The Flowers of Adonis

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  It was a strange blockade, for Lysander was giving every Athenian from the old colonies who wished to return to Athens rather than remain under a Spartan Governor, safe conduct to pass in through it.

  They poured in with their women and children and hastily gathered bundles, praising the mercy of Lysander — until the reserves of food began to run low. Famine hit us in good earnest after the first month. The markets were eaten bare as a barley field by a swarm of locusts. Soon a loaf cost more than a man could earn in two days with honour. People who had dogs began to eat them, and anyone who possessed a horse or mule was rich and frightened, and kept anxious guard over it.

  Theron did not last long into the siege, and after a while I was thinking him lucky.

  He could not have lived very long, anyway. Whatever the injury he had suffered in the wreck, it was not the kind that mends. The Priest of Esculapius did not say so, but I saw it in his eyes, and so, I think, did Theron.

  Towards the end, I used to go to his house every night — he would not let me bring him to mine — so that Myrrhine, who had tended him all day could get some rest. She used to bring out a little food and try to make me eat, but already no honest house in Athens was rich enough to feed a guest, and there would be no market for her fine weaving now; so I used to take my own with me if I had anything to eat, and tell her that I had eaten already, if I had not.

  I do not forget those bitter winter nights. There was no money for a fire, and we piled every covering and garment in the house on to Theron’s bed, for though towards the end he began to burn with fever, he shivered always with an inner cold it seemed nothing could warm. There was nothing of him between withered skin and great gaunt bones; his breath stank, and he coughed blood and pus.

  One evening Myrrhine met me at the door. She had taken to going out in the evenings as soon as I arrived, saying that she went to sleep with a friend down the street, for in that way Theron could have the covering from her bed as well as his own. I was too tired to notice that the excuse seemed a little thin. One was always tired, in those days.

  ‘How is he?’ I asked.

  ‘Much the same, I think. The healer Priest was here this morning. He says that he will last a few days more, but not many. You will find everything to hand.’ And she was gone past me into the winter dusk.

  I went into the inner room that was cold and airless with its sick-man smell. Theron’s eyes were open, and he looked at me, not speaking; speaking made him cough; but with a ghost of his old smile, which he never quite lost. I did what I could to make him comfortable, and moved the lamp so that it did not shine in his eyes, and sponged the blood off his mouth when he coughed. Presently he grew very cold, and since there was nothing more to put over him but the cloak I was wearing, I took it off and spread it over all, and then lay down beside him, pulling the mass of coverings over us both, and put my arms round him.

  He managed a cracked laugh, and said, ‘Timotheus, this is somewhat late in the day!’ And I laughed too, and held him close, with the stink of his sickness all about me. We had never been lovers, but I seemed to know, then, something of what it might be for two who were lovers a long time ago and could lie together on the eve of parting, with only the shared kindness and closeness of friends, because the old demanding fires are burned out.

  I think we both slept a little, and when I woke, I knew even before I looked, that Theron was going. Not in a few days as the Priest had said, but now. He was trying to say something, he spoke his sister’s name, and I thought he wanted her, and wondered desperately what I should do, for if I went to her friend’s house for her, he might die alone before I could bring her back. But as I stumbled out of bed into the icy air, and turned, shading the lamp to look down at him, he seemed to gather up all his strength, and spoke quite clearly, though so faintly that I had to bend close to hear what he said.

  ‘No, don’t call her, nothing she could do — give me your hand to the — threshold.’ I had already set down the lamp again, and his hand was in mine; it felt curiously empty, like a hand that is already dead. ‘I should have got Myrrhine married long ago,’ he said. ‘Too late now — no other male relative — do what you can for her, Timotheus.’ He smiled as though he was falling asleep. The last thing he said was, ‘Alkibiades would have turned back for us.’ Then he began to cough, and a great gush of blood came out of his mouth; and as I raised him and held him against me, his head went back and his eyes set. And I knew that the great bony hand in mine was a dead man’s indeed.

  I laid him down and set to clearing up the mess.

  I had barely got him decent when I heard running footsteps outside and then crossing the outer room, and the door burst open and Myrrhine stood there. ‘Theron —’

  ‘He’s dead,’ I told her.

  ‘I know. Suddenly I knew, and I ran all the way.’

  She came forward into the lamplight, and I saw that there was green eye-paint on her eyes, and her cheeks and mouth were rouged, and long cheap earrings dangled foolishly gay against her neck. She had forgotten in her speed to rub off the harlot’s paint that she must have put on somewhere each evening after she was clear of the house.

  She was kneeling beside the bed, looking down at Theron. She stooped a moment and laid her painted cheek against his grey one; and the earrings tinkled prettily. Then she looked up and saw me staring at her, and put her hands to her face. She got up and looked at me quite steadily. ‘How else do you suppose I kept him fed?’

  ‘I wish I had known,’ I said.

  She made a small weary gesture. ‘What could you have done? No one buys perfumes nowadays, you told me so yourself. You were doing all you could, and more.’

  It was cheaper at that time to bury the dead than to buy food for the living, and I managed to bury Theron respectably, by selling the wine krater that had been my father’s pride, the red one with the athletes round it, and his armour, which was one of the few things that would still fetch a little money at that time. I would have sold them long before, but that I had always felt that they were his and not mine to sell.

  When the funeral was over, I brought Myrrhine back to my own house. I had meant to sell Vasso or give her away to someone who would feed her, as I could no longer afford to do; but I could not have Myrrhine in the house without another woman there. I would have asked my sister to take her, but more than ever, now, no household except for the really well-to-do could afford another mouth.

  So she had the women’s chambers that had been empty since my sister married. She seemed like one walking in her sleep, and I thought, ‘I will give her time to wake up before I talk to her about the future.’

  But on the first evening, it was she and not old Vasso, who brought in the bean broth for my supper. ‘That’s Vasso’s work,’ I said.

  ‘Does it matter? I had to talk to you.’

  I said, ‘Later. We only buried Theron today. You’re tired.’

  ‘Now,’ she said gently; but I saw there was no moving her.

  ‘Is it the future you are troubled about?’

  ‘It was very kind of you to bring me back to your house. But I think I ought not to stay here. Only I do not quite know what to do.’

  ‘Theron asked me to find you a husband,’ I said, and felt an oaf for speaking it to her so soon.

  ‘He was too sick to know what he asked,’ she said. ‘Even if I had not — done what I did to buy food for us, I know that I have no beauty, and no dowry save what the house will fetch if ever I can sell it. And even for those who have both —’ She hesitated a moment. ‘The men we should have married died at Syracuse or Goats’ Creek. There’s a whole generation of us will never find husbands nor bear children, now.’

  ‘That is true,’ I said. ‘And for that reason, if you do not dislike the idea too much, the best way out of the difficulty would be if I were to marry you myself, when the time of your mourning is over.’

  She stood quite still, with a strange look on her face; and I got awkwardly to my feet. ‘I wo
uld not have spoken of this to you so soon,’ I said apologetically. ‘It was you who would have the decision-making on this first evening.’

  She said, ‘I know you loved Theron, but —’

  ‘I need a wife.’

  ‘One with neither looks nor dowry, and who you have seen with harlot’s paint on her face?’ she said. I never heard any woman speak so proudly.

  ‘My father tried to make a match for me once,’ I said. ‘He told me later, when he was angry with me about something else, that the girl’s father said young men weren’t so hard come by that his daughter need marry a cripple.’

  She was silent again, and I waited. Then she said, ‘It is different, now.’

  ‘Not for me,’ I said. ‘But we will only do it if you want to. Think it over, Myrrhine.’

  ‘I do not need to think it over. When the time of my mourning is over, if we both live so long — I will marry you.’

  *

  When the daily corn ration, given out by the government and collected by the head of each household, was down to less than half a measure per head, we sent envoys to the Spartan Kings asking for terms of peace. (After Cyzicus, and again after Arginussae, we could have had peace, each side keeping what we then held; but that would not have suited some in power — Cleontius had roused up the people to fight to a victorious finish. They got him on a charge of evading military service, and executed him.) The Kings said it was a matter for the Ephors; so we sent the envoys off to Lacedaemon, empowered to make the offer that the Spartans had made to us before; each side to keep what we held, only now we held nothing but the city and Piraeus and the Long Walls between.

  The Spartans turned our envoys back on the frontier. Let Athens agree to become ‘subject allies’ of Sparta, and pull down a mile of the Long Walls, and it might be worth their coming again.

  We said, ‘That is that,’ and held on for a while. But towards winter’s end, with the old and the sick mostly dead — and the very young too, for many families were driven by then to exposing their newborn children — we went another mission, with Theramenes at its head.

  He was gone three months on a task that we had expected to be over one way or the other in a week. Men said that he had grown to like the taste of black broth; and since the Oligarchs in the city had for the most part been the rich men, and the Democrats the poor, the longer he waited, the fewer Democrats there would be to blame him afterwards for the harsh terms he brought back with him.

  And they were harsh, when at last he did bring them; though they could have been harsher. For, added to the old demand to recognise Sparta’s overlordship and pull down a mile of the Long Walls, were new ones. We were to hand over all our remaining ships but twelve, and in those twelve we were to bring back our political exiles — all the rabid Oligarchs that we had got rid of when the Four Hundred were overthrown and we had become free once more.

  So we yielded and ceased again to be free. A few voices still cried out against surrender; but most of us were simply too tired to care either way. Five months of famine has that effect.

  Lysander rode in triumph from Piraeus up into the city in the hard spring sunlight, with a body of picked Spartan troops marching behind him. There had been quite a few corpses lying around in the streets he was to pass through. The poorest people had developed an unfortunate habit during the last days of the siege, of dropping dead in the streets; and as by common consent, the city had left the last-fallen to lie there for a greeting to the conquerors. But Lysander had thought of that, and the evening before, he sent prisoners of war to collect the dead and tip them into a communal grave-pit. Also he was taking no chances, and the streets were lined with Spartan guards as he passed through.

  He rode up to the High City, and sacrificed and gave thanks for his victory in the Temple of Athene Parthenos. I think that was when I really knew that we were defeated.

  After that he presided over the beginning of pulling down the Long Walls.

  The Spartans had rounded up all the flute girls in the city to play while the task was carried out; and as the great stones of Themistocles came crashing down, the flutes twittered like little birds. (But it must have been the Corinthians who thought of that; it was not the sort of idea that would occur to the Spartan mind.)

  There were agitators among the crowds and troops too, paid to fling up their helmets and shout as the stones fell, that this was the beginning of freedom.

  The Soldier

  We parted from Konon and returned to Samos while he took his own squadron to Cyprus.

  Samos fell a short while before Athens. We rigged a boom across the harbour, and held out as long as we could — all the longer for half expecting that when we did fall, those of us still left would get the same treatment as our comrades taken at Goats’ Creek. But by this time our losses had made us too weak to hold them off, and they took the boom by storm, negotiations for the surrender of Athens were already under way; and Sparta’s terms included the yielding up of the whole remaining Navy save for twelve ships to be used for bringing back Athenian political exiles. There were nothing like twelve triremes at Piraeus, and so the number was made up from Samos. There were just about enough of us left to man the five triremes needed.

  My good old Pegasus was one of the chosen five; and so I had the honour of bringing Kritias back from Thessaly, where he had been banished after the Four Hundred were thrown out. His courteous, well-modulated voice and cold seagull’s eye make me sick to think of, even now; and I got the decks scrubbed as soon as he had stepped ashore at Piraeus into the welcoming arms of a Spartan guard of honour.

  I had had long enough to get used to the idea that Athens had fallen, but still it came as something of a surprise to see the Spartan blood-red tunics and grim looks on the Munychian quayside.

  Afterwards I was ordered off on a sort of round trip, collecting lesser beauties from up and down the Ionian shore; and by the time I made Athens again it was high summer, and the Spartans, or their creatures, had been in power for more than two months.

  Entering harbour I looked up as somehow one always does, to catch the sun-flash from the High City on the great spear of Athene. And I felt a great desire to go up to Athens and see how it was with the city now. I got my exiles ashore, saw to the berthing of the ship, and turned over to my pilot. I had received no orders, and so assumed that I was on leave; and set out for the city, on foot because after so much sea-going, I needed to stretch my legs.

  For three miles the road looked much as it always had done; and then suddenly the great defensive walls came to a jagged end, and across the tumble of cast down stones, one could see the marshes and the open country on either side. I was prepared for that; but I was not prepared for the feel of the city when I came in through the Piraeus Gate. It did not look so very different from the Athens I remembered. Two months had gone by since the surrender, and there were things to buy in the shops and the market stalls; the streets had been cleaned up, and the people had a little flesh on their bones, though they still wore the sharpened and sunk-eyed look that comes of recent famine. But over everything, there hung a shadow — I do not know how to describe it; it was not only the shadow of defeat but something more. Men glanced at each other overlong in passing, or else took care not to look at all, and between each man and man, was the shadow …

  I turned my steps towards the High City with something of the same instinct that makes a man head for high ground in the hope of getting out of a fever-fog. But when it stood clear above me at the head of the Panathenic Way, I thought for a moment that something was wrong with my eyes, for there seemed to be smoke, and not the thin smoke of sacrifice, up there against the evening sky. I blinked to clear them, but when I looked again, the smoke was still there.

  I remember grabbing a passer-by, and pointing. ‘Am I mad, or are there fires up there?’

  He looked at me, and said, ‘Where are you from, soldier? Those are cooking fires; they’re the Spartan garrison up there!’

  ‘A Sparta
n garrison — in the High City?’ I said abruptly.

  ‘Aye, all among the Gods. They’ve made their latrines behind the Temple of the Maiden, and you have to ask their leave if you want to go up there to sacrifice, now.’

  Then he looked at me again, and the thing in his eyes was the same as the thing in the streets. He muttered, ‘I never said nothing, mind.’ And wrenched himself from my grasp and half ran away down the street. I knew then that the shadow was fear. The whole city reeked of it.

  I decided not to go up to the High City and ask some Spartan bully’s leave to sacrifice on Athene’s altars. But I did not know where else to go. I had no friends in Athens now; it was suddenly a strange city. In the end, I did as I had done before, when I came back from Syracuse to find my mother dead and our house sold up. I went to Timotheus at the perfume shop.

  I don’t know why I was so sure this time, that in a changing world, one quiet little man with a game leg would still be there and still unchanged.

  He was, and serving a customer. I waited, while the man debated the relative merits of oil of rosemary and almond oil scented with amber. Clearly there was money about again, for such rubbing oil was never cheap, and he bought a good-sized flask of it. But both men had the same famine-traces in gaunt wrists and hollow eyes that I had seen all over the city.

  When the customer had gone, Timotheus turned enquiringly to me.

  ‘It’s the Arkadian again,’ I said.

  But already he knew me, this time; and greeted me with the friendly respect one finds in the very best of the merchant shop-keepers; men with a quiet dignity of their own, far too proud to lay any claim to being the equals of their customers. It seemed odd to find the old good manners still surviving when the world had fallen to pieces.

  ‘I am glad you did not come a little earlier,’ he said with a somewhat wry smile. ‘You would have found me serving an officer from the Spartan garrison.’