putting her hand on my face, so that I could smel the wine on her
breath.
I steeled myself and gave no reply, except to go back to the
forge and make sheet out of bronze stock – again.
My aristocratic guests were surprisingly tolerant of my
affection for my forge. Idomeneus took them hunting, and on the
affection for my forge. Idomeneus took them hunting, and on the
third day of their visit I joined them, and we flushed a boar up
behind Eleutherai in driving rain. Antigonus was there, and
Alcaeus, the leading man of the former Milesians, as wel as
Teucer, who had a farm hard by my own purchased from waste
land that Epictetus had been saving for his sons, Idomeneus, of
course, and Ajax and Styges. My guests were Lykon, a very
young man with pale skin like a girl and longer lashes than was
quite right, and Philip, Antigonus’s guest-friend from Thrace.
Philip was an excelent hunter, and in fact had been included
by Penelope because his skils might impress the prospective
father-in-law. Lykon was recklessly brave – the sort of courage
that you have to show when you look like a pretty girl and have
a high-pitched voice. I liked Lykon immediately – he was not
afraid to wash our wooden bowls around the campfire, and now,
faced with a boar, he simply lowered his spear-point and went at
it.
Lykon was between the boar and me. We were in open
woods, high on Cithaeron. The ground was broken and rocky
and rose steeply behind the boar, and it was littered deeply with
oak leaves that muffled sound and made movement treacherous.
It was cold enough to numb your hand on your spear, and
raining.
The hounds were as surprised as the rest of us. We’d been
on the trail of a deer – a deer that Philip had wounded and we al
wanted to bring home. The boar was no part of our hunt, but
now our youngest man was facing it, and it was not smal.
The boar put its head down and charged. Teucer leaped up
The boar put its head down and charged. Teucer leaped up
on a stump and shot – no aiming, no pause to think – and his
heavy war arrow punched the animal in the side and deflected it.
It skidded to a stop and Teucer shot it again, then Lykon tried to
get the point of his spear into it – but from inexperience, he
didn’t know that you never spear a pig in the face. The spear-
point caught on the beast’s snout, which is ful of muscle and
gristle, and glanced off its tusks – and the creature barged under
his point, into his legs, and down he went.
Teucer put a third arrow into it as it tried to savage Lykon.
Philip and I reached it at the same instant. It backed a step
and I put my point deep in the chest, under the chin, a low thrust
as good as any I made in battle, and Philip, may the gods bless
him, leaped high and plunged his point right down between the
animal’s shoulder blades. Then another arrow thudded home – I
was so close that I saw dust fly from the beast’s hide as it hit
despite the rain – and Antigonus and Idomeneus were both
there, adding the weight of their spears, and the thing was dead.
Lykon lay stil, and for a long moment I thought his slim back
was broken.
His right leg was ripped from knee to groin, a long but
thankfuly shalow gash that missed his privates by the breadth of
a finger. And where he’d curled up to cover himself, the boar’s
snout had broken his nose and its tusk had slashed across his
face.
He looked up at me, his face a mask of blood and tears.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I fucked that up.’
We laughed. Lykon was a man after that. The facial scar was
a gift from the gods. No man would ever have taken him
seriously without it. As it was . . .
Wel, you’l hear, in time.
Lykon was the son of an important man from Corinth, a
magistrate and shipowner, and Pen was very fond of him – al of
us were. So we voted, like Greeks, to wait for his leg to heal
before setting out. That meant two weeks of guesting three
aristocrats, and the consequent drain on my pantries and staff.
I tried to think of it that way – the peasant way – but the truth
is, they were fine men and I had a fine time. We hunted some
days, and Idomeneus and Ajax came and stayed – for the first
time, I’l add – and there was wine and talk in the andron every
night.
In the second week, Cleon turned up. He had been to the
house before, and Hermogenes liked him. So he came into the
courtyard and Styges brought him wine.
The first I knew of it was the sound of raised voices outside
my forge. I pushed out through the hide curtains and there was
Cleon, red in the face, and my brother-in-law was being held by
Philip.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
‘This is what you brought me to Plataea to do?’ Cleon asked.
‘To be your servant?’
Lykon sprang forward despite his wound. ‘Antigonus meant
no offence,’ the boy said. ‘How could we know you are a free
no offence,’ the boy said. ‘How could we know you are a free
man?’
In truth, Cleon looked as if he had slept with dogs – his wool
chiton was badly soiled and had wine stains al around the hem
and down the front. He had no leg wraps under his sandals, and
no chlamys or himation. He looked like a slave.
Antigonus had treated him like one, and Cleon had punched
him.
Antigonus was a gentleman. He apologized, and admitted that
he had committed hubris.
But Cleon’s lips trembled and he walked out of my gate. ‘I
came . . .’ he said, and then he spat. ‘Never mind. I won’t come
again.’
He stalked off down the hil. I caled his name, but then I let
him go. You can only do so much for a man.
Mater was surprisingly sober. I’m not dul-witted – I know why.
For once, Pen and I were living the life Mater had wanted, and
she stayed sober enough to be part of it, although it might have
been truer to the gruesome drunkard’s creed if she’d managed
to be roaring drunk and ruin the whole thing for everyone – the
element of self-loathing in the drunkard is the ugliest part of the
whole thing.
But she didn’t. She and Pen sang with Leda and the better
slaves joined in, and she did loom work in the andron while the
men argued.
Mostly, we talked about the Persians. Antigonus and Lykon
and Philip were equaly awestruck that we’d served in the east.
and Philip were equaly awestruck that we’d served in the east.
Philip saw the Great King as a force for good, a great aristocrat
who would make the world a better place – but he liked a good
war story. Lykon took the opposite tack – his father owned
ships and had no time for Persia.
We debated when, and if, the Great King would come for
Athens. Idomeneus and I insisted that we could have won Lade,
and Philip maintained that the Great King could never be
/>
defeated.
We drank a great deal of wine. Pen mocked us from her
loom, and Mater proclaimed that it was high time I stopped
wandering the world like Odysseus and got myself a wife and
some sons and daughters.
What I didn’t know was that Mater had sent a messenger
over the mountains, to Athens.
During his recovery, Lykon couldn’t hunt, so he hobbled around
the farm, asking hundreds of questions, and I returned one
evening, cold through, with a deer across my horse and Philip’s
laughter floating up the hil from the crossroads where he was
drinking with Peneleos.
Ting ting.
Ting ting.
I went into the forge, expecting to find Tiraeus, and there he
was, sure enough, guiding Lykon through making a cup.
I laughed. ‘I’m not sure what your father would think,’ I said.
He laughed. ‘Pater worries that I’l sleep with older men,’ he
said. ‘He’d never object to a little work.’
said. ‘He’d never object to a little work.’
Lykon’s time in my shop put the seal of aristocratic approval
on my smithing. I see that now. By the time Lykon was ready to
go over the mountain, I had shown al of them how to start a
helmet, and I had my brother-in-law’s deep-bowled Corinthian
roughed out, so that the skul stood proud to the cheekplates and
the elegance of the shape had begun to show.
At any rate, we were fast friends by the time we rode up past
the shrine, two by two – Antigonus with Pen, Idomeneus with
Lykon, Teucer with Philip, Alcaeus with me, and a passel of
slaves behind us on donkeys with hampers of food and some
gifts. It was cold, and our breath rose to the heavens with the
breath of the animals, as if we had fires burning inside us.
We had a snowstorm the second day, and we chose to stay
an extra night back at the shrine. The two women who lived
there asked me about Apolonasia, and when I told them that she
was free and had a dowry of forty drachmas, they laughed and
offered to folow me over the mountain. I didn’t tel them the
price the poor girl had had to pay for her dowry. I don’t brag of
my failures. But it served to remind me, when I was feeling
cocky, of what failure was like.
I left the rest of them, rode to the summit despite the snow
and made sacrifice there, surrounded by an endless field of
white, with a clear view over al of the earth as far as I could see
– out to sea to the south, and over al Boeotia to the north, so
that the smoke of hearths in Thebes was a smudge that I could
see far over the dance floor of Ares.
And al I could see in the rim of the world was war.
And al I could see in the rim of the world was war.
And then we rode down into Attica.
Aleitus had a tower. It was a fine building, of carefuly cut stone
in the Lesbian manner, and I liked it immediately, although the
rooms smeled of smoke al the time. I had money – I thought
that I might build myself a tower. Our house had had one once –
a smal thing. But the one Euphoria’s father had was another
thing entirely. It was elegant and strong.
He met us in his courtyard and I liked him, too, although he
wasn’t sure of me. He wasn’t a big man, but wel-muscled, grey-
haired but with plenty of life left in his face, and he was
surrounded by dogs – big boarhounds of a kind we don’t have in
Boeotia. The dogs barked and barked at so many strangers.
The blonde woman-girl who dashed into the courtyard and
stood locked in an embrace with Leda had to be my intended
bride, and I found that my tongue was stuck to the roof of my
mouth.
She was beautiful, the way Briseis was beautiful. I looked at
her, and I became aware that Pen was laughing at me.
Her father clapped me on the shoulder. ‘Happens to al the
suitors,’ he said. ‘Don’t spend too much time with her – she’l
eat your brain and leave you a drooling idiot. I’ve seen it happen
again and again.’ He laughed – the way a strong man laughs
when he is wounded.
The young woman in question glanced at me, smiled and
went back to her friend. So much for my vanity.
Stil, that’s why we have rules of hospitality and customs – to
Stil, that’s why we have rules of hospitality and customs – to
pass the time when our brains are fuddled by sex. I managed to
get down from my horse and introduce my friends and my sister,
and then we were in his hal and my slaves were laying out a
selection of my gifts.
One of the many rewards for a life of piracy was that I had
some beautiful things to give as gifts. Aleitus received a gold and
coral necklace from Aegypt, and a gold cup that had come off
the captain’s table of some Phoenician merchantman, with a long
body and a swan’s head. That was for Euphoria.
My Tyrian dyed wool passed without comment, and a pair of
bronze water pitchers – my own work, let me add – were
virtualy ignored. But I’d made a pair of boar spears to match the
ones I’d seen at Aristides’ house, with long staves and sharp
bronze butt-spikes and heavy heads, and Aleitus passed over
some much richer gifts to pounce on them.
‘Now, these are a sight for sore eyes, lad!’ he pronounced.
No one had caled me lad in quite some time. It made me
laugh.
Stil, the company was good, and Euphoria sang and showed
us her weaving, which I have to admit was superb. In fact, I’d
never seen such fine work from a girl her age.
‘I love to weave,’ she said, and it was the first serious,
grown-up thing I heard her say. ‘Do you know anything about
weaving?’
I thought about a number of answers – I had, after al,
watched my mother and sister weave al my life. ‘No,’ I said.
‘Is it true that you are a master smith?’ she asked.
‘It is true,’ I said.
Her eyes went back to her loom. ‘Are your hands always
dirty?’ she asked.
‘Often,’ I alowed.
She nodded. ‘Then if we wed, you must be careful not to
touch my wool,’ she said. Her eyes flitted across mine. ‘I should
like to marry a man who could make something,’ she added.
‘But Pater says you are low, so I shal not get my hopes up.’ She
wore an enigmatic half-smile as she said this, and I was too much
a fool to realize that this girl-woman was playing me like a lyre.
Low, is it? I thought. But I wiped the rage from my face.
We hunted rabbits the first day, and I knew from the start that I
was being tested. It was wonderful. I felt as if I was living in the
epics, and here I was competing for Atlanta, or Helen, or
Penelope.
The wound on my leg didn’t bother me as it had, but I stil
had trouble keeping up with Lykon and Philip, and it was al I
could do to run the rabbits down. Philip kiled four and Lykon
two – but Lykon, without a word, began to edge them my way
in the last hours, and I managed to kil two with my clu
b before
the sun set.
‘I would have expected a man as famous as you to be faster,’
Aleitus said. It was not quite a sneer – indeed, by the standards
of a rabbit hunt, any man who kiled was alowed to wear a
garland – but his barb went home. Fleetness of foot is one of the
garland – but his barb went home. Fleetness of foot is one of the
most important aspects of war-training, as the Poet recognizes
when he cals Achiles ‘swift footed’.
I swalowed my anger and nodded. ‘I was swifter,’ I said,
‘when I was younger.’
Aleitus laughed. ‘Not yet old enough to know when an
excuse is holow,’ he said.
I almost rode away that day. But my friends calmed me.
The second day we got a dose of winter rains, and we stayed
indoors, listened to the women sing and swapped stories. I told
some of the stories I’m teling now, and my host’s doubts were
plain on his face, and some of his friends – local gentlemen –
sneered.
Let me pause here to say something about them. They were
hippeis and richer – rich farmers, aristocrats, mostly of the
eupatridae – and most of them shunned Athens the way other
men shun impiety. They never went into the city – the city I had
already come to love. They had their own countryside temples,
and sometimes they went to the assembly to vote, but they were
the ‘country’ party, and they loathed the oarsmen and the metics
and the tradesmen, and wanted Athens to be Sparta – a land of
aristocratic farmers. To them, I was a combination of alien things
– a smith, a foreigner. But they were, taken together, good men.
When the weather cleared in the afternoon, we went out into
the fields below his tower to throw javelins. I have my moments
with the javelin, but I’ve never practised as much as I ought, and
while Apolo and Zeus have sent me some good throws, none
while Apolo and Zeus have sent me some good throws, none
came to me that day. My first was so bad that men laughed. One
of the ‘local gentlemen’ was heard to say that my reputation as a
kiler of men must be one of those ‘provincial tales’ that would
not stand up to scrutiny.
Idomeneus grinned from ear to ear and came to stand by me.
We shared the same thought – to kil the fool. But my brother-in-
law, Antigonus, who by that time I loved like a brother, kicked
me – hard – in the shin. I whirled on him, looking for blood. He
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