The swallows are back again
And the crow is on his way
Carrying a little boy in his beak
Or a pretty little girl!
The maidens who accompanied Arete sprinkled wild rose petals before her. They were all lovely, dressed in their best peplums, but no one could match the splendour of the bride. Her happiness made her even more luminous: she had cast aside all her worrisome thoughts to think only of the young man who awaited her at the threshold of a modest home at the foot of the hills.
The sun was setting behind the mountains when she came within sight of the house. Dionysius stood at the door dressed in an elegant white floor-length chiton embroidered with silver palm leaves; certainly some wealthy friend had lent it to him! At his side was the priest who united their hands with the sacred ribbon and blessed the bride.
The girls then accompanied Arete to the bridal chamber, chanting the wedding hymn and lighting the torches they held in their hands from the oil lamp in the atrium. They loosened her hair and combed it, then untied the belt that graced her gown. They undressed her and lay her down on the bed, under the white linen sheets.
Then they scampered down the stairs with mischievous little yelps. Dionysius waited until everything was tranquil and quiet, then went upstairs and neared the bedroom door. He strained his ears, and finally heard the serenade that he had requested for his bride that night. Down in the street, a Messanian singer, accompanied by a flute and a string instrument, had struck up his song: a moving love story where a poor boy falls in love with a princess after having seen her pass only once on her sedan chair.
He gently pushed the door open just a crack, and saw with surprise that the bed was empty. Alarmed, he entered the room: it was empty as well! His heart pounding, Dionysius tried to calm down. He closed the door behind him and started. Arete had been hiding behind the door and was now standing proudly naked in front of him, backed up against the wall, with a naughty, amused smile on her face.
Dionysius shook his head and came close. ‘You know that a young bride should wait timid and trembling under the sheets? Does this seem the time to play games?’
Arete smiled: ‘Do you still think I’m too thin?’
‘I think you are very, very beautiful,’ replied Dionysius. ‘And that I was completely wrong.’ He held out his hand to caress her cheek and she kissed it gently, barely grazing it with her open lips. He slid his other hand down to caress her breasts and stomach. He saw Arete close her eyes and felt her flesh quiver under his fingertips.
He suddenly lifted her in his arms with a natural, gentle gesture, as if she were as light as a feather, and laid her on the bed. He undressed, and to Arete he looked like the statues of the Olympic athletes in the squares and of the gods on the temple pediments. The last rosy reflections of the evening sifted in through the window and alighted on Arete’s skin like the gaze of Aphrodite. The serenade was more distant now, and softer, so much like the melody she’d heard in Acragas, accompanied by the mellow notes of a flute and the silvery warble of strings.
Dionysius lay down next to her and he was drawn in by her warmth and her fragrance; he saw her slowly transfigured by the pleasure he was able to arouse in her virginal body. Her eyes were gleaming with a golden light, her lips swelling, her face relaxing into an almost glassy transparency. She responded to every kiss with equal ardour, gave herself over to every caress with innocent abandon. It was she who drew him into her body, dissolving the reserve of the warrior with the burning intensity of her gaze, enthralling him with her immaculate breasts, gripping his flanks between her thighs like an Amazon. They made love for as long as the flame flickered in the lamp, until they fell back exhausted, immersed in a state of numb, humid bliss. They slipped from love to dream without realizing it: the pearly light of a watery dawn found them still embracing, covered only by their beauty.
Hermocrates desired nothing more than to return to his homeland. He contacted friends who still lived in Syracuse to see if they might petition the Assembly to pass a bill recalling him from exile. Dionysius sent messages to Philistus as well, asking him to mobilize all the members of the Company to vote in favour of Hermocrates’ return. He sent others back to Syracuse just so they could take part in the vote. But after the shameful defeats at Selinus and Himera, Diocles feared that Hermocrates would totally overshadow him if he were to return: the commander’s prestige and his ardent rhetoric would inflame the mob and incite them to insurrection. He worried that Hermocrates would drag the city into another long, bloody war, and that the democratic institutions would not hold up against such a powerful personality. In a series of stormy meetings, the opposing factions clashed harshly in the Assembly, but by the end it was clear that the people imagined that Hermocrates’s return might give the aristocrats the chance to seize power again, and the motion that proposed his recall from exile was rejected by a small margin of votes.
It was Dionysius himself who brought the news to Hermocrates; scowling, he received the younger man in the shadowy atrium of his home, drawn up like a vexed divinity. His body and spirit were still at the height of their vigour, and his gaze emanated a fierce, threatening intensity that struck fear even into the heart of his friends.
The newly acquired kinship with him had not changed the sense of reverential respect that Dionysius had always had for him, and he continued to call him hegemon, as would any of his soldiers.
‘So they’ve refused,’ said Hermocrates, barely restraining his wrath.
‘It was a very small majority,’ Dionysius offered in an attempt to console him.
‘In a democracy, it makes no difference if you’re defeated by one vote or by a thousand.’
‘You’re right. What will you do now, if I may ask?’
A long silence followed, then Hermocrates spoke: ‘It was not a thirst for power that motivated my desire to return; I simply wanted to lead the uprising against the barbarians.’
‘I know, hegemon.’
‘Seeing that my city does not want me, I will lead the war nonetheless from here.’ He stood, and the tone of his voice rang out powerfully, as if he were haranguing the Assembly. ‘Let the refugees who are still in Messana know that we’re going back to Selinus. We will reoccupy the city. Tell them that the days of their humiliation are over. Tell them it is time to gather together all the survivors, wherever they may be; we will help search for them ourselves. I will write a proclamation that will circulate in hundreds, in thousands of copies, a proclamation to rally all the vanquished, all those who have lost their families and their homes, all those who still hear the agonizing cries of their butchered children and raped wives in their ears. I shall call on them to pitch camp among the smoking ruins of their demolished city, I shall return their weapons and their honour to them. We will restore the images of our gods in their temples; the sacred symbols of our religion will be returned to their rightful homes. And then we will attack. We will rout out the enemy wherever they may be, we will hunt them down without respite and without mercy. Go, now!’
Dionysius assented with a barely perceptible nod of his head and left to muster up his comrades and inform them of Hermocra-tes’s intentions. In less than seven days, one thousand Himerans and five hundred Selinuntians were ready to march at his orders.
Arete would have followed Dionysius wherever he went, but she could not oppose the will of both her husband and father, who wanted to send her back to a safe place in Syracuse to shield her from the perilous military campaign and the strain of forced marches. She was so furious at being excluded that Dionysius could barely get her to listen to him when he came to inform her of their decision.
‘You are a bastard, and a son of a bitch,’ she shouted in a fit of anger. ‘What have I done to you to make you treat me like this?’
‘Say that again and I’ll slap you till your face is as swollen as a wineskin!’
‘Just try it!’
‘You bet I’ll try it! I’m your husband, by Zeus!’
‘You’ll be sorry you sent me away!’
‘What is that, a threat?’
‘Take it however you want!’
‘I’m not sending you away, sod it, I’m sending you home!’
‘That’s all? What do you need a wife for anyway, just for fucking? Find yourself a whore then, or better yet, stick it up the arse of one of your friends.’
Dionysius raised his hand to slap her, but she glared back without batting an eye, openly challenging him. ‘I’m leaving,’ he muttered, then turned and strode towards the door.
‘Dionysius . . .’
Her voice stopped him before he could go. He did not turn.
‘I tried,’ said the girl.
Dionysius did not answer.
‘The truth is that I’m miserable without you, while you’re just fine without me, and it drives me crazy.’
‘It’s not true.’
‘What’s not true?’
‘That I’m fine without you. I’ll be counting the days and the hours that separate us and every instant will seem endless.’
‘You’re just saying that so that I’ll go without making a scene.’
‘I’m saying that because it’s true.’
‘Really?’ She was very close now, and he could smell the scent of her skin and the violet fragrance of her hair.
‘Really,’ he replied, and turned. She was standing in front of him, cheeks flushed with annoyance and emotion.
‘Then take me to bed before you go, you bastard. Your men can wait. They’ll have you for who knows how long. I won’t.’
He took her into his arms like he had the night of their wedding and carried her up the stairs to their bedroom. ‘Where did you learn to talk that way?’ he asked as he unbuckled the breastplate and greaves he was already wearing. ‘You’re the daughter of a nobleman, an aristocrat; I thought that—’
‘At camp with the warriors. My father would let me come and stay with him for a few days. Sometimes even a month or more. And now,’ she said, letting her gown fall on to the floor, ‘make this good enough for the whole time you’ll be away.’
They marched for eleven days towards the interior of the island along the steep ridge of the mountains. No one ever dared to challenge them, or even to approach, although sometimes they would spot a man on horseback watching them from the high ground that flanked their path before he raced away at a gallop. Hermocrates marched tirelessly at the head of the column, always the first to awaken and don his armour, and the last to sit down alongside the campfire for a frugal meal. Before he took his rest, he made sure that everyone had eaten enough and had a blanket to shelter from the cold, still fierce at night at that altitude, like a father with his sons.
On the evening of the twelfth day they came into sight of Selinus and the warriors drew up stone-still to behold her. It seemed impossible that such a great and beautiful city had been completely destroyed and her people cruelly massacred and dispersed.
Hermocrates dismissed the men, and the Selinuntians drifted through the city, roaming like ghosts around the crumbling walls, down the roads crowded with debris, among the remains of carbonized bodies. Each was looking for his own home, redolent of freshly whitewashed walls in the spring and of rosemary and mint in the summer, the homes where they had grown up, where they had gathered with their families for so many years to eat their dinners, to laugh and joke, to talk about what they had done during the day. The rooms which once rang with the voices of children playing no longer had roofs, invaded now only by the sigh of the wind blowing down from the mountains.
When they found what they were searching for, they would wander around the empty shell, touching, almost caressing, the door jambs and walls. Weeping, they would pick up a memento of the life they had led, holding on to it like a precious talisman: the fragment of a dish, a little ornament for an arm or ankle, a pin that had once gathered the hair of a beloved person.
Here and there, in what had been their gardens and orchards, pomegranates had managed to bloom, but the vermilion petals, once a festive sign of spring, now seemed nothing more than stains of blood on the fire-blackened walls. Vine shoots snaked over the ground, intertwining with the brambles that had sunk their roots everywhere.
Only once evening had fallen did the Selinuntian warriors emerge from the maze of ruins, one after another, heading towards the flickering fire that had been lit in the agora. Hermocrates awaited them there, along with the Himerans and the Syracusans who had joined him.
They ate mostly in silence, overwhelmed by their memories, and yet, as night drew on, the heat of the blaze and the food they had eaten together, the sensation of being animated by the same emotions and the same determination, the reflection of the flames on the facades of the deserted temples restored a sense of pride to the men, of territory reconquered, of ground reconsecrated.
The next day they collected the remains of their dead and buried them in the nearby necropolis, then divided into groups according to the tasks they’d been assigned. Some went down to the sea to fish with their bows and arrows since they had no nets, others scattered through the fields in search of plots of land that could be cultivated. Several of them set about identifying the least damaged houses and began to clear away the debris and repair them. Still others went into the wood to chop down trunks which could be made into beams for the roofs, boards for doors and windows, planks for building ships. The city soon took on a different appearance, at least in the area around the agora.
The villagers up on the hillside would see fires flickering in the city at night and shadows roaming among the ruins, breeding all sorts of stories. They were rumoured to be the shades of the dead who wandered restlessly among the wreckage of the destroyed city, and the fires were said to be their spirits which blazed with hate for the enemies that had deprived them of life. Not even the shepherds ventured as far as the walls any longer, fearful of making ghostly encounters. But before long, these rumours dissipated as the truth became evident and spread to the three corners of Sicily and beyond.
Hermocrates’s proclamation had had the desired effect and volunteers began to pour in from all over the island, mostly Selinuntians and Himerans. Hundreds, at first, and then thousands of them came on foot and on horseback, from every direction, even from the sea. One man had even managed to escape from slavery and cross the African sea with a kind of raft that he had built from palm trunks. They found him on the beach one morning, more dead than alive; when he came to his senses and saw hundreds of warriors training in the agora with their spears and swords he began to shout that he too wanted his armour and that the time had come to invade Africa. Calming him down took quite some effort.
In just a couple of months’ time, six thousand warriors had assembled and were ready for anything; they were perfectly trained and blindly faithful to their commander. Dionysius had become the second-in-command and was in charge of leading raids into enemy territory to seize food and forage. But the little army’s activity soon became much more massive and aggressive. Hermocrates led a couple of actual expeditions over the summer, attacking Lilybaeum and Panormus by surprise and inflicting severe losses on the garrisons of mercenaries in the service of the Carthaginians. They even made an assault on the island of Motya at night, setting fire to a couple of dry-docked warships. The detachment of Carthaginian soldiers patrolling the territory was intercepted and wiped out. Although both Hermocrates and Dionysius attempted to curb the violent instincts of their troops, they could not prevent the men from committing every sort of atrocity, thus rekindling the hatred and rancour of the enemy.
Philistus constantly sent news from Syracuse through friends in the Company, like Biton, Doricus and Iolaus, who had been Dionysius’s childhood friends. They thus learned just how worried Diocles had become about these military sorties, which he feared would provoke a huge Carthaginian reaction, but even more so about the enormous popularity that Hermocrates and Dionysius himself were gaining at home as news of their exploits spread, especia
lly among the young. The same messengers brought Dionysius ardent letters of love from Arete, unfailingly ending with pleas to join him as soon as possible.
He managed to see her in secret several times during the following winter, taking advantage of any pause in military operations, but it was never possible for them to enjoy more than a couple of days together for fear of being found out. He was forced to spend his time inside the house, to the great delight of Arete, who wanted him all for herself.
At the beginning of the following spring, Hermocrates made a decision destined to cause a great stir. He crossed western Sicily at the head of his army and marched all the way to Himera. He wanted the meaning of his gesture to be quite clear: the Greeks of Sicily must unite in a single powerful alliance, muster an army of unprecedented size and banish the enemy from the entire island. It was at Himera that the war against the Carthaginians had been fought and won seventy years before under the leadership of Syracuse, and it was from Himera that the counter-attack would begin.
It was because of that very defeat, however, that the enemies’ revenge had been so fierce: the vision of what remained of Himera was even more devastating for the survivors than the ruins of Selinus had been. Here the fury of the barbarians had gone totally unchecked: they had demolished the city house by house, torn down the walls, set fire to the temples, toppled and disfigured the statues and tortured to death anyone they found with a weapon in hand. Their dismembered corpses were still scattered among the ruins and at the site of the final massacre; on the great stone that had been their sacrificial altar, the sight was so horrendous that one of the younger warriors fainted outright. The bodies were piled up in the thousands and the ground beneath them was still black with their blood.
Hermocrates himself was completely overwhelmed. Pale with rage and indignation, he circled around that heap of horrors growling words from clenched teeth that no one could understand.