‘I do?’ I asked.
‘You do,’ Euphonia said, with the hint of a sneer.
Eugenios was trying to get my attention, and I needed to escape. I went over to him.
‘That was perhaps the most expensive sacrificial animal in history,’ he said. ‘Forty drachma.’
I shook my head. ‘That will only get worse,’ I said.
He nodded.
We walked back, while I explained — without, I hope, too much pomposity — my thoughts on drawing and cutting with the sword, and what I had learned from the Spartan exercises, their version of Pyrrhiche, and the like.
Anaxagoras looked at me as if I might be human, after all. That was interesting.
‘These are profound thoughts,’ he said. Little knowing what a patronising thing that was to say. ‘You are a philosopher of the sword.’
‘Hmm,’ I said, too polite to openly disagree. Or agree.
He paused and looked at me with his too-serious young face. ‘I have offended you, I think,’ he said.
I shrugged. Hipponax laughed.
Euphonia said something to her friends and both girls shrieked with laughter. Anaxagoras frowned.
She poked Hipponax. ‘Do you want to talk to her, Hip?’ she asked.
Her friend blushed and looked away, embarrassed at my daughter’s temerity.
‘Who?’ he asked.
Hector was always faster on his feet and he smiled and knelt by my daughter. ‘Hipponax wished a secret assignation with your friend here,’ he said. ‘He’s madly in love with the way she giggles, and the way her feet are dirty-’
Euphonia’s friend all but expired in laughter. It is good to be ten years old, still immune to the darts of Eros but aware of their effect on others and find it all funny. Rather like middle age.
Hipponax didn’t like being teased and he expressed himself by tipping his friend over.
Hector shot to his feet, indignant. ‘This is my best chiton!’ he said.
‘You can buy another,’ Hipponax said.
‘We’re not all rich aristocrats,’ Hector said.
Hipponax laughed, suddenly more mature than I’d expected. ‘I’m the son of a fisherman’s wife,’ he said, looking at me.
Pericles winced.
‘You are slumming,’ I said to the young man.
‘I thought he was your son?’ Pericles said.
I nodded. ‘He is my son. I recognise him — he is in every way mine.’
Pericles let go a breath he had held. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But my cousin does fancy him. She’s marriageable, and my mother-’ suddenly the wily Pericles was just another adolescent boy.
‘Your mother?’ I asked.
‘My mother favours the match,’ he said.
‘Match?’ I asked softly. We were speaking quietly. Hipponax and Hector had made up and Anaxagoras had shown himself more than a windbag by helping clean Hector’s chiton and his chlamys as we walked.
‘My mother — pardon me — says that your quarrel with Cleitus is foolish and helps to divide the eupatridae when they should be united,’ he said.
I probably growled in my throat. ‘He killed my mother,’ I said.
Pericles showed some of the power he would later display all too often. ‘He did not,’ Pericles said. ‘He supported your cousin in making private war on you, in revenge for your use of humiliation and violence in a political matter.’
‘I-’ I began.
‘Compared to the actions of the Great King, your argument with Cleitus is of little importance,’ he said, as if he was my own age and not seventeen or whatever he was that summer.
He, too, had a great deal of dignity. And he was right.
He shrugged. ‘If Jocasta was here, my mother would have it all arranged,’ he said. ‘Sorry — among the women, Jocasta is treated as your, hmm, patroness.’ He looked away. ‘As you inconveniently have no wife.’ He looked at me. ‘Actually, my mother initially suggested that we get Heliodora as your wife.’
‘She could be my daughter!’ I shot at him.
He shrugged. ‘When my mother gets the bit in her political teeth,’ he said, apologetically. ‘I convinced her that your Hipponax would do as well.’
‘When?’ I asked. ‘We were at sea-’
‘Oh, today,’ he said breezily.
The speed of the transmission of information from woman to woman on Salamis made the Great King’s spies and the priests of Apollo look like amateurs.
‘But they’ve only just met!’ I said.
Pericles, like most Athenian gentlemen, didn’t seem to think it mattered. ‘They’ve seen each other and they like what they see,’ he pronounced, as if he was not, in fact, a year younger than my son.
We might have gone on in that vein, and who knows what might have happened, but we’d been inland on the main road to the town and we were coming to the broad gravel road down to the beach that the Brauron girls used, and the moon was rising in a later afternoons sky and we heard cries. Because of the ridge, we hadn’t been able to see the sea for several stades, but as we came to the top we were looking down into the bay and across into Attica as the sun set to the left, over by Megara.
Both of the beaches we could see and almost every foot of the ridge were packed with people, and they were wailing. Men stood with their arms raised to the gods, and women tore their hair and their outer chitons and wept.
Over Attica, smoke was rising. We had to look to see what all the fuss was about, but when we saw!
The Acropolis was afire.
It must just have happened as we crossed the ridge from the temple of Apollo. While Pericles spoke to me of his mother’s marriage plots, Persian soldiers were climbing the rock of the ancient temples of Athens, her sacred precinct.
They broke in, and massacred the garrison.
We couldn’t hear that.
But we saw the flames as they rose in the clear evening air. The temples of Athens were burning and women lamented as if their children were lost. Screams rent the air as if the Persians were among us.
‘Keep walking,’ I ordered.
It was horrible.
I can’t describe the terrible fascination that ruin has for the eye. It was an awesome sight — the flames shooting hundreds of feet into the air above the Acropolis, which, even twenty stades away, rose so far above the plain that on most days you could see the roof of the temple clearly, and even the glint of gold from the old Erectheion that was.
But that night, they burned like a torch. An immense torch, as if a titan’s fist had broken through the thin crust of earth and raised it aloft to illuminate the world.
The flames went so high that they reflected in the ocean. Dry cedar and other valuable woods, ivory and gold — all were being consumed, along with three hundred people and all the treasures and sacred objects of a mighty and ancient city.
We walked down the road into an evening lit by horror. Eventually we found ourselves on the beach, still watching the Acropolis burn, with all of the women of Brauron and all the girls. By then the High Priestess was back, standing erect despite her seventy years, watching her city burn.
As we came up, one of the younger priestesses said something, apparently suggesting that the girls should not be allowed to watch.
‘No,’ the High Priestess said. ‘No, let them watch. They will be the mothers of the generation that avenges us. Let them see what the Great King has done, and remember.’ Ferocity growled in her voice. ‘I, for one, will never forget this night. I pray we will never make peace. I ask Artemis, under her own moon, to help us to bring fire to their temples, even to Persepolis and his other cities.’ She raised her arms and, for a moment, we could see the massive fire raging between them, almost like a crown on her head, so perfectly was she placed in front of me, and a chill swept me. A god heard her plea, or took her oath — I was there.
My daughter and her friend clutched my knees and wept, and many other women wept, but some stood dry-eyed.
By chance, or perhaps by purpose, Heliodora was standing close to us as the fire burned down, and she stood with her friend Iris — dry-eyed.