Poseidon's Spear lw-3

by Christian Cameron

  But standing there, I had to acknowledge that this young man made armour on a plane that I would never reach, not if I put down my spear and did nothing but work at an anvil until the end of my days. It was a curiously painful discovery, and yet liberating.

  All this in as little time as it takes one man to greet another on the street, and then Anaxsikles raised his head. And smiled.

  That smile was worth a great deal to me. I was afraid — well, that my behaviour with Lydia had poisoned everything.

  He put his hammer carefully into a rack at his side, handed his mittens to a slave and came out of his shop to embrace me. That was pleasant.

  Spontaneously — mostly to show him how highly I regarded his work — I asked him how much he would charge for a full panoply.

  He grinned. ‘You can make your own!’ he said.

  ‘I want yours. Yours is better.’ I nodded at a pair of greaves on the display bench — the pure form of a man’s lower legs, without any decoration beyond the beauty of the body. ‘I can’t make those,’ I said.

  He laughed. ‘Flatterer,’ he said. ‘I learned to make armour from you. You were the one who taught me that there should be nothing on which the point can catch. I have thought about our duel a hundred times.’

  ‘You’ve created a style,’ I said. ‘I see men in your armour every day. You are the best armourer I’ve ever seen.’

  He beamed. ‘And you?’

  I laughed. ‘I’ve made some simple helmets. I spent a winter learning to cast larger pieces.’

  He nodded. ‘Yes, that’s an important skill. I haven’t tackled it yet. What did you learn?’

  I won’t bore you. I talked about casting ship’s rams, and he came down to Lydia and looked at the ram and smiled when he saw the name. ‘So you still love her, too.’

  I shrugged. ‘Most of what happened is my own fault,’ I said, with an honesty that surprised me. ‘I loved her. I think of her often.’

  He nodded. ‘I always loved her,’ he said. ‘I would have married her — after you left.’ He paused, looked at me. ‘Many hold you responsible. I don’t,’ he said.

  ‘I am, though,’ I said.

  He shrugged. ‘I would have married her,’ he said quietly. ‘Even after her father cast her out.’

  ‘Really?’ I asked.

  He shrugged. ‘Men are fools. Is a hammer the worse when another’s hand has touched it, so long as I wield it well?’ He shook his head. ‘Even now, I would marry her.’

  ‘You wouldn’t be able to live here.’ I said it with flat certainty.

  He nodded. ‘I never expected to be talking to you about this. I, too, failed her. When her father cast her forth, I allowed my father to convince me that she was worthless.’ He shook his head. Gone was the master smith, and in his place was a very unhappy young man.

  I thought for a few heartbeats. ‘I’m trying to contact her,’ I said. ‘I thought to offer her a dowry and a trip to somewhere else. Athens, perhaps.’

  ‘She would never take anything from you,’ Anaxsikles said. ‘I’m sorry. But-’

  It is hard, to hear that someone you have loved hates you utterly. And yet — how could I have expected anything else?

  ‘If I arranged a meeting,’ I said, ‘would you go?’

  He nodded. ‘Of course.’

  I took a deep breath. ‘I never expected this as an outcome. I went to your shop to tell you what a fine smith you’ve become.’

  He nodded. ‘The gods walk the earth,’ he said.

  ‘Indeed,’ I agreed.

  I didn’t tell Anarchos what I had planned. But my heart was lightened. I told only Doola, because of all my friends, only he seemed to understand me. My plan was simple; I intended to reunite Lydia and Anaxsikles and then get them transport to Athens — Lydia’s dowry would set Anaxsikles up in a shop under the Temple of Hephaestos. It was a good plan, and it deserved to succeed.

  But Anarchos dragged his feet, explaining that he only had one clandestine method of contacting Lydia and it was complicated, depending on a Saka slave in the nursery, where Lydia seldom went, as she had no children of her own.

  I tried to see her on my next visit to the palace. I wandered as if lost, looking for her, but the slaves were too afraid of their master and too helpful, and I was quickly escorted to the Tyrant, who laughed and made quips all through dinner about the navigator of the seas who got lost in his palace.

  That night, he invited Dano to join us. She shared my couch in the Italian way for a while, and when it was time for her to move — and I can’t pretend I didn’t enjoy her warm femininity next to me — she smiled. ‘I’m ready to leave,’ she said. ‘When can you depart?’

  I thought about it. It was a four-day run to Croton, unless the weather turned nasty; a week and a half round trip. Doola was all but done with his sales; we accused him every day of playing with the Syracusan merchants the way a cat plays with mice. The Syracusan armament required bronze for everything, from armour to ship’s rams, and bronze needs tin.

  ‘Day after tomorrow,’ I said.

  She grinned. It was a lovely grin, and made her beautiful. ‘Wonderful,’ she said.

  An hour later, Gelon sat on my couch. ‘You are taking my Dano home,’ he said. ‘I had thought to keep her longer.’

  I shrugged. ‘She asked me,’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘But you will return?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  ‘People tell me you are having armour made by Anaxsikles,’ he said.

  I smiled. ‘He is perhaps the finest armourer in the Greek world,’ I said.

  Gelon frowned. ‘He is, after all, just a smith. I understand you have spent time with him. Why? Does his conversation fascinate you?’

  Dangerous ground. We’re plotting to steal your mistress.

  ‘He was once my apprentice,’ I said.

  Gelon recoiled as if he had been struck.

  ‘I am not only a merchant and former slave, but I am a master bronze-smith,’ I said.

  ‘You are a man of many faces,’ he said. He was clearly displeased.

  His displeasure meant little to me. And it occurred to me that if he discussed me with Lydia, he might learn a little too much.

  ‘I have had complaints about your black man,’ he said.

  My black man? That wouldn’t go over well, even as a joke, in our inn. ‘My friend Doola?’ I said carefully.

  ‘If you must. The African merchant.’ His contempt was so deep-rooted as to be offensive. ‘He charges outrageous amounts for tin. I have been asked to seize your cargo and sell it at a fair price.’

  ‘Would that be the Carthaginian price?’ I asked.

  He laughed. ‘You know full well that they are boycotting us — ahh, I see. You make game of me.’

  I shrugged. ‘Yes and no, my lord. I wonder if the merchants who want our tin understand the risks we took to get it. Or would be willing to take those risks themselves.’

  ‘Yet my understanding is that your Doola now holds all the tin in the city, and demands almost twice the Carthaginian price.’ He shrugged. ‘The mechanics of trade bore me.’

  ‘But the adventure of it would not, my lord. We sailed the Outer Ocean and made war on Carthage every day to take that tin.’ I knew what he admired and what he would accept, too.

  He smiled — just a little. ‘This is why I will allow no merchant to vote in the assembly. They are men without a single noble thought.’

  Whatever I might have felt inside, I merely nodded.

  It was the only role I played in the sale of the tin, yet I suspect it was important enough.

  While I worried about Lydia, and spent money on armour, Doola had not merely sold tin. He had followed a strategy like a military campaign, selling tin only to traders who were leaving the city with their cargoes, like the Athenians, and using the profits to buy all the other tin. There wasn’t much, but he bought the Illyrian tin and the Etruscan tin that trickled into the city. He bought most of it on credit
, because when you have fifty ingots of tin in your warehouses, everyone is willing to give you credit.

  While I lay on a kline with the Tyrant, talking of politics, Doola owned all the tin in Syracusa — almost all the tin on Sicily. And then, in the decisive battle of the campaign, he sold it — to six buyers, as he had up the coast at Katania, selling simultaneously to each of them at the same price.

  The next morning, I was up late. I walked up into the town, and found the craftsmen’s gymnasium. It had been closed by order of the Tyrant, it turned out. Allowing little men to exercise was apparently as wrong as allowing them a voice in government.

  I asked around for Polimarchos. Eventually I gave up and asked Anarchos, who shook his head. ‘The fighter?’ he asked. ‘No idea. I had forgotten him.’

  So when I stood on Anaxsikles’ shop floor with his apprentices measuring me with calipers, I asked him.

  He thought a while. ‘I wonder if he didn’t go off to Sybaris,’ he said. ‘I think I remember him getting an offer from a rich man to train him in arms.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, or something equally foolish. When you are young, you expect everything to remain as it was while you change. As you grow older, you realize that nothing stays the same.

  ‘Ten days,’ Anaxsikles said. ‘I’ll work on it myself.’

  ‘Ten days?’ I said. ‘A helmet alone will take that much time.’

  He grinned. ‘Ahh, now who is the master? What colour do you want your horsehair?’

  ‘Red, black and white, you ungrateful pup.’ Truly, Anaxsikles made me feel better, and I can’t explain precisely why.

  I made the rounds of the town. I bought myself a new sword and a pair of spears, and I bought arms for Giannis — better and finer than what I’d made. I armed Megakles as a hoplite, I put Seckla in a fine corselet. I met Neoptolymos going into Anaxsikles’ shop as I was coming out, and we both laughed.

  ‘You said we were taking me home,’ Neoptolymos said. ‘I thought it was time to look the part. We’re all rich, or so I understand.’

  It was great fun to spend money like water on beautiful things.

  17

  The run to Croton was beautiful all the way. The weather was startlingly fine, as it can be on the east coast of Sicily, once in a while. The moist haze lifted, the skies were blue and the wind mostly west of north, so that the rowers had little of which to complain. We coasted to Katania and ate lobster; coasted again until we were opposite Rhegium, and then crossed the straits effortlessly, as if such a thing was easy. Next day we coasted east along the base of the boot of Italy. There are rich towns all along that coast, and we lived well, paid silver, and even the oarsmen, I’ll wager, enjoyed the trip.

  I have said before that few things are as good for a crew as an attractive but unavailable woman. Dano was a fine sailor, delighted by every aspect of life at sea, and she insisted on rowing one afternoon, simply to see if she could; two of her ladies joined her. She didn’t strip to the waist, to the disappointment of the crew. At night she sang, and men came from all the fires to listen to her, or to her slaves and ladies. Pythagoreans make no distinction of rank when they eat or speak, so she discoursed on philosophy to any oarsman who approached her. The food was good, the wine was better and the company excellent. Doola was as pleased as a craftsman at the completion of a noble work, and we were all as rich as Croesus.

  Great days. It was a different greatness from Marathon, or the heady days of the Ionian revolt.

  I remember lying one night on a beach — I think we were a day east of Rhegium — and thinking, as I passed the wine to Doola, that this was how life was supposed to be.

  ‘Friends, whatever will we do next?’ I asked. ‘We’re too young to lie on our laurels.’

  Doola laughed. ‘Home to Massalia, and make babies,’ he said. ‘Buy a farm, and get fat.’

  Gaius joined his laughter. ‘I have two fine daughters who barely know me,’ he said. ‘And enough money that I need never leave them again. I will build a temple, and restore my family’s power and prestige.’

  Neoptolymos nodded. ‘I will take back my castle and my people, and raise strong sons and raid Greeks,’ he said.

  Daud shook his head. ‘I don’t really want to go home any more,’ he admitted.

  ‘Settle in Massalia, then,’ Doola said. ‘Lots of room.’ He looked around. ‘Doesn’t anyone but me miss Demetrios?’

  I nodded. ‘I do.’

  Daud said, ‘We should find him. Make peace.’ He looked around.

  Not everyone agreed.

  Sittonax fingered his beard. ‘I’m not ready to settle down.’ He smiled. ‘And what of you, Ari? Are you done? Will you stop being a sea-wolf?’

  I remember smiling around at them. ‘I would that it could be like this for ever. Triumph after triumph; adventure after adventure. But, I am growing older, and my sword hand will slow. I think I will go back to Plataea, after Neoptolymos is safe in his mountains, and see what awaits me.’

  Doola looked blank. ‘You won’t return to Massalia?’

  I shrugged. ‘Who knows what the future holds,’ I said.

  Dano was good company. I admit that some days I wanted to bed her, and then other days I thought of her as a companion, not a woman. Hah! Make of that what you will.

  At Croton she was very nearly a queen. She feasted us in her home — seven warriors eating vegetables, because, as everyone knows, the Pythagoreans eat no meat. She spent an evening telling us what the Pythagoreans do believe, which is complex and made me vaguely uncomfortable: it seemed to me, and still does, faintly blasphemous. At the core of their beliefs lies the tenet that the human soul — the very essence of a man or woman — is indestructible, and endures from aeon to aeon, so that a man is reborn again and again in a different body, with different parents — perhaps Greek in one generation and Aethiopian in another.

  That much is easily understood, but after that it grows more complex. They believe that the reward of a good life is to go on to a better life, and that the curse of an ill-lived life is to go down the ladder, as they say, so that a bad man might be reborn as a dog. Of this, I have the greatest doubts; how can one cow live a life more filled with cow-arete than another cow, and thus earn a higher step on the ladder? Perhaps I needed to sit longer at Dano’s feet and worship.

  On the third night, we stayed late, and I sat at her feet quite literally. Some of her followers and friends had come to meet me and the others, and they were brilliant people, well educated, handsome — and very un-Greek. Men and women lay together on couches for dinner, and after; men lay with men and women with women, and all of them seemed like family to all the others. Yet at the same time they didn’t seem to me to treat their slaves any better than any other group of people; they were all rich, at least by the standards of Plataea, and had many of the vices and attitudes of the rich. If their women were freer than Greek women, let me add that Greek aristocratic women are also very free.

  It was pleasant, but far more alien than a similar visit to a Keltoi hall or a Cretan lord. Many of them owned all their belongings in common, which sounds remarkable, but in truth, they had so much, and so much surplus, that I doubt the sharing was ever very onerous.

  I ramble. I was delighted with Dano, but not with her world. I didn’t enjoy eating vegetables without meat — indeed, I slipped away every day and ate pork in a taverna by my ship.

  But that last evening, as I lay beside Dano, and she was facing her friend Thanis and had her back to me — her hips pressed against mine — she took my hand, as she never had before. And pressed it against her stomach while chatting.

  The invitation was clear.

  Later, while most of the guests were leaving, she took me aside.

  ‘You could stay here and be one of us,’ she said. ‘You are a natural aristocrat — a man of worth. Leave the world, and join us.’

  ‘I am not sure I could stop eating meat,’ I said.

  ‘Pah!’ she said, and wrinkled her nose. ‘I can sm
ell it on you, even now. But despite that, I think you might find compensations. You have, all by yourself, changed my view of your Heraclitus. You have a good mind, and good discernment. You could be one of us. With me.’

  I kissed her. It was Not enough. It didn’t move me, particularly. I am hard put to explain what was wrong; my body found her attractive enough. My mind found her mind attractive enough.

  Perhaps I had grown too old for love. That is certainly what I thought. I kissed her, my tongue roving automatically, my performance barren of meaning.

  Oh, the horrors of age. I cursed inside at my lack of passion.

  She broke away. She seemed as… unmoved as I. ‘It is your decision,’ she said with a smile that was a little more brittle than before. ‘You would be welcome here.’

  The next day we sailed for Syracusa, and she didn’t see me off.

  Anarchos had nothing for me. I confess that I threatened him. Something about my failure — my failure even to make love to an attractive woman — made Lydia’s happiness more important. Perhaps I was cursed by Aphrodite — that was Seckla’s opinion.

  He was unimpressed by my threats. He laughed in my face.

  Well, there you are. Two bad men, locked in a pointless contest.

  I went back the next day and apologized. ‘I can save her,’ I said weakly.

  ‘So can I,’ Anarchos said bitterly. ‘But I don’t. Because she won’t save herself.’

  ‘Does she love the Tyrant?’ I asked. He shrugged.

  I sighed. ‘I’ll return in the spring,’ I said.

  He nodded. And extended a hand. ‘I hear you are very rich, now,’ he said.

  I laughed. ‘Now. Or, perhaps again.’ I reached under my cloak. ‘Here’s your initial investment. With a sizeable return.’

  He eyes the leather bag. I’d given him gold for his silver, and a magnificent Alban pearl I’d picked up. He rolled it in his hand. ‘Congratulations,’ he said. ‘I admire your fights with the Carthaginians.’

  ‘You could come along sometime,’ I said. ‘I’ll be fighting in the spring.’