by AM Kirkby
***
His father seemed not to feel the bitterness of exile. Robust men like him never did, Lauchme thought; Demaratos never cared what anybody thought of him, but simply forged on with his immense energy. There was always something that needed doing; a deal to be struck, a kiln to be fired, a slave to chastise. Demaratos might have missed Corinth, but he had done well enough here in Tarchna. He'd not come as a poor man - he brought with him five slaves, two of them expert potters and one a painter, plus his valet and a chef; but he'd made himself a wealthy one. There were twenty kilns behind the house now, and more than thirty potters working there; and they all belonged to Demaratos, except for the painter he'd brought with him, who was a free man now, and owned his own slave painters.
Demaratos was wealthy, but it was the wealth that came with dirt and hard work, not the easy wealth of Tanaquil's family. The half-naked slaves made their pots right behind the house; in the morning you could hear the thump and slap of the raw clay being worked, and in the hot afternoons the dust would rise, irritating his nose. You could taste the damp dirt in the back of your throat; the house was never free of the pottery's red silt. Always the clay, always the dirt, always the heat.
Yet Demaratos clung on to the stories of his golden youth. It was the only sign he ever showed of missing Greece. (That, and the way he ran the household, but Lauchme only got round to understanding that when he was much older.) Demaratos' phalanx, the men with whom he stood shoulder to shoulder, spear at the ready, wedged into a tight mass of bodies; “impregnable,” Demaratos boasted, “tight, unbreakable. Whatever they threw at us, we stood firm.” The races he'd run; his prize as victor of the footrace at Thebes, the fine tripod he'd had to leave in Corinth when he escaped; the time he'd come second in the chariot race, but only because the axle worked loose during the race, and that - he always thumped the table to drive home the moral - was why you had to check these things, gods damn it, and you couldn't trust a slave to do it for you. It was impossible to see the athletic youth in Demaratos' bulky frame; but the power that had fuelled his victories was still there, as well as the combative nature that had, in the end, put paid to his chances of power in Corinth.
Strangely, the only story Demaratos never told was that of his political career. Lauchme had pieced together small fragments of information from his mother, from visiting Greek traders, from snippets of overheard conversation, but there were still lacunae, silences no stray words had filled. It was the story of the golden child, victor in every race, winner of every debate, for whom there were no boundaries and no defeats; a youth spoilt by his own charm and his own success.
The name Kallisthenes was mentioned; Lauchme never found out why. There was the mention of bad counsel. Lauchme wasn't quite sure if that involved Kallisthenes.
Demaratos' family was already one of the wealthiest in the city. Greece being what it was, wealth brought power in its train; not the overt rule of a tyrant, but the more subtle influence an oligarch could exert. Hints and raised eyebrows, or a present freely given but with the expectation of return. That should have been enough.
All this Lauchme had put together, painstakingly connecting one piece to another in his mind the way he'd seen his father mend a broken pot, once. (You didn't mend pots, in a potter's house, you got a new one; but this was a wine-cup painted by Andronikos of Athens, his father had said, and Andronikos was a master - a master who had stopped painting some years back - so it was worth the repair. Even so, a tiny shard was still missing, so that Afrodite's thigh had a mark like a tiny arrow piercing it.)
And sometimes, there was mention of a son Demaratos had lost. Lauchme looked at his father sometimes when he was small and wondered if he really had an older brother, and what he might look like; and how could he have been lost, unless perhaps someone had let him wander into the streets one day, but then he surely would have been found later. Older and wiser, he remembered those tenuous mentions of a missing presence in the family, and somehow understood it was, like so many other things, not something he could mention to his father.