Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [111]
But the gods hate hypocrisy and hubris, as any history that is true will show. And murder – and incest. These are the laws of the gods. And there are laws we can only guess at – laws of hospitality, for example. They seem like god-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 Heraclitus 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.’
‘Heraclitus 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 accumulation 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 Heraclitus, and he answered them. He was contemptuous of women as a sex, 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 lust 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 gods, 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 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