Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [99]
‘I’m called Doru,’ I said. ‘Your sister’s my guest-friend. Sit at the fire and drink some wine, if it pleases you.’
Pretty good, eh? You know, honey, sometimes we make up these speeches later to sound better to bards like your friend, but I’d had the right amount of wine that night – enough to loosen my tongue and not enough to clog it up, eh?
Stephanos grinned. ‘Guest-friend, eh?’ he said. He laughed. ‘You must be a gentleman, sir. No Chian fisherman would ever have a “guest friend”.’
He grunted when he tasted the wine. ‘Good stuff. Sorry, lord. I guess you are a gent and I’m making an ass of myself.’
No one had ever called me lord in all my life. ‘Stephanos, I was born a farmer in far-off Boeotia and I’ve been a slave for years. Just freed. No lords here, unless my master Archi comes back.’
Then he slapped my back and laughed – he laughed quite a bit, a deep, throaty laugh that made everyone else want to laugh, too. Ares, he was big! And he introduced his two friends – oar friends, the men who sat below him in his spot in his lord’s ship. I don’t remember their names. I know where they died, and I’ll tell that part when I get to it. But they were good men, and good companions, and I’m sorry I’ve forgotten them. Here’s a sip of wine to their shades.
I hate it when I forget names, honey. The names are all we have, and all that ever gets remembered. Now I’m a lord, and while I live, every son of a bitch in the Chersonese will fear me and know my name. But when I die – who will remember me? Who will know the name of Arimnestos?
By the ravens of Apollo, pay me no attention. Fucking maudlin old man. Too much wine. What was I saying? Aye, it was a good evening. The night I met Stephanos.
We ended up all curled together around the fire. Archi never came back that night, but there were a dozen or so of us, and one of the local girls ran off and came back with a bundle of straw – she’d been selling it all day, she said – and we lay on the straw like chicks in a nest and slept, woke and talked, and slept. Melaina was her name, I learned from hearing Stephanos chide her for sleeping next to me.
‘You’ll wake up with his dick in your arse,’ he said, and laughed. That’s what passed for a sense of humour, on Chios. They thought we all loved boys. Or pretended to think that.
I woke with the dawn. Melaina’s hair smelled like fish. She snuggled her hips against me and whispered that I was not allowed to move. But I had to get up and I was embarrassed by the, mmm, projection I had grown, but she just laughed, not even awake, and told me that if I had to piss, I should piss for her, too, so she could go on sleeping.
Only when I was well away from our fire, pissing in the sand, did I realize that the games were to start in a matter of hours – perhaps less, as games always began with the sun – and I had been awake most of night. I blessed Lord Apollo that good company had kept me from drinking a foolish amount.
I went back to the fire and warmed up while I built it up. All the slaves were asleep. Then I oiled myself. Archi was nowhere to be seen. I was pretty sure Stephanos had mentioned wrestling, so I woke him.
‘Are you in the games?’ I asked.
‘Mother fuck!’ he said, or words to that effect, and rolled out of his cloak. ‘You are a good man,’ he said. ‘Can you spare some oil? I can’t run home and get back in time – the foot race is first.’
So I oiled him, and we went up the beach together. In those days, men didn’t compete naked, like fools. We wore loincloths, and I had to give him my spare. Then we ran. He had long legs but no training.
We got to the crowd just in time to catch the second heat of the two-stade race. I won – not easily, but I had his measure from the run up the beach and all the other competitors were local boys