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Megakles knew it was going to rain soon.

The sky was mostly blue with just a few wispy patches of white cloud, but there was gray behind the hills to the south. He could smell a tinge of

salt on the wind blowing in from the open sea. That wasn't how he knew it would rain, though.

The ache in his shoulder told him that, the spot where the Egyptian's arrow had pierced deep into his flesh 20 years earlier. He remembered little of the encounter,

and what little he did recall, Megakles tried his best to forget. That was the price of being

an Athenian citizen. Sometimes you had to take an arrow in the shoulder. Old pains weren't

his immediate problem right now, though. The stone was.

He had thought to save some silver by quarrying the blocks of limestone on his own property,

just as he was using his own slaves to do the labor, but it turned out the stuff split too

easily to make good building material. So Megakles cursed for the fifth time that day. The three slaves, like the stone, were poor in quality.

They were war captives from somewhere in Lydia or Phrygia or one of those places,

and Megakles felt like they would slit his throat the moment he turned his back on them.

At least they'd been cheap when he bought them on the auction block down at Piraeus a few weeks back.

Glawkius, the Illyrian Shepherd, who had

been Megakles' slave for nearly two decades, had a better idea than continuing to curse at the

cracked and split blocks. He had seen a rock-facing with nice brownish limestone on a neighbor's

land while he was grazing the flocks. It had never been quarried, and it was just off the road.

Why not use that?

It pained Megakles to admit it, but Glaucus was right. He and the farmer transacted regularly,

with Megakles leasing pastures and his neighbor buying breeding rams for his flock. This would

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