When he was not there, I listened for news of him. Sometimes I tried to see for myself, in the way of our people, in a polished cup or a pool of black dye held in the hollow of my hand; but though sometimes the bright surface would cloud, and things begin to move in the clouding, I could never see clear. But indeed news of his victories spread swift enough, the length and breadth of the northern waters. And I would hear sounds of celebration from the little guard-post garrison, and send one of the slaves to ask for Philipus the Commander, what news was come. Once in late summer, when I sent he came himself — he had learned the unwisdom of treating me as no more than Alkibiades’ bitch-slave — and said, ‘We have recaptured Byzantium.’ And I knew that was a great thing, for My Lord had talked to me of it, telling me how the Black Sea Straits could never be secure so long as Byzantium was in Spartan hands. But I thought only, ‘Soon, he will come again!’
But the autumn passed, and it was only news that came, news of My Lord and his squadrons, now here, now there, restless as the wild geese.
And then on the very edge of winter, he came. When he came from the sea we had a little warning, a little time to make ready for him; for from the watch-tower on the high rock of Pactye, the look-out would sight the squadron while it was yet far out at sea. But when he came as he sometimes did by land, riding in with a handful of Thracian horsemen, we had no warning at all.
There was sleet spitting down the thin north-easterly wind, spitting in the mare’s-tail flames of the torches, as I looked down from the window-hole of the keep chamber and watched them ride in. There was no telling Athenian from Thracian in their long boots and embroidered goatskin jackets and thick felt cloaks, and the fox-skin bonnets of the Tribes. But Alkibiades I knew with the knowing of the heart in my breast. And I thought of the night almost three years ago, when I had watched from the screened windows of the Satrap’s palace, and seen him ride in captive. It had been sleeting then, too.
When they had clattered past toward the stable court behind the keep, I ran to the head of the outside stair, and called down to the slaves to bring food and torches, then went myself to mix a krater from our small store of dark Chian wine.
And then he came, and it seemed to me the fire on the blackened hearth-stone leapt up at his coming. The sleet was melting into dark patches of wet on his shoulders, and the shaggy fox-skin of his cap was beaded with it. He pulled it off and flung it on to the chest beside the door, and came to hold his hands to the fire, moving slowly as though he were very tired; not merely saddle sore, but with a deep quiet weariness of the very soul within him. He said, ‘Is it well with you, Timandra?’ as though he had been gone since morning.
And I said, ‘It is well with me, because you are come,’ and knelt to free him of his sword. I put my arms round him, round his thighs, and laid my face against him for an instant. Then I got up and laid his sword beside the Thracian bonnet; leaving him still standing with his hands to the fire.
He said, ‘You have heard that we re-took Byzantium?’
‘I heard,’ I said. ‘I have looked for your coming, since then; every hour of every day, for your coming.’
‘There were things to be done,’ he said. ‘Clearing up. It is all finished now.’
The food came, and I made him sit on the cushioned bench, and fed him and poured wine for him; seeing the blood creep back into his face that had seemed all grey bones when he came in.
We spoke little until the meal was done, and I remember — Oh I remember — how he lay down on the great wolfskin rug that I dragged beside the hearth, with his head against my knee. A couple of hounds had come thrusting into the chamber after him, and his favourite bitch lay suckling her whelps in a corner. He said, ‘It is good to be with you, Timandra … Always remember, whatever happens, that for me, it is good to be with you, Timandra.’
Fear brushed against my heart like a cold feather; and I thought it is over. This is the last time that I shall hold him in my arms. But I said only, ‘For me too, it is good,’ because every moment that I could hold the thing off from being spoken was one moment more that I should have him, one moment less in the great emptiness that must come after.
And then he reached up and pulled me down into the long harsh fur beside him, saying, ‘Here, my girl.’ And he kissed me on the eyes so that I had to shut them, and on the throat and mouth. And I saw the red firelight through my closed lids, and felt the live harshness of the wolfskins under me, and his hands on the fastenings of my clothes; and I put my arms round him.
We made love in the warmth by the fire, with sleet spattering against the wooden shutters, and the little Thracian horses stamping in the stables behind the keep.
Yet even in his love-making there was something changed; something that I had not known before, a desperate urgency and a desperate need that took him by the throat and did what it would with him; he who was always so much the captain of his love-making.
After it was over we lay in each other’s arms, quiet for a long while. He lay half over me still; one arm under my head, and rubbed the roughness of his beard against my cheek. But still I knew that something was changed, something ended — or waiting to begin. I did not know what it was; I did not even know whether it was to do with me at all. I could only fear.
I took his head between my hands, and held it away, to look into his face; and I saw for the first time that he had grown older in the years since Sardis; that the lion’s line had deepened between his brows, and there were grey streaks in his tawny mane of hair. I have never thought that age could touch My Lord, and my heart whimpered over him because he was as other men after all.
I said, making it a thing for laughter between us, ‘How many women have you lain with since last you lay with me?’
He said, ‘Three.’ And then, ‘No, four, there was a girl in Byzantium I almost forgot.’
‘Poor girl in Byzantium.’
‘Oh, I gave her a pair of eardrops and she was pleased enough.’
I waited for something more, but he only smiled at me, between my hands, a little puzzled. ‘Do you mind, Timandra? You never minded before.’
‘Not the girl in Byzantium, nor any of her kind, no,’ I said. ‘But there might be one among the other three?’
He said, ‘Listen, my girl, I’m tired, and I’m a little drunk, and my head is not working very clearly. I do not think I know what you are talking about.’
I said, ‘Something is changed. Something is over, and I do not know what it is.’ I heard my own voice speaking, lightly, as people speak of small things that do not have to do with life and death. ‘If it is the thing between you and me that is over — if there is some other woman, that you would have now in my place —’
He gave his head a little impatient jerk between my hands, but his mouth half laughed at me. ‘Would you have anything to complain of if there were? I have held to you for three full years, Timandra; that’s two years and a summer longer than I ever held to any woman before.’
‘Tell me who she is and where she is,’ I said.
‘Why?’
I let go his head and had him round the neck, straining up against him. ‘So that I can go to her and kill her!’
He was quite silent for a space, and in his silence was a fresh flurry of sleet against the shutters, and far below the sounding of the sea, for the tide was on the turn. And then he flung his head back against my hold, and laughed.
‘She-wolf! I believe you would!’
‘Tell me!’ I said. ‘Tell me!’ and dug my nails into the back of his neck. He broke my hold and caught my wrists and held me in his turn.
‘You women! Can none of you ever think of anything that can be over than the one thing? The lying in bed beneath some wretched man you have set your heart on?’
In a few moments I gave up trying to free my hands, and waited for him to say more.
He said, ‘Timandra, it is not the thing between you and me that is over, it is the campaign here in the North. I have won Athens back the
Northern Empire that I cost her. I have lived three years of my life, and I do not think that any years will be so good again. I think, for one thing, that I shall leave the last of my youth behind me, here with you at Pactye.’
‘You are leaving me here, at Pactye?’
He said, ‘There is no more need of us along these coasts. I have already ordered Thrasybulus and the bulk of the fleet home. With the first sailing weather in the spring I shall go back to Athens.’
‘Take me too!’ I said. ‘I will be a slave again — your slave, your flute-girl.’
He shook his head. ‘Eight years ago, I bade goodbye to Athens, under sentence of death. Nearly five years ago they called me back — but the sentence was not lifted; and there was work to be done here in the North. Now the work is done, and I have repaid, the High Gods know it, every wrong I ever did to Athens in payment for the wrong that Athens did to me — which leaves the State heavily in my debt. So now I go home to take my triumph, and it is in my mind that the old sentence will go whistling down the wind. But there are always those who do not forgive a debt when it is they who owe it. I know that when I go back to Athens I shall be walking into the greatest hazard of my life; and the man who walks that road does best to travel light.’
‘Don’t go,’ I said. ‘You have saved Athens; she can do without you now.’
He answered with his mouth buried in my hair. ‘I don’t believe she can. I know I cannot do without her.’
And I knew that it was as though I were losing him to another woman after all.
The Citizen
We knew that he was coming, for a winter and a spring and the beginning of a summer, before he came. At early winter Thrasybulus came into Piraeus with most of our fleet — a great fleet again, we had scarcely realised how great until suddenly Athens seemed flooded with seamen — bringing word that Alkibiades was returning with the remaining squadron in the spring. And in the spring word came by various traders that he was on his way; and then that he had turned south for Karia to collect that year’s tribute; and then that he was back at Samos. A fast penteconta brought his official word from Paros that his bows were even now set toward Athens; but the next we heard was that the squadron had been seen off Gythion on the Lacedaemon coast; that was just a few days after the Assembly had confirmed him in his command, and elected him to serve as a General for the following year.
I couldn’t get away from the shop that day; there was quite a lot of custom again by that time, though most of it wasn’t the class it had been in the old days. So I wasn’t there to drop my pebble in the pot, but the news was all over Athens almost before the vote was cast; and that evening, when I was able to shut up shop at last, I went round to Theron’s house in the Ceramicus. Things were not quite as they used to be between Theron and me, since he returned with the main fleet. We had been boys when we were at our closest, and now we were men, and not even very young men any more; and the years between had carried us away from each other. There was always a certain constraint between us now. I knew that he was sorry for me, and looked down on me a little. I was poor old Timotheus tethered to his father’s shop by a lame leg; and Theron might be only a fleet rower, but had rowed through the great three-year campaign in the North, of which he once said to me that even the rowers who had a part in it felt like kings. But the old friendship held between us after a fashion; and he made me welcome, and his sister brought us out a jug of much watered wine, and we sat under the trained vine in the little walled-in dirt-patch that served them as a courtyard, and drank, and watched the tethered dung-hill cock, woken by the lamp, strutting among his sleepy hens. Glory is glory, but a rower’s wage of three obols a day, mostly in arrears, does not pay for luxury.
I said, ‘Why is he doing it?’
‘He’s playing for time,’ Theron said.
‘I suppose so. He can’t know all Athens is ringing with his coming, and they have built a fine new house for him in place of the one they pulled down.’
‘He probably does,’ Theron said. ‘But he also knows that the old blasphemy sentence hasn’t yet been revoked; and what he can’t know yet is that the Assembly have elected him General for the year.’ He smiled into his wine cup, and in the small silence a roosting hen ruffled its wings in the vine branches overhead. ‘It seems funny, that, when in fact he has been the General for four years.’
‘Only by the mandate of Samos,’ I said.
‘Samos has been all that there was of Athens with power to make a General. With power enough to count for anything,’ Theron said. ‘Gods! You don’t know — you all seem like dozing old men here; waiting for Alkibiades to come and wake you up again!’
‘When he does come,’ I said, nettled; no one likes to be told that he is a dozing old man, at twenty-nine.
‘When he has had time to know of this afternoon’s vote, I think he’ll come. But how long he’ll stay is another matter.’
*
I got a lift in a cart going down to Piraeus, to see him come in. I did not want to see him first, riding up from the Piraeus Gate, as I had seen him ride out eight years ago. It was foolish, but I had a superstitious feeling about it, remembering the streets of Athens crimson-stained with the flowers of Adonis; especially since the Fates, who had sent him out on one ill-omened day were bringing him home on another. For it was the Festival of Plyntria; the day when our most ancient and sacred statue of Athene is stripped of her garments, and while they go to be washed, is veiled from the sight of her people. It was as if, said an old man in the cart with me, shaking his head, she refused to look upon Alkibiades’ homecoming.
But if Athene would not look, her people had crowded down to Piraeus for the first sight of him, until I wondered if there was anybody left in Athens at all. Wharves and jetties were clotted with them like bees at swarming time; they hung out of doorways and windows, clung to every column-base and thronged every ledge and roof-top. Citizens and sailors from the main fleet, everyone staring out toward the harbour mouth; for it was half a day now since the squadron had been sighted out beyond Aegina. The triremes of the main fleet were for the most part drawn up on to the slipways of the covered docks; transports and merchantmen had been warped to one side, leaving the centre of the harbour clear; and the vast crowds had begun to quieten as the scout-boat was sighted scurrying back. I had got a good place right on the edge of the main jetty; for like most small men I am good with my elbows and quick to seize a chance; and the only disadvantage was the likelihood that I might get pushed off the jetty altogether, and into the harbour.
Then the people on the mole began to stir. We could hear their voices across the water; no cheering, just a confused splurge of voices; and round the high snout of the mole, where the Oligarch’s fort had once stood, appeared the first of the squadron, coming in under sail and oars.
All round the great harbour the stir and ruffle and murmur of the crowd ceased. As she came nearer we could see that she was flashing with captured Spartan shields along her bulwarks; and fantastic shapes that glowed bronze and darkly coloured in the sun were stacked about the mast — someone said that they were figureheads hacked from the prows of captured galleys; and the great blue pennant of the flagship flew from the stern. As she drew nearer, we began to see other things; that her paint was chipped and faded, that the blue pennant was battle- and sea-stained and ragged at the ends, and the deck planks gaped with cracks made by sun and salt. But though I remembered these things afterwards, at the time, like every other soul in that huge, waiting, murmurous multitude, I saw nothing but one solitary figure standing alone on the forward deck.
And my throat ached on the edge of tears like a woman’s, because Alkibiades who had brought us to the very lip of destruction, was home to us again after eight years.
I heard an order barked across the water; men were aloft in the rigging, the weather-worn sail came rattling down, the oars ceased their rapid beat, rose and feathered, then fell again and held water — somewhere in the crowd, Theron would be watchin
g that with professional interest. The long dark flagship slid up alongside the jetty not a spear’s throw from where I stood, bumped lightly against the wooden sheathing of the stone-work, and settled.
Still the cheering did not break; even the murmuring had died away. Save for a small eddy of movement where a handful of nobility and high officialdom were thrusting through towards the trireme, nobody moved or spoke; and surely there was no eye in all that throng that was not fixed on that solitary figure standing unmoving and alone on the forward deck.
He was bareheaded now, having pulled off his great crested helmet and tossed it to one of his staff officers standing below him at the break of the deck; and his hair seemed less bright than when I had seen it last, as though he had rubbed ashy fingers through it. The sunlight cast harsh shadows under his cheek-bones and into the hollows of his eyes. I thought, ‘Lord Apollo! he is not young any more!’ He was like his ship, storm-battered and battle-scarred, worn down to the bones of what he had been, so that suddenly I knew what his skull would look like, clean of the flesh — scoured like a piece of driftwood by sun and salt sea.
He was looking among the crowd; looking, I knew as surely as though he were part of myself, for the face of friends, or enemies, testing their mood as a hound tests the wind for scent. Then he saw the men thrusting through to greet him, friends and kinsmen, the faces of his own seamen and soldiers, among the throng; and it was as though his own face caught fire and he held out his hands to his waiting friends, to all Athens. And the years, and the old wrong, and the old revenge fell away between us; and then the cheering broke; a great crash of cheering like the crash of a breaking wave, that spread from jetty to jetty and out along the arms of the mole and up the narrow ways from the water-side into the town. And Alkibiades had sprung ashore and had his arms round some kinsman or old friend, and I lost sight of him in the crowd. His officers were coming ashore after him; the other ships of the squadron were coming in to their waiting berths, but no one spared a glance for them; we were all craning and jostling for one more sight of Alkibiades. The next time I saw him, he was being carried shoulder high among his own men. Somebody had crowned him with a golden laurel, and the marines were forcing a passage for him up towards the Temple of Poseidon, where the horses waited, forming a ring about him to keep back — not very successfully — the crowds who tried to burst through to touch his feet or his hand or the trailing end of his cloak, as though he were lucky, or a God.
The Flowers of Adonis Page 30
