it.
Isokles pointed down the field. ‘Let’s have a run,’ he said. And they set the distances and were off, running for a while in a pack until the better runners grew bored and took off. They circled the field three times, a good distance, and finished in the yard of the gymnasium. Kineas was close to last and took some good-natured teasing about his legs, and then they headed for the baths.
Tired and clean, with a couple of bruises and a general sense of eudaimia, well-being that inevitably came to him from the gymnasium, Kineas walked beside Calchus. Diodorus had gone off with some younger men to see the market.
‘You could do well here,’ Calchus said suddenly. ‘They like you. This fighting you do — it’s no job for a man. In defence of your city, that’s different. But — a mercenary? You squander what the gods have given you. And one day some barbarian’s sword is in your gizzard, and there you are. Stay here, buy a farm. Take a wife. Isokles has a girl — she’s pretty enough, smart, a housekeeper. I’d put you up for citizenship after the festival of Herakles. By Zeus, they’d accept you today after that boxing.’
Kineas didn’t know what to say. It appealed. He’d liked the men. The citizens of Tomis were a good lot, provincial but not rustic, given to gross jokes and amateur philosophy. And all good sports. He shurgged. ‘I owe it to my men. They came here to join me.’ Kineas didn’t add that something in him looked forward to another campaign.
‘They can just as easily move on and take up service elsewhere. You are a gentleman, Kineas. You don’t owe them anything.’
Kineas frowned. ‘Most of them are gentlemen, Calchus.’
‘Oh, of course.’ Calchus waved dismissively. ‘But not any more. Not really. Perhaps Diodorus? Could be a factor, or your steward. And those Gauls — they should be slaves. They’d be happier as slaves.’ Calchus spoke with authority and finality.
Kineas frowned again and allowed himself to be distracted by a man lying in the street. He didn’t need to quarrel with his host. ‘A barbarian? ’ he asked, pointing.
The man in the street was plainly a barbarian. He wore trousers of leather and had filthy long hair hanging in plaits, and a leather jacket covered in a riot of colourful decoration, and he wore gold. His jacket had several gold ornaments, and showed spaces where other bangles had been removed. He had an earring in his ear. And a cap on his head like a Thracian.
And he stank of urine and vomit and bad sweat. They were almost on top of him. He wasn’t asleep — his eyes were open and unfocused.
Calchus looked at him with deep contempt. ‘A Scyth. Disgusting people. Ugly, stinking barbarians, no one can speak their language, and they don’t even make good slaves.’
‘I thought they were dangerous.’ Kineas looked at the drunk with interest. He imagined that at Olbia there would be a lot of Scyths, born to horseback, a dangerous enemy. This one didn’t look like a warrior.
‘Don’t believe it. They can’t hold wine, can’t speak, can’t really walk. Scarcely human. I’ve never seen one sober.’
Calchus walked on and Kineas followed him, albeit unwillingly. He wanted a better look, but Calchus was uninterested. Kineas looked back, and saw that the drunk was rising unsteadily to his feet. Then he toppled again, and Kineas followed Calchus around a corner and lost sight of the Scyth.
He heard a lot about Scyths at the symposium because he was the senior guest and he introduced the topic. The wine flowed; the inevitable flute girls and fish courses folllowed each other in the approved manner, and then the older men settled in to talk, moving their couches together so that the younger men could relish the more amorous of the flute girls with a degree of privacy. Eyeing a black-eyed girl, Kineas had a brief pang that he was now considered old enough to make conversation, but he pulled his couch to the side, and when he was asked, he suggested that they all tell him about the Scyths on the plains to the north.
Isokles took the pitcher of wine from a slave and looked at Kineas. ‘You’re not proposing we drink in the Scythian fashion? Unwatered wine?’
The young men yelled for it, but the older men held the day, and the wine was mixed at a sedate two waters to each measure of wine. While Calchus mixed the wine, Isokles looked thoughtful.
‘They’re barbarians, of course. Very hardy — they live on their horses. Herodotus has a lot to say about them. I have a copy at my house if you’d care to read it.’
‘Honoured,’ said Kineas. ‘We read Herodotus when we were boys, but I had no idea I’d end up here.’
‘The thing about them is that they fear nothing. They say they are the only free people on the earth, and that all the rest of us are slaves.’
Calchus snorted derisively. ‘As if anyone could mistake us for slaves.’
Isokles, one of the few men who seemed willing to risk Calchus’s displeasure, shrugged. ‘Deny it if you will. Anarchises — does that name mean something to you?’
Kineas felt as though he was back in school, sitting in the shade of a tree and getting interrogated on his reading. ‘Friend of Solon — a philosopher,’ he said.
‘A Scythian philosopher.’ Philokles spoke up from the end of the room. ‘A very plain — spoken man.’
A whisper of laughter honoured his pun.
‘Just the one.’ Isokles nodded at Philokles. ‘He told Solon that the Athenians were slaves to their city — slaves to the walls of the Acropolis.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Calchus. He started passing cups of wine around the circle of couches.
‘Oh, no, not nonsense, if I may.’ Philokles was leaning on his elbows, his long hair framing his face. ‘He meant that Greeks are slaves to their notions of safety — that our incessant need to protect ourselves robs us of the very freedom we so often prate about.’
Isokles nodded. ‘Well put.’
Calchus shook his head vehemently. ‘Crap. Pure crap. Slaves can’t even carry arms — they have nothing to defend, nor can they defend anything.’
Philokles waved to the butler who had brought the wine service. ‘You there,’ he said. ‘How much do you have in savings?’
The slave was middle-aged. He froze at being singled out.
‘Answer him,’ said Isokles. He was smiling.
In fact, Kineas realized that not only did Isokles not mind twisting Calchus’s tail, he positively relished it.
The slave looked down. ‘I don’t exactly know. A hundred owls? Sirs?’
Philokles dismissed him with a wave. ‘Just my point. I have just lost all of my possessions to Poseidon. I do not have a single owl, and this bowl of wine, the gift of my esteemed host, will, once in my gullet, be the sum total of my treasure.’ He drank it. ‘I am now as rich as I’ll be for some time. I do not have a hundred owls of silver. This slave does. May I take it from him?’
Calchus ground his teeth. As the slave’s owner, he probably held the man’s cash. ‘No.’
Philokles raised his empty cup. ‘No. In fact, you would prevent me from taking it. So, it appears that this slave holds property and can defend it. And so would Anarchises say of us. In fact, he would say that we are slaves to the very act of holding our property.’
Isokles applauded with a trace of mockery. ‘You should be a lawyer.’
Philokles, apparently immune to the mockery, replied, ‘I have been.’
Kineas sipped his wine. ‘Why are the Scythians so free, then?’
Isokles wiped his mouth. ‘Horses, and endless plains. They don’t so much defend their territory as wander it. When the Great King tried to make war against them, they melted before him. They never offered him battle. They refused to defend anything, because they had nothing to defend. In the end, he was utterly defeated.’
Kineas raised his cup. ‘That I remember from Herodotus.’ He swirled the wine in his cup thoughtfully. ‘But the man in the street today…’ He paused.
‘Ataelus,’ Isokles put in. ‘The drunk Scyth? His name is Ataelus.’
‘Had a fortune in gold on his clothes. So they have something worth defending.’
The conversation grew much duller as the merchants present squab-bled over the source of the Scythian gold. After another cup of wine, that gave way to a mock-scholarly debate on the reality or fiction of the tale of the Argonauts. Most of the men present insisted that the golden fleece was real, and debated which river feeding the Euxine had the gold. Philokles insisted that the entire tale was an allegory about grain. No one listened to him.
