I inclined my head. 'I have served as a hoplite,' I said.
Heraclitus looked around. 'Your master is about to go to a different school from mine, lad. A harsher school, where the punishment for failure is death. Will you take an oath to protect him?'
Heraclitus had no idea what my young master had done to me – no idea, I suspect, what had transpired on that night, except that he would have known that Mistress had been with the Persian. Or perhaps he knew everything. Young men told him all their secrets. In any case, he didn't order me to swear.
'I want to be free!' I said. I was suddenly bitter. I had done great things for these people, and I was still a slave. Perhaps I'm a slow learner, but for the first time I began to consider that the greater my services were, the more valuable I made myself.
Heraclitus looked into the purification smoke. 'Do you believe that I can read the logos?' he asked me.
I nodded. I would have nodded if he had asked me if I thought he was Zeus come to earth.
He smiled. 'Doru, if you swear this oath and abide by it, you will be free.'
I frowned. 'Death is a form of freedom,' I said.
'Yes…' he said. 'Listen, lad. War is not the only thing that faces you and Archi. This will be a testing time. Stay and help him pass the test. It will help you, too. Will you swear?'
I sighed. I had been toying with running – to the docks. It must have shown. I thought that perhaps I could work an oar to Athens, or find Miltiades in Thrace. But it was a dream, and besides – besides, just at that moment, I caught sight of Briseis. An eddy of smoke revealed her, talking to her betrothed, my enemy Diomedes.
'Yes,' I said, 'I will swear.'
'Good man.'
We swore together. He was a priest of Artemis, holding one of the hereditary roles. He led me into the inner sanctum and showed me the statues and gave me a branch from the sacred tree – just a pair of leaves, but a sign to show my master where I had been.
Then I went home.
Home was not normal. Days had passed and all our rhythms had changed. Mistress never left her room. Master drank. Archi took no exercise and that night he pulled me close and burst into tears.
'Why has Mater done this to us?' he asked me through his tears. 'No one will speak to me!'
It was true. I had seen it in action. Archi was effectively in exile in his own city. None of his classmates would meet his eye, and no one invited him to a symposium or a ramble or even a troll through the stews.
'It will pass,' I said. I thought of Heraclitus. 'Listen, master. Our teacher made me swear an oath to support you. These will be tough times. I'm here.'
Archi was holding me tight, and suddenly he sobbed. 'I betrayed you as surely as Mater betrayed Pater!' he said. 'I knew she was yours. I wanted her. Oh, Doru, forgive me!'
I sat on his couch and held him. I did not want to forgive him. In fact, now that he'd confessed that he knew what he was doing, I wanted to knock his head off. But Penelope's face had not been the face of a slave being taken against her will. I had some experience with women by then. Women can pretend many things, but few of them pretend when they think no one can see them. All this went through my mind.
'Penelope is a slave, but she is her own woman. She wanted you, not me. Why not?' I said bitterly. 'I am just a slave.'
Pitying ourselves, we wept. Foolish boys! We were about to learn what tears are really for. But when our eyes were dry, we were better friends. And the next day, Archi called Penelope to him while I was in his room. He did it without warning. And when she came, he shrugged and left the room.
She looked like a trapped animal – like a doe run down by dogs on the flanks of Cithaeron. Her eyes followed Archi as he walked out of the door, and that gave her away. She really liked him. Perhaps she loved him, or just saw him as a chance for liberty.
'I'm sorry I almost got you killed,' I said. I was stiff and formal. 'I understand that you prefer my master. I won't bother you again.'
She turned her head away. Then she looked back. 'You aren't even really a slave,' she said. 'You're like a man who plays at being a slave. You will die for it, and I will weep for you, but I won't be your lover. Archi is kind, and I think he'll free me when I'm pregnant.'
None of that made much sense to me – although it does now. I said she was smart. She saw things I didn't see, for all my reading and training. So I shrugged, and she bowed her head and left the room without speaking. We should have embraced, but we were too young to forgive and forget.
I was still standing there when I heard a scream from the courtyard. I ran. I thought we were being attacked. Remember that apart from my life as a house slave and companion, I was already a man of violence, and that Diomedes seemed to have a bottomless purse when it came to sending men after me.
When I reached the courtyard, Hipponax was standing stony-faced, staring at a man dressed in the same green chlamys I'd worn a few days previously. Briseis was screaming, her face contorted, all her beauty gone. Penelope was trying to drag her away.
The herald backed out of the gate.
Penelope looked terrified. Briseis's face was the face of a fury, deep lines carved across her smooth brows as she wailed with screams of pain. Her father glanced at her and turned away. Poor man. He had nothing to offer her. Gods send that I never be in his place.
Archi tried to hold her and she began to fight him, and she landed a blow – a foul blow. She was a good fighter, that girl. Down he went, and then she spat like a wild cat and raked her nails across Penelope's chest – I thought they were her nails – and blood flowed.
She screamed again.
I thought she was having a fit. I took her down. I wasn't her brother, and much as I thought I was in love with her, she was a danger to everyone in the yard. I swept her feet and held her arms and put her down on the ground hard enough to drive all the breath from her. She had the strength of a goddess but no palaestra skills, and on her way to the ground I rolled her in the end of her own peplos to pin her arms. She ripped her left arm free and her nails drew blood from my cheek and neck.
But when she wrenched her head back with superhuman strength, a hand shot out and smacked her across the face – once and then again.
'Silence, girl!' her mother said.
I had not seen Euthalia in days. She was neatly dressed in sombre colours, and she did not look as if her life had ended.
Briseis sat back on her haunches and the daimon left her. I saw it leave her eyes. It takes one to know one. But then the bitterness exploded.
'It's your fault, you faithless bitch!' she said to her mother. 'He called me a whore! Diomedes called me a whore! In public! Now I'll die barren. He's broken the marriage contract.' She didn't cry. Crying would have been better than her imperious self-pity. 'If you hadn't been so busy riding the Persian's cock-bird, I might be a matron.'
Euthalia's hand shot out and snapped her daughter's head back again. 'Be civil or take the consequences,' she said.
'I can't even blame him!' Briseis cried, and for the first time her voice cracked and she began to sob instead of scream. 'My mother's a whore! I'll be a whore too! I should kill myself!'
Penelope was cowering. She had a bad scratch across her breast and her Doric chiton was filling with blood. She was sitting on a step crying. I saw now that Briseis had a pin in her hand. She had ripped Penelope with it, and me too, I realized.
Euthalia reached into her bosom and her right hand came out with a knife in it. 'Here,' she said. 'Get on with it.'
This was the family that I had so envied when I joined them.
Briseis picked up the knife and ran her thumb across it like a man getting ready for sacrifice. Then she stepped towards her mother, and I felt that her intentions were plain.
I stepped in on her and raised my left hand as Cyrus had taught me. She tracked the hand with the knife and not the body, and I caught her wrist and disarmed her. She got the pin into my chest, but the gold bent and I only took a finger's breadth. It was cold in my chest, and the pain made me want to kill her.