Amber and Clay Read online

  He taught me not to talk back,

  or ask questions.

  He said when anyone gave me an order

  I should jump to do it,

  scurry,

  as if I couldn’t wait to obey.

  He taught me to bow my head,

  and not look up

  at people who were better than me —

  which was everyone.

  I had a new name: Thrax. It means Thracian boy.

  I said I wanted my old name, Rhaskos.

  He gave me a clip on the ear.

  I decided it didn’t matter what people called me.

  Nobody spoke to me much.

  He was a horseman, Georgios was.

  He told me: A horse is only as good as his feet.

  A horse’s hooves can get soft and sick

  if he stands in his own muck.

  The stalls and paddocks had to be kept clean.

  Our master, Alexidemus,

  was proud of his horses. Horses are precious.

  There wasn’t a horse in the stable

  that wasn’t worth more than I was.

  Even their turds were precious.

  So I picked up turds:

  Squat and stoop,

  till the bucket is full,

  lug it to the dung heap. Dump it.

  That’s what I did all day.

  In summer, the blinding light,

  the stink and the flies.

  When winter came, I was cold.

  I outgrew the tunic my mother wove,

  and no one gave me a new one.

  The turds froze to the ground.

  I was glad to find a fresh one

  to warm my hands.

  Rainy days were best. You can’t scoop turds out of the mud.

  Sometimes I hid in the barn.

  I burrowed into the straw and slept.

  If I was lucky, no one found me.

  I was always starved for sleep.

  Sokrates once asked me,

  how do I know I’m awake when I’m awake?

  how do I know when I’m dreaming?

  It’s strange. In those days

  I felt more awake when I slept.

  My dreams were full of color

  and surprises

  sometimes terror — my mother holding the knife —

  but also action: wrestling in the courtyard,

  riding on my mother’s back.

  I’d wake up

  and the dreams drained away.

  I’d go back to work.

  My hands moved, but my mind stood still:

  a pool of rotten water.

  I felt like a shade, like one of the dead,

  as if no one could see me.

  As I recall these things,

  I imagine you sitting across from me.

  I see your face,

  and it makes me laugh,

  because when I talk about turds,

  you screw up your mouth:

  disgusted.

  Look; I got used to the turds.

  They weren’t the bad part. Horses are cleaner than pigs,

  or men. The bad part was

  if you do the same thing over and over,

  and nobody talks to you,

  you see your life stretching ahead

  endless and dull and lonesome —

  You think the gods have forsaken you,

  because you’re just a thing that picks up turds,

  a nothing.

  Two years went by like that. I think it was two.

  I got bigger. I groomed the horses

  and picked the mud from their feet.

  I walked them out

  after the master rode them.

  Their lives weren’t easy, either.

  The bits in their bridles were spiked, like burrs,

  and the master rode them hard.

  They came back lathered with sweat;

  their mouths wet with foam and blood.

  Some were sent to fight in the wars.

  It’s strange

  how those days blur together.

  But here is one memory

  bright and clear as water:

  I was in the high pasture,

  where no one could see me.

  There was a horse on the ridge,

  a stallion; a fiery chestnut

  blood-red against the sky.

  His head was up, ears pricked. He was sniffing the air.

  Something had spooked him.

  — There was the line of his neck,

  the arc of his withers,

  the saddle-scoop of his back.

  Then his rump, almost round,

  like a ripe apple.

  His tail streamed like a waterfall

  teased by the wind.

  There was a sharp stone in front of me:

  and a bare patch: the puckery dust

  of a dried-up puddle.

  I dragged the stone over the dust

  and made that horse:

  the spear-sharp ears,

  the crest,

  the flanks, the rippling muscles —

  Point and line and curve and scoop —

  Alive in the hollow of my hand —

  I glanced back at the horse. He’d dropped his head to graze.

  Whatever had spooked him was gone.

  I looked down. A shock of joy:

  There was the horse

  small but real

  dug in the dust.

  I’d made the horse.

  I’d curved his rump.

  I made the wind

  that combed his tail.

  Have you ever done that — ?

  Tried to do the impossible,

  without thinking?

  and you did it?

  I remembered the horse I’d seen

  long ago, on the andron wall.

  I’d wondered how that horse came to be.

  Now I understood:

  Another man had seen a horse,

  and picked up a tool,

  and made that horse.

  I, Rhaskos, was like that man.

  Me again. I forgot to tell you two things.

  One: about the land. This boy Rhaskos —

  who’s just found beauty

  in a horse’s behind —

  lives in a radiant land.

  Ελλαδα. Don’t call it Greece.

  That’s a word like a sneer:

  hissy

  greasy

  unmelodic

  and worst of all, Roman.

  The Greeks call their land Ελλαδα. That’s Ε,

  which more or less

  rhymes with play,

  and λλα is la, as in tra-la,

  and the thing that looks like a d

  is more like a th. Eh-LA-tha.

  Ελλαδα.

  Isn’t that better?

  Now close your eyes a second —

  Not yet. Wait till I tell you —

  Close your eyes and imagine blue,

  a startling, bracing, breathtaking blue:

  the sun on a kingfisher’s back — Now!

  . . . Open your eyes. Take that blue

  and brush the dome of the sky.

  Look up! There’s the sun, a burning chariot

  drawn by shell-white horses

  plunging through the clouds.

  That’s Ελλαδα:

  a land of wind and sunlight,

  rimmed by a restless sea.

  A land of rough volcanic rock

  and forests, dense and fragrant:

  alive with bearded centaurs,

  stags and wolves,

  and nymphs with delicate feet.

  And underfoot, cold with dew:

  sweet clover and violets,

  parsley, mint, oregano,

  poppies, wild garlic, and thyme.

  Though

  to be perfectly frank

  it’s not a land

  that feels that it owes you a living. The soil

  i
s laced with acid and iron. The country

  has always been poor.

  There’s the constant threat of hunger. As a god,

  I don’t have to worry about that.

  On Mount Olympus,

  there are endless banquets,

  nectar poured from gold . . .

  What else? Oh, yes,

  the other thing I forgot to mention:

  The country is always at war.

  Civil war. Roughly, it’s Athens versus Sparta.

  It’s been waged

  for twenty-some years

  and will likely keep on going.

  Rhaskos knows nothing about it. Who talks politics

  to a slave? He only knows

  that the horses are sent off

  and few of them return.

  The battlefields are far away.

  Melisto’s city, Athens,

  is bleeding. Money, bronze, horses, lives,

  all lost in the war.

  It’s a war that Melisto

  is too young to understand

  (and I have to admit, it’s complicated),

  but she’s not too young

  to have nightmares about the Spartans,

  those long-haired warriors

  in their red cloaks. Personally, I find them picturesque,

  albeit deadly. Melisto hates and fears them.

  I wonder: does she know

  if the city walls tumble

  and the Spartans take the city,

  what could happen to her?

  The women and children enslaved,

  the men (her beloved father)

  put to the sword?

  It could happen tomorrow.

  And does she know

  that on other islands,

  it’s the Athenians, men like her father

  helmeted in bronze,

  who wage war,

  and besiege the cities?

  They say at Potidaea

  the people inside the city walls

  were so hungry

  they ate the dead before they surrendered.

  I don’t know for sure. I’m a bit squeamish.

  I didn’t watch that part.

  And then there’s plague.

  If there’s a war,

  there are armies on the move,

  and that means disease. If you crowd too many people

  inside the city walls,

  there’s bound to be sickness. There was plague in Athens,

  twenty-some years ago. A filthy business.

  I didn’t watch that, either.

  Plague is disgusting

  and tedious, too.

  It’s the same thing over and over.

  One-fourth of the people died.

  My point is, this miraculous city, Athens,

  exists in the middle of war,

  and Melisto knows that.

  She still has all her baby teeth,

  but she knows about war. She’s a warlike child,

  always waging battles

  against the greatest tyrant she knows: her mother.

  Rhaskos is a year older,

  his mother is gone,

  and his life is hard. He knows that.

  He searches for horses in the dust.

  Are they luckless children, these two little Greeks?

  Perhaps.

  But neither is in any hurry to die.

  It’s good to be alive, even in wartime,

  even in slavery,

  even long ago,

  in Ελλαδα . . .

  THIEF

  After I made the first horse,

  I wanted to make horses.

  That’s all I wanted to do.

  I cleared dirt patches. I yanked up weeds,

  and plowed the soil with a rock.

  I ground the dirt, loose and soft.

  When no one was looking,

  I’d set down my bucket,

  pick up a stick,

  and try to make a horse.

  Whenever I cleaned the stalls,

  I’d watch the horses

  and feel my fingers twitch.

  Wherever I went with my bucket,

  I saw horses

  afloat in the shimmering air.

  When I drew them,

  I couldn’t get the lines right. They were lopsided,

  misshapen.

  I muttered and scratched

  scraped away the bad lines

  and forgot to fill my bucket.

  Georgios caught me at it one day.

  He whacked the back of my head.

  He called me slavish,

  and said I was a thief,

  playing mud pies like a baby

  instead of working for the master.

  If my eyes hadn’t filled with salt water,

  I might have laughed.

  He was a slave himself,

  and all of us stole.

  We stole because we needed things.

  We stole to get back.

  We prayed to Hermes, god of thieves,

  so we wouldn’t get caught.

  Demetrios — he was the slave who guarded the storeroom —

  Demetrios was favored by the god. The master trusted him.

  Who wouldn’t? Demetrios was frugal,

  thin and grave, and his hands were always clean.

  He was respectful, too, never raising his eyes.

  But he was loyal to us, not the master.

  There were nights when the master was away,

  when he’d unlock the storeroom door.

  Those nights, if we wanted a lump of cheese,

  or a handful of olives,

  or a little wine,

  we could help ourselves.

  By dawn the next morning,

  Demetrios would have swept the storeroom

  and rearranged the goods.

  Demetrios could read and write,

  and he knew how to keep

  a straight face

  and a false tally

  better than any man alive.

  Every other month or so,

  he’d steal a water jug of ruddy wine,

  and bring it to the stables

  to share with Georgios.

  Those were the nights when Georgios smiled.

  Years later, I told Sokrates that I stole —

  I mean, that I used to steal.

  I was ashamed to tell him,

  because everyone knew how virtuous he was.

  He wouldn’t have stolen a crust if he were starving.

  He said, “Did you know it was wrong to steal?”

  I was tempted to lie, but he was my friend.

  “I knew it was wrong,” I said.

  He said, “Good.”

  He said it was better to do wrong

  knowing that it’s wrong

  than to do wrong in ignorance,

  by accident.

  I thought that was crazy.

  I talk to him sometimes,

  not the way I talk to you,

  but in my head. I ask him questions,

  and I argue with him. He’d like that.

  Sometimes I want to say,

  Look, I know it was wrong to steal,

  but have you ever thought about what was stolen from me?

  He didn’t know how bitter it is to be a slave.

  He couldn’t see that it was wrong

  that I was a slave. He was the wisest man in Athens,

  but he couldn’t see that I’d been wronged.

  He always said:

  “To suffer a wrong is nothing.

  To do wrong harms the soul.”

  It’s not always nothing to suffer a wrong.

  As for doing wrong —

  I guess I harmed my soul, those days,

  because I stole. After my mother’s tunic fell apart,

  winter came, and I’d have frozen to death

  if I hadn’t stolen a cloak from Georgios.

  He beat me, but he let me keep it.

 
I don’t steal now.

  Even then, I didn’t steal much. But there was one thing I stole

  over and over,

  and I’m proud of it.

  It wasn’t a thing,

  so maybe it didn’t damage my soul.

  I think it was good for my soul.

  On moonlit nights,

  I would visit the andron

  and look at the painted horse.

  I went six or seven times.

  It was a risk. It was a thrill.

  My heart would jump in my chest,

  like a colt leaping. I’d hide in the courtyard

  and listen till I knew

  the whole house slept.

  Then I’d climb into a window

  and creep down the hall to the room

  where the horse still pranced on the wall.

  The full-moon nights were best, of course.

  But the man who made that horse —

  I remember how excited I was when I found this out —

  had dug into the plaster with something sharp,

  to make the horse’s outline.

  Even when the moon was down,

  I could find that horse in the dark.

  I could stand on the couch

  and trace the shape with my fingers.

  One night

  when the master was away

  I decided to take a lamp.

  There was always a light in the kitchen,

  at the altar of Hestia.

  I would borrow the lamp

  and see the horse by lamplight.

  I was risking a beating;

  I was doing a thing

  no one would imagine a slave would do.

  If I were caught stealing a loaf, Georgios would understand.

  He’d have me whipped, but he’d understand.

  But to steal in at night,

  to the best room in the house,

  to see a horse?

  He’d never understand that.

  That made it even better.

  Then came the night I was caught.

  I am Hephaistos, the lame god:

  foot twisted,

  hip wrenched out of joint.

  I am the ugly god,

  cast out of Olympus,

  rejected,

  the maker of beautiful things.

  I see this boy who has no one:

  his father indifferent,

  his mother sold.

  I see this boy as he stoops and labors,

  sweats and survives. I am the god

  who does not turn his back on ugliness.

  Beware, all you

  who cast out children,

  who use them as tools

  for your shameful needs.

  I tell you, these children are not alone:

  A god stands beside them,

  a Fury, a Nemesis,

  who will avenge them.

  I will shape this boy’s fate

  like a tool at the forge;

  through fire and hammer

  I will shape it.

  Look at him! Silver-crowned in the moonlight,

  hoisting himself over the windowsill! He risks his skin

  to visit a forbidden room

  and worship a painted wonder. How he desires it!