Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [62]
Here’s the difference between a slave and a companion. Slaves avoid work. To be a successful companion, you have to work hard. You have to anticipate your master’s needs and fulfil them. No one had to tell me this. I saw it in the way they all behaved.
The truth is that I liked him the moment I met him. And so I wanted to please him. That night, while the Persian lord flirted with Mistress, I went to Master and asked him for the money to buy the boy a lighter bow. He nodded.
‘Come with me,’ he said, and took me to Darkar, the steward, another Lydian.
‘Darkar is the man who controls this house,’ Master said. ‘I’m lucky he allows me to live here. Darkar, this young man is to be my son’s companion.’
I bowed to the steward. He nodded. He was a slave.
‘He will need money,’ Master said.
Darkar nodded, went into a storeroom and emerged with a purse. He handed it to me. ‘Fifty gold darics and some change,’ he said. ‘You will only be told once. If you steal, you’ll be sold. If you don’t steal, you’ll receive a bonus to put away towards your freedom. Understand?’
I nodded. Fifty darics was the price of a hundred slaves. Or a ship. And he said eleutheria, freedom, as if it was a certain thing. ‘Master, why do I need so much money?’ I asked the steward.
‘Never call me master, boy. This is your companion’s money. You but carry it for him, and watch it, and count it – treat it carefully, for they never will. Give me a good accounting, and I’ll speak well of you. My word caries weight, when it comes time for freedom.’
Freedom!
Of course, in my head, I wasn’t really a slave, so I looked at the purse and considered running for a ship.
Ionians. Too much money.
At any rate, the moment I had the purse in my hand, I ran off to the market and bought a good, lightweight bow. I paid well, almost half a daric, and I pocketed the change. What do you think? I knew that they couldn’t catch me. I put the change in a jar in the garden. And I had the bow on Archilogos’s bed when he awoke in the morning, and forty-nine golden darics left to show on my accounts.
The whole time that Artaphernes was with us, we shot until my fingers bled. That’s an expression you hear, but in our case, it was true. First you shoot until your fingertips swell, and after a while they hurt as if stung by ants and they turn bright red. But a pair of boys, each eager for praise and fearing the catcalls of the other, will go right on, until the fingers turn a darker colour, and then the abrasion of the bowstring will break the swollen flesh, and they bleed. And later, if you go back to shooting before the calluses grow, the scabs break and they bleed again. The bowstring of our bow had a brown spot at the draw point from our blood.
Archilogos never tired and never gave up. His whipcord body was proof against fatigue, and he would run and shoot, do lessons and shoot, go to the theatre and shoot. Anything to impress his hero. He’d learned a few lines of Persian poetry and he’d declaim them, hoping that the Persian would overhear.
The Persian had troubles enough without the adoration of the boy. First, it was obvious to me, after the sexual politics of the farm, that the Persian was deeply in love with Mistress, and that she toyed with him. But even that was of little moment next to the greater matters that surrounded us.
It was the years of the seventieth Olympiad. In Greece, the last of the great tyrants had gone and peace began to emerge from her nest. But in Ionia, the tyrants still held sway. Not law-givers, men who make good laws and then relinquish control. I speak here of strong warlords and aristocrats who aped Persian manners and ruled Ionia for their own benefit, not that of their cities.
Hippias, the tyrant of Athens, had been overthrown in my childhood. He had retreated to Sigeum in Asia, a city that his family, the Pisistratidae,