The Flowers of Adonis Read online

  Then we heard the cheering begin, far up between the Long Walls, rolling down to the harbour and out across the water. And suddenly between the masts of the fleet, the waterfront was dark with men.

  ‘Close quarters, with that lot, until we can make Korkyra and turn them over to the transports,’ said Corylas, my second.

  I nodded. ‘But not for us. We’re the flagship.’

  ‘It has its advantages.’

  The troops were embarking, swarming across the gangplanks on to galleys alongside wharves and jetties; while the small boats had grown busy again, scuttling to and fro like water-beetles as they ferried their loads of hoplites out to those offshore. The embarkation was still going on when a fresh wave of cheering told us that the Generals must have come on the scene.

  Corylas listened with his head cocked, and said, ‘Only Lamachus and Nikias by the sound of it.’ There was anxiety in his tone.

  Antiochus who had come from the stern heard him and looked round, grinning all over his wind-burned face. ‘Did you think Alkibiades would ride with that pair of beauties? He’ll be following on last, a clear field and no one to steal his sunlight!’

  And a flicker of laughter ran from one to another along deck and rowing benches. But it was a long wait, all the same. At the sterns of the Lion and the Penelope the Commanders’ pennants fluttered out and the trumpets sounded as first Lamachus and then Nikias came aboard. Lamachus would be sniffing the wind like an old warhorse; but I wondered what Nikias made of it all. He had tried to persuade the people against the expedition from the first, telling them it was a thing beyond their powers: an Athenian Empire supreme from the Black Sea corn lands to the Pillar of Heracles — as though anything was beyond our powers, with Alkibiades who had given us the dream, to lead us!

  ‘Arkadius,’ Corylas said suddenly.

  My true name is Hagnon, but if anyone calls me by it they generally have to call three times before I remember and answer to it. My father was an Arkadian merchant, and I was born in Arkadia and bred there till he died when I was five years old and my mother brought me back to her own people in Athens. When she married again, her second husband adopted me for his own (even in these more easy-going days it is probably owing to him, good dull old man, that I have the rights and duties, including military service, of an Athenian citizen) but Arkadius or ‘The Arkadian’ I have been all my life, none the less.

  ‘What?’

  Corylas laughed a little uneasily. ‘I was just thinking — you know, this is a subject for Aristophanes to put into a play. Here’s the greatest fighting force Athens has ever sent overseas, setting off with her blessing and — we are told — the blessing of the Gods, under the command of a man with a blasphemy charge hanging over his head.’

  I said, ‘I wonder if he knows he’s sailing under death’s shadow.’ I had not known I was going to say that. I had not even thought it, until the moment it was spoken.

  ‘Don’t we all, setting out for war?’ Corylas said.

  But death seemed very far away from us, that morning of our sailing. We felt immortal. The Gods never like that.

  And then at last, far over the water and up through Piraeus, we heard the cheering again, and this time a new note in it that there was no mistaking. ‘Alkibiades!’

  Then we saw the boat coming, and the figure in the stern. You can always pick out Alkibiades even at a distance among a hundred other men. It is something to do with the way he carries his head.

  The Icarus sprang to attention; Antiochus came straddling forward again, the ship’s trumpeter at his side. Out of the tail of my eye I could see that my lads were standing steady as though they, like the mast, were stepped through the deck planks into the keel. It takes time to learn to stand like that on the deck of a galley except in a flat calm; but most of them had been at it longer than I had.

  The boat came alongside. The trumpet crowed, the purple and gold Commander’s pennant went fluttering up at the stern; and Alkibiades, with his gilded young men behind him, came over the side.

  Antiochus had snapped to attention in the formal salute that the occasion demanded, but his seaman’s bonnet was tipped far back on his head, and he grinned like the veriest dockside urchin. And Alkibiades, receiving the salute with graceful formality, had the laughter dancing like devils behind his eyes, for all the gravity of his mouth.

  ‘Behold, I am here — blasphemy charge and all,’ said our Commander sweetly. But there was something behind the raillery — a defiance. I saw then that he did know he was sailing under death’s shadow, and that he was enjoying the knowledge.

  ‘Blasphemy charge and all, sir,’ Antiochus said. ‘There was a time when I doubted you’d make it.’

  ‘There was a time when I doubted it myself — a little,’ Alkibiades said. ‘Well, we’ve only to take Syracuse for them and they’ll forget the whole affair.’

  ‘In any case, you’ve always got the fleet if you should happen to be needing one,’ Antiochus said meaningly.

  Alkibiades gave a shout of laughter and clapped him on the shoulder. ‘You old pirate!’ But they looked at each other an instant, eye into eye, all the same; and I noticed for the first time, in the way that one does notice unimportant things at important moments, that their eyes were exactly on a level.

  Alkibiades turned his head and sent one hard appraising glance along our dressed line, then walked aft, Antiochus at his shoulder and his staff officers following. There was one among them I had not seen before. He was very young, I should have said scarcely old enough to be through his Ephebes’ training. A very dark boy with one of those grave quick faces that one knows instinctively will break easily into laughter, and become grave again as soon as the laughter is over. I found later that he was a distant kinsman of Alkibiades, and that his name was Astur.

  Almost at once after that, across the water from Nikias’ flag-ship, we heard a single trumpet, and all through the fleet, and on shore, all sounds fell away into a quiet filled with the slap of water along the triremes’ sides, and the crying of the gulls. And into the waiting silence, small and clear with distance, came the voice of the Herald raised in the Invocation. It was taken up from ship to ship, and on ship after ship smoke rose from the altars set up in the stern. On our after-deck Alkibiades laid his helmet aside and set the sacrificial wreath on his head, took the golden libation cup that the youngest of his staff officers held ready for him, and raised it high; the altar smoke fronded across his face and the scent of frankincense trailed down the length of the Icarus on the light breeze. He made the Invocation for Victory, turning shoreward to Athene of the Citadel, whose upraised spear, four miles away, made a flake of brightness on the blue air. Then crossing to the seaward side, to Blue Haired Poseidon, for the safety of the fleet. And standing there with one foot on the mounting of the rail, poured the meal and the wine into the lapping water.

  And at full pitch of his lungs, he raised the Paean. For a heart-beat of time his voice hung alone; then we caught it up from him, rowers and seamen, and fighting men alike; and the next ship took it from us, and the next, until from the whole fleet the Paean was ringing upward.

  As the last note died, Antiochus shouted the orders to up-anchor and stand by to set sail. The great bronze-bound anchor came dripping in over the side; and all round us was the shrilling of flutes and the shouted orders of the pilots as the fleet up-anchored and cast off for sea. The rowers began to sing at their oars, taking their time from the bo’s’n’s flute as we came round and headed for the harbour mouth. Once past the mole, the top-men sprang into action and sails, brilliant with coloured suns and stars and dolphins, broke out from masts that had been bare stalks before. The canvas filled with the north-west wind that was rising as usual towards noon and we spread out and made a race of it till we were past Aegina, then fell into the proper stations of a fleet at sea.

  The Seaman

  We makes the gathering at Korkyra and turns the troops over to the transports, and picks up the storeships — whic
h besides corn and supplies, carries stone-masons and carpenters with the tools of their trade for building war machines and raising siege walls and Poseidon knows what-all beside. And we sails the long haul across to Italy. It’s not all Hymettus honey, making that crossing direct — two nights at sea is well enough for pot-bellied trading vessels, but a warship isn’t built for sleeping in like a floating barracks. It’s not too bad for the marines, they can bed down snug enough under the awnings forward, and the Commander has his sleeping space aft and can spread as wide as he chooses, so long as he doesn’t foul the steerman’s feet; but for the rest of the ship’s company from the rowers to the pilot …

  Name of the Dog! It’s times like that, especially in anything like dirty weather, you begin to wonder why you didn’t hamstring yourself in infancy and take to street begging instead!

  That particular crossing goes off smooth enough, though, with no one lost overboard and no rammings in the dark. But we were none of us sorry when we rounded Cape Heraklea the third morning out from Korkyra, and saw Etna trailing smoke to the north.

  That night we lies at Rhegium on the toe of the mainland, the storeships as close inshore as we can get them, the war-craft, except for a few scouts, hauled up on the beach. The locals allows us harbourage and a market for supplies, but ‘no entrance’ says they; so we makes camp above where the ships are beached, in the precincts of the old Temple of Achaea just outside the city, with the tents of the Generals close under the Goddess’s own stone-pines.

  At Rhegium the scouting vessels we sent on ahead rejoined us with news to make a man sit down and weep or curse his own grandmother. The Generals called a Council of War, and seemingly came to some sort of agreement, though a drunk man can see with one eye it doesn’t make them love each other any the more. And that evening Alkibiades himself comes down to my quarters — a spare sail rigged out from the side of the galley — and orders me to have the Icarus ready to sail for Messana at first light. And when I asks the reason, he smiles as soft as mother’s milk, and, says he, ‘to make the Messanians love us, Pilot.’

  So at first light next morning, we sails for Messana. But my bonny lad, pacing the after-deck with his great cloak dragged round him against the chill that blows up off the water at that hour, doesn’t look, for my money, as though he’s going to make anyone love him. I’d taken over the steering oar myself — I’d a good second, well up to handling the Icarus even in the tricky currents of the Strait, and ordinarily I’d have left it to him, but I’ve a feeling that what’s coming may be the kind of thing best not said with a third pair of ears to hear it.

  Astern of us there’s these few lights burning in the camp; and ahead, there’s the mountains of Sicily. No wind to fill the sail, but the sea’s choppy with the meeting of cross currents; short irregular seas that make it hard for the rowers to keep time, and give the steersman plenty to keep him occupied; but even so, I begins to feel the silence stretch out long and thin between him and me, and it’s not the companionable kind of silence, either. To break it, I says, ‘What for your chances with the Messanians?’

  ‘The Lordship of Athens, a matched chariot team, an outworn sandal strap. How should I know?’ says Alkibiades, still pacing. ‘I am Alkibiades and there is no other Alkibiades but me; but alas! owing to some oversight, I am not numbered among the Gods. It’s inconvenient, and I feel the lack of Godhead from time to time.’ He passes me in his pacing, and flings the words over his shoulder. ‘I’ll tell you one thing, Antiochus mine: if I were a God I’d blast that old fire-eater Lamachus with a thunderbolt, and send our devout Nikias such a spiritual ecstasy he’d never come out of it again but sit smiling harmlessly into the white eye of the moon and picking bits out of his navel for the rest of his life.’

  ‘I’ll not have that kind of talk aboard my ship,’ says I, ‘it’s unlucky.’

  He swings round on me. ‘Apart from the fact that she’s my ship, who are you to be so careful about pleasing or displeasing the Gods? You raised the hymn to Demeter and Kore as loud as any of us that night after supper. You invented a new version to the second strophe that was — unorthodox to say the least of it.’

  Well, it’s true enough, but I don’t care to be reminded of it just then, so I says, ‘What I do ashore is one thing, and what I do at sea is another thing. Nobody takes liberties with the Gods at sea. Not if they’re wise, they don’t.’

  We looks at each other an instant in the growing light. I hears the dip and thrust of the oars and the slap of water along the sides, and the faint creak and play of the whole trireme under way. And I knows Alkibiades pretty well; I ought to, by that time. ‘It was a stormy Council, was it?’ I says.

  The little waves slaps against the oars and sends the spindrift flying in my face. And he turns his back on it and leans on the dipping gunwale. ‘Stormy enough. Old Daddy Nikias was for trying to settle everything with treaties and agreements — more treaties and agreements that aren’t worth the papyrus they’re written on — and then sail round the coast making a show of Athenian power, like a Persian gamecock showing off his tail at mating time. Then off home to Athens with “no waste of man-power or resources” — and nothing to show for having come on this jaunt at all!’

  ‘And that wouldn’t do much to help on the plans of the Lord Alkibiades. I’m thinking they don’t include a peaceful settling of Sicily’s affairs.’

  ‘We need a victory, and a bloody one, in Syracuse,’ says he, ‘not a cobbled-up peace that leaves all as it was before.’

  ‘Lamachus will have been with you in that, at all events.’

  ‘Our aged fire-eater? Oh he’d have had us beating on the walls of Syracuse by now. Very full of the advantages — including booty — of surprise; very vocal as to advisability of attacking while the enemy are still wetting themselves with fright at the size of the Athenian fleet.’

  ‘He might be right at that,’ I says. ‘An invading enemy never seems so dangerous or so big as he does at first sight, before you’ve had time to get his measure.’

  ‘Do you think I don’t know that?’

  ‘Then why —’ I begins; but he flings off from the gunwale and laughs, soft and a bit ugly.

  ‘The Sicils promised us, if we came to their aid, the money to pay and victual our troops and keep our ships in trim. Yes? And now the scouts have come back and we know that the Sicils haven’t the price of a new cloak between them! It’s quite beautiful, when one comes to think of it; they must have kept our embassage in a golden haze of the grape from the first moment they stepped ashore, so that everywhere they looked, they saw gold; a Midas touch behind their eyes and in their fuddled heads — Gods! And all the wine drunk from the same fine gold and silver cups passed round ahead of them to every table they feasted at.’ His voice was soft and purring — a panther might have that voice if it spoke with a man’s tongue, lying out on a warm rock. Then between one word and the next it turns quick and hard with exasperation. ‘By the Dog! Antiochus, do you think I like counselling a middle course? I, Alkibiades? What have I to do with middle courses? But look at the other two! For Athens to send out an expedition such as this, and then receive it home with nothing to show for ever having sent it — Can you think what that would do to our place among the allies? Even to what hold we still have in the Aegean? And lacking the Sicils’ gold to feed our men and buy mercenaries from the rest of the island, how in Typhon’s name can we launch an attack on Syracuse? Without even a base. We have got to gain allies among the other cities; kindle the Sicils to revolt for themselves against the power of Syracuse — men in revolt fight without pay. But before all else we must win over Messana. Safe harbourage, lying in the entrance to the Straits and covering the main approaches to Sicily. Strategically it’s the perfect base. Then we can spring at the throat of Syracuse!’

  ‘It’s not me you have to convince; and seemingly you have convinced your fellow Generals — Leastwise, here we are with the Icarus’ prow set towards Messana.’

  ‘I won over Lamac
hus,’ says he, briefly. ‘He’s slightly more open to reason than Nikias, because his ears aren’t so waxed up with his religion; he can actually hear what’s said to him from time to time, if it’s shouted loud enough. Then we were two to one.’

  *

  We comes in to Messana harbour in early sunlight, and drops anchor in the roadstead, a cable’s length offshore. There’s quite a stir, along the waterfront, at sight of the scarlet sun on our sail; and presently, out comes the state penteconta, to know our business. The Commander and Alkibiades talks together for a while, and then Alkibiades goes ashore in our boat.

  We sits on our backsides and waits, while the day goes by and the Icarus swings three-quarter circle to her anchor rope. Arkadius, our lieutenant of marines, sets his men to cleaning their equipment from the salt of our passage, and the rowers crawl into the shade under the benches and sleep like dogs on a dunghill. When the shadows of the mountains are beginning to lengthen across the harbour, and the smells of the day’s heat, good and bad, come wafting out to us across the water, My Lord comes wafting out with them.

  ‘He’s wearing his silken look,’ says Arkadius, out of the side of his mouth, even before the boat comes alongside. ‘Now I wonder what that means.’

  As soon as I gets the chance, I asks him what has happened. ‘We had a beautifully civilised Council meeting,’ says he.

  ‘And?’

  ‘And it was very hot, my dear, and a fly kept on walking about on the Chief Archon’s bald head. Messana is largely populated by cautious old men, and young men with cautious old men’s heads on their shoulders.’

  ‘Then we don’t get the base?’

  ‘They’ll allow us exactly what Rhegium allows us: a market, and leave to camp outside the city. And nothing I could say … Gods! I reasoned with them, I turned the full blaze of my sunshine on them, I even hurled a few thunderbolts — I tell you, Antiochus, I descended to courtship. I wooed that Council till I felt like an ageing hetaira. All to no purpose. Syracuse is nearer and has more to offer than we have.’