The third day in port. Miriam seemed a thousand Parasanges away, and a newly arrived Cyprian ore-freighter had somehow got ahead of his last three grain ships at the pier, and even when the confusion was sorted out, he’d lost another day. In his irritation, he slipped and got the tip of Anaxagoras’s sword in his throat — hard enough to make him feel the front of his gorge with the back, and it ached all day.
‘When we’re on campaign somewhere, in our tenth or eleventh straight day of rain, and I feel like crap, and there’s no wine, I’ll wish I’d enjoyed these days more,’ Satyrus said to Anaxagoras. He was sitting with his lyre in his lap. His throat hurt and he had no interest in playing. Or rather, he had every interest in playing well, and no interest in doing the work to get there, today.
‘You are a king, not a mercenary,’ Anaxagoras said. ‘Surely sooner or later you will stop fighting.’
Satyrus shrugged. ‘Unlikely. When Lysimachos and Ptolemy and Seleucus and Cassander and Demetrios and all the busy, scheming bastards are dead, perhaps. But there’ll be more of them, I expect. Perhaps worse. The rumour is that Lysimachos is getting ready to march into my territory — claiming that he only seeks to march his army around the Euxine to Asia.’
‘Now that he is to marry Amastris?’ Anaxagoras said.
Satyrus looked out at the sea, blue as his former lover’s eyes in the bright sunlight. ‘They’re married now,’ he said, ‘unless something happened to prevent it.’
‘Shall we drink to them?’ Anaxagoras asked. ‘Is this why you are so far away from us?’
Satyrus spilled a libation. ‘To Hera, goddess of the marriage bed. May Amastris be blessed. May they both be happy.’
‘You mean that?’ Anaxagoras asked.
Satyrus smiled. It was a crooked smile, but not a mean one. ‘I think I do. I’m doing my best to mean it.’
Anaxagoras chuckled. ‘Listen, philos. When I was young-’
‘Look at the grey beard!’ Satyrus said.
Anaxagoras glanced at Charmides, who was admiring a serving girl as she, quite self-consciously, carried water on her head across the street. ‘Charmides makes all of us feel old,’ he said, and they both laughed. The younger man glanced at them and smiled.
Satyrus smiled back at him. ‘Will Charmides ever be old?’ he asked.
Anaxagoras shook his head, dismissing the topic. ‘At any rate, when I was young I wanted to marry a beautiful girl — a free girl. A local farmer’s daughter. She was modest and clever and her legs — oh, even now, I think of her-’
‘Aphrodite, philos, this was, what, six years ago? Stop telling it as if you were decades from her!’ Satyrus laughed.
‘And my father forbade it, of course. Rich men’s sons do not wed farmer’s daughters, no matter how good their legs are.’ He laughed, but his eyes were far away.
Satyrus felt a prickle of unease.
‘And the worst of it was that I knew — I knew from the first that my pater was right, and that I would never marry her. But I was stubborn, and romantic, and I pursued her. Long enough to convince her father I meant business.’ He shrugged. ‘And then I realised that she was merely clever, not actually intelligent. That she cared deeply for money and fine things.’
‘It is easy to sneer at such thoughts, when you are rich,’ Satyrus said.
‘Too true. This is not a pretty story, nor one that shows me to best advantage.’ Anaxagoras poured himself more wine. ‘Eventually, I sopped seeing her. It was easy to do — after all, she was a free woman and modest, so that seeing her at all had required enormous effort. You understand?’
‘Of course,’ Satyrus said.
‘And then — within a year — she married. She married well — better, in fact, than me. An aristocrat’s son — a powerful man with powerful connections and an old, old family. And to this day I cannot decide what my role in all of this was — did I love her? Do I bless her success? Should I have wed her myself?’ Anaxagoras drank off his wine. ‘See? No great lesson there. Just real life.’
Satyrus nodded. The silence floated between them, easy enough. Easy silence had been the first sign they were friends, and now it endured, a token of esteem.
‘I worry that I cannot marry Miriam,’ Satyrus said.
The connection was obvious enough. Miriam was a Jew, not a Hellene. The daughter of one of the Middle Sea’s richest merchants, no one could suggest that marrying her was marrying down. But she was a barbarian, a foreigner, an alien.
‘I know,’ Anaxagoras said. ‘I wondered the same. I even wondered if, by courting her, I was — oh, I don’t know. A foolish thought.’
Satyrus smiled. ‘Redeeming yourself, brother?’
‘Proving that I wasn’t such a snob, more like. Although Miriam does rather rise above snobbery.’ Their eyes met, and Satyrus grinned.
‘My mother was more of a barbarian than Miriam will ever manage to be,’ he said.
‘Your father was not a king, of course. Were they married? Your parents?’ Anaxagoras asked.
‘Before Greeks and Sakje,’ Satyrus said. ‘I almost feel as if I was there, I’ve heard the tale so often. Pater was campaigning against Alexander, out on the Sea of Grass.’ He poured wine to the shade of his father. ‘Do you know that most of our sailors and marines worship my father as a god?’
Anaxagoras nodded. ‘I know that Apollodorus wears his amulet, and so does Charmides.’ He smiled. ‘Does it trouble you?’
Satyrus shrugged. ‘When I was a boy, I thought that he spoke to me. And when I was sick last year, he and Philokles seemed to visit me constantly. And yet Philokles never suggested to me that my father was anything but a good man. A difficult standard by which to measure myself, a worthy one, but no more.’ He shrugged again. ‘As I grow older, I find … how can I say this? I find the idea of my father’s deification a little offensive. Obscene.’
Anaxagoras nodded. ‘I’m trying to imagine how I would feel if my own father were deified.’ He laughed. ‘And I can’t. A good man of business — a pious man and a good father for a ne’er-do-well son. But godhood is not in him, and when he passes, his shade will not reach to the heavens for apotheosis.’ Anaxagoras rubbed his beard. ‘I’m not sure he’d want it even if offered.’
Satyrus took a deep breath. Then he changed his mind. ‘Tomorrow?’ he asked.
Apollodorus nodded. ‘Why don’t we stop being so serious, walk down to the pier, and see?’
The land breeze of the early morning found them already clear of the harbour mouth, the great mainsail rigged to catch the world’s wind, a gentle Boreas blowing them west, almost dead astern on their track for Athens after they weathered the northern promontory of Rhodos. The ships that had been laden with grain for Rhodes were full now of copper from Cyprus, cedar planks from Lebanon, skilled slaves who would become freemen in a year or two at Tanais or Pantecapaeaum, marble, spices and even a consignment of fine Aegyptian furniture for a rich merchant in Olbia. They also had the hard silver specie that had paid for the abundance of grain. Two days later, he sent them away north off Lesbos, under guard of half his ships, with Diokles, his most trusted trierarch, in command.
Aekes, a small, fiery man, brought his Ephesian Artemis off the beach in style and rowed away west — the scout ship. Satyrus followed him with two penteres, two triemiolas, and six triremes; almost a quarter of his full fleet, and some of the best ships — and some of his rawest, too.
He missed Diokles already, having seen little enough of the man in Rhodos, but keeping all of his best captains at his side all the time was poor strategy and unfair to them. He kept Aekes, though, because he could be trusted with anything — he had worked his way up to trierarch from the starting position of a Spartan helot, and he owed Satyrus his status, his citizenship, and his fortune.
Steering his own penteres — not his beloved Arete, lost to fire in the siege of Rhodos, but Medea, a smaller, lighter fiver built in Olbia — Satyrus pondered on Athens as a destination and what this visit meant to him. More than just seeing Miriam — although seeing Miriam was the greatest part of it, he admitted to himself. He must decide, before his prow touched the great pier at Piraeus, whether he meant to marry her. But there were other opportunities in Athens, other perils — he was a citizen there, and one whose activities made him both famous and infamous; a hero and a monster. Demetrios the besieger was the city’s current lord. Satyrus wanted to land in Athens ready for anything that might transpire. He wanted to be done with his state of war against Demetrios because, among other things, he expected shortly to be at war with Lysimachos.