I was reading, as I say, when Briseis came in. She smiled at me – quite a happy smile – and took a scroll from my basket.
'Have you read Thales?' she asked. 'For all that he sounds like a soothsayer, he seems the wisest of the lot. Or perhaps he just hated women less.'
'Heraclitus doesn't hate women,' I answered hotly.
'Oh!' she said, and her eyes flashed. 'Wonderful! I'll ask him to accept me as a student straight away.'
I had to smile. I raised my hand the way a swordsman does at practice, when he acknowledges a hit. 'Well struck,' I said.
'I was happy at Sappho's school,' she said. 'I wish I could go back, but I'm too old.' Old at sixteen.
Her father glared at us. 'I'm working,' he growled.
'May we read in the garden?' Briseis asked sweetly, and he kissed her hand – absently – his eyes on his work.
We picked up the scroll baskets and walked into the garden together.
'Why don't you read to me?' she said. There was very little question to it.
And that was that. I read to her every day. We read Thales' book on nature – really just an accumulation of his sayings. We read our way through Pythagoras, and laughed over what we didn't understand, and Briseis asked questions and I taught her what I knew of the geometry, which was not inconsiderable, and I took her questions to Heraclitus, and he answered them. He was contemptuous of women as a sex, but friendly to them as individuals, which Briseis said was a vast improvement on the reverse.
If I thought that I loved her when I was a slave, that was merely the lust for the unattainable. Every boy loves someone unattainable, and no few attain the one they want anyway, to their own confusion. But when we sat together, day after day, then I saw her another way.
I am an intelligent man. All my life, my wits have cut other men like my sword.
She was my better. I saw it with the geometry. In three weeks, she had everything I could teach. By the gods, if I could have taught her to smith, she'd have made a Corinthian helmet in three weeks! Once her mind bit into a thing, she would never let it go, like a boar with his tusks in his prey.
Have you ever seen an eagle kill close to you? She turns, and you catch your breath, and she hits her prey, and if you are close, you can see the blood – a brief red cloud, a mist of blood – and your heart stops with the beauty of it, even as you think that this is an animal killing another animal. Why is it so beautiful?
And so with the mind of Briseis.
After two weeks, she leaned close while I showed her a bronze pyxis I had made for her – we had a small forge – and she leaned close and ran a finger down my jaw.
'Come to my room tonight,' she said.
I leaned back, her touch like a burn on my jaw. 'If I'm caught-' I said, and like a coward, my eyes darted around for the slaves.
She shrugged. 'I wasn't caught. Or am I braver than you, my hero?'
She said nothing more – nothing. Not a glance did she give me, nor a touch of her hand. I went to her room wondering with every heart-pounding step if I had, in fact, created the whole thing in my head. Had she really asked me? Really?
I stopped in the hall outside her room, although there was no cover there. I took a breath and my knees were weak and I shuddered. I had done none of these things before I killed Cleisthenes. Every man is brave for some things and a coward for others. I stood there for a long time, and I'll tell you in honesty that I could feel the shit at the base of my intestines, I was so afraid.
Aphrodite, not Ares, is the deadliest on Olympus.
Then I made myself push through her curtain.
She laughed when her skin was against mine. 'You weren't this cold in the bath,' she said.
'I thought that you were Penelope!' I said with foolish honesty.
There are women who might be offended by that sort of revelation. Briseis bit my ear, rolled off the couch and lit a lamp from her fire jar.
'Aphrodite!' I said. Probably squeaked.
She got on top of me. 'I want you to see me,' she said. 'So that next time you won't mistake me for my maid.'
When we were done – and the moment we were done, she laughed and bounced to her feet – I asked, 'Why?' I reached out and touched her flank. 'Why did you come to me? In the bath?'
She laughed, and her eyes flashed in the lamplight. 'I decided that you should have what Diomedes gave away,' she said. 'Promise me that if you ever have the chance, you'll kill him for me?'
I shrugged. Later, I swore.
I'm a man, not a god. I took to spending my days in the little forge shed in the work yard. It was a tiny shop with one small bench, and Hipponax only had it so that his pots could be mended without being taken to market, but Darkar once told me that they had had a slave who had some skill with iron.
I made instruments at first – a compass for Briseis, and then a ruler marked out in daktyloi. I made a fine compass for Heraclitus, as well. It was simple work, but good. Briseis was pleased by her geometry tools, as she called them, and Heraclitus was delighted, embracing me. I think that he had no use for such things, as he once told me that he could see the logos and all its shapes in his head. But the long bronze dividers were comfortable in the hand, and excellent for showing a student, and their points were sharp and probably used to prick a generation of dullards, which gives me some satisfaction.
When I had my eye back, I bought some scrap bronze and poured myself a plate, pouring directly on to a piece of slate. Then I forged the pour into a sheet, which made me feel better. Making sheet is long work, and finicky. I did an adequate job, although my heart told me that I stopped planishing too early.
Oh, lass, you'll never be a bronze-smith's daughter! Planishing – endless tiny hammer strokes to smooth the forge-work. When you change something's shape, you use the curved surface of the big hammers, pulling the metal or pushing it, this way and that. But that leaves big, lumpy marks. See this cauldron? Look at these marks. See? But a good smith, a master, never lets an item out of his shop with these divots. He uses ever-smaller hammers, working the surface a blow at a time, until it is one continuous surface – like my helmet. See?
Making sheet is about getting the surface to a single thickness and a flat shape, two things that seem like enemies when you are new to the process. More than you wanted to know, eh? But something had changed since I killed Cleisthenes, and I wanted to go back, I think – back to a world where I could do good work.
I had begun to have dreams about home. I had the first in Briseis's bed, the first night I went to her. I dreamed that ravens came and stripped my armour from me, and took me to their nest.
I dreamed of ravens, and their green nest of willows, night after night, until I realized that the ravens were Apollo's, and the green nest was Plataea – was home. And then, for the first time in years, I was homesick. I began to dream more fully, about the farm on the hill, and about the tomb of the hero on the slopes of Cithaeron, and about hunting with Calchas.
The dreams were powerful but they could never compete with the reality of Briseis. Or the coming war. I told myself that it was time to go home – soon.
Anyway, I tell this story awry. I gambled on the waterfront and made love to Briseis; I listened to Heraclitus and read philosophy in the garden; I worked and played on the palaestra and in the gymnasium with Archi. It sounds like a good life. In fact, it was a bad time, but I could not tell you why, except that I could feel the doom over me.
When I had my bronze sheet forged, I cut some scrap from the edges and began to work them, chasing figures into them as practice. I did olives and circles and leaves and laurels, and then I tried a stag, but my stag became a raven early in the process. I made six or seven ravens, until I had done one well.
I remember that raven, because while I admired my work, Darkar came in and asked me to wait on Archi at dinner. That was the third time that Hipponax hosted Aristagoras. This time Briseis was the hostess, with most of the great men of the army as guests. The house was busy, and in those days, it was perfectly acceptable for a free man to wait on his lord, and I did it willingly enough.