sent us a good buck, and Hermogenes and I ran him down with javelins, Calchas working carefully through the trees to push the deer back on our weapons, and we killed when the sun was almost in the treetops. Then Calchas made Hermogenes cut the buck's throat and anointed him with blood on his face, as he had with me.
'Arimnestos says you are to be a free man,' Calchas said. 'You must learn to look other men in the eye. And to think of them like this,' and he pointed at the corpse of the deer. 'Slave or free, a man is nothing but a pile of bones and flesh with blood in the middle.'
Hermogenes didn't say anything, but he embraced me and when he went to leave, we clasped hands as if we were men. We sent Hermogenes home with a haunch of venison and a couple of rabbits, which no doubt made him a hero to his family. Hermogenes and I date our friendship from that morning. But I had to be a slave before I learned how true Calchas's words were. In the Boeotia of my youth, we were poor men, and though we thought we knew the world, we knew little of what passed beyond our town and our mountain and our river. These were the borders of our lives.
Festivals came and passed, and sowing, and reaping, and I was getting older. Hard men came to the shrine and Calchas sat up the night with them. The second year, one tried to rape me, and Calchas killed him. I was well- nigh paralysed with fear, although I managed to bite his hand so hard he screamed. After that, I was more wary of the hard men.
I spent more and more time practising for war. Calchas was a warrior – I had realized that, although I couldn't put a day to the thought. All the men who came were fighters, too. It was as if they belonged to a guild, just like the smiths or the potters, which was odd, because in the Boeotia of my youth, every free man had to be a warrior, but no man I knew actually liked it. Like sex and defecation, it was something every man did but only boys talked about.
What a pretty blush.
So I trained with him. I wasn't always aware that he was training me. He had exercises for every hour of the day, and many of them were remarkably like work – gathering firewood, breaking it in the breaking tree, chopping the bigger pieces into firewood lengths for the hearth with a sharp bronze axe and then splitting them. This task could consume as much time as Calchas wanted it to consume – we needed wood, come winter. And the use of the axe taught me many things – that, just as with smithing, precision was more valuable than raw strength, for instance. That the ability to hit twice in exactly the same place was better than hitting once in two different places. Ah, my dear – you will never fight a man wearing bronze. But you must accept the word of an old man – you can kill a man right through his expensive bronze helmet if you can hit the very same place often enough.
Calchas was no hoplomachos – not just a fighting master. He didn't have a special dance to teach, nor were his lessons about the sword as organized as his lessons in writing. Rather, we'd be deep in a passage of the Iliad, and he would look up and make such a comment as I just made.
'Arimnestos?' he'd say. 'You know that if you hit a man often enough in precisely the same place in the helmet, his helmet will give way? And you'll spill his brains?'
I'd look at him, trying to imagine it. And then we'd go back to the Iliad.
There is a passage, late in the poem, when Achilles is still sulking and Hector rages among the Greeks. And several of the lesser heroes form a line, lock their shields and stop Hector's rush. I remember him singing that whole passage softly. The autumn light came in strongly through our horn window and dust motes floated in the shaft of light. When this happened, I liked to imagine that the gods were with us.
Calchas looked up, into the shaft of light, and his eyes were far away. 'That's how it is, when the lesser men seek to stop the better. You must lock your shield with your neighbour's, put your head down and refuse to take chances. Let the better man wear himself out against your shield. Poke hard with your spear to keep him at arm's length and refuse to leave the safety of the shield wall.' He shrugged. 'Pray to the gods that the killer finds other prey, or trips and falls, or that your own killers come and save you.'
'But you were one of the better men,' I said. 'You werea – a killer.'
Suddenly his eyes locked with mine and I could see him in his high-crested helm, his strong right arm pounding a lesser man's shield down, down, until he made the killing cut. I could see it as if I was there.
'Yes,' he said. 'I was a killer of men.' Then his eyes slipped away. I knew where he was – he was on a battlefield. 'I still am. Once you have been there, you can never leave.'
4
A sowing and a reaping, and another year. Animals died under my spear. I read all of Theognis from Mater's book and came to appreciate that grown men had sex with boys and grew jealous when they took other loves. And that aristocrats could be ill-tempered and avaricious like peasants.
You should read Theognis, my sweet. Just to understand that being well-born is a thing of no value.
I read Hesiod, too. I knew much of him by heart by now, of course. In Boeotia, he is our own poet, and we spurn mighty Homer so that we can love Hesiod better. Besides, his poems are for us – farmers. Is Achilles really a hero? He's as much of a bitch as Theognis, to my mind. Hector is the hero. And even he would not have made much of a farmer – well, perhaps I do mighty Hector wrong. Given a month of rain, Hector would not surrender or sulk in his barn.
I was bigger. I was stronger. I could throw a javelin farther and better than any boy my age in the valley, and Calchas was talking about the boys' games at places like Olympia.
Across the river, the farm grew richer. Every grape vine was trellised and trimmed, the apple trees had supports on the branches and all the new growth was excised in spring by what seemed to me to be a phalanx of slaves.
Miltiades' money could be seen everywhere in our community. Myron had two ploughs. Epictetus's younger son, Peneleos, went with the great man to fight, and his father bought a second farm for his older son. There was talk of his older son wedding Penelope when she turned twelve or thirteen.
Hermogenes was freed and joined his father as a man who worked for wage. All their family was freed now, and Bion made himself a helmet and a great bronze shield and was welcomed into the taxis. Not all freed men were so welcomed – but Bion was a special case.
I went with my brother and Hermogenes to watch the men dance at the festival of Ares. All of them had practised the dances since they were old enough to learn – twelve or thirteen, in most cases. And my father had done well by Bion, teaching him – something that I knew Pater did only with the quickest of learners. So Bion did not humiliate himself, although as a newly freed and enfranchised man, there were farmers eager to see him fail.
That's how men are, honey. Don't you know? With peasants, it is the same in Asia and Aegypt and Boeotia. They think there is much evil in the world and little good, and that one man's gain is another's loss. If Bion was free, then a free man would become a slave. So they whispered.
I watched them dance. I had seen it before – it was magnificent and made my blood run fast, two hundred men in bronze and leather, swaying in line, turning around, thrusting with their spears, parrying with their shields.
Two years and more on the mountain and I knew those moves better than the dancers. I watched with a critical eye – and, honey, there is nothing more critical than a boy of eleven.
It was also my brother's first year in the dance. He was well kitted, with a fine Corinthian helmet and a big shield to keep him safe in the storm of bronze. I watched him dance and thought he did it well enough, but the boy in me couldn't avoid criticism, so that night I asked him why he didn't change the weight on his feet when he went from defence to attack.
Of course he had no notion of what I was talking about, but only heard his younger brother finding fault. We wrestled in the barn – to a draw. I was weaker, but I knew quite a bit more. There's a lesson there, too. All my skill – and I had quite a bit of skill already – was not enough to match his longer reach and his smith's strength.
And even with my blood up, I wasn't fool enough to put a finger in his eye.
But the next day, he cut two poles and asked me to show him what I meant. So I showed him as Calchas showed me – how the movement of your hips reinforces the push of the spear or the rise of the shield. Chalkidis was no fool. No sooner did he see, than he was asking questions. And he took his questions to Pater. Pater came
