Christian Cameron: Killer of Men

'Be off with you, Achilles,' the priest said.

My brother ran off. My sister might have stayed – she had some thoughts in her head, even as a little thing – but Mater called her to fetch wine, and she hurried off.

'May I touch the lens?' I asked.

The priest reached up and put it in my hand. He was down by the fire again.

It was a beautiful thing, and even if he said it had no magic, I was thrilled to touch it. It brought fire down from the sun. And it was clear, and deep. I looked at things through it, and it was curious. An ant was misshapen – some parts larger and some smaller. Dust developed texture.

'Does it warm up in your hand when you bring down the sun?' I asked.

The priest sat back on his heels. He looked at me the way a farmer looks at a slave he is thinking of purchasing. 'No,' he said. 'But that is an excellent question.' He held up the bronze tube. 'Neither does this. But both make the fire brighter.'

'What does it mean?' I asked.

The priest grinned. 'No idea,' he said. 'Do you know how to write?'

I shook my head.

The priest pulled his beard and began to ask questions. He asked me hundreds of questions – hard things about farm animals. He was searching my head, of course – looking to see if I had any intelligence. I tried to answer, but I felt as if I was failing. His questions were hard, and he went on and on.

The shadows grew longer and longer, and then my father started singing. I hadn't heard his song in the forge in a year – indeed, at the age I was at, I'd forgotten that my father ever sang when he worked.

His song came out of the forge like the smell of a good dinner, soft first and then stronger. It was the part of the Iliad where Hephaestus makes the armour of Achilles.

My mother's voice came down from the exhedra and met Pater's voice in the yard. These days, no one teaches women to sing the Iliad, but back then, every farm girl in Boeotia knew it. And they sang together. I don't think I'd ever heard them sing together. Perhaps he was happy. Perhaps she was sober.

Pater came out into the yard with a cup in his hand. He must have burnished it himself, instead of having the slave boys do it, because it glowed like gold in the last light of the sun.

He limped across the yard, and he was smiling. 'My gift to you and the god,' he said. He handed the cup to the priest.

It had a flat base – a hard thing to keep when you round a cup, let me tell you – with sloping sides and a neatly rolled rim. He'd riveted a handle on, simple work, but done cleanly and precisely. He'd made the rivets out of silver and the handle itself of copper. And he'd raised a scene into the cup itself, so that you could see Hephaestus being led to Olympus by Dionysus and Heracles, when his father Zeus takes him back. Dionysus was tall and strong in a linen chiton, and every fold was hammered in the bronze. Heracles had a lion skin that Pater had engraved so that it looked like fur, and the smith god was a little drunk on the happiness of his father's taking him back.

The priest turned it this way and that, and then he shook his head. 'This is king's work,' he said. 'Thieves would kill me in the road for a cup like this.'

'Yours,' Pater said.

The priest nodded. 'Your gifts are unimpaired, it seems,' he said. The cup was its own testimony. I remember the awe I felt, looking at it.

'Untouched by the rage of Ares,' Pater said, 'I owe more than that cup, priest. But that's what I can tithe now.'

The priest was visibly awed. I was a boy, and I could see his awe, just as surely as I had seen Simon's fear and rage. It made me wonder, in a whole new way, who my father was.

Pater summoned Bion, and Bion poured wine – cheap wine, for that's all we had – into the new cup. First the priest prayed to the smith god and poured a libation, and then he drank, and then Pater drank, and then Bion drank. Then they gave me the cup, and I drank.

'Your boy here has a gift too,' the priest said, while the wine warmed our bellies.

'He's quick,' Pater said, and ruffled my hair.

First I'd heard of it.

'More than quick,' the priest said. He drank, looked at the cup and held it out to Bion, who filled it. He started to pass it back and Pater waved at him.

'All servants of the smith here, Bion,' he said.

So Bion drank again. And let me tell you, when the hard times came and Bion stayed loyal, it was for that reason – Pater was fair. Fair and straight, and slaves know. Something for you to remember when you're tempted to a little temper tantrum, eh, little lady? Hair in your food and piss in your wine when you mistreat them. Right?

Anyway, we drank a while longer. It went to my head. The priest asked Pater to think about moving to Thebes – said Pater would make a fortune doing work like this in a real city. Pater just shrugged. The joy of making was washing away in the wine.

'If I wanted to be a Theban,' he said, 'I'd have gone there when I was young.' He made the word Theban sound dirty, but the priest took no offence.

And then the priest turned back to me.

'That boy needs to learn his letters,' he said.

Pater nodded. 'Good thing for a smith to know,' he agreed.

My heart soared. I wanted nothing – nothing – more than to be a smith.

'I could take him to school,' the priest said.

Pater shook his head. 'You're a good priest,' Pater said, 'but my boy won't be a pais in Thebes.'

Again the priest took no offence. 'You won't teach the boy yourself, ' he said. No question to it.

Pater looked at me, nodded, agreeing. 'No,' he said. 'It's my curse – I've no time for them. Teaching takes too long and I grow angry.' He shrugged.

The priest nodded. 'There's a hero's tomb with a priest up the mountain,' he said.

'Leitos,' Pater said. 'He went to Troy. Calchas is the priest. A drunk, but a good man.'

'He can write?' the priest asked.

Pater nodded. The next morning, I rose with the sun to see the priest go. I held his hand in the courtyard while he thanked the god and Pater for his cup, and Pater was happy. He reminded Pater that I was to learn to write, and Pater swore an oath unasked, and the thing was done. I wasn't sure what I thought about it, but that was Pater's way – a thing worth doing was done.

The priest went to the gate and blessed Bion. Pater took his hand and was blessed in turn. 'May I have your name, priest?' he asked. Back then, men didn't always share their names.

The priest smiled. 'I'm Empedocles,' he said.

He and Pater shook hands the initiates' way. And then the priest came to me. 'You will be a philosopher,' he said.

He was dead wrong, but it was a nice thing to hear at the age of six or seven, or whatever I was.

'What's your name?' he asked.

'Arimnestos,' I answered.

It must seem strange to you, sitting in Heraklea, where we rule Propontis as far as the wild tribes, that in Boeotia two towns a day's walk apart could be inveterate enemies. It's true – we told the same jokes and we worshipped the same gods, and we all read Homer and Hesiod, praised the same athletes and cursed the same way – but Thebes and Plataea were never friends. They were big, dandified, and they thrust their big noses in where we didn't want them. They had a 'federation', which was a fancy way of saying that they would run everything and the old ways could go to Tartarus, and all the small poleis could just obey.

So I was five, or perhaps six, when Pater went away and came back wounded, and the men of Thebes had the best of it. They didn't harry our orchards or burn our crops, but we submitted and they forced little Plataea to accept their laws.

And there it might have remained, if it hadn't been for the Daidala.

You think you know all about the Daidala, my dear – because I am master here, and I make the peasants celebrate the festival of my youth. But listen, thugater – it was on the slopes of Cithaeron that Zeus first feared to lose the love of his wife, Hera. She left him, for he is a bad husband, and he cheated on her – and you must tell me, should your husband ever forsake your bed. I'll see to it that he returns, or he'll wear his guts for a zone.