The owl shot by and made a showy landing above him, and squawked. Kineas grinned at it.
‘I know what I’m here for,’ he told the owl. Instead of a slow climb, he reached for a branch overhead, planted his feet and leaped to grab the next major limb.
He just caught it, and he hung for a moment, the strain on his arms as real as anything in the outer world, and it took the concentration of all his years on the floor of various gymnasiums to lever himself up and over, to lie panting for a full minute before he pushed himself up and climbed carefully to his feet…
In the agora of his youth with a sack of scrolls hanging over his arm — fourteen, too young to be a man and old enough to desire to be one. Diodorus and Graccus walked by his side, alert for trouble. Demosthenes had spoken in the assembly against Philip of Macedon, and all of the agora was talking about it. Kineas and his two best friends drifted from group to group, abandoning the safety of their group of rich boys to listen to the conversation of older men.
There was a large circle of men gathered around Apollion, and he walked around them. Apollion — tall, handsome, blond Apollion, who the assembly loved and who fought in the front rank in the phalanx — had made advances, just yesterday, making it clear that he could push Kineas’s career as an orator if Kineas would suck his dick for a few years. He’d put it better than that, but Kineas’s anger — and fear, for Apollion was a big man, dangerous in combat and in the assembly — blinded him to rational behaviour. He’d struck Apollion, in front of everyone in the gymnasium, and fled.
The man looked up from the crowd he was haranguing and gave Kineas a wolfish grin.
Kineas froze, caught between the desire to defy and the desire to flee.
Diodorus didn’t hesitate. ‘It’s like finding Socrates talking in the agora,’ he called out.
Many of the older men laughed aloud. Apollion often liked to quote Socrates — but Socrates had been notoriously ugly. It was a two-edged gibe.
Grinning like the fox he was, Diodorus gave Kineas a shove to get him moving again. ‘Don’t act like a deer caught in torchlight,’ Diodorus hissed. ‘He’ll think you’re pining for him.’
Graccus, who admired Apollion, shook his head. ‘I’d have him in a moment.’ He grinned — he was given to grins. ‘I can’t imagine what he sees in you!’ He swatted Kineas on the leg.
‘He’s saving himself for Phocion,’ Diodorus said, and Kineas, stung at last, smacked him in the ear. Phocion — Athens’s greatest soldier — taught all of them in swordsmanship and in the use of the spear. It set them apart from other rich boys, many of whom disdained military service as something for those too stupid to make money.
Kineas called them idiotai, after Thucydides.
In the dream world, Kineas knew what was coming, and part of his mind flinched from it, even as he experienced it again…
They had crossed the agora and were well down the road to the gates, far from their own haunts, still listening to men gossip and discourse. They were in a bad part of Athens, where men went for cheap wine and cheap sex.
‘We should get out of here,’ Graccus said quietly.
Diodorus looked around. ‘Those are brothels!’ he said. He sounded interested. ‘Some day, I’m going to purchase a hetaira and fuck her every minute of the day.’
‘Is this before or after you’ve sailed beyond the Pillars of Herakles?’ Kineas jibed, but a commotion in the doorway of the nearest knocking shop drew their attention.
‘I’ve fucking paid for an hour, and I’ll have every fucking grain of sand in the glass,’ shouted a man. He sounded like a foreigner — a Corinthian or a Theban. He had a boy by the neck. The boy was short, tough-looking, with heavy dark circles under his eyes. He was naked and there was blood running down his legs.
He wasn’t crying. His shoulders were rigid with tension. He suddenly burst into action, breaking free of the foreigner, but the man was too fast. He tripped the boy, and then, as he went down, he kicked him savagely in the stomach, so that the boy heaved up, vomiting. The foreigner stepped back. He turned back to the brothel keeper. ‘I’ll fuck him in the street if I please,’ he said, his voice so devoid of strain or inflection that the hairs rose on Kineas’s neck.
‘We need to get out of here,’ Graccus said.
Kineas felt something inside him — some combination of his own ideas of right, of Apollion’s desire to force him to have sex, his anger at having failed to stand up to the man.
The brothel keeper shook his head. ‘Respected sir, you must not abuse him — and if he refuses you, you must go.’ The brothel keeper was not a small man and he wasn’t cowed. He wouldn’t have held his place if violence cowed him. ‘The boy is not a slave. You are a foreigner. If you make a fuss, I’ll have you taken.’
The foreigner moved suddenly, grabbing the brothel keeper’s ears and slamming his head against the doorpost of the brothel. Then he raised his knee and smashed it into the brothel keeper’s chin. ‘Anyone else want some?’ he asked the street. He reached down and picked up the boy. Closer up, Kineas could see that the boy wasn’t as young as he had thought — he was, in fact, a few years older than Kineas, just scrawny and ill-fed.
Diodorus reached out a hand, but he was too late. Kineas slipped away and stood in front of the foreigner, whose eyes glittered with something Kineas hadn’t seen before.
‘Put him down,’ Kineas said.
The foreigner was a soldier — he had all the marks of wearing armour on him, and a heavy knife at his belt of the kind soldiers wore when they didn’t wear swords. ‘Or?’ the man said. He didn’t grin or frown. It was as if his face was dead. Kineas’s voice cracked in fear, but he stood his ground.
‘Put him down,’ Kineas said. ‘And don’t even think of harming me.’ Me came out as a squeak, as the man dropped the boy to fall in the garbage of the street. ‘My father is-’
‘I don’t give a fuck about your father, little arse-cunt,’ the man said. He was fast, and he swung hard, punching Kineas in the side of the head before he was ready. Pain exploded in Kineas’s head and he stumbled, hit the wall of the brothel and bounced back, almost into the foreigner’s arms.
Guided by the gods.
The man wasn’t ready for him and as Kineas jostled him, his right hand closed — of its own accord — on the man’s knife. The man shoved him, annoyed now, and Kineas stumbled back with the knife in his hand.
‘Put that down or I’ll rip the flesh off your face,’ the man said.
Graccus was no fool, he was screaming for the watch, running back to the agora because the watch didn’t come down here.
A stone hit the man in the head. It was well thrown, a jagged bit of mortar from the ill-kept tenements, and it made the sound of a dropped melon when it hit. The man’s eyes flicked to Diodorus.
‘You’re dead,’ he said, without changing facial expression. He stepped forward, intent on Kineas.
The boy — the older boy — had one of his legs. The man tripped, stumbled and Kineas blocked a piece of his blow with his left arm and thrust hard with the knife, the whole weight of his stocky body behind the blow. But he struck too high and the knife caught the man’s breastbone and skidded up, cutting sinew, slashing all the way across to the point of the shoulder.
The man shrieked and punched, left-right-left, and one of the blows caught Kineas and flung him back, his jaw broken and blood pouring from his nose. Tears burst from his eyes.
He didn’t drop the knife or lose sight of his opponent. That much of Phocion’s training stuck. He was conscious that this was a fight to the death, and that to lose control to the pain would be the end. But beyond that, his body seemed to be in the fight by itself, with his brain unable to affect the outcome.