Artaphernes shook his head. 'I need to go back to Persepolis, where men kill each other over women and ill-chosen words, but never, ever lie.' He frowned at me. 'You understand this way of planning, then?'
I grinned. 'I do, lord.'
'Women?' Archi asked, breaking in. 'Persians kill each other over women?'
'Adultery is our national sport,' Artaphernes said, his voice heavy with some adult emotion that neither Archi nor I could interpret, and we glanced at each other. He had had too much to drink. 'Every Persian gentleman covets his friend's wife. It is like a disease, or the curse of the gods.' He looked at his cup and I moved to fill it, but he covered it. 'I grow maudlin. Let us forget that last exchange, young friends. Never speak ill of your homeland when among strangers.'
'We are not strangers, I hope!' Archi said.
'I have drunk too much. You see? I offend my host. I am off to bed.' The Mede got to his feet without his usual grace and headed off under the portico. I went and helped him into bed. He mumbled things that I ignored, because when you are a slave, people say the most amazing things. Then I went to deal with Archi, who had no head for wine and was puking in a basin.
At last, when Archi was on his couch with a rug over him, I went to find Penelope.
It was rare for us to have a scheduled tryst, and I was afire. I barely did my duty in clearing the andron of the refuse of a dinner party and I took only a cupful of stew from the kitchen and drank no wine. I needn't have hurried.
The Fountain of Pollio was old then. It has since been restored, but at that time it was the meeting place of slumming aristocrats and slaves. The roof of the fountain had fallen in and been replaced with wood, and the carpenter had done a poor job. Doubtless a slave. The Ephesians used slaves for everything and had few free craftsmen. There were seats – benches, really – all along the outer edge of the round building, but they were rickety and only the strongest had a secure place to sit. Yet it was cool and pleasant to sit at night, and the view was spectacular, out over the river and down the bay all the way to the sea. The smoke of ten thousand cooking fires rose with the incense of the temples, and the pinpoints of ten thousand household lights coloured the landscape at our feet like the gold embroidery on a rich man's purple cloak. I could look at Ephesus by night for hours.
Which was as well, because Penelope was late. I knew that she might not come at all. We were, after all, slaves. I have probably forgotten all the truly dull and onerous days, honey, but don't forget as I tell this story that we were property, like a pot or a sandal, and our master and mistress could, without the least ill will, ruin our plans, our hopes, even our dreams. I knew that Penelope might be working or commanded to sleep in her lady's bed.
It was past full dark when she came, and she surprised me, coming up behind me where I dozed and cupping her hands over my eyes. Of course I grabbed her hands, and of course she squealed, and one thing was leading very pleasantly to another – and don't, by Aphrodite's lovely ankles, imagine we were alone. There were probably twenty courting couples in that dim room, and more outside leaning against the wall, and then there were men playing polis – that's our Greek game of cities, played with black and white counters – and women actually using the fountain. Quite a crowd. When you are a slave, honey, there's no privacy. And no secrets.
At any rate, I'd got myself a solid seat and soon I had Penelope across my lap and one hand well placed under her chiton, and she was searching the inside of my mouth with her tongue – I shouldn't tell you these things, honey, but you'll know Aphrodite well enough yourself, soon, whether I tell you or not – and kissing her was like war, like hunting. My heart pounded and my head was full of her – and then she was off my lap and across the room.
'What are you doing here?' she said, her voice more full of anger than fear.
I had no idea what she had seen, but I was on my feet, ready to attack or defend. The fountain was not a safe place, exactly. There were some bad men in the shadows.
I saw the slim figure vanish even as Penelope called after him – a boy wrapped in a chlamys.
'I'll run him down,' I said. I was instantly jealous.
'No!' my faithless lover protested, but I was off.
The chlamys was an expensive garment, striped with purple, and the wearer had long legs.
I ran the rich boy down in twenty steps, tripped him and landed on top of him with all my weight on his hips. Then I pulled the chlamys away from his head. My heart was beating, and I was ready to kill. Even then, honey, I was a killer. I had already done it often enough that killing was like kissing an old flame. I knew the dance, and my fingers were going for the finish – eyeballs.
This was no rival, and my murderous fingers stilled.
She was a rich girl. She had pearls in her hair, and her face, even in pain, was flawless, a word poets use too often. She was probably fourteen, her hair was black and her lips red, and in the light of the house lanterns, her skin was as smooth as marble. She had muscles like an athlete and high eyebrows.
I was off her as fast as I'd taken her down.
Penelope appeared and stood between us. 'You fool,' she hissed, and I had no idea which of us she was speaking to.
'I had to see where you went every night, Pen!' the girl said. 'Ares, you broke my hip, you barbarian!' She looked at Penelope. 'You have a lover!'
Penelope looked at me a moment. I'd unpinned one side of her chiton the better to reach her breasts, and it was hard for her to deny what we'd been doing. She shrugged.
'What's it to you, rich girl?' I asked.
She looked at me and her eyes twinkled. It hurts me to say this, but next to her, Penelope looked like a slave girl. Like a mortal next to a goddess. A few thousand darics, a few hundred medimnoi of grain and a dozen slaves at your command give you poise, confidence, perfect skin and lustrous hair that no slave girl can match. Look at yourself, girl. Now look at Blondie – your Thracian. She's handsome. But she's invisible next to you. See?
Exactly. So when this rich girl twinkled her eyes at me, I reacted. And she smiled. 'I own her,' the rich girl said. She shrugged. 'I suspect that you are the famous Spear-Boy, Doru of the barbarous west. Yes?' She laughed. 'My brother's companion making love to my companion. Oh, I will have such fun!' She clapped her hands together.
And that's how I met Briseis. Yes – you know that name. She's as much a part of this story as Miltiades or Artaphernes.
I bowed. 'I apologize for hurting you, mistress.'
She raised an eyebrow. 'What will you do for me if I don't report you, boy?' She called me pais, like a small boy who runs errands. She meant to cut me, and she succeeded.
'Nothing, kore,' I returned. A kore was a little girl of good family.
'Doru…' Penelope cautioned.
'Nothing. Report us to Darkar. Better yet, to your parents.' I smiled. 'I will be punished for hurting you.' I shrugged. But I knew a few things – I was not a new slave. I knew that allowing someone to blackmail you was deadly. Masters loved to play this game – get someone else's slave in your debt and then use them as a spy. Oh, yes. Darkar was on top of all those tricks – he was steward and spymaster, too. He knew how to put oil on bread, I can tell you.
She looked at me for a long time. 'Really?' she said. 'Very well.'
'Don't forget to explain what you were doing outside the house after dark, naked under a chlamys.' That was the free man in me, unable to shut up. Somehow, she was like my sister. And I knew what I'd say to my sister if she tried to blackmail me. Which, come to think of it, she had done, a hundred times.
She whirled. 'You wouldn't dare!' she shot at me.
I shrugged. 'Despoina, I am a slave, and slaves are notorious for protecting themselves. And you are naked under that chlamys.'
She turned red – blushed so hard that you could see it under the fretful light of a house lamp.
She pursed her lips and got up – carefully clutching her boy's cloak around her figure – and ran back into her father's house
by the slaves' door.
Penelope paused only long enough to push two fingers rather painfully into the spot where my hip's muscles stopped. 'You idiot!' she hissed. 'She meant to scare you. For fun. Why did you have to challenge her?'
I thought that I had behaved like a hero. On the other hand, I also realized that I had forgotten Penelope's existence for three minutes.
I went inside, shaking my head. I didn't lose any sleep worrying about Briseis.
Morning presented me with new troubles. I was summoned with Archi to face Hipponax as soon as Archi had breakfasted.
Briseis was standing behind her father, dressed in an embroidered Ionic chiton of linen and a pair of golden slippers.
'My daughter says that your companion was caught last night kissing her companion,' Hipponax said. His eyes were on his son, not on me.
Archi shrugged, as young men will do – a reaction that always infuriates a parent, I can tell you. 'He kissed Penelope?' Archi asked, looking at me. 'Why?' Then he grinned. 'Or rather – why not?'
Hipponax had a javelin on the table, a light spear with a shaft of cornel wood. He slapped it on the table. It made a noise like the whip of a muleteer. I jumped. Archi blanched.
Briseis smiled.
Only then did Hipponax look at me. 'Well?' he asked me.
'Yes, lord,' I said. 'I kissed her.'
Hipponax glanced back at his daughter, and then at me. 'I do not encourage flirtation among my people, young man. But I am angered by your casual use of my andron as a place to debauch my daughter's companion.'
I flicked my eyes to that lying little fox, Briseis. So I had kissed her companion in the andron, had I?
But when my eyes met hers, a curious spark passed.
Eyes can pass many messages. And faces give so much away, honey. Especially young faces.
Even as her father spoke, she realized, I think, that her prank was going to cost me. And that her dare – she was daring me to tell her father where the incident had happened – was foolish. No slave would accept punishment under such circumstances. And who knows what she had thought inside that goddess-like head. That I would protect her because I was a foolish boy?
All this in one heartbeat. With a plea not to betray her, now that she had lied and put me in danger.
'I am disappointed in you, boy. You have a good life here. This sort of behaviour is emblematic of arrogance. I must punish it harshly, so that you will understand. Do you have anything to say for yourself?'
I let it hang here for ten heartbeats. I was calm, and I already knew what I would do. So I flicked my eyes over her – and she flinched.
Archi spoke up. 'If he was half as drunk as I, Pater, it is scarcely his fault. He had to spend the evening avoiding the unsubtle grasping of Hippias of Athens.' Bless Archi, he stood up for me like a man.
Hipponax glanced at his son and then at me. 'Is this true?' he asked.
'Yes, lord,' I said. 'I did it. I meant no arrogance, lord. I broke nothing and only one hip of mine ever touched a couch. I was drunk, and I will take my punishment.'
Hipponax raised an eyebrow, and there was humour in it for a moment. 'Well said, boy. Ten lashes instead of twenty. Let it be done now, before your mistress is up. Darkar!' he called, and the steward came forward with a pair of porters.
They took me into the courtyard. They already knew what had passed, and what had really happened. Darkar tied my wrists to the flogging pole hard and poked me in the side. 'You are a fool, and you deserve all twenty blows,' he said. 'You are playing a dangerous game, slave. She will do this to you again, now that she knows she has the power.'
I took the ten blows with gritted teeth. They weren't kisses. The whole weight of the javelin haft on my buttocks, ten times. By the tenth, it took all my strength not to call out. It hurts that much.
Better your arse than your feet, though.
I cried a little afterwards, but in the amphora cellar where no one could see me. Darkar took me there. He wasn't a bad man. He left me until I was done sobbing, and then gave me a bowl of cold water and my chiton. 'You are a fool,' he told me.
Oh, aye. I was a fool. Those ten blows had a profound effect, because they reminded me that I was a slave. It is one thing to offer to accept punishment to protect a beautiful woman – and that was my intention, very heroic – but it is another thing to take the blows. Humiliating and painful, and the humiliation had only just begun, because it was two weeks before I was healed, and because Archi told every one of his friends and Heraclitus exactly what I had done and how I had been punished. He began by being indignant on my behalf and ended being pleased to have such an adult story to tell of his slave, and that had an effect on our relationship. I was a slave.
Penelope avoided me. One evening I found her in the water stores and we kissed. I thought that all was well, but she never came to the fountain. I couldn't figure her out – kissing me like a hetaira, and then pretending she didn't know me when she passed me in the market.
And neither Master nor Mistress allowed us out together any more.
There were other girls. There was a red-haired Thracian girl who was happy to play at the fountain, and I never even knew what house she came from. Sometimes she would come wrapped in a peplos like a matron, but with nothing underneath, and that was fascinating, too. But when I played with her, I thought of Briseis. Briseis's face made other women ugly. Her colours made other women dull. Her figure-
This is a disease that I still have, honey. Hah! The little archer put his shaft deep in me. I doubt that I'd even want the shaft to be drawn, that's how bad I am!
But time passed, and there were other pursuits. Archi began to practise at the gymnasium. He was fast and strong for his age, and we sparred constantly – every day, I think. We had oak swords that hurt like blazes when we swung them too hard, and we had shields – a round aspis for him and a big Boeotian shield for me, like an egg shape with two round cut-outs. It was a joke to Master – he knew I was from Boeotia and the shield was the only Boeotian thing he'd ever heard of.
We threw spears, shot bows and carved each other up with wooden swords. At the gymnasium he was paired against other boys his own age, and I watched. Slaves were not welcome to compete in the gymnasium. Another reminder.
But in the Temple of Artemis slaves were welcome to compete. By the time a year had passed, I had begun to understand Heraclitus's theory of the logos – and to share his suspicion that most men are fools. I could never understand why the other boys were so slow to understand his principles, so slow to learn the rules of rational argument, and so utterly, painfully slow in learning the fundamentals of geometry.
Hmm. What a pleasure I must have been to have around.
Diomedes was one of the young men of Ephesus. He was a year older than Archi, so just about my age, and one day he'd had enough of being called a dolt by Heraclitus. After class, when we were all pushing down the steps, he jostled me.
I stepped closer.
He laughed. 'What are you going to do, slave? Hit me?' He slapped me with his hand open. 'Slave. Go suck Archi's dick, there's a good slave. Is his mouth good for you, Archi dear? Is that why Heraclitus loves the boy so much?'
I shook with rage.
Archi laughed. 'You're a bad loser, Diomedes. And if you had fewer pimples, I imagine you could arrange to suck a few dicks yourself, instead of talking about it.' Archi had that knack – as his sister had – of biting worse than he was bitten.
Diomedes lunged at Archi and I tripped him. He fell down the steps in a tangle of chlamys and limbs, and was hurt. He screamed with pain and his slave, a silent boy named Arete, had to carry him home.
Archi laughed and we went home. But two days later, a big man with a beard asked after me at the fountain. One of the older slaves sent him to me, where I was holding court for the younger slaves. By that time I was quite the young cock among the little ones. No man can be a slave all the time.
The big man came up out of the dark with a companion of his ow
n size, and I knew they were trouble.
'Doru? Slave of Archilogos?' the big man asked.
'Who wants to know?' I asked.
He went for me. He had some training and he had a palm's width of reach on me, and his companion was already brushing the smaller boys out of his way to get behind me.
'Get Darkar!' I shouted at Kylix. He ran for the house and I took a punch. I got away from most of it, but the part I took staggered me, and the second blow caught my forehead.
I ducked and ran into the fountain house, but they were on me, and the slaves inside were as much an impediment to me as they were to the two thugs. One had a leather strap, and he kept hitting me with it. It stung, but it was a weapon for terrifying a cringing slave, not a weapon for hurting a warrior.
I took the strap across my kidneys and got my hand on one of the bad planks in the seats and ripped it free.
Now, mortal combat is an interesting experience, honey. I don't think I ever planned to get that plank. I ran inside the fountain house from instinct and terror. And only terror got that plank off its supports. Amazing what you can do when terror aids your muscles. But once it was in my hands, my daimon entered me, and I went from terror to attack in the blink of an eye.
I ripped it clear and hit one of the thugs right in the side of the head and he went down. His head made an ugly sound hitting the stone floor, too. Music to my ears, and the killer was loose.
The other man grunted and hit me, a light, glancing blow on my arm muscles, but perhaps the twentieth blow I had taken. He was wearing me down.
I feinted and swung my unhandy club, but he was under it and he got an elbow in my gut. I stamped a foot on his instep and we were down in the muck that lay over the stones. I hit my elbow so badly going down that my left arm was numb, then he got my head under his arm and hit me two or three times, hard enough to break my nose – again – and the next shot almost put me out.
But I was a killer, not a victim. I grabbed his balls and tried to rip them off and he screamed. He thought that he had me, with that headlock. I got his balls and I dug my thumb in while I ripped, and he screamed like a woman in childbirth.
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