Christian Cameron: Salamis

It was really just an excuse. I needed to do something with my hands. Mourning for loss is an odd thing. It can come and go. I knew that when the King of Sparta fell I had probably lost Briseis, and now, talking to Penelope, seeing her tears, feeling the weight of the loss of her husband — a good man — it was all more real to me.

I knew in my heart that the Athenians would fight for Salamis. I suspected that Adeimantus would make sure that the rest of the allies left them to die alone. I was determined to die with them.

I needed a little time with my god.

‘Fire hot?’ I asked.

Styges smiled. ‘There were still coals when I came back. Tiraeus must have done some work when he came back, and the slaves have been steady. I sent a shipment of finished goods away yesterday.’

It was, after all, our business. We all shared it, although I had paid down the capital to put up the building.

‘Where is Tiraeus?’ I asked. He had not come out to fight at Artemisium. No shame to him — the town picked five hundred men by lot to stay.

‘He took the first mule train towards Corinth, the night Idomeneus arrived.’ Styges frowned. ‘Why do I know all this and you do not?’

‘I’ve been with my sister,’ I said, and explained.

At any rate, I went to the bellows and pumped while he packed fine engraving tools into a leather bag. I told him about Xerxes mutilating the bodies and we both cursed. Probably helped me make the fire hot. When the fire was fierce enough, I rooted around the floor looking for some scrap bronze.

‘This place is too clean,’ I joked.

Styges shrugged. ‘You haven’t been here,’ he said. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Patching greaves,’ I said.

He nodded, looked at mine, and admired the perfection of the workmanship. ‘You made this?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I admitted. ‘A man named Anaxikles, as young as you are yourself. The best armourer I’ve ever seen.’

Styges sniffed. ‘Not so good that you didn’t take a spear point through his work, however.’ He tossed me a rectangle of neatly hammered bronze plate, thinner than parchment. I bent it back and forth between my hands and decided it was suitable.

He grinned. ‘I reckon anything right for mending pots will mend armour.’

I spent a happy hour shaping and planishing my patch. It was a simple process, but soothing. I marked a line right on the greave with a scribing tool for the lower edge of the patch, so that it would always go to the same place as I tried it. Then I began to shape it, first with a simple crease down the middle to match the central ridge on the greave — see here, thugater, where the front of a good greave is like the prow of a ship? The prow of the ship turns water, but the sharp angle at the front of the greave mimics the line of a man’s shin and turns the points of weapons, too.

But of course, the blow had struck where the sharp line of the shin bends away into the soft curve of the top of the foot — a very complex shape, and one that requires forming both by pushing and pulling the metal.

But it was a small patch and soon enough I had it where it would drop over the original like a mask on an actor’s face.

Then I had to planish it to make it as smooth and nice as the original. Anaxikles had been a master at planishing whereas I always found it a little dull, but that night, in an empty Plataea, I worked the bronze willingly, tapping away to make it smooth with my best flat hammer, and then cutting the patch with a file and then polishing it again with a linen cloth full of pumice, and again with ash until it glowed.

And then I punched fourteen holes around the edges and used them to mark fourteen more in the damaged greave itself. By then, Styges was done and his two slaves were waiting for me while I drove the tiny rivets home, nipped them short and widened their ends into conical sockets I’d made with a tool. It was not master work, but it was good, solid work, and when I polished the rivets so flat that they were nothing but faint circles against the bronze, I felt that I had done honour to my god and to Anaxikles who made them. I poured a libation to Hephaestus, and sang one of his hymns, and then I sent a prayer that Lydia and Anaxikles were happy and healthy.

I looked at that greave with real satisfaction. I remember the darkness, the silence, the smell of the burning charcoal, and the spilled wine and the bronze.

Styges was the last man left. We had a ceremony to put out the fire.

‘The Persians will no doubt destroy the town,’ Styges said.

I nodded. ‘Styges,’ I said. ‘I don’t plan to come back. If — when Athens loses — I won’t stay alive to see what comes after.’

Styges nodded. ‘Idomeneus said the same, last night,’ he said.

‘Just so you know.’

Styges nodded again, his young face silhouetted against the darkness by the orange glow of the last of our forge fire.

Then we said the prayers and cursed the Persians. Fire has power, and so does darkness, and any time a man willingly extinguishes fire, he has power.

Or so Heraclitus said.

We walked down the hill in a sombre mood, to my house. North of us, near the small acropolis, I could hear oarsmen singing. I hoped they were welcoming our new freedmen … who were only going to be free a few days anyway, before they died. I hoped a few days of wine and freedom had some value.

The world was as black as my forge.

We rose with the dawn and joined the rearguard at the gates. Styges closed the gate from inside and then came over the wall on an orchard ladder, which we broke to smithereens. No need to make it easy for the Medes to take our town.

Aristides took his wife and went with the column to Corinth. He had many friends there. There was a rumour that all the exiles were to be recalled and indeed he’d been with the fleet at Artemisium. But he meant to follow the law — he always followed the law.

‘We might fight before you come back to us,’ I said.

Aristides shook his head. ‘I doubt it. The Great King’s fleet will not move so fast, and besides, Themistocles will have to convince the Corinthians to fight at Salamis.’

I said nothing. Neither did he.

Neither of us believed that Corinth would fight.

In the end, Pen chose to go with Jocasta — mostly, I suspect, because they were both women.

I held her for a long time and then I gave her an ivory scroll tube that held my will and all my plans for Euphonia.

She bit her lip. ‘I can’t lose you, too!’ she said.

I said nothing. Aristides turned his head away. Even Styges tried to be somewhere else.

‘You think you will lose?’ Penelope asked. ‘You think …’

I was in armour. I motioned to Hector to bring my shield. Penelope understood, and she took wine and blessed it — she was a priestess of Hera — and poured it on the face of my aspis, cleaning it. A little flowed through a place where a Persian arrow had penetrated, at Artemisium. Then she wiped it with a clean cloth, and I took it.

She was dry-eyed, as a proper matron must be.

She touched my hand once more, and then — we were gone.

I had one more encounter that morning. We rode away toward Cithaeron and Athens, and we passed my cousins on the road. Simonalkes, younger brother to the Simonides who Teucer killed, and Achilles, and Ajax. Simonides was tall and cautious, and Achilles — what a terrible name to give a boy — was not very bright and very aggressive. They had a wagon and two oxen and all their wives on donkeys. They were walking, and I was riding the opposite way.

I thought to ride by them, but it was too awkward. I was in armour, of course, on a horse. At any rate, I dismounted.

‘You are going the wrong way,’ Simonides said — with a little ill will, I thought.