The blonde woman-girl who dashed into the courtyard and stood locked in an embrace with Leda had to be my intended bride, and I found that my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth.
She was beautiful, the way Briseis was beautiful. I looked at her, and I became aware that Pen was laughing at me.
Her father clapped me on the shoulder. ‘Happens to all the suitors,’ he said. ‘Don’t spend too much time with her — she’ll eat your brain and leave you a drooling idiot. I’ve seen it happen again and again.’ He laughed — the way a strong man laughs when he is wounded.
The young woman in question glanced at me, smiled and went back to her friend. So much for
Still, that’s why we have rules of hospitality and customs — to pass the time when our brains are fuddled by sex. I managed to get down from my horse and introduce my friends and my sister, and then we were in his hall and my slaves were laying out a selection of my gifts.
One of the many rewards for a life of piracy was that I had some beautiful things to give as gifts. Aleitus received a gold and coral necklace from Aegypt, and a gold cup that had come off the captain’s table of some Phoenician merchantman, with a long body and a swan’s head. That was for Euphoria.
My Tyrian dyed wool passed without comment, and a pair of bronze water pitchers — my own work, let me add — were virtually ignored. But I’d made a pair of boar spears to match the ones I’d seen at Aristides’ house, with long staves and sharp bronze butt-spikes and heavy heads, and Aleitus passed over some much richer gifts to pounce on them.
‘Now, these are a sight for sore eyes, lad!’ he pronounced.
No one had called me lad in quite some time. It made me laugh.
Still, the company was good, and Euphoria sang and showed us her weaving, which I have to admit was superb. In fact, I’d never seen such fine work from a girl her age.
‘I love to weave,’ she said, and it was the first serious, grown-up thing I heard her say. ‘Do you know anything about weaving?’
I thought about a number of answers — I had, after all, watched my mother and sister weave all my life. ‘No,’ I said.
‘Is it true that you are a master smith?’ she asked.
‘It is true,’ I said.
Her eyes went back to her loom. ‘Are your hands always dirty?’ she asked.
‘Often,’ I allowed.
She nodded. ‘Then if we wed, you must be careful not to touch my wool,’ she said. Her eyes flitted across mine. ‘I should like to marry a man who could make something,’ she added. ‘But Pater says you are low, so I shall not get my hopes up.’ She wore an enigmatic half-smile as she said this, and I was too much a fool to realize that this girl-woman was playing me like a lyre.
We hunted rabbits the first day, and I knew from the start that I was being tested. It was wonderful. I felt as if I was living in the epics, and here I was competing for Atlanta, or Helen, or Penelope.
The wound on my leg didn’t bother me as it had, but I still had trouble keeping up with Lykon and Philip, and it was all I could do to run the rabbits down. Philip killed four and Lykon two — but Lykon, without a word, began to edge them my way in the last hours, and I managed to kill two with my club before the sun set.
‘I would have expected a man as famous as you to be faster,’ Aleitus said. It was not quite a sneer — indeed, by the standards of a rabbit hunt, any man who killed was allowed to wear a garland — but his barb went home. Fleetness of foot is one of the most important aspects of war-training, as the Poet recognizes when he calls Achilles ‘swift footed’.
I swallowed my anger and nodded. ‘I was swifter,’ I said, ‘when I was younger.’
Aleitus laughed. ‘Not yet old enough to know when an excuse is hollow,’ he said.
I almost rode away that day. But my friends calmed me.
The second day we got a dose of winter rains, and we stayed indoors, listened to the women sing and swapped stories. I told some of the stories I’m telling now, and my host’s doubts were plain on his face, and some of his friends — local gentlemen — sneered.
Let me pause here to say something about them. They were hippeis and richer — rich farmers, aristocrats, mostly of the eupatridae — and most of them shunned Athens the way other men shun impiety. They never went into the city — the city I had already come to love. They had their own countryside temples, and sometimes they went to the assembly to vote, but they were the ‘country’ party, and they loathed the oarsmen and the metics and the tradesmen, and wanted Athens to be Sparta — a land of aristocratic farmers. To them, I was a combination of alien things — a smith, a foreigner. But they were, taken together, good men.
When the weather cleared in the afternoon, we went out into the fields below his tower to throw javelins. I have my moments with the javelin, but I’ve never practised as much as I ought, and while Apollo and Zeus have sent me some good throws, none came to me that day. My first was so bad that men laughed. One of the ‘local gentlemen’ was heard to say that my reputation as a killer of men must be one of those ‘provincial tales’ that would not stand up to scrutiny.
Idomeneus grinned from ear to ear and came to stand by me. We shared the same thought — to kill the fool. But my brother-in-law, Antigonus, who by that time I loved like a brother, kicked me —
Antigonus was the right man to be my brother-in-law, that’s for certain. I took a deep breath and walked away. It was a close thing — if one of them had laughed again, there would have been blood.
The third day, we hunted deer in the hills north of the city. More of the local gentlemen came along, and it turned out that we were hunting in teams — in a competition.
I had all my travelling companions in my team. We didn’t know the ground and we didn’t know the habits of the local deer, and neither my prospective father-in-law nor any of his friends showed the slightest compunction in abandoning us to our ignorance. We were left on a mountain road. In the distance, we could see the sea by the shrine of Heracles, over towards Marathon. The countryside was beautiful in the weak winter sun.
I waited until my competition was out of sight.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Philip, you are the best hunter. My guess is that we should go downhill to the water.’
Philip glowed with pride at being singled out among so many warriors. ‘Water — yes,’ he said. Then he shrugged. ‘But I smell rotting apples, and if there’s one thing deer love in winter, it’s an old apple orchard.’
We broke up then, going six different ways to locate the apple orchard like scouts for an army. It was down the hill, almost ten stades away — Philip had the nose of a hound. But we found it.
Philip came up to me. I was still mounted.
‘There are deer lying in the orchard,’ he said. ‘At least six, and perhaps more. You and Idomeneus are the best spears — yes?’
I nodded. ‘And Teucer,’ I said.
Philip grinned — he valued the archer. ‘Of course. The rest of us will push the deer into you, if you’ll make the crawl.’
He got me to a tall rock that rose like a temple column and helped me climb it. From the top, we could see the apple trees, hoary old things with all their leaves down, and I could see the brown-grey smears that were deer lying in the high, dead grass.
Then passed an anxious hour, as Idomeneus and Teucer and I crawled around the orchard to get downwind of the beasts. Twice, we heard the local party blowing horns in triumph, and on one occasion we could see one of the bucks raise his head to look for the sound.
Philip and the beaters started too early — or perhaps we were too slow pushing our spears through the wet, cold grass. Either way, we were a hundred paces from where we wanted to be when Philip blew his horn and the deer began to scramble to their feet.
I leaped up, cursed and began to run.
Teucer didn’t. He rose to one knee and started to shoot.
He saved us from failure. We would never have reached those deer — my best throw with my best spear fell short — but Teucer knocked six down with eight arrows, incredible work at that range through scattered trees and
