Tides of War (17 page)

Alcibiades did not speak all evening, permitting Euryptolemus to articulate as his surrogate, as he often did, so in tune were the cousins with each other’s cast of mind. Euro urged his kinsman to depart for Athens at dawn. Word of defeat would fly home; he must stand present to endure it with honor and to shore up those who had stood at his side.

Alcibiades would not leave. He must remain to take up the dead. “The dam is down, cousin,” he accounted. “We will not hold the flood.”

None slept that night. Retrieval parties formed up before dawn. Mules and asses, even cavalry mounts, had been rigged with the pole sleds called “baker’s boards”; wagons of the commissariat had been recruited, augmented by sledges and litters; men carried cloaks and blankets upon which a body may be borne. The Spartans sent across their priests of Apollo to sanctify the field and formalize permission to us to take up our dead. They had already reclaimed their own.

At first light the Hymn to Demeter and Kore was sung; the parties moved out by tribes. Alcibiades wore dust sandals and a white chiton without emblem of rank. He was grave but not downcast. He took up the dead in silence, working beside soldiers’ squires and even slaves.

Where the Tegeans and lesser Lacedaemonians had won their victory, the bodies of the allied slain had been stripped naked. Armor and weapons were plundered; the foe had looted even the shoes.

Where the Corps of Peers had triumphed, however, no corpses had been violated. Each lay where he had fallen, intact of shield and armor. The Spartans had granted them honor to forbear this indignity. Many wept, my brother included, to behold such greatness of heart.

Midday found Alcibiades stopping with the party in which my brother and I labored. “Is it true, Pommo, that you dashed about the
field at battle’s close, seeking to preserve me?” A number had told him as much; this seemed to delight him enormously. “I did not know you loved me so.”

I advanced some jest that we of the infantry needed him; he knew how to pay. He did not laugh at this poor joke; rather glanced soberly, first to my brother, then me. “Of payment I know this, my friends—how to requite those whose hearts are true.”

Earlier in the forenoon, Lion and I were told later, Alcibiades had chanced to be at the extreme right of the field, that quarter where we had been when the Mantineans routed the Spartan Sciritae. He was speaking with several Mantinean officers when a captain of Spartan cavalry rode up and reined in.

It was Lysander. The rivals spoke at ease, strife forsworn beneath the truce. Lysander remarked the scale of the allied victory in this quarter. Had such prevailed across even another fifth of the field, the outcome had been catastrophe for Sparta.

“You came this close, Alcibiades,” Lysander is said to have spoken.

In response his adversary quoted the proverb “Close captures no crowns.”

To which Lysander replied, “God grant that be your epitaph,” and, turning, spurred away.

When the shadows began to lengthen, the Spartan Corps of Peers moved out for home. We could see them emerge round the shoulder of the wood and trek in column toward the Tegea Road. Agis strode at the fore, flanked by the Knights, with the seven regiments in order in the train. Lion pointed. There was Lysander; he had insinuated his cavalry into a role as royal guard. These trooped adjacent the fore
polemarchs,
the war leaders, and the
pythioi,
the priests of Apollo. The main body trailed, to the skirling of the pipes.

They were eight thousand, all in scarlet, spears at the slope, with squires, one to a man, trooping at their shoulders, bearing their shields, slung and burnished to a mirror’s sheen. Where we stood in the dust of the field, all squatted in shadow. The victors strode in sun.

They were singing. A cadence chant, “Hemorrhoids, Hangnails, and Hell,” which to a beat bespeaks a profane disdain for death. Their spearpoints were sheathed, but their helmets, bossed, flashed like gold in the sun.

A sound broke from Alcibiades. When I turned, his brow stood flushed; tears pooled in the well of his eyes. At first I apprehended this as grief, at the overthrow of all his enterprise. Examination, however, discovered this affect barren of regret. He was moved, as we all, by the splendor of the enemy’s discipline and will.

“Magnificent-looking bastards, aren’t they?”

Upon termination of this day’s session with the assassin Polemides
[my grandfather continued],
as he and I took leave of one another, the man requested of me a service.

His sea chest, he declared, lay now in storage at the officers’ commissary at Munychia naval base, in care of the porter. Would I retrieve it for him? There were documents in it he wished to show me. More, he added, would I keep this chest after his execution?

I urged the man not to get ahead of himself. Acquittal was possible, perhaps even probable, given Socrates’ conviction and the powerful association in the public mind between the philosopher and Alcibiades. Alcibiades’ repute stood now at its ebb; this did not augur inauspiciously for any in faction of opposition to him.

“Yes, of course.” Polemides smiled. “I forgot.”

Passing out of the prison, a violent thundershower detained me at the portal. As I waited on the storm’s passage a boy approached, dashing from the victualer’s shop across the way and, confirming my identity, bade me abide a few moments longer. An older man could be seen, a cripple, hobbling into the lane from the same shop. The fellow shambled across, presenting himself before me in the posture of a panhandler. I retreated, set to step into the downpour rather than endure the assault of this unkempt and aggressive mute. “You don’t recognize me, do you, sir?”

The man’s voice struck me through.

“It’s Eumelus of Oa, Cap’n. ‘Bruise.’ From the old
Europa.”

“Bruise? By the Holy Twain, can it be you?”

This man had served with me at Abydos and Bitch’s Tomb under Alcibiades, twenty years into the war and eleven prior to this day. He had been a
toxotes,
a marine archer, and something of a personal batman to me. A game but inexpert boxer, hence his nickname, he possessed the courage of
an eagle and harbored ambitions to rise in service. At Abydos he had borne me from
Europa
’s quarterdeck when my leg had been sheared in the action.

Bruise had remained in service to the bitter end: Aegospotami. He was captured by Lysander and sentenced to death but was reprieved to the slavers’ block by the lie that his mother was Megarian and he thus not an Athenian citizen. “Soon as they burned me, I skipped. I was home in time to watch Lysander sail in and take our surrender.”

He led me across to the victualry. The shop was his; the lad his grandson. Through his daughter-in-law, he testified, he had secured a contract under the Eleven Administrators; his mart provisioned the warders and inmates, since the refectory’s shuttering in the latest crackdown. He, Bruise, had noted my passing in and out of the prison, but this day was the first, he said, that he had summoned the temerity to approach.

We spoke of vanished comrades and departed times. He remarked the case of Socrates. Bruise had been among the five hundred and one jurors; he had voted to condemn. “A man come up to me by the Anaceum, told me if I liked my contract I’d toss the black pebble.”

Parting, my old shipmate drew me aside to confide this caution: certain unscrupulous turnkeys may approach me or others of the philosopher’s party, proposing for a fee to spirit the prisoner to freedom. This was a drama he, Bruise, had witnessed no few times: the midnight horse, the dash for the frontier, the double cross. “First peep you hear, Cap’n, come to me. I know these blackguards. I’ll spring your friend myself before I’ll let ’em turn the left hand upon him.” I took this intelligence seriously and thanked him from the heart.

The storm had abated; I stood upon the point of taking leave. I must inquire of my old mate if he had acquaintance of Polemides. Indeed. “A good marine; none better.” What about Polemides’ part in Alcibiades’ assassination, I probed, for I knew that Bruise, as so many of the Samos fleet, revered their old commander and upheld his memory with passion. To my surprise Bruise harbored no rancor toward the assassin.

“But he betrayed Alcibiades,” I pressed.

Bruise shrugged. “Who didn’t?”

At home that night, prompted perhaps by Polemides’ request for retrieval of his sea chest, I mounted to the loft in search of my own. To this day sea fighters mark their coffers in the time-honored manner, carving into the pine the stations upon which they have served and tacking beside each a coin of that province. I brought my chest into the library. When the porter delivered
Polemides’ next day, no other site seemed apt, so I had him set it down, side by side with my own.

How different were we, the assassin and myself, who had served our country, both, down thrice nine years of war? Who could tell, remarking our baggage?

I opened my own. At once arose the smells of campaigns, and campaigners, past. I must sit, overcome, and wept for those companions upon whom eternal night had closed, and these, philosopher and assassin, who must tread that same dark passage soon.

My wife, your grandmother, chanced to pass at that moment and, discovering her husband in this case, crossed to me and in kindness inquired of my state. I had made a decision, I told her—just now, this instant.

By all the gods I would toil for Polemides’ exoneration, nor stay at any measure within the law to see him freed.

The Games of the Olympiad following Mantinea
[Polemides resumed]
were those in which Alcibiades’ teams took first, second, and third in the four-horse. Not triumph at Troy nor the apparition of Apollo himself in a winged chariot could have effected a grander sensation. Twice a hundred thousand ringed the hippodrome. Do you recall the victory ode Euripides composed? How did it go? “Son of Cleinias…something something…this glory