citadel — I’m hardly the first to draw this analogy. Women are trained from birth to walk a fine line between desirability and availability. Whether a woman is a queen or a whore, she knows how to draw that line.
Men know nothing. We only want. It is not our place to refuse. When a man is hunted by a woman, he has no weapons, no city wall, no place of refuge. Refusal appears very like cowardice.
Oh, I’m just saying.
I taught Anaxsikles in the shop, and then we worked together. I was learning from my master, and teaching my apprentice. I had very little to teach him, but I recall we were making a pair of greaves, and like all Sicilian smiths, he put a pair of intertwined snakes onto the front — fancy, and very beautiful. His repousse was better than mine already.
Perhaps his superiority made me petulant, but his snakes had come to dominate the whole front of the greave, and when he brought them to me for my approval, I looked at them for a long time, formulating my criticism.
It is hard to be an honest critic. I was a little jealous of his skill. The snakes themselves were beautiful. Yet, in my heart, I knew that I wouldn’t have worn them. Why? And was I just jealous?
So many grown-up thoughts.
Finally, I put them down. ‘Your repousse is superb,’ I said.
He beamed.
‘Better than mine,’ I said.
He made noises of negation, but I could see that he, too, thought his work was better. And yet he wanted my admiration and my approval.
‘But with the snakes so deep, look, a spear point can catch here, and punch right through into a man’s leg.’ The snakes stood so high out of the metal that their sinuous lines made a continuous catchment. If I were fighting a man wearing them… Odd thought, as I hadn’t fought anyone in a long time.
He shrugged, obviously uninterested in my criticism.
‘You don’t believe me,’ I said.
He shrugged with all the easy arrogance of the very young. His shrug said You are a little jealous and thus liable to lie. I know my repousse is without compare. He didn’t quite smile.
‘You don’t believe me.’
‘There’s no spearman in the world who can place his point into so small a target,’ he said.
I wanted to vanquish his youth’s ignorant arrogance.
‘Put them on,’ I said.
He was close enough to his customer’s size to clip them on his legs.
I fetched the master’s spear from over the door. Effortlessly, I flicked it at him, and caught the in-curve of the snake each time — nicking the greave and making marks that would have to be polished out.
He shrugged. ‘I don’t have a spear or an aspis,’ he said.
I found both for him.
We squared off in the street. I realized as we came on guard that Lydia was watching out of her window on the exedra. Well.
‘Ready?’ I said. My voice must have carried something. Anaxsikles paused, and lowered his aspis. ‘You really can do it, can’t you?’ he said.
‘Yes.’ I said grimly.
But he changed his mind, settled his shield and laughed. ‘Show me!’ he said, and his spear lashed out at my face.
I nudged his spear aside and put the point of my spear into the snake’s curves. Anaxsikles screamed and fell.
My spear had gone right through a flaw, and an inch into his shin.
No real ill came of it. I helped him inside, bandaged him and spent the next two weeks making a new greave to replace the one I’d ruined. He put snakes on it, less than one half the height of the last pair. We drank a cup of wine together most nights, and the little fight became quite famous in the smith’s quarte — not as a feat of arms, but as an example of how seriously we took our business. I might have been punished, but instead, like most things in those days, it rebounded to make both of us appear serious in our work.
And Lydia told me that I looked like a god.
Well.
My friends had been gone eight weeks — double their last trip.
I was walking home one evening from my gymnasium, and a big man appeared at a corner. I knew him immediately; he was one of Anarchos’s men. He jutted his chin at me.
I smiled and kept walking.
He ran after me, his heavy footfalls loud on the street. People turned to look, and then studiously looked away. The street was only twice the width of a man’s shoulders, but grown men managed to make it wider to avoid Anarchos’s men.
‘Hey! You!’ he shouted.
I turned.
He stopped. ‘You heard me!’ he shouted, spittle flying. He wanted a fight.
I didn’t. So I nodded. ‘I didn’t understand,’ I said.
‘Anarchos wants you,’ he said. ‘Come.’
So I followed him. As it happened, I had been training with Polimarchos, and I had my beautiful Etruscan kopis under my arm, but I felt no need to use it. I had, indeed, changed. I thought of the two thugs in Athens I’d killed.
We walked in a light rain down to the waterfront. The taverna was closed up tight, and inside, fifty lamp wicks gave the place the light of a temple — and too much heat. A central hearth fire burned and fishermen, slave and free, jostled for wine.
But around Anarchos’s table, there was a clear space as wide as a man’s hips.
He bade me sit as if we were old friends. He got me a fine cup of wine.
‘You must be worried about your friends,’ he said.
I nodded.
He looked concerned. ‘I could sell you information about them,’ he said. ‘But I would be a poor patron if I did. So here it is for free: they are well. They made the coast of Etrusca well enough, and bought their cargo. But then they were plagued with trouble, lost the boat, bought another and have been penned in Sybarus by adverse winds.’ He shrugged. ‘They will make a little off this voyage, but not enough to give Poseidon twenty drachmas. Or me,’ he said. He shrugged again.
‘Thanks!’ I said, with genuine feeling.
He looked at me again. ‘You are an odd fellow,’ he said. ‘You truly value these men.’
I stood. ‘Yes. Like brothers.’
He clasped my hand. ‘Very well. Be at ease.’
Damn him. He was so much easier to hate when he was being a money-grubbing bastard. And since I was going to swindle him, I wanted to hate him.
The world, it turns out, is a very complicated place. No man is the villain in his own tale. Every man has his reasons, no matter how selfish or evil.
I went home.
More weeks passed. I went with Nikephorus and Anaxsikles to the great winter religious festival they have in Syracusa. Lydia carried a garland in the craftsmen’s part of the procession. Men commented on her. Two young aristocrats wrote her poems.
I was jealous.
So I wrote a poem for her myself.
Oh, the foolishness of men.
I am a fair poet. Better than my poetry is Sappho’s, which I knew by heart, and Alcaeus’s and Anacreon’s and Hipponax’s. It is easy to write a good love poem when you know all the classics by heart.
I went home from the Feast of the Kore with rage and jealousy in my heart, and I took wax and stylus and wrote a poem. Naming the parts of her body, I adored each in turn, adorned them with verse and crowned my
