Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [20]
Epictetus shrugged, but he was a happy man – a man who’d done another man an unanswerable favour. ‘Fifty drachmas of silver less an eighth cartage,’ he said. ‘I spent thirty of your profits on new material. It seemed like sense.’
Pater was kneeling in the copper like a boy playing in mud. ‘I owe you,’ he said.
Epictetus shrugged. ‘Time you made some money. You’re too good a man to starve. You know how to work, but not how to be rich.’ He held out a bag. ‘Three hundred and seventy-two silver drachmas after my cartage and all that copper.’ He nodded. ‘And there’s a man coming to see you about a helmet.’
‘From Athens?’ Pater didn’t seem to know what was being said, so he fixed on the idea that the man from Athens was coming. ‘Three hundred and seventy drachmas?’ he said.
He and Epictetus embraced.
That night, Mater and Pater sang together.
They were a remarkable couple, when sober and friends to each other. You’ll never credit this, Thugater, but you’ll find it hard enough when you are my age to look back and see your father and mother clearly, and if Apollo withholds his hand and Pluton grants fortune enough that I live to see you with children at your knee – why, then you’ll remember me only as an old man with a stick. Eh? But I love to remember them, that day. In later years – when I was far away, a slave – I would think of Pater dressed in his best, a chiton of oiled wool so fine that every muscle in his chest showed, and his neck, like a bull’s, and his head – he had a noble head – like a statue of Zeus, his hair all dark and curled. He always wore it long, in braids wrapped around the crown of his head when he was working. Later I understood – it was a warrior’s hairstyle, braids to pad his helmet. He was never just a smith.
And Mater, when sober – it is hard for a child to see his mother as beautiful, but she was. Men told me so all my childhood, and what is more embarrassing than other men finding your mother attractive? Her eyes were blue and grey, her nose straight, her face thin, her cheekbones high and hollow – I often wonder how many Mother Heras in the temple were carved to look like Mater. She would come down in a dress of Tyrian-dyed wool with embroidery – not her own, Athena knows – and she was trim and lithe and above all, to me, sober.
The next day, Pater freed Bion. He offered him a wage to stay, and sent for the priest from Thebes to raise Bion to the level of a free smith. Bion and Pater dickered over the price of his family and Pater settled on two years’ work at the forge. Bion accepted and they spat on their hands and shook.
The following day, Pater came to me where I was sweeping. ‘Time to go to school,’ he said. He didn’t smile. In fact, he looked nervous. ‘I’m – sorry, boy. Sorry I beat you so hard for a drachma knife.’ He handed it back to me – he’d confiscated it and the bronze one he’d made for me. ‘I made you a scabbard,’ he said.
Indeed he had. A bronze scabbard with a silver rivet decoration. It was a wonderful thing – finer than anything I owned. ‘Thank you, Pater,’ I mumbled.
‘I swore an oath that if we made it through the summer . . .’ He paused and looked out of the forge. ‘If we made it through the summer, I’d take you up to the hero’s shrine and pay the priest to teach you.’
I nodded.
‘I mean to keep my word, but I want you to know that – you’re a good – worker.’ He nodded. ‘So – put your knife round your neck. Let’s see it. Now go and put on a white chiton as if you were going to a festival, and kiss your mother.’
Mater looked at me as if I’d been dragged in by the dogs, but then she smiled. Today she looked to me like a queen. ‘You have it in you to look like a lord,’ she said. ‘Remember this.’ She held up her mirror, a fine silver one that hadn’t been sold while we were poor, with Aphrodite combing her hair on the back. I saw myself. It wasn’t the first time, but I still remember being surprised at how tall I was, and how much I really