Finally, I put them down. ‘Your repousse 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 repousse 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 Parthenos, 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.
And her foot rubbed up along the length of the inside of my leg. And she looked at me, an openly curious look. It said, I surprised myself, there, but now that I’ve done it, what do we think?
We drank wine. It wasn’t great wine — Nikephorus didn’t drink great wine. He bought good, dark-red local stuff and he liked it. But it was good wine, and we had two cups each, and then we shared a cup.
This is where I went over the edge.
When I went to the cupboard and took down the kantharos cup with two handles, I knew exactly what I was doing. But I had crossed over.
Her eyes were huge as she drank, and our hands touched a great deal.
We sat for a long time, just looking at each other, our now bare feet busy.
In my head, I was screaming at myself to get up and walk away.
I was going to sail to Alba.
Lydia was not coming.
I eventually got up to wash my hands — almonds in honey are sticky. As I rose, I saw that Lydia’s chiton had come a long way above her knee — the sight inflamed me.
I have so many excuses.
I walked to the kitchen. Cook was smiling as I washed my hands.
‘If I didn’t know you was pledged to each other,’ she said. She frowned, then grinned lasciviously. ‘But I do. Never a word will be spoken, eh?’
I gave her a silver drachma.
There was a knock at the slave door, and a willowy boy stuck his head in and was instantly abashed, since he had to assume I was the master.
‘What do you want, boy?’ I asked.
‘Just?’ he said witlessly.
Cook made a cooing noise. ‘He’s the Mater’s boy,’ she said. ‘What do you want, Petrio?’
He made a sort of sketchy bow. ‘Only, my mistress says… she is sick, and could you send fennel? And Mistress Julia says she’ll be another hour at least, and please do not tell the young people.’ He looked at me. ‘And that’s all she said.’
I smiled.
Cook frowned. ‘You ain’t supposed to have heard that,’ she said.
Petrio ran fo
r it.
I shrugged. And went back to the andron.
Lydia was standing by the door to the portico. Her back was to the steps to the exedra, and I assumed she was about to go. I stepped up to her I have no idea. We kissed. Who started it? Who stopped? Why?
No idea.
We were in a patch of absolute shadow, and we were fools, and my hands roved her body and hers began, hesitantly, and then with increasing knowledge, to roam mine.
Cook walked right up behind us and dropped a plate.
The crack of the plate was like a dose of cold salt water.
Cook glared at me.
I had Lydia’s chiton around her hips, a hand deeply inside her himation and all the pins off her right shoulder.
She blushed, shook her clothes into place and bolted up into the exedra.
I had very little to repair. So I was left with Cook, who stood with her arms crossed, glaring at me.
‘Don’t tell the young people,’ Cook said. ‘That means she didn’t want you necking in the portico. That’s what I heard.’
I nodded and bowed.
‘You had better marry her,’ Cook said. She shook her head — the weary motion women make when men are involved.
You’ll understand me better if you know that while I was repentant, all I could think of as I walked home was the perfect smoothness of her skin, the hard tip of her nipple under my hand, the softness…
Well, girls, you can giggle all you like. I’m helping you understand the enemy. Because men need only the touch of a breast to turn from lovers to predators. Sometimes less than that. And what do you get? A man gets an hour’s pleasure, and a woman gets — if she’s unlucky — pregnancy and death. But your bodies are built to tell you otherwise, and when a man’s hand is on a woman’s thigh, does she think of childbirth, of Artemis coming for her spirit as the baby wails?
No.
Nor does the man, I can tell you.
Even with a porne, the smart ones are careful, gathering seed in a sponge or using… other ways. I’m making you all blush: I’ll stop. But listen, girls. The joy is the same for both. It’s the price that’s different.
The next day, I went to the shop and worked. At lunch, for the first time I can remember, Lydia came down into the shop with a chunk of bread and some excellent cheese and a cup of wine. When she put the wine into my hand, her whole hand wrapped around mine. She smiled up into my eyes. And then slipped away with grace.
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