He wondered if he were better known in Rhodes than in Pantecapaeaum. Theron had told him that this was going to be his last adventure — that it was time for him to stay home and act like a king.
Satyrus had every intention of acting like a king — when he had Miriam by his side. He was cruising the Mediterranean to honour his commitments to Demetrios — grain for Athens — and to get his hostages back. When his duty was done, and when Miriam was free, Satyrus was ready to go back to his kingdom and never, ever leave. He smiled at the thought.
Even this trip … Tanais had never looked finer, and his new ships being built at the new slips had been a sight he wanted to stay and enjoy. He’d come to enjoy giving justice, and walking in the agora, and having men listen to his opinions.
He smiled at another veteran of the siege, and bowed a little to a trio of women — widows — by the wall of the temple, where he and Miriam had curled side by side in the first light of morning, preparing for another day of siege. He felt close to her here — illogical, as she was in Athens, but he felt as if she might step out of the back streets, or emerge with her women behind her from the market.
Then he walked across the agora, where his own statue stood near those of Demetrios and Antigonus and Lysimachos. The Rhodians were great ones for dedicating statues, and even at the height of the siege they hadn’t destroyed the statues of the men laying the siege. And now he had his own. He stood looking at it.
There was no echo in it, and he felt an obscure disappointment. What had he expected? A conversation with himself?
Past the statues. Small boys were trailing him, more than a dozen of them, some begging and more just shouting his name.
At the far western end of the market there was a small grove of olives, just six or eight trees, and the entrance to an underground temple of vast antiquity, where the city’s reserve grain supply had been stored during the siege. Now there was a new altar atop the underground temple, a large, ornate marble with a deeply indented top and scrolled sides. In front of the altar were placed a dozen stele, markers for the dead of the siege.
Jubal, his oar master and sometime siege engineer, sat on his haunches by one of them. He had some teeth missing, and his face had the deep brown of old, salt-stained leather. His dusty cheeks were marked by the tracks of tears.
Satyrus ignored the boys and squatted by Jubal.
‘Neiron,’ Jubal said.
‘Helios,’ Satyrus added.
One by one, they traced the names of their own dead on the newly cut stele. Even the boys were silent.
When they were done, they paid the priestess to sacrifice a young ox, and gave most of the meat away. Before the smoke from the fat and bones began to rise to the gods, Anaxagoras came, and Apollodorus. They, too, looked at the stones. They, too, wept.
Other men came forward — some drawn by the free meat, and others by the observance, and hours passed before they were free to walk, arm in arm, back to Abraham’s house.
Menedemos was with them by then, and the five of them held a small symposium under the stars in the restored garden.
Apollodorus grew drunk quickly, and he cried and cried — a fountain of tears. Anaxagoras watched him cry like a man watched a dangerous stranger.
‘I have never seen him cry,’ he said.
Satyrus took another drink. ‘I doubt he cries while the enemy are still on his deck,’ he said.
‘Men don’t cry for lost friends, they cry for themselves,’ Anaxagoras said.
Satyrus shook his head. ‘Easy to say, philos. But when I think of Helios, I don’t think just of what I lost — good hot wine every morning. Clothes ready when I wanted them. A spear at my shoulder I could trust. By the gods — if that were all, I’d be a pitiful specimen. Apollodorus, too. What does Achilles say? Better a slave to a bad master than a king in Hades? Helios is gone to the land of shades. I’ll be there soon enough, myself.’
‘Maudlin, too.’ Anaxagoras held out his cup for more wine and flopped on his stomach.
‘What do you do when you aren’t criticising me?’ Satyrus asked.
‘I criticise myself. The unexamined life is not worth living.’ Anaxagoras laughed. ‘Where is young Charmides?’
‘Out in a brothel putting all that youth and beauty to good use, I suspect. Or perhaps wooing under some lucky maiden’s balcony.’ Satyrus spilled wine. ‘Here’s to him.’
‘Ares, you sound like some forty-year-old with a paunch and no hair,’ Anaxagoras said. ‘You are, what, five years older than Charmides?’
Across the couches, Jubal had managed to stand. He embraced Jacob, or perhaps just fell against him, and went off to bed. Satyrus rose, and so did Anaxagoras, and they left Apollodorus, face down on his kline, weeping as if he would never cease.
2
‘This is all taking too long,’ Satyrus muttered. He hoped that he was keeping his thoughts to himself — his ships were lading and unlading as fast as the well-bribed slaves could work, and he’d already received payment, and still it seemed to him that every jar of grain was taking an age to move.
Anaxagoras, standing next to him on the great stone pier, his ruddy skin almost white in the full glare of the sun, made an expression with his mouth — wry, deprecating, knowing, amused, all in a single pull of the lips.
Satyrus caught the expression and knew that he was transparent.
‘You know perfectly well that she’s capable of entertaining herself,’ Anaxagoras said. Unforgivably accurate, damningly exact and on the topic of his thoughts. ‘She’s not some foolish dancing girl who will pine for you a day or two and then spread herself for the next pretty young king who wanders by.’
‘You’re not as funny as you think you are,’ Satyrus said. He tried to keep his tone light.
Both of them had been in love with Miriam — at the same time. To some remarkable degree, their friendship was based on that rivalry, and how they had risen above it. But Satyrus still avoided discussing Miriam with his friend, sometimes from a sense of propriety, and sometimes because he feared ridicule. Anaxagoras had — apparently — transferred his attentions to Satyrus’s own sister, Melitta.
‘I am,’ Anaxagoras said. ‘You’re just not in the mood to laugh. I can turn the knife on myself — your sister is out on the plains right now, with at least one former lover and ten men who want her to wife — every one of whom can ride a horse like the wind and shoot a bow.’
‘If my sister had wanted a Sakje, she’d have had one,’ Satyrus said.
‘That was rather my point,’ Anaxagoras said. ‘I know that I have nothing to fear.’ He looked at Satyrus. His tone, his expression, admitted that the exact opposite was the case, and he laughed ruefully.
‘At least you’ll see Miriam in Athens,’ Anaxagoras said.
‘If we ever get there,’ Satyrus allowed.
It was cooler on the palaestra, the sand beautiful between his toes, the sea breeze curling through the colonnade to cool his sweat-slicked skin.
He and Anaxagoras had wrestled, boxed, fought two throws of pankration, and were now facing each other with short swords made of wood and their chlamyses wrapped around their shield arms. Satyrus had the feeling one gets from heavy exercise, a few bruises, a body in the peak of condition.
Anaxagoras had had a year-long siege to make a swordsman of himself, and he was excellent — taught by the same tutor who had helped Satyrus to restore his muscles after a wasting disease. So they circled each other warily, and Anaxagoras, once an aggressive but clumsy swordsman, now bided his time, aware that, as the inferior fighter — although not by much — he needed to launch counter-strikes rather than trying to move in on Satyrus’s longer arms and greater experience.