The Flowers of Adonis Read online

  I got up and lurched after him, turning in the doorway to favour the company with a shrug and a grave shake of the head, which they can take for insolence or apology, whichever best pleases them. Then I follows Alkibiades.

  The door-slave, also somewhat goggle-eyed, was opening the street door for him as I got there, and Alkibiades says to him with grave courtesy, ‘A beautiful evening, is it not? And as warm as milk. Can you direct me to the nearest place where there is some grass to lie on and a leaf or two overhead?’

  I goes after him up the street, keeping a pace or two in the rear. And after a few steps he bursts into song. An old nursery rhyme, of all things.

  Gay girl, myrtle tree,

  Little flowering myrtle tree,

  Come away and dance with me.

  And a bird flew out of the myrtle tree.

  But as soon as we gets to the end of the street, out of earshot of the Chief Archon’s house, he falls silent.

  The Dead

  May the dead take their part in the telling of this story? There are many dead because of Alkibiades.

  The tyranny of Syracuse lay heavy on Messana, as on the other cities of the Straits. And when word reached us that Athens was sending a great war-expedition against her, it sounded to us as the distant trumpets of a relief force must sound in the ears of a beleaguered garrison. To some of us, that is: ah, not to the Syracusian party who held all power in the city; but to us lesser folk with little power or none. At first it was only that we glanced at each other in the street or the market-place or the gymnasium; and then quickly away again, for fear of making too clear the thought that each man carried behind his eyes.

  Later, word came that the Athenian fleet was actually at Rhegium. And then Menaethius, the Olympic victor, gave a supper party to a few friends, at which, when the meal was over and the slaves sent to their quarters, we talked of matters best not overheard by the city in general. We made plans, we few in the summer colonnade of Menaethius’ house, with the moon casting the shadows of the vine leaves across the table to confuse the lamplight, and the soft-edged night moths blundering out of the dark to whirl about the flames. Plans to rise against our overlords and hand the city over to the Athenians’ protection.

  It was a hard choice to make in the first place, not that we owed any loyalty to Syracuse, but we were not the stuff that makes and breaks the patterns of empires; we were merchants, small land-owners, a goldsmith, a couple of ship masters. But we nerved ourselves; we felt ourselves eager and alive, and those of us who were no longer young, felt ourselves young men again.

  Then we went our ways, each to make contact with others of like mind.

  So the thing spread, quietly under the surface, and presently we knew our strength, and our plans were made, so far as they could be made at that stage. The Athenian fleet was still at Rhegium. ‘They will need this harbour,’ Menaethius said. ‘Soon they will come seeking it.’

  One morning the Athenian flagship sailed into the harbour, and the news went racing through Messana that Alkibiades himself had come; that the Archons had summoned a meeting and he was with them in the Council Chamber even then.

  We had certain eyes and ears in the Council Chamber, and so we knew what passed — but we might have guessed that easily enough in any case. We knew also that the Chief Archon had made plans for feasting the unwelcome visitor. All that morning, little groups met in the perfume shops, in the gymnasium, in the Agora, and exchanged a word or two and moved on.

  I was the one who jostled against him in the crowd as he made his way back to the ships, and thrust a note into his hand. There would be no time for a spoken message in the open street, and we dared not commit such things as time and place to paper. So it did no more than let him know (as the Syracusian party knew well enough already), that there were friends of Athens in the city, and alert him for the coming of our actual messenger.

  The rest must be for Pharysatis to accomplish.

  By that time our ranks had opened to include one woman. Courtesans are quick to hear news and can be quick to pass it on. They have more wit and daring than a good woman who has led a good woman’s sheltered life. And the best of them can be trusted to the death when once their faith is given. Pharysatis of old Gorgo’s dancing troupe was Menaethius’ girl whenever he could afford her, and had already done good work for us in passing messages and the like. Menaethius arranged matters somehow with our fat Chief Archon, so that the troupe was engaged for that evening’s supper party, and got word to Pharysatis of what she was to do.

  It had been a full and anxious day, and the summer dusk was deepening into the dark, when the three of us appointed to act for the rest came together in Menaethius’ garden. Menaethius himself, and I, and Basius, the master of the Dolphin. We had chosen the meeting-place because it was easy of access from some waste ground just within the city walls; and being a long garden we could keep well away from the house and all chance that some sound of a late arrival might reach anyone awake in the slaves’ attic or the women’s quarters.

  We waited a long time, while the sky beyond the old temple to Poseidon brightened slowly with the silver forewash of the rising moon; but I do not doubt that it seemed longer than it was. I remember how the darkness of the garden began to be watered with moonlight, and that I looked down at my own hand resting on the head of a sculptured gazelle, and saw it like a hand carved from the same marble, every vein and tendon lightly shadowed in, but without colour and without life …

  And I moved it quickly, to break the spell, and said, because suddenly anything seemed better than the silence, ‘He should be here by now.’

  ‘Soon, anyway,’ Menaethius said, tranquilly. He was always a very tranquil-seeming man, I suppose all his stresses found their outlet in his running, and he wasted no energy on things that did not call for it.

  Pharysatis may not have been able to get word to him,’ said Basius; like me, he was getting edgy. ‘Or he may have thought it a trap.’

  Menaethius said, ‘From what I saw of him at Olympia — unless he has greatly changed in these past few years — I do not think that would hold him back.’

  And we were silent again.

  And Menaethius was right.

  He came out of the black shadow of the city wall, wildcat striped and dappled with the shadows of bramble and arbutus branches, and walking with a long light stride that had something of the wild cat in it too. And behind him followed another, not Pharysatis; her task, once she had brought him to the meeting-place, was to keep watch, but a big loose-limbed man who’s walk had the unmistakable roll of one used to the deck of a ship under foot. Basius has something of that walk himself.

  We came together in the little clearing watched over by the marble gazelle, a small white lake of moonlight among the dark tangle of roses and cistus and sweetbay that hid it both from the house and the temple precincts; and he said to Menaethius, who had moved out a little ahead of Basius and myself, ‘May I felicitate you on your choice of messenger?’

  ‘I am glad that she finds favour in your eyes,’ said Menaethius; and then, ‘May we know who comes with you?’

  In watching Alkibiades I had almost forgotten the other; but he answered himself in a rough-textured voice that was made pleasant by the note of humour in it. ‘Antiochus, pilot of the Icarus, come to see the play runs fair.’ I looked at him with interest; this man who the great Alkibiades had taken out of the fish markets of Piraeus to become the chief sailing-master of his fleet. By the white light of the moon, I saw a man with a drunkard’s nose in a dissolute face, with the same humour in the mouth that I had heard in his voice, a dark head curly as a ram’s fleece that might have been red in the daylight. He wore heavy swinging ornaments in his ears like a barbarian, and indeed there was something of the barbarian, the Outlander, about his whole bearing. It was not the mark of the Piraeus fish market, it was something in himself that would have been there if he had been born into the ranks of the Eupatridae. He was one of those who make their own
laws as they go along, and he would care not a feather in the wind for any other law, and not overmuch for any right or wrong save the will of the man he followed.

  ‘You must forgive me if I seem discourteous,’ Alkibiades was saying, ‘but since I have no proof that in coming to this meeting-place I am not walking into a trap, it did occur to me that I should feel more comfortable between the shoulders if I brought a friend to cover my back. It also appeared to me that it would be still more discourteous to come seemingly alone and leave him to hover unseen in the dark behind me.’ Even in the moonlight we could see the faint smile that barely lifted the corners of his lips. ‘You may regard him as a statue or a myrtle tree. He will be just as silent as to what he hears.’

  There was a moment’s silence. Antiochus, who had dropped back a pace or two, gazing at the moon with absorbed interest; Alkibiades looking from one to another of us with brows a little raised and still that faint smile on his lips.

  Then Menaethius began, ‘We have no right to expect that you should trust us.’

  ‘No, you have not, have you,’ Alkibiades agreed. ‘And while we are on the subject, may I point out while I stand here with the moon full on my face, you all have your backs to it?’

  It had been quite unintentional, and we all moved, and Menaethius presented Basius and myself as formally as though he had been bringing up friends in the palaestra to be made known to each other; and was just about to introduce himself, when Alkibiades said, ‘I know you, do I not? Now where —’

  ‘The last Olympic Festival,’ Menaethius said.

  Alkibiades’ smile suddenly warmed. ‘Menaethius! Of course! You won the Diaulos.’

  ‘And you the chariot race.’

  ‘And carried off third and fourth places. That’s the advantage of entering seven teams,’ Alkibiades said. ‘A runner can only enter himself … You, I take it, are the “better friends to Athens than I found in the Council Chamber”?’

  ‘We are.’

  ‘All three of you?’ said Alkibiades in a voice as silken as a crocus petal.

  ‘There are — others,’ Menaethius said. ‘We three are chosen to represent them, and to put our lives in your hands as surety for the good faith of us all.’

  Alkibiades looked at us each in turn. I have seen a man look so at a matched chariot team, judging the mettle of the horses. Then he said with quick gravity, ‘A good choice, I think, and I accept the surety. Now tell me your purpose in sending to me.’

  Menaethius held the spokesman’s place among us by common consent. ‘Today you sought to persuade the Council to open the city and harbour to you, for a base and repair yard in your attack on Syracuse. We know well enough that you could take without asking; but for the successful breaking of Syracuse, the Sicilian cities must come over to you of their own will. We know that the Council refused.’

  ‘It seems that you know many things.’

  ‘In one form or another, the thing is being talked of all over Messana. But we have our eyes and ears in the Council Chamber also.’

  ‘You? That is, the Athenian faction?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How strong is it, this faction?’

  ‘Not strong as yet, but growing among those who do not love the tyranny of Syracuse.’

  ‘Growing how quickly?’ he demanded; and I felt his mind leap forward, sniffing the wind like a hound.

  ‘Fairly quickly, but there is a way to go yet. It seems unlikely we shall ever be strong enough to take and hold Messana; but if we can count on an Athenian force standing by to receive the city from us immediately on its revolt — then give us two months and we will give Messana into your hands.’

  There was a long silence; and I remember, oh I remember, that somewhere in the arbutus trees a nightingale began to sing, as though the bright fierce moonlight had been gathered and transmuted into singing. They are fools who say the dead forget …

  Then Alkibiades whistled as clear and full as the nightingale. ‘This begins to grow interesting. Give me further details, and I may quite possibly believe you.’

  ‘We scarcely supposed that you would take such a matter as this without the details,’ Basius said.

  And so we laid all plain before him, our plans for rounding up the Syracuse party; for capturing the arsenal; the carefully worked out timing, the names of our key men. We set our lives and our hopes of freedom in his hands. And he listened; making a comment, a suggestion now and then; but for the most part simply listened.

  When it was all told, he stood for a few minutes, his face turned from the moonlight, so that we could not guess the run of his thoughts. And then he glanced over his shoulder at Antiochus, who had brought his gaze down from the moon. And then he gave his attention back to us. ‘On the tenth night of Pyanopaion my own squadron will pass up the straits as though for Megara. Light a flare on the headland when you are ready for your guests, and we will put in to join the party.’

  4

  The Seaman

  We pulls out for Rhegium at noon: and as soon as we rejoins the main force, Alkibiades goes into action. And by the Dog! how the man can stir when he chooses! Like a God — or a Devil! Within a few days he has a force of sixty triremes manned and victualled and we stands away for Naxos under full pressure of oars and sail, on this business of making allies.

  Naxos shows friendly, so we spends only enough time there to sweeten the friendship a little further, and then stands away for Catana. We comes up against another strong Syracusian party there, and in the natural ways of things, they’ve nothing to say to us. So Alkibiades orders us to stand off for a time, while a flying squadron including one of our fast Rhodian pentecontas goes off to reconnoitre Syracuse itself and look for any signs of enemy fleet movements. They brings back word that the Syracusians, expecting, seemingly, that we shall make a land farther up the coast, are too busy making secure their land defences to be worrying much as yet about the sea approach, and so their ships are still on the slipways.

  ‘So — now we know that we are secure from interruption, in we go again,’ says Alkibiades; and in we goes again, the whole force, and sits there in the harbour with our ram heads smiling in the sun and our fighting men on deck — not doing nothing, just on deck. And Alkibiades sends off a herald under the olive branch (we’d sent a boat ashore the night before, to cut it in one of the olive gardens just outside the city) to ask, oh very polite and affable, that ‘Since his earlier request has not reached the main body of the people of Catana, he may be given a public opportunity of making it again before the full Assembly’. And adding that he cannot imagine that they will refuse him, they being a daughter state to Euboa, where, as in Athens, it’s not the custom for such decisions to be taken without the verdict of the people.

  ‘That should draw them, Pilot,’ says he, ‘and the sight of the fleet will make a powerful backing to the argument.’

  And sure enough, back comes our herald bearing pretty speeches — a bit cool, but pretty — inviting Alkibiades to come ashore and address the Assembly next day.

  We spends a busy night; first with the scouts coming and going — we uses men from the pentecontas for that; the Rhodians can all swim like dolphins and so one doesn’t have to send in boats to put them ashore. But when they’ve brought in their reports, there’s boat work enough; all the business of getting the boats away quietly before moonrise, with a detachment of marines and an anxious wait until the word comes back that they were safely landed.

  But next morning — a dry hot end-of-summer day, with the mistral blowing cold and dusty through the heat of it — off goes My Lord in full glory with his staff behind him. I’m not one of the party that time, and I’ve affairs of my own to see to, what with the mistral chopping up the harbour water, and half my topmen taken off their proper duties and sprawling around the fore-deck trying to look like marines in place of those that goes ashore in the night. So I sees nothing of what goes forward in the Agora, but I hears about it later from them that does, and they says it’s b
eautiful, quite beautiful.

  Alkibiades addresses the Assembly from the Speaker’s rostrum; he harangues them fit to bring tears to the eyes, on the subject of their duty to Athens (no one seems very clear how he makes that one out, but he does), he woos them with his most silken and fiery charm, he scourges them with his scorn and illustrates his points with the dirtiest of the stories, and there are no dirtier anywhere, that can be picked up drifting around the fleet. And all the time on the other side of the town, there’s the marines under the Arkadian, picking out the stones from a hurriedly walled-up postern gate discovered by our scouts.

  He’s still talking, as I hears the story, when all at once Athenian helmets starts bobbing up all round the Agora, and the whole place begins to squawk and scurry like a poultry yard under the shadow of a hawk, all the good folk thinking that the town must be in our hands. But Alkibiades, he raises his voice — and lisp or no lisp, he’s one of the few men I know who can make their voices carry the length of a war galley from the stern to the ram fighting-gallery against a full gale — and he holds the whole crowded market-place with it. ‘My friends,’ says he, ‘I have talked long enough.’ (And that was true!) ‘Any of you here that are of the Syracusian party, I suggest that you retire to your own homes or your places of business, or to Tartarus if that suits you better, and take no further interest in these proceedings. Those of you whose hearts are with us, those of you who value freedom, remain here, and know yourselves free to vote as your hearts and your ancient loyalties bid you.’

  So — by evening the Syracusian party have somehow melted away, and the remaining citizens of Catana have voted solidly for an alliance with Athens. And the beauty of it is that there can’t have been more than two score of our marines in the city from first to last!

  Leaning on the stern of the Icarus that night, Alkibiades says to me, ‘Well, we’ve as good a base now as we shall get on this coast until we get Messana. Pilot, we sail for Rhegium at sunrise to pick up the rest of the fleet. It’s beginning to work, this middle course.’