The Flowers of Adonis

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  They brought him down as men bring down a lion they do not dare to close with; while I fell headlong over something that caught my feet, and lay all asprawl. One of the arrows grazed my bare shoulder, but I did not know it until afterwards. They brought him down to his knees, to his face. At the last instant he twisted over and lay with his face to the sky.

  I was struggling to get up, but something clogged my feet as happens in a nightmare, and brought me down again, driving all the wind from my body, and a wave of darkness rose and swept across me and passed on. Someone was standing over me; the fire shone on the blade in his hand; someone said, ‘It’s only his harlot — let her be.’

  I saw between the waves of darkness, how they all came in out of the moon-shadows and stood round My Lord, men in rough sheepskin garments. But I had known Persian soldiers and court officials, and I knew them now, the two leaders; the rest were of another kind.

  One of them, one of the lesser kind, said, ‘The corn harvest will be good this year.’

  And the next wave swept me away with it into a great blackness.

  When I woke, the first green light of morning was washing cool down the hillside. The fire had burned out and last night’s wind had died away. The morning star that the Persians call Astarte was pale among the branches of the almond trees; and the drums from the village were still. They must have broken the faded violet garlands long ago, and opened the tomb and found the dead God risen.

  I lay still, because I knew that when I moved, the dreadful thing would begin. At last I dragged myself to my knees, and crouched there, knowing for the first time that I was hurt in the shoulder. And I saw what I had fallen over. It was Arkadius’ body with its throat cut.

  I disentangled my feet from the folds of his chlamys, and the coverlid that I had flung round me when I ran out, and got up and went to My Lord. He lay rent and hacked in a score of places. The killers had dragged out their spears, but three arrows still stood in him. His face stared up with wide eyes, his lips drawn back from the clenched teeth. His arms were flung wide, his sword still in his hand and the cloak tangled round his shield arm. The marks of fire were on him, and blood — blood everywhere, the grass under him sodden with it. But there was no more blood coming now.

  I knelt, and bent over him and kissed his dead mouth; there was still a little warmth in it, a little warmth left of all that blaze of life. I kissed his throat and belly and thighs, and the strong manhood between them; and held him in my arms. He had not yet begun to stiffen. I knew that once he did, I would not be able to move him. I put out all my strength and managed a little at a time to drag him clear of the blood-soaked ground where he had fallen.

  I got up and dragged myself into what is left of the house. Little of the main hall but the scorched mud-brick walls still standing; and inside the door I had to crawl over fallen roof timbers and charred thatch still smoking in places; but the wind blew the wrong way for the flames last night; at the back of the hall the roof-beams still stood, and when I reached the inner chamber it was scarcely touched, by fire or men. They must have gone straight back to tell their master that they had done his bidding. Even my tunic that I had stripped off last night still lay where I had left it, across the clothes’ chest. It was only when I saw it that I knew I was naked. I dragged it on. I took a mantle of my own — one of the Greek kind, of soft fine stuff that one winds again and again round the body and flings over one shoulder. It was the best thing I could think of for the purpose it must serve. I took the little ivory box in which I keep my pots and sticks of cosmetic, from the table beside the stripped bed-place. I pricked up the wick of the little lamp that still burned — it seemed strange that it still burned — that I might have light to work by, for the full daylight would not come for a while yet. I took clean linen, and went outside and drew water from the well.

  Then I went back to him, bearing all things needful. The last warmth had gone from him in the little time that I had been away.

  I set the lamp at his head. I dared not pull out the arrows for fear of what more damage I should do; so I broke them off as close to the heads as I could. I washed the blood from him and combed his beard and his grey-gold lion’s mane of hair; and swathed him in the soft folds of my mantle — crimson as the dark-hearted anemones, whose name, men say, means Darling, purple-bordered for the flowers of Attis. In Melissa they would be rejoicing in the Risen Lord. The daylight was growing, but it was not yet strong enough for the thing that I must do next; I moved the lamp to cast its light more clearly on his face, and the flame, leapt an instant and cast a flicker of movement over it as though he, too, were about to wake …

  I took his head in my lap, and began to paint his face with red and saffron pigment and green malachite on his lids, and rimmed his eyes with kohl. And when I had finished it was full daylight, and the flame of the lamp was thin and colourless as though it too were dead. And My Lord’s face was as the face of the Attis bound to his Tree.

  And now I must go down to the village and find those who will bury him. I must remember the things that I must buy, the people I must pay. The grave and the wine and the honey, the incense to burn; the priests to make the offerings. He was Lord of Athens and Lord of Timandra; he shall not be thrown into a ditch like a dog.

  There are the bracelets he gave me; the warm amber. Honey-in-the-comb. They will fetch enough to see him decently buried.

  The Citizen

  A little over a year after the Spartans became our overlords, Myrrhine bore me a child.

  When the women’s chambers had been purified and they let me in to her, she was lying very narrow and flat under the cover-lid, with the little thing naked but for the strip of linen where its life had been cut from hers, curled in the hollow of her arm; and the midwife and our old slave standing by as pleased as though they had done the whole thing themselves.

  I had meant to kiss her before I looked at the baby, for it has always seemed to me that a man should be grateful when a woman carries his burden for nine months and goes through many hours of pain and the risk of her life to bear him a child. Even if it was a girl, I do not think I would have exposed it — that must be very hard on a woman. But she opened her arm for me to see, and said, ‘Here is your son,’ very softly; and I did not even answer her. I looked first at the baby’s legs, which was foolish, for one does not pass on to a child the mere mischance of falling out of an olive tree. His legs were reddish and mottled, and had little bracelets of fat at the ankles. I touched the sole of one foot. It was the smoothest and softest thing I have ever felt, and it curled over my finger almost as if it were another hand.

  And then I looked at Myrrhine. She smiled at me and reached out her free hand to touch my face. ‘Maybe he’ll be an Olympic runner,’ she said; and I knew that she had seen what I was thinking.

  ‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘but he doesn’t have to make up for anything, to me, Myrrhine.’

  Her hands went farther round my neck, and she drew my head down until my cheek was against hers. ‘I used to wonder, when I was young and stupid, why Theron chose to be your friend before anyone else’s. The night he died, and you saw me with the harlot’s paint on my face, I think I knew.’ She was growing very sleepy. She said, so low that I do not think the other women heard, for they had moved ostentatiously to the other end of the room and were nodding and whispering together, ‘I love you, kind, lame Timotheus.’ Then she gave me a little push and said, ‘Go now and hang the olive garland on the door.’

  The olive garland for a boy and the hank of wool for a girl had been lying ready in the room behind the shop, since the night before. I picked up the garland, proud as a boy myself, and went to hang it on the shop door, thinking how pleasant it would be when the day’s customers started coming, and saw it hanging there, and the good wishes and foolish jokes that there would be. For the odd thing was that we still laughed sometimes, just as we still begot and bore children, under the Spartans and the Thirty.

  And as I opened the door and steppe
d out into the street, I heard the women wailing against the wailing of the flutes:

  ‘A tamarisk that in the garden has drunk no water,

  Whose crown in the field has brought forth no blossom —’

  In the midst of the other things that I had had to think of, I had forgotten that it was the Feast of Adonis.

  I shut my ears to the sound, and made a great issue of testing the nail that I had driven into the door-post yesterday, to be sure that it was secure, and hung the garland on it, and stepped back to admire the result.

  A man I knew was coming up the street; and I waited for him to come up so that he might notice the garland and congratulate me. But he only jerked his chin towards it, and said, ‘A boy, then.’ And before I could answer, ‘Have you heard the news?’

  ‘What news?’ I said, somewhat put out, for it seemed to me that mine must be the only news in Athens that morning; but also anxious, for in those days news generally meant word of somebody’s arrest by the Thirty. Then as he did not answer at once, I said, ‘Who is it this time?’

  He said, ‘They’re saying down at Piraeus that Alkibiades is dead.’

  And the brightness fell from the morning.

  ‘It’s not true,’ I said.

  ‘It seems well vouched for. A ship master from Myteline brought it. A reliable man, I’d say.’

  ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘Differing stories apparently. The favourite one is that he carried off a girl from her father’s house. Wait a moment, the man said her name — Timandra, that was it — and her father and brothers came after him and fired the house where they were, and shot him down as he broke out through the flames.’

  But I remembered things that Theron had told me, in the long talks we had had during his illness. ‘No, oh no,’ I said. ‘Timandra was with him at Sestos — right from the start of the Propontis campaign. She was a Bithynian flute girl, and if he carried her off from anyone it was from Tissaphernes.’

  ‘You seem to know a lot,’ he said.

  ‘My friend — my wife’s brother saw her more than once, and the fleet talked.’

  We stood and looked at each other in the early morning street, with the flutes wailing for Adonis at the far end of it. He was the kind that takes his time about getting round to an idea, but I saw the understanding grow slowly behind his eyes. ‘Who, then?’ he said at last.

  ‘Spartan or Persian or Athenian Oligarch — we shall never know. But I reckon Kritias and the Thirty will sleep more easily in their beds tonight.’

  He glanced round as though to make sure no one was standing behind him, and said quickly, ‘Yes, well — the blessing of the Gods on your son, neighbour.’ And went his way.

  The little knot of mourning women with the dead Adonis in their midst were coming up the street.

  ‘At his vanishing away she lifts up a lament.

  Oh my child! At his vanishing away she lifts up a lament,

  Oh my Enchanter and Priest!

  Like the lament that a house lifts up for its master, lifts she up a lament,

  Like the lament that a city lifts up for its Lord, lifts she up a lament.

  Her lament is for the corn that grows not in the ear,

  Her lament is for woods where no tamarisks grow,

  Her lament is for a garden of trees where honey and wine grow not.

  A weary woman, a weary child, forespent …

  A girl ran out of a nearby house with an armful of little dark red roses, and scattered them before the bier.

  And I remembered, Apollo Far-shooter! How I remembered, the red roses mashed under the feet of the young men marching out for Syracuse. And the young man riding alone with only a groom to carry his great shield; head up in the early sunshine, and the wide gaze that seemed to look on all Athens as lover looks on lover.

  I went in and shut the door behind me.

  And I thought, ‘Our last hope is gone from us now.’

  *

  There were many who did not — would not might be more like it — believe that Alkibiades was dead. ‘It’s a trick to make us lose heart,’ they said. ‘They couldn’t kill Alkibiades as easily as that.’ A year later there were still rumours that he was alive and had been seen somewhere, in Persia, in Thrace, even lying hidden in Piraeus. ‘He’ll come back,’ people said. ‘He’ll come back, and save us. He’ll come back, and then we’ll see —’

  In the end it was Thrasybulus who saved us, coming down from Thebes with his following, to make his headquarters in the old mountain fortress of Phyle and gather more — old seamen and soldiers, young hotheads eager to die for the freedom of their city; they got away to him despite the Thirty and the Spartan guards. And when the time came they swept back and set us free. Kritias was killed in the fighting. He made, I’m told, a surprisingly good end.

  So we were free, and rebuilt the mile-wide breach in the Long Walls, and said, ‘We are Athens again.’

  But we are not. Something that was Athens when I was a boy will not be there for my sons. This is a world that Thrasybulus has coloured like himself, a grey world that does not like ideas any more. It has banned the plays of Euripides because they made men think. It’s the kind of world that would like to give Socrates the hemlock bowl.

  And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.

  If you enjoyed The Flowers of Adonis you might be interested in Blood and Sand by Rosemary Sutcliff, also published by Endeavour Press.

  Extract from Blood and Sand by Rosemary Sutcliff

  1

  In the swiftly gathering dusk, the lime-washed walls of El Hamed glimmered palely under the fronded darkness of its date palms. From the doorway of the headman’s house, now taken over by Colonel MacLeod as the headquarters of his motley command, light spilled out over the once jewel-bright Colours planted in their stands of lashed muskets before the threshold.

  Between the low wall of the village and the nearest of the irrigation channels the lights of the camp fires were beginning to strengthen. Camp fires of the 78th Highlanders and beyond them the 35th Foot and De Rolle’s Foot beyond again. The night of April 20th, 1807 and away southwards, masked by the tamarisk scrub and the slight lift in the land between, the Turkish forces gathered about their own camp fires, waited also for dawn and the fighting that dawn would bring.

  Round one of the fires, just below the village gateway and scarcely clear of the turbaned gravestones of the village dead, the best part of the Highlanders’ Grenadier company were gathered. They had eaten their evening meal and fallen to their own affairs and pastimes: here a little clump of heads bent together over a greasy pack of cards, there a man playing dice by himself, left hand against right; a man singing softly for his own ear and no one else’s, his gaze on the fire and his hands linked around his up-drawn knees, another doing his mending and yet another writing a letter with frowning concentration, leaning forward, the page tipped to catch the flame-light; one deep in conversation with a stray dog, the kind that always hung about an army camp; one who always suffered from religion on the eve of battle, reading his Bible. Most of the others silent or talking together idly as they readied their equipment for the morning. And among these, Donald MacLeod — no relation to his colonel — and Thomas Keith sat companionably together.

  Donald, an extremely large fair young man from the island of Lewis who combined the position of company drummer with that of medical orderly in the usual way of such matters, had stripped down his drum and was now reassembling and making it ready for tomorrow’s action.

  Beside him Thomas Keith, almost as long-limbed but of a much slighter build, was as dark as the other was fair, with an almost Spanish darkness inherited from a Highland foremother, though he himself was from Edinburgh; a bony-faced young man with harsh angles at cheek and jaw, a wide mouth that was surprisingly mobile despite the un-boyish straightness of the lips; light grey eyes, level-set, and black-fringed with lashes that would have been the envy of any girl.

  Just now, with
a face of absorbed tenderness, he was cleaning his rifle.

  It was one of the new Baker rifles, a marksman’s weapon, normally only issued to certain regiments of the Light Brigade, and his possession of it, in place of one of the heavy muskets still issued to the Grenadier companies, testified to his skill as a shot, a skill which he had acquired to some extent even before he had run away to join the army three years ago.

  His hands busy with the rod and oily rag, his mind went back over those years to his seventeen-year-old self, to the scene in the parlour over his father’s shop on the night that had begun it all. The night his father had told him that, with Grandfather not two months cold in his grave, he had sold Broomrigg.

  Almost everything that he had and was, Thomas knew that he owed to his grandfather. Grandfather who at sixteen had been out with his father, following Prince Charles Edward Stuart, and had spent upwards of twenty exiled years in the French army, returning pardoned at last to marry the heiress of Broomrigg. Grandfather who out of the gathered skills of those exile years had taught him sword-play and the handling of firearms and better French than the visiting master at Leith Academy could do. Grandfather who had talked Father into apprenticing him to Mr Sempill, the gunsmith, instead of keeping him with his elder brother Jamie at the watchmaking. Grandfather who had taught him to ride on Flambeau.

  But Flambeau had gone with the rest. He would never ride the big bay again, feeling the living power between his knees, the demand and response as though he and the horse were one; never feel the thrusting velvet muzzle in the hollow of his apple-bearing hand; never go back to Broomrigg, walking the six miles there and the six miles back on Sundays and holidays that had lit the rest of the week for him.