Christian Cameron - Force of Kings

Apollodorus rubbed his shin. ‘If you had kicked for real, I might never have launched that blow,’ he said.

Satyrus found his hands were shaking — muscle fatigue and the daimon of combat together. ‘I’m done,’ he said, showing his shaking hands.

Other men went out onto the sands, wrestling or boxing, and Satyrus realised that they had all been waiting for him — giving him the sand, as men said of someone they respected. He smiled around, trying to catch every eye — thanking them for their good opinion of him.

It was good to be a hero.

He went in to get a massage and a bath.

Later, after a review of his accounts with Abraham’s steward, he met Anaxagoras in the courtyard, his lyre tucked under his arm as a much younger man would.

‘Revenge is sweet,’ Anaxagoras said with an evil smile.

Indeed, Anaxagoras was the very best of teachers — endlessly patient, his voice carefully modulated, slow to praise and slow to anger — so that when he did praise, a student knew he had done well indeed, and when his cheeks did mottle red, a student knew he’d been very foolish indeed.

Nor was this in any way a reversal of their bouts on the palaestra. Anaxagoras was a competent wrestler, an excellent boxer, a quick study at pankration, and now a brilliant swordsman. Satyrus was, at best, an indifferent musician. He loved to play — enjoyed any music, was constantly and pleasantly surprised that he could play anything at all — but seldom practised hard, so that simple fingerings were still the limit of his powers, and it was rare that duties — and pleasures — allowed him the time or the inclination to take a complete lesson.

‘Play the scale again. This time, every other note,’ Anaxagoras said.

Satyrus did as he was told.

‘Now again, with regard to the tempo. Every note exactly the same length ,’ Anaxagoras said.

The control of his face suggested he was hiding a smile. Satyrus tended to play all the notes in a tune, but without the strict adherence to time essential to make the music correctly.

‘And again,’ Anaxagoras said. ‘Your habit of resting your thumb on the sound board is part of the reason you cannot make your transition correctly.’

Satyrus turned his head sharply, a retort on his lips. And relented, reason telling him that anger at a teacher who was trying to help him was unworthy — foolish and boyish. Besides, his teacher’s carefully controlled face suggested that this was, in fact, a form of revenge.

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?’