Perhaps we delivered.
I fortified myself with one more cup of wine and walked up the town, to the shop where I had worked for a year. I sent a slave in for Nikephorus. But I already knew that the forge was silent, and when the mistress of the house emerged, she looked at me, face carefully blank.
‘Where is Master Nikephorus?’ I asked.
She looked away. ‘He died.’
‘And his wife?’ I asked.
The woman looked at the ground. ‘She died first.’ She finally met my eye, and hers held rage. ‘You have nerve, coming here. After what you did. You don’t think I know you? I know you.’
This was what I had imagined, when I imagined the worst possible outcome of my visit. And I didn’t know her.
‘You ruined her. Turned her head — made her a whore.’ The woman spat at my feet. ‘My curse on you. I pray for your destruction, every day. May the sea god suck you down. May the Carthaginians take you.’
I confess that I stepped back before her rage.
‘I wanted to marry her,’ I said weakly, knowing that this was not precisely true.
‘Did you?’ she asked. ‘I’m sure you still can. She might make a good wife, between pleasuring gentlemen at parties.’ She stepped forward. ‘My sister died, of a broken heart. Her husband died when the fucking Tyrant took his citizen rights. They took you in, you fuck. Gave you work. You ruined them.’ She was screaming now. I was backing away as if she were three swordsmen. Or perhaps five.
Five swordsmen would not have made me feel like this one middle-aged woman.
What do you say? To the screaming harridan in the street? I meant no harm? We were just playing? I play with girls all the time? I’m a warrior, and it is my right to take women as chattel?
One of the effects of age is to realize that most of society’s rules — even the most foolish — exist for reasons, and are broken only at someone’s peril. From the comfort of this kline and across the distance of years, I doubt that I wrecked Lydia alone, or that her mother died entirely of my actions. Nikephorus could have been less intransigent. As I discovered, he threw her from the house. She was a prostitute by the next morning. That’s the way of it. And she came to the attention of the man who became Tyrant, and he took her for his own. As you will hear.
Well.
How much of that is my responsibility? Eh?
When the night is dark, and the wine is sour, it looks to me as if it is all my responsibility. All of it. I played with her life, and I broke it. That’s hubris, my daughter. Treating a free person as if they are a slave.
I never promised you a happy story.
I left the street and walked down the hill, and sat on the beach over the headland from the citadel, and I wept. And then I went back to town along the waterfront, looking for a fight, and didn’t find one. You never do, when you really want one. So I drank, and I walked, and I wandered.
It grew dark. And there was Doola standing in front of me, and he walked with me a way, and then it was morning, and I awoke with a hard head and a general sense of hopelessness.
I went downstairs and sat with my friends. Because they were true friends, I told them the whole story. Doola knew some, and Neoptolymos most of it, but when they heard the whole story, they gathered around me and Seckla hugged me, and Doola just stood with a hand on my shoulder.
‘You owe the girl,’ he said.
‘She must hate me,’ I said.
Doola nodded. ‘I don’t think that will change. You must help her, anyway. Take her away from here, to where she can start again.’
‘Perhaps she likes it here,’ I said; a fairly weak thing to say, really.
Doola just looked at me.
Neoptolymos said, ‘Let’s just take her.’
I didn’t see any solution. But Doola insisted I had to see her, and I determined to try.
I began by asking any staff I met when I went up to the palace. Rumours of the Tyrant’s hetaera were everywhere in the town, but there was no one at the palace who would even mention her. At my third invitation to dine, I went and sat on young Dionysus’ couch — it was crowded, I can tell you — to see what he would tell me, but the party was growing wilder by the moment and I couldn’t even get his attention.
I have seldom felt such an utter depression of spirit as I felt that evening. I sat in the Tyrant’s beautiful garden — he’d had the couches arranged outside — and the sun stained the sky and distant clouds a magnificent orange pink even as his roses scented the air. It was an intimate dinner — perhaps thirty guests, with superb music and very good food. I remember none of the dishes, because I didn’t want food.
I sat alone on a couch, ignored by the other guests, a mere oddity, a foreigner who had sailed a long way and nothing more. I was thirty years old and more. I was a famous man — in a way. But that way was not the kind of fame any man seeks. I had the reputation of a killer. A pirate. A thug. I had abused a girl half my age, and because of it, her family was disgraced or dead and she herself dishonoured. And nothing could make that right. There was no one to kill.
I am not a fool. I was trained by one of the greatest minds in the history of Greece, and I have a brain of my own. I could, and did, see the difference between what my emotions said I had done and the actual responsibility I bore. But that didn’t matter, any more than the various excuses I make myself for the oceans of blood I have shed with the edge of my sword.
I was more than thirty years old, and I had neither wife nor children; no permanence, no hope of continuity. If an enemy spear took me, I would be gone like a bad smell in a powerful wind.
I still think these thoughts, thugater. Nothing makes it better. It is dark, and it can go on for days. There is nothing joyous about murder. The thrill — the contest — of war is only half the story, and the other half is remembering all the men whose lives you reaped so that you could have their gold.
I decided to go. If I had been feeling better, I might have been bold enough to walk off and search the palace, but dark spirits do not raise your courage.
Gelon came and sat on my kline just as I was about to leave. ‘You are like the spectre at the feast,’ he said. ‘Is my food bad? Do the musicians displease you?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I am not in the mood for food. I should have declined to come, my lord. I am poor company.’
He furrowed his brow. ‘I expect better of my guests. Come: tell us of sailing the Outer Sea.’
Another man — one of the horse-breeders who seemed to be Gelon’s favourites — clapped his hands together. ‘Tell us!’
Another one of them, a taller man with ringlets, looked at me curiously. I suddenly knew him — he was one of the wealthy men who had evicted me from the city gymnasium some years before.
Had I been in a different mood, that might have roused me, but in my present mood, it only served to make me tired.
‘Another time,’ I said wearily.
‘I insist,’ said the Tyrant.
Well, he was the absolute lord of Syracusa, and my ships were in his harbour. ‘Very well,’ I said.
He held up a hand. ‘Let me send for Dano,’ he said. ‘She loves any physical science. She will want to hear this herself. In fact, she insisted.’
I lay back, while slaves rearranged the couches so that I could tell my story to the party.
Theodorus — his name came to me — came and stood by my kline. ‘I think I know you,’ he said hesitantly.
‘I was a slave,’ I said. ‘And you didn’t want to know me.’
He frowned. ‘You probably shouldn’t be in the palace.’
I nodded. I found that I was growing angry easily, that I wanted to quarrel with this relative nonentity. Which was foolish. Anger is always foolish.
‘Why don’t you tell him, and we’ll see how he reacts?’ I said.
Theodorus looked at me. ‘How does a former slave own three warships?’ he asked me.
‘Good question,’ I said. I smiled.
He went and said something to one of his cronies, and then the Tyrant was back with Dano. She wore a veil and sat in a chair.