famous that it was hard for my neighbours to accept me as a man who danced and sweated and had trouble with his grape vines. Fame makes you different — ask any man who has won the laurel at Olympia or Nemea.
May none of you ever experience defeat, and the death of all your friends. Idomeneus remained, back at the tomb of the hero, but he was as mad as a wild dog. Black was fighting against Aegina for Athens. Hermogenes was like another man — a good man, but a farmer and a husband. All the rest of them were dead. Even Archilogos was dead. And I didn’t dare allow my mind to think about Briseis. In some way, I let her be dead, as well.
But one of the saddest truths of men is that no grief lasts for ever.
My helmet was waiting, just where I had left it, on a leather bag on the great square bench that Pater had built. I had to hobble around the shop — my calf never healed, and as I said, I never ran well again — and I was angry all the time. Hermogenes forced me to work, and Tiraeus fired the forge, and after mending a few pots, my hands remembered their duty.
I think it was a month after the Pyrrhiche, and perhaps three months after Pen’s wedding, before I looked at the helmet. I was surprised by what a good helmet it was, how far along I had left it. It seemed like ten years — like a lifetime. There was the ding where I’d mis-struck when the boy came to me with news from Idomeneus. I blinked away tears. Then I took out the ding with careful, methodical planishing, which seemed more restful than dull.
When the bowl was as smooth as Briseis’s breasts, I turned the helmet over and looked at the patterns I’d incised.
I had started the ravens on the cheekplates before I left. I did not love Lord Apollo any more. But the ravens seemed apt. If I ever stood in the phalanx again, I wanted to wear ravens.
Instead of going to work on the helmet, I took a piece of scrap, pounded it out flat and tapped the ravens to life on a practice piece. I made a dozen errors, but I worked through patiently, reheating as I went. It was two days before I was satisfied, and then I went back and put the ravens on the cheekplates in an afternoon. I had time left to go and help my slaves prop the grape vines. Then I went back, looked my work over carefully and polished it as the sun set behind the hills of home. I filled the ravens with lead on the inside, planished a little more.
Tiraeus kept an eye on me while he put a new bail on an old bronze bucket for the temple. And then he looked at my work.
‘You’ve grown up,’ he said. And then, his voice rough, he pointed at the back of the skullpiece. ‘Little rough there.’
I picked up the hammer.
Part II
Beneath this stone lies Aeschylus, son of Euphorion, the Athenian,
who perished in the wheat-bearing land of Gela;
of his noble prowess the grove of Marathon can speak,
and the long-haired Persian knows it well.
9
It was late autumn, and the rains lashed the farm, and my slaves stayed in by the fire and made baskets for the next year’s crop. I was in the forge, hammering out the face of a new aspis — I needed a shield.
The world was moving. I could feel it. The last cities of Lesbos were falling to the Persians, and in Athens, the
Empedocles the priest came out from Thebes in the last golden light of autumn, while the hillside of Cithaeron was a glow of red oak leaves. When he had given the blessing of Hephaestus to my forge and relit our fires after we swept the shop, he raised Tiraeus to the rank of master, as the man deserved. Then he looked at my helmet, running his thumb over the eyebrows and using calipers to pick out the measurements of the ravens on the cheekpieces.
‘This is master work,’ he said. He handed it to Tiraeus, and Tiraeus handed it to Bion. ‘And you are the master in this shop, so it is right that you too should be raised.’
I think that the fires in my heart relit that day. I had not expected it, although in retrospect there were a thousand little signs that my friends had made plans for me to be raised to the rank of master. Other pieces were brought out by Tiraeus — things I’d forgotten, like a set of bronze pins I’d made for my sister’s wedding guests — and Empedocles laughed with joy to see them, and that laughter went through me like lightning on a summer’s day. I was, you know, for a time, the master warrior of all Hellas — but it never gave me the joy that making gave me.
Oh, there’s a lie. Killing can be a joy. Or merely a job, or worse.
So, because two of us had been raised, we gave a special sacrifice at the Temple of Hera, where my sister, now a matron, had just been anointed as a priestess. She was two months pregnant, just starting to show, and she officiated with the dignity of her new status. And Antigonus of Thespiae saw nothing wrong with having a master smith as a brother-in-law, so he came with a train of aristocrats to my sacrifice, and Myron arrived with the best men of Plataea, and I saw the wine of a whole crop drained in a few hours — but I reckoned it wine well spent, because my heart was beating again.
The next day, I took ten more amphorae of wine up the hill to the tomb of the hero, and I gave a smaller feast for Idomeneus and his men, and many of our Milesians as well. We drank and we danced. Idomeneus had built a great bonfire, five trees’ worth of wood, and we alternated between too hot and too cold, drank the wine and sang.
It was late in the evening, and the fire burned high, and the younger men and women were piling my straw into a great bale — the better to share other warmths.
I was twenty-seven, and I had never felt so old. But I was happy, pleasantly tired from dancing — the first good dancing since my leg was wounded. I was a master smith, and men came to my forge to talk about the affairs of the city. I might have been content.
Idomeneus came and leaned against me in the warm-chill of the fire’s edge.
‘What ever happened to that slave girl you took away to Athens?’ he asked. ‘Did you sell her?’
I had forgotten.
The gods sometimes work all together, and the next day, when my head rang like my forge from the wine, Hermes sent me a messenger from Athens, with payment for a load of finished bronze. He brought news that Miltiades had been arrested for wishing to restore the tyranny. And he brought a letter from Phrynichus, and a copy of his play, the famous
In the letter, Phrynichus explained that the play had been written to awaken the men of Athens to what the Persians were up to. He said that he had written it so that men might recognize Miltiades for his role in trying to
