This was no rival, and my murderous fingers stilled.
She was a rich girl. She had pearls in her hair, and her face, even in pain, was flawless, a word poets use too often. She was probably fourteen, her hair was black and her lips red, and in the light of the house lanterns, her skin was as smooth as marble. She had muscles like an athlete and high eyebrows.
I was off her as fast as I'd taken her down.
Penelope appeared and stood between us. 'You fool,' she hissed, and I had no idea which of us she was speaking to.
'I had to see where you went every night, Pen!' the girl said. 'Ares, you broke my hip, you barbarian!' She looked at Penelope. 'You have a lover!'
Penelope looked at me a moment. I'd unpinned one side of her chiton the better to reach her breasts, and it was hard for her to deny what we'd been doing. She shrugged.
'What's it to you, rich girl?' I asked.
She looked at me and her eyes twinkled. It hurts me to say this, but next to her, Penelope looked like a slave girl. Like a mortal next to a goddess. A few thousand darics, a few hundred medimnoi of grain and a dozen slaves at your command give you poise, confidence, perfect skin and lustrous hair that no slave girl can match. Look at yourself, girl. Now look at Blondie – your Thracian. She's handsome. But she's invisible next to you. See?
Exactly. So when this rich girl twinkled her eyes at me, I reacted. And she smiled. 'I own her,' the rich girl said. She shrugged. 'I suspect that you are the famous Spear-Boy, Doru of the barbarous west. Yes?' She laughed. 'My brother's companion making love to my companion. Oh, I will have such fun!' She clapped her hands together.
And that's how I met Briseis. Yes – you know that name. She's as much a part of this story as Miltiades or Artaphernes.
I bowed. 'I apologize for hurting you, mistress.'
She raised an eyebrow. 'What will you do for me if I don't report you, boy?' She called me pais, like a small boy who runs errands. She meant to cut me, and she succeeded.
'Nothing, kore,' I returned. A kore was a little girl of good family.
'Doru…' Penelope cautioned.
'Nothing. Report us to Darkar. Better yet, to your parents.' I smiled. 'I will be punished for hurting you.' I shrugged. But I knew a few things – I was not a new slave. I knew that allowing someone to blackmail you was deadly. Masters loved to play this game – get someone else's slave in your debt and then use them as a spy. Oh, yes. Darkar was on top of all those tricks – he was steward and spymaster, too. He knew how to put oil on bread, I can tell you.
She looked at me for a long time. 'Really?' she said. 'Very well.'
'Don't forget to explain what you were doing outside the house after dark, naked under a chlamys.' That was the free man in me, unable to shut up. Somehow, she was like my sister. And I knew what I'd say to my sister if she tried to blackmail me. Which, come to think of it, she had done, a hundred times.
She whirled. 'You wouldn't dare!' she shot at me.
I shrugged. 'Despoina, I am a slave, and slaves are notorious for protecting themselves. And you are naked under that chlamys.'
She turned red – blushed so hard that you could see it under the fretful light of a house lamp.
She pursed her lips and got up – carefully clutching her boy's cloak around her figure – and ran back into her father's house by the slaves' door.
Penelope paused only long enough to push two fingers rather painfully into the spot where my hip's muscles stopped. 'You idiot!' she hissed. 'She meant to scare you. For fun. Why did you have to challenge her?'
I thought that I had behaved like a hero. On the other hand, I also realized that I had forgotten Penelope's existence for three minutes.
I went inside, shaking my head. I didn't lose any sleep worrying about Briseis.
Morning presented me with new troubles. I was summoned with Archi to face Hipponax as soon as Archi had breakfasted.
Briseis was standing behind her father, dressed in an embroidered Ionic chiton of linen and a pair of golden slippers.
'My daughter says that your companion was caught last night kissing her companion,' Hipponax said. His eyes were on his son, not on me.
Archi shrugged, as young men will do – a reaction that always infuriates a parent, I can tell you. 'He kissed Penelope?' Archi asked, looking at me. 'Why?' Then he grinned. 'Or rather – why not?'
Hipponax had a javelin on the table, a light spear with a shaft of cornel wood. He slapped it on the table. It made a noise like the whip of a muleteer. I jumped. Archi blanched.
Briseis smiled.
Only then did Hipponax look at me. 'Well?' he asked me.
'Yes, lord,' I said. 'I kissed her.'
Hipponax glanced back at his daughter, and then at me. 'I do not encourage flirtation among my people, young man. But I am angered by your casual use of my andron as a place to debauch my daughter's companion.'
I flicked my eyes to that lying little fox, Briseis. So I had kissed her companion in the andron, had I?
But when my eyes met hers, a curious spark passed.
Eyes can pass many messages. And faces give so much away, honey. Especially young faces.
Even as her father spoke, she realized, I think, that her prank was going to cost me. And that her dare – she was daring me to tell her father where the incident had happened – was foolish. No slave would accept punishment under such circumstances. And who knows what she had thought inside that goddess-like head. That I would protect her because I was a foolish boy?
All this in one heartbeat. With a plea not to betray her, now that she had lied and put me in danger.
'I am disappointed in you, boy. You have a good life here. This sort of behaviour is emblematic of arrogance. I must punish it harshly, so that you will understand. Do you have anything to say for yourself?'
I let it hang here for ten heartbeats. I was calm, and I already knew what I would do. So I flicked my eyes over her – and she flinched.
Archi spoke up. 'If he was half as drunk as I, Pater, it is scarcely his fault. He had to spend the evening avoiding the unsubtle grasping of Hippias of Athens.' Bless Archi, he stood up for me like a man.
Hipponax glanced at his son and then at me. 'Is this true?' he asked.
'Yes, lord,' I said. 'I did it. I meant no arrogance, lord. I broke nothing and only one hip of mine ever touched a couch. I was drunk, and I will take my punishment.'
Hipponax raised an eyebrow, and there was humour in it for a moment. 'Well said, boy. Ten lashes instead of twenty. Let it be done now, before your mistress is up. Darkar!' he called, and the steward came forward with a pair of porters.
They took me into the courtyard. They already knew what had passed, and what had really happened. Darkar tied my wrists to the flogging pole hard and poked me in the side. 'You are a fool, and you deserve all twenty blows,' he said. 'You are playing a dangerous game, slave. She will do this to you again, now that she knows she has the power.'
I took the ten blows with gritted teeth. They weren't kisses. The whole weight of the javelin haft on my buttocks, ten times. By the tenth, it took all my strength not to call out. It hurts that much.
Better your arse than your feet, though.
I cried a little afterwards, but in the amphora cellar where no one could see me. Darkar took me there. He wasn't a bad man. He left me until I was done sobbing, and then gave me a bowl of cold water and my chiton. 'You are a fool,' he told me.
Oh, aye. I was a fool. Those ten blows had a profound effect, because they reminded me that I was a slave. It is one thing to offer to accept punishment to protect a beautiful woman – and that was my intention, very heroic – but it is another thing to take the blows. Humiliating and painful, and the humiliation had only just begun, because it was two weeks before I was healed, and because Archi told every one of his friends and Heraclitus exactly what I had done and how I had been punished. He began by being indignant on my behalf and ended being pleased to have such an adult story to tell of his slave, and that had an effect on our relationship. I was a slave.
