Stealing Fire (2 page)

THE CARIAN

O
nce there was a boy who lived in a city by the sea which had once been Millawanda of the mighty walls, long ago in the time Homer spoke of, when Troy fell and dark raiders patrolled the seas. He was a scrawny, dark-haired boy ten years old, and his name was Jio.

Well enough, then. I cannot tell it like a poet. I am a soldier, and must speak much plainer.

Once I was a boy named Jio, and I lived in the city of Miletus. My mother was a Carian, from farther south along the coast, with flashing dark eyes and high cheekbones, honey skin, and long, tapering hands. Her long hair fell in ringlets halfway down her back, and she was voluptuous and wild, prone to fits of ecstatic weeping for Adonis, and to dancing alike. Perhaps it was because she was the concubine of a man she did not like, but who indeed chooses who they serve?

My master—my father—had a dozen sons, half of them legitimate, and grandsons nearly my age. He was a wealthy merchant of Corinthian stock whose fathers had been in Miletus four generations before I was born, but who spoke Greek in the house and considered himself a student of Attic philosophy. We spoke nothing but Greek, even in the women's quarters, because his wife would have none of it. Her children would not pick up bad habits this way. Her sons would be Greek gentlemen.

I had all of my mother's wildness and none of her beauty. I climbed the garden trees and ate the fruit, escaped over the walls and wandered the city, going to the port and watching the ships come and go, dreaming of the day that I would run away on one of them, bound for Tyre or Sidon, Pelousion or Syracuse. I stood on the walls of the breakwater in the brisk wind off the sea, my arms spread like a bird, and dreamed of flight. I dreamed at night that the wind picked me up and I soared like Icarus, over land and sea, until all the world spread beneath my wings, precious as a tapestry picked out in bright thread.

Away in Greece on the other side of the seas, Phillip, the King of Macedon, strove with Athens, and the Sacred Band fell on the field of Chaeronea to a prince of seventeen. The world did not yet know the name Alexander. I had never heard it, but already the wind was blowing, leaves flying before the storm that would come.

My father always had an eye for profit, like the canny merchant he was, and he was more than happy to trade with Macedon. Ships came and went to Amphipolis and Phillippopolis, their Macedonian captains received with wine and conversation that bordered on the treasonous. Yes, of course the Greek cities of the coast would like to be rid of Persian overlordship. My father spread his hands. But that was a futile dream, of course, unless some powerful ruler like Phillip could forge a new and stronger alliance. It might be a king like Phillip. After all, what city of Greece could accomplish that, and lift men like him up from servitude to barbarians?

Barbarians, I thought. We are all barbarians to him, with his scrolls of philosophy that he probably doesn't understand anyway. We are barbarians, his lesser children. I could not read a word. The expensive slave from Syracuse who tutored his legitimate grandsons was not wasted on me. And why should he be? My world was the world of the city, running errands and dashing about, doing as the women wished and fetching them little things from the market, eluding the old eunuch who managed the kitchen and always wanted to put me to work peeling something or washing something. There was too much in the world to waste time peeling things.

Of course sometimes when I ran off it caused consternation, and my mother and the others would go at it over my punishment. A few licks with a rod were not so very bad, and I bore them philosophically as the price of my freedom, but my mother would fall into fits and scream until the entire household was disturbed, leaping at the old eunuch and trying to claw out his eyes because he had beaten her son. I found it vaguely embarrassing.

Often it went on until my father stepped in. He hardly saw me at all, but my mother's antics left him solicitous, calling for cool water and a dark room, bathing her face and hands and whispering endearments, lifting a cup of watered wine to her lips with his own hands while his wife fumed.

Once when this happened, the old eunuch caught my eye. “Love is unfathomable,” he said. “And masters all, even kings.”

I took that as a lesson indeed.

My mother died when I was ten. Perhaps that should have drawn us closer in our grief, my father—my master—and I, but it did not. Instead of clinging to me, he wanted to be rid of anything that reminded him of her. And what should remind him more than their son together?

It was perhaps a week after her burial when one of the women called me in and told me to bathe right away, that the master wanted to see me. I was hurriedly scrubbed, my long dark hair combed and tied in a wet tail at my neck, and dressed in a too-short chiton of good cloth that belonged to the oldest grandson. Still pink from the bath, I was rushed into the dining room.

My father reclined on one couch, and a man I did not know reclined on another, the best one as he was an honored guest. I thought, from his beardless face, that he might be a eunuch too, but if so he was dressed like a gentleman. “This is Jio,” my father said. “He was ten in the spring, at the equinox.”

Actually, my birthday was two weeks later, but I was surprised he remembered my age at all.

“Come here, Jio,” the man said, and I walked across the floor toward him, my hardened bare feet against the cold mosaics of the floor. “Look at me.”

I did, searching his face for some clue. I did not understand. His eyes ran over my face, my overbite and sharp chin, my eyebrows growing together in one long line over my eyes, my sun-darkened skin and ordinary brown eyes.

“Turn for the man, Jio,” my father said. “Lift your arms over your head.”

I did, with some embarrassment, as raising my arms in the too-small chiton pulled it up so that it half exposed my buttocks as I turned.

The man's voice was amused. “What can you have been thinking? This boy belongs in the stable, not the bedroom! Graceless and completely unschooled, with a face he won't grow into until he's twenty! Yes, he has good bones, and I believe that his mother was a beauty, but I tell you quite frankly no one will take him. No, not even as a favor to you!”

“You may go, Jio,” my master said coldly, and I did so gratefully, glad only that I had escaped whatever it was.

A few days later I was sold to a horse trader.

T
HE HORSE TRADER
, whose name was Tehwaz, was not a cruel man. He was unsentimental about men or animals, but he never beat either for the pleasure in it. Man and horse should learn to obey, and that was all. He had no gentleness in him either. He bought horses and sold them at a better price. They were things for sale, and he had no affection or attachment to any of them. Of course they must be fed and taken care of, or they should lose their value.

The last boy had died of a fever, and he needed another boy to muck out stables and do the dirtiest work. Each horse must be groomed and exercised daily, and even the yearlings who were not broken must be taken out. Being confined sickens horses, he explained, and horses who are sick do not fetch a good price. Likewise, horses and men alike must be fed, and if the food was the cheapest available, at least there was enough of it.

Of course I tried to run away. Four times I tried it, and each time was caught before half a day passed, brought back to the inevitable beating. There was no anger in it, any more than there was for the colt who bit people. It was a bad habit of which boy and horse alike must be broken.

It worked. After the fourth time it came to me that there was little point in half a day's freedom, which led to four days of pain, and that I should not run unless there was some chance of actually getting away. I should have to wait and bide my time. After all, I was smarter than the colt.

And so I settled in quite satisfactorily, doing my work of mucking out, shoveling horse manure and old hay, and bringing in new hay for the feedboxes. All winter long that was what I did all day, as there were between ten and fourteen horses at any time. The muscles of my arms grew strong as I grew thinner, until it seemed to me that I was nothing but bone and muscle. I was taller, too, one of those mysterious spurts of growing coming on. By my birthday in the spring, when I was eleven, I looked like a boy no more.

My consolation and my joy were the horses. I had never had anything to do with them before, but now I spent the entirety of every day with them. Since it was I who cleaned up their mucky stalls, and I who held their halters while they were groomed, I who brought clean hay and slept in the loft at night, they were used to me very quickly. One horse, in particular, took to me, a lean Nisean mare, almost white, who was in foal to a famous racing champion.

The foal was due around my birthday, and Tehwaz had high hopes that it would be worth a lot of money. “With the dam's beautiful looks and his sire's turn of speed, he'd be a horse fit for a king!”

“Are you going to sell him?” I asked. I hoped not for a while, as I was fond of the mare.

“Not his first year at least,” Tehwaz said. “And who knows? I might keep him until he's broken and I can get the best price.”

“He'd sell better if he'd won a race or two so people would know what he could do,” I said shrewdly, visions in my head of clinging to the back of a milk-white stallion as he charged effortlessly across the finish line, the crowd shouting my name.

“You may have something there, Jio,” Tehwaz said. “We'll see.”

The colt was born on the night of the equinox, and it was I who stood at his mother's head as he tumbled free. A colt, yes, but not milk white. He was almost red, with a white blaze and white feet, his mother's height, and long, spindly legs.

As he stood at her side to nurse, his legs wide-planted, Tehwaz clapped me on the shoulder. “Well done, boy. And if he's not white, he looks like his sire and that's good enough. He'll have the Nisean size! Look how tall he stands! He'll seat a man in armor when he's grown.”

“He's beautiful,” I said, for I had fallen in love.

From that day on any extra time I had was spent with him. Tehwaz called him Good Fortune, but I had another, better name for him. Watching him cavort in the pasture, kicking up his heels for the fun of it, charging and leaping in the spring sunshine, it looked to me as though he were dancing with an invisible twin, with the Spirit of Horse who had come to play beside him. I called him Ghost Dancer.

Late spring began to turn into summer, and we left Miletus. Now was the time to make the circuit of all the fairs along the coast, from the great horse fair at Halicarnassos to the one at Ehweh in the uplands, in the mountains where there was snow on the peaks even in the summer. Hittite lands, they said, where men had lived forever worshipping the gods of the heights. The high mountain pastures produced good horses, and we made a long passage through them, buying and selling. Ghost Dancer was not for sale, of course, but he made a good show frisking along the road beside his mother, full of high spirits. Some horses do not take to the uncertainty of each night in a different place, but he was undisturbed.

“Born for campaign,” Tehwaz said with satisfaction. “Not a timid bone in him. He will fetch the best price I've ever had, mark my words!”

I did. Ghost Dancer would be sold. But not yet. Not yet. We had at least a year, he and I.

Often we would buy a horse in one place and then sell it a bit farther on, so I learned to ride many different kinds of horses, and to stay on those of uncertain temper. Often I rode Ghost Dancer's mother, with him frisking along beside, and we brought up the rear of the column keeping any new buys from straying. The skies were blue and the peaks glittered with snow. On the high currents of the air eagles patrolled, almost seeming to stand motionless at times, borne on the winds.

I might have run. But where should I go? I was city bred, and what should I do in open country alone? I did not know how to hunt or track, and I had nowhere to go in any case. And I should have to leave Ghost Dancer. Tehwaz had tethered me as surely as Ghost Dancer, who skipped along without halter or rope, following after me and his mother.

When autumn ended and winter came we returned to Miletus. I do not think my father should have recognized me if we had passed in the street. Almost two years had changed me. I was growing, and like Ghost Dancer I should be tall if the length of my legs were any indication. It seemed that everything was ungainly, and that my bones ached with the speed of their growth. There was no such thing as enough food. I ate one man's portion and was still hungry, still wanting more. We passed the winter in Miletus, and in the spring were on the road again.

Tehwaz had an offer for Ghost Dancer from one of the leading men of the city, which he laughed at. “If that is what he will pay for a yearling that is not even broken, think what he will pay in the autumn!”

I thought, my face against Ghost Dancer's glossy hide. He was growing too. Soon we would begin breaking him, and when he had his strength I would ride him. I would be the first, I promised him. He should know no cruelty, learn no bad habits. When it came down to it, he should know nothing but love.