Theron turned back to his proper charge – Satyrus. ‘I said three falls,’ he said. He glanced over his shoulder as if to make sure that the girl was gone.
‘Was that one fall, or two?’ the boy asked. There was no wickedness to his question. He meant it just as he asked it. ‘Master?’ he added, a little late. Have to watch that if I want to keep him, Satyrus thought to himself.
Theron swung his arms. ‘That was one fall,’ he said. ‘Are you ready?’
The boy took up his stance. He was confident in his postures – his tutor knew the pankration well enough to teach a boy. Theron stood without moving, and Satyrus held his stance for as long as it took him to draw twenty breaths and release them slowly. He held it well, his hands high, weight well distributed, left foot forward and ready to kick. Theron began to circle and Satyrus circled with him, carefully keeping his distance. He had misjudged Theron’s immense reach the last time. Now he was careful.
Theron lunged in, moving from his left foot to his right and reaching with his arms. The boy blocked one of his reaching arms and kicked hard at his knee, but Theron moved a fraction and took the kick on the side of his leg. He grunted.
‘Good kick,’ he said as he backed away.
Satyrus flashed a grin and moved in to attack, spun on his front foot and kicked again.
Theron grabbed for the leg – he had expected another kick – and grasped air. The second kick was a feint.
Satyrus whipped the kicking foot around, spinning his centre of gravity. He closed, grabbing Theron’s extended hand with both of his own and throwing his weight to rotate the arm.
Theron’s other arm shot out and grappled the boy’s shoulders, pulling at him, grasping for a hold to turn the boy’s body and take the weight off his arm.
Satyrus was too small to resist that grapple long. Desperate, he bit the older man’s left bicep, drawing blood.
Theron shouted and punched him in the head and Satyrus’s whole body moved with the strength of the blow, but he set his jaw and tried to hold his grip on the sweat-slick muscles of his opponent’s arm. Pressed almost ear to chest, he could hear Theron’s heartbeat racing as he sank to one knee under the pressure of the boy’s attack on his shoulder joint.
Theron’s second blow to his head broke his hold, and Satyrus fell bonelessly to the sand. It wasn’t that he decided to relinquish his hold – the strength just flowed away from his limbs. He wondered if he was going to die, as men did in the Iliad when the strength left their limbs. His vision tunnelled and the palaestra began to go away. But he could still hear. He heard the big Corinthian get to his feet, his hands brushing away the sand. He heard the sound of someone clapping.
‘Good thing that you won,’ came the voice of his tutor. He sounded drunk and sarcastic. ‘Embarrassing to lose to a new pupil. Knocking him unconscious will probably teach him a lesson, too.’
The new coach sounded upset when he replied. ‘I never meant to hit him so hard,’ he said. ‘Apollo – I’m bleeding like a sacrifice.’ He shifted his weight. Satyrus could hear everything. He could hear the sound of the man breathing. ‘I regret that,’ he said.
The tutor rose unsteadily, his feet scraping loose sand on the marble floor as he stumbled, every grain giving its own sound to Satyrus’s ears. Then he crossed the sand. Satyrus heard the uneven sound of his footsteps, even on the sand, heard him fetch a canteen from the far wall and felt the cold water hit his face as he sprinkled the contents liberally. Satyrus felt his eyelids flutter of their own volition, and light came to his eyes like a bolt of pain.
‘Ugh,’ Satyrus said.
He tried to sit up, and after a few heartbeats he managed the trick, only to fall on all fours and vomit up his barley porridge. He still had some of Theron’s blood on his mouth.
Theron knelt at his side. ‘Can you understand me?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ Satyrus replied. ‘Master.’
Theron nodded. ‘You scared me,’ he said. He shrugged. ‘I applaud you. That any boy could scare me like that is, in itself, a kind of victory. I will take you seriously. Now promise me that you will not bite or gouge in a contest. It is against the rules.’
‘Not in Sparta,’ said the tutor. He wiped the boy’s mouth with his chiton.
Theron sat back on his heels, his puzzlement plain on his face. It was clear from his expression that he couldn’t decide if the tutor was a peer or a slave. He had a paunch and his hair was thinning on top, and he was clearly drunk – functional, the way many hard-drinking slaves went through life, but drunk nonetheless.
The room was spinning around Satyrus, and he was in no mood to help the new man. Besides, if he couldn’t see that the pins of his tutor’s chiton were gold, he was a fool.
The drunkard leaned forward. ‘You going to live, boy?’ he asked. The smell of sour wine washed over Satyrus, and he retched again. When he was done, he extended a hand to his tutor.
‘Yes, master,’ Satyrus replied. He had no trouble calling the drunkard ‘master’.
But Theron had obviously not risen to be a champion by underestimating his opponents. ‘You are a Spartan,’ he said to the tutor.
The other man nodded. ‘I was a Spartan,’ he said. ‘Now I am a gentleman of Tanais.’ The Spartan’s wit dripped with self-mockery.
‘Theron of Corinth,’ the athlete said, extending his hand.
‘Philokles,’ the other man said, accepting Theron’s hand. Theron made a face suggesting that the Spartan had quite a grip for a drunk.
The two big men watched each other for a few heartbeats. Theron grinned. Philokles smiled slightly.
‘Can I get up now?’ the boy asked. He rubbed his temple. ‘Everything is moving around,’ he said.
Theron pressed with his thumb at the impact point, his heart pounding, and he showed his relief with a sigh when he found nothing moving under the pressure while the boy tried to hold his head still against the pain. ‘No more fighting today,’ he said. ‘And no afternoon nap. Sleeping after a heavy blow is dangerous.’
Philokles nodded at the Corinthian. ‘You’ve read the Hermetics?’
Theron nodded. He raised an eyebrow at the tutor, whose smile broadened.
‘I feel better,’ the boy said. Lies. But the lies of virtue. ‘Let’s have a third fall.’
‘No,’ Theron said.
‘Let’s go fishing,’ Philokles said. ‘A pleasant way to spend a spring day. Aesop would approve, and Xenophon wrote a book on it.’ The Spartan rose to his feet. ‘I’ll find some lines and some wine. Meet me at the stables before the sun is at the zenith.’
He bowed.
Satyrus returned the bow, a little unsteady. He went across the sand under his own power and headed for the baths.
‘Do you fish?’ he heard Philokles say. His ears were ringing and it was all he could do to walk without putting his hands on the columns for support, but he had done other things as hard.
‘My father was a fisherman,’ Theron said.
‘I’ll take that to mean no,’ he heard Philokles say, and then he was safe within the steamy warmth of the archway.
The town of Tanais was the same age as the twins, the newest town on the Euxine Sea, far up the Bay of Salmon. The new settlements spread up the north bank for almost a parasang, with Greek farms interspersed with the heavy stone buildings of the Maeotae farmers native to the valley where the wheat grew like a carpet of gold. Much of the mouth of the river was covered in small wooden wharves and hurdles for drying fish – the famous produce of the Bay of Salmon, the foundation of the fish sauce that every Athenian gourmand craved.
Between the salmon and the wheat, the town was already rich.
The town itself was a small affair centred on a temple to Nike and the accompanying baths and palaestra of a much grander town, built in wood on stone foundations and decorated in the latest fashion. The ivory and gilt statue of the goddess was the dedication of two of the town’s most prominent founders: Diodorus, a soldier of fortune currently far to the south in service to Eumenes the Cardian, and Leon the Numidian, one of the Euxine’s principal merchants. Their names appeared on the founding stones of the temple and the palaestra, on the stone stele to the dead of the town and on the marble plinth at the corner of the new law court. Leon owned the warehouses at the edge of the water, and the stone wharves, and his contributions had dredged the harbour and raised the
