and Ephesus will be free.’
He smiled then. ‘Four hundred?’ he asked. And ate olives at a furious rate.
I found olive paste and anchovies and fish sauce in the pantry, and made us a small dinner with bread and lots of
He shook his head. ‘Your life is so full, and mine is so empty.’
‘You teach the young,’ I said.
‘Not one of them is worth a tenth of you or Archilogos. I would trade ten years of my life for one bright spark to shine against the heavens.’ He nodded. ‘But I have had my great pupils, and plenty of them — and the last not the least. You are called Doru — the Spear of the Hellenes. I have heard this name.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘And you think you have learned something about killing men?’
I shrugged. ‘Nothing different from what you endeavoured to tell me ten years ago.’
‘Sometimes the logos works one way to truth, and sometimes another,’ he said. ‘If we understood everything, we would be gods, not men.’
Too soon, I realized I had nothing left to say. He was not very interested in my forge and my farm, although in his presence, they suddenly gathered a kind of worthiness that they didn’t have when I stood on the command deck of
We gazed at each other for a little while.
‘You wish to see Briseis,’ he said suddenly.
My heart beat faster. I expected him to say that she was away from town, resting from childbirth, dead.
‘I often read to her,’ he said. ‘Nor should I have excepted her when I spoke of the bright sparks of intelligence I have brought to the logos — for of the three of you, the logos burns the brightest in her.’
I smiled to hear the most beautiful woman in the Greek world praised for her brain — but what he said was true.
‘Come,’ he said. ‘We will go to her gate.’
In the near dark, Ephesus was inhabited mostly by slaves and men looking for prostitutes. No one paid us any attention as we walked together.
I followed him up to the gate of the house of my youth. This time, my heart slammed against my chest and I was unable to think, much less speak.
My master took me by the hand and led me to the gate as if I was a young student. I didn’t know the slave on duty there, but he bowed deeply to my master and led him into the courtyard, where she lay on a long couch. A younger woman fanned her, and the smell of mint and jasmine filled the garden, and my head. Suddenly, it was as if no time had passed. My eyes met hers, and I remember giving a twitch, as did she, I think — such was the power of our attraction in those days.
She never spared the greatest philosopher of the age a glance.
‘You came,’ she said, after time had passed.
I trembled. ‘You called to me,’ I said. I was surprised at how calm my voice was.
‘You didn’t hurry,’ she said.
‘We are no longer young lovers, playing at the
‘We never were,’ she returned, and her smile widened by some small fraction of one of Pythagoras’s figures. ‘We never
I nodded. ‘Why have you summoned me, Helen?’ I asked.
She shrugged, and her voice changed, and she tossed her hair, like any other woman. ‘Boredom, I suppose,’ she said lightly. ‘My husband needs captains. It is time you became a great man.’
I was not eighteen. She filled me, just lying on a couch. I could barely breathe. And yet, I was not eighteen. I took a deep breath, bit back my sharp response, turned on my heel and walked away.
You were never promised a happy story, my young friends. I’m afraid that we are coming to the part where you might prefer to stay home.
I headed out of the gate and back to my master’s house. I shivered as if from cold, I was so angry — and so afraid. As I stood in my master’s tiny courtyard, I raised my face to the stars.
‘What have I done?’ I asked.
They didn’t respond.
My head was full of thoughts, like a bag of wool stuffed to the very brim — that I should go back and beg forgiveness, that I should send a note, throw rocks at her window. . kill her.
Yes, that thought came to me, too. That I should kill her. And be free.
Instead, without much conscious thought, I packed up my leather bag, rolled my spare cloak tight and walked out into a quiet night in Ephesus. I had decided that if I could not have her, I might as well test myself or die. It is curious that we do our strangest thinking while we are under the influence of deep emotion. Suddenly I was not a trierarch or a lord. I was a young man bereft, angry, seeking death.
That is love, my friends. Beware of the Cyprian, beware. Ares in his bronze-clad rage has not the power.
I see consternation on your faces — I can only assume that none of you have ever been in love — you, thugater, I’d put a sword in you if I thought that you had, you minx! But listen to me. Love — the all-consuming fire that Sappho tells of, the dangerous game of Alcaeus, the summit of noble virtue and the depth of depravity described by Pythagoras — love is all. The gods fade, the stars grow pale, the sun has no heat to burn, nor ice to freeze, next to the power of love.
When she said that she had written to me from boredom, she struck me with a rod of humiliation. No lover can accept such a blow and remain the same.
I have had many years and many night watches, and the long hours before a hundred fights to think about love, and how each of us might have been, if we were not such proud and insolent animals.
I think — close your ears, girls — I think that men come to love though a mixture of lust and challenge, while women come to love through a different mix of lust and wonder at their own power — and desire to subdue another. As with Miltiades and Dionysius, and many others locked in a competition, there is more dross than gold in the ore, but what is refined in the fire is finer than either of the lovers could have made alone. Men come to love by challenge — the challenge of sex, the challenge of holding the loved one against all comers, the challenge of being the better man in the lover’s eyes.
Briseis never ceased to challenge me. Her company never came free, because she valued herself above any mortal, and her favours were the reward for heroic action, heroic determination — heroic luck. The idea that she would summon me from boredom was a mortal insult to both of us.
So I shouldered my pack and went down the hill, past the sentries on the wall and out of the main gate. The moon was bright enough that I never stumbled. I was walking to Sardis. The Persian capital of Lydia — the heart of the enemy’s power.
Did I say I wasn’t eighteen any more? When Briseis is involved, honey, I’m always eighteen.
Or perhaps fifteen.
I walked all night, and all day the next day. I climbed the great pass alone, my head almost empty of thought from exhaustion, but I stopped and poured a libation for the men who died there fighting the Medes. At the last moment, speaking my prayer, I added the Medes who had fallen there — to my spear, and to others. My voice hung on the air, and I shivered involuntarily. The gods were listening.
I walked down the far side of the pass in a daze, and I didn’t stop to eat or rest, and by the evening of the third day, I came to Sardis. Just as on my first visit, the gates were open. Unlike my first visit, I didn’t kill anyone.
Sardis is a great city, but not a Greek city. There are Greeks there, and Persians, and Medes, and Lydians — a swarthy, handsome people, and the women are dark-haired, with large eyes and beautiful bodies, which they don’t trouble to hide.
I was not of this world when I entered the gates. I must have looked like a madman, but Sardis had plenty of them. My Persian was still good, and I spoke it rather than Greek, and men made way for me. Most probably thought that I was one of the many prophets who afflict Phrygia, wandering and foretelling doom.
In my head, I was locked in a fearful fantasy, where the waking world of shops and handsome women merged with the chaos and death of the battle I had fought here. In the agora, I looked from booth to booth, trying to find the dead men I knew must be lying there.
