Tides of War (60 page)

Heaven had severed Athens from her senses for the excesses of her empire. Such was the Deity’s requital, the street-corner prophets proclaimed, for the hubris of imperial pride.

Spartan morale soared. Desertions from Athens redoubled. I passed along Lysander’s quays that autumn; one saw the same faces as at Samos, so many were the oarsmen, islanders, who had come over. Even the ships were the same.
Cormorant,
Lysias’ squadron leader, was now
Orthia. Vigilant
and
Sea Swallow,
captured at Arginousai from the Cat’s Eyes, were
Polias
and
Andreia
. Already in the taverns one heard short-timers’ jabber; sailors and marines spooked of some fluke demise before war’s end and discharge.

Athens had cobbled together her final fleet. Every jack who could piss standing up had been conscripted, even the Knights. The generals were so shaky they didn’t even plunder. One defeat would finish them, while the Spartans, floated by Persian gold, could absorb loss after loss, simply making each good and continuing to fight.

I had put back to Ephesus after Samos. Where else could I go, with
homicide appended to treason on my proscript? Not that anyone noticed amid the flocks of deserters, turncoats, and renegades lining up at the recruiting desks beneath the red rag. I refound Telamon. A new generation of officers had come out from Sparta, many mates of my youth. They had won their colonelcies or come East to try.

Philoteles, under whom I now took service, was the lad of my
agoge
platoon, twenty-six years past, who had with such empathy informed me of the burning of my father’s farm. Now a division commander, he vowed to make good that long-ago injustice. “When we take Athens I’ll set the title in your fist, Pommo, and see him racked who dares cry foul.”

Here is how I became an assassin. We were training marines, Telamon and I, trying to stay out of trouble. Lysander, who had been recalled to Sparta on expiry of his commission as
navarch
, was back. The ephors had appointed him vice-admiral under Aracus, since no Spartan may hold supreme command twice. Lysander was chief, however, in all but name. Not hintermost among his directives was the elimination of political resistance within the cities. The Spartans are past masters at this, having acquired the practice from the subjugation of their own helots. Now Lysander recruited these themselves, the
neodamodeis,
the freed Spartan serfs, to carry out his campaign of terror.

These helots make able troops in units under Spartan officers. On their own, however, they are notorious. Atrocities began coming to light. Philoteles approached Telamon and others, myself among them, who could be entrusted to act with restraint.

We were called “summoners.” It worked like this. We were issued warrants, called “writs of remission.” The names upon these were of officials and magistrates, naval and army officers, any who had held positions of responsibility under Athenian rule and whose sympathies might lie opposed to “freedom.” In Spartan eyes these were traitors, plain and simple. The bills were death warrants. Arrest was followed by execution, at once and on the spot.

We endeavored to be clement. A man was granted time to shrive himself or scribble his testament. If he’d fled to the interior and we’d had to chase him, we brought him back. The flesh was spared, as much as possible, and bodies released for burial to kin. There was a science to it, this state-sanctioned homicide. It was best to take a man in the street or the marketplace, where dignity enjoined him from putting up a fuss.
A good arrest was civilized. No weapons were drawn or even exposed. The man himself, recognizing his position, sought decorum. The bravest summoned quips. One could not but admire them.

You ask, how did one feel about this? Was he shamed, schooled in the honorable profession of arms, to discover himself a butcher?

Telamon for his part lost not a wink and scorned all who did. To him this work, though distasteful, was as legitimate an aspect of the warrior’s trade as siege operations or the erection of ramparts. As for the victims, their graves were dug. If not us to speed their luckless passage, others would perform it and with far less craft.

Athens’ grave was dug too. For my children and my brother’s, my aunt and sister-in-law and Eunice if she cared, I must be there when the city fell, and possessed of sufficient station to manage their preservation. Of such self-exoneration is participation in terror comprised. I knew. I didn’t care.

One day Telamon and our party were on a spree, with women, on the coast, when a man-of-war beating north hailed us to put ashore prisoners. When the longboat came in, I noted the warrant officer’s red hair and hazel eyes.

It was Forehand, Endius’ man.

There was gray in the fellow’s beard and a cloak of scarlet about his shoulders. No longer a youth in service, he had been freed and enfranchised. I congratulated him with all my heart. “And where bound, beating north this time of year?”

“To Endius, on the Hellespont. He is there now, treating with Alcibiades.”

We returned to Teos, Telamon and I, to discover ourselves fallen from favor with the Spartans. Purges must be made from time to time of those undertaking such errands as we. Philoteles got us out one jump before the next rotation, with orders to trek north to Alcibiades’ new domains and “assess the situation.”

Alcibiades had three castles near the Straits, at Ornoi, Bisanthes, and Neonteichos. These were the strongholds gotten for him by Timandra with loot skimmed, it was said, from the Samos fleet. We beached on the same strand of Aegospotami into which, in less than a twelvemonth, Athens’ final blood would drain.

The Odrysian Thracians detain without exception every foreigner landing on their soil. They impound your kit and compel you to get drunk. Their drink,
coroessa,
is a syrupy liquor, potent as fire, which pours like resin and which they imbibe neat. One must not resist its effect but yield and become as assholed as possible. This is how they determine your
aedor,
“wind” or “breath,” which is to them the supreme and all-defining attribute of a man. We underwent this ordeal with the passengers of two ferries beached before us. Three gentlemen apparently lacked breath. The Odrysians packed them off with the next boat; they simply would not let them in.

Escorts arrived from the interior to take us on. These were youths, spectacular horsemen with foxskin boots and bridles of silver. “What prince do you serve?” Telamon asked, admiring their spirit.

“Prince Alcibiades,” our guide declared.

The lad boasted that his master’s fortune, got from raiding the tribes east of the Iron Mountains, exceeded four hundred talents. If this was true, Alcibiades held more wealth than the treasury of Athens, bereft now even of her final emergency reserve. Spartans and Persians paid
court to him, the youth bragged, and Prince Seuthes himself stood his sanction. We inquired what type of troops he commanded, expecting peltasts and irregulars, tribesmen who would melt away at the first snowflake.
“Hippotoxotai,”
the youth replied in Greek. Mounted archers. We exchanged a glance at this wild tale. Some miles farther our guide reined us in, overstanding a heathland valley. There across an expanse that would have swallowed Athens whole the turf stretched sundered by hoof strikes and littered end-to-end with camp debris, through which women and dogs ranged, scavenging. Great barrows had been thrown up for sacrifice; we saw stands before which troops had passed in review and dikework ponds where streams had been dammed for the watering of horses in the thousands.

“Hippotoxotai,”
the youth repeated.

We rode all day. This part of Thrace is treeless. Rather the ground is swarded with species of low flowering hedges which find the cold hospitable; these heatherlike ivies produce carnelian berries, quite pretty, and provide a carpet over which horses may gallop at speed and upon which one sleeps, wrapped in his pelt mantle, with the bliss of an infant. Peaty rills gush beneath beetling prominences, so cold a draught numbs your teeth and leaves fingers sensationless. Tribal territories are bounded by these courses. To water one’s horse on the land of another is a declaration of war, and that in fact is how they do it.

Fleas abound in Thrace, even in winter. They infest every covert from beards to bed-wrappings; nothing short of a plunge into ice may dislodge them. Horses are runty, tough as rawhide; they can pack their own weight all day and fear nothing save the swell of the sea’s edge, or perhaps the salt stink of it, which takes them mad with fright.

For myself, I debarked in the country upon as doleful a frame as I had ever known. The place cheered me. It was like dying and going to hell. Nothing could be worse, so you might as well perk up. I believe it exercised a similar tonic on Alcibiades. The people had a vigor. Their gods were refreshingly uncouth. And the women. In raiding cultures a man packs with him all he wishes not to lose. These flea-biters ranged with sisters, mothers, daughters, and wives, all itching for trouble. One would think a man of my history would lose appetite for the female. But such is the ungovernable nature of that captain between our thighs that life, or heat at least, does implausibly return. I found myself content to
be on campaign again. The soldier’s life agreed with me. I was watching a Thracian dame milk a bitch (they mix dog’s milk with millet to make a porridge for their babes) when it struck me that I was interested in something. The supreme mystery of existence is this: that, perceiving it for what it is, we yet cling to it. And existence, despite all, discovers measures to reanimate our despoliated hearts.

The words for wind and sky are one in Thrace:
aedor,
a god’s name, which is neither feminine nor masculine but of such antiquity, they say, as to antedate gender. Thracians believe the world upheld not by earth, but sky, elemental and everlasting. They chant this hymn:

Wind is of profound substance in the protocol of Thrace. The natives are never unaware of its “beat” or “nose,” as they call the quarter from which it blows. No man-at-arms may stand upbeat of his better. The nobler takes the beat at his back; the lesser endures it in his face.

Camps are laid out by wind, and a prince’s retinue forms up by beat. With Seuthes this was above a hundred, each stationed about his principal in a hierarchy as elaborate as the court of Persia. Only one foreigner ever mastered the nuance of the Knights’ order of Thrace. Need I name him?

We had bypassed his coastal castle, seeking him inland beyond the Cold Ford, the second tier of mountains, where he had gone, our buck informed us, on a
salydonis,
a combination hunt and rite by which a lesser lord pledges fealty to a greater and upon which the Spartans, Endius’ legation, had accompanied him as a way of assessing the troops Alcibiades and Seuthes proposed to ally with them. For two days we encountered no one, not even herders for the sheep, whose fleeces in that remote province are undyed by their holders, as the code of hospitality permits any to take what he needs. Then at midmorning a solitary rider appeared on the skyline, a thousand feet above us, advancing across our vision with the fearless grace of a young god. The rider descended the slope by traverses as we mounted toward him.

When the prince came closer, however, we realized it was a girl, in hide buskins like a man. One was struck by the gloss and amplitude of her mane, shiny as sable, and which she wore tied in a knot at the crown, while tendrils flew about her face in the wind.

“Stay here,” our guide commanded. “Face into the beat.” He trotted to greet her. The foot-bearers overhauled us. “Who’s this sparrow?” Telamon inquired.