could be kept on for wages and food.
My share was twenty drachmas. That covered lessons at the gymnasium, where I had begun to question how I’d ever killed a single man in combat, so much of my posture and technique was being restructured by Polimarchos. I paid my teacher, and he was truly grateful.
A week later I produced another helmet, this one with repousse work at the brow. It had been ordered, and I had fretted about the fit. Indeed, it was a fraction too small, and I was embarrassed to have to open the brow slightly in front of the client, alternately dishing and raising a few points to expand the metal, all the while hoping that I would not have to re-planish the whole shape.
But my customer, an Etruscan trierarch on business, loved my work. I think he loved more than just my work — he smiled a lot, and seemed to hang on my every word — but this time I received twenty-five drachmas.
A small thing happened at that time, one of many incidents. A boy came to our shop — really a young man, a gifted apprentice called Anaxsikles son of Dionysus. Dionysus was the master smith of the street. He himself was, I gather, a very gifted man, but I never saw anything he made. Rather, he managed a smithing empire — he had twenty-four sheds, with both slave and free smiths working iron and bronze. He was chief of the guild, and his voice was the voice that decided most things on the street, and yet, in as much as I knew him, he seemed fair and very intelligent. He was the sort of tekne every city values — prosperous, rich even, and yet not above his origins.
At any rate, he sent us his son. This sort of temporary fosterage binds the guilds together, and is good for all. It is the chief reason why cities and not workshops develop a style — fosterage creates an equality of knowledge.
But I digress. Don’t look at me like that, honey, I know you want the story. Teaching Anaxsikles was a joy. He had a kind of aptitude for the work that transcends jealousy and competition. He was a god-sent talent. He never needed to be shown anything more than once. If I have a skill in working bronze that is better than other men’s, it is in the construction of armour, and I think it is simply that I have used so much of it that I understand it from the inside in a way that other smiths don’t. But Anaxsikles would drink in my views — on how to fabricate a Corinthian helmet, for instance; where to move the metal to stiffen the brow ridge, or, the way I made them, to leave a heavy plate over the brow — he took it all in. He seemed to feel it in his bones.
So Anaxsikles worked with me on the helmets. He was delighted with the result, and my work improved again.
I only worked with him for two months, but he made me a better smith. He — my student.
At any rate, Nikephorus had a small party in celebration of the final sale. The priest of Hephaestos came and gave me the seal of Syracusa, as a master smith. And Nikephorus’s daughter Lydia came and sang. She was a pretty girl, fourteen years old, all legs and hips and small breasts and shyness, and I liked her. I didn’t get to see many women, and she was lovely.
But I was a fool, so after dinner, when I’d had too much wine and was enjoying the sight of Lydia dancing, Nikephorus leaned over. ‘She’ll make you fine babies,’ he said. ‘Julia never lost a one. How about it? None of us cares you were a slave. Marry Lydia, and you’ll have the shop when I’m a little older.’
This struck me from a clear blue sky although in retrospect, I was, as I say, a fool not to have seen it coming. Lydia was beautiful in her transparent Ionian chiton of Aegyptian linen — probably her best garment — with a flowing light himation falling in folds from her shoulders; very fashionable, and most likely her own work. I’d proven my work; I’d made the master some serious money and he had no son. How had I failed to be prepared?
Did I say he was a fine man? When I looked stunned, he laughed. ‘Well, every man thinks his own daughter the most beautiful since Helen. Perhaps the idea sticks in your craw. Will you think on it?’ he asked.
I nodded.
He leaned over. ‘I’m going to leave the two of you alone a little,’ he said. ‘If you… touch her-’ he shrugged.
I nodded. It is a funny thing, a human thing — I could have killed him any time, he was no fighter — but I feared him far more than he feared me. He was the master smith. He was a master, too; for all I’d just been raised to his ‘level’, he seemed, every day, to know a thousand things I didn’t know.
Within an hour, Lydia was seated on the kline beside mine — to sit on mine would have led to other pastimes — with her arms around her knees. She asked me questions, slow questions, about my past.
So I answered them.
After an hour, Julia came in and sat on Lydia’s couch. ‘Time for bed, sweet,’ she said. She smiled easily at me. ‘Have you bragged and bragged, young man?’
I nodded sheepishly. I didn’t want to marry Lydia and be a bronze-smith. I wanted to go to Alba, kill Dagon and then go back and And what?
In that heartbeat, it occurred to me that marrying Lydia and being the best smith in mighty Syracusa might be a golden future. The shop offered me a challenge — every day. I could see a life where I made things with Anaxsikles, or competed against him to be the best. There is as much arete in craft as in war. Standing in the haze of Ares was
… like another life. Making marvellous things under Nikephorus’s guiding hand Sleeping with Lydia, who even now gave me a look that made both of us blush I blushed and stammered, Julia laughed and I found myself in the darkness with my cheap chlamys around my shoulders and the first kiss of autumn weather in the air, so that the city smell of cat piss and coriander was mixed with burning pine. The night seemed a marvellous place.
I went and had a cup of wine at my new favourite wine shop and went back to my two rooms.
And there they all were, faces beaming. Even Neoptolymos was beaming.
They’d made almost two hundred drachmas. They’d taken their cargo swiftly and safely, earned a bonus and come home laden to the gunwales with Etruscan olive oil and a small cargo of perfumes that had sold at a stiff profit before they’d even unloaded.
I added in forty-five drachmas on my own account.
We all looked at each other, and then we whooped like men giving the war cry, so that our upstairs neighbours thumped their floor and our downstairs neighbour, a prosperous whore, thumped her ceiling.
‘Now we need three hundred and fifty more,’ said Demetrios, who could calculate on an abacus and write slowly with a stylus on a wax tablet. I wrote better, so I took over the scribe’s job.
‘Slaves?’ I asked.
‘Cargo,’ Demetrios said. ‘And slaves, and ropes, and pitch for the hull — even at that, we really need five hundred more.’
‘And we don’t actually have three hundred drachmas,’ Daud said morosely.
I glared at him. ‘Count it again, then.’
‘It’s about to be winter,’ he said. ‘No sailing. We have to eat.’
‘Even if we live off your smithing,’ Doola said, ‘we will only stay even. And we’ll all feel like kept men.’ He laughed.
Demetrios nodded. ‘It’s worse than that,’ he said. ‘Anarchos will know tomorrow what we made, and he’ll be here for a cut.’
‘I’ll cut him,’ said Daud.
‘I’m with you,’ said Neoptolymos. ‘We’re not bending over for him this time.’
I fingered my beard. It was odd for me to side with Demetrios. But I could see he was prepared to hand over something, some face-saving amount of our profits.
And I agreed. By the gods, I agreed.
‘Twenty drachma,’ I said. ‘And another twenty to the Temple of Poseidon, as first fruits.’
‘We saw Gaius,’ Daud said, out of nowhere. He grinned. ‘He wants to come to Alba with us. He’s as poor as we are, and he has to pretend to be rich.’
‘His family weren’t altogether pleased when he came back,’ Doola said. ‘We’re sending him a letter to come down with another load of perfumes.’
I nodded. ‘Can we get one more load in before winter?’
Demetrios fingered his chin. ‘Chancy.’
But we knew we had to try.
The next morning, I took ten drachma of my own money and went and bought myself a fine chlamys. It wasn’t as fine as some men wore, but it was a beautiful red-brown, with a fine black-purple stripe and a field of embroidered stars. I had admired it for two weeks, and it gave me real pleasure to buy it from the maker for her full
