up – they must have been cursing my wagon all the way up the pass – and every one joined in.There was a small man, a pot-mender, and he had a pair of donkeys and a young slave of his own.He came up when the cairn was half-finished.He looked more angry than sad.I caught his eye, and he looked away.‘You know him?’ I asked.A pair of korai from Thebes who were travelling to the Temple of Artemis at Athens were washing his face under their mother’s direction.They were good girls, conscious of so many men around them and yet aware of their duties as women.He shrugged.‘He looks like the pais of Empedocles, the chief priest of the smith god.’ He made the sign automatically – even a pot-mender is at least an initiate.I gave him my sign – it was the Cretan version, and probably a little different, but he knew that I was an initiate and more, and he stepped closer.‘I know Empedocles,’ I said.It was like remembering another life.Empedocles the priest, and his magic lens.I looked at the pot-mender.‘You sure?’ I asked.He nodded and swallowed [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]