Of Merchants & Heros Read Online Free PDF

to stand. ‘But I must go. I was on my way to inspect the beehives. The meadow is full of yellow flowers; the bees will like that. Perhaps, if you have finished, you would like to come along.’
    I said yes, and took up my tunic from where it lay on the rock beside me. I saw his eyes move. My hunting knife was there, concealed by my clothes. I had forgotten to clean it.
    ‘So you have been hunting,’ he said, seeing the blood on the blade.
    ‘No,’ I said, ‘not hunting.’
    With a frown I took the dagger and started to wash it. I had meant to keep my morning’s work to myself, but I would not lie to him. I sat back down and told him what I had done.
    He listened without comment, and when I had finished he was silent for a while. Then he said, ‘And the god heard you, you say?’
    ‘Why yes, Priscus, I know he did. And there was a great eagle, coming from the right. And in his claws he held his prey. It is a sure sign.’
    He nodded slowly to himself, and pulled a face under his white beard. I was drying my knife on a clump of grass, but seeing this I set the knife down. ‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘Do you think I did wrong?’
    He shrugged. ‘It is an honourable prayer,’ he said eventually. ‘But you must be careful what you pray for.’
    This irked me, and I asked him what he meant, saying I knew well enough what it was I had prayed for. ‘What is it?’ I said. ‘Do you suppose the god did not listen, or that I have offended him?’
    He shook his head. ‘No, not that. You saw the eagle, and you felt the truth of it in your heart. It is in such ways that gods speak to men. No, the god heard you. But sometimes, when they grant what a man asks, they also grant what he has not foreseen.’
    ‘You talk in riddles,’ I said crossly, turning and pulling on my tunic. For the first time I had felt whole again. My being pulsed with the knowledge of it, and I did not want to hear his doubts. ‘Anyway, what is done is done. It is with the god now, for good or ill, so let us go and see your beehives.’
    He said no more about it.
    The warm weather came, and that year I turned fifteen.
    I drove my body hard, and my body responded. Where once I had needed the help of the farmhands in lifting a beam, or pulling a cart, now I could do it alone. I had been a slender child, but now I thickened out. My muscles knit to my bone, and I felt my strength as something pleasing.
    Whatever Priscus thought, since the day of my sacrifice to Mars the Avenger my bad dreams had ceased. I had a purpose, and that purpose was Dikaiarchos the pirate. He filled my waking thoughts, and at night I dreamt dreams of revenge, of how I would find him and kill him, and let my father’s shade drink his blood.
    Soon I received another sign that the god had heard me. One day, when I happened to be searching for a tree-axe at the back of the old storeroom, I found a pile of javelins hidden behind a stack of farm tools, and, beside it, wrapped in oiled cloth, a warrior’s sword. The sword was heavy antique work, with a fine pommel of worked bronze turned to verdigris with age. My father had never mentioned it, and I guessed from its look it must have belonged to my grandfather, who had died before I was born, kept from the days when each household was its own fortress and saw to its own defence.
    I cleaned up the blade and waxed the ashwood shafts of the javelins; and when I was not working I taught myself to handle them, swinging and thrusting the sword, and casting the javelins at targets in the woods.
    I discovered I had a sharp eye; soon I could hit a tree trunk no wider than a man at a leaping run. As for the sword, it was too heavy for me at first; but it grew lighter as I worked at it and the muscles firmed in my arms and sides and shoulders.
    A hungry man will find food where a sated man does not. And so it is with anger. It disciplined me to rise each day before dawn; it gave me strength when my body was tired; it guided my spear to a leaping