FARMERS’ LAW
Historian, fantasy writer, and historical mystery writer par excellence Sharan Newman asked me for a story for a collection of historical mystery pieces. This one draws on my academic background in the most literal way. I fought my way through the Nomos Georgikos (Farmers’ Law) in the original Byzantine Greek in a seminar conducted by Professor Speros Vryonis, Jr. This probably isn’t the way he expected me to use it, but I was starting to sell fiction about the same time as I was finishing my grad-school career. This story probably also makes it clear I’m no enormous threat to Sharan at her game.
A brostola suited Father George well. The village lay only five or six miles north of Amorion, the capital of the Anatolic theme. That was close enough for George and his little flock to take refuge behind Amorion’s stout walls when the Arabs raided Roman territory—and far enough away for them to go unnoticed most of the time.
Going unnoticed also suited Father George well. What with Constantine V following in the footsteps of his father, Leo III, and condemning the veneration of icons, a priest wanted to draw as little notice from Constantinople as he could. That was all the more true if he found the Emperor’s theology unfortunate, as Father George did.
Every so often, officials would ride through Abrostola on their way from Amorion up to Ankyra, or from Ankyra coming down to Amorion. They never bothered to stop at the little church beside which George and his wife, Irene, lived. Because they never stopped, they never saw that the images remained in their places there. George never brought it to their attention, nor did any of the other villagers. They had trouble enough scratching a living from the thin, rocky soil of Asia Minor and worrying about the Arabs. They didn’t care to risk Constantine’s displeasure along with everything else.
George was eating barley bread and olive oil and drinking a cup of wine for breakfast when someone pounded on the door. “Who’s that?” Irene asked indignantly from across the table.
“Who’s that?” their daughter, Maria, echoed. Rather than indignant, the three-year-old sounded blurry—she was trying to talk around a big mouthful of bread.
“I’d better find out.” George rose from his stool with grace surprising in so big a man: he was almost six feet tall, and broad as a bull through the shoulders. The pounding came again, louder and more insistently.
“Oh, dear God,” Irene said. “I hope that doesn’t mean Zoe’s finally decided to run off with somebody.”
“Alexander the potter should have got her married off years ago,” George said, reaching for the latch. Zoe was the prettiest maiden in the village, and knew it too well.
But when George opened the door, it wasn’t Alexander standing there, but a weedy little farmer named Basil. “He’s dead, Father!” Basil cried. “He’s dead!”
Automatically, the priest made the sign of the cross. Then he asked, “Who’s dead?” Nobody in the village, so far as he knew, was even particularly sick. Rumor said plague was loose in Constantinople again, but—God be praised, George thought—it hadn’t come to Abrostola.
“Who’s dead?” Basil repeated, as if he couldn’t believe his ears. “Who’s dead?” He’d always had a habit of saying things twice. “Why, Theodore, of course.” He stared at Father George as if the priest should have already known that.
“Theodore?” George crossed himself again. Theodore couldn’t have been more than thirty-five—not far from his own age—and was one of the two or three most prosperous farmers in the village. If any man seemed a good bet to live out his full threescore and ten, he was the one. But, sure enough, the sound of women wailing came from the direction of his house. George shook his head in slow wonder. “God does as He would, not as we would have Him do.”
But Basil said, “Not this time.” He went on, “God didn’t have anything to do with it. Nothing. I’d borrowed an ax from him, to chop some firewood with, and I brought it back to him at sunup, just a little while ago. You know how Theodore is—was. He lets you borrow things, sure enough, but he never lets you forget you did it, either.”
“That’s so,” George admitted. Theodore hadn’t overflowed with the milk of human kindness. The priest tried to make the peasant come to the point: “You went to give the ax back to Theodore. And. . . ?”
“And I found him laying there by his house with his head smashed in,” Basil said. “Didn’t I tell you that?”
“As a matter of fact, no,” Father George said. Though he was wearing only the light knee-length tunic in which he’d slept, he hurried out the door and toward Theodore’s house. Dust scuffed up under his bare feet. Basil had to go into a skipping half-trot to keep up with him.
A crowd was already gathering. Theodore’s wife, Anna, and his two daughters, Margarita and Martina, stood over the body shrieking and tearing at their tunics, which reached down to the ground. Some of Theodore’s neighbors stood there, too: Demetrios the smith and a couple of other farmers, John and Kostas. Demetrios’ wife, Sophia, came out and began to wail, too; her brother was married to Theodore’s sister.
George shouldered his way through them. He looked down at Theodore and crossed himself once more. The prosperous peasant stared up at the sky, but he wasn’t seeing anything, and wouldn’t ever again. Blood soaked into the ground from the blow that had smashed in the right front of his skull from the eye socket all the way back to above the ear. Flies were already buzzing around the body.
John grabbed Theodore’s arm. “Murder!” he said hoarsely, which set everyone exclaiming and wailing anew. What had happened was obvious enough, but naming it somehow made it worse.
“What are we going to do?” Basil asked. “Send down to Amorion, so the strategos commanding the theme can order a man up here to find out who did it?”
That was what they should have done. They all knew it. But Lankinos, the governor of the Anatolic theme, was as much an iconoclast as the Emperor Constantine himself. Any man he sent to Abrostola would likely be an iconoclast, too. If he stepped into the church and saw the holy images of Christ and the saints still on the iconostasis . . .
“We can’t do that to Father George!” Demetrios the blacksmith exclaimed. “We can’t put our own souls in danger doing that, either.”
Theodore’s wife—no, his widow now—spoke for the first time: “We can’t let a murderer walk free.” She drew herself straight and wiped her tear-stained face on a tunic sleeve. “I will have vengeance on the man who killed my husband. I will, by the Mother of God.”
Father George wouldn’t have sworn an oath of vengeance in the Virgin’s name, but he knew Anna wasn’t thinking so clearly as she might have been. Her older daughter, Margarita, said, “Why would anyone want to hurt Father? Why?” She sounded bewildered.
The question made people stir awkwardly. “Why?” Basil echoed. “Well, on account of he was rich, for starters, and—ow!” Father George didn’t see what had happened, but guessed somebody’d stepped on Basil’s foot.
“If we don’t send down to Amorion, how will we find out who killed Theodore?” the farmer named Kostas asked.
No one answered, not in words. No one said anything at all, in fact, though Margarita and Martina kept weeping quietly. But everyone, including Theodore’s daughters, looked straight at Father George.
“Kyrie, eleison!” the priest said, making the sign of the cross yet again. “Christe, eleison!”
“No one had mercy on my husband,” Anna said bitterly. “Not the Lord, not Christ, not whoever killed him. No one.”
She stood with George beside Theodore’s corpse in the parlor of the house that had been the farmer’s. She and her daughters had washed the body and wrapped it in white linen and bent Theodore’s arms into a cross on his chest. He held a small, rather crudely painted icon showing Christ and Peter. He lay facing east on a couch by the bricks of the north wall, so the caved-in ruin that was the right side of his head showed as little as possible. Candles and incense burned by him.
“You heard nothing when he went out yesterda
y morning?” Father George asked.
“Nothing,” Theodore’s widow replied. “I don’t know whether he went outside to ease himself or to see what he needed to do first in the morning, the way he sometimes did. Whatever the reason was, he hadn’t been gone long enough for me or the girls even to think about it. Then Basil pounded on the door, shouting that he was dead.”
“He must have come to me right afterwards,” the priest said. Anna nodded. Father George plucked at his thick black beard. “He didn’t tell you he saw anyone running away?”
“No.” Anna looked down at her husband’s body. “What will become of us? We were doing so well, but now, without a man in the house . . . Hard times.”
“I’ll pray for you.” Father George grimaced as soon as the words were out of his mouth. They were kindly meant, but felt flat and inadequate.
“Catch the man who did this to him—did it to all of us,” Anna said. “He must have thought he would profit by it. Don’t let him. Don’t let Theodore go unavenged.” Tears started streaming down her face again.
Gently, Father George quoted Romans: “‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.’”
But Anna quoted Scripture, too, the older, harder law of Exodus: “‘Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.’ ”
And George found himself nodding. He said, “No one heard anything. Basil didn’t see anyone running off. No one else did, either, or no one’s come forward. Whoever slew your husband got out of sight in a hurry.”
“May he never show himself again, not till Judgment Day,” Anna said.
“Here is a question I know you will not want to answer, but I hope you will think on it,” Father George said. “Who might have wanted Theodore dead?”
“Half the village,” the dead man’s widow said at once, “and you know it as well as I do. When Theodore and I married, he was working a miserable little plot, and we almost starved a couple of times. But he worked hard—nobody ever worked harder—and he always had a good eye for land that would yield increase, so he made himself a man to be reckoned with in Abrostola—even a man people had heard of in Amorion. That was plenty to make lazy people jealous of him.”
The priest nodded again. Theodore had been a great ox in harness. But not everyone said such gracious things about the land deals he’d made, though Father George didn’t tax Anna with that now. He already knew some of those tales; he could learn more later. In the smithy close by, Demetrios’ hammer clanged on iron. George said, “I’ll leave you to your mourning.”
“Find the man who killed my husband,” Anna said. “If you don’t . . . If you don’t, I’ll have to go down to Amorion to see if the strategos and his henchmen can help me.”
“I understand.” Father George bit the inside of his lower lip. With any luck, his luxuriant beard kept Theodore’s widow from noticing. He couldn’t blame her. Of course she wanted the murderer caught and punished. But if men from the capital of the Anatolic theme, men loyal to Constantine the iconoclast, started poking through Abrostola, George would have a thin time of it. The whole village would have a thin time of it, for supporting an iconophile priest. “I’ll do everything I can.”
Anna just waved him to the door, imperious as if she were an empress, not a peasant’s widow. And George’s retreat, to his own embarrassment, was something close to a rout. After the gloom of candlelight inside Theodore’s house, he blinked in the strong sunshine outside.
He almost ran into Kostas, who was coming toward the house. “Excuse me,” he said, and got out of the farmer’s way.
Kostas dipped his head. He was a lean gray wolf of a man, with hard, dark eyes and with scars on his cheeks and forearms that showed he’d done plenty of fighting against Arab raiders. “You’re the man I came to see, Father George,” he said. “Your wife told me you were here.”
“Walk with me, then,” the priest said, and Kostas did. They went past Demetrios’ blacksmithery. The smith stopped hammering at whatever he was making. He raised his right hand from the tongs with which he held hot metal to the anvil to wave to the two men. Kostas nodded again. Father George waved back. As soon as Demetrios started clanking away with the hammer again, the priest gestured to Kostas. “Please, my friend—go on.”
“Thanks.” But Kostas didn’t say anything right away. He stared at the brickwork houses of the village, some whitewashed, some plain; at their red tile roofs; at the flocks and vineyards and pasturage that lay beyond, as if he’d never seen any of them before. At last, when George was wondering if he’d have to prompt the farmer again, Kostas said, “That business between Theodore and me last year, that wasn’t so much of a much, not really.”
“Has anyone said it was?” Father George asked.
Kostas ignored that. “I still don’t think the plot I got from Theodore was as good as the one I gave him in exchange for it, but I never even reckoned it was worth going to law about, you know. Farmers’ Law says I could have, and I think I would’ve won, too. But nobody wants those nosy buggers from Amorion mucking about here, and that’s the Lord’s truth.”
“Seeing how things are these days, I’m glad you feel that way,” George said.
Again, Kostas talked right through him: “If I wouldn’t go to law over it, I wouldn’t smash in Theodore’s head over it, either, now would I?”
“I hope not,” Father George answered. “But someone did.”
“Not me,” Kostas repeated, and walked, or rather loped, away. A lone wolf, sure enough, the priest thought. He let out a long sigh. How many more denials would he hear over the next few days? And which villager would be lying like Ananias?
Like anyone else in the village, Father George kept a couple of pigs and some chickens. He was scattering barley for the chickens when Basil sidled up to him. Not even the chickens gave the scrawny little peasant much respect; he had to step smartly to keep them from pecking at his toes, which stuck out between the straps of his sandals.
“Good day, Basil.” Father George tossed out another handful of grain.
“Same to you.” Basil seemed to like the sound of the words. “Yes, same to you.” He stood there watching the chickens for a minute or two, and kicked dirt at a bird that was eyeing his feet again. The hen squawked and fluttered back.
“You wanted something?” George asked.
Basil coughed and, to the priest’s surprise, blushed red as a pomegranate. “You recall that business year before last, don’t you? You know the business I mean.”
“When you were tending Theodore’s sheep?”
“That’s right.” Basil’s head bobbed up and down. “People said I milked ’em without telling Theodore, and sold the milk and even sold off a couple of the sheep.”
People said that because it was true. He’d got caught selling the milk and the sheep in the market square at Orkistos, more than ten miles northwest of Abrostola. Father George didn’t bother mentioning that. With a grave nod, he said, “I remember.”
“All right. All right, then,” Basil said. “And after that, they gave me a good thumping and Theodore took away my wages. That’s what the Farmers’ Law says to do, and that’s what they did. I got what they said was coming to me, and that’s the end. Fair enough, right?”
“So far as I know, no one has troubled you about it since,” the priest replied. No one had hired Basil as a shepherd since, either, one more thing George didn’t say.
“That’s true enough—so it is,” the skinny peasant agreed. “But do you know what’s going round the village now? Do you know?” He hopped in the air, not because a chicken was after his toes but from outrage. “They’re saying I smashed in Theodore’s head on account of that business, is what they’re saying.”
“You found him dead,” Father George observed. Did you find him dead because you killed him? he wondered. But he kept that to himself, too.
Basil dropped to his knees and clasped the priest’s hand. “Not you, too!” he cried. “I couldn’t’ve killed Theodore, not even wi
th a club in my hand! He’d’ve grabbed it and thrashed me all over again. You know it, too.”
“Not if you struck from behind.” But George hesitated and shook his head. “No. The blow he got surely came from the front. I saw as much. I daresay he would have cried out against you, at any rate, if he saw you coming with a club in your hand.”
“That’s right! That’s just right!” Basil said fervently. He kissed George’s hand in an ecstasy of relief.
Is it? George wasn’t so sure. Maybe Theodore wouldn’t have taken scrawny Basil seriously till too late. But he lifted the peasant from the dirt and dusted him off. “Go your way. And stay away from sheep.”
“Oh, I do,” Basil said. And the priest believed him. Nobody in Abrostola let Basil near his sheep. Had Father George had sheep, he wouldn’t have let Basil near them, either.
Theodore’s funeral felt strange, unnatural. The procession to the burial ground outside the village seemed normal enough at first. Father George and the dead man’s relatives led the way, all of them but the priest wailing and keening and beating their breasts. More villagers followed.
Some of them lamented, too. But others kept looking at one another. George knew what lay in their minds. It lay in his mind, too. They were wondering which of their number was a murderer. Was it someone they despised? Or was it a friend, a loved one, a brother? Only one man knew, and they were burying him.
No. Father George grimaced. Someone else knew, too: the killer himself. And he hoped to walk free, to escape human judgment. God would surely send him to hell for eternal torment, but he must have despised that, too.
George chanted psalms over Theodore’s body as it lay in the grave, to protect his soul from demons. “Let us pray that he goes from here to a better place, to paradise, to the marriage chamber of the spirit,” he said, and he and the mourners and the whole crowd of villagers made the sign of the cross together.
As the funeral ended, they straggled back toward Abrostola. Behind Father George, the gravediggers shoveled the earth down onto Theodore’s shrouded body. The priest sighed and shook his head. That was always such a final sound, and worse here today because some wicked man had cut short Theodore’s proper span of years.
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