broad field with a rose garden behind it. The scent of roses coloured everything that summer, for me. We danced, and then I put a heavy paling in the ground with the help of some slaves and I taught my students to use their swords and spears on the paling, cutting at it, lunging at it, developing the fine control of the weapon that allows you to put your spear into a man's throat or between his eyes, to feel how much thrust it takes to kill and how much is too little.
Winter came and we trained in the hall, we ran in a pack across the hills and we hunted deer. News came that Ephesus had fallen. According to a Cyprian merchant, when the Persian siege mound was even with the walls, Aristagoras filled his ships and sailed away, leaving the Ephesians to their fate. And the Ephesians had surrendered on terms.
I cried. I should have been there. I was wasting my life in a back-water, far from the woman I loved. It was a good life but dull, and I was beginning to get tired of avoiding Nearchos. I wasn't home, I wasn't with Briseis and I wasn't – anyone. The next spring, when the plants were in bud and all women were becoming equally attractive to me, I was saved by Heraklides, who arrived with a cargo and told me that Aristagoras was raising men and ships throughout Ionia to liberate Cyprus.
'And his wife?' I asked.
'Medea come to life.' Herk rolled his eyes. 'He is a fool to marry a girl so young, and so intelligent. If only she was the strategos.' He laughed and I went back to dreaming of my lost love.
In the autumn, as the wheat was coming in, Aristagoras came to Crete. He came with five ships and he toured the lords, asking for support – and receiving it. Cyprus was rich and the Cretans longed to have a piece of Cyprus. They had not been to war for many years, and every young man clamoured to go.
The wheat was in jars by the time Aristagoras made his way to us at Gortyn. He lorded it over us, wearing a purple cloak and flaunting his wealth, and they followed him as men will follow a Siren. I avoided him at first – a difficult trick in the close confines of a hall – but soon enough I saw that he didn't know me from any other Cretan, and then I listened to his words and attended his dinners.
He was a hollow man, his vanity unchanged by failure at Sardis and Ephesus, and I listened with the blood pounding at my temples as he described how the Athenians had broken and run in the great battle near Ephesus, leaving the Ionians to struggle on alone. Men in the hall looked at me. I wanted no part of this man, but my own reputation would suffer if I allowed him to denigrate the Athenians. Finally, I stood up.
'You lie,' I said.
Silence fell over the hall, and Aristagoras turned, his face composed and regal. 'I lie?' he asked in the voice of a councillor or an advocate in the courts.
'You lie,' I said. 'I was at Sardis, when the Milesians hung back and stayed out of the town. I fought in the agora with the Persians, and then I stood my ground at Ephesus when we stopped the Carians cold and sent them back to their sisters. The centre broke first. I know, because when I looked out over the battle, the centre was already gone – and I was still standing my ground.'
Aristagoras looked around. 'Who is this man, that he is allowed to speak in your hall?' he asked Achilles.
'He is my son's war tutor,' Lord Achilles said. He crossed his arms. 'He is young and full of fire – but he has the right to speak here.'
Aristagoras shrugged. 'I say that the Athenians were the first to break.'
I smiled. 'I say you lie. And there are other men here who were at the battle, Aristagoras. Perhaps you should watch your words. Cretans are not as ignorant as you seem to think.'
But Aristagoras was not to be tripped up by a man as young as I. Instead, he smiled at me, rose from his couch and crossed the hall. 'Young man, you know how it is in battle. Neither you nor I could see anything beyond the eye-slits of our helmets. Men tell me that the Athenians were the first to flee. Myself, I was fighting.'
I was old enough to know that loud assertions would only lose me the argument. But my temper was up. 'I was in the front rank,' I said, 'and I was done fighting when the Carians ran. When I had killed three of them, my spear in their necks.' I looked around the hall. 'Any man who says that the Athenians or the Eretrians were the first to run – lies. And can meet my sword.' That was the Cretan way, as I had discovered my first night on Crete, against Goras.
Aristagoras took my hand. 'We should be friends – our argument causes the Persians to laugh at us.' His words were sweet – but his eyes were full of hate. I had interrupted his performance. What a petty tyrant he was. Even now, my hate for him makes my hands shake.
'How's Briseis?' I asked.
It must have been in my voice. He froze, his hand clasped in mine, his other hand on my elbow, and both of his hands tightened. Oh, she's a bad girl, I thought. My smile must have been too knowing.
'No man speaks of my wife in public,' he hissed. Men around us looked at him curiously. His mask of benevolence was slipping.
'Really?' I asked. 'Let go of my arm, my lord. Before I kill you.' There – it was said, right out in public. He didn't know me from before, the fool. My hand was on my fighting knife – we didn't wear swords in the hall, but hung them on pegs, as the poet says.
Oh, the hate in his eyes. 'You – you were Aristides' butt-boy,' he said in a gentle voice, as the recognition dawned. And then his expression changed, as he felt the prick of my dagger against the inside of his thigh, hidden from the other men in the hall.
'Send my regards to Briseis,' I said. In one push of the dagger, I could make her a widow.
And then she'd marry another nobleman. That was the way of the world, lass.
Aristagoras looked at me in disbelief. He was a coward in his soul, for all his posturing, and I could see the collapse in his eyes. He let go of my elbow and stepped back. I bowed slightly and dropped my blade on the couch behind me so other men would not see what had passed, and Aristagoras backed away quickly.
But Achilles liked him, or liked his ideas, or was simply too greedy to see the foolishness of what was proposed, and he promised three ships for the campaign against Cyprus, to be launched the next autumn.
Aristagoras sailed away. Then the war preparations started in earnest. Men flocked to my teaching, and soon I was teaching my way of war in the agora, and I found that I was saying Calchas's words and Heraclitus's words together, as if they were one philosophy. And perhaps they are, at that. We danced, and we cut and thrust at billets of wood, and at each other.
The need for men – armoured men – drove Hephaestion the smith to distraction, and I began to spend more time with him. I was no smith, but I could make sheet out of an ingot, and none of his apprentices could.
In the agora, or at his shop, I spent a lot of time in the town. And the town was full of dangers.
The dangers all had to do with sex. Will I shock you, thugater? I wanted someone to share my bed, and Nearchos wanted to share my bed, but the two were in opposition. We were a balanced duality, as the Pythagoreans say. If I had taken a slave girl, Nearchos would have pouted for weeks – indeed, his father might have disowned me. Nearchos and his father had assumed that I would take Nearchos as a lover when he reached some level of heroic achievement that existed in their imaginations.
In fact, I was coming to like the boy, and by my second spring with them, he was my equal in most things. I had no idea whether he would stand in the battle line, but he was fast and strong and he could use his spear point to chip out his name in a billet of wood – a neat trick.
A year and more, I had lived like a Pythagorean, taking no lovers. To be honest, for a long time I had no interest, at least in part because I wanted no woman but Briseis. By the second spring in Crete, however, my body was becoming too much for me. The spring dances were all around me, the older men took younger men hunting, and I was alone.
I went to the smithy to hide from my lust, and hammered bronze into sheet with Hephaestion, who enjoyed my company but was not inclined to empty flattery. Far from it. He was the teacher I never had, at metal-forming, critical and derisive when I deserved it, full of praise when I did well. His only son was long dead, fallen in one of their local cattle-raid wars, serving his lord. Hephaestion taught me many things about forming bronze, and yet he was not the smith my father was. That is one of the mysteries of learning and teaching, I suppose.
I'll take this moment, while this pretty girl serves me wine, to say that good times, like the time I spent with Hephaestion, are never as memorable as bad times. It is odd, and sad, that I cannot make a story out of Hephaestion, because in a way I loved him the best of all the men I knew on Crete. He was gentle, strong, kind, garrulous and grumpy. He might strike a slave in anger, but he apologized later. And he was never above learning from me, either, when I could remember my father's techniques, for instance. I would have gone mad without
