And then I knew — the need for sanctuary, the seawater already showing the faint whiteness of its salt where it had begun to dry on his body. I thought of the Athenian flagship in the harbour, and I knew.
I took them back to my house, and woke the boy. He might linger in the city when I had bidden him to come straight back, but I knew that I could trust him in such a matter as this. Round-eyed with astonishment and still half-asleep, he set to blowing up the brushwood and smouldering charcoal in the brazier. And when it burned clear red, spread out to dry the dripping tunics which the second man had brought from the bundle. Food I got for them myself, oatcake and goat’s milk cheese; and the rugs from the bed-place to wrap their chilled bodies in. And Alkibiades sat down by the fire and held out his hands to it as though it were the depth of winter. His hair began to feather, coppery gold at the ends as it dried.
A leather money purse and a few gold ornaments had come out of the bundle also; he saw me looking at them, and said, ‘Now arises a nice point: are you, or are you not, one of those to whom one offers gold for the God in return for sanctuary?’
‘If the charge against you is false, then the Lord Poseidon asks no gold for sheltering an innocent man.’
‘And if it is true?’
‘Then His Sanctuary would profit little from the gold of a man lying under the curse of the Gods.’
‘Then you know what they accuse me of?’
‘I have heard somewhat,’ I said.
‘And you think that if I am innocent I should go back to Athens and face my judges.’
It was true, but I do not know how he read it in my face. ‘Hemlock tastes as bitter to the innocent as to the guilty,’ he said.
‘If you are innocent, can you not trust your own city?’
He looked at me a while in silence, and the brushwood flared in the brazier, making strange upward shadows above his jawbone and in the hollows of his eyes. And Great Lord Poseidon! I never saw a man’s eyes so bright, nor, behind the brightness, so full of the dark. Then he said, ‘I would have done so, once, but I have lately learned a little wisdom. Even now I think I might trust them in, say, the matter of the city drains — supposing of course that their moneybags were not too closely involved. But in the matter of my life, I find that I would not trust my own mother, any more.’
And he flung up his head and laughed.
If Dionysus laughed, seeing the Maenads closing in, it will have been such laughter as that. It set the dogs howling in the farm below us.
*
They ate and rested, while the boy found them another cloak to add to my old winter mantle; and before dawn, they were away.
I watched them heading inland into the faint ’fore-dawn light. The search was out for them, and they would lie up in the hills till the Salamina gave it up and the two ships sailed without them; and then come down to find a trading vessel bound for the Peloponnese. But they would not return to me. I was glad to see them go, yet my house felt oddly desolate for their going, as though something bright that had blazed up with their coming, had burned out, leaving a little grey ash over everything; even over my own heart.
6
The Seaman
We landed in Cyllene in Elis, and found lodging with an old Olympic friend of Alkibiades, while he sent to Sparta, asking for political asylum. Of course he gets it. The Spartans may be slow thinking, but they know what’s good for them, and My Lord Alkibiades, outlawed from his own city and hot for revenge might be very good for them indeed! — only Alkibiades doesn’t seem so hot for revenge by then. It’s as though that ugly business over Messana has quenched all that in him, quenched everything.
It frightened me, and I don’t frighten easy.
Well, we goes to Sparta, walking every mile of the rough mountain tracks that turn into quagmires with the first autumn rains. There’s horses to be had in Elis, but they cost money, and the gold that Alkibiades had brought away with him would have to last the Gods alone knew how long. Beside, I think the idea of trudging into Lacedaemon on foot like a soldier at the end of a long march suited the character he was minded to play among the Spartans.
I’ll never forget my first sight of Sparta. The track comes over the Taygetus saddle and drops away from our feet through the grey-leaved scrub whose hot peppery sweetness always makes me long for the good salt smell of open water. Lower down, there’s kerm oak forest, dense as a ram’s fleece; and on the far side of the valley it all begins again, dark forest running up in tongues that mark the river gorges, to threadbare grey scrub and naked rock; and above the treeline, the huge angry masses of the farther mountains with the eagles flying below the snow crests. And between the two, all the plain of Lacedaemon spread out; corn and olives and the river winding down past the city and its litter of settlements, southward towards the sea.
They say Sparta used to be four villages, and from up there on the hill-saddle, it still shows; four districts, the city has, still carrying their old village names, joined together by the marketplace and the temple area. Even the temples of Sparta are of timber without even a lick of paint such as a galley needs to keep her seaworthy. And the houses, even the joined houses of the two Kings are of timber and thatch with here and there a wall of rough piled stones, and the hearth smoke finds its own way out through holes in the thatch. Oh yes I know, I couldn’t see all that, not from such a distance. I learns it later. But when I thinks now of that first sight of Sparta, it seems as though I can see it all at once, and catch already the prison stink of the place. It’s olive harvest, and between us and the city the Helots are hard at it, gathering the olives. (You never sees a Spartan lift a finger on his own land, even at harvest time.) And way off on a piece of level ground north of the city ants are moving about, solemn and purposeful — only that ants don’t drill in straight lines and wheel and countermarch.
‘Looks like a colony of old rooks’ nests, doesn’t it,’ says Alkibiades. ‘A good place to be out of, one day, Pilot. Meanwhile, it will serve its turn.’
And we goes on down the track.
*
They lodges us in the house of a man called Endius, as dour as he’s dark — and he’s so dark that it’s my guess there’s Helot blood in him. You find that darkness sometimes among the Spartans; and when you do, better not ask questions. The Spartans talk a lot about keeping the breed pure, but the men are often away fighting, and like enough to a woman left too long alone, a black-eyed Helot boy from the family farm may seem better than no man in her bed at all.
This Endius is a man of wide cornlands and many olive groves; and his house is one of the finest in the city. So we lodges almost as well as King Agis himself, which is to say almost as well as the pigs in Attica. Me, I’m used to sleeping hard, and I’m as used to fleas as the next man, but I’ll swear the fleas they have in Sparta could keep the ship-board kind as hunting dogs. And in all the three years we spends there — Praise be to Poseidon I’m not knowing it’s that long at the outset, or I’d be howling to the moon like a mad dog — I never gets so that I can sup that foul black broth of theirs without a crawling in my guts.
Three days we kicks our heels and waits, and then Alkibiades gets his summons to go before the Kings and the Council of Ephors. After he’s gone, I can’t breathe in that stinking city, and I goes out and walks about the cultivated land. I’ve an eye for land, as most of my kind have. It’s born in us, along with our hunger for the sea, the hunger for a little plot of good earth, a few olive trees and a radish patch when our seafaring is over. And it’s beyond me how men who own such land, the richest land in Hellas, can leave the working of it all to their slaves and never know the good feel of looking at their corn whitening towards harvest, and thinking, ‘That plot is doing well, because the Gods have been kind, and because I have sweated over it.’
I comes to a pile of stones marking a boundary. Someone has left a garland of withered flowerheads at its foot, and that’s all there is to tell that it’s a wayside Herm — a pile of stones is the near
est they can come to a Herm, even in the city. I stands and stares at it, I don’t know how long, thinking ‘Gods! what a place and what a people!’ and not knowing I said it aloud till Alkibiades’ voice just behind me says, ‘Do I gather that you do not care for our Spartan fellow-men?’
I swings round, and he is standing within arm’s length of me; with that queer emptiness in his eyes, and his teeth just showing between his lips.
‘Do you?’ I says; but I’m not waiting for an answer, I knows he’ll not give me one, anyway. ‘What news from the Council?’
‘If I hadn’t had to search half Lacedaemon for you, you might have had it sooner,’ he says. ‘There’s a full muster of the Assembly called for tomorrow before the Council of Ephors. I am summoned to speak before it.’
‘To what purpose?’ I says bluntly.
He shrugs. ‘There are more guests in Sparta, lately arrived — envoys from Syracuse, no less; with a couple of partridge-plump Corinthian noblemen thrown in. The Assembly is being called chiefly for them, but they think they may as well hear what Alkibiades has to say at the same time. It’s humiliating, Pilot, to be cast for the second attraction, but doubtless very good for the soul.’
We turns back together towards the city; and I looks round at him after we’ve walked a good way in silence.
‘What will you have to say to the Assembly, then?’
‘Oh, you know what I am, my dear; whatever the Assembly most wants to hear. Not that they matter here, anyway; it’s the Ephors that I have to satisfy.’
But I knows that he’s not quite sure, even now. There’s only that emptiness in him, waiting to be filled. And, it’s wondering what will fill it that gives me the shivers.
He laughed then, and flung his arm across my shoulders. ‘Or else I will tell the lot of them to go to Tartarus; and take to the sea with you in good earnest, and we’ll turn pirate and grow rich preying on the Black Sea corn trade.’
He’d have made a good pirate, would Alkibiades; I’ve often thought so.
That night with the newly arrived guests, we eats in the Royal Mess; the long Mess Hall linking the Kings’ houses, where the Kings and their bodyguards eat their two meals a day.
The food was no better than in Endius’ house; barley cakes and olives and more of that stinking black broth with the taint of bullock’s blood coming through the salt and vinegar. They don’t keep the grown men hungry, as they do the boys to teach them to be thieves; for the men have learned their lesson, and can live off the land wherever they find themselves in time of war; if anything, I’m thinking they eat more than we do in Athens, but the food’s vile, none the less. The talk round the long bare table is good, though camp talk, such as one gets around the cooking fires and under the sterns of the beached galleys on campaign. A bit more heavy-handed, maybe, for every Athenian camp has its jesters, and usually there’s a good deal of laughter. The men don’t laugh much in Sparta. But it’s good nutty talk, and Alkibiades seems able to talk it with the best, his face straight, and his laughter, when it comes, short and sharp in his throat. But I think the envoys of Syracuse and Corinth feels themselves somewhat at sea.
Never in all my born days have I seen men look more out of their own place than those nicely polished envoys among the shaggy Spartans. In their pretty soft tunics and curled hair — one of the Corinthians even wore bracelets strung with little bells on both wrists — they looks like striped tulips growing in a thistle patch. Very odd I feels, eating with men I’d by rights be viewing at the other end of a galley’s ram, and on the whole I’m more comfortable watching the Spartans.
King Agis sits at the head of the long central table; shortish and thick-set, a good few years older than Alkibiades and me; decked out like all the rest in a rather dirty soldier’s tunic of goat’s hair dyed blood red so as not to show the stains in battle (can’t think of anything but battle, these Spartans), with his hair in a greasy bush, and his weapons beside him, and nothing to set him apart from his bodyguard save that he sits in a great chair with a brindled wolfskin slung across the back, while the rest of us sits on benches. Certainly there’s nothing special kingly in his face. He looks rather like a boar, come to think of it, with a long snout and his eyes very small and bright, looking as though they’ll turn red when he’s angry. I thinks to myself, ‘He’s dangerous, that one, and not because he’s a King’, and then I finds myself looking at another sitting not far from him, and thinking, ‘But maybe not as dangerous as you.’
I knows, having heard him spoken to by name, that he’s called Lysander, and I’d a known him for a seaman anywhere, without being told that he’s Sparta’s senior trirarch. He’s got one of the most open faces I’ve ever seen — too open by half, like those perfect autumn mornings among the islands that brew up half a gale by noon; and he looks very straight into anyone’s face that he’s speaking to, but there again, somehow too straight, as though he’s doing it deliberately. I thinks, ‘I wouldn’t trust you the length of a galley’s keel, my lad.’ You can see that he’s got more wit in his little finger than Agis has in his whole boar’s carcass, and I’ve a feeling I’d like to take him to a certain wine shop in Troizen and get him dripping drunk and see what comes out.
Meanwhile the company have begun to talk of the things that tomorrow they’ll be arguing before the Assembly.
‘Sir,’ says one of the envoys, ‘if you will only strike now —’
‘The Ephors have the matter in hand,’ says Agis, making pellets with the grey bread. ‘They are resolved to send envoys back with you, to hearten your people so that there is no thought of surrender in them.’
The Syracusian says stiffly, ‘Syracuse has no thought of surrender.’
And another, an oldish fellow who plays with an amber ball while he talks, says, ‘If the Athenians had attacked at once, while the size of their force still seemed to us a matter for nightmare, who knows, Syracuse might be in Athenian hands today.’ (I catches a glance at Alkibiades, but he’s squinting into his wine cup and seemingly aware of nothing else.) ‘You see then, there is nothing that we seek to hide from you. They did not attack at once; doubtless they had good and sufficient reason; and since the foremost of their Generals was removed from them —’ And then he checks and glances under his wrinkled papery old lids at Alkibiades, kind of apologetic.
And Alkibiades takes a sip of his wine and sets the cup down, and smiles at him cheerfully. ‘Speak freely, my friends. We have parted company, Athens and I. Let last summer’s flowers blow down the wind.’
The old man makes him a small courteous bend of the head, and turns back to Agis. ‘The remaining Generals have divided the force between them and keep it sailing to and fro on raids and slaving expeditions until — especially now that they have attacked Hybla and failed to take it — they no longer seem so vast nor so invincible as they did at first.’
I thinks, ‘Fool! That’s not the way to ask for help! Better to have left the talking to the Corinthians!’ And then I changes my mind. He’s no fool, that old man; perhaps with the Spartans it is better to ask proudly than to beg; it is seldom good to beg from a bully. But then the Spartans are not mere bullies; I don’t know. Does anyone know much, where the Spartans are concerned? I looks at Alkibiades again, to see if he does, but he’s wearing his mask, the rather bored one, and I can’t see in.
They goes on talking, and I sits listening while they mulls over the whole ugly story of the fleet’s mishandling through that early autumn when so much might have been done with what Alkibiades has left behind. Most of it’s stale news, of course, but the sourness of it’s in my belly yet, and comes up like the after-taste of vomit at every hearing. Gods! What a confusion of muddled tactics and old men’s half-measures!
Lysander leans forward on his arms, and says with a kind of bluff directness that only just shows the iron underneath, ‘Despite which, being men of good sense, you know that you have no reserves to call upon, whereas Athens has many more fighting men still unused, where her present force
came from. And so you come here to see what Sparta will do for you.’
‘We turned first to our Mother State for aid; Corinth deemed it best that we should come to you, the greatest soldiers of all Hellas.’ The old envoy glaces across at the plump Corinthian with the bells on his wrists, who’s seemingly half asleep. And I fancies there’s a kind of faint wryness about his mouth, as though he’s just bitten on a bitter almond. The Corinthians are noted for their skill in passing anyone who comes to them for help on to somebody else.
‘We’ll make blood-puddings of Athens when the times comes,’ says one of the King’s bodyguard, spitting olive stones on to the floor. ‘But these things can’t be buried, we’re not at war with Athens.’
‘At peace then?’ Alkibiades says sweetly, into his wine cup. ‘There’s a truce between us.’
‘Oh yes, I was forgetting the truce.’
Agis puts in suddenly and loudly, ‘All this will be dealt with before the Council tomorrow. It’s not a thing that can be settled round the mess table. Let’s have the boys in to do a spear-dance for us.’
When the gathering broke up for the night — for the Mess was for the most part made up of older men who didn’t live in barracks but had homes of their own to go to — Alkibiades and I went back to Endius’ house.
Endius hadn’t eaten in Mess that night, and met us in the fore-porch, saying in his clipped Spartan way, ‘There’s one waiting in the andron; a merchant from the north. He brings news which it concerns you to hear.’
Traders do not often come into Lacedaemon, though from time to time one will bring in a consignment of that dark heady resinated wine they make in Thessaly, and exchange it for Spartan hunting dogs to sell in Athens. And it’s my belief that Endius, knowing of his coming, had remained at home that evening to be the first to hear what news he brought. Our host was well in with the secret police; indeed, I’m none so sure he wasn’t one of them, and high up at that. If so, I wonder how sound he sleeps at nights. Ah well, the Spartans are strong stomached.
The Flowers of Adonis Page 8