He never said another word until it came, and he had eaten and drunk, and presently he was lying all out along the cushioned bench with his head in my lap. And then he said, touching the embroidered sleeve of his coat, ‘Running stags. Did you copy them from the pair below your breasts, Timandra?’
‘They are one of the patterns of my people. All the women of my people are born knowing how to make the running stags.’
He said, ‘But no star-flowers. Why no star-flowers for me, Timandra?’
‘The star-flowers are only for the women,’ I said.
‘I am something of a running stag myself, and the hounds are on my heels,’ he said after a little silence.
Fear stirred in me. ‘The Spartans?’ I said. They had been the enemy so long.
‘More like the Athenians. But it was not that kind of hound pack that I meant.’
And we were silent for a longer while, and I seemed to hear a distant baying in the wind, and shut my ears to it as to the thing one must not hear. In Bythinia also, we have our hounds that hunt in the winds under the dark of the moon.
Then he said, ‘But Sparta too; and Athens, and Persia. They have all patted my head and fed me with honey in the comb at one time or another; and now all three of them would be pleased enough to have my guts to girdle their tunics.’
But he did not speak it coldly fierce as he would once have done. And I wished that I could kill every Persian and Spartan and Athenian for the fire and fierceness and splendour that they had killed in him.
I said, ‘I would like to kill them all, and flay them, and tan their hides for saddle leather, as we do with enemies in my own country.’
He said, ‘Little wildcat!’ and smiled for the first time; and the smile made black gashes in his fire-lit face. He turned his face against my belly. ‘I am finished, Timandra.’
‘You are not finished!’ I said. ‘I know you. You will never be finished until you are dead!’
And he said, ‘There are more ways than one of dying.’
The fire sank low, and I dared not move to put on more wood, for fear of disturbing him now that he seemed to have fallen asleep. I had quenched the lamps when he had finished eating, for lamp-oil was none so easy to come by in the North. And the light died with the dying fire and the darkness crept in until I could not see his face.
22
The Whore
All through the rest of that wicked winter, it seemed that My Lord was indeed finished. He had said that there were more ways than one of dying, and it was as though something in him had died. He would sit all day long wrapped in furs like an old man by the fire, scarcely walking abroad, even to look to his garrison or visit his ship on her slipway; not even sending for his favourite hounds from Pactye. Once a day the garrison Commander and the master of the Icarus (a new man; they told me Antiochus was dead) would come to him for orders, and to report. He never had any orders for them and he scarcely seemed to listen to their reports. Sometimes he would bid me fetch my flute and play, but in a little I would know that he was not even hearing the notes that I made for him like a ship at sea or running deer or a wind in fluttering poplar leaves. Then he would demand drink, the dark heady brew of Thrace, and lie beside me at last, drunk and snoring, not even like an old man, but like an old hound who twitches and starts in his dreams.
Nobody could reach him; certainly not I. After that first evening, though his body lay beside me at nights, my spirit could not touch his, nor even come near enough to call to him across the distance still between. And the fort, garrison and seamen began to grow restive. Even when news came that the Thracians had raided one of the Athenian settlements, he said only, ‘Dexippus will have the matter well in hand,’ and went on sitting by the fire.
It could not go on like that, I knew; it must end some time, in some way. It ended four days later, with a knife fight between two of the Icarus’ company. Late in the evening, I could hear men’s voices from their quarters, and I knew the sharpened note in them, the restlessness that comes when the spring fret wakes in men and horses. They were holding a cockfight down there; one of the seamen had come, somehow, by a big painted game cock of the Persian kind, and I knew had backed it against all corners. I could hear them laying bets, urging on the champions.
And then the note began to change and grow ugly.
I was weaving a piece of cloth, the lamp set on a stool beside me, and I remember how the long upward shadow of the shuttle darted to and fro like the darting of a bat across the brindled goat-hair web. I looked round at Alkibiades sitting beside the fire, to see if he too heard that note of threatening trouble, but he was staring into the flames, a finger-tip rubbing the place where his signet ring used to be that he lost somewhere in Karia. And I thought, ‘How far he has gone from his men, that he does not hear. Too far now, ever to come back.’
But I was wrong. Even as I watched. I saw his head go up a little to listen.
Suddenly the sounds of the cockfight swelled up and burst asunder; there was a snarl and a shouted curse, a smother of angry voices, that sharpened as though men were spilling out into the courtyard below. Then unmistakably the clash of blade on blade.
My Lord was up on his feet and reaching for his sword that lay on the chest. He had been so still the moment before, but now that he moved, he had the speed of a hunting leopard. He rasped the blade from the sheath and flung the sheath away, he crossed to the door and wrenched it open, and went down the narrow stairway three at a time.
I followed him. From the turn of the stairway I could see the narrow court in the light of torches, the little crowd ringing two men who crouched with knives in their midst. A loosed game cock was flapping about on cropped wings, spattering blood on the beaten earth from some wound under its breast feathers. From opposite directions, the Icarus’ pilot, and Heraklides, the garrison Commander, came running; but My Lord was there before them. Or maybe when they saw him on the stairway wisdom came to them and they held back; I do not know. He strode straight into the angry throng, all men parting to let him through, and struck up the locked daggers of the two struggling men in their midst. I heard him shouting; and the splurging uproar grew suddenly quiet, but I never heard what he said. One of the men stepped back sullenly, but the other would have still come on, too blind with fury to see who fronted him. My Lord turned on him; there was a flash of torchlight on polished metal, and his sword point was at the man’s throat.
They stood like that a long moment, looking at each other, and all the while My Lord’s back lay wide open to the dagger of the man behind him. I thought suddenly, ‘If they do not kill him now, they are his men again.’ And it was as though the heart in my breast forgot to beat.
Then the man dropped his knife. I heard it ring on the iron-hard earth. Alkibiades lowered his blade, and turned slowly to the other man. ‘Now yours,’ he said, and the second knife rang as it fell. He looked about him at the rest, and they gave back a little. Then he pointed with his sword at the flapping game cock, and said pleasantly, ‘Will somebody wring that creature’s neck; it quite turns my stomach, and it’s making a mess of our nice clean fort.’
Then he caught the Captain’s eye, and jerked his head toward the stairway.
I slipped back into the keep chamber as he came up, Heraklides at his heels, and sat myself down quietly in the corner by my loom. There was no other way out of the chamber, or I would have taken it; but I do not think either of them were aware of me.
Alkibiades came in, then Heraklides who shut the door behind them, and they stood facing each other. Alkibiades was still holding his sword. He said, ‘What has happened?’
‘I imagine one of the men accused the other of pressing his bird, or something of that sort. You were on the scene as soon as I was.’
‘I do not mean only what happened tonight,’ Alkibiades said. ‘That was no more than a symptom of the disease.’
There was a long pause, and then Heraklides straightened his shoulders with a little jerk, and said, ‘Sir, it
has been in my mind for some time that I must speak to you.’
‘Then why have you not done so?’
‘You have not been very — easy of access since your return.’
My Lord laid his sword down on the chest, very gently; and very gently said, ‘Speak to me now.’
Heraklides said, ‘Sir, the garrisons that you left here at Bisanthe and at Pactye and Chrysopolis have held their posts faithfully, waiting for your return. You returned; and they looked to you to set the times stirring again, to lead them out on some venture that would make the long waiting worth while. But it is all of two months since you returned, and there has been nothing but more waiting; so they grow restive, and the seamen with them. Men fret to be up and doing when spring rises in their blood and their leader has come back to them. Failing that, they will fight among themselves. Sir, the men are rotting like the Icarus for lack of us.’
‘You grow poetical,’ Alkibiades said.
‘I speak the commonest of common sense.’
‘What do they ask, then? That I should lead them out to raid Byzantium for women and loot?’
‘The loot might not come amiss!’ Heraklides said grimly; and in his urgency he took a pace nearer to Alkibiades. ‘Sir, the stores that you left with us were gone long ago. We were able to exact a certain amount from the corn ships last autumn, and that yielded us bread through the winter; for the rest, we must buy from the Thracians; and we cannot do that without money or goods to trade with. Our pay is long in arrears — can you give us the three obols a day that are due to us over these many months?’
Alkibiades shook his head.
‘We are no more part of the Athenian Army, we are your men, your war bands; you must use us or disband us; we need to eat and we need to follow a leader. In the name of the Thunderer do something with us!’
Alkibiades stood silent a moment, then he said, ‘Keep your men from killing each other until tomorrow morning, and I’ll do something with you.’
When Heraklides was gone, My Lord stood for a while with his head bent and the heels of his hands pressed against his eyes as though he would have thrust them back into their sockets. Then he looked up, and stretched until the little muscles cracked between his shoulders, like one waking from sleep with a day’s work before him. When he turned back to the fire, his face was still haggard and puffy with much drink and evil dreams, but the clouds had gone from his eyes, something of the old bright purpose was already returned to them.
He said, ‘Leave that weaving a while, and bring me my harness, Timandra.’
And when I brought it, he began to check it over. (I had kept it oiled and burnished as well as any trained armour bearer could have done; left to him the leather would have been dried out, and all as harsh and out of condition as the hide of a sick hound; but I do not think he even noticed that.) He said, ‘If we can no longer claim tribute from the Propontis cities, it is in my mind that they might pay none so badly for protection from Thracian raids such as Lysimachia suffered four days ago. That will do for a start anyway. But we shall need to turn cavalry — rough-riders of the Thracians’ own pattern, so that we can not merely drive them off, but follow them up in retreat — and we shall have to have some show of cavalry before we make our first approach to the settlements …’
I knew how few horses there were in the three forts, but I dared not say a word that might quench the life that had only just returned to him.
And then I saw something in his face, a flash of the old devilry that made me catch my breath …
*
That, having no purchase-gold, was how we turned horse-raider. In the days that followed, My Lord was to and fro between Bisanth and Chrysopolis and Pactye, and at his coming, the forts shook themselves and gathered life again, and began to build new stabling against the time when there would be horses to put in them. And the next time the Thracians came down on a settlement, the men of Bisanthe captured five horses, and the thing was begun.
From then on, we raided in earnest. And I too; I rode with the raiders. Not many among the Athenian seamen and marines could handle our few little hammer-headed Thracian horses as I could, nor had they any skill in getting into a Thracian camp and cutting the picket lines. But they were new to it, and I was old; for among my own people horse-raiding between tribe and tribe is like hunting, a ploy for the young men, and often the girls ride with them if they have enough skill to keep up. So to me it was like my own springtime and the springtime of the world came back to me again; and I do not think that I have ever been more happy than I was riding with Alkibiades on those wild nights!
Some times we got other things, too; cattle and corn; but for the most part it was just the horses that we were after.
But we did not raid all runs at random; My Lord had old links of friendship with certain of the chiefs; some had even helped, I learned, in the building of the forts; and these never lost a horse to us. And there were two great chiefs of Chersonese Thrace, Medacus and Seuthes, whose tribal horse-runs we left alone. I think even My Lord knew that he was not strong enough to handle them — for the present time.
A little while after we started the new way of things, two young brothers, Boiscus and Terdes, driven out of their tribe for fighting at the Spring Gathering came in to join us, bringing their horses with them; then a man from one of the Athenian settlements, then a whole bunch of seamen from a wrecked trading vessel; and so it went on. The time might yet come for turning to the horse-runs of Medacus and Seuthes after all.
Maybe Seuthes thought so also; for one day in early summer the look-outs on the walls came running with word that a small company of Thracians were coming towards the fort. ‘Raiders?’ Alkibiades said. He and I and Heraklides were in the stable court looking to some of the newly captured beasts.
The man shook his head. ‘Not enough of them, sir; and they have led horses with them.’
Alkibiades frowned, and strode off towards the gate. I followed him and he did not order me back. I had taken altogether to man’s dress and was with him at all times, in those days; and the cuckoo never sang so warmly and the oleanders along the streamsides never showed such colours to me in any other summer.
At the gate, the guards were standing by; the man in charge said, ‘Shall we let them in?’
Alkibiades said, ‘The Propontis is too near to Troy. Send up a few javelin men to keep us covered, and we’ll go out to them.’
So the gates were pulled open just enough to let a man pass through, and he went out, I and Heraklides following. Outside, a knot of horsemen had just drawn rein and the leader had swung down from his high embroidered saddle, while behind him his men still sat their fidgeting horses. The little wind parted the fur of their tall fox-skin hats and ruffled the horses’ manes and set the coloured harness-tassels swinging.
The leader glanced up at the javelins on the wall, and down again to Alkibiades. ‘A warm welcome you make ready, Lord, for those who come to your camp in friendship.’ His eyes were a curious rain grey in a lean red face.
‘Surely I make ready the warmest of welcomes, for do I not come out myself to greet my guests?’
The man’s eyes gave a little flicker, as though at some small hidden jest, some enjoyment of a situation that I think Alkibiades shared. He said, ‘That is true. I will say that those are seagulls sitting on your gate-wall, with rushes in their beaks … We bring you a gift from Seuthes, Chief of his Tribe.’
I caught my breath, wondering what that meant for good or ill; then the man gestured with a hand behind him, and two of his followers dropped from their mounts and came forward, one leading a big raking stallion with a black mane and tail and tigerspot markings at the shoulder; a riding rug of fine brown bearskin strapped upon him, and his harness hung with small copper bells; the other with a young unsaddled roan mare dancing at the end of a plaited blue and crimson halter. They brought them forward to Alkibiades and made them stand, turning them this way and that, while the tall leader stood looking on, and playing
with the silver and turquoise hilt of his dagger.
‘This is your gift?’ Alkibiades said after a moment.
‘This is the gift of Seuthes, Lord of his Tribe.’
‘It is a fine gift,’ said My Lord, and smiled. ‘But why does Seuthes send such a gift to me? I have been wont to take the horses that I need, without waiting for a giving.’
‘Seuthes bade me to say this,’ the man said, smiling also, and the men behind him glanced at each other. ‘That he sends you a stallion and a mare from his own herd, that you may breed your own horses from them and not need to come raiding in his grazing lands; and that therefore he may not need to kill you.’
I remember they stood and looked at each other a long moment and the air seemed to crackle between them as my hair does if I comb it before a thunderstorm. Then Alkibiades said, his smile broadening, ‘My thanks for a gift worthy of a King, Seuthes, Chief of your Tribe.’
He moved forward, and laid his hand first on the stallion’s neck, and then on the mare’s in token of acceptance. Then turning he gestured for the gates to be set wide. ‘Or of a friend to a friend. Enter now and drink with me — your men also.’ And taking the reins from the man who held them, he set his hands on the stallion’s withers and made the steed leap and brought him trampling round as the others also re-mounted; and I, as the red mare came by me, I ran and vaulted on to her bare back. She was newly broken, from the feel of her, and she danced under me, but not too wildly, more playing at fright than anything else.
‘Give me —’ I said to the man who held the plaited halter. He looked round and saw that I was a woman, and grinned at me, but loosed the halter into my hand; and we swept in through the gates of Bisanthe. Alkibiades and Seuthes leaning from their horses to grip each other’s shoulders, as men do in friendship among the Horse Peoples.
*
Medacus must have thought that there was danger in Alkibiades and Seuthes together.