The Great King (24 page)

‘No – Pen – let her stay.’ I grinned at her. Brauron is the great temple of Artemis near Athens. Young girls – maidens from age six to age twelve – go there to learn the sacred dances – and they shoot bows and ride horses and probably giggle like fools. My sister had not been rich enough nor had she the connections. Andronicus’s sister Leda had, and she had been a ‘little bear’, as the girls were called – not once but three times. It was all very aristocratic and required an enormous donation of fabric and silver.

And friends in Athens. Phrynicus, the playwright – his relatives were priests at Brauron. I leaned back in my seat – women have much more comfortable quarters than men. ‘Yes,’ I said.

My daughter grinned her impish grin. ‘Really?’ she shrieked.

Pen glared at me. ‘If you plan to spoil her, do it when I’m not here to see it!’ she said, but Leda put an arm around her waist and nodded to me.

‘It’s a fine choice. She’s a beautiful girl and well born. Her grandfather – Euphonia’s father – can host her in Attica, and she’ll have Athenian friends.’

So the next day, I hoisted her on my lap on one of Andronicus’s better horses, and took Brasidas and Alexandros and Lysias and Ajax on other borrowed horses – and my brother-in-law himself. We wore fine cloaks and fine chitons and gold jewellery – well, Brasidas didn’t, but the rest of us did, even Bellerophon – and we rode slowly so as not to raise dust. We crossed the Asopus and ate a pleasant meal in the shade of the sanctuary trees at the temple of Hera. We drew a great deal of comment from my fellow Plataeans, and I met briefly with a very anxious Myron, who was delighted with what I told him. I had a scroll and he signed it.

Then we rode over the hill – to my father’s farm. I sent Hector – unarmed – to announce us.

He cantered back before we came to the fork. ‘Your cousin Simon is waiting for you,’ he said.

My daughter was delightful, chattering all the way and apparently unconcerned that my cousin might greet us with a shower of arrows. I was far more nervous. Twice, she leapt from my horse’s back to investigate things – once, a kitten in the road which needed a scratch, and again, to pick flowers.

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 shop, 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.