Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [17]
‘Their wives are lonely whether they march or not,’ Hilarion added. ‘Maybe while they march to save us, I’ll just slip over the isthmus and visit a few of them.’
Pater spoke for the first time. ‘Hilarion,’ he said softly. He met the younger man’s eyes, and Hilarion dropped his.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
Pater walked into the middle of them. ‘My sense of what you say,’ he began, ‘is that you all support the idea of finding ourselves a foreign friend.’
They looked at each other. Then Epictetus stood and emptied his cup. ‘That’s the right of it,’ he said.
‘But none of us knows what will suit us – Athens or Sparta or Corinth – or perhaps Megara.’ Pater shrugged. ‘We’re a bunch of Boeotian farmers. Epictetus here has at least been to Attica, and Draco’s been to the Peloponnese.’ He looked around. ‘Who would want to be our friend?’
Epictetus winced, but said nothing.
‘If we trained harder, our men could beat the Thebans!’ said Myron’s son, a fire-breather called Dionysius. ‘And then we’d have no need of these foreigners.’
Myron put a hand on his son’s shoulder. The boy was only just old enough to take his stand, and hadn’t been there for the defeat. ‘Boy, when they bring five thousand against our one thousand,’ he said, ‘there’s no amount of training that will help us. No man here cares a tinker’s damn how many we kill – only that we win.’
The older men nodded agreement. The Iliad was a fine story for children, but Boeotian farmers know just what war brings – burned crops, raped daughters and death. The glory is fleeting, the expense immense and the effect permanent.
They talked more, but that’s how I remember it – the day the idea was born. In fact, it was just grumbling. We all hated Thebes, but they weren’t hurting us any.
Epictetus stayed to dinner, though. And he offered to carry the cream of Pater’s work over the mountains to Athens – and back, if it didn’t sell. And Pater agreed. Then Epictetus commissioned a cup. He’d clearly seen the priest’s cup and wanted one for himself.
‘A cup I can drink from, in the fields or at home,’ he said.
‘What do you want on it?’ Pater asked.
‘A man ploughing a field,’ Epictetus said. ‘None of your gods and satyrs. A good pair of oxen and a good man.’
‘Twenty Athenian drachmas,’ Pater said. ‘Or for nothing, if you carry my goods to Athens.’
Epictetus shook his head. ‘Twenty drachmas is what you’re worth,’ he said. ‘And I’ll carry your goods anyway. If I take it as a gift, I owe you. If I pay you, you owe me.’ That’s the kind of man he was.
Pater worked like a slave for the rest of the summer, making finer things than were his wont. He made ten platters, the kind gentlemen served feasts on, and he made more cups, including the fanciest of the lot, with a ploughman, for Epictetus. And he made a Corinthian helmet – simple in design but perfect in execution. Even in the summer of my seventh year, I knew perfection in metal when I saw it.
Pater had no patience in him to teach the young, but he let me put it on my head. He laughed. ‘You’ll be a big man, Arimnestos,’ he said. ‘But not yet.’
He made bronze knives for me and for my brother, fine ones with some work on the backbone of the blade and horn scales on either side of the grip.
I worked like a slave that summer, because we were poor and we had just Bion’s family as slaves – and Bion was far too skilled to waste his time putting air on the fire or punching holes in leather, or any of the other donkey work. And though my brother was too small to plough, he ploughed anyway, with help from Bion’s son Hermogenes. Together they made a man.
Occasionally men like Myron would appear out of the air and take a turn at the plough, or repair a wheel, or perhaps sow a field. We had good neighbours.
When I wasn’t in the forge, I was in the fields too. I loved that farm. Our land was at the top of a hill – a low hill, but it gave a view from the house. In the paved yard, where men stood to talk, you could see mighty Cithaeron rising like a slope-shouldered god, and you could see the walls of our city just across a little valley. Up on Cithaeron,