Shocked at this outburst, I said nothing for a long while, until I sensed his breath had returned to a more even rhythm, that he had cooled down.
"Aedon, you are your father's son, and he loves you as a father should. He simply is not a man to openly express such sentiments. Tenderness, to you or to anyone, is not an art that Gryllus values highly."
"If he valued it any less highly I would be dead."
Aedon again fell silent and I hoped that the matter was ended, but he was still restless, tossing and kicking at his blankets, his mind troubling him so much that it kept him from sleeping, even in his exhausted state.
"What in the name of the gods possessed you to continue fighting today?" I asked him, attempting to lift him out of his doldrums. "You looked like you wanted to kill Boy."
Aedon drew a deep breath, and paused for so long that I thought perhaps he had finally dropped off to sleep. When I peered at him, however, he was glaring fiercely at the ceiling, and even in the room's dim light I could see that his face was contorted in silent rage.
"You wouldn't understand, Theo," he finally mumbled dismissively.
"Understand? What's there to understand?"
Another long silence.
"Look, I just imagined Boy was someone else. It helped to focus my concentration."
I pondered this warily, but my curiosity finally overcame my caution. "Whom did you imagine you were attacking?" As soon as the question left my lips, however, I regretted it, for I knew the answer as well as Aedon.
He glanced at me with a look of disdain for my denseness, then turned his face to the wall.
"Better I'd been born a bastard," he grunted thickly through his split lips.
CHAPTER FOUR
ON AN OTHERWISE silent evening two years later, when Aedon was fourteen, he was awakened by a sound he knew was not proper to the house. As his personal servant, I was the only domestic allowed to spend the night in that wing of the house, and I had been snoring at the foot of his bed. Gryllus had left on a diplomatic mission several weeks before, resignedly charging his son with care of the household, and Aedon, hoping to please his father, felt this responsibility keenly. The sound had awakened him before me, and peering through the slats of the window he spied an intruder in the moonlit courtyard, naked but for a loincloth. He was smeared with a dark, greasy substance, and scaling the wall to the dining room he left a faint smudge behind, a dark blotch on the white plaster. Aedon snatched the short sword Gryllus had given him, and slipped silently out the room, determined not only to preserve his family's honor and wealth, but to live up to the trust his father had placed in him. Stealing silently into the dining room, he glimpsed the felon's fleeting silhouette just disappearing into the other wing of the compound, and he recalled even in the tension of the moment wondering how the fellow could be so familiar with the house.
Feeling his way in darkness through the other door to head off the thief, he rounded the corner and collided with his adversary, who with his blackened, greasy skin and faintly gleaming eyes appeared like a creature from hell. They both yelped, but Aedon reacted first, seizing the other and muscling him to the floor, then rolling with him back into the dining room. During the struggle the slippery intruder escaped his grasp and drew a knife from his belt, which Aedon could see faintly glinting, subtle and lethal, in the near-pitch darkness. He could sense, perhaps from the other's irregular panting and jerky motions, that the fear was rising within. Aedon made a conscious effort to slow his own breathing, to keep his own terror submerged and to think, think hard, of what his father would have wanted him to do. Circling the thief slowly and silently, his eyes straining to see the other's movements in the blackness, Aedon suddenly threw himself at his target with his dagger raised high. He miscalculated the position of a stool on the floor, however, for as he swiped at his enemy's neck, he stumbled, his shoulder smashing heavily into his adversary, and he felt a blinding pain in the ribs. Struggling to regain his balance, he slipped on some residual grease that had rubbed onto the floor, cracked his head against the stone wall, and lost consciousness.
I arrived just as Aedon fell, and was at first puzzled to hear nothing but the frantic twittering of the birds-hadn't I heard a heavy commotion in the room just seconds before? Feeling my way through the room, however, I tripped over a soft object, someone lying on the floor, and landed heavily on another. I felt the warm stickiness on my palms and bare knees, and realizing what it was an instant later, I raced out in horror, bursting into the cook's room and seizing the small oil lamp the cowering old lady had left burning for comfort. Leaving her shrieking in darkness, I tore back into the dining room, where the dimly lit scene left me aghast.
With excruciating pain and difficulty, Aedon had pulled himself into a half-sitting position against the wall, and was watching in silence as the bright blood frothed and bubbled from his side, hissing slightly as it mixed with air escaping from his pierced lung. The furniture in the room was upended, and the greasy black culprit lay prone on the floor, his neck half severed by Aedon's single, lucky dagger thrust. His blood pulsed thickly from the artery in ever-weakening spurts, like that of a ram being bled for the ritual sacrifice, conjoining with the sticky pond forming beneath Aedon. As often happens in my moments of stress or shock, the wordless Syracusan chanting of my early memory rose from the dark recesses of my mind where it lurks like a bat in a cave, pushing itself to the fore of my concentration, and it was only with great effort that I was able to force it back and focus on the task at hand. Aedon's mother burst into the room and began wailing in terror, and the elderly cook, her wits now about her, attempted fruitlessly to extract the thief's blade stuck in Aedon's rib, and splashed water on his face from a small bowl to keep him from passing out again. The caged birds had stopped their raucous chirping and now solemnly watched the proceedings, not without, it seemed, a certain clinical interest. Not a sound came from Aedon, apart from his labored breathing. He closed his eyes, and through his pain managed a half smile.
Because of Gryllus' position, though not without some misgivings, the family was able to secure the services of the city's most respected physicians. They soon had the blade removed from his ribs and prescribed a regime of poultices consisting of a concoction of ashes, spurge, and sour wine. For days afterward he was given to drink a beverage of bitter herbs that made him lightheaded and sleepy. I sent his father a hurried message by military courier, fearing that Aedon might die any day, and Gryllus returned home within two weeks, riding confiscated horses and navy vessels the entire way to speed his journey. Still wearing the dusty and sweat-begrimed clothes in which he had been dressed for the past week, he strode into the house without ceremony, pausing briefly to compose himself and to straighten his shoulders. With tears in his eyes, he entered the room where his son was recovering.
"Son, you truly are a man," he said, clasping Aedon's forearm in both his hands. "You have acted to the glory of the gods and our ancestors. Athens will be proud to see you serve her one day, as will I."
Aedon's face was expressionless, even wary, at this rare sign of his father's approval, but his eyes sparkled in a way I had not seen since he was a young boy. Gryllus was quick to allow the news of his son's bravery to be spread among his colleagues, and within days Aedon was swamped with offers for the services of the most renowned athletic trainers. His friends treated him as a god, or at least as a war hero, though he himself refused to discuss the affair, and shrank from all mention of it except by his father.