Killer of Men (37 page)

The wheat was in jars by the time Aristagoras made his way to us at Gortyn. He lorded it over us, wearing a purple cloak and flaunting his wealth, and they followed him as men will follow a Siren. I avoided him at first – a difficult trick in the close confines of a hall – but soon enough I saw that he didn’t know me from any other Cretan, and then I listened to his words and attended his dinners.

He was a hollow man, his vanity unchanged by failure at Sardis and Ephesus, and I listened with the blood pounding at my temples as he described how the Athenians had broken and run in the great battle near Ephesus, leaving the Ionians to struggle on alone. Men in the hall looked at me. I wanted no part of this man, but my own reputation would suffer if I allowed him to denigrate the Athenians. Finally, I stood up.

‘You lie,’ I said.

Silence fell over the hall, and Aristagoras turned, his face composed and regal. ‘I lie?’ he asked in the voice of a councillor or an advocate in the courts.

‘You lie,’ I said. ‘I was at Sardis, when the Milesians hung back and stayed out of the town. I fought in the agora with the Persians, and then I stood my ground at Ephesus when we stopped the Carians cold and sent them back to their sisters. The centre broke first. I know, because when I looked out over the battle, the centre was already gone – and
I
was still standing my ground.’

Aristagoras looked around. ‘Who is this man, that he is allowed to speak in your hall?’ he asked Achilles.

‘He is my son’s war tutor,’ Lord Achilles said. He crossed his arms. ‘He is young and full of fire – but he has the right to speak here.’

Aristagoras shrugged. ‘I say that the Athenians were the first to break.’

I smiled. ‘I say you lie. And there are other men here who were at the battle, Aristagoras. Perhaps you should watch your words. Cretans are not as ignorant as you seem to think.’

But Aristagoras was not to be tripped up by a man as young as I. Instead, he smiled at me, rose from his couch and crossed the hall. ‘Young man, you know how it is in battle. Neither you nor I could see anything beyond the eye-slits of our helmets. Men tell me that the Athenians were the first to flee. Myself, I was fighting.’

I was old enough to know that loud assertions would only lose me the argument. But my temper was up. ‘I was in the front rank,’ I said, ‘and I was done fighting when the Carians ran. When I had killed three of them, my spear in their necks.’ I looked around the hall. ‘Any man who says that the Athenians or the Eretrians were the first to run – lies. And can meet my sword.’ That was the Cretan way, as I had discovered my first night on Crete, against Goras.

Aristagoras took my hand. ‘We should be friends – our argument causes the Persians to laugh at us.’ His words were sweet – but his eyes were full of hate. I had interrupted his performance. What a petty tyrant he was. Even now, my hate for him makes my hands shake.

‘How’s Briseis?’ I asked.

It must have been in my voice. He froze, his hand clasped in mine, his other hand on my elbow, and both of his hands tightened. Oh, she’s a bad girl, I thought. My smile must have been too knowing.

‘No man speaks of my wife in public,’ he hissed. Men around us looked at him curiously. His mask of benevolence was slipping.

‘Really?’ I asked. ‘Let go of my arm, my lord. Before I kill you.’ There – it was said, right out in public. He didn’t know me from before, the fool. My hand was on my fighting knife – we didn’t wear swords in the hall, but hung them on pegs, as the poet says.

Oh, the hate in his eyes. ‘You – you were Aristides’ butt-boy,’ he said in a gentle voice, as the recognition dawned. And then his expression changed, as he felt the prick of my dagger against the inside of his thigh, hidden from the other men in the hall.

‘Send my regards to Briseis,’ I said. In one push of the dagger, I could make her a widow.

And then she’d marry another nobleman. That was the way of the world, lass.

Aristagoras looked at me in disbelief. He was a coward in his soul, for all his posturing, and I could see the collapse in his eyes. He let go of my elbow and stepped back. I bowed slightly and dropped my blade on the couch behind me so other men would not see what had passed, and Aristagoras backed away quickly.

But Achilles liked him, or liked his ideas, or was simply too greedy to see the foolishness of what was proposed, and he promised three ships for the campaign against Cyprus, to be launched the next autumn.

Aristagoras sailed away. Then the war preparations started in earnest.

Men flocked to my teaching, and soon I was teaching my way of war in the agora, and I found that I was saying Calchas’s words and Heraclitus’s words together, as if they were one philosophy. And perhaps they are, at that. We danced, and we cut and thrust at billets of wood, and at each other.

The need for men – armoured men – drove Hephaestion the smith to distraction, and I began to spend more time with him. I was no smith, but I could make sheet out of an ingot, and none of his apprentices could.

In the agora, or at his shop, I spent a lot of time in the town. And the town was full of dangers.

The dangers all had to do with sex. Will I shock you, thugater? I wanted someone to share my bed, and Nearchos wanted to share my bed, but the two were in opposition. We were a balanced duality, as the Pythagoreans say. If I had taken a slave girl, Nearchos would have pouted for weeks – indeed, his father might have disowned me. Nearchos and his father had assumed that I would take Nearchos as a lover when he reached some level of heroic achievement that existed in their imaginations.

In fact, I was coming to like the boy, and by my second spring with them, he was my equal in most things. I had no idea whether he would stand in the battle line, but he was fast and strong and he could use his spear point to chip out his name in a billet of wood – a neat trick.

A year and more, I had lived like a Pythagorean, taking no lovers. To be honest, for a long time I had no interest, at least in part because I wanted no woman but Briseis. By the second spring in Crete, however, my body was becoming too much for me. The spring dances were all around me, the older men took younger men hunting, and I was alone.

I went to the smithy to hide from my lust, and hammered bronze into sheet with Hephaestion, who enjoyed my company but was not inclined to empty flattery. Far from it. He was the teacher I never had, at metal-forming, critical and derisive when I deserved it, full of praise when I did well. His only son was long dead, fallen in one of their local cattle-raid wars, serving his lord. Hephaestion taught me many things about forming bronze, and yet he was not the smith my father was. That is one of the mysteries of learning and teaching, I suppose.

I’ll take this moment, while this pretty girl serves me wine, to say that good times, like the time I spent with Hephaestion, are never as memorable as bad times. It is odd, and sad, that I cannot make a story out of Hephaestion, because in a way I loved him the best of all the men I knew on Crete. He was gentle, strong, kind, garrulous and grumpy. He might strike a slave in anger, but he apologized later. And he was never above learning from me, either, when I could remember my father’s techniques, for instance. I would have gone mad without him.

The other warriors thought it odd that I played with bronze, but they feared me, so there was no talk that I heard – and they needed armour. Swinging the hammers made me stronger too, and kept me from trouble. I practised arms until I was exhausted, and then I swung a hammer until I was exhausted all over again. That was life.

And then, as I said, the second spring came, and all my careful reserves began to melt away as the sap rose in the trees and the first flowers bloomed. Persephone was returning to the earth.

I wanted a girl. All girls were beginning to look equally beautiful to me, young or old, fat or thin, and yet I knew that to tumble a slave in the lord’s hall would have instant consequences.

Women know things, too. Well might you toss your head, you hussy – I’m sure that women know what men want as soon as their hips get broad. All the women in the hall knew me for what I was – a man who liked women. And that fascinated them, because their men made a fashion of disdaining women at every turn. The lord had three daughters and all of them made Nearchos look handsome, but they all tossed their heads at me just like that – blush as much as you like, young gentlewoman, I love your blushes. My thugater should bring you every day!

But there were other girls. Down by the beach there was a town – not big enough to be a city, even such a city as Plataea, but Gortyn had two or three thousand free people, and a substantial number of pretty girls.

Hephaestion’s shop was at the top of the town, in the no-man’s-land between the lord’s hall and the merchants. I would work at his forge and girls would come to watch me, stripped to my waist, the famous warrior getting his hands dirty.

It was the day before the Thesmophoria, which has a different name in Crete. All the girls were getting ready – on Crete, it is a woman’s holiday, and all the unmarried girls dress like priestesses in their best linen chitons, so that when the sun is behind them, no man need doubt a line of their bodies. They put sashes around their waists and flowers in their hair, and the girls who came to the forge were waiting for disc brooches that the smith and I had spent the morning making. Now we were polishing with the slaves – just to get the job done.

One girl was bolder than the others, fifteen and pretty with the flush of maidenhood and spring, and she brushed her fingers against mine when I gave her a brooch. Next to Briseis she was probably as plain as a daisy next to a rose, but she had a slim waist and high breasts and I wanted to have her on the dusty floor of the forge. Our eyes spent a great deal of time together.

Hephaestion laughed when she was gone. ‘Troas’s daughter, and no better than she ought to be. They’re fisherfolk. You want her?’

I blushed – I do blush, lass – and hung my head.

Hephaestion laughed. ‘Are you hag-ridden, boy?’

I shrugged. Up in the hall, I was a young lord, a warrior. Down in the forge, I was a boy. And I acted like one.

‘Does Nearchos know?’ Hephaestion asked.

‘No,’ I said. And then, ‘I don’t lie with Nearchos.’

Hephaestion reacted as if I’d slapped him. ‘You don’t?’ he asked. ‘He must be bitter.’

I shook my head. ‘He thinks he is unworthy.’ I shrugged.

Hephaestion laughed. ‘You are a failure as a Cretan,’ he said. ‘But you’re a good smith and you serve Hephaestus like a dutiful son.’ We polished for a while, our rags full of powdered pumice and oil. The slaves and apprentices were silent, terrified to have their master working such menial duties.

‘I think perhaps while we make the helmets, you should stay here at the forge,’ Hephaestion said. ‘You, pais, go and get me wine. And wine for Lord Arimnestos.’ He only called me lord to mock me.

While we drank watered wine – wonderful stuff, the wine of Crete, red as the blood of a bull – he nodded at me. ‘You sleep here. Until the Chalkeia. We’ll dedicate all the helmets as our sacrifice – as our sacrifice of labour. And then you can go back to the hall. Lord Achilles will understand why I need you.’

We’ve never had a Chalkeia here, thugater. We should. I’m a sworn devotee of the smith god, and I can say the prayers. Why have we never had one? In any case, it is a smith’s holiday, and the smith has to dedicate work and pay the value of his labour as a tithe – and the smith god judges the quality of the work. In Athens – even in little Plataea – there’s a procession of all the smiths, iron and bronze and even the finer metals, all together, with images of the god and of Dionysus bringing him back to Olympia after Zeus cast him out. There’s a lot of drinking. We should institute it. Send for my secretary.

I’m not dead, yet, eh?

I had no idea why old Hephaestion suddenly wanted me staying in his house – the walk to the hall was only a matter of half a stade. But he was my master, as much as the lord was. Everything in that town was dedicated to preparing the lord and his men for the expedition to Cyprus, and we were two months from the date of launch. Women wove new sails of heavy linen from Aegypt. The tanner made leather armour as fast as he butchered oxen. The two sandal-makers worked by lamplight and, down by the slips, twenty fishermen and their boys worked all day to build a third trireme in the Phoenician style.

Young men are all fools.

I sent Lekthes up to the hall for my bedding, and he came back with Idomeneus. They made me a bed where the smith directed – not even in his house, but in his summer work shed, a pleasant enough building, but only closed on three sides. The two of them swept it clean and brought a big couch from the house and made it up.

Idomeneus took a cup of wine with me. Lekthes had a girl up at the hall – he was a warrior now, not really a servant, and he was considering marriage. But Idomeneus’s tastes ran in other directions, and he was in no hurry to leave the forge.

‘Nearchos asked after you,’ he said. His eyes sparkled and he wore half a smile. ‘He burns for you, master.’

I shrugged. ‘I’m not your master.’

Idomeneus stretched out on a bench. ‘You call Hephaestion master, ’ he said.

I shrugged. ‘He is a master smith.’

‘You are a master warrior. And you made me a free man.’ Idomeneus nodded. ‘I have a way out of your tangle, lord.’

I ran my fingers through my beard. ‘Tangle?’ I asked.

He laughed. ‘You’ve run off down here to avoid Nearchos. And lord, he thinks – you must know – that when the ships sail, you and he will be lovers. Why shouldn’t he think this? Even his father says it.’

I shook my head. Cretans. What can I say? And all of you tittering. Laugh all you like – this was my youth.

‘So – I have found a thread that you can follow out of our labyrinth. ’ He poured more wine straight from the amphora.

‘Am I Theseus or the Minotaur?’ I laughed. ‘And who does that make you?’ We both laughed together.

‘I am prettier than any of Nearchos’s sisters,’ he said, and we both guffawed until Hephaestion came and put his head under the eaves.