The Flowers of Adonis

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  *

  He spoke to the full gathering of the Assembly later that same day, and I was there on the Pnyx to see and hear him. I don’t know how I managed it. I got a lift part of the way but I had to walk the rest, and at what was to me a gruelling pace, to get there in time. And when I arrived my lame leg was shaking under me, and aching worse than it had done since I was a boy and the old injury was new. Even so, I was late, and so far back on the edge of the crowd that I’d have seen and heard scarcely anything but for Theron, for I was too spent to push my own way through as I had done earlier, at Piraeus. He had kept an eye open for me — his height made it easier for him; and he shouted when he saw me, and flourished an arm, and came thrusting back from his own place, grinning and said, ‘Come on, stick behind me.’ And somehow, breathless and buffeted, I found myself among a knot of desperadoes with bleached hair and salt-burned faces, who I realised must be some of his rowing mates. They stank to high heaven, but in that moment I would have asked for no better company in all the world.

  ‘I looked for you at Piraeus, this morning,’ Theron shouted above the tumult of the crowd.

  ‘I was there,’ I shouted back.

  ‘I guessed you would be, even if you had to crawl,’ he said, and flung a heavy arm across my shoulders. ‘You’re as daft as the rest of us.’

  The next time we met, the restraint had come back, but for that time all was well and simple between us, as it had been when we were boys.

  Figures were mounting the rostrum, and the uproar began to die away even before the trumpets sounded and the Priest came forward to make the Sacrifice.

  When it was done, and the smoke of the incense hanging in the air, Alkibiades stood forward to speak, still wearing his crown of golden laurel. He stood there for what seemed a long time, with the blue sky and the far-off Temple of the Maiden behind him, holding out his hands to us, but not speaking. The crowd rustled and murmured, and waited; and still he stood there. He seemed somehow pinned against that empty blueness of sky; I saw his throat work, and the shadows contract into a kind of grimace about his mouth, and realised that he was fighting for speech, against the barrier of the emotions choking him. I should not think that Alkibiades suffered that trouble more than once in all his life; but seeing him that time, I thought, ‘It is a man who feels this way, not a God; and a man can fail; and if he fails, the Gods help him!’ The thought, or something like it, seemed familiar, and I remember the old man in the crowd, on the day of the Adonia. But if Alkibiades failed again, it would be a different kind of failing.

  And then he broke through the barrier. For the first few words his voice was not altogether under his control, and then it steadied and became the old easy voice with the familiar lisp that our hearts had remembered across eight years. He spoke very simply, saying that he held Demeta the Corn Mother herself to witness that he had never profaned her Mysteries. But he blamed no one by name, for the unjust trial and condemnation; in which I think he was wise. His sorrows, he said, had come upon him from ‘some envious genius of his own’ and there he left the matter, and passed on to other things. He spoke of the broken hopes of the Spartans making no mention of the years when it had been our hopes that were broken through him; but all that was forgiven and forgotten and out of mind. He promised us that now we might lift our heads with courage and gaze into the future; and we caught his fire, and kindled and leapt up like smouldering touchwood when it feels the wind.

  In the end, the Assembly took command, in a kind of frenzy of rejoicing. Something in me knew that it was too bright to last; unless that is only the hind-sight, after all. The keys of his new house were publicly presented to him. We ordered the Heralds of the Mysteries to revoke the curse of eight years before, and throw the iron tablets on which it was engraved into the sea. We had already elected him one of the Generals of the year, but now suddenly we raised the cry that he must be General-in-Chief; that he must have sole power, absolute command of our forces by land and sea. The proposal was put to the vote and carried there and then. It was, I think, the first time that Athens had given such absolute power to one man since the days of the Kings.

  Alkibiades tried to refuse; I remember him standing there looking on over the great sea of faces that we must have been to him, his hands going out, almost as though to thrust something away. He said, ‘My friends, you offer too much, too great a weight of honour, you would set upon my shoulders. Such absolute power is for the Gods, not for men.’

  We cheered and shouted him down, and though he tried to speak again, for once he could not get himself a hearing, so that at last there was nothing for him to do but bow his head under its crown of golden laurel, and spread his hands in acceptance.

  We thought that it had been modesty (as though he had ever know the meaning of the word!) which had made him protest against the honour we would do him. But I think, now, that he saw the deadly danger in this new and unheard-of power that we were shackling upon him too soon.

  When the crowd was dismissed and began to drift away, I chanced to come face to face with a man I knew slightly; and it was a hating face, dry-mouthed and narrow-eyed. He looked at me, and said, ‘Despite appearances, not everyone in Athens has forgotten that the Spartans are still in Dekalia.’

  19

  The Seaman

  ‘Another month,’ says Alkibiades. ‘Three months Athens has given me house room, she and I might just about manage one more.’

  I hadn’t seen much of him in that time, for my own days were mostly spent down at Piraeus with the fleet; and so I sees the change in him more clearly than if I’d been with him all the while. His lines had gone leaden and there were dark stains under his eyes. It was the change that always came over him, of late years, whenever the living grew soft.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I says.

  And he grins, ‘Oh yes you do, pilot, you’ve heard what they’re saying in the streets — or hasn’t it reached Piraeus yet?’

  I had come up to report on some repair work, and stayed on to supper in the handsome new house. When the meal was over, he had sent the slaves away, and it was just the two of us under the vine arbour of the old house that had stood there before. It was a very hot evening, and the vine leaves overhead, rimmed with light from the lamps, scarcely stirred. I stared up at them until they blurred and ran together at the edges.

  ‘I’ll tell you what has reached Piraeus,’ I says, ‘the feeling that after all these years of muddled government and frittering away of our resources, Athens would do better with one hand to hold the reins, if the hand was strong enough. You’re already Master of Athens, it wouldn’t be much of a change. I reckon you could be Tyrant of Athens tomorrow, if you reached out your hand.’

  ‘But I’m not reaching out my hand,’ says Alkibiades.

  ‘Why in Typhon’s name not? What do you want?’

  ‘Maybe even that, one day,’ says he, staring into his cup as though he sees things there beyond the reflection of the vine leaves. ‘But not yet. Not till the time is ripe; and the time is yet only ripening on the bough.’ He flings back his head and laughs, sudden and soft in his throat. ‘Besides, I’m ambitious. If I get to the utmost point of ambition too soon, what is left for a later day?’

  ‘So you’ll have us back to sea before that happens?’ I says, and reaches for the wine krater. If the fleshpots aren’t lasting long, make the most of them!

  Alkibiades says, looking at me across the wine, ‘Do you suppose the people are alone in thinking it a short step from General-in-Chief to Tyrant? Do you suppose my enemies haven’t thought of that one, too? And the Gods know I’ve enough enemies in Athens, headed by Kritias and that republican snake Cleontius … When I leave Athens it will be for many reasons — not the least among them, that I’ve no wish for a knife in my back.’

  ‘That’s not like you,’ I says.

  ‘No it’s not, is it? Perhaps I’m growing old, pilot, or maybe its just that I’m beginning to know of Athens.’ He takes a drink, and
sets the cup down very careful. ‘It has reached Piraeus, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I says unwillingly. ‘People are beginning — only a few people — to say why don’t you get off back to sea and win us some more victories.’

  He nods. ‘More victories. I’ve done it once, so why don’t I do it again? They’re hungry already for another triumph; and if they don’t get it … I tell you, Athens is like some women, who can grind a man into their women-parts until they’ve sucked the manhood and the very life out of him, and when they’ve destroyed him, throw him off and take a new lover.’

  ‘Athens won’t take a new lover,’ I says.

  And he says, ‘Not so long as I’m her blue-eyed darling and can give her what she wants.’

  He put his bowed head in his hands and sat there slumped with his elbows on the table, and I thinks, ‘It’s a good thing there’s none but me to see him now.’ And then he does one of his sudden changes that I’ve never got used to in all the years I’ve known him. He gives his shoulders a little shake, and looks up — and he’s Alkibiades again.

  ‘But before I go, I’ll give them something to remember me by until I come again. How many days is it to the Eleusinian Festival? Twelve? Eleven?’

  ‘Eleven, the ships are being made ready now.’

  Ever since the Spartans had been at Dekalia, the Eleusinian Mysteries had been shorn of half their glory; for the procession along the Sacred Way, with its hymns and ritual dances, and sacrifices at shrines by the way, had been too dangerous, and for seven years the whole boiling lot had had to be ferried round by sea.

  ‘We’ll cancel the ships,’ says Alkibiades. ‘This year the procession will travel along the Sacred Way again.’

  ‘There are still Spartans at Dekalia,’ I says.

  ‘But there’s Alkibiades in Athens … I and my troops will guard the pilgrims from any attack. The old glory shall return to the Mysteries.’

  ‘I’m not a public meeting you’re addressing,’ I says.

  But he brushes that aside, and springs up from the table and begins to pace up and down, talking all the while. ‘Can’t you see what it will do for the morale of the troops who have been shut up in Athens all this time? Ever since Agis has been perched up at Dekalia they’ve scarcely been outside the city, save to patrol the Long Walls. This will be like a trumpet blast to them.’

  ‘I can see all that,’ I says. ‘Splendour for Athens and Athenian arms, and for the Mysteries, and splendour for Alkibiades —’

  ‘Of course — among other matters.’

  ‘There’s only one thing — will the Priests of Eleusis accept your escort?’

  He stops pacing and looks at me. ‘They had orders to cast the curse tablets into the sea. If they don’t accept my escort, they’re publicly admitting that they only did so because they were afraid to disobey the Assembly, and not because they believed in my innocence. That doesn’t look well in a priesthood.’

  ‘Were we innocent?’ I says. ‘I’ve always been a bit hazy as to that night.’

  ‘Yes,’ he says, looking at me square, ‘we got drunk and we played the fool, but we stopped short of the Forbidden Things. I’ve mocked the Gods from time to time, who hasn’t? Even good old Euripides. But if we had played with the Great Secret, do you think even I would do as I shall do — go with the initiates into the Holy of Holies?’

  ‘I’d not put it past you,’ I says. But I sees that he’s in earnest; it really matters to him, this going again into the Holy Place. I shall never understand Alkibiades. I’d have said he was more godless than myself.

  ‘I have certain limitations; even I,’ he says. ‘Are you coming with me?’

  ‘Not I. Once was enough for me.’

  The Soldier

  On the day before the procession was due to start out, Alkibiades posted sentries on the high ground at Daphne with orders to keep watch for any sign of movement from the direction of Dekalia. And those of us who were detailed to guard the pilgrims were turned out at first light next morning, the small amount of cavalry we still possessed, from the Temple of the Dioscurii, the foot companies from our makeshift camp below the High City. We ate quickly hearing the horses clattering by; and marched down to take up our positions outside the Dipylon Gate. It was one of those quiet mornings when the fading night turns green and watery while the owls are still crying. I remember the white flowers of the oleander over a nearby grave beginning to shine faintly as white flowers do in the dusk at either end of the day. The horses stamped and fidgeted, we of the foot companies stood at ease, leaning on our spears, talking a little from time to time, but already drawn up in marching order.

  The sentries from Daphne had sent in to report all quiet.

  Just before sunrise we heard horses coming down towards the gate, and Alkibiades came out, riding one of the fine new Thessalian stallions that the city had given him, his staff clattering at his heels. He rode up and down the lines, reining in his fidgeting horse here and there to speak to the Pylarchs and company commanders; or to some scarred common hoplite who had served under him. When he came to me, he reined in and gave me my orders in case of a Spartan attack (we already had them, of course, but Alkibiades was always thorough, and I think he liked the excuse to make personal contact, to see men’s faces quicken when he spoke to them). He said, ‘Not quite the usual kind of work for the old Samos brotherhood, eh, Arkadius?’ Then he rode on.

  My Number Two said, ‘I wonder if the Spartans will attack?’

  ‘It’s in the lap of the Gods,’ I said. ‘Alkibiades hopes they will.’

  The boy looked at me, questioning and surprised. He was one of the Athens garrison, and had not followed Alkibiades to the Black Sea and back again.

  ‘If they do, he’ll lead the defence in person,’ I explained. ‘And everyone will see him, fighting like a God in defence of the Sacred Things, and tell their grandchildren about it afterwards.’

  He made a small bitten-off sound, and when I looked round, he was staring straight ahead of him as though on parade, his face flushed like a nicely brought up girl’s, if you had pulled her veil off in the street.

  ‘I thought you of the Samos brotherhood would cut your sword hands off for him.’

  ‘Oh, we would,’ I said, ‘but that’s quite a different matter.’

  The rim of the sun was hanging like a golden bead on the shoulder of Parnes and suddenly the world began to cast shadows again as the light spilled over and came trickling down the hills; and far off through the city we heard the singing, winding nearer as the light grew more strong. There was movement within the gate, and the head of the procession came slowly through, out of the gatehouse shadows into the early sun between the graves and the oleander trees. First came the Image of Iacchus, the God himself, garlanded with the golden last ears of the corn, and carried by two tall Priests of the Mysteries. Then the High Priest and others bearing the emblems of the God. Then the first of the musicians, and then the long line of Mystae, white-robed and wreathed with myrtle, and carrying each their unlit torch; young boys and maidens for initiation, grown men and women going to review the wonder of the Mystery that they had known before. All singing as they came, the slow first hymn to Iacchus that begins the day.

  The first company, led by Alkibiades, moved off; then it was our turn. I gave the order, and we were on the march, our faces toward Daphne and our shadows reaching out long before us in the morning sun. Presently, looking back, I could see the whole white-robed line of the procession, the myrtle garlands and dark waving branches already hazed by the rising dust-cloud. And all along the line, between them and the menace of Dekalia, the companies of marching troops; and northward again, strung high along the sky’s edge, the thin strung-out line of the scouting cavalry.

  Everyone knows what it is like, the procession along the Sacred Way to Eleusis; the long hymns to Iacchus and to Demeter of the Corn, and to Kore, the Maiden; the sacred dances to the shrilling of flutes and cymbals, the long pauses to sacrifice at the shrines
along the way. The day grew hot, and the soft dust-cloud rose and whitened us from head to foot. The mountains had their pale end-of-summer look, save where the drifting cloud shadows made stains as black as grapes on the high slopes, and on our left even the blue water of the gulf was faded, as though weary in the heat; our helmets burned our foreheads, and the parched ground and sparse tawny grass of the wayside scorched our feet. The very slowness with which we had to travel seemed to make the heat more intense, for it is not easy for men trained to normal marching pace to drift along at the speed of a sacred procession. And all day as we slogged onwards, Alkibiades with his knot of staff officers behind him, passed and repassed us, riding the length of the line like a good sheepdog keeping his flock together and himself between them and any danger of wolf.

  It was dusk when at last we reached the gentle lift of country that formed the boundary of Eleusis. The scent was coming back out of the scrub, rosemary and thyme and lentisk; and looking back, the lights of Athens, kindled for the festival, speckled the dusk ten miles behind us; and ahead, on the low ground at the edge of the sea, the lights of the Sacred Precinct of Eleusis. After the day, coolness seemed to lie like a blessing over the land and the temple and the dark scented tide of pines that washed it round. We went on down the hill, to the Meeting Place, where the Heralds and Eumolpe waited with their torches, to kindle the unlit torches of the Mystae and bind about the left wrist and ankle of each one the ribbon without which they would not be allowed into the Holy Place.