Atlantis and Other Places (29 page)

Getting a bit of your own back?
Alkibiades wondered. It wasn’t as if Agis were wrong. Alkibiades gestured to a herald who stood on the platform with him and the Spartan. The man stepped up and called in a great voice, “People of Hellas, hear the words of Alkibiades, leader of Hellas, and of Agis, King of Sparta.”

Leader
sounded ever so much better than
tyrant
, even if they amounted to the same thing. Alkibiades took a step forward. He loved having thousands of pairs of eyes on him, where Agis seemed uncomfortable under that scrutiny. Agis, of course, was King because of his bloodline. Alkibiades had had to earn all the attention he’d got. He’d had to, and he’d done it.

Now he said, “People of Hellas, you see before you Athenian and Spartan, with neither one quarreling over who should lead us Hellenes in
his
direction.”
Of course we’re not quarreling
, he thought.
I’ve won
. He wondered how well Agis understood that. Such worries, though, would have to wait for another time. He went on, “For too long, Hellenes have fought other Hellenes. And while we fought among ourselves, while we spent our own treasure and our own blood, who benefited? Who smiled? Who, by the gods, laughed?”

A few of the men in the audience—the more clever, more alert ones—stirred, catching his drift. The rest stood there, waiting for him to explain.
Sokrates would have understood
. The gouge on Alkibiades’ forehead was only a pink scar now.
Sokrates would have said I’m pointing the Athenians in a new direction so they don’t look
my
way. He would have been right, too. But now he’s dead, and not too many miss him. He wasn’t a nuisance only to me
.

Such musing swallowed no more than a couple of heartbeats. Aloud, Alkibiades continued, “In our grandfathers’ day, the Great Kings of Persia tried to conquer Hellas with soldiers, and found they could not. We have men in Athens still alive who fought at Marathon and Salamis and Plataia.”

A handful of those ancient veterans stood in the crowd, white-bearded and bent and leaning on sticks like the last part of the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx. Some of them cupped a hand behind an ear to follow him better. What they’d seen in their long lives!

“Since then, though, Hellenes have battled other Hellenes and forgotten the common foe,” Alkibiades said. “Indeed, with all his gold, Great King Dareios II has sought to buy mastery of Hellas, and has come closer to gaining it than Kyros and Xerxes did with their great swarms of men. For enmities among us suit Persia well. She gains from our disunion what she could not with spears and arrows.

“A lifetime ago, Great King Xerxes took Athens and burnt it. We have made it a finer polis, a grander polis, since, but our ashes are yet unavenged. Only when we Hellenes have burnt Persepolis to the ground can we say we are, at last, even with the Persians.”

Some fellow from Halikarnassos had written a great long book about the struggles between Hellenes and Persians. The burning of Athens was the least of it; he’d traced the conflict back even before the days of the Trojan War. What was his name? Alkibiades couldn’t recall. It didn’t matter. People knew Athens had gone up in flames. The rest? Long ago and far away.

Almost everyone in the Pnyx saw where he was going now. A low, excited murmur ran through the crowd. He continued, “We’ve shown one thing, and shown it plainly.
Only Hellenes can beat other Hellenes
. The Great King knows as much. That’s why he hires mercenaries from Hellas. But if all our poleis pull together, if all our poleis send hoplites and rowers and ships against Persia, not even those traitors can hope to hold us back.

“Persia and the wealth of Persia will be ours. We will have new lands to rule, new lands to settle. We won’t have to expose unwanted infants any more. They will have places where they can live. The Great King’s treasury will fall into
our
hands. Now we starve for silver. Once we beat the Persians, we’ll have our fill of gold.”

No more low, excited murmur. Now the people in the Pnyx burst into cheers. Alkibiades watched the Spartans. They were shouting as loud as the Athenians. The idea of a war against Persia made them forget their usual reserve. The Thebans cheered, too, as did the men from the towns of Thessaly. During Xerxes’ invasion, they’d given the Persians earth and water in token of submission.

And the Macedonians cheered more enthusiastically still, pounding one another and their neighbors on the back. Seeing that made Alkibiades smile. For one thing, the Macedonians had also yielded to the Persians. For another, he had no intention of using them to any great degree in his campaign against Persia. Their King, Perdikkas son of Alexandros, was a hill bandit who squabbled with other hill bandits nearby. Macedonia had always been like that. It always would be. Expecting it to amount to anything was a waste of time, a waste of hope.

Alkibiades stepped back and waved King Agis forward. The Spartan said, “Alkibiades has spoken well. We owe our forefathers revenge against Persia. We can win it. We should win it. We
will
win it. So long as we stand together, no one can stop us. Let us go on, then, on to victory!”

He stepped back. More cheers rang out. In his plain way, he had spoken well. An Athenian would have been laughed off the platform for such a bare-bones speech, but standards were different for the Spartans.
Poor fellows
, Alkibiades thought.
They can’t help being dull
.

He eyed Agis. Just how dull
was
the Spartan King?
So long as we stand together, no one can stop us
. That was true. Alkibiades was sure of it. But how long
would
the Hellenes stand together? Long enough to beat Great King Dareios? Fighting a common foe would help.

How long
after
beating the Persians would the Hellenes stand together?
Till we start quarreling over who will rule the lands we’ve won
. Alkibiades eyed Agis again. Did he see that, too, or did he think they would go on sharing? He might. Spartans could be slow on the uptake.

I am alone at the top of Athens now
, Alkibiades thought.
Soon I will be alone at the top of the civilized world, from Sicily all the way to India. This must be what Sokrates’
daimon
saw. This must be why it sent him to Sicily with me, to smooth my way to standing here at the pinnacle. Sure enough, it knew what it was doing, whether he thought so or not
. Alkibiades smiled at Agis. Agis, fool that he was, smiled back.

FARMERS’ LAW

A brostola suited Father George well. The village lay only five or six miles north of Amorion, the capital of the Anatolic theme. That was close enough for George and his little flock to take refuge behind Amorion’s stout walls when the Arabs raided Roman territory—and far enough away for them to go unnoticed most of the time.

Going unnoticed also suited Father George well. What with Constantine V following in the footsteps of his father, Leo III, and condemning the veneration of icons, a priest wanted to draw as little notice from Constantinople as he could. That was all the more true if he found the Emperor’s theology unfortunate, as Father George did.

Every so often, officials would ride through Abrostola on their way from Amorion up to Ankyra, or from Ankyra coming down to Amorion. They never bothered to stop at the little church beside which George and his wife, Irene, lived. Because they never stopped, they never saw that the images remained in their places there. George never brought it to their attention, nor did any of the other villagers. They had trouble enough scratching a living from the thin, rocky soil of Asia Minor and worrying about the Arabs. They didn’t care to risk Constantine’s displeasure along with everything else.

George was eating barley bread and olive oil and drinking a cup of wine for breakfast when someone pounded on the door. “Who’s that?” Irene asked indignantly from across the table.

“Who’s that?” their daughter, Maria, echoed. Rather than indignant, the three-year-old sounded blurry—she was trying to talk around a big mouthful of bread.

“I’d better find out.” George rose from his stool with grace surprising in so big a man: he was almost six feet tall, and broad as a bull through the shoulders. The pounding came again, louder and more insistently.

“Oh, dear God,” Irene said. “I hope that doesn’t mean Zoe’s finally decided to run off with somebody.”

“Alexander the potter should have got her married off years ago,” George said, reaching for the latch. Zoe was the prettiest maiden in the village, and knew it too well.

But when George opened the door, it wasn’t Alexander standing there, but a weedy little farmer named Basil. “He’s dead, Father!” Basil cried. “He’s dead!”

Automatically, the priest made the sign of the cross. Then he asked, “Who’s dead?” Nobody in the village, so far as he knew, was even particularly sick. Rumor said plague was loose in Constantinople again, but—
God be praised
, George thought—it hadn’t come to Abrostola.

“Who’s dead?” Basil repeated, as if he couldn’t believe his ears. “Who’s dead?” He’d always had a habit of saying things twice. “Why, Theodore, of course.” He stared at Father George as if the priest should have already known that.

“Theodore?” George crossed himself again. Theodore couldn’t have been more than thirty-five—not far from his own age—and was one of the two or three most prosperous farmers in the village. If any man seemed a good bet to live out his full threescore and ten, he was the one. But, sure enough, the sound of women wailing came from the direction of his house. George shook his head in slow wonder. “God does as He would, not as we would have Him do.”

But Basil said, “Not this time.” He went on, “God didn’t have anything to do with it. Nothing. I’d borrowed an ax from him, to chop some firewood with, and I brought it back to him at sunup, just a little while ago. You know how Theodore is—was. He lets you borrow things, sure enough, but he never lets you forget you did it, either.”

“That’s so,” George admitted. Theodore hadn’t overflowed with the milk of human kindness. The priest tried to make the peasant come to the point: “You went to give the ax back to Theodore. And. . . ?”

“And I found him laying there by his house with his head smashed in,” Basil said. “Didn’t I tell you that?”

“As a matter of fact, no,” Father George said. Though he was wearing only the light knee-length tunic in which he’d slept, he hurried out the door and toward Theodore’s house. Dust scuffed up under his bare feet. Basil had to go into a skipping half-trot to keep up with him.

A crowd was already gathering. Theodore’s wife, Anna, and his two daughters, Margarita and Martina, stood over the body shrieking and tearing at their tunics, which reached down to the ground. Some of Theodore’s neighbors stood there, too: Demetrios the smith and a couple of other farmers, John and Kostas. Demetrios’ wife, Sophia, came out and began to wail, too; her brother was married to Theodore’s sister.

George shouldered his way through them. He looked down at Theodore and crossed himself once more. The prosperous peasant stared up at the sky, but he wasn’t seeing anything, and wouldn’t ever again. Blood soaked into the ground from the blow that had smashed in the right front of his skull from the eye socket all the way back to above the ear. Flies were already buzzing around the body.

John grabbed Theodore’s arm. “Murder!” he said hoarsely, which set everyone exclaiming and wailing anew. What had happened was obvious enough, but naming it somehow made it worse.

“What are we going to do?” Basil asked. “Send down to Amorion, so the
strategos
commanding the theme can order a man up here to find out who did it?”

That was what they should have done. They all knew it. But Lankinos, the governor of the Anatolic theme, was as much an iconoclast as the Emperor Constantine himself. Any man he sent to Abrostola would likely be an iconoclast, too. If he stepped into the church and saw the holy images of Christ and the saints still on the iconostasis . . .

“We can’t do that to Father George!” Demetrios the blacksmith exclaimed. “We can’t put our own souls in danger doing that, either.”

Theodore’s wife—no, his widow now—spoke for the first time: “We can’t let a murderer walk free.” She drew herself straight and wiped her tear-stained face on a tunic sleeve. “I will have vengeance on the man who killed my husband. I
will
, by the Mother of God.”