Long War 04 - The Great King

by Cameron, Christian

  The old gate had been completely rebuilt. I rang the small bronze bell – my own work.

  A slave opened the gate.

  I didn’t know Simon’s sons at all – I’d seen them a few times in public, but never long enough to leave a mark in my head – despite which, I had to guess that the three big men in the stone-flagged yard were my cousins. I dismounted – there’s nothing more aggressive than a man on horseback. My friends all emulated me, dismounting by the water trough where Draco and Diokles and Hilarion and old Epictetus used to sit and drink wine.

  My cousins stood in a brooding silence, offering nothing.

  I’d rehearsed a few lines, but none of them came to me. But when I reached to hoist my daughter down, I acted. I held her briefly in the air. ‘This is my daughter Euphonia,’ I said. ‘I brought her to show I mean peace.’

  Simonides – the man in the middle, and clearly the oldest – raised his chin. ‘Then you are welcome, cousin.’

  I stepped forward with my daughter in my left arm. ‘You have done well with the farm,’ I said.

  ‘We found nothing but a ruin,’ he said.

  Achilles, the second brother, glowered. ‘All our work,’ he said.

  Ajax, the youngest, shrugged. He was a very handsome young man. ‘They all said you were dead.’ He smiled – alone of his brothers. ‘Well, all except the mad fuck on the mountain.’ He wore a sword, and his right hand was very near the hilt.

  I put my daughter down.

  ‘You brought a great many men,’ Simonides said. ‘I gather we are dispossessed?’

  Achilles looked around, as if counting the numbers. His older brother hissed something at him, and he fell back a step.

  They were ready to fight.

  ‘I’m here in peace, and I’m not here to seize the farm,’ I said, and suddenly I was weary of the whole thing. ‘My mother is buried here, and I will always love this place.’ I raised an eyebrow. ‘May I be honest, cousins? I could order you off, and I think the town would agree. I could buy it from you – this, and ten farms like it.’

  ‘Not for sale,’ bellowed Ajax.

  ‘Will you shut up?’ Simonides said. ‘That’s not what he’s about at all.’

  I looked them over. Achilles looked dangerous – dangerously stupid. Ajax looked handsome and a little shifty, but then, I was not predisposed to love any of them. Simonides was the spitting image of my pater as a young man.

  And we are all Corvaxae – the black-haired men. Sometimes, blood is a little thicker than hate.

  ‘I can buy another farm,’ I said. ‘But I do not really want a farm. I’m a soldier. And a shipowner.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ Achilles snapped. ‘Say it and get out.’

  Andronicus – remember, he was quite an important local man – stepped forward. ‘Simonides, you have made a good impression in Plataea since you arrived,’ he said. ‘But your cousin here led us to Marathon, and his word will carry any council. Courtesy here would be your best path.’

  Simonides took his brother by the arm and hissed, ‘Shut up.’

  ‘I agree that – as you are alive – it is your farm.’ Simonides crossed his arms over his chest. ‘But I want to hear you agree that we’ve done all the work.’

  ‘I’ll do better,’ I said. I took out a small scroll. ‘There. It is yours in law.’

  I wondered whether my pater would send the Furies to pursue me. But really – I had enough enemies, and I didn’t need a farm.

  Then – and only then – did Simonides remember his manners and send a slave for wine.

  The rest of that day was spent in Plataea. I met and embraced a hundred men – starting, of course, with my first true friend – Hermogenes. With Tiraeus, he had purchased the land across from Heron the Ironsmith and started a small bronze smithery. They had done well enough, but they made only small items – strap ends, small bells, buckles, eating knives – because they were poor and the land purchase took all their money.

  The smithery was too small and too ill built. Because of that, they didn’t get work that they should have – men like Draco took their work to Thebes or Thespiae. And Styges worked too far away – he admitted it himself – making war gear in a low shed by the Asopus, almost to Eleuthra. I told him I wanted him in the shop.

  So after I exchanged signs and told them that I had been raised to master in Sicily, I went next door and offered four hundred drachma in gold darics to the widow of a wine merchant to sell me her house. And then I did the same on the other side.

  It is great fun to be able to play the great lord. I spent money like water for a few days, and while my daughter played in the smithy, I hired workmen and was very bossy indeed. I ordered the badly built smith-shed torn down, and I ordered a stone building put up in its place, filling both lots. I had the wine merchant’s house built into one end, and the other house torn down – it was abandoned – and rebuilt. I ordered equipment – anvils, bellows – sent for a carpenter for benches and toolboxes – and when I was done each day, I rode back to stay with Antigonus. I endured Brasidas’s cold looks – he felt it was all helot work – and Andronicus took me aside to say that I should buy farms. Like an aristocrat.

  But I was having a fine time.

  Myron asked me – one of those days – if I was home to stay.

  I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said. ‘But I want a home here. My pater had a foot in the smithy and a foot on the farm. I’m not interested in farming. But I’ll have a foot in the smithy and another on a ship.’ I shrugged. ‘I’d appreciate your help in finding a house.’

  Myron nodded. ‘You are still the polemarch,’ he said. ‘It would be good to have you here. There are new . . . men in this city. And every time Athens sneezes, we catch cold. We live in . . . difficult times.’

  ‘What new men?’ I asked, and Myron looked away.

  ‘We lost men at Marathon and before,’ he said. ‘Some of the slaves Athens sent us are good men, and some are not. And many Thebans have purchased land. Some of them are good men, and some are . . . Thebans.’

  I brought Styges to the building site. He and Hermogenes were not always the best of friends – not all of one’s favourite people can be made to love one another – but I reconciled them to the notion that it was my money going into the smithy. The tool shed was the size of a barn, and copied those I’d seen in Sicily and in Corinth – chimneys, hearths and bellows on the ground floor, lots of light, and space for ten men to work. In the second week, the new bellows came over the mountain from Athens – when you pay silver, you can get things in a miraculous hurry – and the new benches went in along the wall with a row of shuttered windows so that the whole shop smelled of fresh-sawn pine and oak. I had all the shutters painted bright red, and the doors, and I put the raven of the Corvaxae over the door in jet-black ironwork.

  Heron was delighted. ‘A place that big will draw business from Thespiae and Thebes,’ he crowed. And he began to expand his own shop. Ironsmiths and bronzesmiths are not in competition for anything but eating knives, so it was fine that we were co-located.

  Old Tiraeus laughed and watched the sheds being built. ‘This is the second time you’ve saved me,’ he said. ‘I can work the bronze, but I can’t make money.’

  The truth was, Hermogenes was the same. A fine worker, and a gifted hand with the hammer – but not a man who could imagine what would sell, nor who could keep the bins stocked with ingots of bronze, or direct a dozen apprentices in pouring the sheet or pounding it out long before it was needed.

  Styges was, though. On the battlefield and in the shop, he was a thinker. And so, while the new shutters went into the windows and the stucco dried on the outside and the two Athenian carpenters put their great pedal-powered bellows into the forge-fire hearths, I took my ‘associates’ out to dinner without Brasidas and his aristocratic notions. We sat and drank Plataean wine and ate oil on our bread and generally acted like the Boeotian bumpkins we really were.

  I put Styges in charge of the sho
p, despite him being the youngest. Both older men frowned. But in the end, it was my money, and they agreed with no good grace despite the wine and the anchovies.

  Men are men. You cannot tell a master smith that he should work for a younger man – even when Tiraeus himself admitted he lacked the skills to make and keep the silver.

  At the end of the second week, the houses were done – rebuilt. One for Hermogenes and his wife, and one for Tiraeus and Styges, until one or both found a mate. I purchased them four slaves, and we all spent a day in the shop, playing with the bellows.

  At the end of the second week, I sent for Empedocles, and that evening, riding home to Thespiae, I met a silversmith on the road. He was just come from a pilgrimage to Delphi. I didn’t know him, but he proved to be a cousin of Diokles and quite a young man.

  The next morning, he showed up at the stone smithery, and by the end of the day, he had his tools laid out on a bench and was quickly using up his store of silver making trinkets for the pilgrims who came to the temple of Hera – mostly women, and prone to buy jewellery. But his presence made Styges excited, because now he had someone to work silver, he could make fancier armour.

  Myron’s friend Timaeas offered me any of five lots for my own house, and I bought the house across from Myron’s. I spent the money from my tin on that house – new everything, from slaves to statues to household gods. It had two things few houses in Plataea had ever seen – an in-town stable for four horses, and a water trough with flowing water. The house was big and spacious – too big for one man and his small daughter, no matter how rich. But I had the walls painted by professionals, and I spent money – more money – on horses, on silver plates, on good pottery and grain storage and then on grain.

  It was like playing house, with real money.

  I tell all this, as if all I did was concern myself with buildings, but in the main, what I did was play with my daughter and get to know her, and write letters to Jocasta and to Cimon and to Phrynicus asking for help putting her into the summer dances at Brauron, and before the late flowers were past budding and the first barley crop was in, I had a letter from Jocasta, wife of Aristides, informing me that my daughter had a place in the New Moon as a Little Bear, and that her husband was to be put on trial.

  He is too proud to ask your help – but I well remember what you did for Miltiades. Themistocles will stop at nothing to see my husband in exile, and I cannot bear it. Arimnestos, bring your daughter to the temple and come and see what can be done for Aristides, and I will be forever in your debt.

  Jocasta

  Unlike Gorgo, and the other Spartan women, who lived very much in public, it was almost unheard of for an Athenian woman to write a letter to a man – but Jocasta had a good head on her shoulders, and she had seized the excuse of my writing about my daughter (women’s business) to make her plea.

  I knew that things must be desperate indeed.

  Cimon’s answer came the very next day, and the tone of desperation was the same.

  Of course we can arrange for your daughter to be placed at Brauron. But if you were to see fit to accompany her, you might find yourself requested to perform a miracle, as Aristides is threatened with ostracism.

  I felt very wise, what with having made peace with Simon’s sons and having brought some of my prosperity home to Plataea. Three weeks after my arrival, I had every mason in the town at work; the roofer was working from dawn to dusk, there were whole convoys of donkeys bringing goods from Athens, Corinth and even hated Thebes, and the new smithy rang with the music of the hammer on the anvil. My oarsmen – as well as Brasidas and Alexandros – had been formally invested as citizens at my behest. I helped Brasidas purchase a farm and the slaves to run it – never was there a less interested farmer.

  I thought that it was foolish of Themistocles to continue the quarrel with Aristides – just when we needed both men for the war with Persia. I was in a fine mood, and I prepared my daughter to travel over the mountain to Attica while preparing in my mind the speeches of reconciliation I planned for Athens.

  On the summer feast of Herakles, old Empedocles came and blessed the new building and the whole forge, even including the silversmith in his prayers, and he kindled all our forge fires. He had a Theban journeyman with him, and the young man beamed at everything he saw and helped the old man with the rites.

  Then I made a cup. It had been two years since I had worked, and yet the power of the god flowed through me and I made a fine cup – with a flat bottom and sloped sides, and silver rivets on the handle, and the image of a priest blessing an anvil. And Empedocles laughed and then cried and complained that he was an old man, and we all drank a great deal. But I made a second cup and gave it to my daughter, and she shook her head.

  ‘My uncle Andronicus can’t make anything like this,’ she said.

  ‘He’s an aristocrat,’ I said.

  And the next day, while my new slaves we repacking my new donkeys in my new yard of my new house, yet another messenger came, from the Agiad King of Sparta.

  The truth? I rather looked forward to taking the heralds to Susa.

  You must know I’d never been. But I had been to Sardis and I knew enough Persian to get good service and good food. I knew enough Persian aristocrats to expect to have friends at the Great King’s court.

  So I delayed my trip to Athens by a day so that I could say a proper goodbye – to Hermogenes and Styges and Tiraeus, to Myron and Draco – but most of all, to my sister and her husband. I arranged for my daughter to be retrieved after her time at the temple of Artemis. I promised to return.

  ‘How long?’ Pen asked. ‘You only just came home!’

  I nodded and looked out of the window. ‘Look for me in the spring,’ I said.

  ‘A year!’ my sister wailed.

  My daughter clung to me.

  I shrugged and my brother-in-law, who clearly felt I’d endured enough, said, ‘My dears, he’s been commanded by the King of Sparta!’

  ‘I don’t particularly care if he’s been commanded by Hera or Zeus!’ my sister said, but she relented, asked forgiveness for her blasphemy, and sent me on the road with her blessings.

  I suppose I should have worried that Idomeneaus did not come out to wish me well. I prayed at the shrine and Bellerophon told me that the mad Cretan was hunting.

  My six-year-old daughter was going to the temple of Artemis, and I was going a hundred times farther, to the court of the Great King. But she had six mules behind her, all heavily laden, and I had one.

  And we stopped at the high altar on Kitharon, and I saw that someone had been making black offerings. I could guess which of my cousins was not yet done with our feud. But in my new-found wisdom, I was immune to such petty concerns. I brushed the bits of black wool aside and left my daughter to start a fire on the ash altar with her new hero, Brasidas – who would not worship a Spartan, at age six? Alexandros and I ran the mountaintop trails until we killed a deer. We didn’t see Idomeneaus. We brought the deer’s corpse back and opened it and burned the fat and the thigh bones on my daughter’s fire. She had never sacrificed there, and it was a great adventure for her, and afterwards we all ate fresh venison.

  She threw up.

  Parenthood.

  But in the morning, we went down the mountain into Attica, and the world was waiting for us.

  I took Euphonia to see her grandfather. She was very excited to get to Brauron and she rued every day lost, sure that everyone else would be friends and she’d miss everything fun. But her grandfather – her mother’s father – was a fine gentleman, still delighted with me. I was never asked where I had been for the last six years, and I won his heart by telling him that I’d stood next to the King of Sparta during the sacrifices at the Olympic games. And he loved his granddaughter. She was showered with presents – quite wide eyed, and yet perfectly willing to have more.

  We stayed two days, and he agreed to fetch her from Brauron and keep her until Leda or Penelope came for her. My second night there I
drank too much and cried for my daughter’s mother, whom I truly loved. Her father was solicitous, and a little afraid of my grief.

  But grief is only that. And it is better than emptiness or anger.

  Ah, my daughter! You yourself learned the sacred dances in the groves and hills of Brauron, but some of your guests may not know the place.

  Brauron is just a few stades south of Marathon on the same coast. And how that coast brought back memories for me. We met with Phrynicus and his wife – mounted on mules – just west of the city and we kept going, as a ‘stop’ in Athens could have embroiled us in politics very quickly. I had enemies in the city, among the Alcmaeonidae. The richest family in the world. But it was a great pleasure to revisit the days of our heroism together – how men love to talk about a shared adventure, my daughter! We lied and we lied – much as I’m doing with you now.

  Hah, the looks on your faces.

  At any rate, we crossed the mountains and rode across the great plain of Attica, and stayed the night in a fine house – that of a friend of both my father-in-law and of Cimon, and no friend of Phrynicus. A countryside aristocrat who swore that he had never in his life been to Athens. He was of the cavalry class, and he felt that the city was rotten with corruption. He all but fawned on Brasidas, asking his opinion on everything from spear fighting to the education of his son. And the man – Peisander – had a girl just seven years old going off to Brauron, as arranged by Cimon, and so we all rode off together the next day – Phrynicus swallowing his political views at every turn in the road, I can promise you.

  It is hardly central to my tale, but I’ll bore you with it a little, to help you understand how Greeks actually dealt with the coming of the Persians. Peisander had stood in his tribe’s front rank at Marathon. He was a proven man – brave, and patriotic.

  He fairly worshipped Aristides.

  And yet, as we rode down the last ridge and saw the sea, he turned to me and shook his head. ‘You are far richer than I – and a friend of the King of Sparta. And yet I understand from your silence that you support this foolishness – this war with the Great King. How can we hope to triumph?’