The Flowers of Adonis

  And at dusk we got up and ate a little more of the food, and rode on.

  By the Great Road it takes three days from Sardis down to Ephesus, but we headed westward, through the broken country between the mountains and the broad river valley towards Magnesia, then took to the high hill tracks where we must travel by day because it was too hazardous to move at night. Tracks flanking the shoulders of the mountain with only the emptiness dropping away below; and deep snow over rock for a treacherous foothold, and much of the time we must walk leading the horse. Once I said to Alkibiades that we should leave him behind — and I am of a horse-people so that I would not lightly think of such a thing; but Alkibiades said that once through the mountains we should need him on the other side, and that if the worse came to the worst he was meat on the hoof.

  We were two nights in the mountains, with little food and no warmth but what we could give each other in the lee of a rock or a tangle of mountain juniper, while the horse shifted restlessly in his knee hobbles nearby. And Horned Lord of the Wilderness! The huge cold emptiness and the thin harping of the wind!

  After the high, frozen winter-death of the mountains, there was a softness in the air like spring along the coast, when we came down towards it on the evening of that third day. We had eaten the last of our food, but we came upon a goatherd who sold me a lump of hard strong cheese for three times its value; and there was grazing for the horse. That night we slept warm among pine needles, and the next day we followed the coast.

  On the eighth evening after Sardis, we came down to Clazomenea, and saw Athenian ships in the harbour.

  Alkibiades took me to a house in a back street and left me there, saying that I should rest and presently he would come again. The woman of the house was kind. I do not know what Alkibiades had been to her in the past, but whatever it was, it was a long time ago. She gave me hot bean soup, and a rug to sleep under; and I ate and slept. And when I woke, the rags of my flute-girl’s clothing, and Phaeso’s shoes that I had bound to my feet with strips torn from the hem of my cloak, had been taken away, and fresh clothes lay beside the bed-place. And when I reached out for them, I saw that they were a boy’s — good, though shabby and weather-stained — and much the same as I had worn long ago when I rode with the other girls and the young men among my father’s horse-herds.

  I got up, surprised to find myself so stiff and sore — the years in the women’s courts of Sardis had made me soft — and began to pull the clothes on; the close-fitting trousers of dark berry-red cloth, the supple boots, the goatskin jacket with the hair inside and the gold threads worked about the neck. My heart was glad to wear such clothes again, and glad because My Lord had troubled to find them for me in Clazomenea. I had scarcely tied the neck thongs of the jacket, and gathered my hair up under the stocking cap, when I heard voices below; the woman’s, and a man’s; and the man said, ‘We’ve come for Alkibiades’ new fancy girl. Orders to take her down to the ship.’

  I opened the door on to the outer stairway and met the woman coming up.

  She laughed when she saw me, and said, ‘You make a fine boy! I hope you do not mind wearing a dead man’s clothes.’

  ‘A dead man’s clothes?’ I said, and I thought of Phaeso, whose shoes had carried me across the mountains.

  And she shook her head. ‘There, and I did not mean to tell you. I had a merchant and his boy here a year or two back — from somewhere away north, they were — and the boy was sick, and worsened and died here; and his clothes were left behind. Maybe the man didn’t want to be reminded … I meant to sell them, but I never got round to it; and when My Lord bade me find you something for ship-board, I thought they’d be just the thing.’

  A shout came up from below, and she added hurriedly, ‘I meant to feed you before you went, but the men from the Iris are here already.’

  ‘I heard them, calling for Alkibiades’ latest fancy girl,’ I said.

  *

  Later, squatting under the bull’s-hide awnings when the sea-men had left me, I felt the lift of the deck under me, and heard the pad of the sailors’ feet and the creaking of the timbers, that were part of a strange world to me then; and Fear sat beside me in the almost-dark, and I thought that it would have been better for me to have left Alkibiades to break his own way out of prison. I had grown used to life in the women’s courts of the Satrap’s palace. I had even a few friends there, or at least a few fellows who were not unfriendly; I had had Phaeso, who was dead because of me … Now I had abandoned all familiar things, to follow at the heels of a man with cold blue fire in his eyes, and without mercy, and who I did not know at all. But I knew that if it had been all to do again, I would have done all as before. For making or for breaking, he was written on my forehead.

  It was evening, and they had brought me a little lamp and more food before he came, and the anchor-cressets were flaring on the ships, ragged as golden mares’ manes in the windy dusk, and I knew that it would be too late to sail tonight. I heard the boat come alongside, and his voice, and crackle of orders; and I got up and stood waiting. He came, and pulled back the loose leather curtain and stood there, bowed at the shoulder, for he was too tall to stand upright under the awnings, and looked me up and down; and I had the feeling that for the moment he had forgotten he would find me there.

  Then he lounged down upon the piled rugs, still looking at me; and said, ‘You make a valiant boy, Timandra. What a sad pity that I was always a man for women.’ And I saw that he was mocking me.

  I said, ‘I am still woman, under the clothes that the woman of the house gave me.’ And despised myself for saying it.

  He reached out and caught my wrist and pulled me down beside him. ‘Has the day been long?’

  ‘The day has been long.’

  ‘I have been busy,’ he said, and I saw the devilry playing at the corners of his mouth and in his eyes. ‘Would you like to know what I have been doing?’

  ‘If it pleases you to tell me.’

  ‘It does. I have been selling the horse, and making certain arrangements for this sea-going. And I have been letting it fall here and there — among such as are good at spreading secrets —that Tissaphernes is none so bad a fellow after all; for having taken me captive to please the Great King, did he not himself arrange for my escape? That should put paid to any better understanding between our plump friend and the Spartans.’

  He lay back, laughing, and pulled me down on top of him. ‘It isn’t wise to do the dirty on Alkibiades.’

  ‘It might have been quite wise, if one of the palace flute girls had chosen to leave well alone.’

  ‘Do you think I would not have escaped without you?’

  ‘Would you?’ I said.

  ‘Of course. My luck was with me. I always know when my luck is with me.’

  I said, ‘Would your luck have killed three men for you, that night?’

  And he said, ‘The Captain of the Guard was mine. Little she-wolf, do not be claiming all the kill.’

  And I knew that he had forgotten Phaeso already. I wished that I could. Sometimes I wish it when I wake in the night, even now.

  He pulled me closer, and kissed me between the brows. ‘Do not be too eager for gratitude, she-wolf; it’s a waste of time that could be better spent … Isn’t it sweeter this way, than if I had brought you with me out of gratitude?’ He began to pull at the thongs of my jacket. ‘Undo this thing — I want to see if there are still running stags under your breasts and lily flowers on your belly.’

  But while I was doing as he bade me, he reached sideways and pinched out the lamp.

  The Rower

  We are the lowest of the Sea God’s creatures we who row the long war galleys. And that winter was not one to raise the heart of any man above his station. The whole war had moved north, and so instead of making back for Samos we rounded the Chersonese and harboured on the western side — I suppose that was because we would be less open to attack from Abydos there, than in the old base at Sestos. The officers, and sometimes th
e troops and even the seamen got off for a day’s hunting now and then — wolf and wild boar among the hills. There were women in the villages, some native and some who had come in the usual way following the fleet; cheap and easy, so I’m told. But even the Captains grew short-tempered, and there was neither hunting nor whoring for the rowers that winter.

  Most days, those of the fleet that were not up on the beach for careening were ordered out on exercise; but otherwise, save when one’s own squadron was on cruising guard or off tribute-gathering from the coastwise villages of Thrace, there was nothing to do but sit on our backsides and get drunk when we could, and play unending games of knucklebones among ourselves, while the galls on our hands and the salt chaps on our lips and knuckles and knees stiffened without ever really getting a chance to heal — And wait for spring or Alkibiades, whichever came first.

  None of us doubted that he would keep his promise to get back to us; the promise that Antiochus his sailing-master had passed on to us when he got back to report Tissaphernes’ foul trick. If we had not believed it to the marrow of our half-frozen bones, I think we would have revolted before midwinter; not only the rowing benches, but the whole fleet.

  Just before the turn of the year a passing merchantman brought word that Mindarus and his Spartans had left Abydos and were blockading Cyzicus. The news, as usual, was round the whole fleet within half a day of reaching our Admirals. ‘Where’s Cyzicus?’ someone asked, three benches from mine. ‘Somewhere up on the Asian side of the Propontis — at the end of the tunny-fish run.’ ‘We shall see some action now.’

  But there was no order to move; and after the best part of a month, Cyzicus fell. I suppose our Admirals were too busy waiting for Alkibiades.

  And in a few days more, Alkibiades came.

  He burst on us like a storm at sea, wind and hail and sun together; and drove the drink and the staleness of boredom out of us. He recalled all scattered squadrons, and when the whole fleet lay together once more, he went through us ship by ship, cursing us, laughing with us, setting us straining at the leash. He came aboard the Halkyone on the third day, and talked to us, standing in the stern with our Trirarch beside him; his legs a little straddled and his helmet off — always knows when to let his bared face work for him, does Alkibiades. He spoke to us short and to the point; spoke to us all, the rowing benches as well as fighting deck, which was a thing we were not used to. He said that if we were going to smash the Spartan League — and by the grey eyes of Athene, we were going to smash them — we must do it quickly, for money and supplies were short with us, whereas Mindarus and his pack were in the pay of the Persian King. (He had a few pleasant things to say about Tissaphernes in that connection; but he didn’t spend much time on that, only enough to make us laugh, and see an enemy as the smaller for it.) He said that from now on, he would have every man, marines and seamen and rowers to work as one, and all ready to fight on land or at sea. ‘I will have the marines of this ship to man the rigging and the seamen to row their guts out, and the rowers to storm Byzantium if I give the word! And I will have them do it gladly, holding nothing back!’ He must have said the self-same thing to every ship in the fleet before he was done, but we aboard the Halkyone felt, as I suppose did every ship in the fleet, that he spoke to us alone. We had spent the winter grumbling, but we would have cut off our right hands for him after that.

  *

  Spring was scarcely thickening the willow-buds when the last trireme was run down the slipways and we cast off for Cyzicus; and the nights were still long, giving us good sailing time; for the order was that we were to move only under cover of the dark. Two nights it took us, to the rounding of Cape Hellas; solid rowing, for coming down the coast the winds were for the most part contrary and we could not have the sails to help the oars; so it was a hard pull every oar-stroke of the way. We lay up under the lee of Cape Helles that day, while a party went ashore for water; and got what sleep we could in the pitching of the warring currents that meet there. And at dusk we put out to sea again, heading north-east into the straits. The mouth of the Hellespont is like the estuary of a great river; and from our nearer shore there was a nightlong crying and calling of shore birds.

  The fleet had been divided into three squadrons, each led by a skilled pilot. We were in Alkibiades’ own squadron, led by the flagship, and Antiochus himself. (And drunk or sober, all men knew that he was the best pilot in the Athenian Navy.) And all the rest struggling behind us like ducklings after the dilly.

  We were the best part of two more nights nosing up the straits, past Sestos and deserted Abydos and those loathsome muddy river-flats they call Goat’s Creek. And if ever a man earned his pay that red-nosed boozer piloting the flagship earned it. It seemed as though he knew the straits as a lover knows the body of his love. He knew from moment to moment where the currents ran our way, from moment to moment which shore to hug and where to tack across to the opposite side; and we nosed after him, each galley following the faint glow of the shielder stern cresset from the galley ahead; feeling ourselves along as it seemed by the currents and the inshore eddies and the changes of the wind as it came down through the hills. Once we were caught by a black easterly squall and had to row our guts out to keep from being driven on to the lee shore. I can remember now, thinking that my heart must burst at the next pull, and looking up through the wind and the hissing rain and seeing that our pilot had joined the steersman at the steering oar and they were fighting it as men fight a kicking stallion; and knowing that I could go on, because I must.

  We made captive all the trading vessels that we overhauled, and ran them aground behind us, that none of them might carry news of our coming to the Spartan fleet; and we made the passage of the straits undiscovered, and came out into the inland sea called the Propontis, and headed eastward. The weather had changed and the wind fallen away, but a heavy swell was running, and a thick rain-mist hid the coastline, so that the steersmen held their course by the sound of the sea beating on the distant shore, and the leadsman’s constant call.

  ‘It will hold overnight, maybe, but it will lift in the morning,’ said my oar mate. He knew those waters better than I did, having been at the tunny fishing in his youth.

  In the dark before dawn, the flagship altered course and headed in for shore; the signals blinked in her stern, and we followed, nosing in through the darkness and the murk; then the signals blinked again, and we backed water and lay with our noses to the current, while the heavy troop carriers slipped past us like ghosts with even their stern braziers quenched. We waited, using the oars just enough to hold position against the current, till presently they re-passed us, heading out again, and riding higher in the water than they had done before.

  Then we headed back for open sea.

  ‘If it wasn’t for this murk, we’d see the lights of Cyzicus over that way,’ someone said on the deck above us.

  By dawn the mizzle rain was beginning to lift; in the night we had peeled off a hundred triremes — I learned later that they were commanded, fifty each, by Theramenes and Thrassylus, but at the time we knew only that when the sea fret turned grey with dawn, we were one of the remaining forty, the Admiral’s own squadron, and that we were standing in line abreast toward Cyzicus.

  The mizzle had almost ceased, and the sky was breaking away into clear lakes of blue among the drifting cloud; and away on our port side, opposite the mainland, rose the high wooded hills of the great Cyzicus peninsular, looking like an island, a little like Salamis, to us on the rowing benches with our backs to the Isthmus. A shout from the flagship’s lookout, passed back along the line, told us that the Spartan ships were in sight. All around, there began to be the ordered bustle of a galley making ready for action. The sails were run down and the mast unstepped and stowed along the side of the deck. The leather screens were rigged to protect us rowers, the marines were up in the bows, the Trirarch standing beside the pilot in the stern. The bos’n’s flute shrilled, and we swung into a quicker stroke. The feet of the fighti
ng men were close to my head; I heard the lieutenant say, ‘This is a good trick of the Admiral’s, if it only works.’ And someone answered, ‘Why shouldn’t it work? The rest are hull down over the skyline. To the Spartans it must look as though we forty are all there are.’ And then there was silence save for the shift and shuffle of braced feet and the bark of an order, the chink of a weapon and the creak of the oars in the oar-ports. And then the voice that had spoken before said, ‘Look! They’re coming out to engage.’

  Far over the water I heard the bray of the Spartan trumpets. The Trirarch’s hand flashed up, and the bos’n’s flute fell silent. We had been well drilled in what to do, and we hung on over oars a few moments, as though the Admiral was undecided and the whole fleet hung waiting for his word; then as our own trumpets sounded for retreat, the steersman put the steering oar hard over, the rowers on the starboard side feathered their oars, while we on the port benches strained every muscle, and the Halkyone, following the flagship, came about in a wide sea-swallow curve, and the whole squadron was heading out to sea again. But the bos’n’s flute set an easy rowing time, we did not want to out-row the lean dark galleys putting out from harbour after us.

  We quickened the tempo after a while, when we were well out from land and they were close enough to feel themselves hot on the scent. It was fine to see the low black squadrons straining after us like hounds that think the quarry far spent and smell already the kill. So we drew them after us, and laughed in our bursting hearts to see them come. And then out from the headland westward where they had been lying, and down from the hills to the north out of the departing rain squall, appeared the other two squadrons — and it was as though one heard the trap clash shut.

  The Spartans must have woken suddenly to their position, and we heard their trumpets sounding for action stations. They had been deploying into battle-line as they came; but we on the rowing benches never saw the line complete; for once again the Trirarch’s hand flashed up, and the steersman bent his whole weight to the oar, and we brought the squadron about, each trireme almost in its own length, in a smother of yeasty foam that flew back from the oar-blades and drenched us in the cold saltness of it that stung like fire. Far off, and close at hand, the squadron’s trumpets were talking to each other across the water. Later, I knew that half the squadron had engaged the Spartan centre, while the other, our half, led by Alkibiades himself, swept down on the left wing in wild-goose formation, to smash through and throw it into confusion before the other squadrons came in to finish the work. But that was afterwards. One does not see the pattern of a battle from the rowing benches. I knew only that the bos’n’s flute was setting Full Pace and we were driving the Halkyone through the water with the short quick, heart-bursting stroke never used except in the last moments of going into battle. I saw nothing but the straining shoulders of the man in front of me; heard nothing but the bos’n’s flute and the thunder of my own heart within me.