‘And who protects you from the Phoenicians?’ he asked. ‘Their triremes are cruising for you, even now.’ He shook his head. ‘I made enquiries about this Dagon. He is — quite famous. Infamous. A slaver.’ He fingered his beard. ‘A typical fucking Carthaginian.’ He looked at me. ‘Seriously, Ari. May I call you that? Listen. In Syracusa, we all hate them. It’s the unifying force that binds the commons and the lords together. And sooner or later, they will get their forces together and come for us. Iberians, Keltoi, their own Poieni infantry, their crack cavalry force. They’ll load them on ships and try and finish us off. They mean to control all the trade in the Eastern Sea, and we are in the way.’ He drank. ‘Is this about revenge on this Dagon? I don’t finance revenge. And when dealing with Carthage, anyone who sails from Syracusa does so under a death sentence. Why should I wager on you?’
‘No reason at all,’ I said. ‘You invited me, and told me to speak my mind.’
‘I’ve always wanted to fit out a couple of big privateers for cruising against Carthage,’ he said.
I laughed. ‘Listen, Anarchos. Last night you did me the honour of telling me a thing or two. And now I’ll tell you straight back. I’ve been a pirate — with Miltiades. Know the name?’
‘Of course.’
‘So yes — I’ve killed men and taken their gold. Taken their ships and pushed them men into the sea. Taken the women and given them to my men.’ I leaned over to him. ‘I never meant to be that man, but that’s the man I was, for a while. It’s not a bad life, if you stay drunk and don’t think too much.’ I nodded. ‘There’s men who can live like that, all the time. I’m not one of them. Something tells me you aren’t really, either. The captains you’d need to run a couple of corsairs — they wouldn’t be men you could hope to control. And in a year — less, if they were successful — the assembly would have to have you executed. With five triremes, Miltiades virtually strangled the whole trade of Aegypt. D’you get me?’
He nodded.
I wasn’t even lying.
‘If we go for some tin, and succeed — well, it’s no one’s business but ours, eh? If we go to sea to take the ships of Carthage, it’s only a matter of time.’ I shrugged and lay back, and a slave refilled my cup.
‘The odds against you… ’ he said.
‘The odds are balanced by the pay-off if we succeed. What are a thousand talents of tin worth?’ I remember waving my hands in the air.
He laughed.
‘What is my silence with your jilted lover worth?’ he asked. I sat up.
‘Relax, Ari. I really mean no harm, but it is clear to me that you are never going to be a settled bronze-smith, try as you will. You aren’t going to marry that girl. You’re going to go sailing off to Massalia… or Alba.’ He laughed. Damn him.
‘Alba’s too hard,’ I said, knowing that he’d guessed it all.
‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Glad you know that. I know a dozen men who claim they’ve been there. You’ll find more in Massalia, but no two of them tell the same tale, and I’m not sure that Alba isn’t a myth that Carthage uses to hide the source of all that white tin.’
I shrugged. He might have been right, except that Daud knew where Alba was. It was an edge other rivals wouldn’t have had.
‘We’re close to war with Carthage even now. That war is going to collapse our economy. How much money do I have to put in my bet with you, and what’s my profit?’ He sat up, too.
I drank almost a cup of wine, trying to find a path through all the lies, the subterfuge, the desires of my friends, the needs of the group.
Sticking men with a spear is much, much simpler.
‘Your friend Miltiades is leading an expedition against Paros,’ Anarchos added.
Well, that didn’t tempt me. He was now the great man he’d always wanted to be.
I lay back. ‘I’m done with all that,’ I said.
He leaned in, and I realized this was what he wanted to talk about, more than the trade. ‘Why? Tell me why, Plataean. You have a name, you survived slavery and now you are here — if you really are who you say you are. For a few months I told myself that the bronze-smith’s daughter held you. Why not? She’s a beauty. But now I see that you are using her. You really are a man like me, aren’t you?’ he leered. ‘And yet, if you are, why not go back to Miltiades? He’s living high, now. He’ll be Tyrant of Athens if he takes Paros, or greater. He’s building an empire in the east.’
I remember sighing. ‘I said, I’m done with all that,’ I remember responding. I sat up on my couch. ‘Listen, I came as close to death as a man can come. I want a life. A real life.’
‘But not a wife and a home,’ he shot back.
‘I am what I am,’ I said.
He shook his head. We lay in silence — I remember listening to slaves in the kitchen, bickering about whether to serve the next course or not.
‘What do you need?’ he asked.
‘We need to build our ship, and we need thirty good oarsmen. In a perfect world, they’d be slaves willing to work through to freedom for shares.’ I shrugged. ‘Slave oarsmen aren’t what you want in a tight spot. I have reason to know.’
He chuckled. ‘You have no doubt encountered the local attitude about slavery,’ he said.
‘Oh, yes,’ I said.
He shook his head. ‘In a year, war with Carthage may change everyone’s tune,’ he said. ‘I’d want five to one for every silver mina I put in.’
‘Three to one.’
‘Five to one. Five to one, and I do you the justice that it’s a straight business deal in which I’m a member — that is, I make sure the yard deals straight, I help find the oarsmen and I don’t play the patron about control. In exchange, you give me your word, your absolute word, that you will bring your tin here and sell it through me, and give me my share first if you make it.’
I blinked. Five to one.
Of course, we could sail away and never come back.
‘And another thing,’ he said. ‘You’re going to spurn Despoina Lydia. So: how can I believe you’ll come back?’
‘My word? My oath to the gods?’
‘Didn’t you give her the same?’ he said.
That stung, and like most comments that enrage you, it was true.
‘So you marry her,’ he said. ‘And tell old Nikephorus the truth. Then I’ll know you plan to come back.’
‘Marry her and sail away?’ I said.
‘Isn’t that better than not marrying her and sailing away?’ he asked. ‘Let me ask you, oh bold veteran of Marathon — when she kills herself, how will you feel?’
Something cold gripped the bottom of my stomach and my heart.
He laughed. ‘You know, the hard men to touch are the dead ones who feel nothing. Men like you — you are easy. You care. I could make you do a great many things, simply by seizing on your own notions of right and wrong and twisting.’ He put his wine cup down. ‘But I won’t. Here’s my price: marry the girl, and give me five to one. I’ll put up a couple of mina in silver, I’ll coax the shipwrights and you’ll start with a well-found ship. No one loses. In fact, I think I’m actually doing a good deed, and if you make it back, everyone will benefit.’
He raised his cup.
I raised mine.
We drank.
Let me say this. A local thug is a dangerous nuisance. A crime lord is often a much more complex animal. Anarchos was a man who, under other circumstances, would have ruled a city. I’ve seldom known anyone so intelligent, so attuned.
So terrifying.
It took me ten days to face Nikephorus.
I actually started several times, in a small voice — so small he walked past and called out to an apprentice, and the day moved on.
Finally, the day before the spring feast of Demeter, I caught him writing at his work table.
