Poseidon's Spear (Long War 3)

by Christian Cameron

  ‘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 repoussé 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 repoussé 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 repoussé 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 Pa
rthenos, 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.