Christian Cameron: Killer of Men

'Is it magic, lord?' my brother asked.

The priest shook his head. 'There are charlatans who would tell you so,' he said. 'But I love the new philosophy as much as I love my crafty god. This is a thing of making. Men made this. It is called a lens, and a craftsman made it from rock crystal in a town in Syria. It takes the rays of the sun and it burnishes them the way your father burnishes bronze, and makes them into fire. Watch.'

He placed a little pile of shavings of dry willow on the ground, then he held the lens just so. And before we were fidgeting, the little pile began to smoke.

'Run and get me some tow from your mother and her maidens,' the priest said to me, and I ran – I didn't want to miss a moment of this philosophy.

I hurried up the steps to the exhedra and my sister opened the door. She was five, blonde and chubby and forthright. 'What?' she asked me.

'I need a handful of tow,' I said.

'What for?' she asked.

We were never adversaries, Penelope and I. So I told her, and she got the tow and carried it to the priest herself, and he was tolerant, flicking her a smile and accepting the tow with a bow as if she were some lord's kore serving at his altar. And all the time his left hand, holding the lens, never moved.

The light fell in a tiny pinpoint too bright to watch, and the willow shavings smoked and smoked.

'I could blow on it,' I said.

The priest looked at me strangely. Then he nodded. 'Go ahead,' he said.

So I lay down in the dust and blew on the shavings very gently. At first nothing happened, and then I almost blew them all over the yard. My brother punched me in the arm. The priest laughed.

Quickly, I ran into the shop, where Pater stood by his cold forge with a distant look on his face, and I took the tube we used for controlling the heat of the forge – a bronze tube. I ran back into the yard, put the end of the tube near the pinpoint of light and gave a puff, and before my heart beat ten times, I had fire.

The priest wasn't laughing any more. He lifted the tow, put the flames in the midst and caught the tow, so that he seemed to have a handful of fire, and then he walked into the forge at a dignified pace, and we followed him. He laid the fire in the forge under the scraps and the bark and the good dry oak, and the night-black charcoal from mighty Cithaeron's flanks. The fire of the sun, brought down from the sky by his lens, lit the forge.

Pater was not a man easily moved, but he watched the fire with a look on his face like hunger in a slave. Then he busied himself managing the fire – the hearth had been cold for a long time, and he needed coals to accomplish even the slightest work. So my brother and I carried wood and charcoal, and the priest sang a long hymn to the smith god, and the fire leaped and burned through the afternoon, and before long there was a good bed of coals.

Pater took down a leather bag full of sand from his bench, and he had Bion cut him a circle of bronze as big as a man's hand. Then, with that hungry look, he took the bronze in his great hand and set the edge to the leather bag. and after a brief pause his rounded hammer fell on the bronze in a series of strokes almost too fast to see.

That's another sight I'll never forget – Pater, almost blind with his lust to do his work, and the hammer falling, the strokes precise as his left hand turned the bronze – strike, turn, strike, turn.

It was the bowl of a cup before I needed ten breaths. Not a priest's holy cup, but the kind of cup a man likes to have on a trip, to show he's no slave – the cup you use to drink wine in a strange place, that reminds you of home.

Outside, the shadows were growing long.

In the forge, the hammer made its muffled sound against the leather. Pater was weeping. The priest took the three of us and led us outside. I wanted to stay and see the cup. I could already see the shape – I could see that Pater had not lost his touch. And I was six or seven and all I wanted was to be a smith like Pater. To make a thing from nothing – that is the true magic, whether in a woman's womb or in a forge. But we went outside, and the priest was holding the tube of bronze. He blew through it a couple of times, and then nodded as if a puzzle had been solved. He looked at me.

'You thought to go and fetch this,' he said.

It wasn't a question, so I said nothing.

'I would have thought of it too,' my brother said.

Penelope laughed. 'Not in a year of feast days,' she said. One of Mater's expressions.

He sent a slave for fire from the main hearth in the kitchen, and he put it in the fireplace in the yard. That's where Pater kindled the forge in high summer when it was blinding hot. And he blessed it – he was a thorough man, and worth his silver drachma, unlike most priests I've known. Blessing the outdoor hearth was something Pater hadn't even considered.

Then he built up his little fire and the three of us bustled to help him, picking up scraps of wood and bark all over the yard. My brother fetched an armload of kitchen wood. And then the priest began to play with the tube, blowing through it and watching the coals grow brighter and redder and the flames leap.

'Hmm,' he said. Several times.

I have spent much of my life with the wise. I have been lucky that way – that everywhere I've gone, the gods have favoured me with men who love study and yet have time to speak to a man like me. But I think I owe all of that to the priest of Hephaestus. He treated all of us children as equals, and he cared for nothing but that tube and the effect it had on fire.

He did the oddest things. He walked all over the yard until he found a whole straw from the last haying, and he cut it neatly with a sharp iron knife and then used it to blow on the flames. It gave the same effect.

'Hmm,' he said.

He poured water on the fire and it made steam and scalded his hand, and he cursed and hopped on one foot. Penelope fetched one of the slave girls and she made him a poultice, and while she nursed his hand, he blew through the tube on the dead fire – and nothing happened except that a trail of ash was blown on my chiton.

'Hmm,' he said. He relit the fire.

Inside the forge, the sound had changed. I could hear my father's lightest hammer – when you are a smith's child, you know all the music of the forge – going tap-tap, tap-tap. He was doing fine work – chasing with a small chisel, perhaps. I wanted to go and watch, but I knew I was not welcome. He was with the god.

So I watched the priest, instead. He sent Bion for a hide of leather, and he rolled it in a great tube, and breathed through it on the fire, and nothing much happened. He and Bion made a really long tube, as long as a grown man's arm, from calf's hide, and the priest set Bion to blow on the fire. Bion did this in the forge and he was expert at it, and the priest watched the long tube work on the fire.

'Hmm,' he said.

My brother was bored. He made a spear from the firewood and began to chase me around the yard, but I wanted to watch the priest. I had learned how to be a younger brother. I let him thump me in the ribs and I neither complained nor fought back – I just stood watching the priest until my brother was bored. It didn't take long.

My brother didn't like being deprived of his mastery. 'Who cares?' he asked. 'So the tube makes the fire burn? I mean, who cares?' He looked to me for support. He had a point. Every child of a smith learned to use the tube – as did every slave.

The priest turned on him like a boar on a hunter. 'As you say, boy. Who would care? So answer this riddle and the Sphinx won't eat you. Why does the tube air make the fire brighter? Eh? Hmm?'

Pater's hammer was now going taptaptaptaptaptap.

'Who cares?' Chalkidis asked. He shrugged. 'Can I go and play?' he asked.