Gates of Fire (31 page)

TWENTY-SEVEN

T
hat spring called the Skyllian, sacred to Demeter and Perseph one, welled from the base of the wall of Kallidromos just to the rear of Leonidas' command post. Upon its stone-founded approach my master drew up, and I hurrying in his wake overhauled him. No curses or commands to withdraw rebuffed me. I draped his arm about my neck and took his weight upon my shoulder. “I'll get water,” I said.

An agitated knot of warriors had clustered about the spring; Megistias the seer was there. Something was amiss. I pressed closer. This spring, renowned for its alternating flows of cold and hot, had gushed since the allies' arrival with naught but sweet cold water, a boon from the goddesses to the warriors' thirst. Now suddenly the fount had gone hot and stinking. A steaming sulphurous brew spewed forth from the underworld like a river of hell. The men trembled before this prodigy. Prayers to Demeter and the
Kore
were being sung. I begged a half-helmetful of water from the Knight Doreion's skin and returned to my master, steeling myself to mention nothing.

“The spring's gone sulphurous, hasn't it?”

“It presages the enemy's death, sir, not ours.”

“You're as full of shit as the priests.”

I could see he was all right now.

“The allies need your cousin upon this site,” he observed, settling in pain upon the earth, “to intercede with the goddess on their behalf.”

He meant Diomache.

“Here,” he said. “Sit beside me.”

This was the first time I had heard my master refer aloud to Diomache, or even acknowledge his awareness of her existence. Though I had never, in our years, presumed to burden him with details of my own history prior to entering his service, I knew he knew it all, through Alexandros and the lady Arete.

“This is a goddess I have always felt pity for—Persephone,” my master declared. “Six months of the year she rules as Hades' bride, mistress of the underworld. Yet hers is a reign bereft of joy. She sits her throne as a prisoner, carried off for her beauty by the lord of hell, who releases his queen under Zeus' compulsion for half the year only, when she comes back to us, bringing spring and the rebirth of the land. Have you looked closely at statues of her, Xeo? She appears grave, even in the midst of the harvest's joy. Does she, like us, recall the terms of her sentence—to retire again untimely beneath the earth? This is the sorrow of Persephone. Alone among the immortals the
Kore
is bound by necessity to shuttle from death to life and back again, intimate of both faces of the coin. No wonder this fount whose twin sources are heaven and hell is sacred to her.”

I had settled now upon the ground beside my master. He regarded me gravely.

“It's too late, don't you think,” he pronounced, “for you and I to keep secrets from one another?”

I agreed the hour was far advanced.

“Yet you preserve one from me.”

He would have me speak of Athens, I could see, and the evening barely a month previous wherein I had at last—through his intercession—met again my cousin.

“Why didn't you run?” Dienekes asked me. “I wanted you to, you know.”

“I tried. She wouldn't let me.”

I knew my master would not compel me to speak. He would never presume to tread where his presence sowed distress. Yet instinct told me the hour to break silence had come. At worst my report would divert his preoccupation from the day's horror and at best turn it, perhaps, to more propitious imaginings.

“Shall I tell you of that night in Athens, sir?”

“Only if you wish.”

It was upon an embassy, I reminded him. He, Polynikes and Aristodemos had traveled on foot from Sparta then, without escort, accompanied only by their squires. The party had covered the distance of 140 miles in four days and remained there in the city of the Athenians for four more, at the home of the
proxenos
Kleinias the son of Alkibiades. The object of the legation was to finalize the eleventh-hour details of coordinating land and sea forces at Thermopylae and Artemisium: times of arrival for army and fleet, modes of dispatch between them, courier encryptions, passwords and the like. Unspoken but no less significant, Spartans and Athenians wished to look each other in the eye one last time, to make sure both forces would be there, in their places, at the appointed hour.

On the evening of the third day, a salon was held in honor of the embassy at the home of Xanthippus, a prominent Athenian. I loved to listen at these affairs, where debate and discourse were always spirited and often brilliant. To my great disappointment, my master summoned me alone before table and informed me of an urgent errand I must run. “Sorry,” he said, “you'll miss the party.” He placed into my hands a sealed letter, with instructions to deliver it in person to a certain residence in the seaport town of Phaleron. A boy servant of the house awaited without, to serve as guide through the nighttime streets. No particulars were given beyond the addressee's name. I assumed the communication to be a naval dispatch of some urgency and so traveled armed.

It took the time of an entire watch to traverse that labyrinth of quarters and precincts which comprises the city of the Athenians. Everywhere men-at-arms, sailors and marines were mobilizing; chandlery waggons rumbled under armed escorts, bearing the rations and supplies of the fleet. The squadrons under Themistokles were readying for embarkation to Skiathos and Artemisium. Simultaneously families by the hundreds were crating their valuables and fleeing the city. As numerous as were the warcraft moored in lines across the harbor, their ranks were eclipsed by the ragtag fleet of merchantmen, ferries, fishing smacks, pleasure boats and excursion craft evacuating the citizenry to Troezen and Salamis. Some of the families were fleeing for points as distant as Italia. As the boy and I approached Phaleron port, so many torches filled the streets that the passage was lit bright as noon.

Lanes became crookeder as we approached the harbor. The stink of low tide choked one's nostrils; gutters ran with filth, backed up into a malodorous stew of fish guts, leek shavings and garlic. I never saw so many cats in my life. Grogshops and houses of ill fame lined streets so narrow that daylight's cleansing beams, I was certain, never penetrated to the floors of their canyons to dry the slime and muck of the night's commerce in depravity. The whores called out boldly as the boy and I passed, advertising their wares in coarse but good-humored tongue. The man to whom we were to deliver the letter was named Terrentaius. I asked the lad if he had any idea who the fellow was or what station he held. He said he had been given the house name alone and nothing more.

At last the boy and I located it, an apartment structure of three stories called the Griddle after the slop shop and inn which occupied its street-level floor. I inquired within for the man Terrentaius. He was absent, the publican declared, with the fleet. I asked after the man's ship. Which vessel was he officer of? A round of hilarity greeted this query. “He's a lieutenant of the ash,” one of the tippling seamen declared, meaning the only thing he commanded was the oar he pulled. Further inquiries failed to elicit any additional intelligence.

“Then, sir,” the boy guide addressed me, “we are instructed to deliver the letter to his wife.”

I rejected this as nonsense.

“No, sir,” replied the lad with conviction, “I have it from your master himself. We are to place the letter in the hands of the man's mistress, by name Diomache.”

With but a moment's consideration I perceived in this event the hand, not to say the long arm, of the lady Arete. How had she tracked down and located, from the remove of Lakedaemon, this house and this woman? There must be a hundred Diomaches in a city the size of Athens. No doubt the lady Arete had maintained her intentions secret, anticipating that I, made aware of them in advance, would have found excuse to evade their obligation. In this, she was doubtless correct.

In any event my cousin, it was discovered, was not present in the apartments, nor could any of the seamen inform us as to her whereabouts. My guide, a lad of resourcefulness, simply stepped into the alley and bellowed her name. In moments the grizzled heads of half a dozen backstreet dames appeared above, among the hanging laundry of the lane-facing windows. The name and site of a harbor-town temple were shouted down to us.

“She'll be there, boy. Just follow the shore.”

My guide set out again in the lead. We traversed more stinking sea-town streets, more alleys choked with traffic of the natives clearing out. The boy informed me that many of the temples in this quarter functioned less as sanctuaries of the gods and more as asylums for the cast-out and the penniless, particularly, he said, wives “put by” by their husbands. Meaning those deemed unfit, unwilling, or even insane. The boy pressed ahead in merry spirits. It was all a grand adventure to him.

At last we stood before the temple. It was nothing but a common house, perhaps home in former times to a middling-prosperous trader or merchant, sited upon a surprisingly cheerful slope two streets above the water. A copse of olives sheltered a walled enclave whose inner precinct could not be glimpsed from the street. I rapped at the gate; after an interval a priestess, if such a lofty title may be applied to a gowned and masked housewoman of fifty years, responded. She informed us the sanctuary was that of Demeter and Covert
Kore,
Persephone of the Veil. None but females might enter. Behind the shroud which concealed her face, the priestess was clearly frightened, nor could one blame her, the streets running with whoremongers and cutpurses. She would not let us in. No avenue of appeal proved of avail; the woman would neither confirm my cousin's presence nor agree to convey a message within. Again my boy guide took the bull by the horns. He opened his cheesepipe and bawled Diomache's name.

We were admitted at last to a rear courtyard, the lad and I. The house upon entry proved far more capacious, and a good deal cheerier, than it had appeared from the street. We were not permitted passage through the interior but escorted along an outer path. The dame, our chaperon, confirmed that a matron by name Diomache was indeed among those novices currently resident within the sanctuary. She was at this hour attending to duties in the kitchen; an interview, however, of a few minutes' duration might be granted, with permission from the asylum mother. My guide, the boy, was offered refreshment; the dame took him away for a feed.

I was standing, alone in the courtyard, when my cousin entered. Her children, both girls, one perhaps five, the other a year or two older, clung fearfully to her skirts; they would not come forward when I knelt and held out my hand. “Forgive them,” my cousin said. “They are shy of men.” The dame led the girls away to the interior, leaving me at last alone with Diomache.

How many times in imagination had I rehearsed this moment. Always in conjured scenarios, my cousin was young and beautiful; I ran to her arms and she to mine. Nothing of the sort now occurred. Diomache stepped into view in the lamplight, garbed in black, with the entire breadth of the court dividing us. The shock of her appearance unstrung me. She was unveiled and unhooded. Her hair was cropped short. Her years were no more than twenty-four yet she looked forty, and a hard-used forty at that.

“Can it really be you, cousin?” she inquired in the same teasing voice she had taken with me since we were children. “You are a man, as you were always so impatient to become.”

Her lightness of tone served only to compound the despair which now seized my heart. The picture I had held so long before the eye of the mind was of her in the bloom of youth, womanly and strong, exactly as she had been the morning we parted at the Three-Cornered Way. What terrible hardships had been visited upon her by the intervening years? The vision of the whore-infested streets was fresh upon me, the crude seamen and the mean existence of these refuse-choked lanes. I sank, overcome with grief and regret, upon a bench along the wall.

“I should never have left you,” I said, and meant it with all my heart. “Everything that has happened is my fault for not being at your side to defend you.”

I cannot recall a word of what was spoken over the next several minutes. I remember my cousin moving to the bench beside me. She did not embrace me, but touched me with tender clemency upon the shoulder.

“Do you remember that morning, Xeo, when we set out for market with Stumblefoot and your little clutch of ptarmigan eggs?” Her lips declined into a sorrowful smile. “The gods set our lives upon their courses that day. Courses from which neither of us has had the option to stray.”

She asked if I would take wine. A bowl was brought. I recalled the letter I bore and delivered it now to my cousin. Beneath its wrapper, it was addressed to her, not her husband; she opened and read it. Its contents were in the lady Arete's hand. When Diomache finished she did not show it to me, but tucked it away without a word beneath her robe.

My eyes, adjusted now to the lamplight of the court, studied my cousin's face. Her beauty remained, I saw, but altered in a manner both grave and austere. The age in her eyes, which had at first shocked and repelled me, I now perceived as compassion and even wisdom. Her silence was profound as the lady Arete's; her bearing spartan beyond spartan. I was daunted and even in awe. She seemed, like the goddess she served, a maiden hauled off untimely by the dark forces of the underworld and now, restored by some covenant with those pitiless gods, bearing in her eyes that primal female wisdom which is simultaneously human and inhuman, personal and impersonal. Love for her flooded my heart. Yet did she appear, inches from my grasp, as august as an immortal and as impossible to hold.

“Do you feel the city about us now?” she asked. Outside the walls, the rumble of evacuees and their baggage trains could clearly be heard. “It's like that morning at Astakos, isn't it? Perhaps within weeks this mighty city will be fired and razed, as our own was on that day.”