It was a dark winter, with one beam of light. For when I was settling my Milesians, I met Antigonus of Thespiae, the young basileus of that town. He took ten of my families and made them citizens, and we became friends quickly — and as quickly, he courted my sister. He was a wealthy man, and he might have had any maiden in the valley of the Asopus, but he courted Pen, and in the spring he wed her, and men came to that wedding who had whispered about me, and my life was the better for it.
My mother stayed sober until the priest was gone, and I kissed her, and she cried. Then I folded my finery away and went back to the forge, and she went back to drinking, and men went back to whispering that the Corvaxae were all accursed.
There were other fights, that last year. But the Ionian Revolt died with Istes, as he fell, shouting ‘Miletus’.
I suppose we thought that the Long War was over. And I had forgotten my slave girl. I tried to forget Briseis, and Melaina. I tried to forget all of it. I ignored my armour and my helmet and I worked on bronze kettles and drinking cups.
Until the archon came and asked me to return to teaching the Pyrrhiche.
My calf throbbed and burned, and my hips hurt when we danced, but they all admired my splendid Persian scale shirt and my rich red cloak, and Myron came and embraced me.
‘Your new citizens have made us richer by a thousand gold darics,’ he said.
‘And fifty shields in the phalanx,’ Hermogenes said.
The men of Plataea came to me, and clasped my arm. Glad to have you back, they said, but now I sensed the hesitation in their grips and the tendency of their eyes to wander when they spoke. Plataeans didn’t just take off to fight in other people’s wars. Or show up with a passel of foreigners.
But I was the devil they knew. And by then, thanks to the word-fame of my role at Lade, I was famous — so famous that it was hard for my neighbours to accept me as a man who danced and sweated and had trouble with his grape vines. Fame makes you different — ask any man who has won the laurel at Olympia or Nemea.
May none of you ever experience defeat, and the death of all your friends. Idomeneus remained, back at the tomb of the hero, but he was as mad as a wild dog. Black was fighting against Aegina for Athens. Hermogenes was like another man — a good man, but a farmer and a husband. All the rest of them were dead. Even Archilogos was dead. And I didn’t dare allow my mind to think about Briseis. In some way, I let her be dead, as well.
But one of the saddest truths of men is that no grief lasts for ever.
My helmet was waiting, just where I had left it, on a leather bag on the great square bench that Pater had built. I had to hobble around the shop — my calf never healed, and as I said, I never ran well again — and I was angry all the time. Hermogenes forced me to work, and Tiraeus fired the forge, and after mending a few pots, my hands remembered their duty.
I think it was a month after the Pyrrhiche, and perhaps three months after Pen’s wedding, before I looked at the helmet. I was surprised by what a good helmet it was, how far along I had left it. It seemed like ten years — like a lifetime. There was the ding where I’d mis-struck when the boy came to me with news from Idomeneus. I blinked away tears. Then I took out the ding with careful, methodical planishing, which seemed more restful than dull.
When the bowl was as smooth as Briseis’s breasts, I turned the helmet over and looked at the patterns I’d incised.
I had started the ravens on the cheekplates before I left. I did not love Lord Apollo any more. But the ravens seemed apt. If I ever stood in the phalanx again, I wanted to wear ravens.
Instead of going to work on the helmet, I took a piece of scrap, pounded it out flat and tapped the ravens to life on a practice piece. I made a dozen errors, but I worked through patiently, reheating as I went. It was two days before I was satisfied, and then I went back and put the ravens on the cheekplates in an afternoon. I had time left to go and help my slaves prop the grape vines. Then I went back, looked my work over carefully and polished it as the sun set behind the hills of home. I filled the ravens with lead on the inside, planished a little more.
Tiraeus kept an eye on me while he put a new bail on an old bronze bucket for the temple. And then he looked at my work.
‘You’ve grown up,’ he said. And then, his voice rough, he pointed at the back of the skullpiece. ‘Little rough there.’
I picked up the hammer.
Ting-ting.
Ting-ting.
Part II
Beneath this stone lies Aeschylus, son of Euphorion, the Athenian,
who perished in the wheat-bearing land of Gela;
of his noble prowess the grove of Marathon can speak,
and the long-haired Persian knows it well.
9
It was late autumn, and the rains lashed the farm, and my slaves stayed in by the fire and made baskets for the next year’s crop. I was in the forge, hammering out the face of a new aspis — I needed a shield.
The world was moving. I could feel it. The last cities of Lesbos were falling to the Persians, and in Athens, the stasis — the conflict — between the aristocrats and the demos was so bad that it had come to murder in the streets, or so men said, and Persian gold flowed like water to buy the best men. Closer to home, Thebes had begun agitating to take our city, or at least reduce our boundaries. And one voice carried clear from their agora to ours — Simon, son of Simon, loud in condemnation of our archon, Myron, and eager for my blood. Small traders bought us this news.
Empedocles the priest came out from Thebes in the last golden light of autumn, while the hillside of Cithaeron was a glow of red oak leaves. When he had given the blessing of Hephaestus to my forge and relit our fires after we swept the shop, he raised Tiraeus to the rank of master, as the man deserved. Then he looked at my helmet, running his thumb over the eyebrows and using calipers to pick out the measurements of the ravens on the cheekpieces.
‘This is master work,’ he said. He handed it to Tiraeus, and Tiraeus handed it to Bion. ‘And you are the master in this shop, so it is right that you too should be raised.’
I think that the fires in my heart relit that day. I had not expected it, although in retrospect there were a thousand little signs that my friends had made plans for me to be raised to the rank of master. Other pieces were brought out by Tiraeus — things I’d forgotten, like a set of bronze pins I’d made for my sister’s wedding guests — and Empedocles laughed with joy to see them, and that laughter went through me like lightning on a summer’s day. I was, you know, for a time, the master warrior of all Hellas — but it never gave me the joy that making gave me.
Oh, there’s a lie. Killing can be a joy. Or merely a job, or worse.
So, because two of us had been raised, we gave a special sacrifice at the Temple of Hera, where my sister, now a matron, had just been anointed as a priestess. She was two months pregnant, just starting to show, and she officiated with the dignity of her new status. And Antigonus of Thespiae saw nothing wrong with having a master smith as a brother-in-law, so he came with a train of aristocrats to my sacrifice, and Myron arrived with the best men of Plataea, and I saw the wine of a whole crop drained in a few hours — but I reckoned it wine well spent, because my heart was beating again.
The next day, I took ten more amphorae of wine up the hill to the tomb of the hero, and I gave a smaller feast for Idomeneus and his men, and many of our Milesians as well. We drank and we danced. Idomeneus had built a great bonfire, five trees’ worth of wood, and we alternated between too hot and too cold, drank the wine and sang.