'I'm Doru,' I said, 'companion to Archilogos, son of Hipponax.' I shrugged.
'You have the wrist of a real swordsman,' Darius said. He took my herald's staff, a pair of solid bronze rods, and hefted it. 'I'd be hard put to do my cuts with this. Cyrus, try your sword arm on this toy.' He tossed my staff to his brother, who caught it.
They were as alike as statues in a temple portico – skin the colour of old wood, jet-black hair and clear brown eyes, handsome as gods.
Cyrus whirled my staff through some exercises – not my exercises, so I watched with fascination. He tossed it to me. 'Let's see you do that, boy!' he said.
So I did. I copied his moves, interested in the differences, and all four Persians applauded, and after that we were all friends. They were easy men to like, and we fenced sometimes. They never used shields, which made them very different men to face. Cyrus also taught me a trick that has saved my life fifty times – how to kill a man with his own shield. Have you seen it?
Here – you, scribe. Take that shield off the wall – I won't eat you – and put it on your arm. So you do know how to hold a shield – good for you. My opinion of you just went up. Now face off against me – damn this hip. Pretend you have a sword. Now watch, honey.
Just like that, and I've broken his arm and killed him. Sorry, lad. You can get up now. Useful trick, eh? All I do is grab the rim of the shield and rotate it. There's no man born, no matter how strong, who can hold the centre of a wheel while I rotate the rim. Yes? This is based on a mathematical principle that I could explain if I was given enough wine, but for the moment, it suffices that it is true. And see how our pen-pusher's arm is in the porpax – that bronze strap across his upper forearm? So he can't escape his shield once I start to rotate the rim – and I break his arm.
If he was a killer, he might gut me with his blade while I break his arm. If he isn't – and few men are killers, thank the gods – then I push his now helpless arm and shield rim into his face, smash his nose and he's dead. See? Cyrus taught me that, bless him.
They were free-giving, hard-drinking men, and I grew to love them in two weeks. They seemed more alive than other men. More real. They fought duels all the time, cutting other Persians over fancied or real slights, over a misspoken word or a cold shoulder. They were dangerous dogs, and they bit hard.
My status as a slave meant nothing to them, of course. To them, all Greeks were their slaves. Which rankled, but they were so far above me that I couldn't be offended at their attitude to the Ionians – an attitude I shared.
At any rate, the summer passed with lessons and struggles. I was seeing an Aethiopian girl from a house as lavish as ours, the Lekthantae, hereditary priests and priestesses of Artemis, one of the noblest and richest families of the city. Salwe was tall and thin and dark like night, and while we never loved each other, she had a sharp mind and a vicious tongue and we entertained each other, in and out of bed. I loved going out to the Persian camp. I loved working through the ever more complex problems of geometry that Heraclitus gave me. I would sit in the fountain house – after Master lifted the ban – and sing on my lyre, and Salwe would sing with me, her voice capable of curious harmony that she said her people in Africa always sang. It was a good summer.
The tyrants of Ionia were gathering in the houses of the upper town, and so we had dinner with Hippias again, and dinner with Anaximenes of Miletus, who had replaced the traitor Aristagoras as tyrant of Miletus. Aristagoras was reputed to have spoken that summer to the assembly of Athens, just as Hippias predicted, and to have been granted a fleet of Athenian ships to come and make war on the Great King in the name of the 'rebellion'.
There was no rebellion. All the leaders of Ionia were in and out of our house, and the great cities – Miletus, Ephesus, Mytilene – were, if not solid in loyalty to the Great King, at least uninterested in revolt. Some men wanted war, but most of them were penniless exiles.
It was odd, but as a slave, I probably knew more about what was happening than the satrap. I knew that on the dockside, where young men gathered when the ships came in from all over the Ionian, men spoke of Aristagoras as a hero and of Athens as a liberator. Gentlemen and rowers, seamen, small merchants – they were all fired by the idea of independence. But the nobles and the rich in the upper town were insulated from this talk, just as they were insulated from the gossip of their slaves.
As the number of incidents between the Persian soldiers and the townspeople – and the sailors – mounted, Artaphernes was forced to confront the reality that there were people in Ephesus – many people – who viewed any Persian as a foe. And his soldiers didn't help. Darius and Cyrus thought nothing more comical than to separate a pretty Greek girl from her Ionian boyfriend – by a mixture of force and persuasion that, let's be honest, young women enjoy. Some young women. At any rate, multiply their efforts by a hundred, and there wasn't a Greek virgin left in the lower town to marry her behorned and already cuckolded man, and that is the fastest way to violence.
The Persians were fastidious. They didn't rape and they didn't pick on slaves, the way Greek soldiers will. So the slaves didn't mind them. But the Greeks – the smallholders of the lower town – killed a few in ambushes, and then the swords were out all over town, and Artaphernes' troubles began in earnest.
It wore him out. I saw him every day and ran messages for Mistress to him, offering him a remedy for headache or sometimes just carrying a verse or a flower. I liked running errands for my mistress, because she was kind to me, gave me money and it was an excuse to be in the women's wing. She favoured me, and she must have said something, because suddenly, after a year of forced parting, Penelope warmed to me again, and we were allowed to go out together on errands to the agora and to be together in private.
This is what I mean, my honey, when I say that masters have effects on their slaves that they never intend. I don't think Hipponax ever intended that I never see Penelope again, nor, I think, did Mistress understand how far Penelope and I might go – or perhaps she knew exactly what was happening. In fact, even as I tell this, I wonder if she sought to end another liaison – one whose discovery hurt me more than anything.
Anyway, it was on one of our errands together that I contributed unwittingly to the problems of the town. I was in the agora with Penelope – hand in hand – when a man clouted me in the head and sent me tumbling into the muck beneath the tanners' stalls. Penelope screamed. Once again, there were two attackers, but this time I was badly hurt. If my attackers hadn't been fools, I'd have died. One started kicking me and the other grabbed Penelope. In a crowded agora, that was a foolish move. She had a healthy scream and she bit him hard. Unlike a free-born girl, slave girls know just how to deal with attack. But I didn't see any of it, because my initial attacker had put his foot into my guts and I puked. He grabbed my hair – and then I was covered in blood.
Cyrus killed both my attackers. It was the will of the gods that Cyrus and Pharnakes, his particular friend, were in the market, looking for trouble, and I provided it. They killed my assailants with the joy with which men do such things.
But because there was a Greek lying on the ground and a screaming woman, many others in the agora jumped to the wrong conclusions. As I began to return to my senses, an ugly crowd was forming and Penelope was still screaming. She'd never seen a man's intestines before. Not her fault.
I got to my feet and had the sense to offer my hand to Cyrus, and he had the sense to take it, mud and blood and all. Then I embraced Penelope, and she let me lead her away.
'Best come with me, lord,' I said to Cyrus, and he and Pharnakes did as I suggested, like good soldiers. I led them up the hill and the crowd followed us for a few streets, but soon enough we got free.
After that I was much more careful when I was out of the house. Diomedes wanted me dead. I had forgotten him. The very best revenge. His betrothal had been put off all summer, and I suppose he thought to take it out on me. I told Hipponax before he went off to Byzantium on a short cruise, and he told me that he would see to it.
Cyrus told me that it was I who had saved his life, by leading them out of the agora, and not the other way around, and he treated me with courtesy and gave me more lessons. As the summer passed, my Persian got better, and by the time Hipponax returned from his ship, no one else had tried to kill me.
The 'conference' went on and on. The tyrants were not willing to raise men for Artaphernes or to give the assurances he wanted. Nor were they awed by his soldiers. Most of them were islanders, and they had a hard time imagining the Great King's cavalry coming to their shores.
Oft-times, when the guards admitted me to the satrap's presence, I would find him sitting with his head in his hands, staring at his work table. That's how bad the summer had grown, towards the end. Not that he was ever less than courteous to me, and he always paid me a compliment and gave me a tip. Even when he became my mortal foe, I never forgot his basic goodness. Artaphernes was a man. Some men are noble by nature, honey. He
