Myself, I gave the few slaves their freedom and bade them go, thinking that My Lord was safest without them. Then the few remaining mercenaries left, fearing that the sickness was catching, they said, or that there were devils behind it. Only, for some reason, the two brothers, Terdes and Boiscus, who had been the first to come, still remained. And for some reason I trusted them enough to leave My Lord in their care, while I dealt with the rest.
One morning My Lord woke and looked at me with clear eyes again, and demanded milk. I brought him the mare’s milk that I had set by, for the roan mare had lately foaled; and he drank it and tried to get up, then fell back cursing. ‘Typhon! I am as weak as a half-drowned puppy!’
‘Lie still,’ I said, ‘and you will grow strong again.’
He lay still for a while, watching me as I went about the room. I had taken to men’s dress again, it seemed better in those days. Presently he said, ‘It is very quiet. No sound of the men.’
‘There are no men save Terdes and Boiscus,’ I said. ‘They went while you lay sick. They feared that the sickness was catching.’
‘Well, we should all be gone by now, if I hadn’t taken the cursed fever,’ he said, and then suddenly strained up on one elbow. ‘The horses!’
‘Antares and the mare with her foal are still in the stable,’ I said. ‘And three more against need. Every horse that was in the stable when you fell ill.’
‘With the men leaving, how did you manage that?’ he said.
‘I told them that if they took so much as a hair from the tail of a horse, I would make a magic to set the sickness upon them.’
‘And they believed you?’
‘The women of my people, the women of all these coasts, have had something of a reputation since Medea.’
He looked at me strangely. ‘Could you have done it?’
‘I do not know,’ I said. ‘But I would have tried.’
Later, when he had had more milk and slept again, he grew troubled about the unguarded gates, and I told him that I had made the men barricade the land gate for me and narrow the other before they left.
‘What did you threaten that time?’ he said.
I was putting back my hair which had fallen loose, and did not answer for a moment. It was a hot night, and I had stripped down to my loose under-tunic. The past days had not been easy and I was very tired, so that I forgot he would be able to see the ritual cuts of the moon on my breast and arms. ‘The same threat did for both,’ I said.
He watched me and let go a long breath between his teeth. ‘I am not surprised those poor devils were afraid of you. When you look like that I’m not sure I couldn’t be afraid of you myself.’
‘You only once had cause to be afraid of me. And then you never knew it until the time was past.’
‘I read your message,’ he said.
It was three days before he could crawl out of his bed and sit in the late summer sunshine; and almost a moon had passed since Polytion’s visit, before all things were ready for setting out on the road to Susa. And all that time it had been still, golden weather, the barley stubble pale and shining between the hills and the sea, and the grasslands tawny as a hound’s coat; and the heat seemed to beat like a gong out of a fierce empty blueness of sky. But the very night before we were to set out, the weather broke in a great thunderstorm. It grew dark before its time, and the thunder woke among the hills and went booming out to sea; and then came the rain. Big drops that made dark lozenges of wet on the parched ground, then hissing swathes of it that sluiced against the shutters and beat through into the keep chamber on the dark wings of the wind.
And at the height of the storm, the Arkadian came.
At first, when the door burst open and he came stumbling in like something born of the thunder and wind and rain, I did not know him — but indeed his face meant little to me then, in any case — and I remember how My Lord sprang up, reaching for his sword, and the old bitch crouched snarling, waiting only for a word, to fly at the stranger’s throat. And then he said, ‘Your two rascals on the gate knew me from the old days, and passed me through.’
And Alkibiades tossed his sword aside, and cried out, ‘The Arkadian! Great Gods, man! You must be tired of life, that you come bursting in like that!’ and strode forward, holding out his hands. The Arkadian took them, and I saw how they gripped together. Then My Lord said, ‘What have you done to your hands?’ and turned them over, and I saw the palms and insides of the fingers were covered with dried cuts and blisters, and some that had broken and become crusted sores.
‘I would never have said that I had soft hands,’ Arkadius said ruefully, ‘but I fear they are not as hard as a seaman’s should be — or not so hard in the right places.’
‘A seaman’s?’ My Lord said.
‘I hadn’t the passage money on me, so I had to work it from Euboea — they were short of a topman —’ he said. And then suddenly, ‘May I explain all that later, and — may I sit down?’
The Soldier
I felt all at once as though my legs were going to give under me, and had to ask if I might sit down. Then everything went a bit hazy, and when they became clear again, I was sitting on the piled skins of what I suppose was the bed-place, and Alkibiades’ woman was kneeling beside me, holding to my mouth a cup of the sweet heady drink they make from fermented mare’s milk in those parts.
Then they gave me food; coarse stuff and not too much of it. I thought vaguely that their stores were probably running low. And when I had eaten, Alkibiades who had been lounging on a carved chest and watching me the while, demanded the latest news of Athens. I told him what I had seen for myself, and all that Timotheus had told me in the little room behind the perfume shop; the whole dirty, damnable story. When I had finished he sat for a while with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, staring at the floor. His eyes were narrowed, and the frown-line between them deeper than I had ever seen it; and I saw the sweat prick on his forehead, shining in the lamplight. I saw too, how ill he looked, the great gaunt bones thrusting against the discoloured skin, with no flesh between. I said, ‘Are you ill, sir?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘have been — a stinking fever, but it’s gone now. But for that, you would have been almost a month too late to find me here,’ and jerked his thumb in the direction of the embroidered saddle-bags, clearly packed for a journey, which I had not noticed before in the corner of the room. I looked back at him, startled, but before I could ask the question, he added, ‘And if you had got here one day later, you would still have come too late.’
‘The Gods meant that I should come in time.’
‘Why did you come?’
‘To set my sword at your service,’ I said, and heard the words hanging in the shell of quiet that the great stone chamber made about us in the dying storm.
He raised his head and looked at me with an odd smile, bitter and sweet together. ‘So one man out of Athens remembers me; and a man who at one time I should not have thought the most likely.’
‘All Athens remembers you,’ I said. ‘Thrasybulus is in Thebes, and knowing him, he’ll be making plans and gathering men; but it’s you they still look to, to come again and help them.’
‘The fools,’ he said. ‘Why should they imagine that I would lift a finger to help them, after the second time they threw me out? Only one greater fool, and that is myself, for having much the same idea.’
‘You mean —?’ I glanced eagerly toward the saddle-bags. And he laughed.
‘Oh no, I leave it to Thrasybulus to lead a valiant rabble into Athens and overthrow the Thirty. I’m away eastward for Susa, and the ear of the new Great King. There may be other ways of helping Athens than fighting through the city’s streets.’
I waited for him to go on, but he seemed to have no wish to speak more of his plans; and I was content to follow him blind. To me the chances of ever getting to Susa seemed fairly remote; but of course Themistocles did it in our grandsire’s day … I said, ‘Well, you’ll have that famous
luck of yours to see you through.’
He shook his head. ‘My luck is gone from me — I always said I should know when it left me. I must do without it now, as other men do.’ He rose and took a turn up and down the room, then checked and set an arm about my shoulders (I have seen him do that to many men, and never one, I think, who did not feel in that moment that he was the chosen brother) and said, ‘Men used to follow me for my luck — amongst other things — do you still want to follow me without it? Thrasybulus might offer the better chance to see Athens again.’
I said, ‘It’s when a man has lost his luck that he needs another to cover his back for him.’
I remember how his woman whirled round from her place in the corner of the room, showing her teeth like a vixen. ‘My Lord has me to cover his back for him,’ she said. ‘I am good with a knife, yes!’
Alkibiades said nothing, but looked on as a man may look on at two in the wrestling pit.
And I thought, ‘I must go carefully here,’ realising suddenly that of all the women he had had, this bird-boned flute girl with the crooked front teeth and enormous eyes had been with him many times longer than he had ever held to one woman before. I said as though he were not there, and it was just her and me, ‘Timandra, is there not room for both of us?’ and let her see that it was for my need and not for his.
She looked at me a moment, and the vixen went out of her face. She said unsmiling she very seldom smiles; she laughs or she is grave — ‘There is room for both of us.’
*
Next morning early, we set out; Alkibiades leading on a magnificent tiger-spot stallion, Timandra on a mare with a three-month foal running at heel, and myself on a sturdy dun with a cast-iron mouth and the sure feet of a mountain goat, as most Thracian horses have. The rear brought up by two enormous tribesmen on the two remaining horses. I felt the laughter suddenly whimper in my throat as I thought of the whole fighting strength of Athens that Alkibiades was used to lead, and what they would say at the state he rode in now. I must have made a strangled sound, for he looked round and caught my eye — and I remember the amusement kindling for an instant in his own, before he set his face again to the North.
The last thing he had done, while the horses waited, fidgeting in the courtyard, was to cut his old bitch’s throat. She came up to him, pleased at the horses, thinking I suppose that they meant a day’s hunting; and he bent to play with her ears as I had seen him do the night before; and I do not think she felt the knife at all.
‘The pups will do well enough, but she was too old to learn to follow another master,’ he said, cleaning his dagger blade.
I wondered if the man who had once cut off his hound’s tail to give Athens something to talk about, would have troubled himself for an old bitch, when his own life lay in ruins about him, and thought not.
So we rode North, into the hills. There were drifts of little bright cyclamen among the stone pines and the scent of the world was like cool incense after the rain. I looked back once and saw fire licking up red in the morning light. Bisanthe was burning. The past was the past.
Four days later we came down to the appointed place on the Black Sea Straits, north of Byzantium, and found a boat waiting for us. Alkibiades dismounted, Timandra and I after him, and handed the horses over to the two Thracians who had ridden with us. ‘Remember,’ he said, with one hand on the colt’s neck, ‘remember my message to Seuthes; that I send back to him his gifts, with my thanks, having no further use for them, and that I send with them a small gift of my own, in return. Also, two who have no Tribe of their own, but are worth their breed and salt to any King.’
We waited, all together by the boatman’s fire, the horses tethered among a clump of plane trees, while the boat was run down into the water and the saddle-bags loaded in; then the three of us climbed aboard, and the boatman pushed out into the narrows. There was no moon and the night was so dark that we might have been crossing the Styx, and our boatman Charon himself.
I looked back, and saw the firelight gleam from a fisherman’s hut, and against it, the shapes of the two tribesmen standing to watch us go. They would make camp there for the night, and next day they would be away back with the horses, to the chieftain Alkibiades had called Seuthes. I seemed to remember the name from the old days. And I seemed to hear again, Alkibiades saying, ‘Three thousand men will answer to a trumpet call from my keep.’ All that was gone now, and the two men standing on the shore were all that was left of Alkibiades’ kingdom in Thrace. And already they were too far off for me to make them out any more.
‘Never look back,’ said Alkibiades’ voice beside me. ‘It only makes you the more liable to fall and break your neck.’
A little later the boat grounded on the beach, and he sprang ashore.
*
We headed inland and slept in a thicket of juniper and wild pistachio bushes and next morning, after eating some of the food that we had bought from the boatman, shouldered the saddle-bags and riding rugs and set off southward for Chalcedon and its horse market.
I wanted Alkibiades to lie up outside the city with Timandra, and let me go in alone. But he would have none of that, saying that he preferred to choose his own horses, when he did not breed them. So the three of us went in together.
In her embroidered leather tunic and Scythian trews, with her hair bundled inside her cap, Timandra is one of the few women I have ever seen who could pass for a boy; she has the flat rump and narrow flanks, and when she binds her breasts there is nothing at all to lift the front of her tunic. She walks and rides like a man, too, but I think, from signs and portents, that she is woman enough in the dark. Alkibiades treated her in an odd way I noticed, almost, at times, as though she were a boy. Indeed, throughout the journey it seemed to me that he expected her to be many things at once. His woman and his Erômenos, sometimes his casual friend, sometimes his slave and occasionally his dog. An Athenian woman would have been out of her depth, knowing possibly how to be his dog, but not how to be his Erômenos. But Bithynian girls, Timandra has since told me, ride hunting and horse-herding with their brothers and their men, and even at times go to war with them. And I suppose that is the difference. I know that during all those days of journeying, she had a gay and gallant look about her — a young man’s look. And I think that she was very happy.
But I wander down side-tracks as one does when one is tired. I am so tired …
We hid the saddle-bags and the riding rugs — there was a small bag of gold-dust and a good store of Persian darics stowed away among the other things in them, so they needed careful hiding —and went into Chalcedon and bought three horses and a pack-mule under the noses of the Spartan garrison. They almost emptied the bag of darics that I carried next my skin, but My Lord Alkibiades said that he had never yet ridden a bad horse and had not the faintest intention of beginning now.
It has always seemed to me unlikely that anyone, having once seen Alkibiades, even before his hair turned grey, can see him again and not know him; and there must have been many in the streets of Chalcedon who had seen him during the siege and after. It was for that reason I had begged him not to go himself into the city, now that it was under Spartan rule; and Timandra had added her voice to mine.
And we were right. Someone did recognise him, though it was not to the Spartans that they betrayed him, which I suppose was something.
Two nights later, as we sat with some shepherds, sharing the wolf fire in the entrance to their fold, the dogs sprang up baying and bristling, wrinkled muzzles raised into the night; and a moment later we heard horses’ hooves on the bare hillside, sweeping nearer at full gallop. The shepherds were on their feet. The dogs leapt yelling into the darkness. Then a voice shouted, ‘Call in your dogs!’ And there was a swirling and snarling of shadows, as the horses were brought to a trampling halt on the edge of the dark. ‘Call them off, or we’ll see what a few cuts with the bull-whip will do to teach them better manners.’
‘It’s the Chieftain!’ someone said, and
after a few moments of whistling and cursing the dogs lowered their hackles and shrunk back to the fire. Alkibiades and I had sprung up with the rest, Timandra still sat beside the fire, but with her little dagger naked across her knee.
Men were swinging down from the horses, closing in to the firelight. There were maybe ten or twelve of them. I saw fringed tunics and fox-skin caps or flapped Phrygian bonnets; and the firelight chinked on curved blades, and a jewel here and there of gold and lapis or coral. My first thoughts had been that we were beset by robbers, but at sight of the men in the leaping firelight, I changed my mind.
He who seemed to be the leader of the party, a big man with lank reddish hair hanging in elf locks from under the goldwork on his cap, said, ‘You can put up your sword, My Lord Alkibiades, we are twelve to your three, and you need not look to these shepherds to help even the score; they have too much good sense.’
Alkibiades made a little bow, and sheathed his blade. I did the same, but like him, and deliberately in full view of the strangers, I made sure that it was loose in the sheath. ‘You have some business with me?’ Alkibiades said coolly. ‘It seems you know my name.’
‘It is a name well known in these parts,’ said the Chieftain. ‘And there are those in Chalcedon who know the face that goes with it. You have been watched for and expected, as honoured guests.’ He gestured with his dagger, turning to his own men. ‘You three search the horses, saddle-bags, everything, don’t forget the linings of the riding rugs. Teresh, Samba, Molossus, you search our three guests.’
The Flowers of Adonis Page 43
