bowls around the campfire, and now, faced with a boar, he simply lowered his spear-point and went at it.
Lykon was between the boar and me. We were in open woods, high on Cithaeron. The ground was broken and rocky and rose steeply behind the boar, and it was littered deeply with oak leaves that muffled sound and made movement treacherous. It was cold enough to numb your hand on your spear, and raining.
The hounds were as surprised as the rest of us. We’d been on the trail of a deer — a deer that Philip had wounded and we all wanted to bring home. The boar was no part of our hunt, but now our youngest man was facing it, and it was not small.
The boar put its head down and charged. Teucer leaped up on a stump and shot — no aiming, no pause to think — and his heavy war arrow punched the animal in the side and deflected it. It skidded to a stop and Teucer shot it again, then Lykon tried to get the point of his spear into it — but from inexperience, he didn’t know that you never spear a pig in the face. The spear-point caught on the beast’s snout, which is full of muscle and gristle, and glanced off its tusks — and the creature barged under his point, into his legs, and down he went.
Teucer put a third arrow into it as it tried to savage Lykon.
Philip and I reached it at the same instant. It backed a step and I put my point deep in the chest, under the chin, a low thrust as good as any I made in battle, and Philip, may the gods bless him, leaped high and plunged his point right down between the animal’s shoulder blades. Then another arrow thudded home — I was so close that I saw dust fly from the beast’s hide as it hit despite the rain — and Antigonus and Idomeneus were both there, adding the weight of their spears, and the thing was dead.
Lykon lay still, and for a long moment I thought his slim back was broken.
His right leg was ripped from knee to groin, a long but thankfully shallow gash that missed his privates by the breadth of a finger. And where he’d curled up to cover himself, the boar’s snout had broken his nose and its tusk had slashed across his face.
He looked up at me, his face a mask of blood and tears. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I fucked that up.’
We laughed. Lykon was a man after that. The facial scar was a gift from the gods. No man would ever have taken him seriously without it. As it was. .
Well, you’ll hear, in time.
Lykon was the son of an important man from Corinth, a magistrate and shipowner, and Pen was very fond of him — all of us were. So we voted, like Greeks, to wait for his leg to heal before setting out. That meant two weeks of guesting three aristocrats, and the consequent drain on my pantries and staff.
I tried to think of it that way — the peasant way — but the truth is, they were fine men and I had a fine time. We hunted some days, and Idomeneus and Ajax came and stayed — for the first time, I’ll add — and there was wine and talk in the andron every night.
In the second week, Cleon turned up. He had been to the house before, and Hermogenes liked him. So he came into the courtyard and Styges brought him wine.
The first I knew of it was the sound of raised voices outside my forge. I pushed out through the hide curtains and there was Cleon, red in the face, and my brother-in-law was being held by Philip.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
‘This is what you brought me to Plataea to do?’ Cleon asked. ‘To be your servant?’
Lykon sprang forward despite his wound. ‘Antigonus meant no offence,’ the boy said. ‘How could we know you are a free man?’
In truth, Cleon looked as if he had slept with dogs — his wool chiton was badly soiled and had wine stains all around the hem and down the front. He had no leg wraps under his sandals, and no chlamys or himation. He looked like a slave.
Antigonus had treated him like one, and Cleon had punched him.
Antigonus was a gentleman. He apologized, and admitted that he had committed hubris.
But Cleon’s lips trembled and he walked out of my gate. ‘I came. .’ he said, and then he spat. ‘Never mind. I won’t come again.’
He stalked off down the hill. I called his name, but then I let him go. You can only do so much for a man.
Mater was surprisingly sober. I’m not dull-witted — I know why. For once, Pen and I were living the life Mater had wanted, and she stayed sober enough to be part of it, although it might have been truer to the gruesome drunkard’s creed if she’d managed to be roaring drunk and ruin the whole thing for everyone — the element of self- loathing in the drunkard is the ugliest part of the whole thing.
But she didn’t. She and Pen sang with Leda and the better slaves joined in, and she did loom work in the andron while the men argued.
Mostly, we talked about the Persians. Antigonus and Lykon and Philip were equally awestruck that we’d served in the east. Philip saw the Great King as a force for good, a great aristocrat who would make the world a better place — but he liked a good war story. Lykon took the opposite tack — his father owned ships and had no time for Persia.
We debated when, and if, the Great King would come for Athens. Idomeneus and I insisted that we could have won Lade, and Philip maintained that the Great King could never be defeated.
We drank a great deal of wine. Pen mocked us from her loom, and Mater proclaimed that it was high time I stopped wandering the world like Odysseus and got myself a wife and some sons and daughters.
What I didn’t know was that Mater had sent a messenger over the mountains, to Athens.
During his recovery, Lykon couldn’t hunt, so he hobbled around the farm, asking hundreds of questions, and I returned one evening, cold through, with a deer across my horse and Philip’s laughter floating up the hill from the crossroads where he was drinking with Peneleos.
I went into the forge, expecting to find Tiraeus, and there he was, sure enough, guiding Lykon through making a cup.
I laughed. ‘I’m not sure what your father would think,’ I said.
He laughed. ‘Pater worries that I’ll sleep with older men,’ he said. ‘He’d never object to a little work.’
Lykon’s time in my shop put the seal of aristocratic approval on my smithing. I see that now. By the time Lykon was ready to go over the mountain, I had shown all of them how to start a helmet, and I had my brother-in- law’s deep-bowled Corinthian roughed out, so that the skull stood proud to the cheekplates and the elegance of the shape had begun to show.
At any rate, we were fast friends by the time we rode up past the shrine, two by two — Antigonus with Pen, Idomeneus with Lykon, Teucer with Philip, Alcaeus with me, and a passel of slaves behind us on donkeys with hampers of food and some gifts. It was cold, and our breath rose to the heavens with the breath of the animals, as if we had fires burning inside us.
We had a snowstorm the second day, and we chose to stay an extra night back at the shrine. The two women who lived there asked me about Apollonasia, and when I told them that she was free and had a dowry of forty drachmas, they laughed and offered to follow me over the mountain. I didn’t tell them the price the poor girl had had to pay for her dowry. I don’t brag of my failures. But it served to remind me, when I was feeling cocky, of what failure was like.
I left the rest of them, rode to the summit despite the snow and made sacrifice there, surrounded by an endless field of white, with a clear view over all of the earth as far as I could see — out to sea to the south, and over all Boeotia to the north, so that the smoke of hearths in Thebes was a smudge that I could see far over the dance floor of Ares.
And all I could see in the rim of the world was war.
And then we rode down into Attica.
Aleitus had a tower. It was a fine building, of carefully cut stone in the Lesbian manner, and I liked it immediately, although the rooms smelled of smoke all the time. I had money — I thought that I might build myself a tower. Our house had had one once — a small thing. But the one Euphoria’s father had was another thing entirely. It was elegant and strong.
He met us in his courtyard and I liked him, too, although he wasn’t sure of me. He wasn’t a big man, but well-muscled, grey-haired but with plenty of life left in his face, and he was surrounded by dogs — big boarhounds of a kind we don’t have in Boeotia. The dogs barked and barked at so many strangers.
