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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