A group of us stayed up through the night with Teucer, for there was anxiety that if left alone he might try to harm himself. Thus the men at least were rather sullen with excess of wine the next morning, when in the gray light the murdered woman’s corpse, wrapped in linen and purified with wine and spices, was laid upon a pyre which Teucer, as her husband, set to the torch.
The logs were from a fresh-cut beech tree, still full of pitch so they burned hot and fast. It was not even two hours before the ashes were cool enough to allow us to gather up Ctimene’s bones for burial in a bronze jar.
Epeios rode back to his own farm by a different route, and thus Selana and I were alone together in the wagon as we drove home in silence.
At last, when she attempted to say something, she began to weep. I put my arm across her trembling shoulders, holding the reins with my free hand.
“You do well to weep,” I hold her. “And not only for Ctimene’s sake. I am very afraid these may be the last days of peace.”
XXV
The embassy from the Greeks included five others besides myself, and the Lord of the Sicels kept us waiting in the courtyard of his stronghold for three days. Halitherses, who had been on terms of friendship with Ducerius’ father, was almost as much overcome by the insult as by the hardship of being forced at his age to sleep so many nights on the cold ground. When the time came for speaking, the old man could hardly find his voice.
“Great King, we are oppressed,” he said, looking up with watery blue eyes to where Ducerius stood, surrounded by retainers, at the top of the stone staircase before the great double doorway of his palace—he would not even admit us to a formal audience but only stopped for a few moments on his way to an afternoon of hunting. “We are beset by robbers who raid our farms and murder our women and our young children. Now no man feels safe in his own home, and we have nowhere to look for salvation but to you. Drive these brigands from the land, O King. Let us find our protection behind the strength of your sword, and your people will bless you!”
It was a fine speech, but anyone could see that Ducerius was little impressed. He hardly even waited for the old man to finish before dismissing his words with an impatient movement of his arm.
“You are not my people—you are Greeks.”
He smiled tightly and glanced about, as if he had made a jest and was waiting to hear the laughter of his retainers. A few of them actually did laugh.
“I have not soldiers enough to guard every farm,” he went on, turning suddenly wrathful, scowling around at us as if we had accused him of a weakness. “And, besides, if my people resent foreigners who grow rich at their expense, how am I to restrain them?”
“Show us what we have taken away from any man and he will have restitution from us. How have we diminished the Sicels when we work the land as they do, earning our bread with our sweat? You wrong us, Great King.”
Halitherses spoke less in anger than in sorrow and disappointment, for he remembered the father even as he was constrained to listen to the son’s bitter words. He lowered his eyes to the ground, quite as though Ducerius’ bad faith had been his own.
“My Lord, you misunderstand us,” I said, once it appeared that Halitherses had been silenced—I could hardly do otherwise since I happened to be standing beside the old man and the king had fastened his attention on me, almost daring me to answer him, as if this were all a purely private quarrel between myself and him. “We would not have your soldiers wasted in guarding us—we would have you send them into the mountains to root out these brigands. . .”
“Yes!” shouted Diocles, just behind me, raising his fist in a gesture of angry defiance—since he was a Spartan, his friends forgave him these outbursts of intemperance. “Yes, the mountains! No man keeps watch on his chickens when he knows where the fox digs her den.”
The king shifted his gaze for perhaps a second—that was all the acknowledgment Diocles was to receive—and then his eyes returned to my face.
“You ask then that I make war on your behalf,” he said, in a voice of the deadliest calm.
“Does My Lord’s notion of war encompass running to earth a handful of renegades? I should rather have thought that, as a hunter, he might relish a few days of good sport.”
Ducerius did not relish the laughter this raised, even among his own men. With an imperious gesture he compelled them to silence.
“It is sport I willingly leave to you, Tiglath Ashur, since you regard it so lightly. I hope the Greeks are pleased to have found such a champion.”
He swept down the stone steps and away, surrounded by his entourage, leaving us to gape at each other in frustrated silence.
“I would not have thought it possible,” Halitherses muttered, to himself as much as to us. “I never imagined he would have thus turned his face from so plain a duty.”
“By the Mouse God’s navel, I do not know why you are so surprised, old man. The king’s character has never been much of a mystery. The only duty he understands is to himself.”
Diocles’ words were met with a general murmur of assent.
“Come—let us not stand about here like penitents. We must make our report to the assembly. We must decide what we are to do.”
. . . . .
Even in those times the Festival of Mounichion was celebrated in Naxos with games and a market day. The first ceremony of the morning was a procession of young girls in saffron robes who danced before the altar of Artemis, where goats and wild birds were sacrificed in the purifying fire. This everyone attended. Afterwards, since the remaining rites were the natural province of women, who are most particularly devoted to the cult, the men were free to try their prowess against each other in various contests. I took the first prize in both archery and javelin throwing, considered auspicious victories as the goddess is a great patron of hunting, but I finished a miserable sixth in the foot race, and my place in the longjump is perhaps best passed over in silence.
But after we had amused ourselves, and then adjourned to the baths to sweat ourselves clean again, every Greek male over the age of twenty and in possession of more than one hundred drachma in goods or coin met in solemn assembly to settle what was to be done about the raiding brigands—this was the real purpose which had brought us all together.
Since Naxos was too small for each god to be worshiped within his own precincts, most of their festivals were celebrated in the streets. Only the shrine of Dionysos had an amphitheater attached to it, and thus, after the sun had set and darkness covered the world, some four hundred men crowded over its tiers of stone seats, our faces illuminated by the flickering, unearthly light of numberless torches. I sat next to Kephalos, who had that day won enough money dicing to put to rest any doubts concerning his right to be there, and as I looked back at the black hills surrounding this place I could not help but wonder how many spies Ducerius had set to listening out there in the shadows.
Epeios, whom I had not seen since our audience with the king and who now occupied the place just behind me, put his hand on my shoulder and leaned forward until his mouth was almost at my ear.
“Did you hear that Teucer killed himself yesterday?” he asked. “Some neighbors found him this morning, on their way to the festival.”
“No, I had not heard,” I answered, feeling the chill of mortality.
“He took poison. It could not have been an accident—they said he was stretched out over his wife’s grave with the wine cup still clutched in his hands. They said the dregs stank of hemlock.”
He leaned back and appeared to forget all about it. I turned away, oddly troubled, feeling as if somehow I had become involved in the guilt for this death, as if Teucer had taken his life in response to some collective failure from which I could not extricate myself.
At last old Halitherses, who had been sitting in the first tier of seats, rose and turned to face us, ready to speak. He raised his hand, craving the indulgence of our attention, and so great was the respect in which he was held that the assembly of
the Greeks at once fell silent.
“I am here to report that our embassy was without success,” he began, allowing his arm to sink slowly back down to his side. “The king, the Lord Ducerius, has closed his eyes to our necessity. He abandons us to our own defenses. He refuses to take our part against the brigands.”
There was so general an outcry at this that Halitherses did not even try to continue. For a moment he stood before us, like a rock against which the storm breaks its force, and then finally he resumed his seat, conceding, in effect, that the problem had exhausted him, that no words of his, no action within his power, could be of any use to us. It was like watching a man resign himself to death.
“What did they expect?” Kephalos murmured to me. “They sent you on a fruitless mission, and now they put the blame on Halitherses.”
“They blame him because he hoped for success,” I answered.
Suddenly a man I had never seen before, and whose name I later learned was Peisenor, jumped to his feet, waving his arms above his head to command attention.
“The king must be compelled,” he shouted. “Let us withhold our taxes from him until he agrees to protect us—that will bring him around quickly enough!”
“Oh surely—and if he sends a company of his soldiers to your farm? I prefer to be plundered by only one set of bandits.”
“It is a fool who puts himself between the hammer and the anvil.”
So then it was Peisenor’s turn to be hooted into silence.
There were other suggestions, equally servile and self-defeating, and the debate was long, with many bitter exchanges as we wore away the night. It was even proposed that we bribe Ducerius, offering to pay his soldiers if he kept the peace. I listened in silence, anger gathering in my bowels like the poison in Teucer’s wine cup.
Finally Epeios rose and proposed that we send a delegation to the brigands.
“Surely they can be bought off,” he said, hooking his thumbs into the belt of his tunic. “Let us discover what terms they will accept, that we may once more live in peace.”
I could hear low voices all around me, murmuring assent—the Greeks liked this plan.
“Then do not ask me to be one of this embassy,” shouted Diocles. “For it does not take a clever man to know that I and all the rest would come home in pieces. If Ducerius will not grant us peace, what makes anyone think the brigands will?”
“Diocles is a fool!” someone cried out. “Yes, yes,” came another voice, and then another and another. “Diocles is a fool!”
There was a general roar of laughter. Diocles, choking with rage, was forced to sit down again. All he said was no more than a great joke. I kept remembering the sense of shame I had felt at the news of Teucer’s death.
“Diocles may be a fool, but at least he has not forgotten how to be a man,” I bellowed, on my feet before I even realized I had any intention of speaking. “Would you set two masters over yourselves? Is not one bad enough? Would you make treaties with those who have butchered your women and children? And what price do you think they will ask of you? And what price next year, and the year after next? If rabbits get into a man’s garden, does he put food out for them? No, by the gods, he turns his dogs loose!”
“His victories today have gone to Tiglath’s head. He fancies that because he can throw a javelin he has become a hero of legend.”
I turned and saw that it was Peisenor who spoke. He was smiling, as if somehow he had redeemed himself.
A few laughed, but not many—I think finally they had begun to feel ashamed.
“What would you do, Tiglath?” asked Epeios.
“Do?” Now I laughed, although I felt little enough like jesting. “What would I do? I would take a hundred men, or two hundred if that was what the task demanded, and I would hunt the brigands in their dens and kill them there. That is what I would do.”
They did not shout me down. I kept my feet, but all around me there was the sound of angry disagreement, like the buzzing of wasps that have been disturbed in their nest.
At last the noise subsided, and I was left to finish.
“Sooner or later—and I pray it will not be too late—you will discover that there is nothing else to do. But if you wait, if you crawl to embrace the knees of these men who will then be so merciful as to cut your throats slowly, so that you bleed to death only a few drops at a time, then you can take this shame upon yourselves alone. I shall wait until the Greeks have grown tired of being women, and on that day they will know where to look for me. But until then I will not lie with my face in the dirt, waiting for thieves and murderers to break my back when it should please them. Believe me when I say that I will not meekly submit to pillage. If they come to me I will know how to deal with them.”
I did not linger to hear if they cared to answer, for by then I had had a bellyful of their words. What they shouted after me as I strode down the stone tiers and out of the amphitheater was in my ears as no more than the sound of rushing water.
. . . . .
I have often wondered since if my own final boast did not bring down upon me all that happened next, if perhaps the listening gods, or perhaps only King Ducerius, decided to test my mettle against the bold sound of my words. If that can be so, then I think it must have been Ducerius, for the gods can see into our hearts easily enough and know how to set far more cunning traps for a man’s pride.
Yet certainly Kephalos thought that I had tempted fate. All the way home, as he sat in the back of the wagon between Enkidu and the peacefully sleeping Ganymedes, nursing a jar of yellowish local wine, he berated me for my lack of discretion.
“My Lord has a gift for attracting trouble,” he said, with more than usual asperity. “In Assyria, among the Chaldeans, in Egypt, in Sidon, and now here, in what must be our final place of refuge, you take upon yourself the enmity not only of a king and his bandit henchmen but even of the Greeks, our own countrymen and neighbors. Always you think to stand against trouble like a wall—and you, as a soldier of no small experience, should be familiar enough with the customary fate of walls. When will my Lord Tiglath Ashur forsake his vanity over having once been a prince and learn to exercise a little reasonable caution?”
It was only the middle of the afternoon when we arrived back at the farm, so Tullus and Icilius were still out laboring. And since the sun would hold above the horizon for at least another two hours, and the daylight is from the openhanded gods, who will not bless a man who spurns their gifts, Enkidu and I did not go into the house but stopped on the porch only long enough to wash our faces in the pan of water Selana brought out for us before we too left for the fields.
As we picked up our mattocks, Enkidu, his eyes narrowing as he shaded them with his hand, looked toward the eastern mountains. What he saw there, or merely sensed, I know not, but when he stepped back over to the wagon to fetch his ax, which he always kept by him, he lifted out my quiver of javelins as well and handed it to me.
I took them, for I knew that he was right and these were not the times for a man to walk about defenseless.
Since the wheat fields and the vegetable garden were by then well established, and the women had taken charge of the livestock, I had decided to yield to Kephalos’ advice—if so self-interested a suggestion can be called such—and to clear a patch of land by the river, well watered and with just the right amount of shade, and to plant vines there. We would have no grapes for another two years, and no wine for three, but one has to make a start.
Tullus and Icilius had been busy. A neat pile of stones stood near the water’s edge, and the earth was nearly all turned over and ready to receive the rooted plants. In a day or two we would construct long rows of wooden frames to give the tendrils something to climb over, and then, when Kephalos and I had selected and bought the right varieties of vine shoots, we would have to trust to time and careful tending. Vines are like a woman who knows her own value and must be wooed with patient tenderness, but perhaps that is why every farmer loves them above all else
that the hard ground yields to him.
We worked until dark, until the smoke from the hearth fires was almost invisible against the evening sky, and then we gathered up our tools and made ready to turn back toward the house.
“I think we would do well to plant a line of trees on the seaward side,” Tullus said, running his hand along the eastern horizon. “It will shelter the grapes from the wind. Otherwise their flavor may grow harsh in dry seasons.”
“If we plant trees today, it will be ten or fifteen years before they are full enough to do much good,” I pointed out.
“Yes, but if the vines take they will still be yielding fruit a hundred years after we are all dead—one must think of the future, Lord, and the generations to follow.”
“Then it shall be as you think best, Master Tullus, for you are wiser than I in such matters. When we are both old men and good for nothing except getting drunk on the veranda every afternoon, we shall know if your trees were worth the labor.”
He smiled, a willing, open boy’s smile, pleased to have been judged right and pleased all the more, I believe, to think of himself as having earned a place here that would last out his life.
It was a warm twilight and I could almost imagine I smelled our dinner cooking, for my appetite was sharp. I had forgiven the Greeks their cowardice, or, more accurately, I had simply forgotten their existence. I was looking forward to dinner, and after that to drinking wine—but not enough wine to dull the senses—and after that, to gathering Selana into my arms and experiencing how the pleasure of the embrace made her breath catch in her throat. I felt life to be a very fine thing indeed.
We had almost reached the edge of the farmyard. I did not guess that anything could be wrong until I heard horses neighing and the door of my house slamming shut.
This was followed almost at once by the high-pitched screams of a woman’s terror.
At such times the senses are as quick as fire. Even in that first instant, before a thought or an action formed in my mind, I understood with wonderful precision what was taking place. There were four riders. I had never seen any of them before, but they wore the short belted tunics of Sicels. One of them had already dismounted before the house and was loudly demanding that everyone come out, and the other three had caught Tanaquil outside and were trying to ride her down before she reached the barn. She was running in a blind panic, her arms stretched out before her as if she had to push her way through the air. They would have her in a few seconds.
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