Melitta had beaten him to it, although she seemed embarrassed to be dressed in a long woman’s chiton and gilded sandals. To Sappho, she said, ‘I cannot ride like this. Please, domina – I am not a Greek woman.’
Sappho shook her head. ‘You are while under my tent, my dear,’ she said. ‘There is likely to be a battle. Women dressed as men will be in danger.’
Melitta’s brow furrowed. ‘I can be raped to death as effectively in this kit as in my trousers,’ she shot back.
‘Where did you learn such things?’ Sappho asked. ‘War is awful – but no one is going to be raped to death here. Sold into slavery is more likely.’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘I would know.’
‘From my mother,’ Melitta answered. But she had lost the initiative. Sappho, who had endured the sack of Thebes, had survived rape and worse, and Melitta had no answer for her calm.
‘If you wish to go riding,’ Sappho agreed, ‘I will see to it that you dress appropriately. In the meantime, you will be a Greek maiden for a while. And that slave of yours?’ she said, reaching out a long white arm to point at Kallista. ‘She is a hetaira, not a maidservant. Why do you have her? She’s worth a few talents.’
‘It is a long story, despoina,’ Satyrus said. ‘Melitta – inherited her from Kinon, Uncle Leon’s factor in Heraklea. We promised to free her.’
Sappho crooked a finger at the beautiful girl – more beautiful still, now that her hair was clean and she had on a clean gown. ‘Come here, my beauty. Can you dress hair?’ she asked.
Kallista nodded.
‘And perfumed oil? I imagine you know how to apply it?’ she asked.
Kallista looked at the ground under her feet.
‘Your mistress came into my tent looking like a cross between a barbarian warrior and a ragpicker. Do you have any excuse?’ Sappho asked. She had the other girl’s wrist between her fingers.
‘Please, mistress! We were in disguise! People tried to kill us!’ Kallista’s voice was breathy.
‘Hmm,’ Sappho said. She looked at Melitta. ‘I can give you a far better maidservant and have this one sold. She’d benefit herself – with that body and voice she’ll be free before she’s twenty.’ Sappho’s look at the girl was not unkind. ‘You’ll never purchase your freedom as a maid, dear.’
‘We promised to free her,’ Satyrus said. ‘We owe her.’
Sappho nodded sharply. ‘Very well. We’ll discuss this later. Satyrus, you are to go with Crax to see the elephants. Melitta will stay with me. I see that I have a great deal to catch up on.’
‘Despoina,’ Satyrus said in his new-found voice, ‘we are not children. Please, Aunt, don’t be offended, but we’ve spent a month being chased and poisoned. We’ve killed men and seen – things.’ He kept his voice steady by force of will. ‘Melitta is not a child. Neither am I.’
Sappho reached out and took their hands in hers. ‘I hear it in your voices, dears. But it is exactly because you are not children that I must be so careful, especially with your sister. She could be married – any day. And her reputation will matter to her.’
Melitta stamped her foot, which didn’t do her case any good at all.
Satyrus, feeling like a traitor, slipped out of the complex of tents with a cleaner Crax by his side. ‘It’s not fair,’ he said to Crax, and to Philokles, who was waiting by the horses, ‘It’s not fair,’ he said again. ‘She’s always been allowed to ride and hunt. She’s braver than I am!’
Philokles gave him a hard look. ‘I doubt it, boy,’ he said.
Crax shrugged. ‘Greeks hate women,’ he said. He shrugged again. ‘I don’t know why. Afraid, maybe.’ He smiled. ‘We’ll break her out, lad. But listen. Lady Sappho – well, she’s the only wife in this camp. There’s some soiled flowers of various shades, but she’s the only wife. She needs somebody to talk to. Hear me?’
Satyrus shrugged.
‘Want to see some elephants?’ Crax asked, vaulting on to his mare’s back.
Satyrus banished thoughts of his sister. ‘Yes!’
The elephants were huge. Not only were they the largest animals Satyrus had ever seen, they were many times larger than anything in his experience – horses and camels. They had long, wicked tusks that looked like curved white swords and they made noises that all but panicked his horse.
On the other hand, their eyes had a curious intelligence. ‘Are they as smart as a horse?’ he asked Crax.
‘Fucked if I know,’ the Getae replied. ‘Let’s ask a mahout. Hey – India-man!’ he shouted at a wrinkled brown man sitting in the shade.
The elephant-keeper stood from his cross-legged squat with a foreign elegance and walked over. ‘Master?’ he asked.
‘Are they intelligent?’ Satyrus asked.
‘Yes,’ the man said, with an odd sing-song inflection to his Greek. ‘Very smart. Smarter than horse or cow or dog. Smart like person.’ He patted a big cow-elephant on the shoulder. ‘Like person, they don’t make war until man teach them.’ He shrugged. ‘Even then, they won’t fight unless they have men on their backs.’
Hesitantly, Satyrus patted the heavy skin of the animal’s shoulder. It was criss-crossed with scars. ‘She has been in battle?’ he asked.
‘Since she was five years. Now she has fifteen years. Ten big fights and ten more.’ The mahout beamed with pride – a sad pride, Satyrus thought. He spoke to her in another language – liquid and rather like a paean, Satyrus thought. She raised her head.
‘I tell her – battle comes.’ The India-man shrugged expressively. ‘Men teach them war – but when they make war so much?’ He shrugged again and smiled. ‘Like a drunk man with wine? So is an elephant trained to war, and a battle.’
‘War has the same effect on some men,’ Philokles said.
‘Yes!’ the India-man said. ‘Like elephants, man can be taught to love anything – even murder.’
‘You’re a strange one, for a soldier,’ Crax said. He grinned at Philokles. ‘Long-lost brother of yours?’
The India-man had a name, which proved to be something like Tavi, so Tavi was what they called him. They spent most of the afternoon roaming the elephant camp, meeting the beasts. None of them seemed very warlike, despite their size.
‘Let them smell you,’ Tavi said. ‘Let them see you. Then they know you on the day of battle.’
Satyrus submitted to being smelled, and in some cases prodded, by elephants. He fed them nuts and grass, delighted by the manipulations of their trunks and the play of intelligence in their beady little eyes. ‘I want to be a mahout,’ he exclaimed with twelve-year-old enthusiasm.
Tavi put him up on the older cow, and he rode on the beast’s neck with the India-man behind him. He was allowed to carry the goad, and he tapped the old girl, called Grisna, on her shoulder and she turned obediently.
‘This is power,’ he said to Philokles and Crax when he had jumped down from the beast’s neck.
‘More proof, if any were needed, that war is the ultimate tyrant,’ Philokles said. ‘These beasts are as intelligent as men.’ He shook his head. ‘More intelligent, in that Tavi says they won’t make war without men.’
Crax bit his lip. ‘Always you say war is so wrong,’ he said. ‘Why? How do you stop an invader? How do you keep your freedom? By talk?’
Philokles made a clicking noise with his tongue and nodded to the Getae. ‘That’s the root of the matter, isn’t it, Crax? You must train every man in the world out of his love for war at the same time – if you leave just one, he’ll drag the rest of us back to Ares’ bloody altar.’
Crax glanced around, as if looking for another speaker. ‘So I’m right?’ he asked.
Philokles looked at the elephants. ‘Too right.’ He turned away.
Dinner was a subdued affair, punctuated by Satyrus’s excited descriptions of the elephants and of Tavi, the mahout, who had made a lasting impression on him and on Philokles. But Sappho was attentive to her husband, and Diodorus was far away. He would listen with a smile on his face to an elephant story and then his eyes would drift off the speaker and he would eat absently.