Killer Of Men Part 22

I shrugged. 'He had it coming.'

Herac.l.i.tus sat and leaned on his staff. I can't remember another time that he sat with me. Finally he looked at me. 'I have so many things I want to say to you. You can all but see the logos and yet you are so far from true understanding, aren't you? You understand me when I talk, and yet you can hurt a boy like that for a child's reasons.'

I blinked tears. I had been blinking tears since he sat with me. Hah! I feel them in my eyes even now. No one else had cared, except Stephanos and Archi. He sat there, and listened.

'I did it because he broke his engagement with Briseis,' I said. 'He hurt her. I did the right thing!'

Herac.l.i.tus's eyes rested on me, and you could almost see the sparks as his gaze ground away at mine.

Finally, I hung my head. 'No, I did not.'

'No,' he said. 'Tell the truth, at least to yourself. I knew the truth as soon as I heard that the boy had been hurt. You hurt him. Cruelly. Is that who you are? A man who hurts for his own satisfaction?'

I couldn't meet his eyes. And I began to weep. I sat on the steps and told him the tale of Cleisthenes. He shuddered when I cut off the hand. But he smiled when I told him, through my own tears, of the funeral pyre.

'It is the pity of the world that we must come to wisdom through fire,' he said. 'Why can no man learn wisdom from another?'

I couldn't answer him. Perhaps no one can. After a while he went on, 'You have discovered one of the secrets of the world of men.'

'What's that?' I asked. Those boys most of them knew me were wondering why the teacher was sitting with me, and why I was pouring tears the way a mended pot leaks water.

'The secret is that men are easy to kill. That if you are brave and have a steady hand and a cold heart, you can have whatever you desire.' He looked away. 'This city is about to go to war with Persia, and then it will learn a lesson that I think you already know. War is the king and father of all, my son. Some men it makes lords, and others it makes slaves. Do you understand?'

'No,' I said.

'Ah!' he said, and laughed at himself. 'The strife I preach some men master it without knowing why, and use it for themselves, without a thought to consequence. War makes them lords and kings. But they are not good men. The killer lies in every man closer to the surface in some than others, I think. I saw the killer in your eyes when first your master led you up the steps.' He nodded. 'If you would master the killer in you, you must accept that you are not truly free. You must submit to the mastery of the laws of men and G.o.ds.'

'Men fight wars!' I protested.

'And men return from them, confused as to what the laws of men and G.o.ds ask of them.' He looked at a raptor, climbing in the distance over the mountains. 'That bird can kill twenty times a day and never be the agent of evil merely change. But men are not animals. What they mate and what they kill becomes who they are.' He looked at me. 'You are a warrior. You must find yourself a path that keeps you among men and not among animals. Avoid the confusion. Law is better than chaos.'

It doesn't sound like a helpful speech, although I think I can remember every word. And yes, that line about strife and war he said it all the time, and it's in his book. Don't think I was the first to hear it, either. But it stuck.

Listen, all of you. There are men and women you're old enough to know who discover what their nether parts are for and go mad with it. It is the same with killing. Turns out that killing is easy. Inflicting pain is easy. Cleisthenes learned that. And when I gave him the other half of the lesson, he never got to benefit from it. Perhaps if he'd had a teacher like my teacher . . .

For weeks the s.h.i.+ps came up the river and dropped soldiers Greeks on our sh.o.r.es, and we gathered a mighty army. At least, we thought it was an army. Aristagoras promised us an easy fight. He said that the Persians had short spears and no s.h.i.+elds and that their riches were there for us to take.

It is the dark comedy of men that every Ionian knew that he was full of s.h.i.+t. Many of them had faced Persians or run from them and they knew how good they were. And yet this disease, this mania, swept them as if the deadly archer had shot them with arrows of inflammation and disease failure to fear the Persians.

There's a name for this disease in all the tragedies. We call it hubris, and all men and all women are subject to it.

So they debated and planned. No one drilled, though, and no one appointed a commander, although all but the Athenians took orders, or at least suggestions, from Aristagoras. He went to dinner at the house. I wasn't excluded, but I wasn't comfortable attending formal dinners. Oh, my manners were up to it I had learned the manners of aristocrats. But to lie on a couch and be served by Kylix?

I went and ate in taverns by the water. Which proved to be a good choice, because I found Epaphroditos in one and Stephanos in another, and learned to play knucklebones like an islander. Stephanos's victory as a wrestler had promoted him off the oar bench and into the ranks of his lord's retinue, and now he was a hoplite. He and Epaphroditos and I had the games in common, and that was enough. And when we found Heraklides, we were four, which is a good number for men.

Four weeks of dicing in taverns and drinking cheap wine, exercising in the gymnasium all the allied soldiers were welcome there, and no one knew me and four weeks of sitting at Herac.l.i.tus's feet. Indeed, I took my friends to hear him speak. They were pleased but mystified, and all three agreed that he was a great man, but they never went with me again.

Heraklides spoke for the other two. He was in the agora, fingering a plain bronze camp knife. The vendor was a slave for the smith who made it. It was mediocre work.

'I'll pay you in obols what you ask in owls,' Heraklides said to the slave. I had just asked him to come with me a second time to hear Herac.l.i.tus. 'By the G.o.ds, man three obols, then!'

He turned to me with a grin. 'Yon philosopher is a little above the likes of me, Doru. I could see he was a great man it was a pleasure to hear him. But I scarcely understood a word he said.' He whirled back on the slave. 'Four obols take it or leave it.'

Herac.l.i.tus sat with me every day after the other boys walked away, and we talked about laws laws of men and laws of G.o.ds. You've heard it all from your tutors, I'm sure. Aye, I'll have his head if you haven't heard it, honey! That most laws are men's laws for men's reasons. In Sparta, every man takes a boy as a lover, and in Chios, it is death for a man to lie with a boy. These are the laws of men.

But the G.o.ds hate hypocrisy and hubris, as any history that is true will show. And murder and incest. These are the laws of the G.o.ds. And there are laws we can only guess at laws of hospitality, for example. They seem like G.o.d-given laws, but when we meet men who have different guest-laws, we have to wonder.

Bah I talk too much. I should have been a philosopher, as the priest of Hephaestus said.

And then there was Briseis.

I can't remember how long I had been in that house before I saw her again. I was in her father's room, with her father's permission he was formal and polite to me, but a little cold reading his scrolls. He had the words of Pythagoras and some of Herac.l.i.tus and Anaxagoras, too. And I was reading them. I was also helping him and Darkar do sums. I would have carried water to the well at this point, I was so bored and felt so under-used. Archi didn't want me when he went to the daily conference, and so I seemed to have no duties at all except to match him in the gymnasium, at the palaestra and on the track.

I was reading, as I say, when Briseis came in. She smiled at me quite a happy smile and took a scroll from my basket.

'Have you read Thales?' she asked. 'For all that he sounds like a soothsayer, he seems the wisest of the lot. Or perhaps he just hated women less.'

'Herac.l.i.tus doesn't hate women,' I answered hotly.

'Oh!' she said, and her eyes flashed. 'Wonderful! I'll ask him to accept me as a student straight away.'

I had to smile. I raised my hand the way a swordsman does at practice, when he acknowledges a hit. 'Well struck,' I said.

'I was happy at Sappho's school,' she said. 'I wish I could go back, but I'm too old.' Old at sixteen.

Her father glared at us. 'I'm working,' he growled.

'May we read in the garden?' Briseis asked sweetly, and he kissed her hand absently his eyes on his work.

We picked up the scroll baskets and walked into the garden together.

'Why don't you read to me?' she said. There was very little question to it.

And that was that. I read to her every day. We read Thales' book on nature really just an acc.u.mulation of his sayings. We read our way through Pythagoras, and laughed over what we didn't understand, and Briseis asked questions and I taught her what I knew of the geometry, which was not inconsiderable, and I took her questions to Herac.l.i.tus, and he answered them. He was contemptuous of women as a s.e.x, but friendly to them as individuals, which Briseis said was a vast improvement on the reverse.

If I thought that I loved her when I was a slave, that was merely the l.u.s.t for the unattainable. Every boy loves someone unattainable, and no few attain the one they want anyway, to their own confusion. But when we sat together, day after day, then I saw her another way.

I am an intelligent man. All my life, my wits have cut other men like my sword.

She was my better. I saw it with the geometry. In three weeks, she had everything I could teach. By the G.o.ds, if I could have taught her to smith, she'd have made a Corinthian helmet in three weeks! Once her mind bit into a thing, she would never let it go, like a boar with his tusks in his prey.

Have you ever seen an eagle kill close to you? She turns, and you catch your breath, and she hits her prey, and if you are close, you can see the blood a brief red cloud, a mist of blood and your heart stops with the beauty of it, even as you think that this is an animal killing another animal. Why is it so beautiful?

And so with the mind of Briseis.

After two weeks, she leaned close while I showed her a bronze pyxis pyxis I had made for her we had a small forge and she leaned close and ran a finger down my jaw. I had made for her we had a small forge and she leaned close and ran a finger down my jaw.

'Come to my room tonight,' she said.

I leaned back, her touch like a burn on my jaw. 'If I'm caught-' I said, and like a coward, my eyes darted around for the slaves.

She shrugged. 'I wasn't caught. Or am I braver than you, my hero?'

She said nothing more nothing. Not a glance did she give me, nor a touch of her hand.

I went to her room wondering with every heart-pounding step if I had, in fact, created the whole thing in my head. Had she really asked me? Really?

I stopped in the hall outside her room, although there was no cover there. I took a breath and my knees were weak and I shuddered. I had done none of these things before I killed Cleisthenes. Every man is brave for some things and a coward for others. I stood there for a long time, and I'll tell you in honesty that I could feel the s.h.i.+t at the base of my intestines, I was so afraid.

Aphrodite, not Ares, is the deadliest on Olympus.

Then I made myself push through her curtain.

She laughed when her skin was against mine. 'You weren't this cold in the bath,' she said.

'I thought that you were Penelope!' I said with foolish honesty.

There are women who might be offended by that sort of revelation. Briseis bit my ear, rolled off the couch and lit a lamp from her fire jar.

'Aphrodite!' I said. Probably squeaked.

She got on top of me. 'I want you to see me,' she said. 'So that next time you won't mistake me for my maid.'

When we were done and the moment we were done, she laughed and bounced to her feet I asked, 'Why?' I reached out and touched her flank. 'Why did you come to me? In the bath?'

She laughed, and her eyes flashed in the lamplight. 'I decided that you should have what Diomedes gave away,' she said. 'Promise me that if you ever have the chance, you'll kill him for me?'

I shrugged. Later, I swore.

I'm a man, not a G.o.d.

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I took to spending my days in the little forge shed in the work yard. It was a tiny shop with one small bench, and Hipponax only had it so that his pots could be mended without being taken to market, but Darkar once told me that they had had a slave who had some skill with iron.

I made instruments at first a compa.s.s for Briseis, and then a ruler marked out in daktyloi daktyloi. I made a fine compa.s.s for Herac.l.i.tus, as well. It was simple work, but good. Briseis was pleased by her geometry tools, as she called them, and Herac.l.i.tus was delighted, embracing me. I think that he had no use for such things, as he once told me that he could see the logos and all its shapes in his head. But the long bronze dividers were comfortable in the hand, and excellent for showing a student, and their points were sharp and probably used to p.r.i.c.k a generation of dullards, which gives me some satisfaction.

When I had my eye back, I bought some sc.r.a.p bronze and poured myself a plate, pouring directly on to a piece of slate. Then I forged the pour into a sheet, which made me feel better. Making sheet is long work, and finicky. I did an adequate job, although my heart told me that I stopped planis.h.i.+ng too early.

Oh, la.s.s, you'll never be a bronze-smith's daughter! Planis.h.i.+ng endless tiny hammer strokes to smooth the forge-work. When you change something's shape, you use the curved surface of the big hammers, pulling the metal or pus.h.i.+ng it, this way and that. But that leaves big, lumpy marks. See this cauldron? Look at these marks. See? But a good smith, a master, never lets an item out of his shop with these divots. He uses ever-smaller hammers, working the surface a blow at a time, until it is one continuous surface like my helmet. See?

Making sheet is about getting the surface to a single thickness and a flat shape, two things that seem like enemies when you are new to the process. More than you wanted to know, eh? But something had changed since I killed Cleisthenes, and I wanted to go back, I think back to a world where I could do good work.

I had begun to have dreams about home. I had the first in Briseis's bed, the first night I went to her. I dreamed that ravens came and stripped my armour from me, and took me to their nest.

I dreamed of ravens, and their green nest of willows, night after night, until I realized that the ravens were Apollo's, and the green nest was Plataea was home. And then, for the first time in years, I was homesick. I began to dream more fully, about the farm on the hill, and about the tomb of the hero on the slopes of Cithaeron, and about hunting with Calchas.

The dreams were powerful but they could never compete with the reality of Briseis. Or the coming war. I told myself that it was time to go home soon.

Anyway, I tell this story awry. I gambled on the waterfront and made love to Briseis; I listened to Herac.l.i.tus and read philosophy in the garden; I worked and played on the palaestra and in the gymnasium with Archi. It sounds like a good life. In fact, it was a bad time, but I could not tell you why, except that I could feel the doom over me.

When I had my bronze sheet forged, I cut some sc.r.a.p from the edges and began to work them, chasing figures into them as practice. I did olives and circles and leaves and laurels, and then I tried a stag, but my stag became a raven early in the process. I made six or seven ravens, until I had done one well.

I remember that raven, because while I admired my work, Darkar came in and asked me to wait on Archi at dinner. That was the third time that Hipponax hosted Aristagoras. This time Briseis was the hostess, with most of the great men of the army as guests. The house was busy, and in those days, it was perfectly acceptable for a free man to wait on his lord, and I did it willingly enough.

I should have refused.

First, Aristides was confused to find me at his elbow. He smiled at me. I had to look at him for a long time to see the cool swordsman my toughest opponent from the beach. 'So,' he gave his slight smile, 'you have come to take your place among the captains?'

I grinned, and walked off to pour wine for Archi, and then I caught the Athenian's look, and it was one of anger. None of the men at the party knew how to talk to me was I a cup-bearer or a champion? It made them uneasy. Which, in turn, made me uneasy.

Then there was Briseis. She moved among them, dressed in a Doric chiton of pure new linen, s.h.i.+ning white, and transparent, and they watched her the way dogs watch the slave with the food.

I had to watch the interplay among the captains, and I didn't like it. Aristides was not the chief of the Athenians that was Melanthius, an older man, and an astute politician, but not, I think, much of a fighter. Melanthius shared a couch with Aristagoras and they drank together like friends, but I could see that Aristides thought little of either of them. Aristagoras was belligerent and fawning by turns, a depressing sight. Diomedes' father, Agasides, was there and Briseis treated him as if he were made of dung, which he reciprocated. And yet, Hipponax supported him as the war leader of the Ephesians.

There was a captain named Eualcidas from Eretria in Euboea, a famous athlete who had been praised by Simonides the poet, and another Eretrian, Dikaios, who made clear that he loathed all the Athenians more than he hated the Persians. I stared at them, for every one must have been at the fight by the bridge where my father died and I was made a slave.

The Eretrians had come with five s.h.i.+ps because of their ancient alliance with the men of Miletus, of which Aristagoras was once again ruler, although he disdained the t.i.tle of tyrant now that he had returned to them, and claimed that he would liberate all the Greeks of Asia and give them democracies.

The Milesians and Eretrians had sailed up the river together, fifty s.h.i.+ps or more, and landed their men in the precinct of Koressos. Aristagoras was now the accepted commander of the war, and the whole purpose of the war had changed, because all the Greek cities had declared. Now it was the Trojan War. Now all the Greeks were going to make war on Persia. They planned to seize Sardis, expel the satrap Artaphernes and then perhaps march on Persepolis. And that night was the first I had heard of any of these things.

None of them noticed me, but they bickered among themselves aplenty, thugater. If I had been half the veteran I thought myself, I'd have smelled the trouble the way Aristides did.

Aristides watched them with contempt, and Archi worried and fidgeted. Hipponax watched them looking at his daughter, and Briseis rode the wave of their l.u.s.t like a skilled helmsman.

It was not a pretty party, and I should not have been there. They drank, and quarrelled, and each of them thought he was Agamemnon or Achilles. On the sixth bowl of wine, Dikaios the Eretrian raised the cup.

'Your daughter moves like a dancer can her lips do what flute girls do?' he asked.

Men hooted and then fell silent. Hipponax rose from his kline and he looked ready to kill.

'Leave my house,' he said.

Dikaios laughed. 'You dress her like a wh.o.r.e and put her at a party, and then you're offended when I speak what every man thinks? You easterners are soft, and your women are wh.o.r.es.' He drank the wine.

The cup rang like a gong when it hit the floor, and his head hit only a moment later. It rang hollow, like a gourd. He was out.

I had put him in that condition, and now I lifted him I was strong, then and carried him to the courtyard, then threw him into the street, in the dung. Oh, it is easy to make enemies!

Darkar stopped me from going back to the party. So I went to my bed, and later I went to Briseis, and she embraced me with a vigour that frightened me.

'I loved how you hurt him,' she said. 'What do flute girls do?'