The Flowers of Adonis

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  ‘This,’ said Alkibiades softly, ‘is an outrage.’

  ‘Throw your sword towards me — no, keep it in its sheath — I’ve no wish to lose a foot. You also.’ (This to me.) ‘And you, boy, set that pretty little dagger in the turf and step back from it.’

  I shut my teeth and flung my sheathed sword at his feet. He sprang clear just in time, and said, ‘That was unwise, but maybe understandable. Now your daggers.’

  ‘I thought one of these shepherds spoke of you as a chieftain,’ Alkibiades said, ‘but I see I misheard him — unless indeed you take the name as being chief of a robber band.’

  A shout from one of the men told that they had found the gold hidden in the riding rugs. ‘Ah, so,’ said the man with red hair.

  ‘We reckoned that when the great Alkibiades bought horses, and good horses at that, there was likely to be more gold where their price came from.’

  The man told off to search Timandra had approached her rather warily, as she backed, showing her teeth, against the thorn hedge of the fold. I had half an eye on him, ready to do the best I could with my hands if need be. ‘Well man, what are you waiting for?’ said the leader; and he reached out, and for a beginning, snatched the cap from her head. Her hair, that had been piled up under it, fell loose about her shoulders; and he gave a startled shout. ‘A woman! Lord Seitelkas, this one’s a woman!’

  Alkibiades never turned his head, but he said very softly, his lisp much in evidence, ‘Lord Seitelkas, if your man touches her, I will find means to kill you with my naked hands before you or your cut-throats can kill me.’

  They looked at each other a long moment in the firelight; and in the silence the uneasy stirring of the fold flock and the cough of an old ewe sounded very loud. Then the chief turned his head and spoke quickly to the man holding Timandra’s cap in his hand. ‘Search her — but only for the gold. No fumbling at her breasts or the like.’

  When the searching was done, and they had found every scrap of gold from the darics in the riding rug to Timandra’s bracelets, they piled all together on a spread cloak beside the fire, and the chieftain, Seitelkas, looked at it with satisfaction. ‘Not a bad kill, with the horses added to it. Bundle it up, and their weapons with it.’ He turned back to Alkibiades. ‘Those, you shall have restored to you tomorrow when you go your way.’

  ‘You are most kind,’ said Alkibiades. ‘You do intend to set us free, then?’

  ‘Of course. Did you think I meant to kill you?’

  ‘The thought did cross my mind.’

  ‘The Chief Seitelkas does not often slay the strangers in hunting runs.’

  ‘Does he often rob them?’ Alkibiades enquired pleasantly.

  Seitelkas’ sandy brows drew together and his hand tightened on the hilt of his sword, and there was a wolf-growl from the men round him. ‘Be very careful, Lord Alkibiades, or I might break my usual custom … Do you remember, when you laid siege to Chalcedon, the city sent us their riches to carry away and hide? You sent soldiers after us, and heralds who promised evil things if we did not give up the gold: And some of our people grew afraid, so that we gave up to you the gold as you demanded.’

  ‘So this is merely — a return bout?’

  ‘You could call it so.’

  ‘May I point out,’ said Alkibiades, ‘that the gold was Chalcedon’s and not yours?’

  ‘It was our honour that was touched, and for the hurt to our honour, we take payment now.’

  ‘And Chalcedon, I take it, will never see so much as a grain of gold-dust?’

  ‘No,’ said Seitelkas, flinging up his head and grinning down that great beaked nose. And I realised suddenly that he was much younger than I had thought, probably a year or two younger than myself, which seemed to add to the sheer insult of our position.

  All the while, his henchmen had been gathering up the gold and valuables and strapping the bundle on to the baggage-mule, and now they stood ready to depart. He gestured, and our own three horses were brought up. ‘And now, since our piece of business has been so much to my advantage, the least I can do is to provide you with better fare and less draughty quarters for the night than you have here. You shall come back with me to the camp.’

  ‘And how if I refuse?’ Alkibiades said.

  ‘Oh, you will not refuse.’

  The tribesmen stood round us with drawn swords; one, already mounted, had slipped his bow from his shoulders and notched an arrow to the string. We mounted, and the rest closed up around us; and we rode into the dark. At least they did not tie our hands.

  The Chief’s summer camp was not far off, and showed a certain amount of disorder. He apologised like the most courteous of hosts, saying that he was on the beginning of the long horse-drove back to his Hall and home runs for the winter; and fed us on barley cakes and honey and baked boar, washed down with the everlasting fermented mare’s milk, in a great tent, with carpets such as we seldom see in the warehouses of Piraeus lining the walls and spread on the ground. Timandra ate with the women of the household at the back of the tent; and I wondered how all this seemed to her, remembering that these were her own people.

  When the meal was done, Seitelkas stretched himself and belched. ‘You’ll not object to sleeping tied to the tent-poles?’ he said affably. ‘I would never forgive myself if I turned you out into the hills in the dark and you were to fall in with robbers, and you on foot with no chance of escape. But you will see that I cannot have you roaming loose round the camp.’

  Alkibiades grinned. ‘I do indeed see your difficulty, and speaking for myself I shall be delighted to sleep tethered to a tent-pole.’ Then he leaned forward, his hands on the low table before him, ‘But as to this other matter of taking to the hills on foot —’

  ‘Yes?’ said Seitelkas, cocking his eyebrow.

  ‘We shall have a long walk.’

  ‘As far as Daskylon, I was thinking?’

  ‘As far as Daskylon in the first place. And quite frankly, my kind host, I have the strongest objection to walking.’

  ‘You surprise me. Everyone knows that we of the Tribes never walk a step when we can ride, but I understand that the Athenians are great foot soldiers.’

  ‘Oh, we have cavalry, too,’ Alkibiades said modestly. ‘I also never walk when I can ride.’

  ‘It is most unfortunate,’ said Seitelkas. ‘What do you suggest we can do?’

  ‘You could, of course, return our horses.’

  Seitelkas shook his head. ‘We could not be doing that.’

  ‘It seemed worth mentioning,’ Alkibiades apparently yielded the point. He got up and stretched, then looked towards the opening of the tent, where several of the younger men had started a game of knucklebones. ‘May I? I used to be rather good with the bones.’

  We gathered round to watch; Seitelkas with us. The young men made room for Alkibiades instantly; it was amusing to see how even then, the famous charm did its work. They played off, started a new games, and played for a while, Alkibiades with fair skill, but not, I knew, so well as he could play when he chose. After a while he looked up at Seitelkas and said, ‘Join us.’ The Thracians and men of Bithynia are all gamblers, even when there’s no stake; Seitelkas squatted down and joined in, playing against Alkibiades himself.

  Presently Alkibiades said, ‘It is dull playing for no stakes. Can we play for beans or suchlike?’ So they played for beans.

  I had begun to be fairly sure that there was something more than idle whim behind this sudden passion for knucklebones. Then Alkibiades said, ‘I will play you for the horses.’

  I caught my breath in sudden delight at the old Alkibiades; while our noble host flung up his head with a bellow of laughter, and the tribesmen grinned at each other and slapped their neighbours’ shoulders and their own thighs. Timandra had left the women’s end of the tent, two or three of the younger women with her; and stood among us in her boy’s clothes, with her hair still hanging loose about her shoulders, and her great eyes fixed on Alkibiades’ face.

 
Seitelkas said, ‘What will you wager? Beans?’

  ‘No wager,’ Alkibiades said. ‘Just a straight toss-up with the horses going to the winner.’

  ‘But the horses are already mine,’ Seitelkas pointed out kindly.

  There was a pause. Then Alkibiades said, ‘On foot, in unknown country and among stranger tribes, we shall not get through to Daskylon alive, and you know it. I’ll wager our three lives against your three horses.’

  No one moved in the group about them; the young men looked at each other again, but not grinning this time. Seitelkas and Alkibiades confronted each other. Then as though making up his mind, the Chief nodded. ‘So. That is a reasonable stake. Will you throw for each horse and life separately?’

  ‘The Goddess of Luck never yet smiled on those who gamble by halves. One bout of six casts each, and winner take all.’

  ‘As you choose.’ Seitelkas, as the one who had received the challenge, held out his hand for the knucklebones to make the first cast.

  So Timandra and I stood watching among the tribesmen, while Alkibiades with a small east-wind curving the corners of his mouth, played for all our lives.

  We watched the white cubes flash up in the torchlight, the quick sure movements of hands catching them on backs or sides; and I saw that I had been right, Alkibiades had not been playing his best before. The play was so fast that one could hardly follow it. But it seemed a long time all the same, before Alkibiades made the final cast, and sat back, and said, ‘Seitelkas, you owe me three horses.’

  I saw the frown gather on the Chieftain’s face, and his jaw begin to jut, and waited for the storm to break. Then slowly his whole face cracked open into the broadest of grins. ‘If ever I see you again, I’ll remember not to pay knucklebones with you. So, so, the horses are yours; now sleep.’

  We slept tethered to the tent-poles; and we slept well, knowing ourselves safe under the shield of Seitelkas’s somewhat primitive laws of hospitality. And in the morning our weapons and the horses were returned to us, and we took to the hill trail that led south. We were stripped of every coin and grain of gold-dust, even Timandra’s earrings; but at least, we had each a horse between our knees. ‘Seitelkas is a man after my own heart,’ Alkibiades said thoughtfully to the empty air behind his horse’s ears. ‘He and Antiochus and I together, what pirates we would have made.’

  We worked our way round the Propontis, keeping well back into the hills now that it was a Spartan sea with Spartan garrison in its coastwise cities. We lived on the country as well as we could, but pot hunting as we went made for slow travelling, and it was almost the edge of autumn when we came down towards the Phrygian border.

  That night we found shelter — the first for many nights — in a farmhouse lost in the hills, with the sheep folded in one half of it and the family huddled together in the other. And going out early next morning into the clear cold of the sunrise, to make water, I found Timandra standing under a wild cherry tree whose leaves were already turning coral red, and looking back the way we had come.

  She looked round when she heard my footstep, and said, ‘If we hold on towards the noon sun, we shall strike the road from Gurion in two days. It’s a little out of our way, but it will be much better travelling.’

  ‘Of course, this is your country,’ I said. I had gathered something of her story long ago, it was fairly well known in the fleet, anyway.

  ‘Not so far south,’ she said. ‘But I know the border country a little. Five days since, we passed within a day’s trail of my father’s horse runs.’

  I thought for a moment that something ached in her voice, and I said something without meaning to, ‘Would you be glad to go home to your own people?’

  She shook her head. ‘I have no people, neither father nor mother nor brother nor sister. I have no home but in My Lord’s shadow.’

  *

  We managed to sell one of the horses in Gurion, fairly well, considering the poor brute’s half-starved state; and from there on, Alkibiades and I took it in turns to carry Timandra up behind us. It seemed fairer on the two remaining horses that way. At any rate we had some money for the last stage of the journey, and the road made for swifter travelling; and one evening we saw the pale terraces of Daskylon clinging one above the other to its hill slopes, among chestnut and plane trees, with the high snows of the Phrygian Olympus beyond, and knew that we had come to the end of the first stage of the journey.

  26

  The Satrap

  My heart was glad to see that big insolent Athenian, but my head foresaw trouble.

  I had been half expecting he might come to me, now that Sparta was the Lord of all that had been Athens. But I had scarcely thought that he would come quite so tattered. Sarbaces, my steward, told me that he arrived without escort or retinue but one down-at-heel Athenian soldier and a woman in boy’s clothes, and only two half-starved horses between the three of them.

  I sent them fresh garments and a jar of attar of roses, that he might not be ashamed by having to come before me in such beggarly guise. But I must have forgotten what he was like, for when he came, it was quite obvious that he would not have been in the least ashamed to come before me stark naked and lousy; he would merely have thought that he was Alkibiades and that was enough.

  I gave him all the welcome that was in my heart; for truly there was a brotherhood between us … I made him sit beside me and sent for wine and camel’s-milk curds. But I could not speak to him brotherly of his loss of the Northern colonies; and that made a barrier between us that I think I felt more than he did. To cover it, I took my falcon from her perch at the end of the couch, and began to gentle the feathers at the back of her neck.

  He said, ‘Pharnobazus, will you do something for me?’

  ‘If it is in my power,’ I said.

  ‘Give me fresh horses and journey gold and the necessary passes and safe conduct to Susa.’

  I pretended to find a mite among Istar’s neck feathers. It gave me time to think. Then I said, ‘What business calls you to Susa?’

  ‘To get the ear of the Great King, and point out to him certain matters that it may be he has overlooked.’

  ‘Such matters as?’ I said.

  ‘That with Sparta playing overlord to all Hellas, he may well find himself confronted with all our states welded into one, and that such a united Hellas — admittedly a free alliance — was too much for his great-grandfather before him.’

  I had supposed it would be something like that, from the moment he mentioned Sparta. ‘I do not think that the Son of the Sun will take kindly to that reminder!’ I said.

  ‘It would of course have to be put more delicately than I have put it to you.’

  I went on playing with Istar. ‘This would be for Athens, or for Alkibiades?’ I said, for I still needed time to think.

  ‘At one time Athens and Alkibiades were in some sort the same thing.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘I doubt if the severing can be made complete, save by my death. Maybe not even then.’

  I had come near to loving him once. And even now — as I have said, there was a brotherhood between us, and I would have saved him if I could.

  I said, ‘Athens is finished, a carcass with the flies on it, and the Great King will not listen to you. Let the dead bury the dead. Stay here in Phrygia; and no one need ever know what has become of you. You could have a good life here, money to live well enough, if not quite in your old style —’

  ‘Whose money?’ he demanded.

  ‘Mine, gladly given; I do not forget the oath of friendship that we swore at supper, the day that we signed the treaty for Chalcedon. Money to live at least like a gentleman — horses and hounds and flute girls, and honour.’

  ‘Honour?’ he said; and then, ‘I came to you remembering that oath of friendship indeed, but not that I might become your pensioner. I came for the things for which I have asked already; for passes and safe conduct on the Royal Road. And for enough gold to carry me as far as Susa, since what I
had I carelessly mislaid in Bithynia.’ He smiled, the old warm lazy smile. ‘Do I get it, sworn friend of mine?’

  ‘No,’ I said after a moment. And I knew from that time on, that in the end I would not be able to save him.

  ‘Name of the Dog! Why not?’ he demanded.

  The truth was really embarrassing, but nothing else would serve. ‘The Spartan victory has restored to Persia all the Ionian coastal towns which were ours before they became part of your Empire. The Great King is pleased. He will scarcely listen with favour to an anti-Spartan policy.’

  ‘Not even though his brother Cyrus is Spartan from the heart up?’

  I felt my face tighten in spite of myself. He had struck too near the quick for comfort. ‘The talk of a struggle for the throne brewing between the Great King and his brother, is no more than the chatter of magpies.’

  ‘So?’ he said. And I knew that he did not believe me.

  The falcon bated at that moment, hanging head downwards from my fist and wildly flapping her wings; and all the while I righted and reassured her, I was aware of those bright blue eyes of his, a little desperate, but mostly mocking. When I had her quiet again and returned to her block, I said, ‘You must believe what I tell you. The Great King will not look with favour on any plan for the downfall of Sparta.’

  ‘Nor on the Satrap who gave safe conduct and journey gold to the man who brings it,’ Alkibiades said, bitterly amused.

  ‘If you like to put it that way, no.’

  We had both risen, and stood confronting each other. I felt as though I were trying to break through that insolent blue gaze of his and beat it down as though it were a weapon. But I could not.

  He did not lower it even when he broke the silence and said, ‘So you will not help me.’

  ‘Not forward to Susa. Not for the present, at all events.’

  ‘For the present?’ he said quickly.