The Flowers of Adonis Read online

  ‘And more to threaten?’

  ‘To be of most use to us, we need Messana as a friend, not a conquered enemy.’

  ‘So, that’s it then. Do we sail for Rhegium at once?’

  Alkibiades stops his prowling up and down and sits himself down on an armour barrel and smiles at me. ‘Oh no! Never let it be said that Messana is lacking in courtesy. We are bidden to a supper party in the house of the Chief Archon.’

  ‘We?’ Sailing-masters don’t usually get invited to supper in the houses of the great. On the deck of a trireme with dirty weather blowing up, or when the spears are flying and it’s time to manoeuvre the ship to ram, then we count as any man’s equal and a bit to spare, but on shore we’re not gentlemen. Oh yes I’ve supped with more than one of Alkibiades’ friends in Athens, but then all the world knows that a disgraceful number of Alkibiades’ friends aren’t gentlemen either, and you’re as likely to meet a ship’s master or a rich merchant with too many rings and a twang of Corinth at the back of his nose, as you are to meet some bright sprig of the older nobility at his table. Most people are more careful of the company they keep. ‘You and I,’ says Alkibiades. ‘Small and select.’

  ‘Did you tell them my father made his living gutting fish?’ says I. I’m interested.

  ‘I told them I intended to bring my sailing-master with me, because if it was anything like as good a party as I expected, I should require his professional skill to get me back to the Icarus. With the help of the wine and the stephanotis garlands they may not notice the smell of fish guts.’

  ‘There’s times,’ I says, ‘when I wonder why I’ve stuck to you all these years! And if you say “because I’d not be master of the Icarus now, if I hadn’t”, you can sail her back to Rhegium yourself when this bloody supper party is over!’

  He turns himself round a bit on the armour cask, and looks at me. ‘But I was not going to say that,’ he says; and he sounds amused, and in a queer way he sounds puzzled …

  I shall never understand him and I might as well make up my mind to it. I’ve had time enough, if ever I was going to, the Gods know that! I had scarcely parted with my boy’s long hair, the day that he and I first came to hailing distance, nor had he, come to that. I had got myself taken on by a kinsman of my mother’s who owned a half share in a fishing-boat at Phalaron (that was a step up in the world for me!) and my master had sent me on an errand into Athens. I carried out the errand, whatever it was, and went back a roundabout way that would take me through the Agora. All boys like to see a bit of life. The Agora was even more crowded and full of life than usual. And there seemed to be something special going on before the Temple of Zeus. I edged up closer, to see what it might be, and found that it was one of those days the Government decree when they need to meet a special expense or find themselves short of obols, for public spirited citizens to make free gifts to the state. Nobles and rich merchants were outdoing each other at the receiving tables, and from time to time an ordinary citizen coming up with his smaller contribution. Me, I’m not in the least public spirited, and I’d a much better use for the obol in my pouch; but I dawdled to a standstill to watch, and in the few moments I’m stood there watching, Alkibiades comes by.

  I knew him by sight, of course; all Athens did. Even then, he was the kind that only has to walk through a crowded place for all eyes to follow him. He was simply strolling by, when I first saw him, but suddenly he seemed to wake to what was going on. His brows flew up, and I saw the idea and the casual amusement come into his face together. He turned towards the receiving tables, everyone parting to let him through as though he walked on winged sandals, and brought out a crimson silk bag from the breast of his tunic and tossed it down, jingling, among the money already piled there. No one would have guessed, seeing him standing there that Pericles kept him rather short, and the money had been meant to pay a few of his pressing bills. Everyone crowds round to watch the counting, exclaiming in admiration at his generosity, and the public spirit of one so young. And in the general excitement, somehow a fighting quail that he had under his mantle gets free. I’ve a fair idea he let the thing escape on purpose, just for a little amusement in passing; but that’s as may be. It was the time when quail fighting was forbidden, anyway.

  Everyone in the Agora, it seemed, dropped whatever they were doing to try to catch it for him as it hopped and fluttered away on its clipped wings. And I — I was the one to get it (it left a few tail feathers in the hands of a master baker) — and brought it back to him where he stood looking on as though at the antics of a troop of tumblers, and doing nothing about it himself, whatever.

  I had joined the scramble simply for the sport of the passing moment. But when I stands there before him, holding out the quail with its angry head sticking out like a feathered snake between my fingers, suddenly it’s not sport any more. And there’s me with my heart drumming right up in my throat, looking down at the quail as he took it from me, and afraid to look up into his face because I knows that when I do, something’s going to happen, and afterwards nothing’s ever again going to be just the same as it was before. So I looks up, and there’s that cool blue gaze of his waiting for me; and the thing happens.

  Oh not love, not what men mostly mean by love, anyway. He’d had plenty of men in love with him; but we were both of us even then, ones for the women, and the more women the better.

  A new fear came to me, that he was going to offer me money, if he had any left, for having caught his quail; but he was only tucking the bird under his arm again. He said, ‘It’s bleak work thanking a man without a name to thank him by. What do they call you, Catcher-of-Quails?’

  ‘I am Antiochus, son of Andros,’ I says.

  And he says, ‘I am Alkibiades, son of Cleinias.’

  He must have known I was well aware of that; but maybe he also knew, as I did, that I was his man from then on, and there are rituals to be observed in these things. Even two dogs know that, when they cock their legs in the same spot as a sign that they accept each other.

  Then he says, ‘It’s hot. Let’s go and find something to drink, Antiochus, son of Andros.’

  No one less noble or less arrogant than Alkibiades would have been seen drinking with a fisher lad at a public wine booth; and no fisher lad with any sense of the fitness of things would have gone happily, without thought of the honour done him, to drink at a public wine booth with Alkibiades.

  I never thought of that until I went home and told my parents what had happened. At first they did not believe me; and when they did, my father, who was of a hopeful disposition, kept telling me that my fortune was made. ‘He’ll be the making of you — the making of you, boy!’

  Until my mother, who took a darker view of life, some said as the result of having married my father, said, ‘Or the death of you, if all I hear of that one be true.’

  Well, my father has proved right so far, but there’s still time enough for my mother’s turn to come.

  *

  Alkibiades on the deck of the Icarus, says presently, ‘Not curious as to the real reason that you come with me tonight?’

  ‘There’s another reason?’

  ‘There is. Someone jostled against me as I came down the steps from the Council Chamber, and left this in my hand.’ He fishes a folded strip of papyrus from the breast of his tunic and holds it out to me. I have never found reading come easy; it’s a thing you need to learn young, but I can spell out the few words on it with some trouble. ‘Athens has better friends in Messana than you have found among the Council. Trust the messenger who comes to you at Archagorus’ house this evening.’

  ‘Archagorus being the Chief Archon? Can you smell a trap?’

  Alkibiades shrugs. ‘Quite possibly. Quite possibly not. In either case I may be needing a friend to cover my back.’ He gets up from the barrel and stretches until the small muscles crack behind his shoulders. ‘Go and make yourself beautiful, Pilot.’

  3

  The Seaman

  That’s a good
supper party.

  The Chief Archon of Messana was a man who knew how to treat his guests; and the wine, cooled with snow from the mountains inland, was some of the best that has ever gone down my thirsty throat. Just my luck that it should come my way on an evening when it was about as much use to me as vinegar.

  ‘Remember,’ says Alkibiades to me while we were making ready, ‘the Gods alone know what hornets’ nest we may be running our heads into this evening; and so, my dear, you will keep within reason sober, this one shore-going night, if you never did it before and if you never do it again.’

  ‘You’ve never known me too drunk to have my wits about me,’ says I.

  And he grins, settling the shoulder folds of his mantle. ‘I’ve known you with the vine-leaves dripping out of your ears, and the breath of you enough to set them twining up the mast and turn any self-respecting pirate crew to dolphins. And that’s when you go looking round for someone to start a fight with for the sheer murderous fun of the thing.’ And then suddenly he looks at me straight, with the grin wiped off his face, and says, ‘That’s an order, Pilot.’

  So I curses inwardly and smiles my most gentleman-like, with a thirst on me like a lime pit; and lets the boy pass with the wine krater more often than I holds up my cup to be refilled. And truth to tell, as time goes on, it seems that Alkibiades is drinking more than I am. And ‘there’s no justice in this world for poor sailor-men,’ thinks I.

  Very well it becomes him, I must say. And lounging there among the piled cushions, with his mantle slipping half off one shoulder, and his smile and his lisp honeyed enough to make you bilious, he looks like a man without a thought in the world beyond a pleasant evening spent among pleasant strangers. But I wonders if he’s as sharp-aware as I am of the bright hardness of the dagger belted under his mantle against his bare skin.

  There was good talk round the table in Archagorus’ andron that evening. Some of it was above my head, and then I amused myself with the frescoes of nymphs and gambolling kids and slant-eyed satyrs on the walls — they were finer and more lewd than anything I’d seen in Athens, outside Alkibiades’ private supper room.

  But when the talk turned on the plays of Euripides, I grew interested again; for though taking it all in all I’d sooner have a comedy, I like a good tragedy as well as the next; the kind that gives you something to chew on, and maybe tugs at your heart-strings a bit. (They say most sailors are sentimental.) It seemed that Messana, like the other cities of Sicily, set great store by his work, and Aristarchus and his cronies were eager to hear details of his latest play, presented at the Dionysia that spring. Now that was the year that Euripides presented The Trojan Women — a piece of very uncomfortable anti-war propaganda, which could hardly be expected to find much favour in a city just about to launch the greatest attack of its history. (Old Euripides had the courage of his convictions, I’ll say that for him!) And it wasn’t surprising that the prize that year went to a satyr play.

  Remembering Alkibiades storming out of the theatre, and sweeping half the front bench after him, I wondered what he would answer to their questions. He put the tips of his fingers together in the manner of Nikias at his most judicial, and looked at them consideringly. ‘Euripides is not a young man, and reputedly he is a sick one. I think possibly his powers begin to fail.’

  It was a damnable slander, and he knew it as well as I did. But it did Euripides no harm.

  They shook their heads and said they were grieved to hear it, but pressed for details all the same; and Alkibiades told them how the play opened in the camp before fallen Troy; and how, after the Gods had had their say, it concerned nothing but the portioning out of the captured women among the conquerors, and the slaying of Hector’s infant son. ‘It’s scarcely a play at all,’ he says, ‘no plot, no shape; just one damned misery after another, with some passable lyrics in between.’

  And that’s not true either. Only maybe it’s better to pretend, even to yourself, that it is. I remembers, sudden and too clear for comfort (I didn’t know I’d listened that closely), a rag of one of Cassandra’s mad speeches, about the Greeks who died in the siege, far from their homes, fighting a people that hadn’t threatened their walls nor overset their landmarks.

  And they whom Ares took,

  Had never seen their children: no wife came

  With gentle arms to shroud the limbs of them

  For buried, in a strange and angry earth

  Laid dead. And there at home, the same long dearth;

  Women that lonely died, and aged men

  Waiting for sons that ne’er should turn again,

  Nor know their graves, nor pour drink-offerings

  To the unslaked dust. These be the things

  The conquering Greek hath won!

  No, it’s not much wonder that Athens has hated him ever since. Playwrights with a message are first cousins to Hades himself. I has to get my cup filled the next time the boy comes round, to wash the taste of that wretched play out of my mouth.

  But it was not all talk. Archagorus knew how to keep his guests from going to sleep once their bellies were full. And when the main part of supper was over, while the slaves were bringing in fruit and little honey cakes, and fresh garlands to replace those that had withered in the heat, there was a sudden shrilling of flute music from the dark courtyard, and into the torchlight came running a little troop of light-foot Syrian dancing girls led by three flute girls to play for them.

  All evening I had been waiting, questioning in my head every guest at the table, every slave who entered out of the shadows, wondering if this, or this, was our messenger. But for some reason it never occurred to me to look for him — or her — in such company. I was merely pleased that here was something more to my taste than after-supper talk, however good; and sat up to enjoy myself.

  It was pretty to watch; all tiny mouse-quick footwork, and arms swaying like palm fronds, and the chiming of little bright spangles on swinging skirts of blue and violet and crimson gauzes that you could almost see through but never quite as much as you’d like to. You can see much the same thing in any seaport if you know where to go, though this was better done, more classy.

  But when the figs and honey cakes were on the table and the slaves had departed, the dancing grew wilder and more worth watching; the flutes made little trills of notes and from their pretty, commonplace dancing, the girls began to turn acrobat, weaving coloured patterns of themselves in the air, one after another like a shoal of dolphins, going down and over and up, flying heels over head in a whirl of spangled gauzes. One girl in particular seemed to have not a bone in her body but be all fire and whipcord; and every time she came upright from a flying somersault or from some fantastic upside-down trick of skill and balance, she did it with a toss of the head and a flash of a smile that was not just the trained smile of the other girls but seemed to sparkle up from inside her with the pleasure of what she did. There was a hardiness about her, under the paint; she looked as if she could have swarmed up a mast like any of my topmen, to furl sail in a squall of wind. And I says to myself, ‘Pilot, if there’s one for the taking later, that’s the one for you.’

  But Alkibiades also was looking that way; and she — every time she spun past him she gave him a flick with her gold-painted eyes; and I saw that if she were for anybody’s taking it wouldn’t be mine. I wasn’t breaking my heart. The other dancers were pretty and gay and any one of them would likely be just as good under the bushes. And failing any of them, I reckoned there’d be plenty more girls in Messana. I’d forgotten with the chief part of my head, that unless something had gone wrong with somebody’s plans, we should have other things to do that night than tumble in some dark corner with a girl.

  The performance was drawing to an end, the dancers spinning faster and faster, the flute notes like sparks from a windy fire; and then — it was so swift that in the coloured whirl of arms and legs and intermingling skirts and flying hair I never saw quite what happened — the girl seemed to slip or maybe
turn giddy, and the force of her own spinning carried her into our midst and flung her in a tangle of twisted gauzes across the low couch on which Alkibiades half lay. He caught her on the instant, casual and laughing, like a boy catching a ball at play; the flutes fell silent between note and note, and the dance wavered into nothing. And the girl’s thin brown arms flashed up and were round his neck! I never saw a girl so shameless — nor a man for that matter. He simply scooped her into his mantle, swung his feet to the floor and got up, holding her high against his breast and shoulder. She seemed, as far as I could make out, to be biting his ear.

  Then she begins to kick and squeal a bit, for form’s sake, but not much; and Alkibiades stands there smiling pleasantly round at the rest of us, and at our kind host, who’s sitting bolt upright on his couch, his face rigid with startled displeasure.

  ‘See what the Gods have sent me!’ says he, and bows a little. ‘Archagorus, you are the very prince of hosts! Even I never thought of a more charming way to end a social evening!’

  He gives me a quick look under the banquet wreath of stephanotis rapidly sliding over the ear that the dancing girl wasn’t using; and I understands.

  ‘I — I —’ was all Archagorus could say, and his eyes bulging in his head, and the others weren’t in much better case. I never yet found a Greek-speaking port where My Lord’s name for outrageous behaviour wasn’t known, but it looked as though the chief men of Messana hadn’t been prepared for anything quite like this. At sight of their faces the laughter rose in my throat, only as I made ready to move, the touch of the dagger against my bare skin sobered me.

  Alkibiades blew a kiss to the other girls who had drawn together in a startled knot, and turns and strides a little unsteadily from the andron, the girl still giggling across his shoulder.