Sacrifices
by A.M. Kirkby
Published by A.M.Kirkby at Smashwords
Text Copyright @ 2011 A.M. Kirkby
All Rights Reserved
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, events, and locations are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons or events, living or dead, are entirely coincidental.
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Other works by A.M. Kirkby at Smashwords:
A ghost story of the Norfolk Broads
Sword of Justice
The Tin Heart
Walsingham Way
Doppelganger
Green land
and for children:
Kasbah Cat
Pagliaccio the Opera Cat
Va-teh, the man is saying, va-teh, and it takes Karkana a while to work out what he wants.
He fills the cup from the spring, and takes it over to the stranger, the only one in the long chained line of men to have spoken. The others are all silent, some asleep, except one at the end who keeps repeating a single word to himself, over and over.
They are prisoners, he knows, or slaves. The two are often the same.
"Take care of the cup," he says earnestly. "It's my favourite. Auntie made it."
"Nice, is nice," the man says, obviously understanding the language better than he speaks it, from the care with which he holds the cup and drinks, a tiny sip at a time, with the delicacy of a cat.
It is nice, Karkana knows; he'd seen his aunt make it, spinning the clay so thinly, thinner even than his mother could stretch out the dough for the crisp flaky pastries they always ate for Ghost Week. He'd been there when she took it out from the ashes of the kiln that had smoked three days, and blew gently to clear the shining black rind from its ashes. It had still been warm when he took it in his hands, a thing just born, and he had loved it instantly. Yes, it's nice.
The man holds the cup out to him again, saying once more va-teh, va-teh? But this time more hesitant, or more polite, Karkana couldn't tell.
He goes again to the spring, and hands the cup to the strange man, who might be Hellene, or Phokaian, he's not sure what the difference is. He sees the man has more reason than one to drink delicately; his lip is cracked, a faint trace of blood oozing from the split. The man's throat bulges and tightens as he swallows, with effort.
One of the soldiers in charge of the chain gang shouts; the men at the front are already moving off, and the man in front of Karkana is stumbling to his feet, still holding the cup. He hasn't had a chance to finish his drink. His face is like a dead man's, sharp and grey, though Karkana realises he is not a ghost, but covered with the dust of the road; he holds the cup out to Karkana hurriedly.
He can't drink it all, Karkana thinks, his throat is too dry. He'll need it; in southern Etruria the August sun can take your wits out of your head and fry them before it puts them back, so his father says. He shakes his head, pushes the cup gently back towards the stranger. "Take it", he says.
So he watches the man stumble off, with all the other slaves and prisoners in the chain, one arm bent protectively to shelter the little cup.
***
When Karkana gets home from the village that day, his father has come back; a father burnt brown by the sun, with a scar on one cheek that is still only half-healed, with a crust of bubbled blood and a pucker of new soft flesh round it, but still, recognisably father, and he runs into his father's arms, forgetting he's grown since his father went and jumping up into his arms though he's too heavy for his father to carry any more. His father forgets that too, and whirls round and round with him till the sky starts to tilt and unhinge.
His father puts him down. The world still spins.
He is shouting with excitement, laughing, staggering. He punches his father hard, hugs him, makes sure it is really his father and not a hinthial, a revenant, one of the things they don't talk about when he is in the room, though he's heard the stories from the other children in the village anyway.
"Ouch," his father says, as Karkana finds a sore place. "Watch it. A Phokaian got me there with the butt of his spear."
"Ouch," Karkana says. "What did you do then?"
"Gutted him like a trout," says his father, grinning. "And ate him for supper."
"Fibber."
His father shrugs.
"Your father doesn't know how to gut a trout," his mother says. She must have come into the room while Karkana was whirling about with his father; she has an amused but slightly pained smile on her face, the same smile she always has in the morning when his father has a hangover, which is not all that unusual.
"I do too."
"So why have I just had my arms up to the elbow in fish guts?"
Trout for dinner, Karkana thinks happily, and wonders how his mother got the trout with no father here to fish, whether she'd asked the neighbours, or her sister for some; or did father bring the trout with him from the expedition, was that what a naval expedition meant? (And anyway, why were they fighting about trout? And at sea?) But never mind; father was here, and there would be trout for dinner as there always was when they had something to celebrate, the feast of the hidden gods or a birthday, or a good harvest from the vineyards.
The trout is marvellous, flaking away from the bone fragrantly, stuffed with wild fennel where the guts would have been. Karkana thinks about the gutted Phokaian, imagining a fish in a helmet and breastplate; he laughs, and looks at his father, and suddenly thinks it might not be a good idea to tell him exactly what he's thinking about, so he says; "I'm glad you're back", and sees his father smile, till the puckering scar begins to stretch and pull and obviously hurts, so that he grimaces, which makes it worse, then covers the scar with his hand and closes his eyes for a moment.
"Is it bad?" his mother asks.
"Not as bad as being gutted like a trout," father says, and nearly laughs, but doesn't.
As Karkana drifts towards sleep that night, he thinks; I gave my cup away, and so my father has come home. As if it's a reward for his kindly deed. Mother always tells him the lasas reward good deeds, though he doesn't think it was the lasas who brought his father back...
He wakes up in the night, somehow knowing something is wrong. Then he realises he has put his hand out to the place where he always keeps his little wine cup, and it's not there. For a moment he panics, feels around, thinks; it's been stolen. Then he remembers that he gave it away.
He hears his parents' voices. They are up late, and he feels lonely without the curves of his wine cup to rub with his caressing thumb, so he goes out to the atrium where he can see them sitting under the starlit heaven, in a small pool of lamplight.
"We sent the prisoners up to the temple," his father is saying.
"But there were hundreds of them! There's no water there, no food, what are you going to do with them all?"
His father looks unhappy and says nothing.
"It's miles out of town. They won't be worth selling when you've finished with them."
"Look," his father says crossly, "it's the only place that was big enough to take them all. Safely."
"Safe you call it," she says, and is about to say more when his father sees him standing there, and calls to him. His voice is warm, but his eyes shift to his wife, and whatever she was about to say, she is suddenly silent.
***
It's years later. Karkana is thirty, and he owns more wine cups than he could ever need. He has taken over his father's business now, trading with Athens, sending ships across the Adriatic full of ore from the mines of Etruria, bringing luxury back. Sometimes, a fortunate trade brings in fine onyx seals from the hot rocky land of the Medes and Persians, a land he'd believe was mythical if he hadn't seen these for himself; more often he deals in Greek earthenware. There are delicate kraters, kylices, rhytons, amphoras - not the crude storage amphoras with their rough unglazed exteriors, but the finely decorated styles, used in the house - and kantharoi with their upswung handles, packed in straw mats and then bedded in loose straw for protection; and there are wine cups by the thousand.
Right now his favourites are those by Exekias, even though the new red-figure work by Andonikes and Euphronios is more fashionable. There's something in the slick blackness of Exekias' figures that appeals to him, the flowing curves of his wasp-waisted men and thin-legged horses, rather than the superficial realism of the new school. He wonders if he's becoming too attached to the past, if he's sliding into a grumpy middle age - but it only takes one look at the Exekias krater he owns (though he'll have to sell it, eventually) to set his mind at rest; the artist really is a master without parallel. He doesn't feel the same way about Psiax at all, even though Psiax fetches equally high prices and works in black-figure.
There's one little wine cup he has decorated just with little figures of swordfish. If you pour white wine into the cup, they seem to be swimming in it just as if they were in a small sea, and the black of their flexing bodies shines like fish scales, and seems to move. That's Exekias' talent; flow. Life.
They moved from Cisra just after his father came home, when Karkana was seven. He doesn't remember it well; some places he can see clearly, like the atrium at home, narrow and cramped, with the three amphorae against the wall and the gnarled stump of the vine, or the pool under the three great pine trees where he used to play with his friends, whose names, still remembered, are a sort of talisman of past days - Vel and Larth and Aule - though he can't any longer remember their faces. But between the places he remembers, his memory is greyed out, blurred; if he went to Cisra now he wouldn't know how to get from his house to the temple of Tinia, though he hopes his feet would somehow remember what his mind doesn't.
They moved up north to Felsina and now Spina, where they made a home among the canals, in the spreading salt lagoons where the sea comes to die.
His mother is still complaining about it. She never saw her amber brooch again, that she used to be so proud of. Every time her husband displeased her, by being late, or forgetting something, or making a bad trade with one of the foreign boats, or dragging mud into the house from the quayside, whatever was said first, and next, they knew eventually the amber brooch would impose itself on the conversation, and then the recriminations would start, reopening that years-old argument over who lost it in the first place. It was still an argument, even though amber was easier to get here than it ever had been in Cisra; there were always Gauls about, or Celts of some description, who sourced it up in the far north, in the lands of ice that were dark six months of the year. But even so, they never heard the last of it.
And why did we have to move to Cisra anyway? she asked, as the next step in that particular dispute.
"You know very well why," his father would say, and then she'd complain about having had to leave all her friends behind in Cisra.
"I had no choice," his father would say, and then she'd tell him it was his fault, he shouldn't have taken the prisoners where he did in the first place, and then they would both stop, and look guiltily at Karkana, and the argument sputtered and died like a snake run over by a cart wheel, that wriggles ever more slowly for a few minutes till the wriggling stops.
***
He's in Athens. It really is as impressive as Kallisthenes told him it would be. The massive walls of the Acropolis, honey-coloured, bare, above the plain; in the distance, the hill of Lykabettos, a cone of dark green foliage and crumbling rock. The path winding up the flank of the Acropolis to the narrow gates, lined with relics; tripods, pillars, records of Olympic victors, spoils of war - helmets, shields, breastplates - sphinxes, horses, kouroi, lions. Kallisthenes reads him some of the inscriptions; gods damn it, one of the helmets is older than the foundations of Cisra, the bronze thin as lace where wind and rain had eaten it away.
Then they go up the steps through the three gates, through a stair between great rock walls, so narrow it is sunless and cold despite the fine weather, and out to the airy plateau where the sky is so big and close he feels lost for a moment, till Kallisthenes' hand finds his. There before them is the temple of Athena, austerely Doric, the columns' fluting sharp in the clear light.
They go inside. It is dark, except where the light from the open doors slashes across the floor. It is a massive space; he can tell that by the echo, before his eyes adjust to the hushed darkness. The only sound is the slither of feet on the marble floor.
"The goddess," Kallisthenes whispers, and he realises that the massive tree trunk he is looking at is actually a statue. Two small, high, round breasts; a long, thin nose; that's all the humanity that has been grafted on to the olivewood, dark with age as if it had been singed in the fire. He shivers. It's cold out of the sun, he thinks, but he knows that's not what had set his flesh to prickling.
Later, lying on Kallisthenes' couch in that golden light of the hour before sunset, he twisted his fingers in his friend's dreadlocks, and wonders if all foreign cities are so surprising. Kallisthenes has an image of the goddess here, but she's not the fearsome black thing he saw this afternoon in the temple; she's a smug and slightly plump young woman in white-painted clay, decorated with bands of bright pink, purple and turquoise. You can't imagine her defending the city, and Karkana is quite glad that that is the case. You could give this goddess flowers, and she would smile on you; the other one, he thinks, wants blood.
Kallisthenes turns, and taking Karkana's hand in his, turns it over and kisses the palm.
"You're thoughtful tonight," he says.
Karkana doesn't reply; he twitches one side of his mouth, a sort of half-smile he uses sometimes when a sales pitch gets too much.
"Tired? I'll leave you, if you are. Athens can be an exhausting city."
"No, no," he says, suddenly ashamed of putting Kallisthenes off; "don't go. We won't have much time to talk tomorrow; I have three workshops to visit, and orders to make."
"You'll need a bath when you come back. Covered in clay dust, you filthy Etruscan."
Karkana swipes his friend playfully, finds his ribs unprotected, and tickles him till he laughs, and yells "Enough!" It's an old joke - the day they met, Karkana had been unloading a boat, and slipped in the mud of the lagoon - that is becoming a part of their friendship, part of the ties that bind them together, and suddenly, Karkana is reminded of the way his parents still quarrel over that amber brooch. He grins.
"What's that about?" Kallisthenes asks.
"Thinking of my parents."
Kallisthenes' eyes seem to harden. "I wish I'd known mine."
That surprises Karkana. He knows Kallisthenes lives on his own, with only three or four servants in the household, but that's not so unusual for a man of his age. His surprise is obvious to Kallisthenes, who answers the question Karkana hasn't had to ask.
"I grew up with my uncle and aunt - my father's sister; they were all the family I had. Mother died of a fever a week after I was born."
"And your father?"
"My father was killed after Alalia," he says.
"At Alalia, do you mean?" Karkanas wonders for a moment whether his Greek is not quite as good as he thinks it is. And he also thinks how little he knows about Kallisthenes; he wonders if their three-month relationship will make it as far as his parents' forty years of marriage.
"No, not at Alalia; after. If I hadn't met you, I would still hate the Etruscans. But then I have to remember, you're from Spina; nothing to do with Alalia."
Karkanas feels the same prickly cold he'd felt in front of the implacable goddess. He remembers that Kallisthenes doesn't know he was born in Cisra, spent his early childhood there.
"Greece lost two thirds of her ships in that battle. Did you know that? The fleet was almost destroyed. The lucky ones, who could jury-rig their boats and stop up the leaks, sailed for Massilia, but the others had to surrender."
Karkanas remembers the prisoners he'd seen that day, so long ago. A hollow-eyed foreigner asking for a cup of water. A little bucchero cup he'd cherished and lost.
"After the battle, they took the Greek prisoners up to the temple."
That was where he'd met the stranger; on the way up from the shore.
"They lined them up against the wall, in chains. In chains, like slaves. And they stoned them to death. Every one."
The evening light had turned to grey dusk while they'd been talking. Karkana realised he could no longer see his friend's eyes, and he was glad.
"How do you know all this?"
"There was a plague in Cisra, five years later. They sent a man to Delphi, to ask the oracle how to atone for their crime. And from Delphi, word came to Athens. We'd been waiting all that time for father to come home."
"My father was in... a battle, once," Karkana said. "I remember asking my mother when he would come back, and never getting an answer. But that was two months, not five years."
He wonders if he was stupid not to have known what was going on. He was only six, maybe seven. And they moved away from Cisra soon after; if they'd stayed, he was sure he would have heard gossip, but in Spina, Alalia was a long way away. And by the time he was old enough, it was a long tine past, too... But then he remembers the way his parents cut certain conversations short when they knew he was listening. He shivers. He remembers the cold in the temple on the Acropolis, and gives it its real name: fear.
***
Karkanas has grown older. He lives with his parents, still; they're growing old, father nearly sixty now but still with that erect bearing of a former warrior, his mother thinned and sharpened by age. He has a wife now, a potter from Felsina who shares his love of Exekias and his bed, and sometimes forgets to wash the red smudges of clay off her face before sitting down to dinner.
He thinks sometimes of Kallisthenes. That was only a year ago, but he is so much older now. He thinks of a little bucchero cup. He could get his wife to make him one just like it, but that's not the point.
Before he left Athens, Kallisthenes told him one other thing. The vote had hung in the balance, he said; some wanted the prisoners sold. Others wanted them dead. It was down to one man to vote; and he voted for death. Then Kallisthenes said a name.
Karkanas knows now why they left Cisra in such haste. He knows what happened to his bucchero cup, to the man who held it. And he knows now that he, like Kallisthenes, is an orphan; that in every way that matters, his father never really came home.