The Flowers of Adonis

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  He said, ‘Your hair is the colour of Hymettus honey where the lamp shines on it.’

  I said, ‘Why have you come?’

  And he answered, with the laughter twitching at his lips, ‘I asked Agis the King what I should do to amuse myself while the Dekalia Force was away, and he bade me to do whatever I pleased.’

  ‘And this is what you please,’ I said.

  ‘This is what I please. We shall do better, I think, without the lamp.’ And he crossed to it with that long light stride of his, and pinched out the flame between finger and thumb. For a moment darkness hung like a web before my eyes; then as the slurred moon swam into some rent in the clouds, it paled, and I saw him again, a man-shaped darkness blotted against lesser darkness of the window.

  I said, ‘Get back as you came.’

  ‘Presently,’ he said.

  ‘Now! My women are close by; I have only to call.’

  His voice was softly amused, ‘But you are not going to call, are you, Timea?’

  It was the first time he had spoken my name, and the first time it had ever seemed to me that my name was beautiful.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  And then I felt more than saw, how he held his arms out to me; and I went into them as though there had never been any other place for me from the day that I was born. He caught me against him, and I felt even then how his hard body was alight with laughter. His tunic was wet with the first spattering of the rain, and there was rain on his lips, and the cool wetness of rain in his hair that fell forward across my face; and the fresh sweet smell of the rain was all about him, mingled with the smell of wine.

  I said, when I could speak again, ‘How did you escape your guards and get past mine?’

  And he said, ‘Love, your brave Spartans are no match for an Athenian in guile. Antiochus is on watch outside; there is nothing to fear.’

  As though discovery was all I had to fear that night.

  And as though it was a thing of long agreement between us, he picked me up and carried me across to the bed-place and laid me down on the wolfskin rug that I had brought with me to furnish my marriage bed.

  He hurt me, then, for I was a virgin, having been bred up to give proof of that to My Lord the King. And Oh, the pain was sweet! I took it and drew it up into my body, writhing and gasping beneath his thrust, until his man-spear broke through and I gave him the proof that had been meant for Agis the King.

  Afterwards, when he lay quiet with his body all along mine, and his head driven into the hollow between my neck and shoulder, I said, ‘Was it only to be revenged on Agis?’

  ‘That I came? I had other reasons.’

  ‘Tell them to me.’

  ‘Small foolish reasons. Because the little hairs on your arms and legs make a silvery bloom over the brown of your skin; because your mouth is wide; because you have the scar of an old spear-thrust below your left knee — thin and white as the sliver of the New Moon. Did you come by it on the practice grounds?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘when I was fifteen. One of the boys playing the fool with his weapons.’

  He turned his head and kissed me on the throat. ‘It would be hard to find an Athenian girl with the mark of a spear gash below her knee … Because I knew your hair would smell of sweet-grass. Because I knew you would be fierce and sweet in the taking.’

  And fool that I was, because they were small foolish reasons, I believed him at least half the way; and half was enough for me.

  I wish I had died that night, with the first fiery pain of love upon me!

  It was full summer when I went to my nurse, the only woman in the world I could trust, and said, ‘Panthea, I think I am with child.’

  ‘That was in my mind also,’ said she; and then, ‘Pray to the Gods he does not lisp when he comes to talking.’

  I said, ‘You knew?’

  She took me in her arms, and held me as she was used to do when I was small, and said, ‘There’s not much that you can keep from me, my lamb. There were still traces on your marriage wolfskins for all your sponging, on the morning after the Army marched for Dekalia — you may thank your fortune it was old Panthea that found them. And well enough I know that you haven’t slept lonely every night since then.’

  ‘Why did you never say anything? Never seek to stop me?’ I asked childishly.

  ‘Because I wanted you to have something from life, no matter what came after. It is better for a woman to have her springtime and pay for it, than never to have known the spring at all.’

  ‘Tanthea, what shall I do?’

  ‘That depends. Do you want to do away with the child?’

  ‘No! Oh no!’ I wanted Alkibiades’ child more than I had ever wanted anything in this world. But I clung to her, frightened as a child myself, with the newness of what was happening to me. ‘Will he kill me, when he knows?’

  She was silent a moment, then she said, ‘You must tell Agis that the child is his.’

  I almost laughed at that. ‘I am not one of his bodyguard nor from the Boys’ Barracks! He has never lain with me, all Sparta knows it!’

  ‘All Sparta knows he says he has never lain with you. He was here in the bride chamber with you on your wedding night.’

  ‘But he never lay with me. The earth shook. Panthea, don’t you understand?’ I shook her, wondering desperately whether age was making her wander in her wits.

  ‘He was drunk, that night,’ Panthea said. ‘All Sparta knows that too. Men often do not remember clearly when they are sober again, what things they did when the wine was in them … There was confusion in the house — Oh, I was not there, but one learns things — his latest boy made trouble; and I doubt if there’s anyone with a clear idea of how long before the earth shook, he went to the bridal chamber. Swear he got you with child that night. Tell how he came for you like a leopard in the coupling season — you can swear you found means to smuggle something into his wine, if you like — and when the earth shook, the thing was already done.’

  ‘He will never believe me.’

  ‘He will never be able to be quite sure.’

  But I had thought of another thing. ‘Unless the child is born early, it will be more than ten months — close on eleven — since that night.’

  ‘I’ve known first children carried as long in the womb before now,’ Panthea said. She put back my hair from my forehead and looked at me fixedly. ‘Swear that he lay with you that night before the earth shook, and when you found that he had forgotten, and taken the oath, you kept silent for his sake. Swear it is the King’s child and let nothing shake you from that. Part of him will want to believe you, the more so if it is a boy, for then he will have done his duty by Sparta and his house, and need never come to your bed again.’

  After she had held me for a little while in silence, she said, ‘Will you tell Alkibiades?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It is his right to know. But not yet.’

  I do not know why, not yet. I could not know then, that when he knew his seed had quickened in me and taken root, I should have already begun to lose him.

  *

  It was a night of late summer with the moths blundering into the lamp, when I saw my side-cast shadow on my chamber wall, just as I had seen it the night he first came to me, and knew by the faint swelling and softening of my belly, that the time had come to tell him, before all Lacedaemon knew that Agis’ Queen was with child.

  In the heat of the summer’s end when people sleep in the courts and porticos, it was not so easy for him to come to me in my chamber. But we contrived to meet at times, still, with the help of old Panthea. Most often we met in the mouth of the wooded glen that ran up toward the Place of the Lady. It seemed natural enough to my women that I should go there, taking only my old nurse for company; while Alkibiades was free to come and go as he would, so long as he made no attempt to cross the border. I did not think the Lady would be angry, seeing that I was about Her business.

  It was there that I told him, lying in the shade of myrtle and k
erm oak and arbutus trees, his arm under my head, the cicadas filling the noontide heat with their shrill churring, and beyond the trees the cornlands were cut stubble, drained of colour, shimmering in the heat.

  He rolled towards me, and cupped his hand over my belly, and said, ‘A child of mine, so small that I can cover him with the palm of my hand.’ And then, ‘What shall you say to Sparta? And Sparta’s King?’

  And love-blind as I was, I did not see then, only in remembering long afterwards, that he was not concerned for me, only curious as to what I would do.

  I told him how I was prepared to swear to Agis that the child was his own. ‘No one else will ever know,’ I told him.

  ‘They’ll guess,’ he said.

  ‘They’ll never be sure. Only you can be sure.’

  ‘Only you and I,’ he said. ‘Bear a son for me, sweetheart.’

  I said, playing with him a little, ‘Would not a daughter serve as well? You’ll not have to find her dowry.’

  ‘Nor my son his armour,’ he said, and pulled me to him. ‘Every man wants a son by the woman he loves.’

  ‘You have one son already,’ I said. ‘For me this is the first time, and it seems strange to me that you have one son already.’

  ‘One lawful son.’ His voice was muffled in my hair. ‘I have told you what manner of son he is.’

  ‘He was little more than a baby when you saw him last,’ I said, driven by sudden pity for a son of Alkibiades who had nothing of his love. ‘You could not be sure what manner of son he will be.’

  ‘When I saw him last, he was sitting in the sun with shallow eyes. He had caught a frog and he was pulling it to pieces,’ Alkibiades said. And then, as though that explained and disposed of everything, ‘I never loved his mother.’

  And then just as suddenly, I could not bear, with his child lying curled in my own belly, to think of that other child his words had called up to shadow the summer noon. I turned quickly to the last thing he had said, ‘Why did you marry her, then?’

  For somehow the laws that bind other men did not hold for Alkibiades, and the idea that he had married simply because his guardian had arranged the marriage, never came into my mind.

  ‘I married her for her money — I was somewhat short at the time — but the money ran out. Poor Hipparite, unsatisfactory in all things. And so damnably faithful. That wouldn’t have been so bad, but she would have had me faithful too.’

  ‘She could not help it that you did not love her,’ I said.

  ‘There were so many things that she could not help.’

  ‘And you love me! I am glad, I am glad!’

  ‘I love you — till the moon darkens in the sky,’ his arms tightened round me, and I felt a kind of ripple run through him, as though his whole body was shaken with silent laughter.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘What are you laughing at?’

  ‘A foolish thought, a man’s thought. You would find no laughter in it.’

  The Citizen

  At first the war seemed far off, and I remember my own furious rebellion — Gods! How the young can rebel! — against the short leg that kept me safe in Athens. More, I think, when the news began to be bad, than in the early days when it was all good. But we were to have our fill of death in Athens too, before all was over.

  It began even before our General Demosthenes was sent out with reinforcements. We scraped what seemed at the time to be the bottom of the barrel to gather those reinforcements, and all Attica began to go short, and part with family treasures to pay for them. My father gave the gold earrings shaped like tiny hanging vases, that had been his wedding gift to my mother; and felt it deeply that he could not give me. (I felt it deeply, too; a fact which I think he overlooked.) But even so the fleet sailed short of sixteen hundred Thracian mercenaries who we could ill spare, simply because we could not raise the money for their pay. They raised what they could of it themselves, on their way home, by looting the towns and villages they passed through.

  But it was not until early the following summer that the war really broke over us. That was when Agis and his Spartans came over the Pass at Dekalia, as they had used to do in the old days before the truce. Then for the first time in twelve years we saw the smoke of burning farms, and the Meltemi blew the ashes south into the streets of the city as I remembered it doing when I was a child. Now, suddenly, it came howling in upon us that this was no mere summer raiding. The Spartans had taken and fortified Dekalia; they had come to stay! Agis swept across Attica like a plague, leaving black destruction everywhere behind him; and our slaves deserted in hordes to join his raiding parties, and it was no longer possible to work the silver mines of Laurium — old Nikias would have felt the pinch there, if he hadn’t been sweating a cold sweat before the walls of Syracuse. Our corn supplies from the north were cut off, and every day Athens became more full of pitiful refugees from all over Attica, to squat in the streets and build themselves shelters against the very walls of the temples, and hold out their hands for help.

  No one came to buy at my father’s shop any more, there was no money for perfumed rubbing oil in Athens now; but the men came to talk, as they always had done, old men looking more and more like shadows as the days went by. Everyone knew whose brain was behind the seizing and fortifying of Dekalia; no Spartan would have thought of it. ‘He has betrayed Athens,’ they said. ‘He has betrayed his own people.’

  But I thought of him riding down to the Piraeus Gate, on the morning that our fleet sailed for Syracuse, with the sun in his eyes and the crimson Adonis flowers trampled beneath his horse’s hooves. And the young man in the crowd saying, ‘The Gods help him if ever he betrays us.’ And the old man saying, ‘The Gods help him and us, if ever we betray him.’

  And I went down into the darkest corner of the storeroom and cried. But I am still not sure whether I cried for Athens or for Alkibiades, or for something that was dead within myself.

  The Seaman

  I’ve seldom grown more heartily sick of anything than I did that summer of playing watchdog for Alkibiades while he tumbles the Queen of Sparta. I’d got myself a regular Helot girl by that time, too, and could have spent the nights pleasantly on my own account. But Alkibiades never considers anybody’s nights but his own …

  No, that’s not it either — I was maddened that he should go running his head into such a hazard simply because he was bored.

  I tells him so one evening, when he comes up with me on the track below the Taygetus woods where he meets her now that the heat of late summer’s come. I tells him, crawling out of the bush where I’d been watch-dogging for him as usual; and he stands stock still in the path and laughs at me with his hand on my shoulders. ‘Oh my Antiochus, my soul of circumspection, it’s over-late in the day for you to turn mentor!’

  And there’s a triumphant devilry in his laughter that makes the hair rise on my neck; and I says, ‘That’s as maybe. In Poseidon’s name, what madness is it now?’

  ‘No madness,’ he says, laughing still. ‘I have lain with a Queen under an arbutus tree and listened to the cicadas and sworn to love her until the moon darkens in the sky.’

  ‘It’s full now, that’s twelve nights,’ I says, picking twigs out of my hair.

  *

  But I was wrong. There was an eclipse of the moon that night.

  If I had been about my proper way of life I should have known that it was coming, for a seaman’s business includes the sky. But stranded long enough on the beach, a man loses touch with such calculations. I was busy with my Helot girl in the loft over Endius’ stables when I heard the sounds of fear in the street, and somebody crying on the Lady Artemis and somebody banging on a cauldron to drive demons away. And I rolls over on the straw and pushes my fist through the thatch to see what’s to be seen.

  The moon’s hanging huge over the roof of Endius’ house, bloated and red — the dull ugly red of blood that’s beginning to dry at the edges; and even as I lies there watching, a shadow begins to creep across it, deepening
as it goes, as if the darkness were eating the moon away.

  I doesn’t think of it that Syracuse also will be seeing what Sparta sees in the sky that night. I certainly doesn’t think of the effect on an army and a fleet near to breaking point, with a priest-ridden old fool like Nikias in command — not until the news came through, best part of a month later.

  Demosthenes had enough sense, it seems, to see by that time that the only chance of saving anything from the wreck, was to pull out the whole Athenian force while it was still possible. Athenian morale was about as low as it could get, their losses had been heavy and they were eaten up with fever. But if they could be brought off, Athens would suffer a hearty kick in the soft underbelly of her pride, but she would have a sizeable army again to run Agis out of Attica; and once that was done there’d be fresh hope for salving something out of the general wreckage. Demosthenes had even managed to drag Nikias round to his way of thinking, which can’t have been easy for the old man was of the weakly stubborn kind who will go on blindly carrying out his original orders even when the changed shape of things has made them insane as well as suicidal. The order for withdrawal had actually been given and all things made ready in secret for the fleet to sail next day. And then the moon had darkened, and Nikias had listened to his soothsayers and cancelled the orders. The fleet must wait until the moon had purified herself by another circle and come to the full again. Another month in those stinking swamps I remembers below Syracuse, with the men dying like flies of dysentery as much as wounds. I had never much liked the little I had seen of Demosthenes, the man was so worthy; but Great God Poseidon, my belly sickened for him!