Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [27]
My sister had changed. She was seven, and sharp-tongued, busy teaching her elders their business. She had a fine pottery-and-cloth doll from the east that she treasured. She sat in the sun and told me stories of her precious doll Cassandra, and I listened gravely.
My brother worked the forge and resented it, but his body was filling out. He already looked like a man – or at least, he looked like a man to me. He wasn’t interested in anything I could tell him, so I left him alone. But on my second evening, he gave me a cup he’d made – a simple thing with no adornment, but the lip was well turned and the handle well set.
‘Pater put in the rivets,’ he admitted. Then, with a shrug, ‘I can probably do better now.’ He frowned, and looked away.
I loved it. I imagined drinking with my own bronze cup by a stream, up on the mountain. ‘Hephaestus bless you, brother!’ I said.
‘So you like it?’ he asked. Suddenly he was my brother again. The next day was like the old days and the resentment was gone, so that I was able to show him a better way to fling a javelin and he loved it, and he took me into the shop and showed me how he raised a simple bowl. We’d come a long way as a family, when my brother could work a sheet of carefully pounded-out copper without permission from Pater. In fact, Pater came in, looked at his work and ruffled his hair. Then he turned to me.
‘How are your letters, boy?’ he asked. ‘Your mother claims you can read.’
Odd how fast the mind works when fear comes in. For one moment, I thought that I would impress him – and then I thought that perhaps that would be an error, because my days on Mount Cithaeron would end, and there would be no more rabbit hunts in the dawn. And in that one burst of thought, I understood how much I had become separated from the world of the forge.
But, of course, the desire to please Pater won out.
‘I can read the Iliad, Pater,’ I said. ‘And write all my letters.’
Pater handed me a piece of charcoal and a flat board he whitewashed and used for designs. ‘Write for me. Write, “This cup is of Miltiades and Technes made him”.’
I thought for a moment, and then, somewhat daring, I changed the words so that I needed only two.
I wrote in a clear hand, like a good craftsman. I knew that Pater would engrave the words if mine were good enough. Two words – Greek is a splendid language for ownership. ‘OF-MILTIADES BY-TECHNES’, I wrote.
Pater examined it. He could read, albeit slowly. Then he smiled.
My brother winked at me, because we could count those smiles on our fingers, they were so few and so valuable.
‘Mmm,’ he said. He nodded, then scribed it on copper – twice, to be sure. Then he put it on a cup he had, around the base. He used a very small chisel – a new tool, and clearly expensive, with a fine handle – to work the letters deeply. Chalkidis and I watched together until he was done.
‘Chalkidis pounded the bronze to sheet,’ Pater said. ‘I made the cup. You provided the letters.’ He nodded, obviously satisfied. ‘He will like this.’
Pater had a standing commission, making armour and fancy tableware for Miltiades. Pater wasn’t alone – Miltiades bought Draco’s wagons almost as fast as he could build them. They might have asked themselves why an Athenian aristocrat didn’t buy these things closer to home, but they didn’t.
Mater did. She mentioned it at least twice a day.
‘Your father is rushing to his doom,’ she said. ‘Miltiades is as far beyond your father as he is beyond – me.’
Sober, Mater’s intelligence was piercing and cruel. Sadly, the gods made her so that she was only happy when she was lightly drunk – witty, flirtatious, clever and social. But sober she was Medea, and dead drunk she was Medusa.
I read to her, and she lent me her book of poems and said that she would come and visit. ‘I like what I hear of your Calchas,’ she said. ‘Has he made love to you yet?’
She was born