The Flowers of Adonis

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  ‘So we leave the Commander in the Persian Satrap’s hands for so long as he likes to hold him — likely until he meets with a fatal accident,’ I says. ‘That’s fine counsel, that is!’

  And I sees the warning flicker in his eyes. It’s not the easiest thing to hold that kind of talk, with every word of it going back to the Satrap — and the Son of the Sun himself for all I knows.

  ‘Oh not so long. I am convinced that I shall rejoin you before the winter is out.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘My dear Antiochus, you mistake the situation. There is no question of my being held indefinitely — nor of the fatal accident that you suggest. Tissaphernes is at heart still my good friend, I am convinced of it; and when this unfortunate coil of false accusations against him is disentangled, I shall be immediately set at liberty.’ That’s for the King’s Eyes and Ears in the shadows. For me, he adds grinning, ‘My famous luck is with me yet. When it deserts me again, I shall know. And then I’ll turn cautious and sit at home by the fire.’

  And I knows what he’s really telling me is that he’ll break himself out before winter’s end, and we’re to leave him to it. And I believes him. He has the look of a man with his luck still on his forehead. And ye Gods! I’m angry! So angry I can barely speak to ask if there’s anything more.

  ‘Tell the fleet Commanders all that I’ve told you,’ he says, ‘and make very sure that they understand. Remind them of the orders I left with them, and do what you can to see that they’re carried out. Go now; I’ve been promised safe passage out of this camp and back to the coast, for you and the rest of our party — but that of course goes without saying, since Persia and Athens are not at war.’

  The Whore

  In the women’s quarters there are screened windows and galleries that look down into the palace forecourt; and when we heard the trumpets, the Satrap’s wives ran to see the cavalcade ride in.

  When one spends much of life shut behind the walls of the women’s chambers, the sight of a few men and a handful of steaming horses makes a change. Something to look at for a few moments and talk about afterwards for days.

  The rest of us, slaves and concubines, ran to look, too. The scene below us was cut up into four-petalled shapes by the fret of the window screens. Snowy forecourt and running figures and the flare of torchlight, all held within the dark blurred outline of the rose-fret as I pressed my face against it. I saw the horsemen come through, the hooves of the horses skidding a little on the half-frozen ground; the dark faces of the Nubian guard under their pointed helmets; and then the Satrap himself, riding with his officers around him, all drab-coloured in furs and sheepskin with here and there the glint of a jewelled hilt, and the bird-wing gleam of coloured silks beneath; and the little bells chiming on the horses’s bridles. The Satrap looked like a bear, hunched in his furs on his horse’s back — swag-bellied as a bear looks when it sits up like a man.

  Behind him followed more of the guard, and riding in the midst of them hedged with their spears, a tall man swathed in sheepskins. He was bareheaded, and when the torchlight struck on his hair it shone the colour of newly burnished bronze; and the heart in my body knew him even before he looked up in passing close beneath the gallery, and the torchlight showed me his face.

  All along the gallery there was a murmuring and exclaiming and twittering; a little flurry of excitement.

  Then someone thrust between me and the girl peering over my shoulder, crying, ‘Let me look! Let me look, it’s not fair!’ And I lost my place and could see only the blue dusk and the shifting gleam of torches gilding the undersides of the window-fret; and hear the voices and the horses’ hooves.

  When there was nothing more to see, the women began gathering into little knots. ‘It is the Athenian!’ ‘It is Alkibiades, and a prisoner!’ ‘What can it mean? Have we had a great victory?’ ‘But I do not think we are at war with the Athenians.’ ‘He has hair as bright as a Persian’s!’ ‘He has hair like a lion’s mane!’

  And some were mobbing Arbaces the chief eunuch, with soft coaxings and promises of presents, to find out what had happened and bring them word.

  I went away and found a quiet place under the stairway to the fountain court, and crouched there with a fold of my wide skirt pulled over my head. It was very cold there, but it is not easy to find a place in the women’s courts of the Satrap’s palace where one can be alone and think.

  I thought, with my head on my knees and my forearm pressed across my eyes until bursting flowers and coloured sun-wheels spun before me against the blackness. I had not tried to forget the night under the almond tree. I had not tried to remember it. It was, it is, part of me, it breathes with my breathing and beats with the heart in my breast. I had not waited for him to send for me again, in the after-time, before he was gone from Sardis; I had not looked for him to come back. I had accepted the bondage he had put on me, in the dawn when I left the dagger and the white almond flowers on his breast instead of killing him. It was complete and for all time, and needed no renewing.

  Crouching in the chill darkness of the fountain court, I did not even know or question whether I most loved or hated him. I knew only that he had returned to Sardis a captive, and that though my own life paid for it, I must find means for his escape. In that brief moment when he looked up into the torches before I was thrust aside from the window, I had seen the look on his face. It was almost gay, his eyes wide and bright, his mouth touched with an east wind smile; and behind it, something I have seen in the eyes of a wild stallion captured in the nets. I knew that given time, a very little time, he would plunge into some reckless attempt at freedom, and end on the spears of the guards.

  Somehow, I must get word to him; and quickly, or he was marked for death. And to do that I must have a man to help me; some man that I could trust. My thoughts were scurrying now, like mice; and suddenly they came to rest, not on a man, not a full man, but on Phaeso. He that had looked us over, the dancing girls and I, on the night we went to amuse the Satrap and his dear friend at supper. In the ordinary way there is no one less to be trusted than the eunuchs of the women’s court. No use to a woman, cut off from the fellowship of men, they have nothing to gain in life but wealth and power; and nothing else to lose.

  But Phaeso was a captive like me, taken by a dealer in castrated boys and sold through the market of Cos; and in his case the gelding had been done too late. When that happens, it may take years for the manhood to die. Sometimes it never quite dies at all, and that must be hard to bear. Phaeso had still something of a man’s heart and a man’s needs in him; and a great bitterness under the gentle rounded outer-seaming. I knew the bitterness because my own cried out to it and found an answer, and I thought I might rely on that bitterness now, as well as on a certain friendship that we had for each other.

  I went in search of Phaeso, and when I found him hurrying down a corridor with two more of his kind, I made him a certain signal that we had between us. He went on with the others, but I waited where I was, and in a while he came back. I asked him to find out for me where the Athenian was lodged and how he was guarded.

  ‘You will hear all that soon enough,’ he said in his light cool voice. ‘The women’s courts know everything almost before it happens.’

  I said, ‘But I want to hear even more quickly and in more detail; and I want to be sure that what I hear is the truth.’

  He said, ‘Why do you want these things, Timandra?’

  ‘For good reasons that I have. Do this for me. Phaeso, there is no one else in the whole palace that I can trust.’

  He took my hand, and I let him, though despite my liking for him, my flesh crawled a little at the touch of his. He said (it was the only time I ever heard him speak so), ‘In a few more years, I shall have ceased to care. You will be able to buy my favour for a gift, and I shall betray you to any who offer a larger gift than yours; and the Head Wife will fawn upon me as she does on Arbaces. But for this while, you can trust me, Timandra.’

  He was
so young; far younger than I, though not in years, and his manhood had been taken from him just as he began to feel it stirring; and one day he might be as he had said, but not yet. And grief rose in me because I was prepared to pay his life as well as my own, for Alkibiades’; and in that, as in the loss of his manhood, he was having no choice in the sacrifice. I kissed him then, not as a flute girl fondling a eunuch whose favour she needs, but as a woman kisses a boy.

  The next day he sought me out, and told me that Alkibiades had been lodged with all honour in the Guest Court, with two of the Satrap’s personal bodyguard constantly before his door; and that the word was that presently he was to be sent to Susa.

  So then I bade him do another thing for me. Two or three times in the past — the first time when I was still in the pleasure-house below in the city, I had lain with a certain one of the Nubian guard when he wanted a woman; a man with not much in his head, but the body of a black panther. Some women say black men make the most enjoyable lovers, for their man-part is larger and more potent than a white man’s; but I would not myself count him among the few who ever gave me pleasure. It was some time since we had been together, but I thought that I had enough skill in the ways of a woman beneath a man, to draw his interest back again if need be. So I said to, Phaeso, ‘Now get a message to Hanna of the guard, for me. Bid him meet me tomorrow night in the pavilion of the lower paradise. Say that I have a secret to tell him that may make us rich, and that I keep it for him alone, because of certain joys that we have known together.’

  He said, ‘Timandra, I have gone blindfold into this for your asking. But now I must know — what wild business have you in hand?’

  And then I took the biggest risk of all. I told him the whole truth. If I had been right in believing that I could rely on his friendship and on his bitterness, I should know now.

  He said, ‘It is a small revenge, but even a small revenge is sweet.’ And then, ‘But with you, I think that it is a greater matter.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘For me it is a thing that must be done, as a flower must open and die, and the swallows fly north in the spring time.’

  ‘And what will happen to you? They will find out.’

  ‘I think that they will kill me; but that is no very great matter. But take great care that they can bring nothing against you. If they do, I will swear upon the horns of the Lady Ashtaroth that you were nothing in all this but my unknowing tool.’

  *

  The next night I rubbed spikenard between my breasts, and took a flask of wine with certain herbs added to it. The women of my people have been skilled in the use of herbs since the time of the witch Medea, and they were all quite easy to obtain. Then I slunk out by one of the small postern doors of the Lion Court and down to the lower paradise. It is not hard for a mere flute girl to get out from the women’s courts, even at night. If I had been one of the Satrap’s wives, it would have been a different matter.

  The lower paradise had sunk into disuse since the new Paradise of Alkibiades had come into being; the bushes had not been pruned that autumn, and desolation lay upon the place that was not merely the desolation of winter. At first I thought that it was empty, and I cried out within myself, ‘What shall I do? Mother of All, tell me what I shall do if he does not come!’ But as I drew near to the deserted pavilion he stepped out from the overgrown myrtle bushes and stood in my path, straddling, with his thumbs in his belt.

  My breath went out of me in a sigh. ‘You are come!’

  ‘The little gelding said that you had a secret for me.’ His smile was a white blur in the darkness of his face, and he cocked his head on one side. ‘Come now, and tell me what it is, my girl.’

  ‘Later,’ I said. ‘Let us go into the pavilion.’ For the door was unfastened and creaking a little in the wind. ‘See, I have brought you some wine to keep out the cold.’

  He shrugged and laughed, the soft guttural laugh far back in his throat, of all his kind. And we went into the pavilion. It was almost as cold within as without, but at least we were sheltered from the wind. And I gave him the wine, and when he had drunk, crept close to him, murmuring that his cloak was big enough for us both. I pressed my body against his and as we wormed under the cloak the smell of the spikenard came into his nostrils; and soon the herbs of Ashtaroth were in his blood and his loins, and he thought no more of asking what secret I had to tell.

  When he had finished, I felt bruised and sick; for the herbs of Ashtaroth are not gentle. But I knew that he would want me again and again.

  We met twice more after that, but those times I mixed no herbs in the wine I brought him, and so, his needs being less urgent, we had time for love-play and even for talking, as well as for the other thing. And so I learned that Hanno was among those who kept guard on the Athenian. And the days and times of his guard duty, which held him from coming to me every night. He told me this to show me how important he was, and how greatly the Satrap trusted him. And then I knew that the Lady of the Moon, the Mother of All things, was indeed holding me by the hand.

  Just as we were parting the third time, I asked him with my arm round his neck, ‘Hanno, will you do something for me tonight? For you and me?’

  ‘What is it?’ he asked, cautious as an animal snuffing the wind.

  ‘Give the Athenian a message for me. You can do that?’

  ‘I might be able to, if it’s Budas or Narko with me,’ he said grudgingly. ‘What is the message, then?’

  I took a deep breath, knowing that this was one of the danger moments, like the one when I told Phaeso my plan. I said, ‘Tell him to wait seven days, and then send word to the Satrap that he sleeps badly in captivity, and would have a night’s loan of the palace flute girl he had before.’ The request was just the kind that Alkibiades would make, as much for devilry as anything else, so that it would not seem strange in the Satrap’s eyes. And since he was being kept less like a captive than a guest under guard, it seemed to me most likely that Tissaphernes would grant it. Also, I thought that Alkibiades, if he remembered me, if he remembered that night at all, would guess at some other meaning behind the message, and so it might hold him, for those seven days, from running upon disaster in some mad attempt at escape, on his own. But could I persuade Hanno to take such a message? Already I could feel the anger in him as he caught me by the arms and dragged me against his body. ‘You ask me to tell him that — you bitch!’

  I let myself go, yielding under his sweaty hands. ‘Listen, he means nothing to me; no more than any other of the men I have lain with, excepting you. You are a man, strong and black and potent; beside you they are children.’ I laughed softly. ‘Black darling, I have lain with many men before you came; have I had less to give you because of that? I shall be with many after you have turned to someone else, and you will care no more than for the swaying of a seeding grass-head in the wind. Listen now, last time I went to him he made it well worth my while; and this time — they have not stripped him of his jewels? — this time he shall make it doubly worth my while; and what he gives me, you and I will share between us. And we will laugh! Think how we will laugh!’

  I gentled him round at last, and made him repeat the message over and over again, to be sure that he had it right. And then he had another thought, and asked why seven days.

  I said, ‘Look up there into the sky and tell me what you see.’ And he said, ‘The horns of the Old Moon.’

  ‘And in seven days, when you look into the western sky at sunset, you will see the white horns of the New Moon; and that night there will be a great feast of Cybele. But in the dark nights between, among my people the women keep themselves apart from all men.’

  ‘I never heard of that custom before,’ he said, grumbling. I had not, either, but it made as good a tale as any other. And in the long run, no man comes between a woman and the Fierce Mother. So despite his grumbling and cursing, he would leave me in peace for those dark nights; and Alkibiades would get my message, and wait. And I should have time for working out the rest o
f my plan, and for the gathering and brewing of certain herbs not so easy to come by as the others had been.

  *

  A horse I must have too, but there were several posting stables in the town. I gave Phaeso my silver bracelets with the turquoise and enamel mounts — one of the Satrap’s wives had given them to me for my help in a certain matter — and bade him see to the hire of a post horse and the providing of food and a thick cloak for the winter journey; and be careful to let no one see his face too clearly. And he came to me two days later, and told me that all was arranged. He would have the horse waiting at a certain place on the night of the feast of Cybele, with a cloak — old he said, but thick and warm — and a wallet of food, and what money was left from the sale of my bracelets.

  I did not see Hanno again, and could only trust that he had given the Athenian my message; and I walked in the moonless nights in the wild tangle of the lower paradise, and about the place where the Persians expose their dead to be torn by dogs and kites, and sought out and gathered the herbs I needed.

  On the day of the New Moon, I was practising with the dancing girls in the fountain court — we had to practise every day — when Arbaces himself came waddling down the stair and called to me. I laid down my flute and went to him; while the girls huddled together, looking on. He said, ‘It seems you must have pleased the Athenian, when he sent for you last time he was in Sardis.’

  My heart leapt sickeningly in my breast, but I managed to give no sign, only wait submissively for what he would say next. He said, ‘He has asked for you to be sent to him again, since he cannot sleep; and the Satrap has given his leave. Though what the man can find of pleasure in that scrawny body of yours, to warrant a second visit … Phaedime, now, there’s a plump pigeon for the taking!’