I shrugged. ‘I know nothing of the politics here, gentlemen. I have no love for the Carthaginians, however.’
They all looked at me.
‘They enslaved me,’ I said.
From their looks, I might as well have said ‘and sold me in a brothel’. Every face closed.
‘You are a slave?’ Theodorus asked.
I shook my head, but I already knew we were done. I had seen this attitude in Athens.
‘I am not a slave, was not born a slave and was only made a slave by force,’ I said.
Theodorus got up. His hip had been against mine, sitting for wine, and he moved away as one would from a leper. ‘No slave can take exercise in our gymnasium,’ he said.
They all looked at me with marked distaste.
I got up. ‘I’m sorry to have intruded, gentlemen,’ I said. I drained my cup — the wine was excellent. ‘I appreciate your hospitality, even if you do not desire my company. May the gods be kind to you.’ I collected my chlamys, and made what exit I could.
I could feel their stares until I got to the door of the wine shop, where one of the serving girls suddenly went up on tiptoe and brushed a kiss on my beard. ‘I hate them,’ she said.
Aphrodite, that little brush of a kiss went to the very roots of my being. And took much of the sting out of my humiliation.
The next morning I told my master, Nikephorus, the entire story.
We were polishing — a nasty job, and one usually done by slaves, but Nikephorus liked to see things gleam. Every day. So we often started the days polishing. I’d polished all day for my first week, until he had time to test me. And of course, I knew the grips and handshakes of a master. They were different for Syracusa, but not so different.
At any rate, we polished for a while and then he sat back on the bench and admired our work. ‘I don’t exercise as much as I should,’ he said. ‘But the crafts have a gymnasium with a bath. You should have asked.’ He smiled his slow smile, and his eyes twinkled. He was grey without seeming old — bent, and strong, like Hephaestos himself. His wife, let me add, was much younger, and they fought often, and made up in the traditional way, and were equally loud in both pastimes. I liked his wife, too, Julia. She was, and she had a neat, orderly mind that catalogued everything that came her way — the heroes of the Iliad, the ships in the harbour, the wares in the shop — which was odd, as her house was the messiest I’ve ever seen. She never put anything away, and her slaves were just like her. But she was kind to apprentices and journeymen: she gave us food from her larder and juice from her store, wine was always free and she had a great store of scrolls to read — like a rich woman, which I think she was. I first read a good copy of Pythagoras on Mathematics at her house.
My daughter is making that face that means I’m rattling on.
So Nikephorus said, ‘I’d have loved to see those rich fucks when they found out you had been a slave. Like you’d poured shit on them.’ He laughed aloud. ‘Well, well. After work today, we’ll go and exercise.’ He groaned. ‘But it may kill me.’
We went through the streets at twilight, through parts of the city I hadn’t yet seen. I discovered that the textiles I’d bought down by the harbour were a pale shadow of what was available in the weavers’ street, where women hung recently completed items in the doors of their shops. Weaving is a woman’s craft, and the women of Syracusa were at least as dexterous as those of Athens or Plataea.
I saw wine shops better than the ones I frequented, and a street of iron-smiths where we stopped to drop off a whole leather-wrapped bundle of bronze fittings. I saw good swords and bad, fine spears and cheap spears, good eating-knives and dull eating-knives.
The craftsmen’s gymnasium was small, but quite pleasant. It didn’t have its own track, but it did host three professional trainers, paid by the guilds, and it had good equipment — a matched set of lifting stones with handles, for instance. I was introduced around, and men watched me lift, and other men watched me box.
And there was a curious device I hadn’t seen elsewhere — a room with a bright lamp with a lens focused on a whitewashed wall. On the bench was a single, heavy wooden sword.
‘Shadow-fighting, friend,’ said one of the trainers. He lit the lamp and shone it on the wall, and then fought his shadow for a few blows. It was good training and self-explanatory, and I set to.
The trainer, a freedman names Polimarchos, grinned at me. ‘Had a sword in your hand before, I take it.’
I smiled.
‘Care to have a try with padded swords?’ he asked.
This was different from Boeotia, where we used wooden swords and hurt each other. The swords were padded with wool and leather, and he had small shields with central grips. I’d never used such a shield, and I pursed my lips.
‘Not much like an aspis, is it?’ I asked.
‘Teaches the same lessons, though,’ Polimarchos said. ‘The small shield teaches the larger. Punch with your hand — deflect your opponent’s blade before his blow is fully developed. Right? You’re a fighter. We call it the shield bash, here, but I’ve heard it called a dozen names. And try keeping your sword inside the shield. Let the shield cover your sword hand.’
I had been fighting most of my life — I’d had a good teacher as a boy. But I hadn’t ever given much thought to the theory of swordplay until that moment.
We picked up the padded weapons. The padded sword was badly balanced, and felt like a dead thing in my hand. The shield was odd.
But I set myself in my fighting position, with my sword high behind me and my left leg forward, and Polimarchos looked at me for a moment and shook his head.
He stepped forward, and we began to circle.
He managed our distance expertly, keeping me a little farther away than I would have liked. So I pushed him, and he struck, his right leg shooting forward across his left, and his padded blade slamming down towards my shield. I raised the shield slightly, and he rolled the blade off my little shield and cut into my thigh.
‘Don’t rely on the shield,’ he said. ‘Act with it.’
The third time he cut down at my thigh, I cut at his wrist and scored. He winced. ‘Too hard, Ari,’ he said. ‘I have hit you twice, and not left a mark — eh?’
His point was a fair one.
But pain didn’t make him flinch, and we went back at it. He could not hit me at will, but he could hit me often. I could hit him occasionally. He was twenty years older than I, and a freedman.
After an hour, I could scarcely breathe, and darkness was falling. ‘Train me?’ I asked him.
He nodded. ‘You are a good fighter — a trained man, I can tell. But the Etruscans and the Latins and the Syracusans train in these things. Techniques that you don’t know, I can tell. The way you stand — your legs are too far apart. You crouch forward slightly — surely your first trainer told you to keep your back straight? And there’s other moves — cuts — worth knowing. I get a drachma for an hour of my time.’
I nodded. ‘And spear-fighting?’ I asked.
Polimarchos had a pleasant face. He was shorter, a little heavy at the waist like many trainers, and his arms and legs had the defined muscles of the professional athlete. He was bald on top, and his surviving hair was no colour at all, and neither were his eyes. He smiled a lot, especially when he hit me. He grinned. ‘I know some things about spear-fighting,’ he said.
We walked out of the gymnasium. I paid my fee — a month there cost the same for a smith as a day at the City Gymnasium for a foreigner, but a drachma to the trainer was painful.
Nonetheless, I took him out for a cup of wine. We came to an agreement — he was eager to teach a swordsman, I could tell, rather than pushing tradesmen to do a little exercise, which was his day-to-day fare.
The craft gymnasium added to my social life, as I met other men of my own age, and received some invitations, which reminded me that men my age with incomes assured were married. I had been married. I forgot for days, even weeks, at a time. I forgot I was married, and forgot she was dead.
I never forgot Briseis, though.
After seven or eight weeks, this life became my life. Plataea was far away, and the pirate lord was dead and buried. I made my first helmet, and my master clapped his hands to see it done, and sold it for a handsome price. He gave me almost half of the profit — by the standards of the day, this was very generous. A journeyman like me
