Marathon: Freedom or Death lw-2

by Christian Cameron

  14

  We set the wedding for late winter, and I rode back over the mountains with my companions. We celebrated the feast of Artemis at Plataea, and they rode away to their homes.

  It is one of the saddest comments on men, honey, that war and death make for a long story, but a winter of contentment and happiness can pass in a single breath. Our barns were full, our byres were full and all that winter we hunted on Cithaeron, we danced the Pyrrhiche and we discussed strategies against Persia. Women sat at their looms and wove and put in their own comments. We stored food, we worked on our leather. My forge roared every day as I made helmets — a few good ones, and more of the new-style open-faced bowls, which men now call ‘Boeotians’. We called them dog-caps. If not for Cleon, the winter would have been perfect — and forgettable.

  I spent my spare time learning to engrave. Tiraeus knew something of it, and had a set of gravers among the tools he’d brought with him from when he was a tinker. I bought more tools, fine steel from Corinth.

  But a few weeks before I was due to return to Attica, I found Cleon lying out in the freezing rain, drunk and asleep. At first I thought he was dead. I took him home, cleaned him and sobered him, and then he wept.

  The next day, he was drunk again. I waited him out and sobered him up.

  Tiraeus was in the shop. ‘You’re wasting your time,’ he said. ‘He’s a drunk. Let him go.’

  ‘He saved my life once.’ I went back to trying to scratch marks accurately on smooth bronze.

  By now I was a better engraver than Tiraeus, and I began to put borders on everything I made, acanthus leaves, olive leaves, laurels, waves, whatever I fancied. I was planning to make a fine table setting for my new wife.

  Instead, I kept having to sober Cleon. He cost me a day’s ploughing, as I had to leave the turning of the wet, cold earth to other men so that I could sit inside with him. But after another day of it, and with due apologies to Hermogenes and Tiraeus and Styges, who, in effect, lived with me, I sent all the wine away to my warehouse in the town. All of it. We had nothing to drink on the hill but water.

  Cleon still managed to find wine, however. He was drunk again the next day, drunk and desperately sorry, so that he followed me around the farm begging me to forgive him and kill him. I’m ashamed to say I punched him and left him where he fell.

  On his fifth day in my house he tried to fall on one of my swords. He wedged the sword into the cracks in a floorboard, but he was drunk and botched it, so that when he fell, his weight mostly knocked the blade flat. He ripped himself open over the ribs, and all the slaves had to help move him and clean him.

  That night, Mater came downstairs. She came down to where I was sitting with him in the andron. I had no thoughts in my head — I was just going through the motions of friendship, because in just five days I had come to loathe him and his weakness.

  But Mater came down, and she sat by him. ‘Leave him to me,’ she said.

  So I did.

  I have no idea what she said — as one drunk to another.

  But the next week, just a few days before I left for Attica, he came out to the forge, sober and in a clean chiton. He sat on the hearth for a while and watched me. I was trying to engrave a pattern of animals — I wanted to put my stag on the bowl I was finishing, and I had botched it so badly that I was angrily polishing the lines off again.

  ‘May I show you how to draw a stag?’ Cleon asked. He was so hesitant it would have broken your heart, honey.

  I was none too tender with him. ‘Try,’ I said. ‘Be my guest.’

  I don’t know what I expected — when drunk, men claim all sorts of skills, and I still didn’t know whether he had had a skinful or not, although he looked pale enough.

  He took the metal to the rawhide window for light, and he took my black wax and began to draw.

  In three lines, I could see the stag. Before he had the antlers done, he wiped the whole right off the bronze and started again, but this time his hand was surer, and the lines went down as if he were copying them from something he could see — and perhaps he could, inside his head.

  I was delighted. I was delighted in many different ways — as a craftsman, as a friend, as a man trying to reclaim a drunk from Hades.

  And when I took the graver in my fist, he snatched it from me. ‘I do clay, mostly,’ he said, ‘but I know how to grave metal.’

  I held up one of my borders. ‘As do I,’ I said.

  He frowned. ‘You are scratching,’ he said. ‘You need to cut the metal.’ He picked up my heaviest graver and began to push it across the surface of my bowl. ‘Like this. Careful strokes. Deeper where you want a heavier line.’

  At first his hands were tentative and slow, and he left tiny errors on the lines — still deeper and better cut than mine, but wavering. But then he drank some warm milk, and his hand steadied, and before the afternoon was over, Tiraeus had slapped him on the back and the three of us polished the finished bowl together and set it in the glow of the fire to admire our shared work.

  ‘Can you stay sober?’ I asked him.

  He looked at me. ‘I doubt it,’ he said. ‘How much engraving do you have for me?’

  Tiraeus laughed. But I knew he was telling the truth.

  I remember the ride over the mountains. We’d already started the first ploughing, and as Hesiod says, ‘The boneless one is gnawing on his foot’.

  It was the ugly time when the days grow longer, but only so that more rain can fall, and still nothing comes from the earth, and men think winter may never break. There was snow everywhere on the mountain, and yet our horses made short work of the ride, and we came down into the plains of Attica without losing a toe from frostbite.

  Aristides was there first, with Jocasta, an unexpected ally in this marriage business, and she and Pen were immediate friends. Miltiades came with his wife, a vapid Thracian princess I’d met often enough before. Even the Alcmaeonids were represented in the person of Kineas, an elder, a member of the Areopagitica and a powerful man. He was pleasant and dignified. It was a very public wedding, and the little Temple of Aphrodite where we were bound together was filled to the outer row of pillars with guests.

  I remember little of the ceremony except my own sense of importance, which makes me laugh now. I was delighted that so many famous men had come, and yet I was decent enough to be equally delighted to see Paramanos and Agios and Harpagos, whose ship was in Piraeus and who had kept his cargo waiting to come up and kiss my bride. With them were a dozen oarsmen and marines who had the wherewithal to travel into the hills above Marathon to see me wed.

  Euphoria was so beautiful on her wedding day that I couldn’t think of much else, to tell the truth. I remember the look in her eyes when I lifted the veil, and I remember how she rested her hip against mine in the chariot as we rode from her father’s house to the house we had borrowed to be ‘mine’. Her women bathed her — winter is an unkind time for weddings, I have to tell you — and men sang songs about the size of my member and the depth of her cunny — oh, you blush, my dear. You’ve never heard wedding songs?

  And when I undressed her, she devoured me. Who knew that under her humour and her nimble fingers and equally nimble head lurked a woman of flesh and blood? We coupled — well, all night. Her body was like a feast, and all I could do was eat.

  But I’ll keep the rest of those memories for myself. I will only brag, like other bridegrooms I have known, that I kept her warm, and she craved my warmth often enough to make my sister blush. Like you, blushing girl — but not so often nor so red. Look, friends — she’s gone off again! You could heat a room with her warmth!

  We rode back over the passes into Boeotia and started our new lives.

  And for the rest, I remember little enough. Except that we were happy, and healthy, and in love.

  It didn’t last. Nothing worth having ever does. But it was the happiest time of my young life.

  15

  Spring in Boeotia. The feast of Persephone, the dancing
maidens, the birth of ewes and kids, the rain, the mud, the first green, and then the burst of flowers from the ground as if the earth is impatient for new life — which she is. And soon enough, the barley harvest, which was as rich and fecund as the autumn wheat harvest had been.

  Euphoria was pregnant. She filled our old house with herself, and as soon as the jasmine blossomed we had sprigs of it in every room. There were flower-wreaths on every door, and a dozen new women, her women, and her father’s gift to me, with as many boarhounds — and they wove and chattered and cooked and laughed and barked.

  Mater bloomed as well. I heard her singing with Euphoria on the second day she was in my house, and I shook my head, waiting for my new wife to discover what a horror my mother really was. But Mater did not fail.

  Was it Cleon? Was Cleon a mirror to her? Or was it having a daughter-in-law of her own class that brought her downstairs and into our lives?

  I grumbled. I won’t lie. I had little love for Mater, and when she was sitting at my table, night after night, she was like a blight on my crops.

  Euphoria was not afraid of me. She never was — a rarity in those days, when men feared my wrath. Ah — you still fear it, do you, young man? Very wise. My hand is not yet a willow branch. But in those days. .

  Nonetheless, when I was rude to my mother, Euphoria would look at me across the room. ‘May I have a word with you in private, my dear?’ she would ask. And when we had a door between us and the rest of the world, she would say, ‘I am mistress in this house, and I insist that my husband have the manners of a gentleman. Rude to your mother? How boorish is that?’

  I remember it well, my honey. Her tongue was as sharp as my sword, and she was seldom wrong. And I was so besotted with her that I seldom troubled her with a reply. Indeed, I felt that I was the luckiest man in the world that such a creature had agreed to be my wife. I sometimes wondered if I was one of those monsters in our myths who keeps the maiden until slain by a hero — was I the hero or the Minotaur?

  And we did fight. It will sound odd, when you consider her birth and mine, but I found her stinginess offensive. She disliked spending our winter stores on guests, on Cleon, on Idomeneus. She would keep yesterday’s barley in a pan by the hearth to feed to local men who appeared through the spring mud to talk about politics, and she tasted all the wine in my cellar, then divided the amphorae into those for guests and those for the house.

  ‘We are not poor!’ I remember shouting at her.

  ‘And I will keep us that way!’ she shouted back.

  On another evening, when Idomeneus made a remark about the age of the lamb he was eating, I winced — there was some screaming. I remember asking, ‘Are you the daughter of some shepherd? No — Attic shepherds are generous. A slave, perhaps?’

  ‘Slave?’ she roared, turning on me. ‘This from a man with his arms black to the elbows?’

  Now this hurt, as I washed and washed each night before I went into the house, because I didn’t want to seem like the blackened smith to my glorious, aristocratic wife.

  I cocked back my hand to hit her. Most men hit their wives, and with various amounts of reason — some because they are weak fools who have to be stronger than someone, and others because their women hit them first. But let us be honest — men are, by and large, bigger than women, and far stronger, and my pater taught me that any man who uses force on a woman, to get her into bed or merely win her agreement in argument, is contemptible.

  You heard me. If you think otherwise, let’s hear it.

  Despite which, married for a month, I found myself with a hand in the air. And I wasn’t going to give her a swat — I was going to knock her teeth out. Trust me — I know what I intended. Rage consumed me. Black hands, indeed.

  You have to love someone to be that angry, I think.

  She didn’t flinch.

  I stormed out of the house rather than hit her. I got a horse and rode over to see Peneleos, and had a cup of wine with him and his sister and his wife. They told me, in short, that I was a fool and I needed to go back and apologize — excellent advice — and I rode back to find Euphoria’s door shut and barred, and I had to listen to the sound of her weeping. I called, and she shouted something.

  Peneleos had told me not to worry if we weren’t reconciled before bed. But I couldn’t sleep, and it was a long, long night. I lacked the courage to go to her door again, and when I went to the pantry to get a cup of beer in the night, the two kitchen slaves — both hers — flattened themselves against the wall in terror of me.

  When the sun rose, I went out into the courtyard and sang a hymn to Helios, hoping that she would come down, and then I went and lit the forge. Tiraeus came in, munching a crust of stale bread. He had no idea that there had been a quarrel.

  ‘You look like goat crap,’ he said, after we had worked for an hour.

  ‘Bad night,’ I said.

  ‘Bah — newly-weds!’ he said. ‘She’s pregnant. You can stop fucking now.’ His grin took the sting from the words.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘We had a fight.’

  He shrugged. ‘Never been married,’ he said. ‘But it does seem to me that most people fight. You and me, for instance.’

  That was true enough, and Tiraeus and I were, in some ways, closer than any other two men I knew, except maybe me and Hermogenes. When we shared a project, we were inseparable. Craft made us closer than brothers. And still we could disagree on everything and anything, and when a helmet or a cup was in that dangerous stage just short of completion, it would all boil over into anger and disappointment and outrage. We were so used to it that we’d get the edges on a helmet trimmed and shake hands and say, ‘Tomorrow, we fight.’ And we’d laugh — but the next day, as we raised the last lines on the skull, the fight would start.

  All of which is by way of saying that, as usual, Tiraeus had a point.

  ‘So, what did she do?’ he asked.

  ‘Served Idomeneus some three-day-old stew.’ Put that way, it just didn’t sound as bad.

  ‘I see. Death sentence for that, I agree. And what did you say?’ Tiraeus punctuated his remarks with taps on the bowl he was planishing.

  ‘I. . called her a slave. Pretty much.’ I cringed at the thought.

  ‘Ahh.’ Tiraeus picked up his bowl, stared at the area he was planishing and shook his head. ‘Well, that doesn’t sound so bad.’ He looked at me. ‘You call me the son of a whore all the time.’ His smile told me differently, and I understood — both that he felt I had behaved badly, and that he resented my epithets when I was angry.

  And while I took this in, the door opened and there was Euphoria with a cup in her hands — warm wine and spices. ‘Husband?’ she asked from the door. She had never been in the forge before.

  ‘Wife?’ I asked in reply, and I caught the handle of the cup and pulled her gently in. ‘Welcome to the forge.’

  ‘Empedocles would have a fit,’ Tiraeus said. He got up from his stool and came over. ‘I’ll just step outside for a piss, eh?’

  I put a hand to stop him. ‘Wife, I have behaved badly, and I used a phrase which no free person should ever use to another. I wish to apologize in front of my fellow master smith. And I understand that I am guilty of doing the same to him — when in anger.’

  ‘You do have a temper,’ Tiraeus said.

  Euphoria looked at me for a moment. There were questions in her eyes, and those questions were, in some ways, more painful than shouted arguments and closed doors. ‘Apology accepted,’ she said. ‘I’ve brought you wine, and there’s breakfast for both of you in the andron.’

  The breakfast was an apology of its own — eggs and good bread and spiced wine for me and Tiraeus and for Hermogenes when he came in from the vines. And that day I learned what was best about Euphoria — the thing that made me the luckiest of men. When she accepted my apology — why, then, the argument was over. I have known women — Briseis, I must confess — who hold a grudge for ever. But Euphoria, however angry she might have been, dismissed her a
nger as the sun burns through a morning fog, so that once the anger had passed, it never needed to be recalled.

  Beautiful breasts and a lovely waist and a face like a statue are all very well — but an even temper and a sense of fairness will last longer. Ask any married man. Or woman, for that matter.

  That was the spring of contentment. We argued — twice, I think, and I’ll tell the story of the second time in a moment — but we also ate and danced and made love and went into Plataea for market days — together. And because Euphoria was such a lovely, pleasant girl, everyone wanted to meet her, and suddenly I was a man with friends, acquaintances, invitations.

  Penelope visited twice — it was only thirty stades from her home to mine, and once the roads were dry she could come on a whim. As the days grew longer and hotter, and the season prepared to turn again, she was pregnant, too, and delighted to be so, and she told me with a giggle that she thought that the bonfire of Pan had had a salutary effect, and her husband rolled his eyes.

  They were served our best food and drink, I noticed. And then dismissed, because there are fights not worth having.

  We hosted Myron to dinner before midsummer’s eve — he hadn’t eaten in my house since my father was alive. His wife had arranged it with Euphoria, although neither was present for the dinner. Instead, most of the men who came were older men. Peneleos was there, and he was my age, as was his older brother Epictetus; and Bion was there because he was my right hand and welcome any time. But the other men were older — Draco seemed older than the hills, and Diocles was only a little younger than Mater, and Hilarion, once the life of the party and a poor farmer, was now a cheerful and wealthy man.

  They were my neighbours. We also invited Idomeneus down from Cithaeron, and Alcaeus of Miletus, who had status in Plataea by virtue of being the lord, in effect if not in fact, of fifty good spearmen who were now citizens.

  We had a good sacrifice up the hill. I remember that I watched the skies for a day, praying for good weather, and I remember that we still had to squelch our way across the best barley field because we’d had rain, but our little altar was high and dry on the hilltop. Myron made the sacrifice, and he mentioned my father in his prayer. And then we gave the fat and the bones to the god, and squelched our way back down to the house with the slaves carrying the skin and all the meat, and we had quite a dinner — a whole sheep. The slaves shared in it. I had quite a few slaves by then — with my wife’s I had twenty. Too many, and they were starting to breed more.