Anyway, Brunhild finally figured out old Regin Fafnirsbruder’d flown the coop. She didn’t rub her eyes or go “I can’t believe it” or anything like that. She just sort of shrugged her shoulders, so the chain mail went clink-clank again, and she said, “Curse his foul sorcery.”
Then she remembered I was there. I swear to God, I wouldn’t’ve been sorry if she’d forgotten. She walked over to me, that crazy armor jingling every step she took, and she looked up into my face. Like I said before, she didn’t have to look up very goddam far, on account of she had almost as much heighth as I did.
“You came through the fire for me,” she said. “You did it unwittingly, I think, and aided by Regin Fafnirsbruder’s magecraft, but the wherefores matter only so much. What bears greater weight is that you did it.”
“Yeah, I guess I did.”
Old Brunhild nodded. The sun shone off her helmet like a spotlight off the bell of a trombone in a nightclub. She took this deep breath. “However it was done, it was done. As I said when first you woke me, if you would claim me for your bride, you may.” And she looked at me like if I was crumby enough to do it, she’d spit in my eye, honest to God she did.
Isn’t that a bastard? Isn’t that a bastard and a half, as a matter of fact? Here’s this girl—and she’s a pretty girl, she really is, especially if you like blondes about the size of football players—and she was saying, “Yeah, you can give me the time, all right, and I won’t say boo,” only I know she’ll hate me forever if I do. And when old Brunhild hated somebody, she didn’t do it halfway. Ask Regin Fafnirsbruder if you don’t believe me, for crying out loud. And she was holding on to that sword so tight, her knuckles were white. They really were.
I said, “When I woke you up back there, in that crazy old castle and all, didn’t you tell me you were in there waiting for Sieg—for somebody?” I couldn’t even remember what the hell his name was, not to save my life.
“For Siegfried.” Old Brunhild’s face went all gooey again. I’d kind of like to have a girl look that way when she says my name—or else I’d like to puke, one. I’m not sure which, I swear.
“Well,” I said, “in that case maybe you’d better go on back in there and wait some more, dontcha think?”
She swung up that old sword again. I got ready to run like a madman, I’m not kidding. But she didn’t do any chopping—it was some kind of crazy salute instead. “Ja,” she said, just like old Regin Fafnirsbruder, and then she put the sword back in the sheath. “I will do that.” And then she leaned forward and stood up on tiptoe—just a little, on account of she was pretty goddam tall, like I say—and she kissed me right on the end of the nose.
Girls. They drive you nuts, they really do. I don’t even think they mean to sometimes, but they do anyway.
I wanted to grab her and give her a real kiss, but I didn’t quite have the nerve. I’m always too slow at that kind of stuff. Old Brunhild, she nodded to me once, and then she walked on back through the fire like it wasn’t even there. I heard the door close. I bet she laid down on that old sofa again and fell asleep waiting for old Sieg-whatever to get done with whatever he was doing and come around to give her a call.
As soon as that door closed, I decided I wanted to kiss her after all. I ran toward the ring of fire, and I damn near—damn near—burned my nose off. I couldn’t go through it, not any more.
No Brunhild. Damn. I shoulda laid her, or at least kissed her. I’m always too goddam slow, for crying out loud. I swear to God, it’s the story of my life. No Regin Fafnirsbruder, either. I don’t know where the hell he went, or when he’s coming back, or if he’s ever coming back.
If he’s not, I’m gonna be awful goddam late making that Rhine boat connection to old Düsseldorf.
What’s left here? A crumby castle I can’t get into and that little tiny town down there by the river where Isenstein used to be or will be or whatever the hell it is. That’s it. I wish I’d paid more attention in history class, I really do.
Well, what the hell? I started towards old—or I guess I mean new—Isenstein. I wonder if they’ve invented scotch yet. I swear, I really wish I’d paid more attention in history class.
Jesus Christ, they’re bound to have beer at least, right?
THE DAIMON
This one first appeared in a Roc alternate-history anthology of novellas, Worlds That Weren’t. In real history, Alkibiades had to abandon command of Athens’ expedition against Syracuse in the Peloponnesian War because of scandal back home. Here, things change because Sokrates accompanies the force. The world that results is quite different. In a piece like this, trying to get the little details right from a distance of 2,400 years is half the challenge and more than half the fun.
Simon the shoemaker’s shop stood close to the southwestern corner of the Athenian agora, near the boundary stone marking the edge of the market square and across a narrow dirt lane from the Tholos, the round building where the executive committee of the Boulê met. Inside the shop, Simon pounded iron hobnails into the sole of a sandal. His son worked with an awl, shaping bone eyelets through which rawhide laces would go. Two grandsons cut leather for more shoes.
Outside, in the shade of an olive tree, a man in his mid-fifties strode back and forth, arguing with a knot of younger men and youths. He was engagingly ugly: bald, heavy-browed, snub-nosed, with a gray beard that should have been more neatly trimmed. “And so you see, my friends,” he was saying, “my daimon has told me that this choice does indeed come from the gods, and that something great may spring from it. Thus, though I love you and honor you, I shall obey the spirit inside me rather than you.”
“But, Sokrates, you have already given Athens all she could want of you,” exclaimed Kritias, far and away the most prominent of the men gathered there and, next to Sokrates, the eldest. “You fought at Potidaia and Delion and Amphipolis. But the last of those battles was seven years ago. You are neither so young nor so strong as you used to be. You need not go to Sicily. Stay here in the polis. Your wisdom is worth more to the city than your spear ever could be.”
The others dipped their heads in agreement. A youth whose first beard was just beginning to darken his cheeks said, “He speaks for all of us, Sokrates. We need you here more than the expedition ever could.”
“How can one man speak for another, Xenophon?” Sokrates asked. Then he held up a hand. “Let that be a question for another time. The question for now is, why should I be any less willing to fight for my polis than, say, he is?”
He pointed to a hoplite tramping past in front of Simon’s shop. The infantryman wore his crested bronze helm pushed back on his head, so the cheekpieces and noseguard did not hide his face. He rested the shaft of his long thrusting spear on his shoulder; a shortsword swung from his hip. Behind him, a slave carried his corselet and greaves and round, bronze-faced shield.
Kritias abandoned the philosophic calm he usually kept up in Sokrates’ company. “To the crows with Alkibiades!” he burst out. “He didn’t ask you to sail with him to Sicily for the sake of your strong right arm. He just wants you for the sake of your conversation, the same way as he’ll probably bring along a hetaira to keep his bed warm. You’re going for the sake of his cursed vanity—no other reason.”
“No.” Sokrates tossed his head. “I am going because it is important that I go. So my daimon tells me. I have listened to it all my life, and it has never led me astray.”
“We’re not going to change his mind now,” one of the young men whispered to another. “When he gets that look in his eye, he’s stubborn as a donkey.”
Sokrates glanced toward the herm in front of Simon’s shop: a stone pillar with a crude carving of Hermes’ face at the top and the god’s genitals halfway down. “Guard me well, patron of travelers,” he murmured.
“Be careful you don’t get your nose or your prong knocked off, Sokrates, the way a lot of the herms did last year,” somebody said.
“Yes, and people say Alkibiades was hip-deep in that sacrilege, t
oo,” Kritias added. A considerable silence followed. Kritias was hardly the one to speak of sacrilege. He was at least as scornful of the gods as Alkibiades; he’d once claimed priests had invented them to keep ordinary people in line.
But, instead of rising to that, Sokrates only said, “Have we not seen, O best one, that we should not accept what is said without first attempting to learn how much truth it holds?” Kritias went red, then turned away in anger. If Sokrates noticed, he gave no sign.
I am the golden one.
Alkibiades looked at the triremes and transports in Athens’ harbor, Peiraieus. All sixty triremes and forty transport ships about to sail for Sicily were as magnificent as their captains could make them. The eyes painted at their bows seemed to look eagerly toward the west. The ships were long and low and sleek, lean almost as eels. Some skippers had polished the three-finned, bronze-faced rams at their bows so they were a gleaming, coppery red rather than the usual green that almost matched the sea. Paint and even gilding ornamented curved stemposts and sternposts with fanlike ends.
Hoplites boarded the transports, which were triremes with the fittings for their two lower banks of oars removed to make more room for the foot soldiers. Now and then, before going up the gangplanks and into the ships, the men would pause to embrace kinsmen or youths who were dear to them or even hetairai or wives who, veiled against the public eye, had ventured forth for this farewell.
A hundred ships. More than five thousand hoplites. More than twelve thousand rowers. Mine. Every bit of it mine, Alkibiades thought.
He stood at the stern of his own ship, the Thraseia. Even thinking of the name made him smile. What else would he call his ship but Boldness? If any one trait distinguished him, that was it.
Every so often, a soldier on the way to a transport would wave to him. He always smiled and waved back. Admiration was as essential to him as the air he breathed. And I deserve every bit I get, too.
He was thirty-five, the picture of what a man—or perhaps a god—should look like. He’d been the most beautiful boy in Athens, the one all the men wanted. He threw back his head and laughed, remembering the pranks he’d played on some of the rich fools who wanted to be his lover. A lot of boys lost their looks when they came into manhood. Not me, he thought complacently. He remained every bit as splendid, if in a different way—still the target of every man’s eye . . . and every woman’s.
A hoplite trudged by, helmet on his head: a sturdy, wide-shouldered fellow with a gray beard. He carried his own armor and weapons, and didn’t seem to be bringing a slave along to attend to him while on campaign. Even though Sokrates had pushed back the helm, as a man did when not wearing it into battle, it made Alkibiades need an extra heartbeat or two to recognize him.
“Hail, O best one!” Alkibiades called.
Sokrates stopped and dipped his head in polite acknowledgment. “Hail.”
“Where are you bound?”
“Why, to Sicily: so the Assembly voted, and so we shall go.”
Alkibiades snorted. Sokrates could be most annoying when he was most literal, as the younger man had found out studying with him. “No, my dear. That’s not what I meant. Where are you bound now?”
“To a transport. How else shall I go to Sicily? I cannot swim so far, and I doubt a dolphin would bear me up, as one did for Arion long ago.”
“How else shall you go?” Alkibiades said grandly. “Why, here aboard the Thraseia with me, of course. I’ve had the decking cut away to make the ship lighter and faster—and to give more breeze below it. And I’ve slung a hammock down there, and I can easily sling another for you, my dear. No need to bed down on hard planking.”
Sokrates stood there and started to think. When he did that, nothing and no one could reach him till he finished. The fleet might sail without him, and he would never notice. He’d thought through a day and a night up at Potidaia years before, not moving or speaking. Here, though, only a couple of minutes went by before he came out of his trance. “Which other hoplites will go aboard your trireme?” he asked.
“Why, no others—only rowers and marines and officers,” Alkibiades answered with a laugh. “We can, if you like, sleep under one blanket, as we did up in the north.” He batted his eyes with an alluring smile.
Most Athenians would have sailed with him forever after an offer like that. Sokrates might not even have heard it. “And how many hoplites will be aboard the other triremes of the fleet?” he inquired.
“None I know of,” Alkibiades said.
“Then does it not seem to you, O marvelous one, that the proper place for rowers and marines is aboard the triremes, while the proper place for hoplites is aboard the transports?” Having solved the problem to his own satisfaction, Sokrates walked on toward the transports. Alkibiades stared after him. After a moment, he shook his head and laughed again.
Once the Athenians sneaked a few soldiers into Katane by breaking down a poorly built gate, the handful of men in it who supported Syracuse panicked and fled south toward the city they favored. That amused Alkibiades, for he hadn’t got enough men into the Sicilian polis to seize it in the face of a determined resistance. Boldness, he thought again. Always boldness. With the pro-Syracusans gone, Katane promptly opened its gates to the Athenian expeditionary force.
The polis lay about two-thirds of the way down from Messane at the northern corner of Sicily to Syracuse. Mount Aetna dominated the northwestern horizon, a great cone shouldering its way up into the sky. Even with spring well along, snow still clung to the upper slopes of the volcano. Here and there, smoke issued from vents in the flanks and at the top. Every so often, lava would gush from them. When it flowed in the wrong direction, it destroyed the Katanians’ fields and olive groves and vineyards. If it flowed in exactly the wrong direction, it would destroy their town.
Alkibiades felt like the volcano himself after another fight with Nikias. The Athenians had sent Nikias along with the expedition to serve as an anchor for Alkibiades. He knew it, knew it and hated it. He didn’t particularly hate Nikias himself; he just found him laughable, to say nothing of irrelevant. Nikias was twenty years older than he, and those twenty years might just as well have been a thousand.
Nikias dithered and worried and fretted. Alkibiades thrust home. Nikias gave reverence to the gods with obsessive piety, and did nothing without checking the omens first. Alkibiades laughed at the gods when he didn’t ignore them. Nikias had opposed this expedition to Sicily. It had been Alkibiades’ idea.
“We were lucky ever to take this place,” Nikias had grumbled. He kept fooling with his beard, as if he had lice. For all Alkibiades knew, he did.
“Yes, my dear,” Alkibiades had said with such patience as he could muster. “Luck favors us. We should—we had better—take advantage of it. Ask Lamakhos. He’ll tell you the same.” Lamakhos was the other leading officer in the force. Alkibiades didn’t despise him. He wasn’t worth despising. He was just . . . dull.
“I don’t care what Lamakhos thinks,” Nikias had said testily. “I think we ought to thank the gods we’ve come this far safely. We ought to thank them, and then go home.”
“And make Athens the laughingstock of Hellas?” And make me the laughingstock of Hellas? “Not likely!”
“We cannot do what we came to Sicily to do,” Nikias had insisted.
“You were the one who told the Assembly we needed such a great force. Now we have it, and you still aren’t happy with it?”
“I never dreamt they would be mad enough actually to send so much.”
Alkibiades hadn’t hit him then. He might have, but he’d been interrupted. A commotion outside made both men hurry out of Alkibiades’ tent. “What is it?” Alkibiades called to a man running his way. “Is the Syracusan fleet coming up to fight us?” It had stayed in the harbor when an Athenian reconnaissance squadron sailed south a couple of weeks before. Maybe the Syracusans hoped to catch the Athenian triremes beached and burn or wreck them. If they did, they would get a nasty surprise.
> But the Athenian tossed his head. “It’s not the polluted Syracusans,” he answered. “It’s the Salaminia. She’s just come into the harbor here.”
“The Salaminia?” Alkibiades and Nikias spoke together, and in identical astonishment. The Salaminia was Athens’ official state trireme, and wouldn’t venture far from home except on most important business. Sure enough, peering toward the harbor, Alkibiades could see her crew dragging her out of the sea and up onto the yellow sand of the beach. “What’s she doing here?” he asked.
Nikias eyed him with an expression compounded of equal parts loathing and gloating. “I’ll bet I know,” the older man said. “I’ll bet they found someone who told the citizens of Athens the real story, the true story, of how the herms all through the polis were profaned.”
“I had nothing to do with that,” Alkibiades said. He’d said the same thing ever since the mutilations happened. “And besides,” he added, “just about as many of the citizens of Athens are here in Sicily as are back at the polis.”
“You can’t evade like that,” Nikias said. “You remind me of your dear teacher Sokrates, using bad logic to beat down good.”
Alkibiades stared at him as if he’d found him squashed on the sole of his sandal. “What you say about Sokrates would be a lie even if you’d thought of it yourself. But it comes from Aristophanes’ Clouds, and you croak it out like a raven trained to speak but without the wit to understand its words.”
Nikias’ cheeks flamed red as hot iron beaten on the anvil. Alkibiades would have liked to beat him. Instead, he contemptuously turned his back. But that pointed his gaze toward the Salaminia again. Athenians down there on the shore were pointing up to the high ground on which he stood. A pair of men whose gold wreaths declared they were on official business made their way toward him.
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