He came that night, just as he had come the first night of all. But there was no smell of rain about him, only the smell of wine, for he had come, I suppose, straight from the Mess table. And he stood rocking on his heels and staring at me as though he had never seen me naked before, with the smile playing like summer lightning in the shadows at the corners of his mouth. I had half sprung up at his coming, but his look kept me sitting on the side of the bed-place.
He said, ‘Why do you look so startled? You sent for me, Timea.’
‘If you have no wish to see me,’ I said, ‘do you not wish to see our son?’
‘Surely. But I knew that he was born and all was well with him; and I have been busy of late. You will have heard that I am sailing with the Chios fleet.’
‘I have heard,’ I said. My voice sounded strange in my own ears. ‘I have been busy too. It is hard work to bear a child.’
He said, ‘The child, where —’ glancing about him.
I pointed to the little olive-wood cradle in the shadows beside the bedhead, and as he came towards it I got up and flung a cloak round me, and reached down the lamp from its stand to give him light to see by.
Leotichides lay on his side lapped in soft folds of deerskin, his thumb in his mouth. Alkibiades touched his cheek with one finger, and said, ‘Greetings, small son. In some ways it’s a pity that we shall not have a chance to improve our acquaintance.’
It was strange to stand there with him, leaning over the cradle, with the child asleep between us, and know that this was the last time we should be together.
‘He’s a fine baby,’ he said, and stepped back.
I made one last attempt to reach him. ‘Don’t go with the Chios fleet.’
‘Sparta isn’t the safest of places for me any more, my sweet.’
‘Safety? What do you care for safety?’ I said. Suddenly I was shaking. I set the lamp down on the chest top lest I should spill the oil. ‘Go on — but in the Mother’s name, be a little sad!’
And he said, ‘Timea, I’ll be as sad as you please, when I’ve time for it; just now my mind’s on other things.’
If I’d had a knife in my hand I think I would have stabbed him then. But I had only words to fight with. ‘This new venture — if it means so much more to you than my love —’
‘If! If — ye Gods, the conceit of women!’ he said. ‘This new venture as you call it, it means not only the escaping of death, it means life! Life, Timea!’
‘I could give you life —’
‘Not the life that is for me! Timea, did your mother never tell you that no woman should try to hold a man once he wants to go free?’
‘That’s a fine doctrine for me!’ I said. I had no pride left. I am sick with shame to remember it now; I would have clung to him, flung myself down and clutched his knees if it had seemed to me that there was hope in that. ‘You have told me what manner of son your wife bore you; I have borne you a son who will be King of Sparta!’
‘Never call on a man to do for gratitude what he will not do for love. That’s another thing your mother should have told you.’
I had begun to feel very cold, but I had stopped shaking. ‘Did you never love me at all?’
‘Of course I did! I loved you all last summer, and that is as long as I have ever loved any woman.’
And then I knew that I had been wrong when I thought that I was losing him to the Syracuse dead and to the Chios venture. I had never had him to lose. That was the bitter thing; not that it was over, but that it had never been. I stood looking at him in the lamplight, seeing the laughter in him; and thought clear and cold behind my forehead, that if I called in the guards and he was taken in my room, the thing would have passed out of my hands, and the Gods alone knew where it would end. And I had the child to think of as well as My Lord Alkibiades. So I said, ‘Go now! Go quickly, before I call the guard!’
He grinned at me with no more shame than a boy caught stealing eggs, and set his hands on the high sill of the window, and then he was gone.
Next day Dionyssa came to visit me. We sat in the sun in the women’s court, under the trained vine where the buds were breaking, and watched Leotichides waving vague arms and legs on a spread rug at our feet.
Dionyssa, who was with child and suffering miserably from sickness every morning, looked at him and said, ‘Ten months! Oh Timea, how did you endure it? All those extra days!’
And I caught her in my arms and said, ‘Oh Dionyssa, swear never to tell a soul! He was no more than nine months within me.’
She looked at me, startled. ‘But Agis —’
‘He is not the King’s,’ I said. ‘He should be called not Leotichides but Alkibiades. Oh Dionyssa, swear you will not betray me!’
She swore of course. She always swore not to reveal the secrets that I was fool enough to tell her when we were children. But I had learned many years since that Dionyssa could never keep a secret.
Just to make sure, I told three or four others of my friends and household in the next few days, choosing always the ones that had Dionyssa’s failing.
It is strange; it seemed to me at the time that I was thinking very clearly and coldly; but now, looking back, I know that I was only striking out blind, and all my thinking was confusion. I thought, ‘They will have no proof; I shall deny everything, but the seed will be cast and blow where the wind carries it.’ And I thought, ‘The messengers will have reached Agis before this, both the Ephors’, and mine; but if just a little doubt keeps open in his mind until I can see him and talk with him, we may yet be safe, the child and I. If not, maybe he will kill me, but that is so in any case; the odds against me have only worsened a little because of what I told Dionyssa; but he will take no chances with Alkibiades. He will die, that one — a regrettable accident, maybe. He will not sail for Chios.’
And I sacrificed a black puppy to Artemis Orthia, and prayed, ‘Oh Mother, Lady of the Lashes, Lady of the Lions, give me his life! And if need be take mine in quittance!’
The King
I got word at last of what had been doing in Sparta all winter without any report of it being sent to me — to me, the King! It was the Ephorate of course, showing me their power because for once I had acted as a King and not a mere figurehead, sending ships to Lesbos without waiting for the express leave of the home government. I swore I’d have blood for that insult, but that must wait. I broke off my own negotiations with Pharnobazus, and leaving Dekalia safely garrisoned behind me, came down to Corinth, where I found the Allied Fleet assembled in the harbour, thirty-nine triremes in all. Sparta had sent up Alkmenes, who I am bound to say would have been my own choice, and two others, to oversee the mustering. And from them I learned details of the Spartan squadron about to sail under the command of Chalcidius, with Alkibiades as his official adviser — that swashbuckling Athenian who I had left virtually a prisoner. How the change had come about, none of them seemed very clear; and there was no point in troubling about that now. There was nothing to be done but get the Allied Fleet under way as quickly as possible, in the hope of making Chios before our Spartan squadron. If I could do that I would have won the game. If not, the Ephors were my masters — and the Gods damn them! They are to this day!
I took command at once; and since the weather is still chancy at that time of year, ordered that for the sake of speed the whole fleet should be portaged by the great haul across the Isthmus, rather than sailing round the Peloponnese as had been intended. But when I gave the order I met with blank faces, and a courteous deputation from the City Council. The Isthmean Games had just begun, and while the Truce of the Games lasted, certainly while the actual three-day Games were in progress, they could not allow the use of the portage-way for a war fleet.
To do so would be to risk the anger of Poseidon in whose honour they are held.
‘Then give me leave to work the portage with my own men,’ I said. ‘I’ll take full responsibility along with the command, and if Poseidon is angry, let his anger fall on me, I’ll risk
it.’
They refused, smiling still; and invited me to a dinner in my honour and to watch the Games next day. It was like battering one’s head against a well-padded wall!
We sat on our rumps for two days, until the Games were over; and then at last the Council gave orders to the portage authority, and the first of the ship-carriages was manoeuvered into position and the first galley floated on to it and trundled up on to the portage way. By evening the first of the fleet was within sight of the Saronic Gulf, and there were seven vessels already on the track. The Corinthians know how to handle their ship traverse, I’ll say that for them. I had not seen the portage in action before, and went up with some of the fleet officers to the highest point (but none of it rises much above sea level) to see how all went forward. And I was impressed. There is always something impressive in the sight of many men working as one coherent whole, especially with something which, if it once gets out of control, will spread death and havoc all about it. I had watched three ships go by, and was watching a fourth come up — the long lines of the hauling teams bent double and moving in time to the chanty man who led them, and the whips of the slave-drivers who moved alongside. The galley, chocked up on its sled, came steadily on up the gradual slope, the drag-rope team following behind, the watermen with their great dripping ox-hides filled from cisterns along the way, keeping the traverse-grooves running wet and dashing the runners to lessen the charring. Even so the steam and the smitch billowed up, mingling with the smell of the parched pale earth and the camomile flowers along the edge of the cut. And the dust rose and hung over everything.
I saw a young man come quickly up the hillside from the direction of Corinth, and knew by the blood colour of his tunic that he was a Spartan, and from the way he walked, that he was saddle sore. He came up to me and saluted, and the men with me fell back a little to give us speaking space.
‘Permission to speak, sir,’ he said, and when I nodded, ‘I am sent by the Council of Ephors to bring you the happiest of news, that Timea the Queen has borne you a fine healthy son!’
I felt as though one of the water-skins meant for the sledge runners had been dashed over me. The fourth ship had drawn almost level with us and I had to walk away, for the roar and creak of the carriage and the shouts of the drivers made it all but impossible to hear him; and that gave me a few moments of respite. Then he was offering me the congratulations of the Ephors. And all the while, as he looked me in the eyes, we both knew, as all Sparta must know, that if the Queen had borne a son, he was not mine. I thought he smiled a little. He never knew, that boy, how near he was to death, up there on the shallow hillside above the portage way … I bade him return to the city, and then turned back myself to watch the galley lurch past over the highest point of the track; while already, far down the cut, the next was coming into view.
I don’t think, despite my threat, I would have touched Timea, even if she had stood before me at that moment. She had done what many women do when their husbands are long away, and the thought of her woman-flesh sickened me anyway. I was not the only man who would return home to father a child born more than nine months after he marched away; but I was the King. Some raider had taken what was the King’s. Mine! Mine to me! A little hammer was beating behind my forehead; beating and beating out the question — what man in Sparta would have taken that which was the King’s? And wherever I looked, the same face looked back at me. Alkibiades! I knew now the meaning of that look, at our last meeting.
I remembered my old bitch going to him; that time it was the bitch I had kicked, and Alkibiades had gone free. But standing up there beside the portage way, I swore before Zeus and before Artemis Orthia that he should not go free again. One of the men with me asked me if I was ill. The fool! I cursed him, and stood to watch the next ship go by, and thought of Alkibiades’ hard brown body flung across the nearest traverse groove, and the sledge runners spattered and sodden with blood and offal. It was a good thought. But there were plenty of other ways. I did not care how long it took to bring him to his death, so that it was I who brought him to it in the end.
The Spartan
The scandal about Alkibiades and the Queen finally broke wide open just at the time that Alkmenes’ messenger arrived on the last of the relay horses that had been kept ready for him, with word that the Allied Fleet had sailed from the Isthmus, and orders for our own five to put out to meet him, or rather to meet Agis the King, who had arrived and taken over the command. The scandal made a magnificent excuse for my fellow Ephors; and I have never known them work so fast as they did in stripping Alkibiades of his fleet appointment.
Alkibiades came to me raging. ‘Hell and Night’s Daughters! What am I to do? Sit here in my cage again until Agis has leisure to come home and hang me?’
‘You should have thought of that before you started picking forbidden fruit,’ I said. ‘Incidentally, why do your scandals always blow up just as your fleets are about to sail?’
He glared at me. ‘I was bored! Ye Gods! How bored I was. And there was a warm ripe Queen for the plucking; and the chance of fathering the next King of Sparta. What would you have me do?’
‘The question is rather,’ I said, ‘what shall you do now? Timea, whatever she lets drop to her friends, will undoubtedly deny the whole thing to Agis, and he’ll never be able to be quite sure. He was drunk on his wedding night, and first children have been carried ten months before now, if the talk of the women’s quarters is true.’
‘My dear Endius, do you really expect me to remember and play up to a story like that? I might just as well tell the truth. Agis will find means to kill me if he once gets his paws on me — on the off chance, as it were. No, if I don’t fancy dying in Sparta — and to be quite frank with you, I don’t, it’s an unpleasant place to live in and it would be an equally unpleasant place to die in — I’ve got to get out.’
‘There’s one point you’re overlooking,’ I said. ‘The King has taken command; supposing that you do continue to turn Fortune round in her tracks and still sail with the Spartan squadron, you’ll be joining a fleet under Agis’ command. That doesn’t sound to me like safety.’
‘Better take my chance that way than caged here waiting for the end.’
‘You’re mad!’ I said.
‘Fortune sometimes favours the mad. She generally favours me at sea.’
‘The question remains — how do you propose to get to sea?’
But suddenly Alkibiades’ fury had left him; and he flung up his head and laughed. ‘I have, at the moment, not the least idea. And when a man reaches that stage, it is time to rely on the Gods — or luck! I shall rely on my famous luck to cast something up for me before the squadron sails.’
‘Then she’d better work fast,’ I said, ‘with the squadron sailing in the morning.’
And she did — somewhat expensively for Sparta.
Before the night was out, another messenger came in at foundering point — no relays waiting for him — with tidings of disaster. The Athenians at the Isthmean Games must have kept their eyes open and their wits about them, and sent home word of what they saw. So the Allied Fleet had been met by a hurriedly scraped-up Athenian one, under a mere trirarch, Konon by name, and driven aground in one of the bays below Epidauras, where they were now blockaded. Agis, quite sensibly, had left them there and was returning to Sparta to take over the war plans from this end. But it was hard to see what he could do.
Sailing orders were immediately cancelled and a meeting of the Council called. In the grey dawn light the situation looked damnable, and the gathering of unshaven men in hastily flung on cloaks decided that whatever the King’s orders when he returned, to send the Spartan squadron now would only be to lose five more ships. For the present at least, the Chios expedition was off. The orders went to the fleet.
I got home to find Alkibiades waiting for me in my own quarters, unshaved and hurriedly dressed as the Ephorate, but blazing with eagerness. I never knew a man who could catch fire and kindle the fools
around him as that one could! He was pacing up and down when I came in; but he swung round and caught me by the shoulders. ‘What decision?’
I told him; and he made an impatient gesture dismissing it. He must have known all along what it would be. ‘That’s madness, of course. If you delay now, the news of the Allied Fleet aground and blockaded will get out, and your chance will be gone for ever. Chalcidius must sail this evening, and with me beside him.’
‘You?’ I said, and laughed in his face.
‘Listen!’ he said. ‘We talked of this before. Your credit, your whole position in relation to our friend Agis depends now on this Ionian revolt; and an Ionian revolt can’t succeed without the Satrap’s support. You know well enough that I’m the only man in Sparta who can get it for you.’ He flung away from me, then back again, his eyes blazing in his head. ‘Get the Council together again and make them reappoint me, and when that’s done, get a vote out of them and send orders to Chalcidius. The fleet must sail by tomorrow.’
‘A fleet of five triremes to capture Chios?’ I said.
‘It will not need capturing. Half the Council and many of the people are on our side already — only we must get to them before they hear the state of the Allied Fleet. Then we can tell them we are only the forerunners; that a fleet of forty ships have sailed from the Isthmus to their aid, that Sparta is backing them to the hilt — that Athens is bleeding to death.’
‘Great Lord Apollo!’ I said. ‘Five ships to start an Empire’s revolution!’
‘It can be done! It’s a gamble — a glorious gamble, but I can pull it off for you, and there’s not another man who can! Beside —’ Suddenly his whole manner changed. It made me think of a sword blade thrust into some fine-wrought dark coloured scabbard. ‘Don’t you see, this is your perfect chance. You will be the prime mover in the affair, and if you can get all settled ahead of Agis, think of the kudos you’ll gain, Endius, my friend.’