The Flowers of Adonis

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  We waited, both looking at the door; and in a little she came back, closed the door behind her, and put aside her veil.

  ‘Well?’ Theron said.

  ‘The executions have been carried out.’ She set down the dripping jar. ‘But they say that one has escaped.’

  ‘Which one?’ Theron demanded.

  She looked from one to the other of us, frowning a little. ‘It sounded like Thrasybulus — was there one called Thrasybulus?’

  Theron nodded. ‘There was,’ he said. ‘That makes three, with Theramenes and Thrassylus.’

  ‘They are speaking the names of the new Generals out there in the street, too.’

  ‘Who?’ I said quickly.

  ‘Adeimantus, Menander, and Tydius the Son of Lamachus.’

  Theron and I looked at each other, sharing the same thought, wondering at the significance behind the choice of at least two of Alkibiades’s most deadly enemies. ‘I wonder who was behind that selection?’ I said.

  He shrugged. ‘The Assembly.’

  ‘Behind the Assembly, then.’

  ‘The Gods know — Cleontius and Kritias, maybe.’

  ‘We really must get out of this way of relating everything to Alkibiades on one way or another,’ I said. ‘It’s a bad habit.’

  ‘It’s one shared by most of Athens.’ Theron said.

  The Whore

  We seldom heard anything of the outside world. For myself, it did not matter. I did not care what men did in Athens or Sardis, or whether Spartan or Athenian fleets held power over the sea; and sometimes it seemed to me that Alkibiades did not either. And then I was glad, for the outside world was always a threat that might call him away from me. While his whole heart was turned to spreading and strengthening his hold on the Chersonese, he was part of the world I knew — even, I sometimes thought, playing a game that I knew; for what chief of a hundred horses in Thrace and Bithynia does not seek to make himself greater than another chief? In that world, my spirit could understand and follow him, even though I no longer rode at his side. But when his thoughts turned away to his old world, then I was lost, and left too far behind even to call to him to wait for me.

  But from time to time, news did come, brought by a merchant on his way to Byzantium, or a ship’s captain putting in for water. So we knew of a great sea fight off some islands called Arginussae, and an Athenian victory, and of many Athenian ships sunk in a storm afterwards. I was sorry about that. I belong to the great plains and the horse herds and the hills of summer pasture; the sea is strange and terrible to me, and I do not like to think of men, so long as they are not enemies of My Lord’s, choking out their lives in it. And no matter what Athens had done to him, the men of the Athenian fleet were not My Lord’s enemies. That was in his face when the news came.

  One day in high summer — it was two years and the half of a year since My Lord came back to the North, and the olives were ripening and the barley in the coastwise terraces white for the sickle against the darkening of the sea — a ship put in in passing, and the rich merchant she carried came up to eat with Alkibiades, for seemingly they had known each other well in the past. They ate on the roof of the great chamber, under the pot-grown shade-vines that I had tended and trained with such care. Just the two of them, while I waited on them myself as I generally did when strangers came. It was better that way, lest they had private things to speak of, not for the ears of the slaves. It was beginning to be cool after the blazing heat of the day, and over the walls of the fort the sea was the colour of pearl. They had eaten kid seethed in milk, and black figs, and I had mixed the second krater full of water and dark Thracian wine; and they sat at ease, both turned to look seaward.

  Then the merchant said in his soft deep voice, ‘You are, as you always were, a host without equal, Alkibiades.’

  ‘I fear this does not quite reach the standards of the old days,’ Alkibiades said. ‘Next time you must give me notice of your coming, my dear Polytion, and I will have a few score Thracian sword dancers to entertain you while you eat, and three virgins in fox-skin hats to help you while the night away.’

  ‘It is pleasant enough without,’ the merchant said.

  ‘So, then now you shall pay for your supper by telling me the news of the world beyond Cape Helles.’

  The merchant looked round at him. ‘Are you interested?’

  ‘That’s a strange question. What makes you ask it?’

  ‘I am not sure. You have the air of having all the world that concerns you here under your hand. Your forts and your tribesmen … You know they say in the world beyond Cape Helles that you plan to make yourself King of the Chersonese?’

  ‘It serves to pass the time,’ Alkibiades said after a moment, and took another mouthful of wine.

  ‘It is true, then?’

  ‘It depends on what you mean by King. Two paramount chiefs of my acquaintance both call themselves Kings.’

  There was a silence, and I heard the sounds of the fort, men’s voices and the stamping of horses in the stables and the never ceasing crying of the gulls. Then the merchant said softly, ‘Of course if you were to become, shall we say, Lord of these parts, including the cities and the settlements — and it seems you’re not far off that, now —’

  ‘Not far,’ Alkibiades said.

  ‘There might be some possibility of a Thracian alliance with Athens — given time.’

  I saw My Lord’s face as he played with the wine in his cup; and I thought, ‘It is still Athens — still Athens with you — and the Great Mother have pity on all others who tear out their hearts for you!’

  Then My Lord said, ‘This news of the outer world that you owe me?’

  The merchant Polytion made a small lazy gesture with his hands, and leaned back.

  ‘Lysander has command of the Spartan fleet again.’

  Alkibiades sat up straight. ‘Lysander?’

  ‘Kalitikades who took over from him was killed at Arginussae.

  ‘That I had heard, even in the wilderness,’ My Lord said. ‘But Lysander! Are you sure? No man can hold the Fleet Command twice by Spartan law.’

  ‘Yet most assuredly Sparta had to find a way of getting Lysander back a second time. He’s too useful to be wasted at home; all that influence with young Cyrus … They have got over the difficulty by making him Vice-Admiral, under an Admiral who counts for no more than a straw in the wind — I can’t even remember his name.’

  ‘That’s unusually intelligent, for the Spartan government,’ Alkibiades said. ‘So there is dear friend Lysander back at Ephesus again.’

  ‘And acting as deputy Satrap at Lydia, while Cyrus rushes off like a dutiful son to his father’s deathbed — and I imagine to make his own claim to the Sun throne before his brother Artaxerxes gets it.’

  ‘So, the old Lion is dying at last, is he? If Cyrus gets the throne, life will be magnificent for Lysander. Think of having the King of Kings in your bed, Polytion!’

  ‘It is no laughing matter,’ said the merchant.

  ‘No, Polytion. It is no laughing matter. But it is not without its amusing side, all the same.’

  ‘As deputy Satrap, he has control of the Lydian revenues,’ Polytion said abruptly.

  Alkibiades sat very still for a moment. ‘Hades! I’d not thought of that. He’ll have less cause than ever to worry over the pay for his fleet; while we — while the Athenians — I suppose are in the same old straits, pushed for every obol.’

  ‘So it seems, as far as one can say without being in the Councils of the State.’

  ‘It is a pity there are no true pirates left in the Navy,’ Alkibiades said. ‘They lost the last of the breed in myself and in Antiochus. They could have done with us now.’ It was the first time I had heard him speak Antiochus’s name since he came North again; and he laughed, but the laughter was twisted inside him. ‘The present breed are poor stuff — Adeimantus, Menander, Tydius. Three of them to do my work; and they cannot do it.’

  ‘Perhaps they are not — overstrain
ing themselves to do it.’

  Alkibiades looked round at him quickly. ‘What do you mean?’

  And Polytion smiled down his long nose. ‘I have heard it whispered — we merchants hear the oddest things, you know, and it is probably no more than the tales women tell to a child at bedtime — that however short the fleet may be, the Admirals’ coffers are not altogether strangers to Persian gold.’

  Alkibiades’s hand clenched round his wine cup until I saw the knuckles shine white as bone. And his eyes opened with a cold blue light. ‘If I thought that,’ he said, ‘by the Gods! If I thought that —’

  ‘Yes?’ said Polytion, and then, ‘What could you do?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Mr Lord, and dropped his face into his hands.

  *

  But when, just after harvest time, word came that this Lysander was busy in the Hellespont and had taken Lampsakus, My Lord shifted his headquarters back to Pactye; I think to be close on hand when the fighting came, though I never heard him say so. Maybe he hoped that there might still be some part that he could play. I do not know. He let me go south to Pactye with him, and I had learned again to ask no more than that.

  The Soldier

  We had been saying all that year among ourselves that it was madness to leave the Hellespont unguarded, with the fleet scattered from Samos half across the south Aegean, as we were by then. A few of us even tried to put it to our new Admirals, but only got cursed for our pains. I suppose that the Spartans having refused us fight so long — ever since Arginussae — the High Command thought that they had learned their lesson. It is always a pity when the High Command starts to underestimate the enemy. Alkibiades would have known better.

  About harvest time we got word — the Pegasus was at Chios with Konon’s squadron — that the Spartan fleet were out from Ephesus and heading north. Lysander, who was in command again, must have known as well as we did that the Hellespont was unguarded, and soon the corn ships would be coming through.

  We put out from Chios, joining the rest of the fleet off Mitylene and gave chase. But he had the wind of us, and off Cape Helles our scouting vessel met us with the news that he had taken Lampsakus two days ago and made his headquarters there. It was the perfect base from which to cut off the corn fleet.

  We put in at Sestos to re-victual — it seemed strange to be back there again — then held on north, maybe two miles farther up the coast, and took up our position almost opposite Lampsakus, at, of all God-forsaken places, Aegospotami! Goats’ Creek — only no self-respecting goat would have lived there. What possessed our Commanders to take up such an idiot position is beyond knowing. Or if I have sometimes had a suspicion that it was worse than idiocy, I have thrust it away. They were fools, stiff-necked in their folly; surely it must be unjust to suspect them of more than that …

  But certainly to have chosen Aegospotami for a fleet base was foolish past belief, and most of us knew it. With no proper harbour but an open and unprotected shore-line, and no nearer source of supplies, once the two days’ rations that we carried had given out, than Sestos, two miles down the coast.

  Every morning we manned ship and sailed across toward the Spartan base, trying as we had tried so often before, to draw the Spartans out to battle. But Lysander was too wily for that; as he had refused to be drawn from Ephesus until the moment of his own choosing, so he refused to be drawn from Lampsakus. Only every day when we returned, a couple of their light reconnaissance galleys would follow us at a respectful distance — we thought it was a respectful distance — and hang about in mid-stream till we had disembarked; then return to their own side of the straits.

  It seemed as though it might go on like that for ever. It went on for six days. On the fifth day, Ariston who was also with Konon’s squadron, and I, sick of the disorderly camp, and the mud flats through which the Goats’ Creek looped out to the straits, strolled northward into the rising ground, and sat ourselves down on the edge of a derelict olive garden. All round us the cut barley stubble stretched between the straits and the hills, lion tawny in the evening light; southward the tents of the camp sprawled along the shore; the black shapes of the triremes drawn up on the mud, the smoke of camp fires lying low in the air. And beyond, across Goats’ Creek, the desolate country was flecked with moving black fly-specks, men off to Sestos for supplies, or for the evening pleasures of the town.

  And across the straits, the buildings of Lampsakus showed up, acid white, with the Spartan fleet lying below its walls.

  ‘Gods! What a camp!’ I said. ‘Alkibiades would weep to see us!’

  ‘Maybe he does see us,’ Ariston said quietly. ‘I can’t imagine he’d have a Spartan and an Athenian fleet sitting on his threshold and take no interest.’

  ‘If I was him, after the treatment he’s had from us, I’d go as far away as possible and take no interest at all.’

  ‘Would you? I wonder.’

  ‘No, I suppose not,’ I said.

  We sat in silence for a while. I was watching the swallows dart above the stubble. All this was haunted country for us, haunted by those three years when we had followed him from victory to victory; the old feeling themselves young, and the young feeling themselves Gods. And Alkibiades came often to our minds, the drawling voice, the insolent sunny gaze, the flame to warm one’s hands at … I turned my head and looked northward, wondering if he was indeed watching us from the hills; and saw a horseman coming down through the lower slopes of the cornland.

  One cannot look in any direction in Thrace without seeing a horseman, where there are men at all; so I thought little of this one, and did not even mention him to Ariston, who was lying with his head on his arms and his face turned towards the straits.

  The man was nearer now, you could hear the beat of his horse’s hooves and see the little puffs of dust rising round them; his shadow was lance-long in the sunset light, and I thought it was a fine horse, and the fellow did not ride like a Thracian. Ariston, hearing the hooves also, turned his head and sat up. And in the same instant it was as though some film of unknowing peeled away from my eyes.

  ‘It is!’ said Ariston. ‘Zeus! It’s Alkibiades!’ and began to scramble to his feet.

  For a moment longer I did not move, held by some feeling that he was not real, that my own thoughts had conjured him up. Then I was on my feet too, and running, overtaking Ariston, so that we reached him together. We came up on either side of the raking tiger-spot stallion, and he had a hand for each of us — only his hair was grey, not streaked among the gold as it had been when I saw him last, but quite grey.

  ‘Arkadius! Ariston!’ (They said he never forgot a face or a name.) ‘I did not think to find two old friends and such a welcome, before I even reached the Athenian camp!’

  ‘Alkibiades! We were talking of you just a while since. Have you come to join us?’

  ‘I, that am a declared fugitive? Hardly. But I must speak with your Generals none the less.’

  We turned back beside him, both full of questions that it did not seem to be the moment to ask; neither, I think, quite sure even now that we were not walking beside a dream. I kept my hand on his horse’s shoulder as we walked, as though without that link to hold him, he might be gone from us like a breaking wave. And we brought him back to the camp without another word between the three of us.

  On the fringe of the camp, others recognised him and came running; shouting, catching at his feet, at his horse, thrusting round him. The old bos’n of the Marathon was almost crying, so was a young lieutenant of marines who had barely joined before he left us. Suddenly the dream was gone, and we knew that we had him with us, Alkibiades in the flesh.

  He looked round him, greeting this man and that, and then without the least change of manner, demanded, ‘Since when have the Athenians given up posting sentries or digging covering dykes for the galleys when they make camp?’

  ‘There are no Spartans this side of the straits, My Lord Alkibiades,’ someone said.

  ‘And they have no ships to ferry th
em over? Gods! You’re enough to break a Commander’s heart! Where are your Generals’ headquarters?’

  Ariston pointed out the tents of our three beauties, pitched in the lee of a thorn thicket. Alkibiades dismounted. Someone took his horse, and he strode off towards them. A good many of us followed him, glancing at each other. There might well be trouble when he and his successors met, and if there was, better that we were on hand.

  The Generals and senior officers had gathered for the evening meal before Adeimantus’ tent; and they rose from the table, somewhat startled men, when they saw who they had for company.

  Alkibiades came straight to the point. ‘In the name of the Dog, what do you think you’re doing here?’

  Tydius said harshly, ‘Surely it is we who should be asking that of you?’

  ‘I’ve come to give you good advice. Cut out of here and back to Sestos tonight.’

  ‘The days when you gave the orders here are past,’ Menander said. He was always a vulgar brute, and Alkibiades let him see what he thought of him. He flushed red as a pomegranate in the fading light.

  ‘I said advice, not orders.’ Alkibiades was obviously longing to blast them all to Tartarus, but trying to keep things cool and reasonable. ‘I’ve been sitting up in the hills watching you these five days past, and scarcely able to believe my eyes that you are here at all — on an open coastline, no harbour, no base for provisions nearer than Sestos. Great Gods, gentlemen, why?’

  ‘I see no reason why we should account to you for our choice of position,’ said Tydius. ‘But since you ask it — we happen to be desirous of bringing Lysander to action. I think you found yourself faced with the same need at one time —’

  I saw Alkibiades’s eyes and his nostrils widen, but he said nothing; and Tydius went on, ‘From here, we have a perfect quoin of vantage for watching Lampsakus.’

  ‘And Lampsakus has a perfect quoin of vantage for watching you!’ Alkibiades’ voice cut now like a whiplash. ‘Lysander has his fleet under perfect discipline — you can see that, even from this side of the straits if you had cared to place look-outs on higher ground. His ships are manned and ready all day to put out at the word of command; and his troops ready to embark. Have you not noticed the Spartan picket-boats that watch you home each day, and hang round till you are disembarked and scattered half over the Chersonese? Do you suppose Lysander doesn’t know as well as I do, that your discipline grows worse each day? You post no sentries; at this moment there’s scarcely a man aboard your ships; they’re all messing about on shore or away after supplies or tumbling the girls in Sestos.’