Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [9]
‘I must have the only clean forge in all Hellas,’ he said to the priest.
The priest laughed. ‘You took that wound fighting us last year,’ he said. He pointed at Pater’s leg.
‘Aye,’ Pater allowed. He was not a man given to long speeches.
‘Front rank?’ the priest asked.
Pater pulled his beard. ‘You were there?’
The priest nodded. ‘I close the first file for my tribe,’ he said. It was a position of real honour – the priest was a man who knew his battles.
‘I’m the centre man in the front rank,’ Pater said. He shrugged. ‘Or I was.’
‘You held us a good long time,’ the Theban said. ‘And to be honest, I knew your device – the raven. Apollo’s raven for a smith?’
My father grinned. He liked the priest – a small miracle in itself – and that smile made my life better. ‘We’re sons of Heracles here. I serve Hephaestus and we’ve had the raven on our house since my grandfather’s grandfather came here.’ He kept grinning, and just for a moment he was a much younger man. ‘My father always said that the gods were sufficiently capricious that we needed to serve a couple at a time.’
That was Pater’s longest sentence in a year.
The priest laughed. ‘I should be getting back,’ he said. ‘It’ll be dark by the time I see the gates of Thebes.’
Pater shook his head. ‘Let me relight the fire,’ he said. ‘I’ll make you a gift and that will please the god. Then you can eat in my house and sleep on a good couch, and go back to Thebes rested.’
The priest bowed. ‘Who can refuse a gift?’ he said.
But Pater’s face darkened. ‘Wait,’ he said, ‘and see what it is. The lame god may not return my skill to me. It has been too long.’
The fire was laid. The priest went out into the sunshine and took from his girdle a piece of crystal – a beautiful thing, as clear as a maiden’s eye, and he held it in the sun. He called my brother and I followed him, as younger brothers follow older brothers, and he laughed. ‘Two for the price of one, eh?’ he said.
‘Is it magic, lord?’ my brother asked.
The priest shook his head. ‘There are charlatans who would tell you so,’ he said. ‘But I love the new philosophy as much as I love my crafty god. This is a thing of making. Men made this. It is called a lens, and a craftsman made it from rock crystal in a town in Syria. It takes the rays of the sun and it burnishes them the way your father burnishes bronze, and makes them into fire. Watch.’
He placed a little pile of shavings of dry willow on the ground, then he held the lens just so. And before we were fidgeting, the little pile began to smoke.
‘Run and get me some tow from your mother and her maidens,’ the priest said to me, and I ran – I didn’t want to miss a moment of this philosophy.
I hurried up the steps to the exhedra and my sister opened the door. She was five, blonde and chubby and forthright. ‘What?’ she asked me.
‘I need a handful of tow,’ I said.
‘What for?’ she asked.
We were never adversaries, Penelope and I. So I told her, and she got the tow and carried it to the priest herself, and he was tolerant, flicking her a smile and accepting the tow with a bow as if she were some lord’s kore serving at his altar. And all the time his left hand, holding the lens, never moved.
The light fell in a tiny pinpoint too bright to watch, and the willow shavings smoked and smoked.
‘I could blow on it,’ I said.
The priest looked at me strangely. Then he nodded. ‘Go ahead,’ he said.
So I lay down in the dust and blew on the shavings very gently. At first