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 wome
n 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.
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