‘I took the liberty of buying you some decent wine,’ I said. I put a hand on his shoulder as his face darkened. ‘Don’t give me any shit, brother. You’re poor as a frog without a swamp and you need a decent amphora to get you through the play.’
‘If it ever goes on,’ he said. ‘Fuck me, Arimnestos. Cleitus and the Alcmaeonids paid to suppress it, and now they’ve threatened that if it goes on, I’ll be beaten. Or Irene will be. They say they’ll pay men to disrupt the performance, the way they broke up Miltiades’ festival of return.’
I shook my head. ‘Don’t give an inch,’ I said. ‘I’m working on the problem of the Alcmaeonids.’
‘What can you do?’ he asked. ‘I mean no offence, Arimnestos, but you’re just a foreigner!’
‘And you need a bodyguard,’ I said. I knew where to find one.
That night, we ate good fish and drank good wine, and Irene lied like a good wife and said she’d found a big silver piece in the floorboards. And in the morning, I made excuses and slipped away, feeling bad for having done so. Phrynichus needed me. But what he really needed was a success for his play.
My next stop was Cleon’s. He was more sober than when last I’d found him.
‘You’re a thetes now?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘I drank the money I made with Aristides,’ he said. ‘After they died, I mean. And spent some on whores.’ He looked around the main room of his house. It was clean, because it was empty.
‘What trade do you work?’ I asked.
He looked out of the door into the street. ‘I was a pot-engraver,’ he said. ‘Hard to explain, really. I cut the scenes into the surface of pots before the painter painted them, on the most expensive items. But there’s a whole new style of painting now, with no engraving, and I don’t get much work, and what I do get — well, slaves earn as much as I do.’ He shook his head. ‘Before Yani died, I had a fishing boat — my pater’s. That kept us on the right side of the ledger. But I sold it.’
‘You don’t have any land?’ I asked.
‘Not any more,’ he allowed.
‘Would you work for me?’
‘Here? In Athens?’ he asked.
I watched him for a moment, because I didn’t need a drunk, but I did need to know that the man who’d stood at my shoulder in the fight at Ephesus was still in there. His hair was greying at the temples, his chiton was dirty and he had the weathered skin of a man who’d slept in alleys too many times.
‘No,’ I said. ‘That is, I need you here for a few days. We’ll break some heads. And then you’ll have to leave, because the Alcmaeonids will eventually figure out who you are, and kill you.’
Cleon looked blank. ‘And then?’
‘And then you come with me to Plataea. And start again.’ I walked over to him. ‘Sell this house, go to Plataea and become a citizen. Stand at my shoulder. Be my friend.’
‘On a farm?’ he asked.
‘If that’s what you can do, yes.’ I looked around the house. ‘Anything to keep you here?’
‘Not a fucking thing,’ Cleon said. ‘Who do we kill?’
Paramanos hugged me like a lost brother. I had last seen him covered with wounds from Lade and making a slow recovery when we fled Kallipolis, and we drank more wine than might have been wise.
It’s a funny thing — Paramanos and I could have been great friends all along, I think, but for the fact that I used fear to cow him in the first moments of his service under me, and while he served me, I think he hated me. Relationships between men can be as complicated as those between women.
But Lade changed that, as you’ll see. After Lade, those of us who survived it — we never forgot.
Black joined us, and Herk, my first tutor in the ways of the sea, and he and Cleon embraced, and we drank too much cheap wine, as I mentioned. Other men came around — oarsmen, sailors, hoplites.
‘Miltiades needs us,’ I said.
Agios, once Miltiades’ helmsman, nodded, and Cleon shrugged, but Paramanos shook his head.
‘I’m not a citizen here,’ he said. ‘And my status has been made abundantly clear. When I’ve had my fees paid, I’ll be taking my money and going back to Cyrene.’
Black nodded.
I looked at him. ‘You too?’
‘Athens isn’t my place,’ he said.
‘Herk, you’re a citizen?’ I asked.
‘Oh, indeed,’ he said. ‘Born a thetes, but in the last allotment, I was a hippeis.’ He shrugged. ‘The men of property treat me like shit, for all that I’m a landowner now. You think I lived in Kallipolis as an exile? I hate Athens. The City of Aristocrats.’ He looked around. ‘You know what? For the commoners — the tyranny was better.’
Cleon barked his strange laugh, and I could see that the two of them got along very well.
I need to explain. For me, my loyalty to Plataea was absolute. To hear these three knock Athens — most especially Herk, who, by all accounts had made his fortune in her service — made me angry. Cleon I could understand. His city had let him down. But Herk?
‘You’re a thankless bunch,’ I said. ‘Miltiades made you rich in the service of Athens, and now he needs you, and you are running off to Cyrene?’
Paramanos stroked his beard. ‘Yes.’ He turned his head away. ‘I’ve been threatened. My daughters have been threatened.’
Agios nodded, clearly unhappy.
‘Gentlemen, sitting at this table are five bad men whose names make Syrian merchants shit themselves — and you are afraid of some threats from bum-boys in Piraeus?’ I stood up. ‘I’m going to take action. My actions are going to be carefully thought out, but I’m not going to use the law — except as bait. When I’m done, there won’t be anyone to threaten your daughters. Join me. We all owe Miltiades.’
Paramanos made a curious face. ‘Do we really owe Miltiades, friend?’ He shrugged, but his eyes met mine squarely. ‘Be honest — Miltiades uses us, and now that he’s down, he can’t help us. Why should we help him? Listen — if it was you, or Herk, or Black or Cleon here — I’d carve my way through the bastards. But this is not my city, and not my fight.’
Black shrugged. ‘I’m your helmsman,’ he said. ‘You bought me free. I do what you say.’ He took a drink of wine. ‘I got married,’ he added, and moved as if he feared a reprisal.
‘You got married?’ I asked. ‘What’s she like?’
‘Like any Athenian fishwife, but louder,’ Paramanos said. ‘You can meet her later. Tell me why I should help.’
I could marshal arguments — Heraclitus had taught me well — but I shook my head. ‘No, brother. It’s up to you. For all his little ways, Miltiades has been our friend. I think we owe him.’ I looked around. ‘Yes — he uses us. And by the gods, we know he wanted to be tyrant, and he’d have sold his own mother in a brothel to get it. But how often have we followed him to riches, eh?’
Paramanos shook his head. ‘You know — we all know — that we’ll do it. If only to find out what you have planned.’
‘I need citizens,’ I said. I wasn’t going to stop to consider his sudden change of heart — I’d expected it. ‘How many oarsmen on your ships are citizens? How many marines?’
‘A dozen marines — many of them are zeugitai, members of the hoplite class. And I can round up fifty oarsmen who are thetes.’ He looked at me. ‘Why?’
‘The muscle have to be citizens,’ I said. ‘And we have to have their families safe — on Salamis, for instance.’
My plan was simple — far simpler than Phrynichus and Aristides and their plans with complex choruses and speeches by actors. I explained what I had in mind, and then we mustered the oarsmen. It was winter — most of them were delighted to have a few days’ work. Most of them were so poor when they were ashore that the prospect of moving their families to Salamis — the island off Athens, if you don’t know it — sounded like a festival. I paid them enough to make it a festival.
Being lower-class men themselves, they knew where I could find other men — informants and the like. That was likely to prove the breaking point of my plan, and I had a simple solution to my need for information.