I was wearing my new armour the next morning as we began to load the ships. Armour is a silly thing to wear for work, but by the gods it was good to look like a nobleman, and I was young and arrogant. My shoulder still hurt from the pounding of my shield against it in the fight and the race.
I noted that men were careful how they spoke to me.
Stephanos was closer, if anything. He wasn't afraid of me, and he was overjoyed that Cleisthenes was dead. In fact, I earned his friendship with that blow. And when I was maudlin that first night, Melaina told me stories of Cleisthenes and the local girls until I felt like a public benefactor.
I felt like less of a benefactor as the ships were loaded. There I stood, sparkling in a scale corslet worth a farm, a good helmet and a fine aspis. Other men were loading the ships – we had no discipline, and so every ship loaded at its own speed – and we were so late leaving the beach that we saw Lord Pelagius and the women of his household with the body, building a pyre. And the older woman, whose tears seemed pulled from her as you'd pull the guts from a dead boar, she must have been his mother.
Only then did I find fully what it is to be a killer of men. When you kill, you take a man's life. You take it. He can never have it back. When the darkness comes to his eyes and he clutches his guts, he is done. And you don't rob just him but his parents and his family, his sisters and brothers, his wife and children, his lovers, his debtors, his master and his slave – all robbed.
Cleisthenes was a bad man, I have no doubt, but all his people were on that beach, and it was like a scene in a play in Athens – not that they came at me like furies, just that they were all there: his horses and hounds, his women, his slaves, his son. All there in one place, for me to see.
I killed him because I didn't like him. Let's not lie. So – I stood there, coming to terms with the consequences. Most killers are dull men. I truly think they never see the funeral pyre. They never think. I walked down the beach, and every one of them saw me, and they looked at me as if I was some kind of beast.
I think too much. So I drink. Here – you. Blush for me and make me happy. There – ahh! My world is brighter for your presence, lady.
I never promised you a happy story. We landed in Ephesus and all the lords of the fleet met with the lords of the city, but I stayed on our ship. I was afraid of being taken. Afraid of being a slave again. Afraid of what I'd done with Briseis. Afraid that she had already forgotten me.
And I dreamed of Cleisthenes and his funeral pyre. I still do. He's the only one. I've killed enough men to make a phalanx, and he's the only one who haunts me.
Archi was distant when he went ashore, but he came straight back to the ship with word that Diomedes' father had sent his son to a farm in the country to recover, and nothing had been said.
Typical. The things you most fear never come to pass. Diomedes and his father might seek revenge, but they had not gone to law.
I left the ship and entered the house as a free man, wearing armour. I felt odd – everything was odd. Food tasted wrong, and I longed to go and eat in the kitchen, but I didn't, just as I wanted one of the slaves to tell me how bold I looked in my magnificent shirt of scale armour, but none of them even met my eye.
Not even Penelope, who threw her arms around Archi when we returned and didn't even look at me.
Briseis looked at me, an enigmatic half-smile at the corner of her mouth. I found that I couldn't really breathe. I felt as if I'd been gone ten years, and I found that I'd forgotten what she looked like. She stood in the courtyard to welcome us because her mother never left her room any more and Briseis was, in effect, the lady of the house.
'Well,' she said. That was all.
I didn't see her again for days. I took baths and thought guiltily of our love-making – if that's what it was. And I found that I thought of Melaina – which seemed like treason, except that she was more my speed, if you take my meaning. I wondered why I hadn't even tried to kiss her.
Archi went to the conferences, and met with men like Aristides and Aristagoras, plotting a campaign against the Medes for the freedom of Ionia.
I found myself a lonely man in a city that had been my playground. I couldn't exactly go and sit by the Fountain of Pollio, could I?
I met my Thracian girl in the back alley, almost by accident, and tried to get her to go for a walk with me, but she ran. That hurt.
So after two days of failing to be the returning hero, I went up the hill to the Temple of Artemis. And there I found boys sitting in front of Heraclitus. I wasn't a boy, but I sat at his feet.
He nodded to me. He was laying out the rules of triangles. There were three new boys. I had been gone just two months, and even that world had changed. But I listened, and my mind went down the paths of numbers and figures in the sand, instead of death and war and sex, and I took a little healing, as I always have from the wise.
When he was done with the other boys, he came and sat next to me.
'What you did to Diomedes was cruel,' he said.
'The logos speaks through strife,' I said, quoting him.
'Don't give me that shit,' he said. His gaze met mine and ground mine down like stone against iron. 'You hurt that boy.'
I shrugged. 'He had it coming.'
Heraclitus sat and leaned on his staff. I can't remember another time that he sat with me. Finally he looked at me. 'I have so many things I want to say to you. You can all but see the logos – and yet you are so far from true understanding, aren't you? You understand me when I talk, and yet you can hurt a boy like that – for a child's reasons.'
I blinked tears. I had been blinking tears since he sat with me. Hah! I feel them in my eyes even now. No one else had cared, except Stephanos and Archi. He sat there, and listened.
'I did it because he broke his engagement with Briseis,' I said. 'He hurt her. I did the right thing!'
Heraclitus's eyes rested on me, and you could almost see the sparks as his gaze ground away at mine.
Finally, I hung my head. 'No, I did not.'
'No,' he said. 'Tell the truth, at least to yourself. I knew the truth as soon as I heard that the boy had been hurt. You hurt him. Cruelly. Is that who you are? A man who hurts for his own satisfaction?'
I couldn't meet his eyes. And I began to weep. I sat on the steps and told him the tale of Cleisthenes. He shuddered when I cut off the hand. But he smiled when I told him, through my own tears, of the funeral pyre.
'It is the pity of the world that we must come to wisdom through fire,' he said. 'Why can no man learn wisdom from another?'
I couldn't answer him. Perhaps no one can. After a while he went on, 'You have discovered one of the secrets of the world of men.'
'What's that?' I asked. Those boys – most of them knew me – were wondering why the teacher was sitting with me, and why I was pouring tears the way a mended pot leaks water.
'The secret is that men are easy to kill. That if you are brave and have a steady hand and a cold heart, you can have whatever you desire.' He looked away. 'This city is about to go to war with Persia, and then it will learn a lesson that I think you already know. War is the king and father of all, my son. Some men it makes lords, and others it makes slaves. Do you understand?'
'No,' I said.
'Ah!' he said, and laughed – at himself. 'The strife I preach – some men master it without knowing why, and use it for themselves, without a thought to consequence. War makes them lords and kings. But they are not good men. The killer lies in every man – closer to the surface in some than others, I think. I saw the killer in your eyes when first your master led you up the steps.' He nodded. 'If you would master the killer in you, you must accept that you are not truly free. You must submit to the mastery of the laws of men and gods.'
'Men fight wars!' I protested.
'And men return from them, confused as to what the laws of men and gods ask of them.' He looked at a raptor, climbing in the distance over the mountains. 'That bird can kill twenty times a day and never be the agent of evil – merely change. But men are not animals. What they mate and what they kill becomes who they are.' He looked at me. 'You are a warrior. You must find yourself a path that keeps you among men and not among animals. Avoid the confusion. Law is better than chaos.'
It doesn't sound like a helpful speech, although I think I can remember every word. And yes, that line about strife and war – he said it all the time, and it's in his book. Don't think I was the first to hear it, either. But it stuck.
Listen, all of you. There are men and women – you're old enough to know – who discover what their nether parts are for and go mad with it. It is the same with killing. Turns out that killing is easy. Inflicting pain is easy. Cleisthenes learned that. And when I gave him the other half of the lesson, he never got to benefit from it. Perhaps if he'd had a teacher like my teacher… For weeks the ships came up the river and dropped soldiers – Greeks – on our shores, and we gathered a mighty army. At least, we thought it was an army. Aristagoras promised us an easy fight. He said that the Persians had short spears and no shields and that their riches were there for us to take.
It is the dark comedy of men that every Ionian knew that he was full of shit. Many of them had faced Persians – or run from them – and they knew how good they were. And yet this disease, this mania, swept them as if the deadly archer had shot them with arrows of inflammation and disease – failure to fear the Persians.
There's a name for this disease in all the tragedies. We call it hubris, and all men and all women are subject to it.
So they debated and planned. No one drilled, though, and no one appointed a commander, although all but the Athenians took orders, or at least suggestions, from Aristagoras. He went to dinner at the house. I wasn't excluded, but I wasn't comfortable attending formal dinners. Oh, my manners were up to it – I had learned the manners of aristocrats. But to lie on a couch and be served by Kylix?
I went and ate in taverns by the water. Which proved to be a good choice, because I found Epaphroditos in one and Stephanos in another, and learned to play knucklebones like an islander. Stephanos's victory as a wrestler had promoted him off the oar bench and into the ranks of his lord's retinue, and now he was a hoplite. He and Epaphroditos and I had the games in common, and that was enough. And when we found Heraklides, we were four, which is a good number for men.
Four weeks of dicing in taverns and drinking cheap wine, exercising in the gymnasium – all the allied soldiers were welcome there, and no one knew me – and four weeks of sitting at Heraclitus's feet. Indeed, I took my friends to hear him speak. They were pleased but mystified, and all three agreed that he was a great man, but they never went with me again.
Heraklides spoke for the other two. He was in the agora, fingering a plain bronze camp knife. The vendor was a slave for the smith who made it. It was mediocre work.
'I'll pay you in obols what you ask in owls,' Heraklides said to the slave. I had just asked him to come with me a second time to hear Heraclitus. 'By the gods, man – three obols, then!'
He turned to me with a grin. 'Yon philosopher is a little above the likes of me, Doru. I could see he was a great man – it was a pleasure to hear him. But I scarcely understood a word he said.' He whirled back on the slave. 'Four obols – take it or leave it.'
Heraclitus sat with me every day after the other boys walked away, and we talked about laws – laws of men and laws of gods. You've heard it all from your tutors, I'm sure. Aye, I'll have his head if you haven't heard it, honey! That most laws are men's laws for men's reasons. In Sparta, every man takes a boy as a lover, and in Chios, it is death for a man to lie with a boy. These are the laws of men.
But the gods hate hypocrisy and hubris, as any history that is true will show. And murder – and incest. These are the laws of the gods. And there are laws we can only guess at – laws of hospitality, for example. They seem like god-given laws, but when we meet men who have different guest-laws, we have to wonder.
Bah – I talk too much. I should have been a philosopher, as the priest of Hephaestus said.
And then there was Briseis. I can't remember how long I had been in that house before I saw her again. I was in her father's room, with her father's permission – he was formal and polite to me, but a little cold – reading his scrolls. He had the words of Pythagoras and some of Heraclitus and Anaxagoras, too. And I was reading them. I was also helping him and Darkar do sums. I would have carried water to the well at this point, I was so bored and felt so under-used. Archi didn't want me when he went to the daily conference, and so I seemed to have no duties at all except to match him in the gymnasium, at the palaestra and on the track.
I was reading, as I say, when Briseis came in. She smiled at me – quite a happy smile – and took a scroll from my basket.
'Have you read Thales?' she asked. 'For all that he sounds like a soothsayer, he seems the wisest of the lot. Or perhaps he just hated women less.'
'Heraclitus doesn't hate women,' I answered hotly.
'Oh!' she said, and her eyes flashed. 'Wonderful! I'll ask him to accept me as a student straight away.'
I had to smile. I raised my hand the way a swordsman does at practice, when he acknowledges a hit. 'Well struck,' I said.
'I was happy at Sappho's school,' she said. 'I wish I could go back, but I'm too old.' Old at sixteen.
Her father glared at us. 'I'm working,' he growled.
'May we read in the garden?' Briseis asked sweetly, and he kissed her hand – absently – his eyes on his work.
We picked up the scroll baskets and walked into the garden together.
'Why don't you read to me?' she said. There was very little question to it.
And that was that. I read to her every day. We read Thales' book on nature – really just an accumulation of his sayings. We read our way through Pythagoras, and laughed over what we didn't understand, and Briseis asked questions and I taught her what I knew of the geometry, which was not inconsiderable, and I took her questions to Heraclitus, and he answered them. He was contemptuous of women as a sex, but friendly to them as individuals, which Briseis said was a vast improvement on the reverse.
If I thought that I loved her when I was a slave, that was merely the lust for the unattainable. Every boy loves someone unattainable, and no few attain the one they want anyway, to their own confusion. But when we sat together, day after day, then I saw her another way.
I am an intelligent man. All my life, my wits have cut other men like my sword.
She was my better. I saw it with the geometry. In three weeks, she had everything I could teach. By the gods, if I could have taught her to smith, she'd have made a Corinthian helmet in three weeks! Once her mind bit into a thing, she would never let it go, like a boar with his tusks in his prey.
Have you ever seen an eagle kill close to you? She turns, and you catch your breath, and she hits her prey, and if you are close, you can see the blood – a brief red cloud, a mist of blood – and your heart stops with the beauty of it, even as you think that this is an animal killing another animal. Why is it so beautiful?
And so with the mind of Briseis.
After two weeks, she leaned close while I showed her a bronze pyxis I had made for her – we had a small forge – and she leaned close and ran a finger down my jaw.
'Come to my room tonight,' she said.
I leaned back, her touch like a burn on my jaw. 'If I'm caught-' I said, and like a coward, my eyes darted around for the slaves.
She shrugged. 'I wasn't caught. Or am I braver than you, my hero?'
She said nothing more – nothing. Not a glance did she give me, nor a touch of her hand. I went to her room wondering with every heart-pounding step if I had, in fact, created the whole thing in my head. Had she really asked me? Really?
I stopped in the hall outside her room, although there was no cover there. I took a breath and my knees were weak and I shuddered. I had done none of these things before I killed Cleisthenes. Every man is brave for some things and a coward for others. I stood there for a long time, and I'll tell you in honesty that I could feel the shit at the base of my intestines, I was so afraid.
Aphrodite, not Ares, is the deadliest on Olympus.
Then I made myself push through her curtain.
She laughed when her skin was against mine. 'You weren't this cold in the bath,' she said.
'I thought that you were Penelope!' I said with foolish honesty.
There are women who might be offended by that sort of revelation. Briseis bit my ear, rolled off the couch and lit a lamp from her fire jar.
'Aphrodite!' I said. Probably squeaked.
She got on top of me. 'I want you to see me,' she said. 'So that next time you won't mistake me for my maid.'
When we were done – and the moment we were done, she laughed and bounced to her feet – I asked, 'Why?' I reached out and touched her flank. 'Why did you come to me? In the bath?'
She laughed, and her eyes flashed in the lamplight. 'I decided that you should have what Diomedes gave away,' she said. 'Promise me that if you ever have the chance, you'll kill him for me?'
I shrugged. Later, I swore.
I'm a man, not a god. I took to spending my days in the little forge shed in the work yard. It was a tiny shop with one small bench, and Hipponax only had it so that his pots could be mended without being taken to market, but Darkar once told me that they had had a slave who had some skill with iron.
I made instruments at first – a compass for Briseis, and then a ruler marked out in daktyloi. I made a fine compass for Heraclitus, as well. It was simple work, but good. Briseis was pleased by her geometry tools, as she called them, and Heraclitus was delighted, embracing me. I think that he had no use for such things, as he once told me that he could see the logos and all its shapes in his head. But the long bronze dividers were comfortable in the hand, and excellent for showing a student, and their points were sharp and probably used to prick a generation of dullards, which gives me some satisfaction.
When I had my eye back, I bought some scrap bronze and poured myself a plate, pouring directly on to a piece of slate. Then I forged the pour into a sheet, which made me feel better. Making sheet is long work, and finicky. I did an adequate job, although my heart told me that I stopped planishing too early.
Oh, lass, you'll never be a bronze-smith's daughter! Planishing – endless tiny hammer strokes to smooth the forge-work. When you change something's shape, you use the curved surface of the big hammers, pulling the metal or pushing it, this way and that. But that leaves big, lumpy marks. See this cauldron? Look at these marks. See? But a good smith, a master, never lets an item out of his shop with these divots. He uses ever-smaller hammers, working the surface a blow at a time, until it is one continuous surface – like my helmet. See?
Making sheet is about getting the surface to a single thickness and a flat shape, two things that seem like enemies when you are new to the process. More than you wanted to know, eh? But something had changed since I killed Cleisthenes, and I wanted to go back, I think – back to a world where I could do good work.
I had begun to have dreams about home. I had the first in Briseis's bed, the first night I went to her. I dreamed that ravens came and stripped my armour from me, and took me to their nest.
I dreamed of ravens, and their green nest of willows, night after night, until I realized that the ravens were Apollo's, and the green nest was Plataea – was home. And then, for the first time in years, I was homesick. I began to dream more fully, about the farm on the hill, and about the tomb of the hero on the slopes of Cithaeron, and about hunting with Calchas.
The dreams were powerful but they could never compete with the reality of Briseis. Or the coming war. I told myself that it was time to go home – soon.
Anyway, I tell this story awry. I gambled on the waterfront and made love to Briseis; I listened to Heraclitus and read philosophy in the garden; I worked and played on the palaestra and in the gymnasium with Archi. It sounds like a good life. In fact, it was a bad time, but I could not tell you why, except that I could feel the doom over me.
When I had my bronze sheet forged, I cut some scrap from the edges and began to work them, chasing figures into them as practice. I did olives and circles and leaves and laurels, and then I tried a stag, but my stag became a raven early in the process. I made six or seven ravens, until I had done one well.
I remember that raven, because while I admired my work, Darkar came in and asked me to wait on Archi at dinner. That was the third time that Hipponax hosted Aristagoras. This time Briseis was the hostess, with most of the great men of the army as guests. The house was busy, and in those days, it was perfectly acceptable for a free man to wait on his lord, and I did it willingly enough.
I should have refused.
First, Aristides was confused to find me at his elbow. He smiled at me. I had to look at him for a long time to see the cool swordsman – my toughest opponent from the beach. 'So,' he gave his slight smile, 'you have come to take your place among the captains?'
I grinned, and walked off to pour wine for Archi, and then I caught the Athenian's look, and it was one of anger. None of the men at the party knew how to talk to me – was I a cup-bearer or a champion? It made them uneasy. Which, in turn, made me uneasy.
Then there was Briseis. She moved among them, dressed in a Doric chiton of pure new linen, shining white, and transparent, and they watched her the way dogs watch the slave with the food.
I had to watch the interplay among the captains, and I didn't like it. Aristides was not the chief of the Athenians – that was Melanthius, an older man, and an astute politician, but not, I think, much of a fighter. Melanthius shared a couch with Aristagoras and they drank together like friends, but I could see that Aristides thought little of either of them. Aristagoras was belligerent and fawning by turns, a depressing sight. Diomedes' father, Agasides, was there and Briseis treated him as if he were made of dung, which he reciprocated. And yet, Hipponax supported him as the war leader of the Ephesians.
There was a captain named Eualcidas from Eretria in Euboea, a famous athlete who had been praised by Simonides the poet, and another Eretrian, Dikaios, who made clear that he loathed all the Athenians more than he hated the Persians. I stared at them, for every one must have been at the fight by the bridge where my father died and I was made a slave.
The Eretrians had come with five ships because of their ancient alliance with the men of Miletus, of which Aristagoras was once again ruler, although he disdained the title of tyrant now that he had returned to them, and claimed that he would liberate all the Greeks of Asia and give them democracies.
The Milesians and Eretrians had sailed up the river together, fifty ships or more, and landed their men in the precinct of Koressos. Aristagoras was now the accepted commander of the war, and the whole purpose of the war had changed, because all the Greek cities had declared. Now it was the Trojan War. Now all the Greeks were going to make war on Persia. They planned to seize Sardis, expel the satrap Artaphernes and then perhaps march on Persepolis. And that night was the first I had heard of any of these things.
None of them noticed me, but they bickered among themselves aplenty, thugater. If I had been half the veteran I thought myself, I'd have smelled the trouble the way Aristides did.
Aristides watched them with contempt, and Archi worried and fidgeted. Hipponax watched them looking at his daughter, and Briseis rode the wave of their lust like a skilled helmsman.
It was not a pretty party, and I should not have been there. They drank, and quarrelled, and each of them thought he was Agamemnon or Achilles. On the sixth bowl of wine, Dikaios the Eretrian raised the cup.
'Your daughter moves like a dancer – can her lips do what flute girls do?' he asked.
Men hooted – and then fell silent. Hipponax rose from his kline and he looked ready to kill.
'Leave my house,' he said.
Dikaios laughed. 'You dress her like a whore and put her at a party, and then you're offended when I speak what every man thinks? You easterners are soft, and your women are whores.' He drank the wine.
The cup rang like a gong when it hit the floor, and his head hit only a moment later. It rang hollow, like a gourd. He was out.
I had put him in that condition, and now I lifted him – I was strong, then – and carried him to the courtyard, then threw him into the street, in the dung. Oh, it is easy to make enemies!
Darkar stopped me from going back to the party. So I went to my bed, and later I went to Briseis, and she embraced me with a vigour that frightened me.
'I loved how you hurt him,' she said. 'What do flute girls do?'
I explained, with some blushes, what they do. She laughed. 'Not enough in it for me,' she said. 'What pleasure does the girl get?' and we laughed together. The next morning, I ran six stades with Archi and he beat all of us. We threw javelins and fought with spears. After we had clashed shields and bruised each other for an hour, Agasides came and ordered us down to the beach. Heralds were crying in the agora and on the steps of all the temples, and the whole army was assembling for the first time.
The beach was a vision of Chaos. We stood together in a mob, perhaps seven thousand men, and Aristagoras placed his contingents in the phalanx. He put the Athenians on the right of the line, in the place of honour. The Ephesians were in the centre, towards the left.
When Agasides had his place in the battle line, he chose men for the front rank. He chose Hipponax, but he did not choose me or Archi. Few men of Ephesus knew me, and despite my excellent armour and my victory in games, the Ephesians didn't see me as a citizen (which I was not). Agasides, of course, knew me – as one of the men who had injured his son, and as a former slave.
So Archilogos and I were placed together – in the fifth rank. We were, without a doubt, the two best athletes in the city, and probably the best men-at-arms, but Ephesus had known three generations of peace, and Agasides placed men according to his likes and dislikes and with no eye towards the phalanx as a fighting machine. Hipponax had fought pirates several times, and despite his reputation as a soft poet, was a good choice. But all the other front-rankers were Agasides' drinking companions, business partners and political allies.
We were one of the last contingents to form, and we looked bad. Other contingent commanders came and stared at us while we grumbled and switched places endlessly. A man would make his claim to the front rank – always couched in political terms – and Agasides would stand indecisively, balancing one interest against another.
When, at last, we were in our places, Aristagoras came and addressed us, and for all his faults he had lungs of brass. We were told that the army would march up-country to Sardis over the passes in the mountains, and that all the hoplites and their slaves should assemble in two days, after the feast of Heracles – that is the feast that they celebrate in Ephesus, nothing like our Boeotian feasts. Two days, and we would march.
It was the first time most men had heard that we'd be marching up-country, and there was much grumbling.
I talked to the men around me and realized that none of them had ever stood in a shield wall or fought with bronze or iron. They were like a pack of virgins going to do the work of flute girls. I was a mere seventeen, but I had seen three pitched battles and I had killed.
Archi took me aside after the muster. 'You've got to stop talking so much,' he said. 'You'll take the spirit out of us! Sometimes I regret that you are free. You cannot speak to the first men of the city as if they were simpletons.'
I shrugged. 'Archi, they are fools, and men are going to die. I have fought in a phalanx. None of these men have. I should be in the front rank.'
Aristides had his helmet perched on his brow. He was leaning on his spears, listening to us, and then he came over. He glanced at Agasides and spat. 'You were there when your father stopped the Spartans?' he asked.
I nodded. 'I was there,' I said. I didn't mention that I had been a psilos throwing rocks.
He nodded. 'You should be in command, then. These children,' and he nodded to Archi, 'will die like sacrificed goats if we face the Medes.'
Archi blushed. 'I will stand my ground,' he said.
Aristides shrugged. 'You'll die alone then,' he said. I went back to the house and spent hours putting a pair of ravens over the nasal of my helmet. I softened the worked metal by annealing it, and then I had to cut my punches shorter to use them from inside the bowl of the helmet, but the work came along nicely enough. Sitting on a low stool at the anvil, tapping away at my work, alone in the shed, I was safe from the anger that had followed me from the muster.
I had started putting a band of olive leaves at the brow when the light from the doorway was cut off.
'I'm working!' I called without turning my head.
'So I see,' Heraclitus said. He came in, and I stood hurriedly.
'Stay where you are. I thought I would find you here.' He looked around, examined my practice pieces. 'You seem infatuated with ravens,' he said with a smile.
'My family calls itself the "Corvaxae",' I said. 'The Crows.'
'Ah! And why is that?' he asked.
I told him the story of the ravens and the Daidala, and then I told him about my sister's black hair, and how my father had always put the raven on his work.
Philosopher that he was, he wanted to see the metal worked, so I punched an olive leaf from inside the helmet and then made the work finer and neater by working it from the outside. I showed him how the work made the bronze harder.
He watched me anneal the back of the crown, and he reminded me of old Empedocles, the priest of Hephaestus, when he commented on the bronze tube that I used to raise the heat of the forge fire.
'I have seen the fire and the metal together before,' he said. 'I suppose that I already knew that fire softens and work hardens.' He smiled. Then he frowned. 'With iron, fire hardens.'
I shook my head. 'You are the wisest man I know, but no smith! Fire softens iron. To make it hard, you quench it in vinegar when it is hot.'
'It is fire that is the agent,' he said. 'The agent of change is always fire.'
I could hardly argue with that.
He looked at the new leaves around the brow of the helmet. 'You won the olive wreath at the games at Chios?' he asked.
I smiled with pride. 'Yes,' I answered. 'Now I will wear them for ever.'
He turned my work this way and that, and I explained planishing to smooth and harden the metal. And then I showed him how I melted the bronze and poured it on slate. He played with the bronze tube, just as Empedocles had, and blew through it, making the fire leap, and he laughed with joy.
'All things are an equal exchange with fire, and fire for all things,' he said. 'Look at how you use the charcoal to make the fire, and the fire melts the bronze. You merely trade the charcoal for the heat, the way men at the docks change gold for a cargo.'
I nodded, because that made sense to me.
'So it is with anger and with war,' he said. 'Anger is to men what fire is to your forge. And if we eradicate that anger, much might follow.'
I shrugged.
He took me by the shoulder. 'You are full of anger,' he said. 'Anger gives strength, but it comes at the price of soul. Do you know what I am saying?'
I said yes – like a boy. In fact, I heard him, but had no idea what he was saying – that is, how his words were meant for me. He had come down from the temple just to say those words, but I was young and foolish.
I embraced him, and he left me, and then I finished my work.
That night I went to sleep early, intending to rise and go to Briseis, but I was tired and I slept through the night. Then the next day we had an assembly of arms, and we drilled – raising and lowering our shields, and forming to the left, so that we marched up the beach and formed a front on the Athenians from a column into a deep line.
Aristides said it was horrible. I had no idea. This kind of drill was outside my limited experience of war.
In the afternoon, I read Thales to Briseis. She smiled at me. 'I was lonely last night,' she said, and I started, because she said it in front of Penelope.
So that night I went through the bead curtain into her room. We made love, and it was good. And then we began to talk of my going up-country.
I wanted her to tell me that she loved me, and that she would miss me. But she was merely playful, and when I searched for an endearment, she grabbed my manhood and kissed me until I lay with her again.
I am making all of you blush. But the blushing time is over, and the hard part has come.
We were lying together on her kline after that second time. She lay on top of me, the weight of her – not much of a weight, I'll allow – pressing down on my hips. She was idly licking the bruise on my shoulder when I heard heavy footfalls in the hallway. I had time to roll her off me.
The beads parted and Hipponax burst into the room.
He had a sword.
Behind him was Darkar, and behind both of them was Archi with Penelope in tow, her eyes wide with terror.
Hipponax raised the sword. He hesitated – unsure, I think, which of us to kill first.
I took the sword from him as easily as you would take a spoon from a child. Then I stood between him and his daughter.
Oh, the furies must have been laughing.
What hurt most was the look of pain on Archi's face.
Hipponax was weeping. He hit me with his fist, ignoring that I had a sword – that's how angry he was.
I flung the sword away rather than kill him with it. And he hit me again. I fell.
When he turned on Briseis, she had the sword. She looked at me – with contempt.
'Stop this,' Briseis said. She was sixteen, and yet her voice stopped all the war in the room.
'You whore!' her brother cried. He sounded as if he was in physical pain.
'How could you-' her father started. He sobbed. 'What is the curse of the women of my house?'
Briseis stood there, naked, the sword in her fist. She held it steady, and when her father approached her, she pricked his chest with the point. 'No closer,' she said. 'My virginity was never yours to barter.'
'What?' Hipponax asked. 'Drop the sword!'
She shook her head. 'Go to bed. We will talk about this in the day.'
Hipponax took a shuddering breath and exploded. 'You faithless bitch!' he roared. 'And I allowed your brother – and this piece of offal – to beat Diomedes! He was right! I will flog you in the streets – I will sell you to a brothel. I will sacrifice you-'
She pricked him with the point. 'No,' she said.
She looked at Archi. 'Take Pater to bed,' she said.
Archi was shaking. He flicked a glance at me. 'He must die,' Archi said.
So much for friendship.
She looked at me. 'Why?' she asked. 'He is not anybody, and he will never tell.'
Her words cut me as if the blade she held pricked my flesh.
So much for love.
She laughed. 'You are all fools. This body is mine. I will use it as I wish. If I wish to take my pleasure with a man or a dog, so be it. I learned that from Mater, and from Diomedes, and you two fools will need to learn the lesson. Men will not be my masters. By Artemis the virgin, and by Aphrodite, I will be the master and not the slave.'
They stepped back.
'You will die a lonely old bitch,' her father said.
Briseis laughed. 'Pater, you are dear to me, but you are a fool. I will die the queen of Lydia. Aristagoras has agreed to marry me.' She laughed.
Something in me died. 'What?' I spat. It was good, then, that I had no weapon in my hand.
Briseis smiled at me – the smile matrons give to simple children in the agora. 'You thought I was going to marry you, because you have a fine suit of armour?' She pointed the sword at her father and brother. 'As soon as Sardis falls, I am to wed him.'
She turned to me and smiled. 'You have served your turn, Doru. Take your armour and go from this house. I don't think you should come back. Pater might hurt you. And you love him.' She said the last as if it made me the greatest fool in the world.
But I obeyed her, and my world filled with darkness. I went to my bed with Darkar at my heels. He spoke, and I have no idea what he said. I took the wool bag with my armour, and I took my sword and my spears. I rolled my heavy cloak and my sleeping pad inside my aspis.
Darkar was still talking at me when I got to the gate.
Archi was there.
'How could you?' he asked.
'I love her,' I said. He had a naked blade in his hand, and I drew my blade. 'Loved her,' I spat.
'Never come back,' he said. We faced each other with blades in our hands. I found Aristides on the beach in the morning.
'Will you take me as a hoplite?' I asked him, straight away.
He looked around. 'Tell me why,' he said. 'You served with Archilogos of this city, last I heard.'
'I serve him no longer,' I said.
Aristides nodded. 'More fool he.' He smiled. 'Will you stand in the seventh rank?'
The lowest place. An eighth-ranker was a file-closer – a form of officer. But a seventh-ranker was a man either too young or too small to fight.
'I'm better than that,' I said, with all the anger gathered in the last few hours.
Aristides was only a couple of years older than me, but he had a way about him, and he gave me his famous half-smile. 'I know that you can kill,' he said. 'I don't know you otherwise. Seventh rank, or stay on the beach.'
So when we marched on Sardis, I marched with the Athenians, the wings of betrayal beating about my head, the furies at my back and all of Persia before me.
In the seventh rank.