Tides of War (54 page)

The women attacked Alcibiades’ cavalry from the rooftops, hurling tiles, bricks, and stones with fabulous daring. Nor did they give back beneath the return volleys, but kept up a din of such profane contumacy as, the troopers testified, evoked sterner terror than any phalanx of Spartans or horde of shrieking savages. Alcibiades himself was struck by a brick on the shoulder. The blow fractured his collarbone; he must be assisted from the fray by Mantitheus, fighting as ever at his side. Alcibiades, as was his habit, fought helmetless; a handsbreadth more and the missile would have staved his skull.

In the city, the foe’s battalions swept along the Exposition Road. Now came the struggle for the Pteron, the great seawall upon which men and horses and ships were dueling, it seemed, for every yard. Scaffolding ascended on both flanks, all pine and all blazing. Cofferdams abutted the final furlong, spiked with construction debris, brick and timber, mortar sleds, pumpworks, and great piles of iron fittings which made them jagged death pits. Horses and men were tumbling into these in numbers as ghastly as they were uncountable.

Antiochus made signal: “Advance!” I had stationed
Calliope
at the left of the line, to pass close abeam of the Pteron to evaluate the situation. We returned signal and kicked off.

The riot upon the seawall was absolutely spectacular. Alcibiades with the cavalry and heavy infantry had punched through now, though we did not know this yet from our vantage. Their lane of advance down Exposition Road had been blocked by masses of the foe, a hundred shields across and what looked like a mile deep. Some four or five thousand of the enemy, including cavalry, had got aboard the seawall before Alcibiades and Adeimantus and now hacked and heaved toward the Windlass House at the extremity. They were going for the cable, to reseal the harbor and trap the vessels inside. Defending the final furlong of seawall were the Athenian marines who had taken the Quay and cut the chain. Flanking these, Erasinides’ engineering vessels had set themselves broadside against the seaward palisade and were applying winch and tackle to the enemy’s submerged stakes while simultaneously
disembarking more marines from transports moored outboard hull-to-hull. Passing the terminus of the Pteron aboard
Calliope,
I could see in the van of the foe a personage magnificently mounted and appareled, compassed by a guard of knights.

This could be none but Lysander.

At once I determined to strike for him, forswearing all other objects. I resolved to sacrifice my own life and all my crew if I must. I signaled to my second, Lycomenes, aboard
Theama
to take the squadron forward on his own, then made to Damodes, trierarch of
Erato,
these signals: “Follow me” and “Land marines.”

I could see Damodes, called the Bear, upon his sternpeak. He, too, had spotted the foe and hopped with frenzy to get at him. As these turns eventuated, Antiochus’
Tyche,
within the harbor, had had her stem staved and must withdraw. He brought her out stern-first, backing water, and now approached the Pteron from the landward side. To moor a triple against a twenty-foot seawall is no mean feat in broad daylight. Under fire
Calliope
came in like a garbage scow helmed by a drunk. Antiochus simply rammed
Tyche
stern-first between two cofferdams and, slinging the last of his hello-theres, mounted behind a screen of fire.

The struggle aboard the Pteron had reached that state of compaction where even the most elementary tactics may not be implemented, such is the press of mayhem. The enemy had five thousand on the wall, massed shield-to-shield, with thousands more pressing from the land. The main of our cavalry fought dismounted now, as the foe in his swarm carved the horses out from under them. These unfortunate creatures wailed in agony upon the block, hooves thrashing, wounding others, while more struggled in the water, drowning. My foot slipped mounting a dam and I fell hard, all my weight plus armor, beating my helmet crown-first into the stone. I blacked both eyes and tore thumb’s web so that it still has not knitted. In this shape I clambered at last onto the Pteron, seeking the Spartan.

It was not Lysander but the prince.

Cyrus of Persia, who had sworn to break up his very throne to bring low the might of Athens. Cyrus! Cyrus!

Our men cried his name and hurled themselves at the champions who defended him. The prince’s knights dueled with breathtaking valor, the riders’ prowess exceeded only by that of their mounts,
specimens trained to maintain cohesion flank to flank and to rear and strike both with forehooves and the spiked armor on their chests. The look in their eyes I shall never forget.

“Kill him!” Antiochus bellowed from
Tyche
’s stern.

Now through the mob punched cavalry and heavy armor, Alcibiades and Adeimantus. Marines pressed about, crying that they had Prince Cyrus trapped. At once an alteration overcame our commander both wondrous and profound. Though beneath his breastplate his clavicle had been fractured, as we learned later, such an injury as would carry away any man with incapacity and pain, he straightened and elevated his eighteen-pound shield upon that forearm above which the bone had been shattered.

He went after the prince. So did everyone. We were driven, all, before that tide which was the mass of flesh and armor being propelled toward the Pteron’s extremity by the advancing press of Spartan and Peloponnesian reinforcements surging from the shore.

Now came Lysander at these battalions’ fore. He called to Cyrus to make for him. Break through, I will preserve you! A space separated the two, packed shield-to-shield with Athenian marines, such orphans as myself off marooned men-of-war and our commanders, Alcibiades and Adeimantus with the last of the cavalry. Ships roared, afire port and starboard; warhorses’ muzzles seemed to belch live steam; men’s cries ascended in a din ungodly.

“Do you see, men of Greece?” Alcibiades cried toward the foe. “A Spartan fights at the barbarian’s shoulder!”

“For freedom from thou, prideful villain!” Lysander bawled back.

The Spartan dug his knees into his mount and slung, so proximate across the press that the shaft of his javelin traversed barely thrice its length before seating with thunderous concussion upon his enemy’s shield. Alcibiades took the stroke flush on his shattered arm. The warhead tore through the bronze and split the oak beneath, penetrating to a handsbreadth of his flesh.

“He is wounded!”

Men of both sides cried in exigency, Spartans and Persians rallying to press for the kill; Athenians and allies closing yet more densely, if that were possible, to erect a wall of their own flesh before their commander. An infantryman at Alcibiades’ side elevated before him the
shield his strength could no longer bear. Darts transfixed the hero’s back. Shafts riddled Alcibiades’ mount. Clouds flew about his head.

Lysander’s knights heaved upon him. Alcibiades slung his ax across a sward of plumes and pike blades. I myself was within feet of the Spartan, so close I could see his beard beneath the cheek pieces of his helmet, as he beat the weapon apart with his shield.

“Sling there, Lysander!” Alcibiades bellowed, indicating Prince Cyrus. “Sling there and stand with Leonidas!”

He meant of course the Spartan king who had fallen with such valor at Thermopylae, two generations past, defending Greece from the Persian.

Lysander frothed with fury. “Can you court the crowd even now, thou actor!”

“He is here, thy king Leonidas—and marks thou traitor to Greece!”

Our marines made a last rush for Cyrus. Missiles rained from ships and seawall; prince and knights fell back. “Kill him!” Antiochus trumpeted above the melee. The youth gave place toward the Pteron’s end, driven by the Athenian press.

“Men of Persia,” Cyrus cried in his tongue (or so it was translated for us later), “it is up to you now to decide if your prince will live or die.”

Without a heartbeat’s demurral Cyrus’ champions flung themselves and their steeds upon the spearpoints of the Athenians, driving these back by their magnificent sacrifice and creating an interval for their master. Cyrus spurred. Prince and mount broke through, lapped in deliverance by the bronze of Spartan knights.

Here came the terminal push. Mass against mass, each division straining to hurl the other into the sea. All utterance ceased. Men did not shout or even groan. Even the horses no longer made cry, but that sound arose which constrains all who have known battle to start from their slumber in terror.

The foe were too many, we too few.

We fell back. The ships took us off. The assault was over.

Alcibiades got off aboard
Tyche
. Men pressed about him, Antiochus recounted to me later, motioning toward the conflagration and acclaiming his triumph.

He rejoined nothing at that hour. Only past dawn ashore at Samos, bathed and bound by the surgeons, did he summon to his side, in
confidence and apart, Adeimantus, Aristocrates, Antiochus, Mantitheus, and myself. We must take thought now, he admonished, for our lives apart from him.

“With this night,” he said, “my star has fallen.”

There is an anecdote of Lysander in the aftercourse of the battle. It is recounted that on remuster at the Artemisium, when reports accounted forty-four of eighty-seven triremes burned or destroyed, with the shipyards, repair works, and all construction ramparts of the Pteron, he was confronted not alone by Prince Cyrus, who must account the produce of his father’s gold, but by representatives of the Spartan ephorate, technically his superiors, who chanced to be present from the home government.

“And what do you call this, Lysander?” these officers demanded of their admiral, indicating the ruin of the port.

“I call it what it is,” Lysander is said to have replied. “Victory.”

These journals of the younger Pericles
[Grandfather continued]
it has been my honor to preserve, along with this ensign of
Calliope,
sacrificed subsequently in the fight at the Blue Rocks, and
Endeavor,
whose helm was his at the Arginousai Islands. This was the last command he ever held. But such, my grandson, we shall get to presently
.

To return to Polemides, whom we left at the inception of the raid.

He had successfully fled Ephesus, he told me, exploiting darkness and the disorder wrought by the assault. His burns and their attendant shock caught up with him, however, in the country south of the city. He must seek cover.

In the raid’s wake Lysander’s coast guard had doubled watches and patrols. Rewards were posted for all stragglers of the Athenians; locals, boys, and even women swelled the manhunts. Polemides survived on the flesh of mice and lizards spiked in the canals in which he had gone to ground, and leeks and radishes grubbed at night from the kitchen gardens of housedames. Warships of Athens transited on night reconnaissance; he made signal and once attempted swimming out, but his strength failed. He hid, he said, like a rat.

The term of his bride Aurore came and went. He had a child now or so presumed, but did not dare daylight, seeking a ship or even to post a letter. Though he declined as ever to confide to me such as he deemed overpersonal, it took scant imagination to conceive his distress, in terror for his life, whose preservation he now sought most desperately for the sake of his bride and child; with the consternation of being unable to reach her side for the birth; and the grief he had occasioned her, who could not know if he even still drew breath.

I was at Athens then. The city was sobered and chastened, groaning awake with a hangover from its bout of passion with Alcibiades. As a respectable matron recinches her girdle and reclaims her dignity after the
excesses of the Dionysia, so did the city of Athena shudder and splash its face, embracing collective amnesia. Did we really say that? Do that? Promise that? Those who had capered most shamelessly to their new master’s pipes now came to themselves and, repenting this license, snapped out to the bracing chill of abjuration. So that, the more abjectly a man had groveled for Alcibiades’ favor or donated resources to his cause, the more he now affected indifference and swore himself superior to such slavishness.