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 repoussé 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 arête 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 com
e 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.
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