This time we swept the slopes of the mountain with something like efciency, and Idomeneus cursed and said we’d ruin the hunting. I promised that the next hunt would go up behind Eleutherai, a longer expedition and better training — and a new stock of deer. We killed seventy animals and carried the meat home, and while we were up on the mountain, the older men discussed politics and war.
The Persians were coming closer. The Great King had sworn to burn Athens, or so men said, and Eretria in Euboea too. The rumour was that Thebes was willing to swear fealty to the Great King for aid against Athens.
‘We’ll have to fight,’ Peneleos said.
Everyone looked at me. And I was old and wise.
‘Bullshit,’ I said. ‘The Persians are mighty, and their armies are huge and they own more triremes than all of the Greeks ever did — but do you know how
‘My pater says one Plataean is worth ten Thebans,’ said young Diocles, son of Eumenides. Eumenides had stood his ground when my brother died at Oinoe.
‘Your pater should know better,’ I said. ‘When the Thebans come, they’ll have ten men for every one of ours. And our knees will rattle together like dry leaves in a wind.’
‘We can stand against them in battle or stay in our walls,’ Idomeneus said. ‘What I would fear is raids — greedy men, well led, coming for cattle and slaves.’
‘That’s a scary thought,’ Peneleos said. ‘That’s war the way bandits make war on honest men.’
Hermogenes was eating deer meat, and he belched. ‘That’s how war is made, out there in the world,’ he said.
‘Aye,’ Cleon said.
‘We should have an alarm, and a select group that could come out at a moment’s notice and run down thieves,’ Idomeneus said. ‘Better yet, four or five alarms, all a little different, for the quarters of the territory around us, so that the moment we hear the alarm, we know where to run.’
We all agreed that the Cretan had a fine idea, and when next the assembly met after the feasts and contests of Heracles, I moved that we create a select militia and that the alarms be built, and it was carried. So those who took part in my deer hunts on the hillside became the Plataeans’
Cleon somehow managed to have a poor harvest in a year of plenty. I went to visit him, taking a wagon to fetch his surplus, and he brought me just ten medimnoi of grain.
‘What in Pluton’s name?’ I swore. ‘Did you sleep all day?’
Cleon looked at the ground. ‘I’m not cut out to be a farmer,’ he said.
‘What will you eat this winter?’ I asked.
He made a face. ‘Your handouts?’ he asked, and his voice was bitter.
Despite Cleon’s failure, it was a good year. After my second ploughing and before the turning of the year, when the days finally begin to get longer and the rains let up a little, I travelled over the mountains into Attica to meet my prospective bride, a girl of fourteen years called Euphoria, whose father was a wealthy cavalry-class man from the hills north of Athens. She had been Leda’s schoolmate at Corinth, and she could read and sing and weave, and when I arrived. . well, she’s worth a better story than that. So perhaps I should tell you how I met Euphoria.
12
She didn’t have black hair. She was as blonde as the sun, and her hair was like a banner for men’s attentions. Men crowded around Euphoria like vultures on a battlefield, like ravens on a new corn crop, like seagulls on a fishing boat with a fine catch, and she may have loved the attention she received, but she appeared to be immune, as some men are to the arrows of Apollo. She was showered in presents from the time she was old enough to walk, and some men called her Helen. Her father was Aleitus, a famous hunter, and her mother, Atlanta, had won every woman’s foot race in Greece and was that rarest of creatures, a female athlete. Euphoria had the body of a grown woman when she was fourteen, with deep breasts and wide hips — and she had hair of gold. Have I mentioned that?
My sister filled me in on these details as we sat at the big farm table in the main kitchen of our house at the edge of winter. The hearth smoked, and the smoke rose through the rafters in beams of sunshine, like the arms of the gods reaching to earth. Still makes you cough, though.
Pen raised her hand and ordered more small beer with a crook of her finger. Life as the wife of an aristocrat agreed with her.
Her husband, Antigonus, was a good man. He doted on her and yet made good company for me, and several of his friends slept in the andron and would accompany us over the mountains. Pen told me that I needed some aristocratic friends. But the very idea of marrying into the aristocracy of Attica made my stomach roil, and the thought of marrying a famous beauty put me off my food.
‘You are a famous man,’ my sister said. ‘You need to marry well.’
‘I am the bronze-smith of Plataea,’ I said. ‘What will her father say if I take Tiraeus and Hermogenes?’
Pen stuck her tongue out at me. ‘If he’s as well bred as people say, he’ll welcome them, and you. But why try his patience? And why don’t you have any presentable friends?’ She rolled her eyes at her husband’s sister, Leda, who smiled knowingly and batted her eyelashes at all the male guests indiscriminately, despite being married to some lordling at Thebes.
‘Miltiades? Aristides?’ I laughed. ‘Perhaps Idomeneus? Have you met Cleon?’
Mater made one of her rare appearances. She dropped on to a stool by Leda and barked her laugh. ‘Idomeneus is very well bred,’ she said, ‘for a wolf.’ She looked around at all of us. ‘If you take Idomeneus, make sure he doesn’t kill anyone. Penelope, motherhood agrees with you more than it ever agreed with me.’ She beamed a mixture of wine and affection at us. ‘I am
I went straight out to the forge and began to pound a lump of bronze with a hammer. I pounded it into sheet — a slave’s job, but one that allowed me to hit something very hard, again and again, until I was calm and Mater was back in her rooms, drunk and silent.
But the next morning she was back again. ‘Why don’t you ask Miltiades to meet you?’ she asked. ‘He can stand as your mentor. He’s a man of property, and as I have cause to remember, he has beautiful manners.’
‘He’s killed more men than Idomeneus,’ I spat.
‘Why must you behave like a beast, my love?’ Mater asked, putting her hand on my face, so that I could smell the wine on her breath.
I steeled myself and gave no reply, except to go back to the forge and make sheet out of bronze stock — again.
My aristocratic guests were surprisingly tolerant of my affection for my forge. Idomeneus took them hunting, and on the third day of their visit I joined them, and we flushed a boar up behind Eleutherai in driving rain. Antigonus was there, and Alcaeus, the leading man of the former Milesians, as well as Teucer, who had a farm hard by my own purchased from waste land that Epictetus had been saving for his sons, Idomeneus, of course, and Ajax and Styges. My guests were Lykon, a very young man with pale skin like a girl and longer lashes than was quite right, and Philip, Antigonus’s guest-friend from Thrace.
Philip was an excellent hunter, and in fact had been included by Penelope because his skills might impress the prospective father-in-law. Lykon was recklessly brave — the sort of courage that you have to show when you look like a pretty girl and have a high-pitched voice. I liked Lykon immediately — he was not afraid to wash our wooden
