Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [149]
I was old enough to know that loud assertions would only lose me the argument. But my temper was up. ‘I was in the front rank,’ I said, ‘and I was done fighting when the Carians ran. When I had killed three of them, my spear in their necks.’ I looked around the hall. ‘Any man who says that the Athenians or the Eretrians were the first to run – lies. And can meet my sword.’ That was the Cretan way, as I had discovered my first night on Crete, against Goras.
Aristagoras took my hand. ‘We should be friends – our argument causes the Persians to laugh at us.’ His words were sweet – but his eyes were full of hate. I had interrupted his performance. What a petty tyrant he was. Even now, my hate for him makes my hands shake.
‘How’s Briseis?’ I asked.
It must have been in my voice. He froze, his hand clasped in mine, his other hand on my elbow, and both of his hands tightened. Oh, she’s a bad girl, I thought. My smile must have been too knowing.
‘No man speaks of my wife in public,’ he hissed. Men around us looked at him curiously. His mask of benevolence was slipping.
‘Really?’ I asked. ‘Let go of my arm, my lord. Before I kill you.’ There – it was said, right out in public. He didn’t know me from before, the fool. My hand was on my fighting knife – we didn’t wear swords in the hall, but hung them on pegs, as the poet says.
Oh, the hate in his eyes. ‘You – you were Aristides’ butt-boy,’ he said in a gentle voice, as the recognition dawned. And then his expression changed, as he felt the prick of my dagger against the inside of his thigh, hidden from the other men in the hall.
‘Send my regards to Briseis,’ I said. In one push of the dagger, I could make her a widow.
And then she’d marry another nobleman. That was the way of the world, lass.
Aristagoras looked at me in disbelief. He was a coward in his soul, for all his posturing, and I could see the collapse in his eyes. He let go of my elbow and stepped back. I bowed slightly and dropped my blade on the couch behind me so other men would not see what had passed, and Aristagoras backed away quickly.
But Achilles liked him, or liked his ideas, or was simply too greedy to see the foolishness of what was proposed, and he promised three ships for the campaign against Cyprus, to be launched the next autumn.
Aristagoras sailed away. Then the war preparations started in earnest.
Men flocked to my teaching, and soon I was teaching my way of war in the agora, and I found that I was saying Calchas’s words and Heraclitus’s words together, as if they were one philosophy. And perhaps they are, at that. We danced, and we cut and thrust at billets of wood, and at each other.
The need for men – armoured men – drove Hephaestion the smith to distraction, and I began to spend more time with him. I was no smith, but I could make sheet out of an ingot, and none of his apprentices could.
In the agora, or at his shop, I spent a lot of time in the town. And the town was full of dangers.
The dangers all had to do with sex. Will I shock you, thugater? I wanted someone to share my bed, and Nearchos wanted to share my bed, but the two were in opposition. We were a balanced duality, as the Pythagoreans say. If I had taken a slave girl, Nearchos would have pouted for weeks – indeed, his father might have disowned me. Nearchos and his father had assumed that I would take Nearchos as a lover when he reached some level of heroic achievement that existed in their imaginations.
In fact, I was coming to like the boy, and by my second spring with them, he was my equal in most things. I had no idea whether he would stand in the battle line, but he was fast and strong and he could use his spear point to chip out his name in a billet of wood – a neat trick.
A year and more, I had lived like a Pythagorean, taking no lovers. To be honest, for a long time I had no interest, at least in part because I wanted no woman but Briseis. By the second spring in Crete, however, my body was becoming too much for me. The spring dances were all around me, the older men took younger men hunting, and