I shrugged. ‘Yes and no, my lord. I wonder if the merchants who want our tin understand the risks we took to get it. Or would be willing to take those risks themselves.’
‘Yet my understanding is that your Doola now holds all the tin in the city, and demands almost twice the Carthaginian price.’ He shrugged. ‘The mechanics of trade bore me.’
‘But the adventure of it would not, my lord. We sailed the Outer Ocean and made war on Carthage every day to take that tin.’ I knew what he admired and what he would accept, too.
He smiled — just a little. ‘This is why I will allow no merchant to vote in the assembly. They are men without a single noble thought.’
Whatever I might have felt inside, I merely nodded.
It was the only role I played in the sale of the tin, yet I suspect it was important enough.
While I worried about Lydia, and spent money on armour, Doola had not merely sold tin. He had followed a strategy like a military campaign, selling tin only to traders who were leaving the city with their cargoes, like the Athenians, and using the profits to buy all the other tin. There wasn’t much, but he bought the Illyrian tin and the Etruscan tin that trickled into the city. He bought most of it on credit, because when you have fifty ingots of tin in your warehouses, everyone is willing to give you credit.
While I lay on a kline with the Tyrant, talking of politics, Doola owned all the tin in Syracusa — almost all the tin on Sicily. And then, in the decisive battle of the campaign, he sold it — to six buyers, as he had up the coast at Katania, selling simultaneously to each of them at the same price.
The next morning, I was up late. I walked up into the town, and found the craftsmen’s gymnasium. It had been closed by order of the Tyrant, it turned out. Allowing little men to exercise was apparently as wrong as allowing them a voice in government.
I asked around for Polimarchos. Eventually I gave up and asked Anarchos, who shook his head. ‘The fighter?’ he asked. ‘No idea. I had forgotten him.’
So when I stood on Anaxsikles’ shop floor with his apprentices measuring me with calipers, I asked him.
He thought a while. ‘I wonder if he didn’t go off to Sybaris,’ he said. ‘I think I remember him getting an offer from a rich man to train him in arms.’
‘Oh,’ I said, or something equally foolish. When you are young, you expect everything to remain as it was while you change. As you grow older, you realize that nothing stays the same.
‘Ten days,’ Anaxsikles said. ‘I’ll work on it myself.’
‘Ten days?’ I said. ‘A helmet alone will take that much time.’
He grinned. ‘Ahh, now who is the master? What colour do you want your horsehair?’
‘Red, black and white, you ungrateful pup.’ Truly, Anaxsikles made me feel better, and I can’t explain precisely why.
I made the rounds of the town. I bought myself a new sword and a pair of spears, and I bought arms for Giannis — better and finer than what I’d made. I armed Megakles as a hoplite, I put Seckla in a fine corselet. I met Neoptolymos going into Anaxsikles’ shop as I was coming out, and we both laughed.
‘You said we were taking me home,’ Neoptolymos said. ‘I thought it was time to look the part. We’re all rich, or so I understand.’
It was great fun to spend money like water on beautiful things.
17
The run to Croton was beautiful all the way. The weather was startlingly fine, as it can be on the east coast of Sicily, once in a while. The moist haze lifted, the skies were blue and the wind mostly west of north, so that the rowers had little of which to complain. We coasted to Katania and ate lobster; coasted again until we were opposite Rhegium, and then crossed the straits effortlessly, as if such a thing was easy. Next day we coasted east along the base of the boot of Italy. There are rich towns all along that coast, and we lived well, paid silver, and even the oarsmen, I’ll wager, enjoyed the trip.
I have said before that few things are as good for a crew as an attractive but unavailable woman. Dano was a fine sailor, delighted by every aspect of life at sea, and she insisted on rowing one afternoon, simply to see if she could; two of her ladies joined her. She didn’t strip to the waist, to the disappointment of the crew. At night she sang, and men came from all the fires to listen to her, or to her slaves and ladies. Pythagoreans make no distinction of rank when they eat or speak, so she discoursed on philosophy to any oarsman who approached her. The food was good, the wine was better and the company excellent. Doola was as pleased as a craftsman at the completion of a noble work, and we were all as rich as Croesus.
Great days. It was a different greatness from Marathon, or the heady days of the Ionian revolt.
I remember lying one night on a beach — I think we were a day east of Rhegium — and thinking, as I passed the wine to Doola, that this was how life was supposed to be.
‘Friends, whatever will we do next?’ I asked. ‘We’re too young to lie on our laurels.’
Doola laughed. ‘Home to Massalia, and make babies,’ he said. ‘Buy a farm, and get fat.’
Gaius joined his laughter. ‘I have two fine daughters who barely know me,’ he said. ‘And enough money that I need never leave them again. I will build a temple, and restore my family’s power and prestige.’
Neoptolymos nodded. ‘I will take back my castle and my people, and raise strong sons and raid Greeks,’ he said.
Daud shook his head. ‘I don’t really want to go home any more,’ he admitted.
‘Settle in Massalia, then,’ Doola said. ‘Lots of room.’ He looked around. ‘Doesn’t anyone but me miss Demetrios?’
I nodded. ‘I do.’
Daud said, ‘We should find him. Make peace.’ He looked around.
Not everyone agreed.
Sittonax fingered his beard. ‘I’m not ready to settle down.’ He smiled. ‘And what of you, Ari? Are you done? Will you stop being a sea-wolf?’
I remember smiling around at them. ‘I would that it could be like this for ever. Triumph after triumph; adventure after adventure. But, I am growing older, and my sword hand will slow. I think I will go back to Plataea, after Neoptolymos is safe in his mountains, and see what awaits me.’
Doola looked blank. ‘You won’t return to Massalia?’
I shrugged. ‘Who knows what the future holds,’ I said.
Dano was good company. I admit that some days I wanted to bed her, and then other days I thought of her as a companion, not a woman. Hah! Make of that what you will.
At Croton she was very nearly a queen. She feasted us in her home — seven warriors eating vegetables, because, as everyone knows, the Pythagoreans eat no meat. She spent an evening telling us what the Pythagoreans do believe, which is complex and made me vaguely uncomfortable: it seemed to me, and still does, faintly blasphemous. At the core of their beliefs lies the tenet that the human soul — the very essence of a man or woman — is indestructible, and endures from aeon to aeon, so that a man is reborn again and again in a different body, with different parents — perhaps Greek in one generation and Aethiopian in another.
That much is easily understood, but after that it grows more complex. They believe that the reward of a good life is to go on to a better life, and that the curse of an ill-lived life is to go down the ladder, as they say, so that a bad man might be reborn as a dog. Of this, I have the greatest doubts; how can one cow live a life more filled with cow-arete than another cow, and thus earn a higher step on the ladder? Perhaps I needed to sit longer at Dano’s feet and worship.
On the third night, we stayed late, and I sat at her feet quite literally. Some of her followers and friends had come to meet me and the others, and they were brilliant people, well educated, handsome — and very un-Greek. Men and women lay together on couches for dinner, and after; men lay with men and women with women, and all of them seemed like family to all the others. Yet at the same time they didn’t seem to me to treat their slaves any better than any other group of people; they were all rich, at least by the standards of Plataea, and had many of the vices and attitudes of the rich. If their women were freer than Greek women, let me add that Greek aristocratic women are also very free.
