We were only a few stades from the coast — indeed, as soon as the clouds blew past, I could see Aetna, the beach and trees to the south. I think I might have swum to shore.
But it was not to be. A coaster — a small ship with one mast and a few oarsmen — came out of the storm, throwing a fine bow wave. She was well handled, cutting slantwise across the wind, tacking back and forth in the straits.
A lookout must have spotted us. I was facing the other way and missed all this. Neoptolymos grunted once or twice, but I don’t think he was fully alive at that point, and both of us were parched.
Perhaps I baked for fifteen minutes in the sun, and then I was shocked to hear a hail, and the coaster was a stade away. It was as if a sea monster had surfaced by my side.
The boat dropped its scrap of sail — the breeze was still stiff — and four oarsmen pulled towards me, almost into the eye of the wind, moving the little ship. I paddled weakly towards them.
They pulled me aboard. They spoke Greek, in a way, more like trade lingo. I assumed they were Sikels, and I was right. The leader — trierarch seems too grand a term for a forty-five-foot trading boat — ran his hands over my injuries, gave me a hard smile and nodded to another, younger man who had to be his younger brother. Then he turned to Neoptolymos.
After the sort of examination a man gives to a ram he’s buying in the agora, the two Sikels spoke to each other. The older man’s name was Hektor. Even here, among barbarians, the poet’s work lived. That gave me a ray of hope.
The ray of hope lasted until we found ourselves assigned to oars. The shackles were more figurative than real, but it was clear that I was rowing for my food, at least. Since I could barely speak with any of the men on board, I assumed I was a slave. Again. I was with two men with heavy, hooked noses and deep-set eyes, and two men who were as black as any men I’d ever seen, and Neoptolymos.
On a positive note, we were not forbidden to talk, and as soon as we’d rowed the ship around the headland, the work of an hour, the nearer African smiled at me. ‘Doola,’ he said. I took it for his name.
‘Arimnestos,’ I said. I tapped my chest.
‘Ari?’ Doola asked.
Close enough.
I nodded.
The younger African tapped his chest. ‘Seckla!’ he said sharply.
‘Ari,’ I said again.
You get the picture.
The other two men were not Phoenicians, although they looked the part, nor were they Sikels or Hebrews or anything I knew. They didn’t speak much. But within a few hours, I knew that the ruddy-haired man was Gaius and the dark-haired one was Daud, and that they didn’t really share a language, either. They just looked as if they did. In fact, I’ll save time and say that Gaius was Etruscan and Daud was all Keltoi, from northern Gallia, and spoke a few words of Greek and a few more of Sikel and no other tongue but his own.
It is amazing how much information you can convey without many words. And it is perhaps a comment on my former servitude how happy I was on that boat. The food was good, mostly grilled fish. We had wine every night. The Sikels treated us as — well, more as employees than slaves, and I never was entirely sure as to my status. We moved from small port to small port — really, just a stone house and some wattle huts on a headland with a beach. We rowed past the Greek towns and their temples and familiar smells. We sailed past the Carthaginian towns and well out to sea, and it occurred to me that my new hosts feared the Carthaginians far more than they feared the Greeks, the Italiotes or the Etruscans.
Mostly, we loaded dry fish and sold metal. Every town had a small forge and a bronze-smith, and our ingots of copper and tin were their life’s blood. I was shocked when I finally understood the price of tin. It was absurdly high, and I thought of my time as a smith on Crete — about as far from the tin mines of northern Illyria as a man can be, and still be in the world — and wondered. What had happened? Tin hadn’t ever been that high.
You cannot make bronze without tin. And the tin has to be high quality. You don’t need to add much tin to the copper to make bronze — a little more than one to twenty. But without tin, all you have is soft copper, whether you are making cook pots or helmets.
So an increase in the price of tin — affected everyone.
Neoptolymos was the only man to whom I could really talk. As I recovered a little, so did he, and I went back to work on his Greek. He was sullen, and it was only then that I began to understand the depth of his betrayal. The man I had heard mentioned on the beach — Epidavros — was his uncle. Neoptolymos didn’t need me to tell him who had sold him to the Carthaginians. He already knew. He chewed on his desire for revenge every minute. Illyrians are good haters, and in this case, I think his need for revenge kept him alive.
Mind you, I thought of Dagon constantly. I hated him: I wanted to torture him to death, and I knew, in my heart, that I was afraid of him. This had not happened to me before, and the sensation was like the ache of a tooth. I had to probe it with my tongue.
A week passed, and another. We were not shackled or roped at night. I began to prowl the encampment when the boat was beached, testing the boundaries. We were well along the west coast of Sicily — I have no notion greater than that — in a town that had several stone houses with tile roofs, and I had been a rower for perhaps three weeks when I walked boldly down the beach away from the encampment and into the streets of the town. I made it to their very small agora just before dark, and there was the younger brother, sitting on a blanket, with various ingots of Cyprian copper and a few knucklebones of tin — clearly not Illyrian tin, let me add, because that comes in plainer ingots.
Hektor’s brother rose from his blanket, walked over to me and put a hand on my arm. But there wasn’t any threat.
I shrugged. ‘I want to see the town,’ I said in Greek.
He shrugged and let go my arm.
I walked about. In truth, they were subsistence farmers with no temple and very little to see — a pair of stone statues that were really just phallic pillars. A bronze brooch was the town’s chief adornment for a woman, and only one man wore a sword, and it was more like a dagger.
In the days of my lordship, I’d have walked past them all like a king. As a semi-slave rower, I found the town fascinating. Or rather, a welcome break.
In a very few minutes, I was back in the small agora, and Hektor’s brother met me, led me to the blanket and offered me a cup of wine. So I sat with him. Drank his wine. And, with a smile, got up and walked back down to the boat. I still didn’t know his name, because his brother never used it.
It may seem odd to you, thugater, but I was not unhappy. My body was healing, and no one was unfriendly. Doola and I were becoming comrades. I learned some of his words — I still remember that nitaka means ‘I want’. He learned more of mine. Enough words that when I came back from my wander — he had been sleeping — he rose, threw a chiton over his nudity and sat with me.
‘Was it good?’ he asked. Let me just say that there were grunts, gestures and incomprehensible words interspersed with our very small shared vocabulary. I’ll leave that out.
‘Not bad,’ I said, and shrugged. ‘Hektor’s brother gave me wine.’
‘He’s not bad,’ Doola agreed.
We sat in companionable silence until Hektor himself joined us. He lay down. He was a very big man — a head taller than me — and handsome. He had a small amphora and a mastos cup, and he poured a libation. Doola and I both raised our hands in the universal sign of prayer to the gods, and he grinned. He said some words. Then he drank from the cup and passed it. After a while a small boy, I think Hektor’s son, came and brought small fish fried in olive oil. Neoptolymos joined us and ate the fish with the closest thing to a smile I’d seen from him. We ate them, got greasy, drank the wine. One by one the other rowers came, and then the rest of Hektor’s deck crew — all relatives, I guess.
I still think they had made a profit. It was a good little party.
So the next morning, when the boat rowed away, I was at my bench. I was happy enough.
That’s the best evening I remember. I can’t say exactly how long I rowed for the Sikels. At least a month, and perhaps longer. But sometime after that, on a clear day, we saw a trireme hull up to the north, and the Sikels spoke in agitated tones, and we turned south and ran downwind. The two brothers argued, and I will assume that the younger was in favour of maintaining our course to the west and appearing unfazed, while the older was in favor of running immediately and gaining sea room.
We ran south across a darkening sea, and as the wind grew less and less, we went to the oars and pulled. Hektor began to cheat the helm more and more west of south.
But the black trireme was on us.
I rowed looking over my shoulder. I’d been the hunter a hundred times. I’d snapped up coasters just like this one — sometimes three and four at a time. I knew in an hour that the trireme had us.
So did Hektor.
He gathered his family in the stern. I couldn’t hear them, or understand them. But they didn’t shout, and they took weapons. They had a look about them that I know too well. They weren’t planning to resist because they believed they could win. They were resisting so they would die with honour.
The youngest boy smiled and kissed his father and uncles and brothers and then jumped into the sea just before the trireme came alongside, and drowned. Just like that.
Hektor was a giant, a fine figure of a man, but he was no fighter, and the marines from the black hull knew their business. He inflicted no wounds. They spitted him on a spear. He screamed a few times, until one of the marines hit him with the hilt of his kopis the way a fisherman whacks a fish to kill it. Hektor died.
The other Sikels fought, but they didn’t fight well. Two were wounded. But Hektor’s brother and the rest were taken.
They looted the boat, and then they took us aboard. In less time than it takes to tell it, I was a slave rower. Again. On a Carthaginian military trireme.
I know you think I should have risen from my bench with Doola and perhaps Seckla and killed all the marines. But my body was far from healed — healed for fighting, I mean — and I had neither weapon nor armour, and they had everything. I considered fighting. I wondered, almost idly, if I had learned cowardice at last. Doola and I certainly exchanged a look, in the last few moments before the marines came aboard. Neoptolymos grunted once, in real agitation. He wanted to fight, but he looked for my lead.
Well, I’d led once before, and failed.
If Hektor had armed us I’d be dead. So there. Poseidon frowned, and smiled too. I went to a bench, and I had Doola and Seckla at arm’s length, and Hektor’s brother below me, Neoptolymos a dozen benches ahead of us.
The trireme was called the Sea Sister in Phoenician. I didn’t know a man aboard, but in an hour I knew that the trierarch was a capable man with an expert set of officers. Nor were the rowers slaves. This was a military ship, run for a profit by means of piracy. We preyed on the Sikels and the Etruscans, too, as well as the Greeks of Magna Greca. In my first week aboard we took six ships — none much larger than the coaster on which I’d served. Ours was the only one that resisted, and for several weeks they treated us with care, keeping us at arm’s length when we were fed. Wine was rare, and meant we were in for a fight. But at the end of the fifth week, we pulled into Laroussa, a Carthaginian port on Sicily, and the rowers were marched down the wharf from the ship to a barracks — and paid.
I almost expired from shock. I had assumed I was a slave. The Sea Sister was run in Phoenician, of course, and I spoke a little and understood more; and most of the officers spoke enough Greek to be understood. None had bothered to suggest to me that I was not a slave. But in the barracks, I was shown a bed and handed a little less than sixty drachmas.
Doola and I had managed to expand our shared vocabulary, although, to be honest, we spoke neither Greek nor Numidian, but our own language. Now that we were in barracks, though, I found that there were a dozen more Greeks in our crew and they knew the town and the drill.
‘We’re not slaves,’ said an Athenian guttersnipe named Aristocles. ‘But we have very limited rights. You can go to the whorehouses or the agora or the wine shops. You cannot leave town. You cannot refuse to row.’ He shrugged. ‘It is like being a slave with some privileges.’ He grinned, showing me all ten of his teeth. ‘You look like a gent,’ he said. ‘Want to share a ride?’
He meant share a porne at the brothel, and I didn’t really fancy that, but I bought a pitcher of wine and fruit juice on ice — extravagant aristocrat that I was — and a dozen of us drank it in a taverna that smelled like old octopus. Then we ate a huge meal.
The whores came around when the serious drinking started. They didn’t want sex — the ideal customer paid and passed out. But I hadn’t even talked to a woman in months, and my body felt better — the soreness in my side and my shoulders was a little less every morning, and the wounds from Dagon’s spear were healed. I wanted one of them. So I talked, chatted, flirted.
For my pains, I ended up riding one of the older women — she seemed quite old to me — a near-hag of thirty. She had beautiful hair and some teeth and a deep tan and a ready laugh, and she was the only one of the porne who had much of a smile. We drank wine afterwards, and she sat with me, a hand on my arm, for the rest of the evening, and we had another ride after dark. Of course I paid. Porne don’t ride for free, and men who say so lie. But she liked me well enough, and I her. Her name was Lin, or enough. She was a Sikel.
I went from mourning Euphoria to riding an old prostitute. Yes. I was alive.
We were on shore a little less than a week. The Sea Sister was provisioned for sea again, and an officer came and fetched us. We each got a few coins for signing on — not that we had any choice — and in an hour the shore was a dream and Lin’s body was a mirage, and I was rowing.
This time, we went north along the coast of Sardinia, and the sea was empty. The officers were cautious about our landing beaches. Then we turned east into the setting sun and sailed on the ocean’s wind. On the second day, we picked up a small coaster. The crew fought. Two of our marines were killed and the crew of the coaster all suicided, the survivors diving in armour into the sea.
Carthage had a terrible reputation, in those days. A lot of what happened came from the way they treated slaves. The Sea Sister was an exception, but our victims had no way of knowing that. Most Carthaginians, sea officers or lubbers, treated slaves as an expendable resource. Always more where this one came from, whether this one was a skilled rower or a fine mosaicist or an ignorant yokel.
But I digress.
Later that afternoon, we found out why the coaster had fought so hard. Out of the afternoon haze came her consort, a heavy Etruscan trireme. She was ready to fight, and so were we, and our trierarch turned into the wind, dropped his boatsail and we took the oars in our hands.
The trierarchs gave us a short speech. My Phoenician was up to it, so I could tell that he promised all the rowers a share if we won. I passed that on to Seckla and Doola and Neoptolymos and Hektor’s brother.
I was on the top deck, and I knew the business. We went for a straight head-to-head ram, the helmsman watching the enemy ship like a cat watches a mouse’s hole.
‘Oars in!’ he shouted, when we were half a stadion from our enemy, the two ships hurtling together with the speed of two galloping horses.
All our oars came in. On the top deck it was easy, but the lower decks needed time to get the oars across — at the bow and stern, the rowers had to cooperate, putting the blades out through the opposite oar-port. But we were a good crew.
So were the Etruscans.
We hit, not ram to ram but cathead to cathead, and our forward-row gallery took the blow of theirs and both splintered, and men screamed as their bodies were ground to bloody pulp between the uncaring masses of the two ships. All the momentum came off both ships, and we coasted to a near stop, broadside to broadside, the height of a tall man apart.
Our archers began to shoot into their command deck, and their archers did the same, and then the grapnels flew. Indeed, both sides had decided to fight it out.
Men are foolish animals. No one needed to die. I don’t think there was a man on either ship who stood to gain much from victory. This wasn’t a struggle for freedom or domination, except at the lowest level. This wasn’t Lade or Marathon. This was more like two travellers wrestling at a crossroads, with no spectators.
But there was no less ferocity for all that.
Their marines came at us first. They wore full panoply and they were men who knew their business, and I thought, as a spectator, that they were better men than ours. And we were short by two men of our complement, and when each side has only a dozen armoured warriors, the loss of two is sufficient to swing a contest.
It was odd to sit and watch a deadly fight. One Etruscan went down immediately. A lucky shot from a boarding pike sent him over the side, where he sank without a trace. But our captain took his death wound in the very next fight — a moment’s inattention, a mistake by the man at his side and he was spouting blood. They dragged his bleeding body clear of the fight and dropped him near the stern, and then the melee grew desperate — the Carthaginians knew that they were losing, and the Etruscans knew they were close to winning.
The Etruscans pushed our marines relentlessly down the central gangway — a catwalk that was at the height of our heads and open to the weather. Our ship wasn’t covered with a solid deck, as some of the newest ships are today, so we could watch the whole fight.
The helmsman led a counter-attack from the stern, and his spear put down an Etruscan marine who fell across the catwalk about even with Doola’s bench, one forward from mine. His spear snapped, and he plucked an axe from behind his shield and spiked a second Etruscan in the temple. One of the Carthaginians at his side took a spear in the thigh at the same moment, and the two men fell in a tangle, right onto my bench. And the fight locked up — the catwalk could just fit two men wide, and there they were, like two teams pushing against each other at an athletic contest.
The dying Etruscan was in my lap, bleeding on me. And shitting on me, as well. His sword clattered at my feet out of his dead hand, and lay in a pool of his own blood on the boards where I rested my feet to row.
I had the strangest thoughts. And a great deal of time seemed to pass while I had them, all between one drip of blood from the corpse and another. Just for a few beats of my heart, I think that I saw the world as Heraclitus saw it. It seemed to me, and it still does, as one of the pivotal moments of my life.
The sword lay at my feet, beckoning me. Indeed, it all but called out to me.
I looked at it. But I didn’t take it, because I had a thousand conflicting thoughts in an instant.
It seemed to me that I was four feet lower than any opponent, and that after I cut the ankles of one or two men, I’d be skewered, shieldless, like a dog in a pit.
It seemed to me that I owed Carthage nothing.
I looked at the Carthaginian marines fighting — literally at my head — and I felt no kinship. No brotherhood. They paid, and I rowed, and I was not free to leave. Had Hektor been captain, had the crew been Sikels, I might have felt a bond.
And the man lying across my lap looked Greek. He smelled of coriander, his skin was brown and tanned and his eyes were like my eyes, and his armour — a handsome bronze thorax, a beautiful Corinthian helmet with plumes and a crest of red horsehair — was Greek armour. I didn’t feel the least inclination to risk my skin to help the barbarian Carthaginians fight — and win — against the barbarian Etruscans who at least looked Greek.
And yet another voice urged me to take up the sword.
Because with it in my hand, I was a different man. A free man. The master of my own destiny.
And then came a moment of superb, crystalline clarity. It was absurd.
I — a slave, or near enough — held the key to the fight. If I rose from my bench, sword in hand, the side I backed would triumph. I saw this as if it were written in carved letters on stone.
I, an unarmed slave, held the fate of twenty armoured men and four hundred rowers in my sword hand. Not because I was a great fighter. Not because I was Arimnestos of Plataea. But because I was in the right place, at the right moment of time, and a sword had fallen at my feet.
And I thought, this is how all the world is, in every minute, in every heartbeat in which every human makes any decision. This is the river into which Heraclitus said we could not twice dip our toes. This was the moment, and from this moment every other moment would flow.
I picked up the sword.
The river flowed on. Or rather, a dozen rivers flowed away from that moment. Alive, dead, slave, free — all flowed away from that moment.
The helmsman swung over an Etruscan marine’s shield and cut the fingers off the man’s sword hand.
I caught Doola’s eye. He, too, had a knife in his hand.
So did Hektor’s brother.
I had never spoken a word to him since he poured me wine in the market of some tiny town in Sicily. But now he watched me.
I decided. I swear that in that moment, I saw the future — that the stream came together in a mighty river, and time flowed. I once joked to Doola that we won the Battle of Mycale in that moment, he and I. Fifteen years before the Persians beached there, and we landed our marines, and fought it out for the supremacy of the world.
Every stream flowed from there.
I rose on my bench, dumping the dead Etruscan into the benches below me but wrestling the corpse for his aspis, the round shield on his left arm. It was a perfect fit, and that meant it would not come off cleanly. My moment was passing.
I gave up on the shield. The kopis whirled up over my head, and I cut — and severed the helmsman’s foot at the ankle. He screamed and fell to the deck, and I cut his throat.
Doola was off his bench and onto mine, crawling aft, with Hektor’s brother and Seckla right behind him. Seckla stripped the helmsman of his dagger and sword as he passed, and Hektor’s brother had his spear — all as smoothly as if we’d planned this a hundred times. Perhaps we had. In truth, I think that the fates were there — immanent. At our shoulders.
And then the four of us burst off the benches into the rear files of the Carthaginians. I got my hands on one man’s shoulders and pulled him down, and Seckla cut a man’s hamstrings and Hektor’s brother rammed his spear deep into the side of a third marine under his fine bronze corselet.
In three heartbeats, every top-deck rower was up. The last marines and officers died in a paroxysm of blood.
And then I had time to get the aspis on my arm.
And face the Etruscans.
The lead Etruscan stepped back and raised his helmet. Grinned.
The two ships rose and fell on the swell.
‘Speak Greek?’ I asked.
He looked at the man behind him.
He had a magnificent octopus on his shield and his helmet. He had ruddy blond hair, and didn’t look a bit like a Greek. He was as handsome as Paris. He raised his helmet and nodded.
‘A little,’ he said.
‘I don’t know about the rest of these men,’ I said slowly and carefully, ‘but I’ve had enough of being a rower and a slave. If you’ll give your word to the gods that you’ll free us ashore and give us a share of the value of this ship, why, we’ll row her to port for you. Otherwise-’ I tapped my sword against my shield rim.
The other oarsmen made a lot of noise.
Ten marines can cow two hundred oarsmen — but not under these conditions. Not when we were already up off our benches, with many of us armed.
The Greek-speaker nodded to me and called to the other ship. I didn’t understand a word.
But Gaius appeared at my hip — he was a lower-deck rower. He shouted with joy and clambered past me. Then looked back at me. He embraced an Etruscan, and they spoke, quickly, and then he came back and took my hand.
Message received.
‘That’s his cousin,’ said the Greek-speaker. He gave me a grin. ‘We’ll see you right. I swear by the daimon of hospitality and the God of the Sea.’
We shook, and men cheered.
And the river flowed on.
It took me months to learn enough Etruscan to get a cup of wine. It sounds like the language petty kingdoms of northern Syria speak, and while I recognized the sounds, I didn’t understand a word. Gaius left us immediately, and many of the rowers — like men of their kind — were rowing Etruscan hulls for pay before the week was out, collecting small wages, tupping different porne and drinking better wine, but living the same life.
I collected what I thought of as ‘my people’, and Gaius got us a fair price for our share of the trireme Sea Sister.
A year had passed since I found Euphoria dead — or more. I was drinking wine with strangers, in a place so foreign they’d never heard of the fight at Marathon, where Keltoi were thicker on the ground than Hellenes. I had no urge to go home, but I was sick of being a chattel, and whatever had been broken was healing. I wanted to live, and I wanted to be a lord and not a slave. I thought often of the Keltoi woman, stepping over the side. I thought often of the moment when the sword fell at my feet. From the gods.
I thought of Dagon.
Neoptolymos wanted to go to Illyria and kill his uncle, but his plans were adolescent.
We didn’t have enough money to buy a ship. But the Etruscan cities in the north were fighting a war with the Keltoi, and I thought that my little oikia might earn money there.
One evening, as the money was running short, it came to a head in a taverna.
I threw a few obols on the table for wine. ‘I say we go north and see what we can pick up,’ I said. I looked at Doola, who shrugged.
‘Wrong way for me,’ he said. He grinned his huge grin. ‘Home is that way.’ He pointed a thumb over his shoulder.
‘So’s Carthage,’ Demetrios said. He was Hektor’s brother. By then, I knew his name. But he shrugged. ‘And Sicily.’
Seckla looked interested in going north to fight. Not Daud. He shrugged. ‘My home,’ he said, pointing north. Even though he and Gaius looked like brothers, he was a Kelt.
‘Come to Sicily,’ Demetrios said suddenly. ‘We can work the passage and save our money. Keep our arms.’ We had all kept the weapons of the Carthaginians — what we were allowed to keep. I had the dead Etruscan’s sword. ‘Listen, my people are always fighting the Greeks — no offence, brother — or the Carthaginians.’ He spat. ‘We’ll earn some money, buy a ship, be partners.’
Daud hugged us all. ‘I’ll go home,’ he said.
‘Where is home?’ Demetrios asked him. ‘My brother always wanted to ask you.’
Daud nodded. ‘North and north and north. Over the mountains and up the great river; over a range of hills by the big forts, and then down the River of Fish to the Northern Sea.’ He smiled. ‘I was a great fool to leave home, but I’m grown-up now.’
‘Where the tin comes from?’ Demetrios asked suddenly — eagerly. Greedily, perhaps.
Daud shook his head. ‘Yes and no. It comes through our town, but it’s from across the Sea-River, on Alba. Or so the traders say.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m not of the Veneti. They know all about the tin. And they don’t tell.’
‘Hektor dreamed of taking a ship to Alba,’ Demetrios said. ‘We were going to take on a cargo of tin, and die rich men.’
Why does insane adventure appeal to me? That’s the way I‘m made. I remember leaning forward, like that young man who has just become interested in my tale — eh? Slavery is dull, but Alba is exotic, eh?
Just so.
‘How far is Alba?’ I asked.
Demetrios shrugged. ‘No one knows. The Phoenicians have an absolute monopoly outside the Pillars of Heracles. Greek merchants used to go overland from Massalia — but those were gentler times.’
Doola shook his head. ‘A dream,’ he said, ‘is an important thing, but a cup of wine is better. The tin of Alba is legendary. But with a little luck we could buy a small ship, and have a good life.’
‘Don’t you want to go home?’ I asked.
Doola and Seckla exchanged a look.
‘No,’ Doola said. Sometimes he sounded like a Spartan.
I waved at the wine slave for more wine. ‘I, for one, would like to go to Alba.’
Daud leaned over. ‘If you are going to Alba, I’ll stay,’ he said.
Doola grinned. ‘Insane,’ he said.
‘We don’t even have a ship,’ Seckla complained.
Doola looked at me. ‘You can navigate?’
I nodded.
Demetrios looked offended. ‘I can navigate.’
Doola grinned his big grin. ‘This one has been a trierarch. I can see it. On a big ship — yes?’
I nodded.
Doola and Seckla exchanged a long look.
‘Let’s swear,’ Doola said suddenly.
So we swore out a pact. It took some time to argue the details, but we swore to be brothers, to split shares evenly: to save and buy a ship, sail her to Alba, take on a cargo of tin and bring it home. We were as drunk as lords by the time we put our right fists together and swore by Zeus and four other gods.
With other men, it would have been a drunkard’s oath. Something we talked about while we traded for bits of amber and salt fish.
But I was not the only man there under the hand of the fates. And when the seven of us were together, it seemed that there was nothing we could not do.
So we swore, and in the morning, we took ship for Sicily.
Now, I had been to Sicily several times by then, but never as a free man with a few obols and a sword, and it tasted better. This time, we landed on the beach by Syracusa, the greatest Greek city on the richest island in the ocean, and we gaped like country hicks. Syracusa is a magnificent city, the rival of Athens.
By all rights, we ought to have squandered our hard-earned drachma in brothels and gone back to sea as oarsmen, or at best, marines. But that’s not how it fell out because, as I say, the gods were close. On landing, we went together up to the big Temple of Poseidon on the headland and spent good money on a ram. I sacrificed him myself, and his blood poured across the altar, and even as a junior priest collected his blood, a senior priest was dividing the meat. It was everyday work for both of them, but a few routine questions — they were courteous men, those priests — established that we were sailors looking for a boat, and that the junior priest’s brother had a small boat to sell.
Twenty days of day-labour, and that boat was ours. It was scarcely forty feet long and just about wide enough to walk the length when the mast was down, but it could carry cargo. I guarded temples and carried sacks on the waterfront for a week, and then I found skilled work at a forge — and suddenly we had the silver to buy the boat. It was odd, and perhaps sad, that I made more in a day as an underpaid journeyman bronze-smith than all five of us earned doing the sort of day-jobs slaves usually did. But access to the shop allowed me to repair our war gear and to make us all some small things: cloak pins, clothes’ pins, buckles. My new master liked my work a great deal — he was mostly a caster, not a forger — and he paid me well enough.
So the other four went to sea with a cargo of salt fish for the cities of Magna Greca, and I stayed in Syracusa making cheap cloak clasps in bulk because, truth to tell, I was making more cash than the boat.
It may seem funny, after a life as a pirate and a lord, that I took pride in keeping a tiny tenement apartment in Syracusa clean and neat, in earning a good wage smithing bronze. Nor did I ever think they’d sail away and leave me. In some way that I still cannot define, we were bonded, as deeply as I was bonded with Aristides and-Well, now that I think of it, most of the friends of my boyhood died at Lades, and I had never really replaced them. Hermogenes, Idomeneus — both were fine men, but more followers than friends. Too many men saw me as a hero, as distinct, as above.
Those six — Doola, Seckla, Daud, Gaius, Demetrios and Neoptolymos — it was a different thing. And I find I’ve been a bad poet; I haven’t sung you what they were like.
Doola was big without being tall, and always at the edge of fat without being fat. He had no hair on top of his head, and once we were free he grew a thick beard. He had heavy slabs of muscle, but a sensitive, intelligent face. He was quick to anger and quick to forgive.
Seckla was tall and thin, almost feminine in his face and hands, anything but feminine in his temperament — eager to resent a slight, eager for revenge. He never forgave. His dark skin was stretched tight over fine features, and his hands were long and thin. Despite his combative nature, he was really a craftsman, and his hands were never still, making nets, wrapping rope ends, making thole pins fit their holes better — he never stopped moving about the boat, and on land, he never stopped fussing with food.
Daud was all Keltoi — tall, heavily built, a fearsome sight in armour. He drank too much, and was quick to anger and as quick to weep. He tried so hard to hide his emotions, and failed so badly — here’s to him, thugater. He had red-blond hair that was just starting to darken, eyes the colour of a new morning and skin so pale that it never tanned properly, and he often wore a chiton when the rest of us were naked, just to save himself from burning. I’m pale, and my paleness was nothing next to his. We used to mock him about it, and he would join in, agreeing that there was no sun where he came from. He could ride anything, and he was a trained warrior, where Seckla and Doola were really not very good when I met them.
Demetrios was a Sikel — small, swarthy, dour. He laughed easily but seldom showed his thoughts — unlike Daud, who sought to hide his thoughts but inevitably failed, at least back then. His skin was dark, his nose was prominent and he hated to fight, not from cowardice but from genuine aversion. He was slow to trust and quick to worry. He was, in many ways, a countryman among cosmopolitans. But he was a sure hand at sea and on land; he knew how to fish in any waters, and his boat-handling and seamanship were infinitely better than my own. Indeed, working with him quickly showed me how little a pirate chief actually knows about handling a boat. His navigation was weak; he preferred to coast everywhere, even in dangerous waters. He worried constantly, and he often reminded me of a pet rat I had as a boy — snout quivering, hands rubbing together. Yet he would have died for any one of us, if he’d had to.
Neoptolymos was, as I have said, Illyrian. He had muddy-blond hair and watery blue eyes and he drank — constantly. He was easily angered and, to be honest, never a very pleasant companion. He felt that he had forfeited his honour when his sister was raped to death. He seldom smiled. He was harsh with others and himself. Yet buried under the broken unhappiness of youth was a man who had the manners of a gentleman and the easy habits of a rich man. His purse was always open to his friends. His knife was always ready to defend us. His code was barbarous — but noble. He could also play any musical instrument he was given after a few hours of mucking about.
And finally, there was Gaius. He left us for a while, but he was one of us nonetheless. He was Etruscan; but that is like saying ‘he is Greek’, because every Etruscan city is at odds with every other, and they rarely unite. He, too, had red-blond hair and pale skin — when I first met the two of them, I thought he and Daud were brothers, when in fact they weren’t even from the same people, and both were a little annoyed at my assumption.
We had divisions. Four of us were warriors, and three were not; three of us were at least nominally aristocratic, and three were working men. Slavery can erase arrogance, but it cannot erase habits of mind and body; so Daud, Neoptolymos, Gaius and I would work on our bodies and practise with weapons, which the other three looked on as an affectation or a foolish waste of money. We tended to spend freely. Daud especially could empty his purse for a beggar, even if the gesture meant that he was instantly a beggar himself. I would buy the best wine, and the best cloak, I could afford, and the three men born to labour would roll their eyes and pray to Hermes for deliverance from the spendthrift. I remember this happening in the Agora of Syracusa, and I laughed and told them that they reminded me of my aristocratic wife — and then I suddenly burst into tears.
I tell this now because, truth to tell, what they looked like and how they acted was — well, to put it bluntly, it was muted, unimportant while we rowed for our lives as slaves. Slavery made the bond, but once we had survived, we had to know each other.
My daughter is smiling. I have digressed too long. But those were good times.
The boat returned from its first voyage, and we had just about broken even. A small boat carries a limited cargo, and even if the skipper picks his cargo well, he has to sell all of it at a good price, over and over, to cover the cost of four men eating, drinking wine, their clothes ruined at sea, their oars broken on rocks. The overheads of a sea voyage are, to be blunt, enormous for poor men. Our little tub had four oars, a big central mast that could be unshipped and room for about two tons of cargo — which is nothing, in wine or grain. Less than nothing for metal.
On the positive side, we were not in debt to the vicious moneylenders of Sicily. They were notorious, and for good reason, and they had amazing networks of informants. So that by the second afternoon after our little boat was pulled up on the back, a pair of men came down to her. One sat on her gunwale and the other stood with his arms crossed. They were quite large men.
‘You need more money to make a profit off a boat this size,’ said the man sitting on our gunwale. We were all there, scrubbing black slime out of the bilge and weed and crap off the hull. Demetrios had brought in a cargo of Italian wine, and made what should have been a handsome profit, but about a third of the amphorae had either broken or slipped some seawater, so that his profits just about covered losses with a little left over.
Before this gets monotonous, let me add that had we not been ambitious to buy bigger ships and go farther, this would have been a good life. The boat covered expenses and then some, and I was starting, even after six weeks, to make a steady wage. It was only the scope of our ambition that rendered the pace slow.
I’m digressing again.
‘I don’t feel that I have your attention, gents,’ said the man on the gunwale. His partner picked up a large piece of wood and came over to the boat. He struck the hull, hard, just where the strake met the bow.
None of the oak pins came loose, but no one likes to see a stranger hit his boat.
‘I see I have your attention now,’ said the man on our gunwale.
Daud and I walked down either side of the boat, and we must have looked like trouble. The man on the bow stood up, dusting his hands.
‘I don’t think you know me, gents. But if you touch me, you are all dead men.’ He laughed. ‘I’m a little surprised you don’t know me. Hurt, even. But you’re all strangers — foreigners. So I will let it go this time. Especially as I’ve come to offer you money.’
Demetrios shrugged. ‘We don’t need money,’ he said.
‘Really?’ said the man by the bow. ‘Let me introduce myself. I’m Anarchos, and if I wish to loan you money, then you need to take it. Please understand this, gents — I own you as surely as your former owner owned you. Your slavery is written in the sky. Don’t pretend you are free men — I know escaped slaves when I see them. And I can sell you into slavery, or kill you — and no one in this city will even shrug. You aren’t citizens. You aren’t even registered metics. You are poor men, and you have no friends.’ He smiled, and the hardness left his voice. ‘But I am a reasonable man, and an easy master. You split your profits with me, and I loan you money when you fail. I am your patron, and you are my workers, and all is well. I will help you in the courts, and in the assembly, if it comes to that.’ He looked around. ‘No one in Syracusa will say Anarchos is a bad patron.’
Daud was ready to fight. I could see it in his posture.
I was calculating.
This was new to me, even though I prided myself in being more like Odysseus than Achilles.
If the man spoke the truth — even a wicked, cocked-up version of the truth — attacking him would serve little purpose. Nor did we plan to stay in Syracusa. No local crime lord could possibly imagine what we had in mind.
I put a hand on Daud’s shoulder. ‘My friend is a Gaul,’ I said. ‘And prone to violence.’ I smiled at the hired muscle — the man was big. ‘I know a little about violence myself,’ I added. ‘But we don’t want any trouble.’
Anarchos nodded. ‘You’re the smart boy, then.’
I resented his tone and his use of the word boy. But I was not a great lord with fifty hoplites at my back. I was an ex-slave with six friends. I think my hands trembled.
But I smiled. ‘We had a good voyage.’ I had another knucklebone to roll, and I cast it slyly. ‘And of course, I make a fair wage as a bronze-smith.’
He nodded, pursed his lips. I had scored a hit. Not a hit that would win the fight, but a real score, nonetheless. Bronze-smiths were a close-knit clan with their own rules and laws and status, and men like Anarchos, however powerful, didn’t cross the smiths.
‘I’ll check on that,’ he said. ‘The bronze-smiths wouldn’t like an ex-slave making a claim that wasn’t true.’
I reached into the boat and took out my leather satchel — made by Seckla. From it, holding it up so that the hired muscle could see me, I took a bronze eating-knife with a pretty bone handle, the bone dyed green with verdigris; there were fine silver tacks in the handle for decoration. It was in a sheath of Seckla’s make with a long bronze pick.
‘My work,’ I said, handing it to the moneylender.
He nodded.
‘Keep it,’ I said. ‘A token of my esteem.’
His head shot up. ‘Fuck you, slave,’ he said. ‘No one talks to me like that.’
I crossed my arms. ‘You’re off your mark here. I’m a craftsman. These men are my friends. I have other friends. We don’t want trouble.’
He got up. Rubbed his chin, and then his face changed. ‘I’ll keep this,’ he said, holding my eating-knife. ‘And I’ll make some enquiries. And I’ll be back.’ He looked around. ‘I expect you’ll need my money. And I’ll expect you to be civil. Understand?’
By civil, he meant subservient.
Again, you might expect that I’d just kill him and be a local hero.
But it doesn’t really work like that.
Some time much later, Daud told me that we could have saved a year of our lives by killing him then and there. And maybe we could have.
But Heraclitus was reaching me across the years. I had to learn other ways of solving my problems.
So I bowed my head. ‘Of course, Patron. ’
He nodded seriously. And strode off, full of self-importance, his sell-sword by his side.
Daud turned on me. ‘Are you a coward?’ he asked, and stomped off. I didn’t see him for a day.
I must have turned red, because Doola came and put his arm around my shoulders. ‘Well done,’ he said.
‘I don’t feel that it was well done,’ I admitted. Now that the man had walked away, I felt craven.
‘We didn’t fight, and we didn’t take his money,’ Demetrios said. ‘Nice job. My brother was good with these vultures, but I–I fear them.’
So we went back to scraping the boat clean, and afterwards we returned to our two rooms under the thatch, where we counted our money. The taverna on our corner had taken all the wine that wasn’t tinged with seawater at a good price, and all the tinged wine at one half that price. After Demetrios paid off our debts — mostly food, rope and wood — we had about sixty drachma. I had made another twenty-four drachma profit, after my own food, wine and clothes.
Eighty-four drachma, for six men.
Daud shook his head. ‘We’ll never get a twenty-oared ship at this rate.’
We had decided that if we were going to try the tin run to Alba, we needed at least a twenty-oared galley with a good mast. It was a common enough type of boat in the trade. And we needed a dozen slaves. We couldn’t afford to pay rowers and sailors and build the boat.
We estimated that building the boat would cost us three hundred drachmas.
But Demetrios was altogether more sanguine. He put the money in a sack, and put the sack into the thatch. ‘Not bad,’ he said. He shrugged. ‘Not bad. Ari is pulling more than his fair share. And without him, we’ll never get it done.’
I didn’t really want to hear that, because while I liked working in the shop, I wanted to be at sea. And my status — if you could call it that — as leader was suffering. All of them looked to Demetrios, not to me. He had become the skipper. I wasn’t there, at sea. They told me stories of the storm that hit them in the straits off Sybarus, and how Demetrios stayed at the helm all day and all night You get the idea.
I might have been bitter. But I wasn’t. Sometimes a dream was bigger than any reality. Sailing to Alba was a big dream — an heroic deed, a worthy thing. I was willing to sacrifice. We all were.
We were brothers.
‘What about Illyria?’ I asked. Neoptolymos raised his head and smiled. And then frowned and drank more wine.
‘I will never go back until my sister is avenged,’ he said.
I looked at them. ‘There’s still tin coming through Illyria,’ I pointed out. ‘And Neoptolymos knows where to get it.’
He shook his head. ‘My cousins will have the keep now, and the river. I would be killed. I will return with a hundred warriors — with my friends.’ He smiled at me, and for a moment we were brothers. He knew I would back him. I knew that, if we lived, someday we would go there. After we put Dagon down. We never talked about it, but Neoptolymos and I knew.
Many debts.
The money went into the thatch, and the boat went back to sea. They tried fishing for a few weeks, and made about six drachma over expenses. They accepted a cargo of artworks for the Etruscan coast and sailed off, leaving me to worry about the consequences of failure.
But I didn’t worry much. I’m not much of a worrier, in that way. I went to work each morning as the sun rose. At the height of the sun in the sky, I would walk out of my master, Nikephorus’s shop, and go two streets to a waterfront wine shop where I’d buy a skewer of somewhat questionable meat. After that meal, I’d walk back to Nikephorus’s shop and work until late afternoon, when I’d go to the gymnasium, pay my foreigner’s fee and exercise with much richer men. I’d lift weights, throw the discus and run on the track.
After some weeks, other men spoke to me. I was clearly a foreigner: despite its size, Syracusa had only about six thousand citizen males, and they all knew each other. They were like any Greek gentlemen — well spoken, talkative, friendly — but only with each other.
But hospitality overcame diffidence after some time, and eventually one of the richer men — I knew who he was, even if he had no idea who I was — came and asked me if I liked to box. His name was Theodorus, and his family owned stone quarries.
We exchanged blows for some time. He wasn’t very good, and it wasn’t my best sport, but a few minutes of contest taught each of us that the other was a solid opponent.
He laughed. ‘So, you are a gentleman. The gatekeeper has… hmm
… questioned your right to exercise here.’
I nodded. ‘I’m a bronze-smith,’ I said. ‘From Plataea, in Boeotia.’ His face hardened. ‘I fought in the front rank at Marathon,’ I added. I didn’t like the way it sounded — a plain brag.
‘Ahh!’ he said, and took my hand. ‘Things are a little different here. I doubt there’s another bronze-smith in our gymnasium.’ He led me over to a group of men just emerging from the dressing rooms. They were in their thirties and forties, and they all wore the chlamys the way much younger men would wear them, in Athens. But their bodies were hard, and they all seemed to smile at the same time.
‘Ari fought at Marathon,’ he said, by way of introduction.
‘By Nike!’ said one man, with greying black hair and a thick beard. ‘That’s something!’
They all gathered around me, and one slapped my back.
‘Tell us what it was like,’ said Theodorus.
I started to tell the story — just as I have told you — and the tall bearded man grinned and plucked my arm. ‘Let the poor man get dressed, and we’ll buy him some wine. Talking is thirsty work.’
They were clearly surprised to see my plain chlamys and short linen chitoniskos. I looked like a servant with them, and I resolved to buy a better chlamys to wear to the gymnasium.
We sat in a wine shop, where a cup of wine cost an afternoon’s wage for a skilled bronze-smith, and where women, not men, waited at the tables. Lovely women. Slaves, I assumed.
I told my story, and the men with me responded well.
Theodorus nodded at the end. ‘I’ve been in a ship fight, and some cattle raids,’ he admitted, ‘but nothing like that.’
‘If Carthage keeps preying on our shipping, we’ll see it here,’ another added. ‘What do you think, Ari?’
I shrugged. ‘I know nothing of the politics here, gentlemen. I have no love for the Carthaginians, however.’
They all looked at me.
‘They enslaved me,’ I said.
From their looks, I might as well have said ‘and sold me in a brothel’. Every face closed.
‘You are a slave?’ Theodorus asked.
I shook my head, but I already knew we were done. I had seen this attitude in Athens.
‘I am not a slave, was not born a slave and was only made a slave by force,’ I said.
Theodorus got up. His hip had been against mine, sitting for wine, and he moved away as one would from a leper. ‘No slave can take exercise in our gymnasium,’ he said.
They all looked at me with marked distaste.
I got up. ‘I’m sorry to have intruded, gentlemen,’ I said. I drained my cup — the wine was excellent. ‘I appreciate your hospitality, even if you do not desire my company. May the gods be kind to you.’ I collected my chlamys, and made what exit I could.
I could feel their stares until I got to the door of the wine shop, where one of the serving girls suddenly went up on tiptoe and brushed a kiss on my beard. ‘I hate them,’ she said.
Aphrodite, that little brush of a kiss went to the very roots of my being. And took much of the sting out of my humiliation.
The next morning I told my master, Nikephorus, the entire story.
We were polishing — a nasty job, and one usually done by slaves, but Nikephorus liked to see things gleam. Every day. So we often started the days polishing. I’d polished all day for my first week, until he had time to test me. And of course, I knew the grips and handshakes of a master. They were different for Syracusa, but not so different.
At any rate, we polished for a while and then he sat back on the bench and admired our work. ‘I don’t exercise as much as I should,’ he said. ‘But the crafts have a gymnasium with a bath. You should have asked.’ He smiled his slow smile, and his eyes twinkled. He was grey without seeming old — bent, and strong, like Hephaestos himself. His wife, let me add, was much younger, and they fought often, and made up in the traditional way, and were equally loud in both pastimes. I liked his wife, too, Julia. She was, and she had a neat, orderly mind that catalogued everything that came her way — the heroes of the Iliad, the ships in the harbour, the wares in the shop — which was odd, as her house was the messiest I’ve ever seen. She never put anything away, and her slaves were just like her. But she was kind to apprentices and journeymen: she gave us food from her larder and juice from her store, wine was always free and she had a great store of scrolls to read — like a rich woman, which I think she was. I first read a good copy of Pythagoras on Mathematics at her house.
My daughter is making that face that means I’m rattling on.
So Nikephorus said, ‘I’d have loved to see those rich fucks when they found out you had been a slave. Like you’d poured shit on them.’ He laughed aloud. ‘Well, well. After work today, we’ll go and exercise.’ He groaned. ‘But it may kill me.’
We went through the streets at twilight, through parts of the city I hadn’t yet seen. I discovered that the textiles I’d bought down by the harbour were a pale shadow of what was available in the weavers’ street, where women hung recently completed items in the doors of their shops. Weaving is a woman’s craft, and the women of Syracusa were at least as dexterous as those of Athens or Plataea.
I saw wine shops better than the ones I frequented, and a street of iron-smiths where we stopped to drop off a whole leather-wrapped bundle of bronze fittings. I saw good swords and bad, fine spears and cheap spears, good eating-knives and dull eating-knives.
The craftsmen’s gymnasium was small, but quite pleasant. It didn’t have its own track, but it did host three professional trainers, paid by the guilds, and it had good equipment — a matched set of lifting stones with handles, for instance. I was introduced around, and men watched me lift, and other men watched me box.
And there was a curious device I hadn’t seen elsewhere — a room with a bright lamp with a lens focused on a whitewashed wall. On the bench was a single, heavy wooden sword.
‘Shadow-fighting, friend,’ said one of the trainers. He lit the lamp and shone it on the wall, and then fought his shadow for a few blows. It was good training and self-explanatory, and I set to.
The trainer, a freedman names Polimarchos, grinned at me. ‘Had a sword in your hand before, I take it.’
I smiled.
‘Care to have a try with padded swords?’ he asked.
This was different from Boeotia, where we used wooden swords and hurt each other. The swords were padded with wool and leather, and he had small shields with central grips. I’d never used such a shield, and I pursed my lips.
‘Not much like an aspis, is it?’ I asked.
‘Teaches the same lessons, though,’ Polimarchos said. ‘The small shield teaches the larger. Punch with your hand — deflect your opponent’s blade before his blow is fully developed. Right? You’re a fighter. We call it the shield bash, here, but I’ve heard it called a dozen names. And try keeping your sword inside the shield. Let the shield cover your sword hand.’
I had been fighting most of my life — I’d had a good teacher as a boy. But I hadn’t ever given much thought to the theory of swordplay until that moment.
We picked up the padded weapons. The padded sword was badly balanced, and felt like a dead thing in my hand. The shield was odd.
But I set myself in my fighting position, with my sword high behind me and my left leg forward, and Polimarchos looked at me for a moment and shook his head.
He stepped forward, and we began to circle.
He managed our distance expertly, keeping me a little farther away than I would have liked. So I pushed him, and he struck, his right leg shooting forward across his left, and his padded blade slamming down towards my shield. I raised the shield slightly, and he rolled the blade off my little shield and cut into my thigh.
‘Don’t rely on the shield,’ he said. ‘Act with it.’
The third time he cut down at my thigh, I cut at his wrist and scored. He winced. ‘Too hard, Ari,’ he said. ‘I have hit you twice, and not left a mark — eh?’
His point was a fair one.
But pain didn’t make him flinch, and we went back at it. He could not hit me at will, but he could hit me often. I could hit him occasionally. He was twenty years older than I, and a freedman.
After an hour, I could scarcely breathe, and darkness was falling. ‘Train me?’ I asked him.
He nodded. ‘You are a good fighter — a trained man, I can tell. But the Etruscans and the Latins and the Syracusans train in these things. Techniques that you don’t know, I can tell. The way you stand — your legs are too far apart. You crouch forward slightly — surely your first trainer told you to keep your back straight? And there’s other moves — cuts — worth knowing. I get a drachma for an hour of my time.’
I nodded. ‘And spear-fighting?’ I asked.
Polimarchos had a pleasant face. He was shorter, a little heavy at the waist like many trainers, and his arms and legs had the defined muscles of the professional athlete. He was bald on top, and his surviving hair was no colour at all, and neither were his eyes. He smiled a lot, especially when he hit me. He grinned. ‘I know some things about spear-fighting,’ he said.
We walked out of the gymnasium. I paid my fee — a month there cost the same for a smith as a day at the City Gymnasium for a foreigner, but a drachma to the trainer was painful.
Nonetheless, I took him out for a cup of wine. We came to an agreement — he was eager to teach a swordsman, I could tell, rather than pushing tradesmen to do a little exercise, which was his day-to-day fare.
The craft gymnasium added to my social life, as I met other men of my own age, and received some invitations, which reminded me that men my age with incomes assured were married. I had been married. I forgot for days, even weeks, at a time. I forgot I was married, and forgot she was dead.
I never forgot Briseis, though.
After seven or eight weeks, this life became my life. Plataea was far away, and the pirate lord was dead and buried. I made my first helmet, and my master clapped his hands to see it done, and sold it for a handsome price. He gave me almost half of the profit — by the standards of the day, this was very generous. A journeyman like me could be kept on for wages and food.
My share was twenty drachmas. That covered lessons at the gymnasium, where I had begun to question how I’d ever killed a single man in combat, so much of my posture and technique was being restructured by Polimarchos. I paid my teacher, and he was truly grateful.
A week later I produced another helmet, this one with repousse work at the brow. It had been ordered, and I had fretted about the fit. Indeed, it was a fraction too small, and I was embarrassed to have to open the brow slightly in front of the client, alternately dishing and raising a few points to expand the metal, all the while hoping that I would not have to re-planish the whole shape.
But my customer, an Etruscan trierarch on business, loved my work. I think he loved more than just my work — he smiled a lot, and seemed to hang on my every word — but this time I received twenty-five drachmas.
A small thing happened at that time, one of many incidents. A boy came to our shop — really a young man, a gifted apprentice called Anaxsikles son of Dionysus. Dionysus was the master smith of the street. He himself was, I gather, a very gifted man, but I never saw anything he made. Rather, he managed a smithing empire — he had twenty-four sheds, with both slave and free smiths working iron and bronze. He was chief of the guild, and his voice was the voice that decided most things on the street, and yet, in as much as I knew him, he seemed fair and very intelligent. He was the sort of tekne every city values — prosperous, rich even, and yet not above his origins.
At any rate, he sent us his son. This sort of temporary fosterage binds the guilds together, and is good for all. It is the chief reason why cities and not workshops develop a style — fosterage creates an equality of knowledge.
But I digress. Don’t look at me like that, honey, I know you want the story. Teaching Anaxsikles was a joy. He had a kind of aptitude for the work that transcends jealousy and competition. He was a god-sent talent. He never needed to be shown anything more than once. If I have a skill in working bronze that is better than other men’s, it is in the construction of armour, and I think it is simply that I have used so much of it that I understand it from the inside in a way that other smiths don’t. But Anaxsikles would drink in my views — on how to fabricate a Corinthian helmet, for instance; where to move the metal to stiffen the brow ridge, or, the way I made them, to leave a heavy plate over the brow — he took it all in. He seemed to feel it in his bones.
So Anaxsikles worked with me on the helmets. He was delighted with the result, and my work improved again.
I only worked with him for two months, but he made me a better smith. He — my student.
At any rate, Nikephorus had a small party in celebration of the final sale. The priest of Hephaestos came and gave me the seal of Syracusa, as a master smith. And Nikephorus’s daughter Lydia came and sang. She was a pretty girl, fourteen years old, all legs and hips and small breasts and shyness, and I liked her. I didn’t get to see many women, and she was lovely.
But I was a fool, so after dinner, when I’d had too much wine and was enjoying the sight of Lydia dancing, Nikephorus leaned over. ‘She’ll make you fine babies,’ he said. ‘Julia never lost a one. How about it? None of us cares you were a slave. Marry Lydia, and you’ll have the shop when I’m a little older.’
This struck me from a clear blue sky although in retrospect, I was, as I say, a fool not to have seen it coming. Lydia was beautiful in her transparent Ionian chiton of Aegyptian linen — probably her best garment — with a flowing light himation falling in folds from her shoulders; very fashionable, and most likely her own work. I’d proven my work; I’d made the master some serious money and he had no son. How had I failed to be prepared?
Did I say he was a fine man? When I looked stunned, he laughed. ‘Well, every man thinks his own daughter the most beautiful since Helen. Perhaps the idea sticks in your craw. Will you think on it?’ he asked.
I nodded.
He leaned over. ‘I’m going to leave the two of you alone a little,’ he said. ‘If you… touch her-’ he shrugged.
I nodded. It is a funny thing, a human thing — I could have killed him any time, he was no fighter — but I feared him far more than he feared me. He was the master smith. He was a master, too; for all I’d just been raised to his ‘level’, he seemed, every day, to know a thousand things I didn’t know.
Within an hour, Lydia was seated on the kline beside mine — to sit on mine would have led to other pastimes — with her arms around her knees. She asked me questions, slow questions, about my past.
So I answered them.
After an hour, Julia came in and sat on Lydia’s couch. ‘Time for bed, sweet,’ she said. She smiled easily at me. ‘Have you bragged and bragged, young man?’
I nodded sheepishly. I didn’t want to marry Lydia and be a bronze-smith. I wanted to go to Alba, kill Dagon and then go back and And what?
In that heartbeat, it occurred to me that marrying Lydia and being the best smith in mighty Syracusa might be a golden future. The shop offered me a challenge — every day. I could see a life where I made things with Anaxsikles, or competed against him to be the best. There is as much arete in craft as in war. Standing in the haze of Ares was
… like another life. Making marvellous things under Nikephorus’s guiding hand Sleeping with Lydia, who even now gave me a look that made both of us blush I blushed and stammered, Julia laughed and I found myself in the darkness with my cheap chlamys around my shoulders and the first kiss of autumn weather in the air, so that the city smell of cat piss and coriander was mixed with burning pine. The night seemed a marvellous place.
I went and had a cup of wine at my new favourite wine shop and went back to my two rooms.
And there they all were, faces beaming. Even Neoptolymos was beaming.
They’d made almost two hundred drachmas. They’d taken their cargo swiftly and safely, earned a bonus and come home laden to the gunwales with Etruscan olive oil and a small cargo of perfumes that had sold at a stiff profit before they’d even unloaded.
I added in forty-five drachmas on my own account.
We all looked at each other, and then we whooped like men giving the war cry, so that our upstairs neighbours thumped their floor and our downstairs neighbour, a prosperous whore, thumped her ceiling.
‘Now we need three hundred and fifty more,’ said Demetrios, who could calculate on an abacus and write slowly with a stylus on a wax tablet. I wrote better, so I took over the scribe’s job.
‘Slaves?’ I asked.
‘Cargo,’ Demetrios said. ‘And slaves, and ropes, and pitch for the hull — even at that, we really need five hundred more.’
‘And we don’t actually have three hundred drachmas,’ Daud said morosely.
I glared at him. ‘Count it again, then.’
‘It’s about to be winter,’ he said. ‘No sailing. We have to eat.’
‘Even if we live off your smithing,’ Doola said, ‘we will only stay even. And we’ll all feel like kept men.’ He laughed.
Demetrios nodded. ‘It’s worse than that,’ he said. ‘Anarchos will know tomorrow what we made, and he’ll be here for a cut.’
‘I’ll cut him,’ said Daud.
‘I’m with you,’ said Neoptolymos. ‘We’re not bending over for him this time.’
I fingered my beard. It was odd for me to side with Demetrios. But I could see he was prepared to hand over something, some face-saving amount of our profits.
And I agreed. By the gods, I agreed.
‘Twenty drachma,’ I said. ‘And another twenty to the Temple of Poseidon, as first fruits.’
‘We saw Gaius,’ Daud said, out of nowhere. He grinned. ‘He wants to come to Alba with us. He’s as poor as we are, and he has to pretend to be rich.’
‘His family weren’t altogether pleased when he came back,’ Doola said. ‘We’re sending him a letter to come down with another load of perfumes.’
I nodded. ‘Can we get one more load in before winter?’
Demetrios fingered his chin. ‘Chancy.’
But we knew we had to try.
The next morning, I took ten drachma of my own money and went and bought myself a fine chlamys. It wasn’t as fine as some men wore, but it was a beautiful red-brown, with a fine black-purple stripe and a field of embroidered stars. I had admired it for two weeks, and it gave me real pleasure to buy it from the maker for her full price. I didn’t haggle. She grinned at me.
‘You’re the new smith,’ she said, as she took my money. ‘Going to marry our Lydia, are you, boy?’
News travels fast.
Then I went to the silversmith’s ghetto, and traded six of my good bronze pins for one heavy silver cloak pin. The smith came out and dealt with me in person. I knew him from the gymnasium. He fingered the chlamys. ‘I know that work,’ he said. ‘It’s good to see a young man do well. See that you stay among us.’
Dressed in my finery, I went to the great Temple of Poseidon by the harbour, and there I counted twenty drachma into the bronze urn by the entrance, watched at a distance by one of Anarchos’s runners. I knew most of them by now, as I was in the city all the time. A day-priest — one of the citizens — came and clasped my hand.
‘First fruits of a trading voyage,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘But you are surely the new smith — the one who fought at Marathon?’ he asked.
I shrugged. ‘I am also sometimes a trader — a sailor.’
He laughed. ‘Any Hellene serves the sea. The god thanks you. We do too. We need a new roof.’
From the temple, with my cloak on, pinned with fine silver, I walked down to the waterfront where Anarchos sat with his ‘friends’. He had two big ‘friends’ who stood behind him. I stood at the edge of the terrace until a slave deigned to notice me, and then one of the big men came and led me to the great man’s presence.
He looked me up and down slowly, and then gestured with his stick at the stool closest to him. ‘Sit!’ he said.
Wine was brought.
‘You have something for me? And you have brought it with a proper humility?’ he said, loudly, because this being a patron of the lower orders was a performance art.
I nodded. Took a purse from a fold of my cloak and put it in his hands.
‘We put our first fruits in the temple,’ I said. ‘So you have our second fruits.’
He glanced in the bag, and if he was disappointed, he hid it well. ‘Very proper,’ he said with a firm nod. He leaned forward. ‘Nice cloak,’ he said.
‘I may be courting,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘So I hear. Although other things come to my ears. You tried to mix with the citizens. That was foolish.’
I shrugged. And smiled.
Just for a moment, I threw back my cloak and looked him in the eye. Lydia, in a similar flash of the eye, could convey I am a virgin, and yet I burn with a fire so hot that you would flinch from it.
I could learn from a fourteen-year-old girl.
In one flash of the eye, I said I fought in the front rank at Marathon, and I’ve buried more enemies than you’ll ever have. You may have the upper hand here, but you do not want a fight.
Then I dropped my eyes, smiled and went back to my wine, which was good wine.
He nodded, leaned forward, and put a hand on my shoulder. He was not afraid of me. That, by itself, was interesting.
‘I wish you luck, smith. Your friends — they are lucky to have you. I think we understand each other.’
‘I will continue to value your… friendship, when I own a shop,’ I said.
He took a breath.
I let one go.
We both smiled.
I rose, shook his hand as lesser man to greater, and walked away.
A few paces on, he called out: ‘Are you really Arimnestos of Plataea?’
I turned back. ‘Yes,’ I called.
He nodded.
When I got home, Doola was sitting by the door with a cudgel, and Neoptolymos and Daud were in their leather armour. I shook my head.
‘I told you so,’ Daud said to Doola. He fingered my cloak. ‘There goes all our profits.’
Demetrios raised an eyebrow.
‘It is done,’ I said.
Daud looked at me. ‘You are the brains here, but I swear, Ari, you’ll wish we’d killed the bastard.’
Neoptolymos agreed. ‘We can take his whole gang.’
‘And the citizens of the city? And the courts?’ Demetrios nodded to me. ‘How much?’
‘I bought the cloak from my own money,’ I said, a little defensively. ‘Twenty for Anarchos, and twenty for Poseidon.’
Daud shrugged and Neoptolymos stared at the floor, but Doola clapped me on the back.
‘And now, brothers, I have a plan.’ I looked around. ‘Are we still going to Alba?’
A chorus of cheers erupted. Damn, it makes me want to weep, even now. We had the dream — the best dream men ever dreamed. We were going to be heroes. That dream bound us as thoroughly as iron manacles, but better by far.
‘Listen, then,’ I said. ‘Anarchos wants to own us. He wants to loan us money. When we can’t pay it, he’ll own our boat and our lives and get his claws into a smith.’ I shrugged. ‘I’ve been offered the bronze-smith’s daughter, friends.’
You can imagine what response met this. I’ll leave you to picture it, friends, because many of you are too young to hear the expressions that men use to each other.
Heh, heh.
‘Listen, you sex-starved oarsmen! Anarchos has every reason to want a piece of us.’ I smiled. ‘So we risk it all — we make another voyage to Italy for perfume. If we make it, we make a good profit, and then we go to Anarchos to borrow money for a larger ship. ’ I looked around at them. ‘He won’t loan us enough for us to succeed. But he won’t know how much we already have.’
Demetrios got it immediately. ‘We could never come back here again,’ he said. Just thinking about it made him breathe heavily.
Doola got it, too. ‘So we take the great man’s money, and we just sail away. Apparently to Etrusca, for perfumes.’ He laughed his great laugh.
Daud joined the laughter, and Seckla, and finally, so did Neoptolymos.
One of my better plans.
The next morning I realized that my plan had two painful flaws.
One was that I had to pretend that I was going to marry Lydia, or at least, that I hadn’t decided.
Herein lies the complexity of the human heart, my young friends. When I was in Nikephorus’s shop, I wanted to marry her. I wanted that life.
When I was in my two rooms, staring at the place amid the thatch where the money rested, all I wanted was Alba. I was both men. Both men lied, both told the truth.
And so, though I had intended to make the dangerous winter crossing to Italy with the boat, I couldn’t go. If I had, Anarchos would have seen in a moment that I wasn’t staying.
So I had to sit at home, while they took the risks.
Or sit in the andron of Nikephorus’s house, with Lydia playing the lyre, or singing. We were left together more and more.
Lydia was quite sure we were to wed. And she was quite prepared to move on. Quite aggressively prepared, really. She was perfectly modest. She didn’t grab my shoulders and push her tongue down my throat — pardon me, ladies, but I’ve known it done. But autumn turned to winter, it grew colder and wetter outside, and Lydia wore less and less to our chaperoned evenings. Her mother either took no notice or cooperated actively. Things were said.
I remember one evening she finished a song and said, in a matter of fact voice: ‘My best friend kissed her husband for months before they were wed.’ She smiled, and went back to playing the lyre.
When she danced, her hips took on a life of their own. When she handed me wine, her fingers brushed mine.
Listen, my young friends. A woman has natural defences against the assault of a man. A woman is like a citadel — I’m hardly the first to draw this analogy. Women are trained from birth to walk a fine line between desirability and availability. Whether a woman is a queen or a whore, she knows how to draw that line.
Men know nothing. We only want. It is not our place to refuse. When a man is hunted by a woman, he has no weapons, no city wall, no place of refuge. Refusal appears very like cowardice.
Oh, I’m just saying.
I taught Anaxsikles in the shop, and then we worked together. I was learning from my master, and teaching my apprentice. I had very little to teach him, but I recall we were making a pair of greaves, and like all Sicilian smiths, he put a pair of intertwined snakes onto the front — fancy, and very beautiful. His repousse was better than mine already.
Perhaps his superiority made me petulant, but his snakes had come to dominate the whole front of the greave, and when he brought them to me for my approval, I looked at them for a long time, formulating my criticism.
It is hard to be an honest critic. I was a little jealous of his skill. The snakes themselves were beautiful. Yet, in my heart, I knew that I wouldn’t have worn them. Why? And was I just jealous?
So many grown-up thoughts.
Finally, I put them down. ‘Your repousse is superb,’ I said.
He beamed.
‘Better than mine,’ I said.
He made noises of negation, but I could see that he, too, thought his work was better. And yet he wanted my admiration and my approval.
‘But with the snakes so deep, look, a spear point can catch here, and punch right through into a man’s leg.’ The snakes stood so high out of the metal that their sinuous lines made a continuous catchment. If I were fighting a man wearing them… Odd thought, as I hadn’t fought anyone in a long time.
He shrugged, obviously uninterested in my criticism.
‘You don’t believe me,’ I said.
He shrugged with all the easy arrogance of the very young. His shrug said You are a little jealous and thus liable to lie. I know my repousse is without compare. He didn’t quite smile.
‘You don’t believe me.’
‘There’s no spearman in the world who can place his point into so small a target,’ he said.
I wanted to vanquish his youth’s ignorant arrogance.
‘Put them on,’ I said.
He was close enough to his customer’s size to clip them on his legs.
I fetched the master’s spear from over the door. Effortlessly, I flicked it at him, and caught the in-curve of the snake each time — nicking the greave and making marks that would have to be polished out.
He shrugged. ‘I don’t have a spear or an aspis,’ he said.
I found both for him.
We squared off in the street. I realized as we came on guard that Lydia was watching out of her window on the exedra. Well.
‘Ready?’ I said. My voice must have carried something. Anaxsikles paused, and lowered his aspis. ‘You really can do it, can’t you?’ he said.
‘Yes.’ I said grimly.
But he changed his mind, settled his shield and laughed. ‘Show me!’ he said, and his spear lashed out at my face.
I nudged his spear aside and put the point of my spear into the snake’s curves. Anaxsikles screamed and fell.
My spear had gone right through a flaw, and an inch into his shin.
No real ill came of it. I helped him inside, bandaged him and spent the next two weeks making a new greave to replace the one I’d ruined. He put snakes on it, less than one half the height of the last pair. We drank a cup of wine together most nights, and the little fight became quite famous in the smith’s quarte — not as a feat of arms, but as an example of how seriously we took our business. I might have been punished, but instead, like most things in those days, it rebounded to make both of us appear serious in our work.
And Lydia told me that I looked like a god.
Well.
My friends had been gone eight weeks — double their last trip.
I was walking home one evening from my gymnasium, and a big man appeared at a corner. I knew him immediately; he was one of Anarchos’s men. He jutted his chin at me.
I smiled and kept walking.
He ran after me, his heavy footfalls loud on the street. People turned to look, and then studiously looked away. The street was only twice the width of a man’s shoulders, but grown men managed to make it wider to avoid Anarchos’s men.
‘Hey! You!’ he shouted.
I turned.
He stopped. ‘You heard me!’ he shouted, spittle flying. He wanted a fight.
I didn’t. So I nodded. ‘I didn’t understand,’ I said.
‘Anarchos wants you,’ he said. ‘Come.’
So I followed him. As it happened, I had been training with Polimarchos, and I had my beautiful Etruscan kopis under my arm, but I felt no need to use it. I had, indeed, changed. I thought of the two thugs in Athens I’d killed.
We walked in a light rain down to the waterfront. The taverna was closed up tight, and inside, fifty lamp wicks gave the place the light of a temple — and too much heat. A central hearth fire burned and fishermen, slave and free, jostled for wine.
But around Anarchos’s table, there was a clear space as wide as a man’s hips.
He bade me sit as if we were old friends. He got me a fine cup of wine.
‘You must be worried about your friends,’ he said.
I nodded.
He looked concerned. ‘I could sell you information about them,’ he said. ‘But I would be a poor patron if I did. So here it is for free: they are well. They made the coast of Etrusca well enough, and bought their cargo. But then they were plagued with trouble, lost the boat, bought another and have been penned in Sybarus by adverse winds.’ He shrugged. ‘They will make a little off this voyage, but not enough to give Poseidon twenty drachmas. Or me,’ he said. He shrugged again.
‘Thanks!’ I said, with genuine feeling.
He looked at me again. ‘You are an odd fellow,’ he said. ‘You truly value these men.’
I stood. ‘Yes. Like brothers.’
He clasped my hand. ‘Very well. Be at ease.’
Damn him. He was so much easier to hate when he was being a money-grubbing bastard. And since I was going to swindle him, I wanted to hate him.
The world, it turns out, is a very complicated place. No man is the villain in his own tale. Every man has his reasons, no matter how selfish or evil.
I went home.
More weeks passed. I went with Nikephorus and Anaxsikles to the great winter religious festival they have in Syracusa. Lydia carried a garland in the craftsmen’s part of the procession. Men commented on her. Two young aristocrats wrote her poems.
I was jealous.
So I wrote a poem for her myself.
Oh, the foolishness of men.
I am a fair poet. Better than my poetry is Sappho’s, which I knew by heart, and Alcaeus’s and Anacreon’s and Hipponax’s. It is easy to write a good love poem when you know all the classics by heart.
I went home from the Feast of the Kore with rage and jealousy in my heart, and I took wax and stylus and wrote a poem. Naming the parts of her body, I adored each in turn, adorned them with verse and crowned my technical achievement by starting each verse with a letter of her name.
I wrote it fair.
The next time I was served dinner by my master, I put it in her hand.
She didn’t react at all. She scarcely noticed me, in fact. She made lovely small talk, asked after my friends and then went on to talk of her new friends since the festival — young women of the upper classes who had condescended to her before, but now sought her out.
Indeed, Nikephorus confessed to me that he’d had new clients the last few days — a gang of rich boys who wanted armour.
‘My daughter is the talk of the town,’ he said happily.
And Julia gave me a look — as expressive, in her way, as any of Lydia’s.
I took the bait and swallowed it whole.
Several days passed. I worked very hard, and I exercised even harder. But her eyes seemed to be everywhere. For the first time in many years, I didn’t imagine Briseis. I didn’t pine for my dead Euphoria. I didn’t ever stop thinking about Euphoria, precisely, but it was not her body I pictured in my arms.
The young sprigs came to be fitted for armour. I fitted them, and they were young, empty-headed and rich, so they were easy to hate. I guess they assumed I was a slave.
They wagered on which among them would have her first. Anaxsikles looked at me as if he expected me to kill one on the spot. Since our very short duel, he saw me as Achilles come to life. Funny, if you think about it.
She appeared from time to time, dressed to please in a carefully pleated chiton and blue himation, and served wine.
‘I’ve never thought of bronze this way before,’ said one sprig.
‘So ruddy,’ said the second.
‘So… hard,’ said the third. They thought they were the wits of the world. They sailed out of the shop like triremes in a stiff breeze.
In that moment, seeing her watch them with something like adoration, I hated those three boys more than Dagon and Anarchos and my cousin Simon all put together in one awful husk.
But they were gone.
I kept working, and she went back to her rooms. Her father came in, looked at the three roughed-out helmets I’d done and the pairs of greaves Anaxsikles had nearly finished, and gave my arm a gentle squeeze. ‘We’ll all weather this,’ he said. ‘And be the richer and better for it.’
He straightened up and admired a nearly complete sword hilt I had on the table. I’d made a trade with a cutler so that I could have new swords for my friends. ‘I’m going out to meet friends,’ he said. ‘Lock up.’
One by one, the slaves and apprentices looked to me for permission to withdraw. Already, in most minds, I was the young master. I remember Anaxsikles kept polishing at a greave until he put it down in disgust.
‘I made a planishing error,’ he said. ‘I can’t polish that out.’
‘Go home,’ I said. ‘Look at it again in the morning.’
He laughed, grabbed his chiton and vanished.
Then Julia appeared in the shop with a cup of lukewarm wine — housekeeping was never her strong point. ‘I need you to watch the house,’ she said. ‘My mother needs me for an hour.’
I went back to my work. It was getting dark too fast for anything but general work, and finally I missed a simple blow, shook my head in disgust and frowned at the apprentice boy. ‘Go home,’ I said. ‘You’re a good lad, but I can’t see to work.’
He flushed at the praise, and was out of the door before I’d washed my hands.
I went and drank Julia’s warmed wine. It was warm in the shop, but cold outside, and I’d left the wine far longer than I should have. It was cold, and had a fine layer of shop dust on the surface — a bronze smithy is never clean. I drank it off anyway. I remember that taste so well.
I took the cup — a fine piece of bronzework, of course — up the steps to Julia’s kitchen. I gave the cup to a kitchen slave, a Sikel. She grinned.
‘You staying for dinner, master?’ she asked.
I shook my head. ‘Not invited, lass,’ I said.
‘Oh!’ said the serving girl. ‘Cook! He ain’t staying!’
Cook, a big Italiote woman who never seemed to understand that she was a slave, came out of the kitchen. ‘Missy says you are staying to dinner, young master. And the mistress said so, too. Said she’d be home by now,’ added the cook with a significant sniff.
Well.
‘I’ll give you a nice bowl of hot water and a towel, eh?’ said Cook.
‘Is it true you was a slave?’ said the girl.
I nodded. ‘Twice.’
She sighed. ‘I’d like to be free.’
I washed my hands and face. I had a lesson. I was going to miss it, and I wasn’t sure why.
No, that’s a lie. I knew exactly why I was missing it. I was letting down my teacher, I was distracting myself from my exercise, and I was quite possibly about to betray my master’s trust while deflowering his daughter.
That’s why I stayed to dinner.
Men’s reasons are complex animals, my young friends. I told myself many things, but here, with you, in the firelight of my own hearth, I know — I know — that I wanted her. And despite guest oaths, and friendship and trust and even love, I was willing to have her body, not even for the sweet desirability of it, but because other men wanted it, and I could not stop myself from this contest.
Bah! Fill my cup. I disgust myself. And I do not want to tell this part of the story.
Lydia came down to dinner dressed like a goddess in a play: like Artemis as the patron of young women, or Athena as Parthenos, the virgin. She had on a chiton of Syrian linen dyed the colour of a stormy sea that must have cost as much as five of my helmets. My critical eye saw that her pins had already ripped a line of very small holes in the cloth along the contrasting linen-tape edges of pure white. Over the chiton, which fell to the floor, she wore a himation of wool that was almost transparent, and fell in frilly folds to the floor — just off white, with a stripe of pure Tyrian purple. In her hair was a fillet of white linen tape, and on her feet Lydia had the most beautiful feet.
On her feet she wore sandals of gold. In fact, they were leather, with gold leaf laid carefully over the sandals, and again, I could see where she had now worn them enough that the gold had come away from the very top of the arch of leather over her foot.
Noticing these things is not the same as caring. She was as beautiful as a goddess. Her face was radiant, and her carriage was proud and erect. Every line of her body showed through the fabric. She had muscles on her legs and arms that enhanced her posture.
‘ The girl with the golden sandals has shot me with the dart of love,’ I said. I knew my poets.
A man of twenty-six has every advantage with a girl of fifteen. Compared to any other possible suitor, I was better. I was better.
And I should have known better, as well.
I led her to the table. I clapped my hands for the slaves, and when they came, I pointed at Lydia.
‘Does she not look like a goddess?’ I asked.
Cook gave her a hug, and the two girl slaves curtsied.
And we sat to dine.
If we had been aristocrats, I’d have reclined, I suppose — I’ve honestly only eaten by myself about a dozen times in my life. She’d have sat in a chair, or even fed herself in the kitchen. But this had developed a sense of occasion, and so I sat in a chair — men did, you know, back then — and Cook served us herself. We had chicken with a lovely herb sauce thickened with barley, and thick bread with olive tapenade, and some other opson that was made with tuna and highly spiced. At every remove, we expected Julia home.
One of the slaves brought us honeyed almonds, which were a special treat, as we knew Cook didn’t really like the mess. The slave girl had obviously sticky fingers and a lot of honey around her mouth, and Lydia and I both saw it: our eyes met, and we laughed aloud.
And her foot rubbed up along the length of the inside of my leg. And she looked at me, an openly curious look. It said, I surprised myself, there, but now that I’ve done it, what do we think?
We drank wine. It wasn’t great wine — Nikephorus didn’t drink great wine. He bought good, dark-red local stuff and he liked it. But it was good wine, and we had two cups each, and then we shared a cup.
This is where I went over the edge.
When I went to the cupboard and took down the kantharos cup with two handles, I knew exactly what I was doing. But I had crossed over.
Her eyes were huge as she drank, and our hands touched a great deal.
We sat for a long time, just looking at each other, our now bare feet busy.
In my head, I was screaming at myself to get up and walk away.
I was going to sail to Alba.
Lydia was not coming.
I eventually got up to wash my hands — almonds in honey are sticky. As I rose, I saw that Lydia’s chiton had come a long way above her knee — the sight inflamed me.
I have so many excuses.
I walked to the kitchen. Cook was smiling as I washed my hands.
‘If I didn’t know you was pledged to each other,’ she said. She frowned, then grinned lasciviously. ‘But I do. Never a word will be spoken, eh?’
I gave her a silver drachma.
There was a knock at the slave door, and a willowy boy stuck his head in and was instantly abashed, since he had to assume I was the master.
‘What do you want, boy?’ I asked.
‘Just?’ he said witlessly.
Cook made a cooing noise. ‘He’s the Mater’s boy,’ she said. ‘What do you want, Petrio?’
He made a sort of sketchy bow. ‘Only, my mistress says… she is sick, and could you send fennel? And Mistress Julia says she’ll be another hour at least, and please do not tell the young people.’ He looked at me. ‘And that’s all she said.’
I smiled.
Cook frowned. ‘You ain’t supposed to have heard that,’ she said.
Petrio ran for it.
I shrugged. And went back to the andron.
Lydia was standing by the door to the portico. Her back was to the steps to the exedra, and I assumed she was about to go. I stepped up to her I have no idea. We kissed. Who started it? Who stopped? Why?
No idea.
We were in a patch of absolute shadow, and we were fools, and my hands roved her body and hers began, hesitantly, and then with increasing knowledge, to roam mine.
Cook walked right up behind us and dropped a plate.
The crack of the plate was like a dose of cold salt water.
Cook glared at me.
I had Lydia’s chiton around her hips, a hand deeply inside her himation and all the pins off her right shoulder.
She blushed, shook her clothes into place and bolted up into the exedra.
I had very little to repair. So I was left with Cook, who stood with her arms crossed, glaring at me.
‘Don’t tell the young people,’ Cook said. ‘That means she didn’t want you necking in the portico. That’s what I heard.’
I nodded and bowed.
‘You had better marry her,’ Cook said. She shook her head — the weary motion women make when men are involved.
You’ll understand me better if you know that while I was repentant, all I could think of as I walked home was the perfect smoothness of her skin, the hard tip of her nipple under my hand, the softness…
Well, girls, you can giggle all you like. I’m helping you understand the enemy. Because men need only the touch of a breast to turn from lovers to predators. Sometimes less than that. And what do you get? A man gets an hour’s pleasure, and a woman gets — if she’s unlucky — pregnancy and death. But your bodies are built to tell you otherwise, and when a man’s hand is on a woman’s thigh, does she think of childbirth, of Artemis coming for her spirit as the baby wails?
No.
Nor does the man, I can tell you.
Even with a porne, the smart ones are careful, gathering seed in a sponge or using… other ways. I’m making you all blush: I’ll stop. But listen, girls. The joy is the same for both. It’s the price that’s different.
The next day, I went to the shop and worked. At lunch, for the first time I can remember, Lydia came down into the shop with a chunk of bread and some excellent cheese and a cup of wine. When she put the wine into my hand, her whole hand wrapped around mine. She smiled up into my eyes. And then slipped away with grace.
I wanted her. All the time.
That afternoon, without any connivance, the two of us came together in the corridor behind the kitchen, and there wasn’t another person in sight, slave or free. Before we could breathe, we were in each other’s arms, drinking deep. Her hand was under my chiton, on my hip, and mine We had perhaps ten heartbeats, and we almost managed to make love. Luckily we heard movement, and we broke.
It was all just a matter of time.
And in between these trysts I cursed myself for a fool and a coward and a liar, leading her on, and I swore not to have her.
The problem is, you see, that it no longer mattered. Men make much of the act of sex, but it is the act of possession and love that makes the bond. I didn’t need to ride her — she had given herself. We hadn’t made a baby, but we had made a pact, and I knew I wasn’t going to keep it.
Liar. Betrayer.
I thought that I could play her along until I was ready to leave. And ‘let her down easily’.
But I never even tried.
I wanted her, body and soul. But not enough, you’ll note, to change my plans, or take her with me.
The next day was the same. But I had begun to hedge my bets. I kissed her when I knew that Cook was close by and would end it.
See? There’s no way to tell this to make myself good.
And I still wanted her, every minute. When I saw her, all my friends vanished, the boat was a chimera and I was willing to be a smith in Syracusa. For life.
And then, at the whim of the gods, our boat came back.
They had a better boat. As soon as she was pulled up on the shingle, I could see she had almost double the cargo space, and she was better built — the tongues of wood that held the planks together were tightly placed and beautifully pegged. The steering oars, rather than grey with age, were shining golden wood — new, and very handsome.
They had perfumes and some Etruscan tin. The Etruscan mines are small and stingy, and the Etruscans don’t let much out of the country. But Gaius had arranged the sale, and the tin gave us an entry into the trade.
It was a step. Two steps.
As we drank that night in a wine shop, Doola pointed proudly at our new boat. ‘We call her Amphitrite,’ he said. ‘She rides the waves like a girl riding a man. With passion.’ He lifted his cup and we all drank, and Seckla put wine on the floor for luck.
‘So-’ Doola was hesitant, and they all looked at me.
‘We want to change the plan a little,’ Seckla said, all in a rush. His hands moved as he spoke. ‘We want to get into the tin trade, first by selling the load we have down the coast, in the Sikel communities where Demetrios has friends. And then-’
Demetrios couldn’t take it any more. ‘ Amphitrite can take a longer voyage,’ he said. ‘We take her to Massalia, in Gaul. We load tin there, and we see if we can get someone to tell us about the north. Then, when we’ve sold some cargoes-’
‘How long?’ I asked.
Doola was the only one to meet my eyes. ‘Two years,’ he said. ‘Maybe three, until we’ve got secure trade connections in Massalia and Etrusca and Latinium. Etrusca is rich, brother. There’s no reason for us to be here. Sicily is not the hub. Etrusca is.’
I laughed. Shook my head. ‘How’s Gaius?’ I asked.
‘He’s going to come back to us — with a small ship of his own,’ Neoptolymos said. ‘We visited his city.’
‘It’s a dung heap compared to Syracusa,’ Daud said. He shrugged. ‘And everything they have is taken from my people. But they are rich, and they buy tin — all ten cities. Eleven cities. However many; they pack more cities into the plains of Tusca than we have cities in all of Gaul.’
I shook my head. ‘I’ve got myself into trouble,’ I admitted. ‘If I stay here two years, I’ll be a married shop-owner with a pot belly and four kids. And no mistake.’
Their faces fell.
For the very first time, it occurred to me that we might part ways. Somewhere in another world, off to the east, I had a ship, a family, some wealth and the burned-out remains of a prosperous farm. I could always make a go of it there.
I could marry Lydia and take her to Plataea.
I could go and find Briseis. By Aphrodite, friends, I never, ever, forgot Briseis for more than ten heartbeats. Even then.
Heh.
‘If we do as you suggest,’ I said to Doola, ‘we work our way up to the Alba run gradually. I see the value in it. But it is my observation — I hear the gossip here — that the Carthaginians have all but closed the Gates of Heracles. I don’t know of any ship, Greek or Etruscan, that trades with Iberia or Alba. They carry it all, and they sink anyone who tries to run the gauntlet. Am I right?’
Neoptolymos took a swig of wine while keeping me in the corner of his eye, and he gave a hard grin. ‘That sounds like a fight.’
Doola nodded, biting his lip. ‘It’s true.’
‘Gaius is a trader, and he’s filled your heads with trade. I’m a bronze-smith, but I’m also a warrior. If we go to Alba — even if we only go to the north coast of Iberia! — we will have to fight and sail and sneak, and fight again, if we must. And if we spend two or three years learning the trade, the bastards will see us coming. We need to take them by surprise — a crew of nobodies, a ship they don’t know.’
‘Two ships,’ Demetrios said with a shrug. ‘ Amphitrite goes too. We can fill her full of stores, and take a rowed ship for speed when we need it. Two ships double the profit, and make it more likely one gets home.’
I shrugged right back at him. ‘Ten ships? A couple of triremes?’
Seckla punched me in the arm.
‘When I touch our patron for money, he’s not going to want to let us sail away,’ I said. ‘Not without security.’ I shrugged again. ‘If we do it, we can’t ever come back here.’ In fact, I knew I wasn’t coming back anyway.
Oh, the gods must have laughed.
Well, I had their attention.
‘Listen,’ I said. ‘We can build our second ship right now. We must have five hundred drachmas. I have more due to me at the shop. You have more in the tin. Let’s get the hull under way. When it’s finished, we hire rowers to get us to wherever slaves are cheap. And we buy them and train them ourselves.’
‘Now?’ Doola said.
I gave another shrug. ‘Or we give up the whole enterprise. Look, it is insane. We’re six former slaves, and we’re going to take on the Carthaginian trade empire and sail across the Outer Sea to Alba? I agree. We can stay home, make money, take wives and be fat.’
Doola smiled bitterly. ‘I knew my plan would founder on the rock of your desire for heroism.’
I shook my head. ‘No. It doesn’t have to be like that. If we all say so, we’re absolved of our oaths and we can walk away.’
But they all shook their heads. That’s how fate works. We knew we wanted something impossible, but we weren’t willing to give it up.
The next day, Doola, Demetrios and I hired horses and rode along the coast to Marissilia, a little port full of fishing boats around the corner from Syracusa. It was sixty stades from the taverna where Anarchos sat and ruled the waterfront. I knew it wasn’t far enough, but I had a master to serve and work to do, and my time and funds were limited.
We walked from boatbuilder to boatbuilder. The two largest were scarcely interested in our triakonter, and the smaller didn’t have the labour to build her. The triakonter, or thirty-oared ship, was the backbone of most small military expeditions, and was also the most useful size for a rowed merchant ship.
The day was lost.
Lydia vanished into the women’s quarters with her courses, and I was able to work without interruption, to meet my master’s eye and to ask for another day off and receive it, as well as a purse with sixty drachma — my share of five helmets, all completed. The greaves and breastplates were now on my part of the shop floor.
I went and trained, boxed, sparred with the wooden swords and Polimarchos put bruises into my side. ‘That’s for standing me up, you ingrate whoreson,’ he growled. ‘I hope she was worth it.’
Your trainer always knows.
I was having trouble with my life. I kept different parts in different jars — I was a smith, I was an athlete, I was a sailor. I was looking for a shipbuilder, but I couldn’t ask Nikephorus to help me, because that would lead very quickly to some shocking admissions. That meant I couldn’t ask Polymarchos anything, either, or it would be known throughout the guild in a matter of days.
On one of those evenings, as the cold winter rain fell and the masseur worked my muscles, I remember two middle-aged men, both smiths, coming and sitting on my bench. They were good-natured, but firm.
‘You’re cutting into our business, you scamp,’ one said. He was Diodorus, a master armourer who worked in a different street. I knew him well. The other I didn’t know as well.
‘Charge more for your damned helmets!’ the younger man said. ‘Or make them worse.’
They both laughed. But I took their point immediately, and when I went back to Nikephorus, he nodded.
‘I’ve heard the same. We’ll raise our price. And refuse a few commissions. I’m sorry, lad, but I don’t want Diodorus to decide to go back to casting brooches. He used to, and he gave it up so that I could have that part of the business.’ He tugged his beard and looked at me under his bushy eyebrows. ‘Don’t take it personally. But you have to work with people.’
That meant I was going to make a great deal less money.
On the other hand, I was lucky my master had shared the money with me from the start.
‘I’m making some pieces for trade… and the panoplies for Lydia’s suitors,’ I said with a smile that was false. ‘After that, I’ll stick to stock for a while.’
He ruffled my hair. I felt the traitor I was.
‘Lydia misses you,’ he said. And grinned. ‘When’s the wedding?’
I shook my head, put my eyes down and tried to hide. ‘Not discussed. Yet.’
He nodded.
‘Best discuss it,’ he said, and rose to his feet. ‘Soon.’
I left work and walked down to the port, where Neoptolymos and I watched a dancer while drinking decent wine. She was good. But I remember thinking at her every gyration that Lydia’s hips were more expressive when she rose from her seat than this golden girl was as she moved.
Ah, lust. Eros.
We gave her the tips she expected from a couple of men and finished our amphora of wine, and then we wandered the waterfront, peering into boats.
‘I’ll need a trireme to get my place back,’ Neoptolymos said, out of the darkness.
‘I’ll find us one, when it’s time,’ I said. ‘This will sound foolish, but I own a trireme. If she still swims above the waves, I’ll put her at your service.’
He was sitting on the dog’s head that held the mooring lines for a pair of smugglers owned by Anarchos. Pretty little twenty-oared boats with lines like racehorses.
He laughed. ‘You’re an odd one. You own a trireme. You fought at Marathon. Yet you are living in a tenement in Syracusa with a pack of former slaves, trying to sail around the world.’ He punched me. ‘Why in Hades don’t we take your Poseidon-forsaken trireme to Gades and Alba? Eh?’
I shook my head. It was hard to explain, and I didn’t really want to, but ‘If I go back, I have to go back,’ I said lamely. ‘Political power, my farm, my family, war, Athens-’ I realized that I sounded angry. I was angry.
What was I angry at?
‘What happened?’ Neoptolymos asked. He leaned forward and put a hand on my arm. ‘It’s none of my business. We all trust you. But you have things none of us has — none of us but bloody Gaius. It’s funny that you’re the one pressing us to move faster, as you are the one who has somewhere else to go. I’ll never take back my little kingdom. Even if I do, I’ll never… make it right. My sister told me to be careful of pirates, and I left her to her death. A horrible death.’ He stared at the stars, and wept.
I hugged him. ‘Don’t be an arse, brother. You did not rape your sister. You did not kill her. You are not responsible. Or rather-’ I thought of Heraclitus. ‘Rather, yes, you made an error, and you can atone for it by finding Dagon and putting a spear up his arse.’
At my crudity, he raised his face.
‘You are a good hater,’ he said.
‘I have imagined killing him twenty thousand times,’ I said.
‘Killing who?’ asked a gruff voice. Anarchos came out of the darkness with a half-dozen of his minions. He owned the boats. He wasn’t the one out of place.
‘A Phoenician named Dagon,’ I said, with perfect honesty.
Anarchos frowned, whether in real interest or simulated, I could not tell. But then he shrugged. ‘I hear you are looking to build a boat?’ he asked. His flunkeys stood around him, trying to look tough, which is difficult in the dark. One of them had a torch, and it didn’t throw enough light for anyone.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘A triakonter, big enough for the tin trade.’ A little truth goes a long way.
‘You have a regular source with the Etruscans?’ Anarchos asked. He was really interested. We all knew this could lead to big money.
I shrugged.
Anarchos stepped up close to me, so I could smell the onion on his breath. ‘You have a problem, my young friend. Everyone I know is waiting for you to marry the bronze-smith’s daughter. Some say she‘s already baking your bread in her oven, eh? And yet, other people tell me you are looking to get a ship built.’ He eyed me, his head a little to one side like a curious dog. ‘And I say — to myself I say it — what if he’s playing her for a fool?’
Shit. Anarchos was that smart. And that was going to make it nearly impossible to take him for money.
‘And I wondered, does the old smith know his new young master is building a ship?’ Anarchos was very close, and very quiet. ‘Not that I’d tell him, unless I had reason. I am, after all, a reasonable man. And your patron.’ He took a step back. ‘I have six shipyards under my thumb, Arimnestos of Plataea. I think you know this, so I have to wonder why you don’t come to me. And then I have to find you in the dark and ask you all this. And it seems to me that your slave friends have just made a fine profit on a voyage, but not an obol has found its way to me. I wonder if we don’t need a little reminder of how this ought to work. Eh?’
It’s hard to glare at a man by torchlight.
‘I will apologize for our oversight,’ I said slowly, ‘and bring you our contribution in the morning. And you must understand, patron, that I might be a little shy about using your boatyards. I don’t wish to say any more about it.’
‘But I have two yards that need work — and can build your ship. By giving this work to either one, I am more important, and my patronage is secure. And you would deny me this?’ He laughed, as a man will when explaining a sticky problem to an infant.
I shrugged in the darkness. ‘We are not rich men,’ I said. ‘But I will try your yards.’
‘Ah! You sound as if you are doing me a favour. And perhaps you are. You are an odd duck, Plataean. You demand to be treated differently from all the rest of my clients — and I do treat you differently. You think I’m a fool? I’ve held this waterfront for thirty years. I know what kind of man you are. Don’t treat me as a fool, and we will continue as friends. Come and drink wine with me.’
‘Tomorrow, patron. ’
He laughed. ‘You know what is funny, Plataean? You think you are a better man than I. You don’t want to drink wine with a crime lord, eh? You have aristocrat embroidered on your forehead. And yet I like you, and I let you do things that I would kill other men for doing — like refusing to drink with me. And I’ll go further. I’ll bet that you’ve killed men and taken their gold without a qualm. Just like me. And you have friends and allies who depend on you — like I do. You keep your word. So do I.’ He pointed at me, and the torchlight caught the grey in his hair and made it flare. ‘I give you my word that if you come and drink with me, you will not regret it, and neither will your friends.’
He turned on his heel and walked up the wet stones to his house, leaving me with Neoptolymos and a body full of the daimon of combat. I had been so sure he was going to attack us.
The next evening I appeared at his house wearing a good Ionian chiton of my own, and over it a decent himation I’d bought secondhand. Of my friends, only Doola wanted to come, and I wasn’t sure that an African, however dignified, was going to win Anarchos over.
Slaves took my stick and my himation, and I went into his andron, which was beautifully appointed — more like that of a very rich merchant than a street fixer. He had a pair of marble amphorae on columns — they must have been a thousand years old. His kline were all Ionian work, like the ones on which Briseis and I made love, with wicker mats on a fruitwood frame. I sank onto mine, a slave took my sandals and I was given a cup of red wine.
He was on the other kline, and he raised his head over the arm rest. ‘So — you came,’ he said. ‘I’m surprised, after all my ranting last night. I’ll have to kill a rival to convince my bullies I’m still tough.’
I laughed. I wanted to hate him, but in truth, I liked him for all the reasons he named. We had a great deal in common.
‘Tell me about your boat,’ he said.
‘I have our contribution,’ I said.
He shook his head. ‘That’s business. Bring it to me in public. This is private. No witnesses, no attribution. I’ll take no revenge for what you say here. So speak the truth, or keep your breath in the fence of your teeth.’
The six of us had debated all day what we should do. Daud and Neoptolymos were for instant flight over the sea to Etrusca. Doola and Demetrios and I were for looking at what the crime lord had to offer.
‘He can sell us to the Phoenicians!’ Seckla said. He certainly had Anarchos sized up.
‘Not if he’s in love with Ari,’ Doola said. He gave me a wicked smile.
Daud looked away. ‘You two make me uncomfortable,’ he said.
The Keltoi don’t take the love of men for men with the ease that Greeks do. And Etruscans and Aegyptians and everyone else, for that matter. Barbarians.
‘Not if he sees real profit,’ Doola said. ‘We represent a long shot at a lot of money, friends. Let’s not undersell our own possibilities. I am not saying we should share the whole truth with the whoreson. Just that if he really can get our boat built, he might be an ally. An untrustworthy ally, but an ally.’
Doola. He put everything so well.
So I was allowed to bargain with Anarchos.
I leaned on the arm of my own kline and smiled.
‘We want to enter the tin trade,’ I admitted. ‘We have the skills. We have the ability to do things few other men understand. I know what tin looks like at every stage. I can buy at the side of the stream, or at the mine head.
‘We can navigate and sail. There’s tin at Massalia in Gaul, and it comes from upcountry. There’s tin in the mountains behind the Tuscan plain, and there’s tin in Illyria. We have an Illyrian, a Gaul and an Etruscan.’ I shrugged. ‘I can’t be plainer than that.’
Anarchos drank his wine, and his slaves bustled to refill the cup. Another oddity — he didn’t have the terrified slaves of a bad master. He had the sort of slaves we all want to have. They were mostly silent, but when Anarchos made a witticism, they smiled or even laughed.
Interesting.
‘And you can do all this with a triakonter?’ he asked.
‘Well… yes. And the ship we have now.’ I shrugged. ‘And ten more, when we get into the trade.’
‘And who protects you from the Phoenicians?’ he asked. ‘Their triremes are cruising for you, even now.’ He shook his head. ‘I made enquiries about this Dagon. He is — quite famous. Infamous. A slaver.’ He fingered his beard. ‘A typical fucking Carthaginian.’ He looked at me. ‘Seriously, Ari. May I call you that? Listen. In Syracusa, we all hate them. It’s the unifying force that binds the commons and the lords together. And sooner or later, they will get their forces together and come for us. Iberians, Keltoi, their own Poieni infantry, their crack cavalry force. They’ll load them on ships and try and finish us off. They mean to control all the trade in the Eastern Sea, and we are in the way.’ He drank. ‘Is this about revenge on this Dagon? I don’t finance revenge. And when dealing with Carthage, anyone who sails from Syracusa does so under a death sentence. Why should I wager on you?’
‘No reason at all,’ I said. ‘You invited me, and told me to speak my mind.’
‘I’ve always wanted to fit out a couple of big privateers for cruising against Carthage,’ he said.
I laughed. ‘Listen, Anarchos. Last night you did me the honour of telling me a thing or two. And now I’ll tell you straight back. I’ve been a pirate — with Miltiades. Know the name?’
‘Of course.’
‘So yes — I’ve killed men and taken their gold. Taken their ships and pushed them men into the sea. Taken the women and given them to my men.’ I leaned over to him. ‘I never meant to be that man, but that’s the man I was, for a while. It’s not a bad life, if you stay drunk and don’t think too much.’ I nodded. ‘There’s men who can live like that, all the time. I’m not one of them. Something tells me you aren’t really, either. The captains you’d need to run a couple of corsairs — they wouldn’t be men you could hope to control. And in a year — less, if they were successful — the assembly would have to have you executed. With five triremes, Miltiades virtually strangled the whole trade of Aegypt. D’you get me?’
He nodded.
I wasn’t even lying.
‘If we go for some tin, and succeed — well, it’s no one’s business but ours, eh? If we go to sea to take the ships of Carthage, it’s only a matter of time.’ I shrugged and lay back, and a slave refilled my cup.
‘The odds against you… ’ he said.
‘The odds are balanced by the pay-off if we succeed. What are a thousand talents of tin worth?’ I remember waving my hands in the air.
He laughed.
‘What is my silence with your jilted lover worth?’ he asked. I sat up.
‘Relax, Ari. I really mean no harm, but it is clear to me that you are never going to be a settled bronze-smith, try as you will. You aren’t going to marry that girl. You’re going to go sailing off to Massalia… or Alba.’ He laughed. Damn him.
‘Alba’s too hard,’ I said, knowing that he’d guessed it all.
‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Glad you know that. I know a dozen men who claim they’ve been there. You’ll find more in Massalia, but no two of them tell the same tale, and I’m not sure that Alba isn’t a myth that Carthage uses to hide the source of all that white tin.’
I shrugged. He might have been right, except that Daud knew where Alba was. It was an edge other rivals wouldn’t have had.
‘We’re close to war with Carthage even now. That war is going to collapse our economy. How much money do I have to put in my bet with you, and what’s my profit?’ He sat up, too.
I drank almost a cup of wine, trying to find a path through all the lies, the subterfuge, the desires of my friends, the needs of the group.
Sticking men with a spear is much, much simpler.
‘Your friend Miltiades is leading an expedition against Paros,’ Anarchos added.
Well, that didn’t tempt me. He was now the great man he’d always wanted to be.
I lay back. ‘I’m done with all that,’ I said.
He leaned in, and I realized this was what he wanted to talk about, more than the trade. ‘Why? Tell me why, Plataean. You have a name, you survived slavery and now you are here — if you really are who you say you are. For a few months I told myself that the bronze-smith’s daughter held you. Why not? She’s a beauty. But now I see that you are using her. You really are a man like me, aren’t you?’ he leered. ‘And yet, if you are, why not go back to Miltiades? He’s living high, now. He’ll be Tyrant of Athens if he takes Paros, or greater. He’s building an empire in the east.’
I remember sighing. ‘I said, I’m done with all that,’ I remember responding. I sat up on my couch. ‘Listen, I came as close to death as a man can come. I want a life. A real life.’
‘But not a wife and a home,’ he shot back.
‘I am what I am,’ I said.
He shook his head. We lay in silence — I remember listening to slaves in the kitchen, bickering about whether to serve the next course or not.
‘What do you need?’ he asked.
‘We need to build our ship, and we need thirty good oarsmen. In a perfect world, they’d be slaves willing to work through to freedom for shares.’ I shrugged. ‘Slave oarsmen aren’t what you want in a tight spot. I have reason to know.’
He chuckled. ‘You have no doubt encountered the local attitude about slavery,’ he said.
‘Oh, yes,’ I said.
He shook his head. ‘In a year, war with Carthage may change everyone’s tune,’ he said. ‘I’d want five to one for every silver mina I put in.’
‘Three to one.’
‘Five to one. Five to one, and I do you the justice that it’s a straight business deal in which I’m a member — that is, I make sure the yard deals straight, I help find the oarsmen and I don’t play the patron about control. In exchange, you give me your word, your absolute word, that you will bring your tin here and sell it through me, and give me my share first if you make it.’
I blinked. Five to one.
Of course, we could sail away and never come back.
‘And another thing,’ he said. ‘You’re going to spurn Despoina Lydia. So: how can I believe you’ll come back?’
‘My word? My oath to the gods?’
‘Didn’t you give her the same?’ he said.
That stung, and like most comments that enrage you, it was true.
‘So you marry her,’ he said. ‘And tell old Nikephorus the truth. Then I’ll know you plan to come back.’
‘Marry her and sail away?’ I said.
‘Isn’t that better than not marrying her and sailing away?’ he asked. ‘Let me ask you, oh bold veteran of Marathon — when she kills herself, how will you feel?’
Something cold gripped the bottom of my stomach and my heart.
He laughed. ‘You know, the hard men to touch are the dead ones who feel nothing. Men like you — you are easy. You care. I could make you do a great many things, simply by seizing on your own notions of right and wrong and twisting.’ He put his wine cup down. ‘But I won’t. Here’s my price: marry the girl, and give me five to one. I’ll put up a couple of mina in silver, I’ll coax the shipwrights and you’ll start with a well-found ship. No one loses. In fact, I think I’m actually doing a good deed, and if you make it back, everyone will benefit.’
He raised his cup.
I raised mine.
We drank.
Let me say this. A local thug is a dangerous nuisance. A crime lord is often a much more complex animal. Anarchos was a man who, under other circumstances, would have ruled a city. I’ve seldom known anyone so intelligent, so attuned.
So terrifying.
It took me ten days to face Nikephorus.
I actually started several times, in a small voice — so small he walked past and called out to an apprentice, and the day moved on.
Finally, the day before the spring feast of Demeter, I caught him writing at his work table.
‘We need to talk,’ I said.
He looked at me. ‘We certainly do,’ he said. ‘My daughter is very unhappy.’
I nodded. ‘I want to marry her,’ I said. ‘But I have a problem, and I want to admit it to you.’
He nodded. ‘You are already married.’
I shook my head. ‘She died; I loved her very much. That is not what this is about.’
He nodded. I could tell he was gritting his teeth. I wasn’t doing well.
‘I want to take an expedition to Massalia to buy tin,’ I said. ‘It may be more than that.’ I held up my hand, silencing his protest for a moment. ‘I am not what you think, master. I am a smith — but I am also a warrior, and sometimes a sea captain.’ I tried to read his expression. ‘I wish to ask her to marry me, but I wish you to know that if I die at sea, I have nothing to leave her. I think you want a son to manage the shop, and I am not that man.’
He sat back and polished a bronze cup on his writing table absently — but thoroughly. He was angry — I could see the anger in the red blotches on his face, and in his posture. Finally, he got up.
‘Leave this house,’ he said. ‘My curse on you. You have lied, and your lies have hurt us all. My daughter loves you. My wife loves you. I love you. And this is what you give us? That you wish to run away to sea?’ He shook his head slowly. ‘Have I treated you badly, that this is what you repay me with?’
I opened my mouth. I was shocked. I had expected — well, I had expected it would all be fine. I wanted Lydia — at this point, I was aware that Julia was keeping the girl from me for our mutual protection, so to speak. And in my worst nightmares, I hadn’t imagined that Nikephorus would send me from the door.
I walked to the door in a haze.
‘Don’t go to the gymnasium. You will never work in this town again,’ he said.
I stopped in the doorway, all youth and bluster. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘I love her — I mean-’ I paused. ‘I never meant to hurt any of you.’
‘Really?’ he asked, and closed the door.
I walked slowly towards our tenement. Before I’d gone a hundred steps, I heard a woman shriek. It was the sound men made when they knew a wound was mortal, the sound women made when childbirth became too much to be borne.
I prayed to Poseidon, to Heracles, to Apollo and to Aphrodite.
They ignored me, because I had done this myself. And, of course, to her.
Anarchos sent me word, by a thug, that our deal was off.
The thug said it in just that way.
‘The patron says the deal is off. But he says, “No hard feelings”. Eh?’ The bruiser shrugged.
I shrugged too. We understood each other perfectly, the bruiser, the crime lord and I.
I drank too much, for the first time in my life. That is, I drank too much quite regularly for several days.
Doola found me drinking in the morning of the third day, and collected me and my bad temper and led me home.
‘We’re putting to sea,’ he said.
‘It’s winter,’ I answered.
None of them ever questioned me about the failure of my plan, or the loss of my work, or anything.
They stood by the hull of our boat, just about the same length as four horses, and together we pushed her down into the water on rollers. We warped her around to the pier that small merchants and smugglers used, and we loaded salt fish in bales. The bilge was already full of small amphorae.
Even in my mood of abject self-hatred, I was curious.
‘What’s in those, wine?’ I asked Seckla. They didn’t look like wine amphorae, unless it was a very fine vintage.
Seckla shrugged. ‘Doola got a deal,’ he said.
Doola grinned. ‘Fish oil. From the Euxine.’ He helped me hoist a bale of dried fish. ‘The importer died, and I bid at his estate auction. It may be worthless, but I paid about the value of the jars.’
Well. Everyone else was pulling his weight, even if I had failed.
We got to sea with a favourable breeze. I hadn’t sailed in months, I didn’t know the boat and I was miserable and temperamental. I objected to everything, disliked the way the sails were stowed, disliked the placement of the helmsman’s bench — on and on.
Everyone stayed out of my way.
And of course, I saw that I was not in command. Demetrios was in command.
Since my first slavery, I have always been a leader — often the leader. To see how well Demetrios commanded them… in fact, he didn’t command at all. He merely indicated what needed to be done, and it was done. He did it with smiles and shrugs.
It made perfect sense; he’d been running the boat for months without me. But it was another blow.
Luckily for me, we had a storm.
I don’t remember the storm very well. It came up slowly, and I remember that we had time to tie everything down, to run cables to the masthead, to brail up the sail until it was just a scrap of heavy weather canvas; time for each man to prepare himself a nest against the gunwales where he could be warm and dry — well, that’s a lie, but miserable in as much comfort as he could manage.
We were well north of Sicily, in the Etruscan Sea, and we had plenty of sea room, so we set the helm and sailed with the wind and waves under the windward quarter. Our boat climbed each wave, bobbing like a cork, and seemed to skid along the crest with an odd bumping motion until we slid down towards the next trough. It wasn’t the biggest sea I’d ever seen, and the sky never took on the purple-black colour I associate with the worst weather. But it took me outside myself; focused me on survival and teamwork.
The storm took three days to blow itself out, and on the morning of the fourth, we were scudding along in a stiff winter breeze in bright sunshine. The sea was a deep blue, the whitecaps were a startling white and the mainland of Italy was visible on the horizon.
And I felt better.
We made landfall. None of us knew where we were, but after a day tacking north, we saw a cluster of rocks that Doola and Demetrios recognized, and then we were in the estuary of the Po, one of the larger rivers on the Etruscan plain. We entered the mouth of the river, got our mast down and landed in the mud and grassy fields of Italy. It had been a remarkable passage with a fine landing, and in midwinter, such a passage was worth a trip to the temple and the sacrifice of a young ram. We were the only foreign boat in the river mouth.
After a meal on the fruits of our sacrifice, we slept and headed upriver. The wind and current were against us, and we had to row all the way. Even a small boat is a heavy burden with four rowers, and we had to row near our peak effort to make any headway at all.
We rowed for about half a day, and gave it up, and spent another night in the estuary. Ostia, that’s what the village is called. I remember that the wine was good.
We were windbound for four days, and despite the rain on the fifth, we were stir-crazy, and we set out again with rested muscles and a gentle breeze at our backs. We got the sail up, and between the fitful breeze and our new strength, we got upriver at a walking pace all day.
That night we slept on the boat, a tangle of arms and legs in a gentle but spray-filled wind. My cloak soaked through, and my spare.
On the third day out, we made Rome. Despite Daud’s carping, Rome was, and is, a fine town with handsome buildings. The core town is not much bigger than Plataea, and I could see real similarities. They call Plataea ‘Green Plataea’ for the contrast between our tilled fields and the desert that is most of Greece. Italy is fertile, but Rome’s surrounding plains are astonishingly fertile. The farms are larger than anything at home, with two-story houses, roofed in thatch, built around central courtyards.
There was a fine temple, visible from the water; it was painted in bright colours, with an impressive colonnade. We arrived on a sunny afternoon, and the red tile roof seemed like the welcoming hand of Zeus extended to us.
The town itself was unwalled, and seemed to have both planned and unplanned elements — hundreds of small houses built like peasant huts in Greece, shacks, really — and then a cluster of public buildings and larger houses. The waterfront and the ford over the river seemed the focal points, but perhaps that is merely a sailor’s perspective.
We beached on mud below the ford. The bank had been so completely cleared of trees as to make it very difficult to moor our boat. After I had stood for what seemed like a long time, searching the bank for an old stump, a small boy appeared.
He spoke in a foreign tongue and held out his hand. I had no idea what he was saying — he wasn’t speaking Etruscan. After several sallies, I understood that he wanted six coppers — the words were enough like Greek to make them out, especially when he ticked them off on his fingers.
Doola jumped ashore.
‘It was the same last time. He’ll find a place to moor us.’ Doola laughed, and paid the boy in Sicilian obols. The boy looked at them, squinted at Doola and then nodded sharply. Two other boys came out with a heavy stake and a maul, drove the stake into the bank and moored us, bow and stern.
‘Romans can make money out of anything,’ Doola remarked.
Seckla ran off on his long legs to find Gaius, and we set to unloading the boat. There was a pier, but the charges were exorbitant, and the bank was firm enough to get our bales of dry fish over the side and onto our tarpaulins with relative ease. Before the tenth bale was ashore, a dozen men had appeared to sneer at our fish, and before the twentieth bale was ashore, Doola was bargaining furiously.
Gaius appeared in the midst of this, embraced every one of us, handed round a flask of wine and then issued a set of rapid-fire orders in the local tongue. He ordered four bales of fish set aside for his own use, he changed the bid price in the ongoing dickering, and he asked me to fetch him one of the jars of fish oil.
I had, in effect, been demoted to the level of holding mooring lines and fetching fish oil.
And I was fine with that. I wanted to work, to be useful.
He broke the seal on the first amphora and a smell hit us that was like raw human sewage. It was incredible.
He grinned, and dipped the tip of a finger into the stuff. Well, no one likes the smell — they say you can smell the factories in the Euxine from a hundred stades away.
He tasted it, and grinned. In Greek, he said: ‘Four for me. The rest, I’ll find a proper buyer for those.’
He had a donkey, which he left with us, and he walked away — he was wearing a good himation and carried a stick, like a gentleman, and he appeared unhurried, but when I got the next armload of the heavy little amphorae ashore, Gaius was gone.
He came back with a trio of slaves and a wagon. Doola and Demetrios had sold ten of the amphorae at a healthy two silver coins apiece — a wild profit — and we had covered the costs of the voyage on the salt fish. Sailing in winter is dangerous, but the profits are excellent, if you live. In the dead of winter, a spot of fish stew, a cup of good wine, a taste of fine fish sauce — these mean more.
In fact, by the time Gaius returned, Daud and Neoptolymos weren’t unloading any more. They were standing guard with spears over the bales of fish. No one threatened violence and there was no out-and-out theft, but no one thought the two warriors were slacking, either.
We made a good profit. The fish oil was not all good — in fact, about one amphora in three was ruined or too old — but what was good was very good. Doola had performed his usual miracle, and we cleared almost fifty drachmas or their local, Latin equivalent. We climbed up the Capitoline Hill and made sacrifice at the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. They, like the Etruscans, had the same gods as Hellenes, but with different names, some interesting and some barbaric — Minerva for Athena, Jupiter for Zeus, and so on. Jupiter Optimus Maximus is ‘Zeus Greatest and Best’, and was worshipped in much the same way as our ‘Zeus Sator’. Poseidon — Neptune in Rome — was not much worshipped, but we gave him our sheep, to the puzzlement of the two priests, both of whom were prominent local aristocrats, just as they are at home. Gaius introduced us to everyone as his companions in slavery, which didn’t seem to have anything of the same stigma in Roma that it had in Syracusa.
The town was too small to hold our interest long, and had no shipbuilding. I saw some fine metalwork, most of it done by slaves, and I was very impressed by the Etruscan-style painting on plaster, which seemed to me much better than that which I had seen in Boeotia, and as good as the painting in Attica.
We picked up a cargo of tanned hides — rich, creamy leather from mature cattle. We got over two hundred hides at a good price — not a great price, but a good one — and a hundred big amphorae of local wine. And Gaius handed his share of the cash to his wife and came aboard.
None of us asked him about it, and he didn’t say much, but he was happy to be at sea, and to be working. I’m guessing, but I think that the life of a penniless Etruscan aristocrat in Rome didn’t agree with him. He had obligations he could barely fulfil, and he was a drain on his family. He never said so, but I saw how happy his wife was to receive ten good Athenian drachmas.
It can be hard, being an aristocrat. If you work, people make fun of you. You have to figure out a cunning way to make some money without appearing to get your hands dirty, unless you own a lot of land. Gaius didn’t own a lot of land, but he wasn’t afraid to work — once we were safely at sea.
And so, we did it again. Winter can be a cruel mistress, but we were blessed again, and we made Sardinia in two days and then did what Demetrios was best at — we coasted along until we found a town that wanted our hides. Some of the men of the town were Sikels, and Demetrios did most of the work, and we sold our hides at a profit, sold some of our wine, took on another cargo including copper and sailed for Marsala.
Marsala is a Greek town, for all that the Phoenicians established it. It is mostly Phocaeans, and when we made landfall it made me homesick, at least for Greece. Marsala looks like Greece.
The harbour is magnificent, and the two beaches are fine white sand. We beached, stern first, and ran the boat up above the tide line with the help of a dozen locals for a few coppers. Then we propped the hull to keep it sound and began unloading. Hawk-nosed Phoenicians came down to look at our wares, and tattooed Keltoi, tanned Greeks and even a couple of blond Iberians. Everyone expressed a unified contempt for our sour Roman wine and our ugly hides and our poor-quality Sardinian copper.
And then one of the Phoenicians offered us a handsome profit for a single sale — the whole cargo.
He was a big man, with a nose bigger than some men’s faces, and he thumped his stick at Doola. ‘Everything,’ he said. ‘One hundred and fifty drachma. Take it or leave it. And no shilly-shally.’
Other men began to shout.
Doola nodded. ‘No,’ he said.
The Phoenician shrugged, turned on his heel and walked off, attended by two slaves. A cold wind blew along the bay, and the islands off the coast were showing spray off their sandbars.
But as if his offer had changed the mood, the other potential buyers began to bid. They were like sharks on the corpse of a whale — as soon as one made a buy, two more would go after Doola as if he was the enemy. I’d never seen it like this; Rome, for example, had been much calmer. I went to his shoulder with some notion of supporting him, but Demetrios pulled me back.
‘This is his element,’ he said. ‘Let him swim.’
The frenzy lasted less than an hour, but by the end of it, Doola’s clay pot held more than two hundred drachma, and we had four damaged hides, a dozen amphorae of wine and one single ingot of copper.
Doola looked at the young Gaul standing there. ‘I’ll give you what’s left for two silvers,’ he said. ‘The copper alone’s worth twice that.’
The man beamed with gratitude, Doola took his cash and we had an empty hull. He gave me the clay pot full of silver. ‘It doesn’t pay to be too greedy,’ he said. ‘We were lucky — the only cargo on the beach.’
I shrugged under the weight of the pot. ‘This is going to sound foolish,’ I said, ‘but why did you refuse the first offer? He met your price.’
Doola rocked back and laughed his laugh. ‘Did he? I couldn’t work it all out, so I assumed he was under my price.’ He shook his head.
Demetrios laughed, too. ‘You made almost twice that.’
Neoptolymos was carrying our belongings. There was nothing in the boat to guard but the oars, and we paid a local Gallic boy to handle that. ‘Are we there yet?’ he asked.
We sat in a very Greek taverna with two pretty slave girls, ten big wooden bench-tables and nets hanging from the rafters — we might have been in Piraeus. He poured the takings out on the table, and added the Sicilian money from a leather wallet he wore all the time.
We had a lot of money, so much money that the innkeeper came down from his perch and leaned into our group. ‘Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, gents, but there’s no watch here, and some hard men just sent runners for help. That’s too much money to show in here.’ He stepped back and raised his hands. ‘I don’t want trouble, and I don’t want corpses.’
Doola shook his head in disgust. ‘I should have known.’
Demetrios looked around. The taverna was empty.
I felt like a fool. I was a hard man, and I tended to watch these things for the rest of them. But after two months’ black depression I was rising to the surface, and the money, and the feeling of victory, had excited me. Too much.
My eyes met those of Neoptolymos, and then we were arming. Gaius didn’t have all his war gear, but he had a good sword and a heavy himation. Neoptolymos and I had all our gear. Daud had the gear I’d made him: a plain bronze Boeotian cap and the sword I’d traded for.
Seckla laced my leather spola while Doola did the same for Neoptolymos.
‘I really don’t want any trouble,’ said the innkeeper.
Doola grinned at him. ‘Then send a runner out there and tell them that it would be a mistake for them to attack us. Send another to the archon for the guard, and we’ll be out of your hair in no time.’
The innkeeper spread his hands again. ‘If only-’
Doola’s grin took on a certain air. I got it.
‘He’s in on it,’ I said.
Doola nodded. He had Neoptolymos in his harness and he fetched a bow.
I pointed at the gleaming pile of coins. ‘Seckla, you stay right here, no matter what, and watch the money.’ I handed him my long knife. It wasn’t a fine weapon, but it would do the job. It cut twine well, and meat. And men.
The innkeeper backed across the room, but Gaius had him in a headlock before he could get out the door.
‘By the gods! You’ve got this all wrong!’ he whimpered.
Doola shook his head. ‘He’s probably not important enough to the gang to bargain with,’ he said. He looked at Demetrios. ‘I really fucked this up, brothers. Too much money.’
I won’t surprise you if I say that, with armour on my back and an aspis leaning against the wall, I was a different man. I wanted the fight, and I could see that Neoptolymos did, too.
I hadn’t fought in a year.
More than a year.
In fact, standing in a wretched waterfront tavern in Marsala, I realized I hadn’t really fought since Marathon. I laughed aloud.
Daud looked at me. ‘You aren’t one of those madmen who love the fight, are you?’ he asked.
I shook my head. ‘No. Or maybe yes.’ I laughed again; I sounded wild, even in my own ears. ‘Listen, brothers. My last fight was at Marathon, for all the things men find worthy. And now I’m going to fight to the death for some coins in a tavern.’
Gaius was at the door. We had a simple building, a tavern with a portico full of tables outside, a single door and two windows facing the beach. I realized my brothers were readying themselves to die.
Suddenly, I was in charge.
‘This is easy,’ I insisted. ‘They can only come at us a few at a time. Daud, make sure the kitchen is clear behind us and there’s no back door.’ I went to the entrance and looked out onto the seafront and the failing light. There were a dozen or more men.
They saw me.
I stood in the doorway. After a long minute, I made the universal sign that men make that means, Give me your best shot.
They hesitated.
Can I make you laugh? I seriously thought of charging them. I wanted that fight.
Doola loosed an arrow. It went over their heads, just over their heads, into the hull of an upturned boat.
And just like that, they folded and crept away.
I turned and glared at Doola, and he was unconcerned.
An hour later, we were drinking wine. Daud was on watch — our only fear was that they might set fire to our boat in sheer peevishness.
We let the innkeeper go. He served us himself, he was modestly obsequious, and by full dark it was obvious that no one was going to attack us.
About the same time, a dozen spearmen appeared out of the darkness, fully armed and carrying aspides. Daud whistled, we all took our places and Demetrios of Phocaea, of all men, came out of the darkness behind them. I’d last seen him sailing out of the wreck of the Ionian centre at Lades, waving his thanks. He’d been the navarch, or as close as; it made no matter.
He was the archon basileus, or something like that, and he had come with his guard to restore order. Householders had complained.
We embraced like old friends. We hadn’t been close, as he’d thought I was an impudent young pup and I’d thought he was an arrogant old man.
But we slept that night around his hearth, and in the morning, everything was different.
He didn’t ask any hard questions, but he was happy to show us to the shipyards, and when none of them wanted our work, he offered to pressure them. We shook our heads. Who wants a boat built unwillingly?
After another day or two, we rode north around the coast a full day to Tarsilla, a smaller port, not a city, but a prosperous town. Carthage burned it later, but it was a fine place, with a terraced town and a beautiful two-beach port. Even in winter, the trees were fresh and green. There were three shipyards, all two- and three-man operations, and Demetrios knew all the shipwrights. His own trading trireme had come from Tarsilla.
Vasileos was the lead shipwright of the town, and his yard had the best wood. He took our job immediately. He liked the size of the project for the time of year, because a larger ship needed more men to work on it and was usually built in spring or summer, right by the sea. But a smaller ship like a triakonter could be built well up the beach by just three men. He wasn’t a tall man, and he had something of the Phoenician look about him — hawk-nosed, big-handed, with a thin frame and broad shoulders, and when he swung his adze, it cut with the accuracy that a trained spearman treasures.
After some negotiation, we bought a small house in Tarsilla and moved our sparse goods there. Doola, Seckla and Demetrios brought our little Amphitrite around the coast to the town, laden with bronze fittings for the ship.
Gaius, Neoptolymos and I went upcountry with Doola, looking for a crew.
That may sound foolish, but I had a notion — shared by Demetrios — that we’d have to fight, and that we wanted a free crew if we could get one — fighters rather than slaves, like the ancient men in Homer. And Daud thought that young men searching for adventure sounded like the cheapest labour.
There are mountains behind the coast; in places cliffs come right to the sea edge, and nowhere are the mountains far from the beach. We went up into the mountains, where the local folk live — more like Sikels than like Keltoi, for all that they speak Gallic and wear armbands and tattoos. They were hospitable, and we got a dozen potential oarsmen out of the little hill villages.
We got another dozen from among the fishermen themselves, though their parents resented us. But Doola, with his exotic looks, and Neoptolymos, with his lyre, made us sound like the Argonauts, and there was a tacit understanding — never quite spoken — that if we fought, we’d be going to fight Phoenicians. I’m not saying that they are bad men. I’m just saying that they seem to have a lot of enemies.
Demetrios of Phocaea provided the rest of my spear-carrying oarsmen from his own tail.
I visited every time the business of building the boat took me to Marsala. We had to count every obol that winter and spring. The easiest way for the metalwork to get done was for me to rent shop space in Marsala, where charcoal and copper were available, and to smelt and forge the metal gear myself. So I did: I traded bronze-work for a pair of iron anchors — better than anything I’d used at home — but men said that beyond the Pillars of Heracles, the anchor stones didn’t work so well. I forged bronze thole pins and I cast lead counterweights for the oars; I forged sixty bronze rings for the sail, while the women of Marsala wove and sewed the hemp for a full set of sails for each boat. I made some chain — chain’s heavy and expensive, but it is better than rope — and I made war gear, caps for every oarsman and simple circular plates for their chest and back. I’d seen these in Etrusca and again in Rome, and they made sense to me: a disc of heavy bronze that covers a man’s heart gives him confidence, and will protect him from many blows.
I bought or traded for knives — all Spanish blades that I hilted in bronze — and the last of our damaged hides went into making scabbards and belts.
It was a little like arming Plataea. It made me happy enough.
Vasileos finished our ship before the spring feast of Demeter. We made a rich sacrifice to her and to Poseidon; I put a decent helmet on the altar of Heracles and a good bronze lamp on the altar of Hephaestos and another on the altar of Apollo. I confess that I felt my skills had diminished. I had betrayed Nikephorus and his daughter, and the smith-god withheld his hand from my shoulder. I marred my work often with stray blows; my helmets were not as neat as I expected them to be, and every one of them seemed to have its flaw. When I made Gaius a pair of greaves, I marred the work with a foolish error in the planishing that I could see every time he wore them.
I thought of Lydia a great deal. I wished, very hard, that she had suitors and another husband. And I wished other, conflicting things.
My friends stood by me. Doola would sit in the rented shop and pump the bellows silently for me. Seckla ran errands and bent metal. Demetrios sat with me when I was in the depths. Neoptolymos made me play the lyre, and I grew almost proficient. Gaius and I boxed.
Despite which, I lay every night and counted the people I’d betrayed, the way I’d done it, the reasons.
Listen; it may seem a small thing to you, trifling with a girl. I have mounted quite a few of them, and without regret.
When I was a pirate, I killed men, took their chattels and was accounted a hero. That is the life I led, then.
But when you are a pirate, you think like a pirate and you are judged — by other pirates. When you are a bronze-smith in a polis, you are judged by a different standard, and I’m enough of a pupil of Heraclitus to know that all of us are, to some extent, a reflection of the lives we lead and the men we trust and listen to. Lydia wouldn’t even have been a bump on my road, the summer of Lades.
But I had become a different man. Or rather, I was striving to become a different man.
And failing.
I thought of standing at the door of the taverna in Marsala, longing for the clash. Knowing that I could probably take the whole pack of petty thieves. Eager for the spark.
And I’d sigh, and the whole thing would play again in the theatre of my mind. My last dinner with Lydia. Her foot on mine… my hand on her hip. Her breasts.
Her father, and the look of bewildered anger.
And all the other men and women. Dead, abandoned. My son, somewhere on Crete.
Euphoria, dead in my arms.
Briseis.
It was a long winter, and a longer spring.
And then the ship was finished.
At thirty oars, she was probably the smallest ship I ever commanded. But no one ever questioned that I would command her. Demetrios was going to take Amphitrite, and he would have Doola, Seckla and Gaius, plus two of our fishermen, Giorgos (the oddest name for a fisherman) and Kosta. I had Neoptolymos and Daud; an older fisherman eager to make a fortune named Megakles, and the shipwright himself. Vasileos couldn’t resist. He was a fine helmsman and a superb resource, the kind of man who could repair anything that nature or error destroyed.
He added a great deal to our crew. He was older, steady and had a knack — I have a bit of it, and Doola, too — of saying something and being obeyed without ever sounding as if an order had been given. With me, it is reputation — I’m the hero. With him, it was age and also reputation: he was perhaps the most renowned sailor on that coast, and the young men obeyed even the shift of his eyebrows.
I decided to emulate his extremely laconic manner.
As for my crew, I had, as I say, a dozen local lads, a dozen shepherds from the hills and six trained Greek oarsmen. They had been at Lades — they worshipped me, and every one of them felt he owed me his life, which is a secure foundation for leadership.
We spent a week building a set of oar benches on the beach, and then we practised every day while the farm boys and the shepherds ate us out of our wallets. The hill boys acted as if they’d never seen food before.
Or wine.
I expected fights, and there were fights, but the boys — all the locals — didn’t quarrel with the men, Demetrios’s oarsmen. I didn’t break up the first fights, but after two evenings of it, I handed them all shields in the dawn of our third day together and made them run five stades. Most of them were puking by the third stade.
And so it went. I’ve trained crews before, and I’ve told you all about it. These were, in the main, better men than I usually had — eager, young and intelligent. The local fathers locked away their daughters, and we worked them hard, and in a week, we had something like a crew.
Our Amphitrite didn’t waste the time. She ran up to Marsala and back twice, gathering cargo, and then down the Etruscan coast for hides, wine and all the Etruscan tin that Gaius could arrange, albeit in small quantities. I continued to train my oarsmen, now at sea. We pulled up and down the beach for two weeks, and my store of silver dwindled and the locals began to jack up their prices as my demands increased.
That’s the way of the world.
Amphitrite came back from Veii and the Etruscan coast. She sold her cargo, loaded some Alban tin that had come over the passes from High Gaul, and sailed for Sardinia. The margin on tin was very small — the Phoenicians got most of the profit by sailing to Iberia, and their price made the price of the tin brought over the mountains on donkeys precious little. But Doola was finding buyers in Sardinia, Sicily and Etrusca from both ends of the trade, and he knew his business.
And besides, our dealings in Marsala netted us Sittonax. He was Daud’s age, and spoke another dialect of Keltoi — they couldn’t really understand each other, and mostly they spoke Greek, even though both of them could understand each other’s poetry. He came over the mountains with the tin, as a guard. Someone gave him the ‘mistaken’ impression that we could sail him back to Alba.
He was the first Kelt I’d met who refused to adopt Greek dress, and wore trousers and all his barbaric finery all the time. Daud had been broken to our ways by years of slavery, but Sittonax made him wear trousers — and how we mocked him.
They got along like lovers, which is to say, they fought often, and made up swiftly — and they were brothers in all but name. And Sittonax knew a great deal about tin and where it came from.
He was my thirty-first oarsman. I don’t think he ever pulled an oar in the whole voyage. He was the laziest man I’ve ever seen, and yet he seemed to get things done. He could tell lies without turning a hair, yet we all accepted him as an honourable man. My forge time went to trade goods, about which Sittonax and Daud advised me with conflicting and sometimes boastful advice, and my ram. I had decided to put a bronze sheath on the projection that, on small ships like a triakonter, was usually left bare. I wanted it light, but with enough punch to crack a hull. I had seen a number of rams, and I’d seen the flaws. Sharp rams cut the water nicely but got stuck in the prey; round rams made for uncertain steering.
I designed a different shape — a series of heavy plates held apart by spacers, like an empty packing crate with partitions for amphorae, but no amphorae. I asked around for weights and got a great many answers. Even alloying the metal myself, the tin and copper came to a great amount — almost fifty mina — and I wondered if I was up to the work, and if I was wasting money and bronze.
I had help from six other smiths when I cast the ram in sand in my rented shop yard. The neighbours complained I was going to burn the neighbourhood down.
My mould cracked and the molten metal ran all over the yard, and it was only by the will of Hephaestos that no one was injured.
I tried again. Fewer men came to help me, the second time. I had real trouble moving the gate, the piece of iron that kept the molten bronze out of the mould, and when it moved, it cracked, and the white bronze flowed awry.
I went to the shrine of Hephaestos and prayed. I spent a night on the mud floor in front of the terra cotta statue. I dedicated two rams and a good helmet.
Doola and Seckla and Neoptolymos came to help, the third time. They were already making coasting trips in Amphitrite by this time. But they were in, and they were friends. The local bronze-smiths were distant men.
I heated the bronze for longer. I’d made a huge wax model of the thing and built the mould carefully, with wood and iron strapping and sand.
Either the third time was the charm, or the god had forgiven me. I like to think it was the latter. But either way, the ram came shining from the mould. Vasileos shook his head and said the shape was all wrong. He wanted it to be sharp — and he said it would bite the water badly.
But a week later, we mounted it on the hull and it went on like a porpax on a man’s arm. Perfectly.
Of course, in and out of all this, we were training our oarsmen. After four weeks of training, most of my shepherds were passable, and my fishermen were bored and threatening to go back to their fathers’ boats, and it was time to take my ship to sea. So I paid for a priest to come from Marsala with my last funds, and we sacrificed a sheep and feasted. And in the morning, before their hangovers were clear, I had them all aboard, and we were running down the coast, headed east, to Italy.