I never saw Byzantium that trip. The storm hit us four days out of Cyprus with a hull full of copper. We ran before it, because we were crossing the deep blue between Cyprus and Crete and we had nowhere to land and we didn't dare show the low sides of our trireme to the wind.
It hadn't been a good trip. We'd had weather out of Ephesus, weather all the way to Cyprus, weather while we collected copper and weather while we rowed – all rowing, no sailing – to Crete.
Men looked at me. I was the foreigner, and the gods of the sea were angry. Well they might. I was an oath-breaker, fleeing from my oath to Hipponax, and the sea had no love for me.
I took turns with Herk at the steering oars. We'd been trained well, Archi and I, when we made the runs up to the Euxine and across the wine-dark sea to Italy. I could handle a ship, even a long killer like Herk's light trireme. I marvelled at the Athenian build style. They really were pirates – the hulls were thin as papyrus, and the ship itself was narrower and lighter, and the rowers were packed even closer than rowers in Ephesian ships – free men every one, with a sword and a couple of javelins, the richer men with a spolas or a thorax.
South and east of Crete, the weather seemed to abate and we made a good landfall, and the first night that we slept on a beach, every man kissed the sand. I speak no blasphemy when I say that the furies must have had a lot of law-breaking and oath-breaking to pursue. Perhaps some other bastard took up their attention.
Cretans aren't like other Greeks. The men of Crete are war-worshippers, and they have aristocrats and serfs – most of the farmers are not free men at all, but something like slaves. Only the aristocrats fight, and some of them still use chariots. I didn't think much of their primitive agriculture. It is a curse of youth that you cannot keep your mouth shut and so, on our third night in the 'great hall' of the local lord, Sarpedon of Aenis, I found myself arguing with local men about how best to grow wheat and barley. I used an unfortunate phrase in the heat of my anger at the fool's intransigence – we don't call them Cretans for nothing – and this fool called me out, demanding blood.
'You must be joking?' I asked. I'd had some wine.
He slapped me like a woman. 'Coward,' he said. 'Woman.'
Idomeneus came and told me that I had to fight or be ashamed. I laughed. I wasn't ashamed and I had little interest in fighting. But the lord glowered and the other men hooted at my apparent cowardice.
His name was Goras, and I killed him. He was a good fighter, but half drunk and no match for me. The only danger was from the darkness and the drink – I vowed never to fight under such conditions again. His first blows were wild and thus dangerous, but I set my feet and put my spear into his throat and down he went, and the hall fell silent. Herk shook his head. He gathered me with his other men, paid an indemnity and took us away. In the morning we sailed, heading west along the south coast of Crete.
'That cost me the whole value of my trading there,' he said to me in the morning. 'Can't you keep that sword in its sheath?'
I wasn't surly. In those days, killing often brought me a black cloud – I would sit alone and mope. But I heard his words, and they were just words.
We had good weather as we coasted Crete, and we sold our Athenian olive oil and beautiful red-figured and black-figured vases at enormous profit in the market of Hierapytna, and the mood of the crew improved. But not for long.
Herk took me aside after we were invited to the lord's hall. 'Could you refrain from killing anyone until our business here is done?' he asked.
I nodded. 'Silent as the grave.'
But of course, I wasn't.
In truth, there's little I could have done about it. Word of my fight up the coast had made it here. And word of the Ionian Revolt was everywhere, and men behaved like men – like warriors. As they had taken no part, they had to belittle those who had. As we had lost, we were to be humbled.
I have watched this pattern play out too many times. More wine, here.
We were in the lord's hall, and Herk had sent Idomeneus to watch over me. I was quiet, listening and not talking, striving to be the sort of man – well, the sort of man that Eualcidas had been, silent and cheerful. Grown men always tell you that this is the way of excellence, but they neglect to tell you that it is easier to be silent and dignified and cheerful when you are forty and have won ten battles. It's like getting women – much easier when you are too old to enjoy them.
Hah, I'm a foul old man. Too true.
I listened to them demean the Ephesians and the Athenians, and I said nothing. I said nothing when they laughed at Aristides' youth. But I suspect my attempts at dignity weren't much better than stubborn glowering. I was easy meat. Finally, an older man, a leader, came over to where I stood, and he grinned.
I grinned back – glad that someone, at least, was interested in being my friend.
'I heard that you killed a man down the coast,' he said. 'But I have to assume you stabbed him in the back. I mean – look at you. No intestines. No reply to the insults we heap on you. Or are you some sort of woman?' He laughed, showing all his teeth.
I sputtered. This is where heroes are supposed to make a good speech, but I was taken by surprise and I failed. Blood rushed to my head and when Idomeneus tried to hold my arm, I punched him in the mouth. Then I turned.
'You want to die?' I asked. I don't remember what else I said – just that.
He laughed. And threw a punch, a fast punch, right through my defences, and knocked me flat, dislocated my jaw.
I lay there in a rage of pain, and he laughed again.
'This is their great killer?' he asked his friends. When I got to my feet, he didn't even take a stance. He feinted, and then I was on my back again, and my right temple felt as if his knuckle had gone through it.
They all laughed – all except the Athenians. They didn't laugh – but they did nothing to help. My friends – the men I'd fought beside – they weren't all on Herk's ship. And Herk himself shifted uneasily, but he stayed put.
Not cowardice. Just being practical men of business.
I got to my feet slowly. I wasn't thinking too well. And I was filled – suffused – with the purest spirit of Ares. Ares, the hateful god. I was glowing with hate. I felt betrayed.
I was young.
My tormentor came forward again and I stumbled towards him, and he laughed. They all laughed. That's what I remember best – the laughter.
The rage and the hate were all through me, and with them came a plan, and I followed my plan.
I let him chase me around the hall. I fell over benches. I accepted the humiliation, backing, always backing – running, even. Oh, yes. I was the coward he thought me, step by step, and men roared with laughter to see my antics.
Except Herk. He knew me, and his eyes grew big, and when I was close to him he yelled something at me, pleading.
Then my head cleared. Two heavy blows to the head do not leave you with much, in a fight. But if you are used to taking blows – and I was – you can get your own back, if you stay alive and keep your blood pumping. I'd run around the hall for five minutes by then, and I'd taken blows – to my abdomen, but it was thick with muscle, and to my thighs, where the other tormentors rained their fists on me as I hopped past.
When my head was clear, I jumped a bench and a kline in one bound and stood in the open space in the middle of all the men. He came at me, and he was still laughing.
He threw his punch, and I caught his fist in the air and broke his arm. The sound of his arm breaking was like a limb snapping from a good, old olive tree.
Then I broke his neck.
And they all stopped laughing. I said nothing. I watched them lie on their couches frozen in the act of fondling their boys.
Now they had the rage and I was calm. I watched the rage flow out of me and into them. He'd been someone they liked – someone they fancied. Now he was meat.
They were warriors. They had elaborate codes of honour, and they did not rush me like a pack.
Herk shook his head and all the Athenians gathered together. Knives began to appear around the hall, and swords.
I let my eyes rove over the Cretans, looking for a leader. I'd like to say I was like a ravening wolf, or a lion who had just killed a bull – but I was shaken by the killing. I had broken his arm – had I always meant to break his neck, too?
Yes.
'He attacked me,' I said to the room. 'And insulted me. How would you have me respond?'
Herk touched my shoulder and I flinched, not from fear, but because I was tense, waiting for them to rush me.
'Come,' he said. 'Before they kill you.'
They let us walk away. I still wonder about it – I didn't see fear in them, only rage – the same engulfing redness I had felt.
We were not welcome after that. No mess – the Cretans live in messes of warriors, like the Spartans – no mess would have us to dinner, and no man would trade with us. My fellow oarsmen looked at me with fear and I heard them whisper behind my naked back as we rowed the long ship west along the south coast of Crete. That was a black time.
We rowed along the coast and the next night we camped on a beach. I tried to sleep by myself, but instead I sat awake, watching the stars. Then Herk came, and Cleon, the man who had held my back when we sacked Sardis.
They shuffled, and I shuffled. Hard to explain how men who can fight and kill in the phalanx can't tackle, oh, many things, like talking to a friend who's doing wrong, or getting a girl you really like to look at you. So many ways to be a coward. So we sat a while, looking at the stars.
'I can't keep you aboard,' Herk said, suddenly.
There it was. We'd all known what he had to say. I had hoped for something different, but I knew – I knew from the heavy silence. Nor had I forgiven them – for letting me down. Nor had they forgiven themselves – so they held it against me. See? Nothing is simple.
So I watched the stars a while longer. But my rage mostly died with the man whose neck I broke, so after a longer pause than anyone wanted, I said, 'I know.' I shrugged, I think. But I was bitter, and young.
'Tomorrow we will come to Gortyn,' Herk said. 'The richest kingdom on Crete. The king is always hiring mercenaries. I'll do my best for you – I promise. By Hermes, lord of trades. But you – my friend, you are under a curse, and it burns black over your head, a sign for every man who can see. And your curse kills. The men – they should love you. You are a hero. Instead, they're afraid of you. And so am I. I can't risk taking you across the blue water to Piraeus. Someone will put a knife in you, and feed you to Poseidon. One storm – that's all it would take. They'd gut you.'
I nodded. 'I just want to go home!' I said suddenly.
Herk looked away.
Cleon put an arm around my shoulders. I've never forgotten that. Cleon stood by me. Later, I stood by him, and if you keep listening, you'll hear. But he said, 'Herk is right. And you can get a ship to Piraeus – in the spring. Stay here a while. Make some money. Go to a priest – find out what you've done. Purify yourself.' The arm tightened. 'Stop killing.'
Aye, I think I wept. Herk was as good as his word, too. Better.
Gortyn sits in the mountains above the sea – a strong place, if not a beautiful one, and it rests on the bones of an older castle, and that rests on stones placed by giants and titans – the past is all around you, at Gortyn, so that when you stand in their Temple of Poseidon Earth-Shaker, you can look down through a hole in the floor at the stones placed by the gods, a thousand lives of men ago or more.
The port town is called Levin. The lord of Gortyn owns all the towns on that stretch of coast, and nowhere have I been in a place where the divide between low and high was so deep. As deep as the sea – as high as the grey-white mountains that rise from them.
Herk sold me, in effect, bragging about my fighting skills and my learning to the king and his leading warriors in the king's mess. The king had a palace but he spent no time there – instead, he lived with nine other rich aristocrats in a fine marble building on the street that ended with the ancient Temple of Poseidon. The building was new-built, but in the fashion of an old-style megaron. The ten men had their couches arrayed around the hearth, and there were more slaves than you could shake a stick at.
I stood silently while Herk talked me up.
'He's a killer,' one of the aristocrats said. 'He killed Laenis down at Hierapytna – that's what we hear. What happened? You – lad, tell it yourself?'
I shook my head. 'Men mocked me,' I said. 'Mocked my friends, mocked the men I stood with in battle. I became angry.'
The king's name was Achilles. He was old enough that his hair was mostly grey – all grey on his chest and back, although he had muscles on his chest like a statue. He nodded.
'My son needs to learn from a killer. But not if the killer can't control himself.' He got up. 'Let us hunt a boar tomorrow, gentlemen.'
They all nodded. Hunting is an excellent way to take a man's measure, and they were going to take mine.
I remember that I slept badly – not from worry, but from shame. Or rather, fear. Was I mad? Had the war god taken my wits?
Tired and red-eyed, I walked out of the guest megaron as the sun rose, found a spring on the hillside and washed. For the first time in many days – perhaps longer – I prayed. I prayed to Heracles my ancestor, and to Athena, because she was the enemy of Ares and I wanted no more from Ares. Then I walked down the hill to where forty or fifty men were gathered with spears. Naked. On Crete, men always hunt naked. The highest fashion is to have a perfect body. And having put in the work to have one, no one wanted to cover that work with cloth.
I got my spears and stood with them. The king emerged from his mess with his officers, and they shook hands with or embraced most of the men there, and then the dog-handlers came, and we were off – up the hillside, past my spring.
The day went on and on, the sun rising hotter and hotter on us. The dogs flushed two pigs – and both evaded us, so that the men began to talk of nets. But the king would have nothing to do with them. I heard one voice, shriller and angrier, demanding nets, and I could see the resemblance. This was his son. He had enough spots to be a fawn.
The third pig that the hounds eventually flushed for us was a little bigger than a dog and not very dangerous. But she was smart enough to keep the dogs off her and fast enough to make us run to keep up, and before long, I was the only man still pacing the front coursers. Those men were all in top shape, but I'd been at war – and at an oar – all summer, and I was half their age. I ran up the mountain and I began to catch the dogs. It was so steep that I knew that if I stumbled I'd have to stop and climb – but for the moment, momentum and pride kept me going, and I could see the pig.
I had no idea about the etiquette of Cretan hunting and no desire to annoy the king. In any case, Lord Achilles had bandy legs and a broad chest and ran slowly, but he was strong as an ox and had the open friendliness that only big men seem to have. Despite his ugly body, men liked him. He was a powerful lord. And he was next behind me on the mountain – the others were way behind us. Slow he might have been – but he wasn't to be stopped. And there I was, love-sick and fury-hounded, sprinting along beside the lead hound, wondering what Artemis would have me do.
The pig lost her nerve when she saw a stand of oak. We were well up the mountain and the ground was rough with stone. The oaks were scrubby things, nothing like the trees of Cithaeron, but I knew what she meant to do. I put on a burst of speed and threw one of my heavy spears – missing the pig, but turning her away from the trees and back towards the hunters.
She lacked the experience of hunting to know what to do. She turned and I stooped, picked up a jagged rock and threw it just beyond her. She turned again and the pack closed in on her.
Achilles came up with his officers and their lovers and there were ten spears in the pig within a few heartbeats. I got my spear wet in her blood out of habit. In some circles, a hunter who does not wet his spear is a coward, or not a man – different hunters have different habits.
Old Achilles – he seemed old to me, although he was ten years younger than I am today – took me by the shoulder. 'Well done. You are a man of courtesy – like a warrior of the old times.'
Achilles' eldest son – I had pegged him correctly – was introduced. He was just a year or two younger than me, a lout named Nearchos, all pimples and straggly black hair and youthful anger. He glowered at me and then turned away, affecting boredom.
'My son is a rude fool. Nearchos! This foreigner is a man. He has killed in duels and in war. Look at him! No need to run a little pig down and kill it when he could share the kill with the rest of us – he doesn't need that little glory for himself, see?' Achilles squeezed my shoulder. 'He needs a man to take him in hand and show him the path.' He winked at me.
Nearchos looked at me from under his eyelashes and then blushed and turned his back, more like a maiden at the well than was quite right.
As we walked back to the hall, Idomeneus took my spears. 'They want you to be his – well, his lover. His erastes. To teach him the ways of the world.' Idomeneus batted his eyelashes at me.
I rolled my eyes. Boys will be boys, and what happens after a hunt is not for a maiden's ears, but I've never understood the peculiar mating of boys and men that some practise, and even if I did appreciate such stuff, Nearchos's face would not have launched a single scow, where Helen's launched a thousand ships.
On the other hand, I was flattered to be treated as a hero in a foreign land. Back at the hall, the pig grew in size with every retelling, and my act of generosity was magnified to near legendary status.
Herk took me aside. 'They love you,' he said. 'I thought they might. Will you stay?'
'Do I have a choice?' I asked.
Herk shrugged. 'Don't be a prick. I'm doing my best for you.' And he was.
I shrugged. Nearchos was leaning against a pillar, whittling a stick with a pretty knife and looking at me when he thought I couldn't see him.
'I could live here for a season.' I shrugged again. 'But sooner or later, they're going to know that my father was a bronze-smith. Not a noble.'
Herk tried to hide a smile as he saw how it was with Nearchos, and he turned his back on the boy. 'Lord Achilles is as rich a man as Miltiades and he's asked me twice if you might be interested in staying on as his boy's war tutor. And to fight in his war band, of course.' The big Athenian sighed. 'It's a soft life here. But you already have a name. What's waiting for you at home? A farm? Farming is for fools. Stay here, and be rich. And when you leave here, everyone will think of you as an aristocrat. Crete is the most aristocratic place in Hellas. What in Tartarus does home have, by comparison?'
'I'll let them know who I am,' I said, with a little too much youthful emphasis. 'All right. I'll stay.'
'And Cleon's right – see a priest.' My friend raised an eyebrow.
'Before the furies come for you.'
I looked at Nearchos. Then I looked back at Herk.
'You don't have to lie with him,' he said. 'Be unattainable. But teach him. You have a great deal to teach. You have a brain, lad – remember that sophist you took us all to see?'
'Heraclitus?' I asked.
'That's it. You have a formal education. You can teach.' He pointed his chin at Lord Achilles, who was laughing with his leading men. 'I'll negotiate your price, if you like. And I can set it high – ten times what Miltiades would pay for a spearman.'
'Very well,' I said. And the knucklebones were cast. I was not going home. Both Idomeneus and Lekthes chose to stay with me as my 'men'. Old Herk wrote them into the contract like the wily Athenian he was, and so we all had bed and board and wages from Lord Achilles, and they became my sworn men in the Cretan way. Idomeneus was all for it – he was a peasant from down the coast and he understood the system better than I. In three weeks he'd gone from bed-warmer to warrior. He began to grow proud.
I had few friends on the ship, as I've said, but Cleon was one. We embraced, and I promised to visit him in Athens. He laughed. 'I live in a house smaller than a grain-byre,' he said. 'But I'd love to see you. By Zeus and Hermes and all the gods, it is good to be going home, and here's my hand and a prayer that I see you framed by my doors!'
Good man. Listen, honey – the Poet talks about heroes, but there's never enough about the Cleons – good men who love their wives and their children but still stand their place in the battle line. He hated war. But he did it.
Then, richer and lighter, Heraklides and Cleon and their ship sailed away, and left me and my little entourage with the lords of Crete. And Cleon's eagerness to be home rang in my ears.
In fact, Idomeneus, the scared boy of the battlefield, Eualcidas's catamite, became my confidant and adviser. He knew the local words, he knew the laws and he understood the complex relations between lord and lord – so much more complicated than life in Boeotia, or so it seemed to me then. Now I understand that every man's customs seem natural to him and alien to a foreigner.
When I discovered that Idomeneus and Lekthes were to fight in the line with me, I bought them simple arms and armour – good stuff from a local smith of god-sent talent called Hephaestion, a fitting name for a smith. They had simple leather corslets and good bronze helmets in the local style, and it was my fancy to have us all carry Boeotian shields, to mark us as different.
You hardly ever see a Boeotian any more. Take mine down, thugater. Try that on your arm, young man. You see? The porpax runs the opposite way from what you might expect, eh? Long and narrow – and the cut-outs in the side are not for putting your spear through! Older men on Crete told me that those holes are for wearing the shield on your back in chariot combat – the holes make it easier on your back and elbows, or so I'm told.
I think it's just because that's the way a bull's hide cuts. Those old Cretan noblemen never made a shield, and I've made quite a few.
But you can see that it is lighter than an aspis. Not as safe – thinner. And a man with a Boeotian shield has to be aggressive in his blocks – no messing around. You can stand behind an aspis and take blows, but with a Boeotian you have to get that forward edge out and in your opponent's face.
Anyway, that was my whim. I was flattered by the attention of all these Cretan aristocrats, and the word of my killing the warrior Goras on the east coast had come to Gortyn.
I trained the two of them and Nearchos together. Nearchos had already received years of training, or what the Cretans called training, meaning that he was in top shape and could recite the Iliad. So we ran, and we hunted, and I began by teaching them the Pyrrhiche – the Boeotian war dance in armour that shows a man how to move his body, flex his hips, thrust low and high, and drills a group of men to move in unison. I drafted an old flute player from the hall and in two weeks they were able to do the dance. Men came and watched and laughed.
Lord Achilles watched one afternoon. Nearchos was surly, because he hated performing in front of people. I knew him a little by then and liked him a little better. There was a noble young man buried beneath the angst and the boyhood and the burning desire.
When we had completed the dance ten times, and all three of my students were stumbling with fatigue, Lord Achilles got up and nodded. 'You give them grace. But how is it different from our dances?'
I had seen their dances. In Gortyn, when the ephebes dance, they dance with weapons and armour, but it is all show – postures meant to show a man's muscles, to stretch him and prove the soundness of his legs. On Crete, they use the dances to pick the fittest – by which they mean the most beautiful.
It's the same dance in Plataea, and yet utterly different. We dance for war, and our dance has all the feints, all the attacks, all the shield parries – and the first figure is the hardest, where men learn to rotate from one rank to another. On Crete, they never rotate ranks – the front-rank dancers are the most beautiful. I don't know what they do when they get tired in combat.
'If we are all trained the same way,' I said, 'we will all move together in combat.' I shrugged, I think. 'And he needs something different. This is different.'
Then I remembered something that Calchas had said. 'And men are scared in combat,' I added. 'If they learn to block and thrust by rote, over and over, then they can do it even when terror and panic pull at their guts.'
Old Achilles had been in a fight or two. He nodded. 'How many fights have you seen?' he asked.
I thought for a minute. 'Four field battles. Ten duels.' That was an exaggeration, but not by much. 'A skirmish or two,' I added with modesty that was, in fact, the exact truth. And some beatings and a murder, I thought. I was just eighteen, and I'd seen more violence than any of the men in the lord's hall.
After that day, there was less laughter when we danced, and other men came and asked to join in. They came self-consciously, with servants carrying their armour. I accepted them all, and I moved the dancing to the broad field with a rose garden behind it. The scent of roses coloured everything that summer, for me. We danced, and then I put a heavy paling in the ground with the help of some slaves and I taught my students to use their swords and spears on the paling, cutting at it, lunging at it, developing the fine control of the weapon that allows you to put your spear into a man's throat or between his eyes, to feel how much thrust it takes to kill and how much is too little.
Winter came and we trained in the hall, we ran in a pack across the hills and we hunted deer. News came that Ephesus had fallen. According to a Cyprian merchant, when the Persian siege mound was even with the walls, Aristagoras filled his ships and sailed away, leaving the Ephesians to their fate. And the Ephesians had surrendered on terms.
I cried. I should have been there. I was wasting my life in a back-water, far from the woman I loved. It was a good life but dull, and I was beginning to get tired of avoiding Nearchos. I wasn't home, I wasn't with Briseis and I wasn't – anyone. The next spring, when the plants were in bud and all women were becoming equally attractive to me, I was saved by Heraklides, who arrived with a cargo and told me that Aristagoras was raising men and ships throughout Ionia to liberate Cyprus.
'And his wife?' I asked.
'Medea come to life.' Herk rolled his eyes. 'He is a fool to marry a girl so young, and so intelligent. If only she was the strategos.' He laughed and I went back to dreaming of my lost love.
In the autumn, as the wheat was coming in, Aristagoras came to Crete. He came with five ships and he toured the lords, asking for support – and receiving it. Cyprus was rich and the Cretans longed to have a piece of Cyprus. They had not been to war for many years, and every young man clamoured to go.
The wheat was in jars by the time Aristagoras made his way to us at Gortyn. He lorded it over us, wearing a purple cloak and flaunting his wealth, and they followed him as men will follow a Siren. I avoided him at first – a difficult trick in the close confines of a hall – but soon enough I saw that he didn't know me from any other Cretan, and then I listened to his words and attended his dinners.
He was a hollow man, his vanity unchanged by failure at Sardis and Ephesus, and I listened with the blood pounding at my temples as he described how the Athenians had broken and run in the great battle near Ephesus, leaving the Ionians to struggle on alone. Men in the hall looked at me. I wanted no part of this man, but my own reputation would suffer if I allowed him to denigrate the Athenians. Finally, I stood up.
'You lie,' I said.
Silence fell over the hall, and Aristagoras turned, his face composed and regal. 'I lie?' he asked in the voice of a councillor or an advocate in the courts.
'You lie,' I said. 'I was at Sardis, when the Milesians hung back and stayed out of the town. I fought in the agora with the Persians, and then I stood my ground at Ephesus when we stopped the Carians cold and sent them back to their sisters. The centre broke first. I know, because when I looked out over the battle, the centre was already gone – and I was still standing my ground.'
Aristagoras looked around. 'Who is this man, that he is allowed to speak in your hall?' he asked Achilles.
'He is my son's war tutor,' Lord Achilles said. He crossed his arms. 'He is young and full of fire – but he has the right to speak here.'
Aristagoras shrugged. 'I say that the Athenians were the first to break.'
I smiled. 'I say you lie. And there are other men here who were at the battle, Aristagoras. Perhaps you should watch your words. Cretans are not as ignorant as you seem to think.'
But Aristagoras was not to be tripped up by a man as young as I. Instead, he smiled at me, rose from his couch and crossed the hall. 'Young man, you know how it is in battle. Neither you nor I could see anything beyond the eye-slits of our helmets. Men tell me that the Athenians were the first to flee. Myself, I was fighting.'
I was old enough to know that loud assertions would only lose me the argument. But my temper was up. 'I was in the front rank,' I said, 'and I was done fighting when the Carians ran. When I had killed three of them, my spear in their necks.' I looked around the hall. 'Any man who says that the Athenians or the Eretrians were the first to run – lies. And can meet my sword.' That was the Cretan way, as I had discovered my first night on Crete, against Goras.
Aristagoras took my hand. 'We should be friends – our argument causes the Persians to laugh at us.' His words were sweet – but his eyes were full of hate. I had interrupted his performance. What a petty tyrant he was. Even now, my hate for him makes my hands shake.
'How's Briseis?' I asked.
It must have been in my voice. He froze, his hand clasped in mine, his other hand on my elbow, and both of his hands tightened. Oh, she's a bad girl, I thought. My smile must have been too knowing.
'No man speaks of my wife in public,' he hissed. Men around us looked at him curiously. His mask of benevolence was slipping.
'Really?' I asked. 'Let go of my arm, my lord. Before I kill you.' There – it was said, right out in public. He didn't know me from before, the fool. My hand was on my fighting knife – we didn't wear swords in the hall, but hung them on pegs, as the poet says.
Oh, the hate in his eyes. 'You – you were Aristides' butt-boy,' he said in a gentle voice, as the recognition dawned. And then his expression changed, as he felt the prick of my dagger against the inside of his thigh, hidden from the other men in the hall.
'Send my regards to Briseis,' I said. In one push of the dagger, I could make her a widow.
And then she'd marry another nobleman. That was the way of the world, lass.
Aristagoras looked at me in disbelief. He was a coward in his soul, for all his posturing, and I could see the collapse in his eyes. He let go of my elbow and stepped back. I bowed slightly and dropped my blade on the couch behind me so other men would not see what had passed, and Aristagoras backed away quickly.
But Achilles liked him, or liked his ideas, or was simply too greedy to see the foolishness of what was proposed, and he promised three ships for the campaign against Cyprus, to be launched the next autumn.
Aristagoras sailed away. Then the war preparations started in earnest. Men flocked to my teaching, and soon I was teaching my way of war in the agora, and I found that I was saying Calchas's words and Heraclitus's words together, as if they were one philosophy. And perhaps they are, at that. We danced, and we cut and thrust at billets of wood, and at each other.
The need for men – armoured men – drove Hephaestion the smith to distraction, and I began to spend more time with him. I was no smith, but I could make sheet out of an ingot, and none of his apprentices could.
In the agora, or at his shop, I spent a lot of time in the town. And the town was full of dangers.
The dangers all had to do with sex. Will I shock you, thugater? I wanted someone to share my bed, and Nearchos wanted to share my bed, but the two were in opposition. We were a balanced duality, as the Pythagoreans say. If I had taken a slave girl, Nearchos would have pouted for weeks – indeed, his father might have disowned me. Nearchos and his father had assumed that I would take Nearchos as a lover when he reached some level of heroic achievement that existed in their imaginations.
In fact, I was coming to like the boy, and by my second spring with them, he was my equal in most things. I had no idea whether he would stand in the battle line, but he was fast and strong and he could use his spear point to chip out his name in a billet of wood – a neat trick.
A year and more, I had lived like a Pythagorean, taking no lovers. To be honest, for a long time I had no interest, at least in part because I wanted no woman but Briseis. By the second spring in Crete, however, my body was becoming too much for me. The spring dances were all around me, the older men took younger men hunting, and I was alone.
I went to the smithy to hide from my lust, and hammered bronze into sheet with Hephaestion, who enjoyed my company but was not inclined to empty flattery. Far from it. He was the teacher I never had, at metal-forming, critical and derisive when I deserved it, full of praise when I did well. His only son was long dead, fallen in one of their local cattle-raid wars, serving his lord. Hephaestion taught me many things about forming bronze, and yet he was not the smith my father was. That is one of the mysteries of learning and teaching, I suppose.
I'll take this moment, while this pretty girl serves me wine, to say that good times, like the time I spent with Hephaestion, are never as memorable as bad times. It is odd, and sad, that I cannot make a story out of Hephaestion, because in a way I loved him the best of all the men I knew on Crete. He was gentle, strong, kind, garrulous and grumpy. He might strike a slave in anger, but he apologized later. And he was never above learning from me, either, when I could remember my father's techniques, for instance. I would have gone mad without him.
The other warriors thought it odd that I played with bronze, but they feared me, so there was no talk that I heard – and they needed armour. Swinging the hammers made me stronger too, and kept me from trouble. I practised arms until I was exhausted, and then I swung a hammer until I was exhausted all over again. That was life.
And then, as I said, the second spring came, and all my careful reserves began to melt away as the sap rose in the trees and the first flowers bloomed. Persephone was returning to the earth.
I wanted a girl. All girls were beginning to look equally beautiful to me, young or old, fat or thin, and yet I knew that to tumble a slave in the lord's hall would have instant consequences.
Women know things, too. Well might you toss your head, you hussy – I'm sure that women know what men want as soon as their hips get broad. All the women in the hall knew me for what I was – a man who liked women. And that fascinated them, because their men made a fashion of disdaining women at every turn. The lord had three daughters and all of them made Nearchos look handsome, but they all tossed their heads at me just like that – blush as much as you like, young gentlewoman, I love your blushes. My thugater should bring you every day!
But there were other girls. Down by the beach there was a town – not big enough to be a city, even such a city as Plataea, but Gortyn had two or three thousand free people, and a substantial number of pretty girls.
Hephaestion's shop was at the top of the town, in the no-man's-land between the lord's hall and the merchants. I would work at his forge and girls would come to watch me, stripped to my waist, the famous warrior getting his hands dirty.
It was the day before the Thesmophoria, which has a different name in Crete. All the girls were getting ready – on Crete, it is a woman's holiday, and all the unmarried girls dress like priestesses in their best linen chitons, so that when the sun is behind them, no man need doubt a line of their bodies. They put sashes around their waists and flowers in their hair, and the girls who came to the forge were waiting for disc brooches that the smith and I had spent the morning making. Now we were polishing with the slaves – just to get the job done.
One girl was bolder than the others, fifteen and pretty with the flush of maidenhood and spring, and she brushed her fingers against mine when I gave her a brooch. Next to Briseis she was probably as plain as a daisy next to a rose, but she had a slim waist and high breasts and I wanted to have her on the dusty floor of the forge. Our eyes spent a great deal of time together.
Hephaestion laughed when she was gone. 'Troas's daughter, and no better than she ought to be. They're fisherfolk. You want her?'
I blushed – I do blush, lass – and hung my head.
Hephaestion laughed. 'Are you hag-ridden, boy?'
I shrugged. Up in the hall, I was a young lord, a warrior. Down in the forge, I was a boy. And I acted like one.
'Does Nearchos know?' Hephaestion asked.
'No,' I said. And then, 'I don't lie with Nearchos.'
Hephaestion reacted as if I'd slapped him. 'You don't?' he asked. 'He must be bitter.'
I shook my head. 'He thinks he is unworthy.' I shrugged.
Hephaestion laughed. 'You are a failure as a Cretan,' he said. 'But you're a good smith and you serve Hephaestus like a dutiful son.' We polished for a while, our rags full of powdered pumice and oil. The slaves and apprentices were silent, terrified to have their master working such menial duties.
'I think perhaps while we make the helmets, you should stay here at the forge,' Hephaestion said. 'You, pais, go and get me wine. And wine for Lord Arimnestos.' He only called me lord to mock me.
While we drank watered wine – wonderful stuff, the wine of Crete, red as the blood of a bull – he nodded at me. 'You sleep here. Until the Chalkeia. We'll dedicate all the helmets as our sacrifice – as our sacrifice of labour. And then you can go back to the hall. Lord Achilles will understand why I need you.'
We've never had a Chalkeia here, thugater. We should. I'm a sworn devotee of the smith god, and I can say the prayers. Why have we never had one? In any case, it is a smith's holiday, and the smith has to dedicate work and pay the value of his labour as a tithe – and the smith god judges the quality of the work. In Athens – even in little Plataea – there's a procession of all the smiths, iron and bronze and even the finer metals, all together, with images of the god and of Dionysus bringing him back to Olympia after Zeus cast him out. There's a lot of drinking. We should institute it. Send for my secretary.
I'm not dead, yet, eh?
I had no idea why old Hephaestion suddenly wanted me staying in his house – the walk to the hall was only a matter of half a stade. But he was my master, as much as the lord was. Everything in that town was dedicated to preparing the lord and his men for the expedition to Cyprus, and we were two months from the date of launch. Women wove new sails of heavy linen from Aegypt. The tanner made leather armour as fast as he butchered oxen. The two sandal-makers worked by lamplight and, down by the slips, twenty fishermen and their boys worked all day to build a third trireme in the Phoenician style.
Young men are all fools.
I sent Lekthes up to the hall for my bedding, and he came back with Idomeneus. They made me a bed where the smith directed – not even in his house, but in his summer work shed, a pleasant enough building, but only closed on three sides. The two of them swept it clean and brought a big couch from the house and made it up.
Idomeneus took a cup of wine with me. Lekthes had a girl up at the hall – he was a warrior now, not really a servant, and he was considering marriage. But Idomeneus's tastes ran in other directions, and he was in no hurry to leave the forge.
'Nearchos asked after you,' he said. His eyes sparkled and he wore half a smile. 'He burns for you, master.'
I shrugged. 'I'm not your master.'
Idomeneus stretched out on a bench. 'You call Hephaestion master, ' he said.
I shrugged. 'He is a master smith.'
'You are a master warrior. And you made me a free man.' Idomeneus nodded. 'I have a way out of your tangle, lord.'
I ran my fingers through my beard. 'Tangle?' I asked.
He laughed. 'You've run off down here to avoid Nearchos. And lord, he thinks – you must know – that when the ships sail, you and he will be lovers. Why shouldn't he think this? Even his father says it.'
I shook my head. Cretans. What can I say? And all of you tittering. Laugh all you like – this was my youth.
'So – I have found a thread that you can follow out of our labyrinth. ' He poured more wine straight from the amphora.
'Am I Theseus or the Minotaur?' I laughed. 'And who does that make you?' We both laughed together.
'I am prettier than any of Nearchos's sisters,' he said, and we both guffawed until Hephaestion came and put his head under the eaves.
'Is this the Dionysia?' he asked. 'By the smith god, I didn't expect a symposium your first night under my roof!' But seeing my wine, he sat, poured himself a cup unmixed and leaned in. 'Tell me the joke?'
Idomeneus was fond of the smith – more than fond, I think. 'I am solving my lord's dilemma,' he said.
Hephaestion winked. 'Bed the boy yourself and pretend to be Arimnestos?' he said.
Idomeneus blushed. Then we started listing things that Nearchos might notice, and we drank a great deal more, and Hephaestion went to bed drunk.
'I never heard your idea,' I said.
Idomeneus was drunk, and he put his arms around me. 'I love you,' he said.
'Yes,' I said. 'Go to bed!'
'Ish – is that an invitation?' he asked with heavy innuendo, and then he grinned. 'Lisshen, master. Tell the boy that he'sh a warrior now – too noble to be your lover. Tell him you free him to have a lover of his own.' Idomeneus burped, which rather spoiled his performance.
'Hmm,' I said, or something equally useless. I was drunk myself.
But the next morning, pounding metal with a heavy head – not something I recommend to any of you – the idea seemed better and better.
I drank water and worked, trying to sweat the wine out of my head. Which was for the best, because in early afternoon, a long line of dancing women came up the hill from the town, heading for the mountain. Troas's daughter was at the head of one of the files of dancers, and she led her laughing girls in a full rehearsal around the yard of the smithy.
I had a pair of roses that Idomeneus had plucked, at my direction, from the garden behind the hall, and I'd woven them with bronze wire so that they would sit with the laurel in her hair.
Hephaestion had a mirror, and I showed her what she looked like in the golden light of the bronze surface.
'Oooh!' she said, patting the flowers gently. 'I wish I was prettier, though.'
'You are beautiful, Gaiana!' I said. Or words to that effect.
She laughed. I kissed her, and she did not kiss like a virgin. She laughed into my mouth like Briseis.
And then I knew why the smith had given me the shed. I grabbed her hand, but she pulled away and straightened her chiton. She grinned. 'Too fast for me, lord,' she said.
I had a horn comb, and I combed her hair a little. She leaned back against me and we kissed again, then she stood up. 'No one expects the girls down from the mountain until dawn,' she said. Outside the shop, the other girls were calling for her.
'I will be in the shed,' I said, and ran a finger around one of her nipples, and she smacked me – playfully, but hard.
'Don't go to sleep,' she said, before darting out of my arms and out of the door.
And I didn't. Nor did Gaiana. That's another happy time in my memory. She came to me every night and I worked all day in the smithy. Her father came on the third day and Hephaestion introduced me.
'He's smitten with your daughter,' Hephaestion said.
'You don't look like the kind of man who marries a fisherman's daughter,' Troas said. He had a scraggly beard and the hands of a man who dragged nets all day, with enormous shoulders.
'Marries?' I asked, and I suspect, thugater, that my voice cracked.
Troas laughed. 'If I tell the priests you took her maidenhead, you'll owe me her bride price.'
I felt foolish. We were bartering. Before you think ill of the man, remember that the lords of the town might take his daughter for nothing, and he would have the care of any resulting children. That's Crete. Democracy has a great deal to recommend it, honey.
Mind you, daughters were usually safe from lords on Crete. Hah!
'What is her bride price?' I asked. In truth, he scared me more than a Persian battle line.
'Ten silver owls,' he said.
I almost laughed my relief. Hephaestion interrupted me.
'Ten? For a girl who has lain with any man who will have her?' He spat.
Troas flushed. I think he was hurt. 'I thought we were friends?'
Hephaestion glared at him. 'When you come to buy a bronze knife, what do you tell me? That it is a beautiful item, that the blade is as sharp as obsidian, that it feels perfect in your hand? No! You tell me that it is too small, dull, ugly – anything to lower the price. Why is your daughter different from my knife?'
I served them both wine, and Hephaestion, pretending to be my father, arranged the bride price at six owls.
It was odd, but I knew I would be sailing away with the fleet, and I knew in my heart that I wouldn't come back. So out of something – it was hardly love – I said that I would marry her.
Troas looked as if he had been axed. 'No, lord,' he said.
Well, there you go. He had a son-in-law lined up. Not some useless sword-swinger who would vanish in the summer, but a strong young man with a broad back for hauling nets.
Beware, when you think too much of yourself. I realized in an ugly moment that Troas didn't think much of me. He wanted six silver owls so that his daughter and her boy could have a good start – his own boat, probably.
I was born a peasant, lass – never let yourself believe that peasants have a simpler life.
I went up to the hall, still wearing my leather apron. I opened the cedar box where I kept my goods – my embroidered cloak, my good linen chiton, the gold and lapis necklace from Sardis, and my pay.
I took twelve silver owls from the hoard – a little under a third of my coins, and turned away to find Nearchos gazing at me from the other side of the hall.
I smiled at him. I couldn't help it.
He came across to me, dressed in a scarlet chiton with matching sandals. His pimples were gone and his chest had filled out and his hair was long and oiled.
'You are an odd man, Arimnestos,' he said, and we embraced.
'Walk with me,' I said.
He looked around and his face was red. I sighed and prayed to Aphrodite.
I caught the eye of Idomeneus, and he winked.
So we walked out into the garden, and then up the mountain, and the gossip of the older warriors followed us like a living thing.
'I'm not taking you for an afternoon of love,' I said, as soon as we were out of earshot of the other men.
He flushed. 'I didn't expect as much,' he said – but he had hoped it.
'I want you to look at yourself,' I said. Like many a teacher and father before me, I dare say.
But he looked away, expecting censure.
'Do you listen to me when I tell you what Heraclitus said? Do you understand anything of the logos, and of change?' I asked.
He shrugged, the angry young man I'd met more than a year before.
'I am not a Cretan lord, Nearchos. I am a peasant from Boeotia, and I have made my name with my spear.' I took his shoulders and he looked at me then, because this was not the speech he expected.
'You are a lord's son,' I said. 'And now you are a man, not a boy. You are waiting – all of you are waiting – for me to take you as a lover.' I shrugged. 'That would be wrong. I admire you – but you are a man, now. A man chooses his own lovers.'
He stood, suddenly. 'But I want you!'
Suddenly I realized that this boy deserved the truth and not some story, some manipulation from Idomeneus. He was an honourable boy, with his whole life before him.
'I am not available,' I said primly. There – the truth.
'I am not worthy yet,' he said.
'Don't be foolish,' I said. 'Customs are different. I am from Plataea. In Plataea, we frown on relations between men.' Well, not exactly. But close enough.
That made him smile. 'My sisters said the same to me,' he said, smiling because it was so silly – to him.
'I am taking a girl in the town as a lover,' I said. 'I will not bring her to the hall. I do not seek to embarrass you. And if you require it, I will leave.'
He shook his head. 'A girl?' he asked. 'You are the oddest man. You spend your spare time pounding bronze and reading scrolls, and now you make love to women. It is – unmanly!' He spat the last word.
'I will leave, then,' I said. There – I'd told the truth. I felt better for it. Idomeneus's way might have worked, but the deception would have required too much effort. And I think that Heraclitus would not have approved.
He took my hand. 'No,' he said. 'No, I am being stupid. I love you.'
I embraced him. 'We will fight side by side,' I said. 'Better than sex. Now – go and take a lover. And be kind to him. Or her.'
'A girl?' he asked. He laughed. 'We might set a fashion. I was with a girl once – they're soft.' He laughed again.
'You can get used to it,' I said.
On the way down the hill, I considered that Idomeneus and Nearchos both loved me, and said so, while neither Penelope nor Briseis nor Gaiana ever said they loved me. Perhaps it is because none of my three women ever stood with me in the battle line. Hah – that would be a phalanx. And not a coward among them.
At any rate, after that day, Nearchos and I were friends, and a little more. I lived in the smith's shed until the festival, and afterwards, too. We made fine helmets, and good armour, that turned Persian arrows and kept men alive. At the Chalkeia I made myself known to the priest with signs, and was raised from the first to the second degree because my sacrifices were found worthy.
I was happy. Too bad it doesn't take long to tell. I am honest – too honest, and look at her blush when I say Gaiana and I made love every night – every night – ten times, if we wanted. Oh, youth is wasted on the young, honey. But you might ask – what of home? Didn't I want to go home?
Didn't I want to avenge my father, live on my farm? Or kill Aristagoras and take Briseis for my own? See? You do want to know. Well, children, this isn't the Iliad. If I had a fate, I didn't know it. And when you are eighteen, or perhaps nineteen, and men treat you like a hero, when your hands make beautiful things, when every night has a soft mouth and your couch is warm with love…
No one who is that happy gives a crap about fate, or furies. I was happy. I didn't give my father, my farm or Briseis any more than a passing thought. And of the three, Briseis would have won out.
For two months, I was happy. Two months of making love while the rain fell on the roof of the shed, and making beautiful things all day with the power of my arms and shoulders – dancing the military dances, drilling with weapons, wearing armour. A week before we were due to sail, Lord Achilles paraded us in the agora, and we made a fine sight. There were men lacking swords and men lacking greaves, but every man had a thorax of bronze or leather, a good helmet, spears and a knife. Every man – even the rowers. Six hundred men. Sixty of us – the lord's retainers and relatives – had full panoply. On land, we would be the front rank, and at sea we would fight as marines.
Nearchos had the new ship, of course. He was the lord's son. And I, of course, was to be his helmsman.
We celebrated with a night of drinking, and we poured wine over the ram of the new ship and I called her Thetis. Then we spent a week practising at sea. Our fisherfolk could row, and our officers were decent enough, but I needed that week, and more. I was not really a helmsman and I made mistakes every day, getting the Thetis off the beach and back on, stern-first. But I was smart enough to go for help, and I found it with Troas, who was rowing in our upper bank and wearing one of my helmets. I brought him aft as 'assistant' helmsman. He had his own fishing boat, and he knew the sea far, far better than I.
Never be too proud to get help, honey bee. And he did help. After all, I'd paid him double his price, and I'd given Gaiana good gifts – I'd made her a mirror, and I'd made her two pairs of bronze oar-pins, guessing that her eventual husband would want them.
The last day was hard for Nearchos and the other local men. Me, I was anxious to get away. I could feel the draw of the world. It was as if I had been asleep and now I was waking up again.
Gaiana came to me one last time at the shed. I had presents laid out for her on the bed – a length of good Aegyptian linen and a necklace of silver with black beads. She cried a little.
'I'm pregnant,' she said.
I smiled, because I was a man of the world and I had expected this. 'How do you know?' I asked.
She smiled – no wild talk. 'Girls know,' she said. 'I could just be late,' she admitted.
'Best marry your fisher-boy, then,' I said.
She looked confused.
'Don't you have a boy to marry?' I asked.
'How do you know?' she blurted out. And then she met my eyes. 'I like him.' Defiantly. And then, hesitantly, 'I like you, too.'
'I won't be coming back,' I said, more harshly than I meant. 'I offered to marry you and your father turned me down. He knows I won't come back.' I shrugged. I was growing to like the purity of telling the truth. Sometimes it was very hard – sometimes I still lied just to make things easier – but simple truths seemed to make things, well, simple. 'Is your boy on my ship?'
She shook her head. 'He wants to go, but Pater won't let him.'
Pater – Troas – sounded smarter and smarter.
I gave her my gifts and we made love. It should have been gentle and tragic, but it wasn't. Gaiana never had tragedy in her. She laughed in my mouth, and she laughed when our fingers last touched.
'What shall I call your boy?' she asked. 'If he's yours?'
'Hipponax,' I said.