Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [115]
Archi took me aside after the muster. ‘You’ve got to stop talking so much,’ he said. ‘You’ll take the spirit out of us! Sometimes I regret that you are free. You cannot speak to the first men of the city as if they were simpletons.’
I shrugged. ‘Archi, they are fools, and men are going to die. I have fought in a phalanx. None of these men have. I should be in the front rank.’
Aristides had his helmet perched on his brow. He was leaning on his spears, listening to us, and then he came over. He glanced at Agasides and spat. ‘You were there when your father stopped the Spartans?’ he asked.
I nodded. ‘I was there,’ I said. I didn’t mention that I had been a psilos throwing rocks.
He nodded. ‘You should be in command, then. These children,’ and he nodded to Archi, ‘will die like sacrificed goats if we face the Medes.’
Archi blushed. ‘I will stand my ground,’ he said.
Aristides shrugged. ‘You’ll die alone then,’ he said.
I went back to the house and spent hours putting a pair of ravens over the nasal of my helmet. I softened the worked metal by annealing it, and then I had to cut my punches shorter to use them from inside the bowl of the helmet, but the work came along nicely enough. Sitting on a low stool at the anvil, tapping away at my work, alone in the shed, I was safe from the anger that had followed me from the muster.
I had started putting a band of olive leaves at the brow when the light from the doorway was cut off.
‘I’m working!’ I called without turning my head.
‘So I see,’ Heraclitus said. He came in, and I stood hurriedly.
‘Stay where you are. I thought I would find you here.’ He looked around, examined my practice pieces. ‘You seem infatuated with ravens,’ he said with a smile.
‘My family calls itself the “Corvaxae”,’ I said. ‘The Crows.’
‘Ah! And why is that?’ he asked.
I told him the story of the ravens and the Daidala, and then I told him about my sister’s black hair, and how my father had always put the raven on his work.
Philosopher that he was, he wanted to see the metal worked, so I punched an olive leaf from inside the helmet and then made the work finer and neater by working it from the outside. I showed him how the work made the bronze harder.
He watched me anneal the back of the crown, and he reminded me of old Empedocles, the priest of Hephaestus, when he commented on the bronze tube that I used to raise the heat of the forge fire.
‘I have seen the fire and the metal together before,’ he said. ‘I suppose that I already knew that fire softens and work hardens.’ He smiled. Then he frowned. ‘With iron, fire hardens.’
I shook my head. ‘You are the wisest man I know, but no smith! Fire softens iron. To make it hard, you quench it in vinegar when it is hot.’
‘It is fire that is the agent,’ he said. ‘The agent of change is always fire.’
I could hardly argue with that.
He looked at the new leaves around the brow of the helmet. ‘You won the olive wreath at the games at Chios?’ he asked.
I smiled with pride. ‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘Now I will wear them for ever.’
He turned my work this way and that, and I explained planishing to smooth and harden the metal. And then I showed him how I melted the bronze and poured it on slate. He played with the bronze tube, just as Empedocles had, and blew through it, making the fire leap, and he laughed with joy.
‘All things are an equal exchange with fire, and fire for all things,’ he said. ‘Look at how you use the charcoal to make the fire, and the fire melts the bronze. You merely trade the charcoal for the heat, the way men at the docks change gold for a cargo.’
I nodded, because that made sense to me.
‘So it is with anger and with war,’ he said. ‘Anger is to men what fire is to your forge. And if we eradicate that anger, much might follow.’
I shrugged.
He took me by the shoulder. ‘You are full of anger,’ he said. ‘Anger gives strength, but it comes at the price of soul. Do you know what I am saying?’
I said yes – like a boy. In fact,