The Flowers of Adonis

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  ‘I have a letter for him.’

  I knows well enough that my bonnie boy’ll be where I left him, a couple of hours since, up on the house-top where he can get a good view of the straits, with a wine jar and no wish for unexpected company. It’s always like that with him when he sees a stretch ahead without enough to fill it. So I says, ‘I’ll take it to him.’

  ‘Your pardon, sir, but my orders are to give it to the Lord Alkibiades and to no one else.’

  I shrugs. ‘He won’t be best pleased to see you, but that’s your affair. I’m going up to his house now; you’d best come with me.’

  Alkibiades is exactly where I expected, sprawling on a pile of rugs in the lea of the windbreak of myrtle and oleander bushes in tubs, with the all but empty wine jar beside him. His eyes are bloodshot, and he curses soft and foul at sight of the messenger, then sits up and reaches out a hand. ‘Give it over.’

  I keeps a tight eye on the man as he does so. ’Twouldn’t be the first time a murderer has used the guise of a messenger, since the world began. But it’s only a little roll of papyrus, sweat darkened as though he’s carried it a good while next his skin.

  Alkibiades looks at it as though it’s a dead mouse. ‘Who gave you this?’

  ‘A man, who had it from another man.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In Epidauros, just before the ship sailed.’

  Alkibiades nods and tosses him some money. ‘Go below, and tell the kitchen slaves I sent you to be fed. Then wait; there may be an answer.’

  ‘There is no answer,’ the man said.

  ‘So? Well go and tell them to feed you, all the same.’

  When the fellow had gone, he still sits turning the letter over in his hands, till I asks, ‘Am I to go and tell them to feed me, too?’

  ‘No,’ he says, ‘I’ve a feeling this is from Sparta, in which case it probably concerns you too. And it certainly won’t be a love letter.’

  He slips his thumb under the sealed thread and snaps it, and unrolls the small strip of papyrus and starts reading. And as he reads, all the lines of his face that are heavy and blurred with drink and boredom comes up keen again, like a rusted spear-blade under the scouring-sand. When he comes to the end, he looks up with an odd expression on his face, and holds it out to me. ‘Read it.’

  I takes it and looks at the thick lines of writing. The Spartans always write as though even their Alfa Beta Gamma was standing on parade, a stiff outlandish script. ‘A few words I can manage,’ I says, ‘but not this lot. Read it to me.’

  So he reads it again, out loud. ‘Apollo alone knows why I should trouble myself to send you this warning. You’re no further use to me, living or dead; and I’m like to run into trouble enough on my own account. It will be no news to you that you have left enemies behind you in Sparta, it’s a habit of yours. You have the offensive habit of being too successful and therefore dangerous. Also others have not failed to notice that the child which the Queen carried so unusually long has a strong look of you. Agis has especial cause to wish for your head — or other parts than your head. He has disowned the Queen’s son, though he has not put the Queen herself away. I suppose he can never be quite sure enough for that. She sent him word of the child’s birth — it was an extremely clever letter, I read it — which, if her messenger had not been delayed so that he did not receive it until some while after the Ephor’s somewhat blunter announcement, I really believe might have convinced him that the boy was his. As it is, how annoying for King Agis to find that it is all to do again. His annoyance has taken the form of drawing him closer to the Ephorate in this one thing (I of course have served my year and am no longer one of that august body; but I have my useful contacts still), and between them they have decided upon your death. The order has gone out to Admiral Astiochus at Chios; it may well have reached him by the time you get this. If I were you I would take my leave of the Spartan Navy as quickly and quietly as maybe.’

  He let the scroll snap back on itself. ‘That’s all.’

  I felt rather as though I had taken a blow amidships, and yet I wasn’t altogether surprised. ‘Who from?’ I asks, after a moment.

  ‘It’s unsigned and an Spartan writing looks alike. But can you think of any of the Ephorate, any man in Sparta except one, who would write to warn a man of his impending demise in quite that chatty style?’

  ‘Endius,’ I says. ‘But he was never your friend. He’d have been in on this murder plot himself if it had suited him.’

  ‘Of course. But as I told you before, he has small love for Agis. And in an odd way we understood each other.’ He was still sitting on the pile of rugs, his hands hanging from lax wrists across his knees, the letter dangling from his fingers. ‘How very depressing, not to have sired a line of Spartan Kings, after all.’

  ‘Did you really think you would? What are you going to do now?’

  He ignores my second question as though I hadn’t asked it. ‘I didn’t know, but with nothing more amusing to do, it was worth the try.’

  And then without warning, he springs up; and for all that he had to keep it quiet, I have seldom seen him in a worse rage. He’s grey-white with it, shaking. He crosses to the roof parapet, and I saw how his hands gripped and worked on the stonework till the knuckles shone white and waxy as bare bones, as he stood there staring out with wicked slit eyes towards Samos. He says in a voice as though he can’t quite get his breath, ‘May Night’s Daughters have them for their own! They have had three years of me, and in those three years they have brought Athens almost to her knees. And now, like Athens, they plot my death by crooked ways behind my back. They shall learn, as Athens did, the un-wisdom of that! They shall weep blood in the learning, those brave Spartans!’

  ‘So what now?’ I says again.

  He swings round from the distant view of Samos tawny in the evening light. ‘I take my leave of the Spartan Navy as quickly and quietly as may be.’ He’s still shaking like a white poplar, his nostrils flaring, but suddenly there’s a kind of marshlight laughter flickering round his mouth. It fair gives me the creeps! ‘Coming, Pilot?’

  ‘I told you before, the last time you asks that,’ I says. ‘I’ve followed you too long to break the habit now. Besides, I reckon the Spartan fleet might not be too healthy for me after this, either.’

  We rode out of Miletus that night, crossed the river at the head of the estuary, and turned the horses’ heads towards Sardis.

  12

  The Seaman

  Sardis is a big sprawling town, perched on one of those crumbling outcrops of the hills that border the Lydian Plain. The markets and the Temple Area are bad Greek — at least Alkibiades said it was bad Greek, I’m no judge — the fortress-palace, behind its bronze-sheathed doors and its Nubian guards, part Persian and part peculiar. We were given rooms in the Court of Strangers, the guest place, between the inner curve of the palace wall and the chariot court where the Satrap’s hunting leopards also had their cages. And we ate there alone on that first night.

  The slaves had already unpacked our saddlebags, and the few things that Alkibiades had been able to bring away with him were scattered about the bare rest-house chamber, making it at once personal, his own quarters and nobody else’s. Any room that houses Alkibiades, however short a time, takes on his colour like that. There’s his sword in one corner and his high Phrygian riding-boots in another, his spare cloak flung over the big cedar-wood armour chest, and beside it a small rose-quartz hermaphrodite which I had last seen in the house in Miletus. I picks it up and looks at it to be sure. It’s beautiful in its way, and quite foul. I don’t know how the maker did it; it was only a slender little figurine not much more than the length of my hand, combining, breasts and cod in the usual way of things; but there it was, in every line, in the eyes and the curve of the lips, beauty and the stink of corruption. I put it down again. ‘How did that get here?’

  ‘In my saddlebags,’ Alkibiades says.

  ‘In Aphrodite’s name, why?’

&
nbsp; ‘It happened to be the choicest thing lying to hand at the time we left. With the breed of Tissaphernes, friendship generally begins with a gift.’

  ‘It makes my gorge rise to think of courting the Persians!’ I says.

  ‘You have been bred, like the rest of us, on too many stories of Marathon and Salamis. The great days, the clean days are past, Pilot. I need Tissaphernes’ friendship if I am to do Sparta justice, and — carry out certain other plans of mine.’

  ‘You’ll not find it so easy to use the Satrap against Sparta,’ I says. ‘Have you forgotten he’s still bound to them by the treaty you and he and Chalcidius signed, back in the summer?’

  ‘Oh, I think we may contrive to — modify the treaty. But first I must gain our plump Persian’s confidence and make him the friend of my bosom.’ And he picks up the figurine and wraps it in a bit of that fine coloured stuff they weaves in Cos from wild silkworm thread, as tenderly as though his whole revenge for the past and hopes for the future’s bound up in it.

  The Whore

  Tissaphernes made a garden — a paradise, the Persians call it.

  He began it in the spring after I came to the palace, on the cool northern slopes of the hill. He laid out terraces, and had cisterns and channels made for falls of water; and in the autumn he had trees planted. Quite big trees, planes from the north and frankincense and rose bushes from the south, and almond trees from my own Black Sea coast, all brought with their roots in baskets of earth, in ox-carts or slung on the backs of camels. But at the same time the masons began to build a wall round it, so that the delights of the paradise might be private from the eyes of the world. And the wall grew until the garden was hidden, except for the tops of the tallest saplings.

  I could see them from a certain window in the quarters of the palace slaves. I watched the few twigs above the wall, bare through the winter and then growing woolly with leaf buds, and here and there a pale spark of blossom at the winter’s end. Some of them put out no buds — I suppose the tree-spirits sickened and died at being torn from their homes even to make beauty for a Satrap of the Great King. And they were torn up by the gardeners and forgotten, and others put in their places. The ones that lived grew taller through the year; and through their bare twigs that winter I saw workmen setting tiles the green of the flash on a mallard’s wing on the topmost part of a roof that I supposed must shelter a garden house of some sort.

  When spring drew near again, before anything else broke from bud, suddenly above the mud-brick wall the almond trees were in flower. And every pale star pierced my heart like a sword; I who had seen them flower so many springs from the rich black earth of the north. Suddenly I was wild for freedom as in the first days after I was sold, one with the talking painted bird that fluttered on clipped wings in the Satrap’s private court, and the hunting leopards with collars on their necks, and the falcons in the mews, and the yearling colts that the young men broke to the chariots. For it is not with me as it is with most of the dancing girls and fan bearers and the Satrap’s soft-fleshed concubines, who were born and suckled in slavery. I was born free, and my father was a chieftain’s younger son, of the Thracian people who crossed the Narrows where the Black Sea stretches its hands to the Propontis, and conquered the people who were there before, and are called Bythinians now. I was bred free and rode my horse with the other girls and the young men on the hunting trail — until war came between our tribe and another. They were stronger than us, and when the fighting ended my grandfather’s great timber hall was a blackened shell and most of the horses were dead. And without the horses, the people also die. Then the Strangers came, the slave dealers who come always on a people in the wake of war or famine, as the buzzards and the wolves gather to a carcass. I did not think that I had anything to fear, for I have never had anything of beauty except my hair. Small breasts and narrow flanks and crooked teeth are not what the slave dealers hunger after. But my father bade me fetch my reed flute and play for the strangers after supper. And no flute in the world of men has the soft note of our Phrygian kind. I played my best — I did not know how else to play — and they smiled to hear; and when I played, they gave my father good money for me, and took me away.

  I was sold in Sardis slave market, to a man who kept a house where merchants and caravan captains go for their pleasures, and sometimes some lesser one from the Satrap’s Court. And after I had been there a while, one of Tissaphernes’ agents heard me playing my flute for the pleasure of the guests; and so I came to be a flute girl in the Satrap’s palace. Sometimes the women told me that I was lucky.

  One evening when the almond trees were in full flower, I was summoned to the new garden-house to play for the Satrap and his guest, who were supping there. I had seen this guest of the Satrap’s in the distance, more than once, that winter; the tall Athenian with hair the colour of the Black Sea cornlands; riding out with the Persian nobles, with furs over his gay silks and a falcon on his fist; walking in the outer court with Tissaphernes, deep in conversation. Once, when I had been called on to play my flute for a festival, I had seen him spring out into the midst of a circle of laughing courtiers, together with that flame-headed comrade of his, who they said was always master of any ship that he commanded; and each with a hand on the other’s shoulder, spin off into some quick-footed seaman’s dance to their own mouth-music since no one there knew the tune.

  We all knew (slaves know most things) that he carried two death sentences on that bright head of his, one set there by his own people, and one by Sparta; and I never saw a man carry a death sentence so lightly. He had become something of a favourite with Tissaphernes; indeed the new garden had been named after him, the Paradise of Alkibiades. The Persians love their gardens so much that I suppose there was no greater compliment that the Satrap could pay him.

  I remember that at the thought of playing for Alkibiades in the little garden-house beyond the almond trees, of seeing him close for the first time, a breath of pleasure and interest woke in me. It was so long since I had felt it, that I scarce knew what it was; but because of it I took more pains than usual in putting on the loose trousers striped like a wild tulip and the tunic of peacock gauze that were provided for me to wear at such times, and in painting my eyelids with green malachite and lengthening them with kohl. It was done for my own pleasure, not for any foolishness of thinking that the Athenian would look my way. I took my flute; and then with the three dancing girls who were summoned with me, went and stood before one of the harem eunuchs to be inspected and approved. In the usual way of things it was Arbaces the chief eunuch, but he was ill that day from overeating, and so we were spared his fat hands and womanish pokings and tweakings. Phaeso, who looked us over in his stead was not quite as most of his kind, and never touched us. Then we were turned over to two of the palace guard, to be taken to the garden-house.

  It was still very cold after the sun had set, and braziers burned at each corner of the garden-house, giving off the scent of burning amber mingled with the sharpness of wood-smoke, and the fretted walls had been hung with embroidered cloths on two sides, to keep out the thin evening wind that had been scattering the first petals from the almond trees outside. I had expected that there would be several of the court there, but at the low table in the centre of the room, with a pair of slaves to wait on them, only Tissaphernes and the Athenian reclined on piled cushions and played with the dried fruits and little sweetmeats of camel’s milk curds and honey that ended the meal. I had seen the slaves before; Tissaphemes always had them to serve him at table when he did not want the talk to be spread around, for they were deaf mutes. But I suppose they thought that we four, slipping quietly in through the hangings, to take our places in a little knot on the cushions set for us at a little distance, were out of hearing, or that none of us would understand, for they spoke in the Attic Greek which is the common tongue of diplomats everywhere. But if so, they forgot that it is also the common tongue of traders. And I, who have a quick ear for such things, had been more than a ye
ar in that house in the lower town where the merchants came.

  Although we had been sent for, it seemed that they did not want our music or dancing, yet, at all events, for they talked on as though we were not there. At first I did not listen. I was content only to watch Alkibiades under my lids, while pretending to gaze into my lap. He wore Median court dress, like Tissaphernes. Loose trousers striped violet and white, his tunic deeply green as the heart of an emerald, two gilded daggers stuck cross-wise in his fringed silken sash; a diadem of braided silk and silver wire on his head, silver bracelets showing on his arms where the wide sleeves fell back, kohl rimming his eyes. He might almost have passed for a Persian, save that his bones showed too clearly. The Persians live hard when they are young, but turn too much to luxury as they grow older; and by the time they are thirty, their bones are fleshed over. His hands were bigger than a Persian’s too, horseman’s hands, as theirs are, but I knew that they would never be able to fit easily round the slender grip of a Persian sword …

  Gradually I began to hear what they were talking about, and I understood and remembered most of it. It seemed to me that they had been talking of the same thing for a long while, and maybe had talked of it before. Alkibiades was saying, ‘In my view a drachma a day is over-generous — unwisely so.’

  And Tissaphernes put a sweetmeat into his mouth — he had a red passionate mouth like a woman’s — and said, ‘That did not seem to be your opinion before we signed the treaty. A drachma a day, even for the rowers, was your own demand.’

  Alkibiades spread his hands. ‘I admit it. It was in my mind that by paying high, you would outbid Athens for troops and rowers. But now — I have had leisure to think, and I believe that I was mistaken.’ He smiled. ‘It is not every day that Alkibiades admits to being mistaken … I should have thought that you would have looked with favour on the lower price.’