Killer of Men lw-1

by Christian Cameron

  Pater took down a leather bag full of sand from his bench, and he had Bion cut him a circle of bronze as big as a man's hand. Then, with that hungry look, he took the bronze in his great hand and set the edge to the leather bag. and after a brief pause his rounded hammer fell on the bronze in a series of strokes almost too fast to see.

  That's another sight I'll never forget – Pater, almost blind with his lust to do his work, and the hammer falling, the strokes precise as his left hand turned the bronze – strike, turn, strike, turn.

  It was the bowl of a cup before I needed ten breaths. Not a priest's holy cup, but the kind of cup a man likes to have on a trip, to show he's no slave – the cup you use to drink wine in a strange place, that reminds you of home.

  Outside, the shadows were growing long.

  In the forge, the hammer made its muffled sound against the leather. Pater was weeping. The priest took the three of us and led us outside. I wanted to stay and see the cup. I could already see the shape – I could see that Pater had not lost his touch. And I was six or seven and all I wanted was to be a smith like Pater. To make a thing from nothing – that is the true magic, whether in a woman's womb or in a forge. But we went outside, and the priest was holding the tube of bronze. He blew through it a couple of times, and then nodded as if a puzzle had been solved. He looked at me.

  'You thought to go and fetch this,' he said.

  It wasn't a question, so I said nothing.

  'I would have thought of it too,' my brother said.

  Penelope laughed. 'Not in a year of feast days,' she said. One of Mater's expressions.

  He sent a slave for fire from the main hearth in the kitchen, and he put it in the fireplace in the yard. That's where Pater kindled the forge in high summer when it was blinding hot. And he blessed it – he was a thorough man, and worth his silver drachma, unlike most priests I've known. Blessing the outdoor hearth was something Pater hadn't even considered.

  Then he built up his little fire and the three of us bustled to help him, picking up scraps of wood and bark all over the yard. My brother fetched an armload of kitchen wood. And then the priest began to play with the tube, blowing through it and watching the coals grow brighter and redder and the flames leap.

  'Hmm,' he said. Several times.

  I have spent much of my life with the wise. I have been lucky that way – that everywhere I've gone, the gods have favoured me with men who love study and yet have time to speak to a man like me. But I think I owe all of that to the priest of Hephaestus. He treated all of us children as equals, and he cared for nothing but that tube and the effect it had on fire.

  He did the oddest things. He walked all over the yard until he found a whole straw from the last haying, and he cut it neatly with a sharp iron knife and then used it to blow on the flames. It gave the same effect.

  'Hmm,' he said.

  He poured water on the fire and it made steam and scalded his hand, and he cursed and hopped on one foot. Penelope fetched one of the slave girls and she made him a poultice, and while she nursed his hand, he blew through the tube on the dead fire – and nothing happened except that a trail of ash was blown on my chiton.

  'Hmm,' he said. He relit the fire.

  Inside the forge, the sound had changed. I could hear my father's lightest hammer – when you are a smith's child, you know all the music of the forge – going tap-tap, tap-tap. He was doing fine work – chasing with a small chisel, perhaps. I wanted to go and watch, but I knew I was not welcome. He was with the god.

  So I watched the priest, instead. He sent Bion for a hide of leather, and he rolled it in a great tube, and breathed through it on the fire, and nothing much happened. He and Bion made a really long tube, as long as a grown man's arm, from calf's hide, and the priest set Bion to blow on the fire. Bion did this in the forge and he was expert at it, and the priest watched the long tube work on the fire.

  'Hmm,' he said.

  My brother was bored. He made a spear from the firewood and began to chase me around the yard, but I wanted to watch the priest. I had learned how to be a younger brother. I let him thump me in the ribs and I neither complained nor fought back – I just stood watching the priest until my brother was bored. It didn't take long.

  My brother didn't like being deprived of his mastery. 'Who cares?' he asked. 'So the tube makes the fire burn? I mean, who cares?' He looked to me for support. He had a point. Every child of a smith learned to use the tube – as did every slave.

  The priest turned on him like a boar on a hunter. 'As you say, boy. Who would care? So answer this riddle and the Sphinx won't eat you. Why does the tube air make the fire brighter? Eh? Hmm?'

  Pater's hammer was now going taptaptaptaptaptap.

  'Who cares?' Chalkidis asked. He shrugged. 'Can I go and play?' he asked.

  'Be off with you, Achilles,' the priest said.

  My brother ran off. My sister might have stayed – she had some thoughts in her head, even as a little thing – but Mater called her to fetch wine, and she hurried off.

  'May I touch the lens?' I asked.

  The priest reached up and put it in my hand. He was down by the fire again.

  It was a beautiful thing, and even if he said it had no magic, I was thrilled to touch it. It brought fire down from the sun. And it was clear, and deep. I looked at things through it, and it was curious. An ant was misshapen – some parts larger and some smaller. Dust developed texture.

  'Does it warm up in your hand when you bring down the sun?' I asked.

  The priest sat back on his heels. He looked at me the way a farmer looks at a slave he is thinking of purchasing. 'No,' he said. 'But that is an excellent question.' He held up the bronze tube. 'Neither does this. But both make the fire brighter.'

  'What does it mean?' I asked.

  The priest grinned. 'No idea,' he said. 'Do you know how to write?'

  I shook my head.

  The priest pulled his beard and began to ask questions. He asked me hundreds of questions – hard things about farm animals. He was searching my head, of course – looking to see if I had any intelligence. I tried to answer, but I felt as if I was failing. His questions were hard, and he went on and on.

  The shadows grew longer and longer, and then my father started singing. I hadn't heard his song in the forge in a year – indeed, at the age I was at, I'd forgotten that my father ever sang when he worked.

  His song came out of the forge like the smell of a good dinner, soft first and then stronger. It was the part of the Iliad where Hephaestus makes the armour of Achilles.

  My mother's voice came down from the exhedra and met Pater's voice in the yard. These days, no one teaches women to sing the Iliad, but back then, every farm girl in Boeotia knew it. And they sang together. I don't think I'd ever heard them sing together. Perhaps he was happy. Perhaps she was sober.

  Pater came out into the yard with a cup in his hand. He must have burnished it himself, instead of having the slave boys do it, because it glowed like gold in the last light of the sun.

  He limped across the yard, and he was smiling. 'My gift to you and the god,' he said. He handed the cup to the priest.

  It had a flat base – a hard thing to keep when you round a cup, let me tell you – with sloping sides and a neatly rolled rim. He'd riveted a handle on, simple work, but done cleanly and precisely. He'd made the rivets out of silver and the handle itself of copper. And he'd raised a scene into the cup itself, so that you could see Hephaestus being led to Olympus by Dionysus and Heracles, when his father Zeus takes him back. Dionysus was tall and strong in a linen chiton, and every fold was hammered in the bronze. Heracles had a lion skin that Pater had engraved so that it looked like fur, and the smith god was a little drunk on the happiness of his father's taking him back.

  The priest turned it this way and that, and then he shook his head. 'This is king's work,' he said. 'Thieves would kill me in the road for a cup like this.'

  'Yours,' Pater said.

  The priest n
odded. 'Your gifts are unimpaired, it seems,' he said. The cup was its own testimony. I remember the awe I felt, looking at it.

  'Untouched by the rage of Ares,' Pater said, 'I owe more than that cup, priest. But that's what I can tithe now.'

  The priest was visibly awed. I was a boy, and I could see his awe, just as surely as I had seen Simon's fear and rage. It made me wonder, in a whole new way, who my father was.

  Pater summoned Bion, and Bion poured wine – cheap wine, for that's all we had – into the new cup. First the priest prayed to the smith god and poured a libation, and then he drank, and then Pater drank, and then Bion drank. Then they gave me the cup, and I drank.

  'Your boy here has a gift too,' the priest said, while the wine warmed our bellies.

  'He's quick,' Pater said, and ruffled my hair.

  First I'd heard of it.

  'More than quick,' the priest said. He drank, looked at the cup and held it out to Bion, who filled it. He started to pass it back and Pater waved at him.

  'All servants of the smith here, Bion,' he said.

  So Bion drank again. And let me tell you, when the hard times came and Bion stayed loyal, it was for that reason – Pater was fair. Fair and straight, and slaves know. Something for you to remember when you're tempted to a little temper tantrum, eh, little lady? Hair in your food and piss in your wine when you mistreat them. Right?

  Anyway, we drank a while longer. It went to my head. The priest asked Pater to think about moving to Thebes – said Pater would make a fortune doing work like this in a real city. Pater just shrugged. The joy of making was washing away in the wine.

  'If I wanted to be a Theban,' he said, 'I'd have gone there when I was young.' He made the word Theban sound dirty, but the priest took no offence.

  And then the priest turned back to me.

  'That boy needs to learn his letters,' he said.

  Pater nodded. 'Good thing for a smith to know,' he agreed.

  My heart soared. I wanted nothing – nothing – more than to be a smith.

  'I could take him to school,' the priest said.

  Pater shook his head. 'You're a good priest,' Pater said, 'but my boy won't be a pais in Thebes.'

  Again the priest took no offence. 'You won't teach the boy yourself, ' he said. No question to it.

  Pater looked at me, nodded, agreeing. 'No,' he said. 'It's my curse – I've no time for them. Teaching takes too long and I grow angry.' He shrugged.

  The priest nodded. 'There's a hero's tomb with a priest up the mountain,' he said.

  'Leitos,' Pater said. 'He went to Troy. Calchas is the priest. A drunk, but a good man.'

  'He can write?' the priest asked.

  Pater nodded. The next morning, I rose with the sun to see the priest go. I held his hand in the courtyard while he thanked the god and Pater for his cup, and Pater was happy. He reminded Pater that I was to learn to write, and Pater swore an oath unasked, and the thing was done. I wasn't sure what I thought about it, but that was Pater's way – a thing worth doing was done.

  The priest went to the gate and blessed Bion. Pater took his hand and was blessed in turn. 'May I have your name, priest?' he asked. Back then, men didn't always share their names.

  The priest smiled. 'I'm Empedocles,' he said.

  He and Pater shook hands the initiates' way. And then the priest came to me. 'You will be a philosopher,' he said.

  He was dead wrong, but it was a nice thing to hear at the age of six or seven, or whatever I was.

  'What's your name?' he asked.

  'Arimnestos,' I answered.

  2

  It must seem strange to you, sitting in Heraklea, where we rule Propontis as far as the wild tribes, that in Boeotia two towns a day's walk apart could be inveterate enemies. It's true – we told the same jokes and we worshipped the same gods, and we all read Homer and Hesiod, praised the same athletes and cursed the same way – but Thebes and Plataea were never friends. They were big, dandified, and they thrust their big noses in where we didn't want them. They had a 'federation', which was a fancy way of saying that they would run everything and the old ways could go to Tartarus, and all the small poleis could just obey.

  So I was five, or perhaps six, when Pater went away and came back wounded, and the men of Thebes had the best of it. They didn't harry our orchards or burn our crops, but we submitted and they forced little Plataea to accept their laws.

  And there it might have remained, if it hadn't been for the Daidala.

  You think you know all about the Daidala, my dear – because I am master here, and I make the peasants celebrate the festival of my youth. But listen, thugater – it was on the slopes of Cithaeron that Zeus first feared to lose the love of his wife, Hera. She left him, for he is a bad husband, and he cheated on her – and you must tell me, should your husband ever forsake your bed. I'll see to it that he returns, or he'll wear his guts for a zone.

  At any rate, she left him, and when she was gone, as is the way with men, he missed her. So he asked her back. But when you are a god, and the father of gods – aye, or when you are merely a mortal man and full of your own importance – it is hard to ask forgiveness, and harder still to be refused.

  So Zeus went into Boeotia, and in those days there were kings. He found the king – a Plataean, of course – and asked him for advice.

  The king thought about it for a day. If he had any sense, he asked his own wife. Then he went back to mighty-thewed Zeus, and he no doubt shrugged at the irony of it all. And he said, 'Mighty Zeus, first among gods and men, you can win back beautiful cow-eyed Hera if you make her jealous, by making her think that you intend to replace her for ever.' So he proposed that they make a wooden statue of a beautiful kore, a maiden in a wedding gown. And that they take it to the sacred precincts on the mountain, and imitate the manner of men and women going to a wedding.

  'Hera will come in all her glory to destroy her usurper,' the king said. 'And when she sees that it's nothing but a billet of wood, she'll be moved to laughter. And then you'll be reconciled.'

  Perhaps Zeus thought it was the silliest plan he'd ever heard, but he was desperate. To an old man like me, it seems a deeply cynical plan. But for all that, it worked. The wedding procession wound up the hillside, and Hera came and destroyed the statue with her powers. Then she saw that she had merely burned a piece of wood, and she laughed, and she and Zeus were reconciled, and celebrated their eternal marriage again.

  So every town in Boeotia used to take turns to celebrate the Daidala – forty-eight towns, and in the forty-ninth year, the Great Daidala, when the fires burned like the beacons burned when the Medes came. And they would compete to celebrate with the best festival, the largest fire, the finest ornaments on the dresses, the most beautiful kore. But as Thebes's federation gained power, so Thebes took over the festivals. They would allow no rival, and the Daidala was celebrated only by Thebes – and little Thespiae and our Plataea. Only our two little states dared to insist on our ancient rights.

  Now, when the men of Thebes bested us that time, our leaders signed their treaty, accepted their laws and accepted the federation, the way a poor man accepts a bad sausage in the market when he dares not haggle. But the treaty said nothing about the Daidala. And Plataea's turn was coming – her first turn to celebrate the festival in nigh on fifty years.

  For a year after the battle, men said little about it. But then the Plataean Daidala was just a few years away – and towns worked for years to make the festival great. So it was that not long after the priest came to our house – this is how I remember it – and the forge fire was relit, men started to come back to the forge. First they came to have their pots mended, and their ploughs straightened, but soon enough they came to talk. As the weather changed, and Pater worked outside, men would come as soon as their farm work was done – or before – and they would sit on Pater's forging stumps, or recline against the cow's fence or her shed. They would bring their own wine and pour it for each other or for Pater, and they would t
alk.

  I was a boy, and I loved to hear men talk. These were plain men, not lords – but not fools, either. Even here in this house I hear the life of the rustic made a thing of fun. Perhaps. Perhaps there are boors who think more of the price of an ass than of a beautiful statue. What of it? How many of these philosophers could plough a straight furrow, eh, girl? There is room in the world for many kinds of wisdom – that was the revelation of my life, and you should write it down.

  Hah! It is good to be lord.

  At any rate, by the end of the day we'd have the potter, Karpos, son of Phoibos, the wheelwright, Draco, son of Draco, the leather worker, Theron, son of Xenon, some of their slaves and a dozen farmers in the yard. And they would debate everything from the immortality of the gods to the price of wheat at the market in Thebes – and Corinth, and Athens.

  Athens. How often in this story will I mention her? Not my city, but crowned in beauty and strong, in a way Plataea could never be strong – yet capricious and sometimes cruel, like a maiden. As you will be, soon enough, my dear. Athens is now the greatest city in the world – but then she was just another polis, and outside of Attica, men paid her little heed.

  Yet she was starting to learn her power. I must weary you with some history. Athens had been under a tyranny for forty years – the Pisistratidae. Some say that the tyrants were good for Athens, and some say they were bad. I have friends of both groups, and I suspect the truth was that the tyrants were good in some ways and bad in others.

  While the tyrants were lording it over Athens, the world was changing. First, Sparta rose to power, initially by crushing the cities nearest to her, and then by forcing the rest of their neighbours into a set of treaties that compelled them to serve Sparta. Now, in the Peloponnese – everywhere else, too – only men of property fought in the battles. Slaves might throw rocks, and poor farmers might throw a javelin, but the warriors were aristocrats and their friends.