Killer of Men

by Christian Cameron

  Pater wasn’t done. He stood over Simon with his staff raised. ‘You think I’m afraid of you, you coward!’ he said. ‘You think I don’t know why I’m lame? You ran. You left me in the bronze storm. And now you come here and your mouth pours out filth.’ He was panting and I was more afraid, because Simon was wheezing, down on the floor, and Pater had hurt him. It was not like two boys behind the barn. It was real.

  Simon got himself up and he pushed against Bion. ‘Let go, slave!’ he croaked. ‘Or I’ll come back for you.’ He leaned against the doorway, but Bion ignored him, linked an arm under his chin despite his size and dragged him from the room.

  All the oikia – the household, slaves and free – followed the action into the courtyard. Simon wouldn’t stop – he cursed us, and he cursed the whole oikia, and he promised that when he came into his own he’d sell all the slaves and burn their houses. Now I know it for what it was – the blusterings of an impotent but angry man. But at the time it sounded like the death curse of some fallen hero, and I feared him. I feared that everything he said would come to pass.

  He said that he’d lain with our mother in the hills, and he said that Pater was a fool who had risked all their lives in the battle and who sought death rather than face his wife’s infidelity. He shouted that we were all bastards, and he shouted that the basileus, the local aristocrat, would come for the farm because he was jealous of Pater.

  And all the time Bion dragged him from the yard.

  It was ugly.

  And when he was gone, Pater wept. And that made me even more afraid.

  It seemed as if the roof had fallen in on our lives, but it was not many weeks later when Pater brought the priest to the forge, all the way from Thebes. He rebuilt the fire and the priest of Hephaestus took his silver drachma and made a thorough job of it; he used good incense from the east and he poured a libation from a proper cup, although made of clay and not metal as we expected. Because Chalkidis and I were old enough to help in the forge, he made us initiates. Bion was already an initiate – Hephaestus cares nothing for slave and free, but only that a craftsman gives unstintingly to his craft – and he advanced a degree. It was very holy and it helped to make me feel that my world was going to be restored. We swept the forge from top to bottom and Pater made a joke – the only one I can remember.

  ‘I must have the only clean forge in all Hellas,’ he said to the priest.

  The priest laughed. ‘You took that wound fighting us last year,’ he said. He pointed at Pater’s leg.

  ‘Aye,’ Pater allowed. He was not a man given to long speeches.

  ‘Front rank?’ the priest asked.

  Pater pulled his beard. ‘You were there?’

  The priest nodded. ‘I close the first file for my tribe,’ he said. It was a position of real honour – the priest was a man who knew his battles.

  ‘I’m the centre man in the front rank,’ Pater said. He shrugged. ‘Or I was.’

  ‘You held us a good long time,’ the Theban said. ‘And to be honest, I knew your device – the raven. Apollo’s raven for a smith?’

  My father grinned. He liked the priest – a small miracle in itself – and that smile made my life better. ‘We’re sons of Heracles here. I serve Hephaestus and we’ve had the raven on our house since my grandfather’s grandfather came here.’ He kept grinning, and just for a moment he was a much younger man. ‘My father always said that the gods were sufficiently capricious that we needed to serve a couple at a time.’

  That was Pater’s longest sentence in a year.

  The priest laughed. ‘I should be getting back,’ he said. ‘It’ll be dark by the time I see the gates of Thebes.’

  Pater shook his head. ‘Let me relight the fire,’ he said. ‘I’ll make you a gift and that will please the god. Then you can eat in my house and sleep on a good couch, and go back to Thebes rested.’

  The priest bowed. ‘Who can refuse a gift?’ he said.

  But Pater’s face darkened. ‘Wait,’ he said, ‘and see what it is. The lame god may not return my skill to me. It has been too long.’

  The fire was laid. The priest went out into the sunshine and took from his girdle a piece of crystal – a beautiful thing, as clear as a maiden’s eye, and he held it in the sun. He called my brother and I followed him, as younger brothers follow older brothers, and he laughed. ‘Two for the price of one, eh?’ he said.

  ‘Is it magic, lord?’ my brother asked.

  The priest shook his head. ‘There are charlatans who would tell you so,’ he said. ‘But I love the new philosophy as much as I love my crafty god. This is a thing of making. Men made this. It is called a lens, and a craftsman made it from rock crystal in a town in Syria. It takes the rays of the sun and it burnishes them the way your father burnishes bronze, and makes them into fire. Watch.’

  He placed a little pile of shavings of dry willow on the ground, then he held the lens just so. And before we were fidgeting, the little pile began to smoke.

  ‘Run and get me some tow from your mother and her maidens,’ the priest said to me, and I ran – I didn’t want to miss a moment of this philosophy.

  I hurried up the steps to the exhedra and my sister opened the door. She was five, blonde and chubby and forthright. ‘What?’ she asked me.

  ‘I need a handful of tow,’ I said.

  ‘What for?’ she asked.

  We were never adversaries, Penelope and I. So I told her, and she got the tow and carried it to the priest herself, and he was tolerant, flicking her a smile and accepting the tow with a bow as if she were some lord’s kore serving at his altar. And all the time his left hand, holding the lens, never moved.

  The light fell in a tiny pinpoint too bright to watch, and the willow shavings smoked and smoked.

  ‘I could blow on it,’ I said.

  The priest looked at me strangely. Then he nodded. ‘Go ahead,’ he said.

  So I lay down in the dust and blew on the shavings very gently. At first nothing happened, and then I almost blew them all over the yard. My brother punched me in the arm. The priest laughed.

  Quickly, I ran into the shop, where Pater stood by his cold forge with a distant look on his face, and I took the tube we used for controlling the heat of the forge – a bronze tube. I ran back into the yard, put the end of the tube near the pinpoint of light and gave a puff, and before my heart beat ten times, I had fire.

  The priest wasn’t laughing any more. He lifted the tow, put the flames in the midst and caught the tow, so that he seemed to have a handful of fire, and then he walked into the forge at a dignified pace, and we followed him. He laid the fire in the forge under the scraps and the bark and the good dry oak, and the night-black charcoal from mighty Cithaeron’s flanks. The fire of the sun, brought down from the sky by his lens, lit the forge.

  Pater was not a man easily moved, but he watched the fire with a look on his face like hunger in a slave. Then he busied himself managing the fire – the hearth had been cold for a long time, and he needed coals to accomplish even the slightest work. So my brother and I carried wood and charcoal, and the priest sang a long hymn to the smith god, and the fire leaped and burned through the afternoon, and before long there was a good bed of coals.

  Pater took down a leather bag full of sand from his bench, and he had Bion cut him a circle of bronze as big as a man’s hand. Then, with that hungry look, he took the bronze in his great hand and set the edge to the leather bag. and after a brief pause his rounded hammer fell on the bronze in a series of strokes almost too fast to see.

  That’s another sight I’ll never forget – Pater, almost blind with his lust to do his work, and the hammer falling, the strokes precise as his left hand turned the bronze – strike, turn, strike, turn.

  It was the bowl of a cup before I needed ten breaths. Not a priest’s holy cup, but the kind of cup a man likes to have on a trip, to show he’s no slave – the cup you use to drink wine in a strange place, that reminds you of home.

  Outside, the shad
ows were growing long.

  In the forge, the hammer made its muffled sound against the leather. Pater was weeping. The priest took the three of us and led us outside. I wanted to stay and see the cup. I could already see the shape – I could see that Pater had not lost his touch. And I was six or seven and all I wanted was to be a smith like Pater. To make a thing from nothing – that is the true magic, whether in a woman’s womb or in a forge. But we went outside, and the priest was holding the tube of bronze. He blew through it a couple of times, and then nodded as if a puzzle had been solved. He looked at me.

  ‘You thought to go and fetch this,’ he said.

  It wasn’t a question, so I said nothing.

  ‘I would have thought of it too,’ my brother said.

  Penelope laughed. ‘Not in a year of feast days,’ she said. One of Mater’s expressions.

  He sent a slave for fire from the main hearth in the kitchen, and he put it in the fireplace in the yard. That’s where Pater kindled the forge in high summer when it was blinding hot. And he blessed it – he was a thorough man, and worth his silver drachma, unlike most priests I’ve known. Blessing the outdoor hearth was something Pater hadn’t even considered.

  Then he built up his little fire and the three of us bustled to help him, picking up scraps of wood and bark all over the yard. My brother fetched an armload of kitchen wood. And then the priest began to play with the tube, blowing through it and watching the coals grow brighter and redder and the flames leap.

  ‘Hmm,’ he said. Several times.

  I have spent much of my life with the wise. I have been lucky that way – that everywhere I’ve gone, the gods have favoured me with men who love study and yet have time to speak to a man like me. But I think I owe all of that to the priest of Hephaestus. He treated all of us children as equals, and he cared for nothing but that tube and the effect it had on fire.

  He did the oddest things. He walked all over the yard until he found a whole straw from the last haying, and he cut it neatly with a sharp iron knife and then used it to blow on the flames. It gave the same effect.

  ‘Hmm,’ he said.

  He poured water on the fire and it made steam and scalded his hand, and he cursed and hopped on one foot. Penelope fetched one of the slave girls and she made him a poultice, and while she nursed his hand, he blew through the tube on the dead fire – and nothing happened except that a trail of ash was blown on my chiton.

  ‘Hmm,’ he said. He relit the fire.

  Inside the forge, the sound had changed. I could hear my father’s lightest hammer – when you are a smith’s child, you know all the music of the forge – going tap-tap, tap-tap. He was doing fine work – chasing with a small chisel, perhaps. I wanted to go and watch, but I knew I was not welcome. He was with the god.

  So I watched the priest, instead. He sent Bion for a hide of leather, and he rolled it in a great tube, and breathed through it on the fire, and nothing much happened. He and Bion made a really long tube, as long as a grown man’s arm, from calf’s hide, and the priest set Bion to blow on the fire. Bion did this in the forge and he was expert at it, and the priest watched the long tube work on the fire.

  ‘Hmm,’ he said.

  My brother was bored. He made a spear from the firewood and began to chase me around the yard, but I wanted to watch the priest. I had learned how to be a younger brother. I let him thump me in the ribs and I neither complained nor fought back – I just stood watching the priest until my brother was bored. It didn’t take long.

  My brother didn’t like being deprived of his mastery. ‘Who cares?’ he asked. ‘So the tube makes the fire burn? I mean, who cares?’ He looked to me for support. He had a point. Every child of a smith learned to use the tube – as did every slave.

  The priest turned on him like a boar on a hunter. ‘As you say, boy. Who would care? So answer this riddle and the Sphinx won’t eat you. Why does the tube air make the fire brighter? Eh? Hmm?’

  Pater’s hammer was now going taptaptaptaptaptap.

  ‘Who cares?’ Chalkidis asked. He shrugged. ‘Can I go and play?’ he asked.

  ‘Be off with you, Achilles,’ the priest said.

  My brother ran off. My sister might have stayed – she had some thoughts in her head, even as a little thing – but Mater called her to fetch wine, and she hurried off.

  ‘May I touch the lens?’ I asked.

  The priest reached up and put it in my hand. He was down by the fire again.

  It was a beautiful thing, and even if he said it had no magic, I was thrilled to touch it. It brought fire down from the sun. And it was clear, and deep. I looked at things through it, and it was curious. An ant was misshapen – some parts larger and some smaller. Dust developed texture.

  ‘Does it warm up in your hand when you bring down the sun?’ I asked.

  The priest sat back on his heels. He looked at me the way a farmer looks at a slave he is thinking of purchasing. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But that is an excellent question.’ He held up the bronze tube. ‘Neither does this. But both make the fire brighter.’

  ‘What does it mean?’ I asked.

  The priest grinned. ‘No idea,’ he said. ‘Do you know how to write?’

  I shook my head.

  The priest pulled his beard and began to ask questions. He asked me hundreds of questions – hard things about farm animals. He was searching my head, of course – looking to see if I had any intelligence. I tried to answer, but I felt as if I was failing. His questions were hard, and he went on and on.

  The shadows grew longer and longer, and then my father started singing. I hadn’t heard his song in the forge in a year – indeed, at the age I was at, I’d forgotten that my father ever sang when he worked.

  His song came out of the forge like the smell of a good dinner, soft first and then stronger. It was the part of the Iliad where Hephaestus makes the armour of Achilles.

  My mother’s voice came down from the exhedra and met Pater’s voice in the yard. These days, no one teaches women to sing the Iliad, but back then, every farm girl in Boeotia knew it. And they sang together. I don’t think I’d ever heard them sing together. Perhaps he was happy. Perhaps she was sober.

  Pater came out into the yard with a cup in his hand. He must have burnished it himself, instead of having the slave boys do it, because it glowed like gold in the last light of the sun.

  He limped across the yard, and he was smiling. ‘My gift to you and the god,’ he said. He handed the cup to the priest.

  It had a flat base – a hard thing to keep when you round a cup, let me tell you – with sloping sides and a neatly rolled rim. He’d riveted a handle on, simple work, but done cleanly and precisely. He’d made the rivets out of silver and the handle itself of copper. And he’d raised a scene into the cup itself, so that you could see Hephaestus being led to Olympus by Dionysus and Heracles, when his father Zeus takes him back. Dionysus was tall and strong in a linen chiton, and every fold was hammered in the bronze. Heracles had a lion skin that Pater had engraved so that it looked like fur, and the smith god was a little drunk on the happiness of his father’s taking him back.

  The priest turned it this way and that, and then he shook his head. ‘This is king’s work,’ he said. ‘Thieves would kill me in the road for a cup like this.’

  ‘Yours,’ Pater said.

  The priest nodded. ‘Your gifts are unimpaired, it seems,’ he said. The cup was its own testimony. I remember the awe I felt, looking at it.

  ‘Untouched by the rage of Ares,’ Pater said, ‘I owe more than that cup, priest. But that’s what I can tithe now.’

  The priest was visibly awed. I was a boy, and I could see his awe, just as surely as I had seen Simon’s fear and rage. It made me wonder, in a whole new way, who my father was.

  Pater summoned Bion, and Bion poured wine – cheap wine, for that’s all we had – into the new cup. First the priest prayed to the smith god and poured a libation, and then he drank, and then Pater drank, and then Bion d
rank. Then they gave me the cup, and I drank.

  ‘Your boy here has a gift too,’ the priest said, while the wine warmed our bellies.

  ‘He’s quick,’ Pater said, and ruffled my hair.

  First I’d heard of it.

  ‘More than quick,’ the priest said. He drank, looked at the cup and held it out to Bion, who filled it. He started to pass it back and Pater waved at him.

  ‘All servants of the smith here, Bion,’ he said.

  So Bion drank again. And let me tell you, when the hard times came and Bion stayed loyal, it was for that reason – Pater was fair. Fair and straight, and slaves know. Something for you to remember when you’re tempted to a little temper tantrum, eh, little lady? Hair in your food and piss in your wine when you mistreat them. Right?

  Anyway, we drank a while longer. It went to my head. The priest asked Pater to think about moving to Thebes – said Pater would make a fortune doing work like this in a real city. Pater just shrugged. The joy of making was washing away in the wine.

  ‘If I wanted to be a Theban,’ he said, ‘I’d have gone there when I was young.’ He made the word Theban sound dirty, but the priest took no offence.

  And then the priest turned back to me.

  ‘That boy needs to learn his letters,’ he said.

  Pater nodded. ‘Good thing for a smith to know,’ he agreed.

  My heart soared. I wanted nothing – nothing – more than to be a smith.

  ‘I could take him to school,’ the priest said.

  Pater shook his head. ‘You’re a good priest,’ Pater said, ‘but my boy won’t be a pais in Thebes.’

  Again the priest took no offence. ‘You won’t teach the boy yourself, ’ he said. No question to it.

  Pater looked at me, nodded, agreeing. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s my curse – I’ve no time for them. Teaching takes too long and I grow angry.’ He shrugged.