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
– wel, 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 alowed.
‘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 stil 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 aleys too many times.
‘No,’ I said. ‘That is, I need you here for a few days. We’l
break some heads. And then you’l have to leave, because the
Alcmaeonids wil eventualy figure out who you are, and kil you.’
Cleon looked blank. ‘And then?’
‘And then you come with me to Plataea. And start again.’ I
walked over to him. ‘Sel 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 kil?’
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 Kalipolis, and we drank more wine than might
have been wise.
It’s a funny thing – Paramanos and I could have been great
friends al 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’l 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
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’l 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 alotment,
I was a hippeis.’ He shrugged. ‘The men of property treat me
like shit, for al that I’m a landowner now. You think I lived in
Kalipolis 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 wel.
I need to explain. For me, my loyalty to Plataea was
absolute. To hear these three knock Athens – most especialy
Herk, who, by al 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
‘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 carefuly
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 al owe Miltiades.’
Paramanos made a curious face. ‘Do we realy 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. Tel me why I should help.’
I could marshal arguments – Heraclitus had taught me wel –
but I shook my head. ‘No, brother. It’s up to you. For al his
but I shook my head. ‘No, brother. It’s up to you. For al 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 folowed him to riches,
eh?’
Paramanos shook his head. ‘You know – we al know – that
we’l 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.
Money.
Twice I walked up the hils of Athens to Miltiades and asked
him for more money – ostensibly to plead my case. As he was
my proxenos, it was his duty to help me, and the first time he did
so with a good grace. The second time, he was none too happy
to loan me the value of a good farm in silver coin. But he did.
‘What in the name of Tartarus do you need al this silver for,
you Plataean pirate?’
‘Buying jurors,’ I said.
Crime eats money the way vultures eat a dead beast. Bribing
a jury is an old and honourable tradition in democratic Athens,
one that blatantly favours the rich, of course. Heh, democracy.
Al forms of government favour the rich, honey.
I bought quite a few men. I divided the sailors and marines
into teams, and I gave one to Cleon, and set them to watching
Phrynichus. That was the most public team, and I was going to
make Cleon vanish later. He had an additional set of duties,
paying informers to look for my girl.
Agios led the scout team. They reconnoitred the Alcmaeonid
estates.
impossible to keep it quiet.
It was near dark – every window had an oil lamp in it, and
the more civic-minded brothel-owners had a big lamp out front,
hanging from the exhedra, as wel. I was climbing the hil in the
aleys south of the Panathenaic Way to check on Phrynichus
aleys south of the Panathenaic Way to check on Phrynichus
when they came at me – four men.
Two of them filed the street ahead of me. They had swords.
‘That’s him – the Plataean,’ one caled out.
‘A friend sent us,’ said the smaler of the two men ahead of
us. ‘We think maybe we should reason with you.’ He laughed.
I could hear movement behind me, and I knew there were
more of them. But the two in front of me were right on the edge
– we were just shy of that moment when they would be keyed
up enough to attack me. I’ve watched the process often enough
– some men take for ever to be ready to fight, and others can
fight at any moment.
I put a hand on my own sword – Athens was none to keen
on men carrying weapons in the streets, but at dark, with a heavy
cloak, no one would say anything about it. The smaler man
laughed again. The odds were bad – one against four is insanity,
unless you have no choice. The street I was in – an aley, realy –
was no wider than a man lying on his back ful length, and I was
at an elbow where someone’s semi-legal building crowded the
street and made it bend.
One of the men behind me stubbed his toe on a cobblestone
and cursed. I heard the curse and felt the movement of his arms
as he windmiled them to save himself – and I turned on the bal
of my foot and punched the point of my sword into his side. I
wasn’t as clever as I’d wanted to be, and my blade skidded
over his arms and the point caught in his ribs, and his fist
connected with my face – not hard enough to stun me, but hard
enough to rock me back.
enough to rock me back.
Worst of al, as he fel away from me the point of my sword
remained lodged in his ribs and the hilt was wrenched from my
hand.
I puled my cloak off by yanking it against the fine silver pin –
which popped open and tinkled as it landed in the street, a nice
find for the first child to look out of his door in the morning. The
cloak weights slammed the smaler of the two men in front of me
in the face – luck and training there – and made him duck back
when he could have gutted me.
There’s no conscious thought in a fight like that. There were
no openings, no holds, no attacks that were going to get me free.
I had no weapon. I kicked at the bigger of the men in front of me
as I changed my stance, and then I leaped through the
unshuttered window to my left, my back foot catching the oil
lamp on the sil so that it landed behind me and exploded, lamp
oil on my cloak and on the floor and fire spreading up my cloak.
But I had a wal between me and my attackers. I threw my
burning cloak at them and turned to find three young men staring
at me as if I was an apparition from the heavens – perhaps I
was, with al the fire running along the floor behind me.
The fire – not a very big fire, I have to add – kept my
attackers back for the space of three or four heartbeats, and by
that time I was through the room curtain of wooden beads. This
was not a brothel or a wine shop. It was a private house, and I
passed through a room with four looms against the four wals,
through another door as men shouted behind me and out into a
courtyard. There were two slaves standing by the gate, and they
courtyard. There were two slaves standing by the gate, and they
looked as confused as men usualy look in a crisis. I went past
them – between them – without slowing, and I was in another
street.
I ran up the hil. I could see the Pisistratids’ palace on the
Acropolis as a landmark. I remember offering my prayers to
Heracles that I had so easily averted an ambush that should have
kiled me – realy, if they hadn’t stopped to talk to me, I’d
already have started to rot, eh?
otherwise premature. At the next corner I ran ful tilt into the
larger of the two men who’d confronted me in the aley. I
bounced harder than he did, and he landed most of a blow with
something in his left hand – a club, I suspect.
It caught me on the outside of my left bicep – hard – and
numbed my arm. I stumbled back into a closed door and he
recovered his balance, grinned in the feeble light and came to
finish me.
But he paused to yel ‘I’ve got him!’ to his mates, and as he
did that, the door under my numb hand opened and I fel through
it, my legs pumping franticaly to keep me upright, so that I
carried the young man who’d opened the door right back into
the room and knocked him flat.
He was quite smal, pretty, and had make-up on his eyes –
which were wide with sudden terror. I’d hurt him, no doubt.
There was a cloak hanging on a wooden stand at the edge of
the bed – probably the boy’s own, or forgotten by a client. I
the bed – probably the boy’s own, or forgotten by a client. I
snatched it as the big man came through the door. I got it on my
left arm, which was numb but not useless, and got my feet under
me – this was moving so fast that the pain of the blow from his
cudgel was just hitting me. The big man was coming in for the kil
and I swirled the cloak, which seemed to fil the tiny room, and
my right arm moved behind the cloak, lost in it, and my attacker
flinched back.
It is a thing known to any trained man that men wil flinch
from a cloak or a stick, when neither can do them any real harm,
even with a direct blow to the face. But my cloak a
nd my fist
were both feints, and my right-foot kick caught him in the knee
before he could shift his weight off it, and I heard the joint pop.
He roared and went down. The hand with the cudgel swept past
me, and it was as if he’d decided to hand me his cudgel –
despite the dark and the confusion, his left hand brushed against
my right, and the club was in my hand.
There were men in the aley outside. By the sound of it, there
were quite a few of them – not just the initial four.
My recent opponent was thrashing on the floor and roaring.
As he made no move to harm me, I took a deep breath and hit
him behind the ear with his own cudgel, and he went out.
The painted boy squeaked and ran through a doorway I’d
missed. I folowed him, eager to avoid the men on the street. We
went straight into the building’s central courtyard, which was ful
of men and boys on couches. My hip caught a table of pitchers
of water and wine, and the whole thing fel with a crash. Then I
was across the room, through a door that seemed to me the
was across the room, through a door that seemed to me the
biggest and into the building’s andron, with painted wal panels
and a garishly painted ceiling – Zeus and Ganymede, as you
might expect. Then I ran out of the main door under a pair of
kissing satyrs and into a street that was briliantly lit by cressets in
the building I had just left – a prosperous brothel.
By the flickering light, I could see men coming for me from
the downhil end of the street – a dozen, at least.
So I turned and ran, uphil. There is no fighting a dozen men
at the edge of darkness.
I went one street and turned into an aley. I saw a big ceramic
rain-cistern under a house gutter and leaped to it at ful stride. I
got a leg over the roof edge and I was up. I lay flat on the roof. I
was unable to breathe, and my two wounds had burst into pain
the way a flower opens with the dawn, and it was al I could do
not to cry out.
I heard men run by – they were an arm’s reach away – and
meet with other men in the next street.
I looked around the roof. It was a low building, the sort of
cheap private residence that filed the south slope of the hils
before Pericles rebuilt the city. One storey, mud brick on a stone
foundation with beams holding a roof that was also a place to
cook, sleep in warm weather – make love, when privacy was