The Great King (41 page)

My guest house was decorated with scenes from the Odyssey – the return of Odysseus, the loom of Penelope, and the moment at which Penelope takes her husband in her arms. My daughter loved them, and did her best to ‘help’ the artist, who might mock or curse me but was always bright and pleasant with her – even when her dirty handprints marred Penelope’s face.

Storm Cutter
returned very profitably from Aegypt with the onset of spring, and Paramanos told Moire where to find us and he took a cargo for Corcyra and came right round to Thisbe. My African navarch announced himself by riding into my courtyard on one of the handsomest horses I’d ever seen – he had Ka behind him on another – and Jocasta, wife of Aristides, mounted on a third.

When I’d known him well, Moire hadn’t been much more fulsome than a man of Lacedeamon, but six more years among Greeks had broadened his vocabulary and his confidence. He sat easily on a kline with a cup of wine, and chatted with Aristides about Aegypt as if he were an Athenian gentleman of the bluest blood – but that was, in those days, how the explosion of sea trade was changing Athens. Navarchs and helmsmen were suddenly men of property and wealth, and merchants – Athenian, Metic or freedmen – were growing to be as wealthy as the old money – or wealthier.

In some ways, it didn’t seem right. I had taken an embassy to Susa and brought back almost nothing – I’d preserved some fabrics from India and Kwin, and one packet of spices – but while I’d spent my fortune on a failed embassy, Harpagos, Moire and Megakles and Sekla had made me a fortune moving goods from Athens to Aegypt and Asia. Our piratical triremes made poor merchantmen, but the sudden demand for luxury goods could make even a trireme’s voyage profitable. And the pause in the endless naval war between Athens and Aegina – according to Moire, the rumour in Athens was that Sparta had ordered Aegina to cease operations – made shipping safe, or at least safer than it had been in twenty years.

At any rate, I sat home that spring, and my captains made me more money. Moire purchased a pair of small round ships in Corinth, stowed them with Boeotian barley and shipped it up the coast of Illyria with
Storm Cutter
as a watchdog, while Harpagos and Sekla took
Lydia
and a larger round ship that could carry two
thousand
medimnoi of grain – a good size hull and the proceeds of two successful voyages – and laded her for Aegypt.

Moire brought us reports of the failed revolt in Aegypt and the ongoing revolt in Babylon. When Sekla sailed, he had orders to pick up any information he could gather. It is not part of my tale to explain the workings of shipping – mine or anyone else’s; merchanting is a dull business, unless there’re pirates or a storm – but I will mention that Sekla, who was from somewhere on the coast of Africa, had met Greeks and Phoenicians who traded up the Nile where he found merchants from the Erythra Thalassa and the Great Eastern Ocean, and he was afire to go. My reports from Susa and my discussions with Abha made for some fine spring conversations, a cup of wine on my knee, in my own garden.

Sekla, eyes afire, leaned forward. ‘When all this war is done, I say we take two triremes and a store ship,’ he said. ‘Carry our goods up the Nile, and build ourselves ships on the Erythra Thalassa and try the Great East Sea.’

‘That is a mighty dream,’ I said.

Sittonax laughed. ‘You sailed to Alba,’ he said. ‘Why not India?’ The Galle was becoming a geographer.

I laughed, but Sekla looked off into the darkness. ‘Doola would sail to India,’ he said.

And I thought it might be true. That’s when that dream began. It is another story, but I’ll tell it to you some day.

Jocasta’s arrival changed the house in every way. First, a great Athenian lady does not travel alone, and she had six women with her – joined within hours by my sister Penelope and my sister-in-law Leda and
their
servants.

I remember standing under my portico, looking at my garden, and poor Euphonia caught my hand. ‘I don’t
want
to go and weave with the ladies,’ she said. For almost two months, she had stayed up too late every night and listened to tales of sailing the world with a dozen men who catered to her every whim, and the arrival of a houseful of gentlewomen had catapulted her back to her life as one of them. ‘I want to sail to Aegypt with Sekla. A pox on all this weaving.’

But I won’t make a mockery of femininity. The air of the house changed for the better, and Jocasta and Penelope got more work out of my servants and my slaves than I ever had. Pen fired my cook and bought me a Thracian – imagine having a tattooed killer as your cook, but I did, and he was very good.

We laid in more wine.

I did enjoy the moment when Jocasta entered the andron to set up her loom, and there was the Persian cup. She started.

She looked at me as a nine-year-old girl looks when she wants one more piece of honeycomb and doesn’t dare ask.

I took it down and handed it to her.

She held it for a moment, and handed it back. ‘A remarkable piece of vulgarity,’ she said.

‘A gift,’ I said.

‘Oh, well.’ She smiled. ‘People do give the oddest things.’

The oarsmen were sent to find their own lodgings.

Hangings went on the walls for the first time – I hadn’t missed them – and one day, Jocasta and Leda and Penelope went to the agora with a dozen servants and four slaves and spent – I can’t remember how much, but it seemed a great deal – on a wine service in silver and a complete set of the sort of overly ornate Athenian ceramics that I carried in my ships and avoided owning – all scenes of the gods and everyday life in lurid red and black. I liked plain black ware and I liked my good Boeotian pottery – thick, heavy and solid as Old Draco or Empedocles himself.

By next morning, I couldn’t find a scrap of it in my house.

You see – like all men, I’ve turned to mockery of women, when what I really want to convey is that my sister and Jocasta and their friends made my house beautiful and civilised enough to receive the Queen of Sparta. I had to admit that the Athenian ware was pretty enough, and the cups were light in the hand, well crafted. My rooms were full of light and air – but decorated in the latest taste – and the women set up looms and prepared for me a set of matching drapes for my couches with a sort of ruthless efficiency that reminded me of a well-run ship. Really – watching Jocasta direct a dozen women weaving on four looms was much like watching Paramenos direct a ship in a storm – no hesitation, no anger, just a single-minded concentration on the task. They wove wool, and then they wove all our spare flax into towels, and then . . .

And then Gorgo came.

She came to Plataea with a dozen Spartan women and two men – Sparthius and Bulis. She arrived quite late in the evening, having celebrated the Epikledeia in Corinth. The queen was tired, but we stood with her people in my small courtyard and gave her Plataean kykeon, wine with barley meal and grated goat’s cheese, and she laughed that laugh and was visibly delighted by everything – including a suddenly shy Jocasta and my daughter, who kept grabbing the great queen’s hand and dragging her to see the most ordinary things – which she accepted with a good grace.

When she was gone into the guest quarters, led by Pen and Leda, I put the two Spartiates on kline and we sat and drank most of an amphora of wine. I told them what I knew of the revolt in Babylon.

Finally, I turned away another bowl – Hector nodded, as if to tell me in his fifteen-year-old wisdom that I had chosen well – and cocked an eyebrow at Sparthius. ‘And Brasidas?’ I asked.

He looked away. Bulis looked at his feet. These were men who could defy the Great King and fight anyone to the death.

I let it go.

Eugenios, my new slave domesticos, purchased over my bewildered objections by Penelope for roughly the price of all of my other slaves combined, came in and escorted the Spartans to their room. They had to share – even my house, which seemed as vast as a cavern when it was just me and my daughter and her nurse, was now as full of people as a hive is with bees. It was not too late at night.

It was probably better that way. We didn’t sit up late, as the Spartans were tired – so we had a fresh day in which to renew acquaintance. But as soon as Eugenios escorted them out, Leda and Pen joined me and sipped my wine, sitting on a kline and swinging their feet.

‘A symposiast at last,’ Leda said, stretching. ‘I declare I shall wear ivy on my brow and sing a lewd song.’ She looked at me from under her brows and made me laugh.

Pen poked her. And turned to me. ‘Fancy, having the Queen of Sparta in our house.’

Our house.
Well, it made me smile.

Leda got up and stretched again. She and Pen were just thirty – matrons. Both were priestesses of Hera and busybodies, so they were fit from walking. Each had borne just one child – both sons. Pen’s son Euaristos was new to me, just five years old. Leda’s son was six, born to a man she never mentioned. I noticed that they were fit – and lovely – but neither was as fit as any woman among the Spartans.

All this was by the way. Leda was, I thought, stretching to catch my attention. And that was a kind of trouble I didn’t need. But I liked her smile and her wit, and I probably grinned at her like an old satyr.

They went off to bed chattering.

Morning came early.

I met Gorgo playing with my daughter in the garden, less than an hour after dawn. Euphonia could barely sleep for the excitement of having the Queen of Sparta in the house, and her doting nurse helped her dress and loosed her on the world.

The queen rose early.

‘I hope you are not planning on going riding,’ I said.

Gorgo laughed, long and hard. ‘I was hunting,’ she said. ‘I had a beast in view.’ She shrugged. ‘You took my boys to Susa and you brought them home. And helped with the chariot. All in all, I owe you.’ She smiled down at Euphonia. ‘She is charming. She was telling me about Brauron. You should send her to Sparta for a summer.’ She nodded. ‘She’s athletic enough. Some girls can’t take the pace of the races and the dance, but she could.’

‘Can
you
tell me anything of Brasidas?’ I asked.

Gorgo looked away. ‘He is still in Babylon,’ she said. ‘I doubt Demaratus can save him now.’

‘What did he
do
?’ I asked.

Gorgo shook her head. ‘It is not my place to speak of it. And I regret that. We are deeply in your debt, Arimnestos of Plataea.’

We talked for some time about the situation, and Euphonia, bored, slipped away into the garden and vanished to the stables.

At some point, I thought of Demaratus, and the tablets, and I sent Eugenios to fetch them. He brought them to me – somewhat hacked about. The string that held them together had been cut, so that they were simply three individual wax tablets, one double sided, and one with a carved cover. I held them out to the queen with a bow.

‘I’m sorry, my queen. These are from the former King of Sparta, Demaratus, and I was to deliver them to you immediately – and I have failed. I forgot them. And indeed, I can’t imagine that they have much of import – I confess I’ve read his note on the wax – it used to be clearer – and all it contains is directions for the factor of one of his farms.’

The queen took them. She sat suddenly, as if overcome by emotion – she, a Spartan – and she held them in the skirts of her chiton. Then she took the cover, and flexed it between her powerful hands, so that the frame splintered.

She took a sharp knife from her zone, and slipped it between the wax and the board beneath, and peeled the wax away in one neat rectangle – and the board beneath was covered in dense black writing.

She laughed aloud.

‘I should not have let you see that,’ she said. She raised her eyes. ‘Swear you will not tell.’

Well, I’m telling you now, but I think everyone involved is dead, now.

She peeled all three boards clear of their wax, and Eugenios carried the wreckage away. I have no idea what the former King of Sparta said to Gorgo in a three-page letter, but I’ll guess that he sent her a list of messengers and codes. Because from that day forward, she always seemed to know more than anyone about the Medes – and especially about their fleet.

Just as we tidied up the last splinters, Aristides joined us – shocked, I think, to find the Queen of Sparta alone in the garden with a man, much less with me. His wife joined us soon after.

She came across the garden, and I could see that age sat more heavily on her than on Gorgo, although they were much of an age – thirty or thirty-five, whereas their husbands were fifty-five and fifty-eight. She had more grey in her hair, and child-rearing had flattened her breasts, widened her hips and added to her weight. She was a handsome woman with a straight back and a dignity unmarred by time – but Gorgo appeared ten years younger – or even fifteen.

Gorgo smiled at her and took her hand, and they embraced. And Jocasta giggled – something I would not have thought possible – and whispered to Gorgo, who shrieked as if bit by an adder and then laughed so hard I thought she might fall down. She took Jocasta’s hand and put it on her right breast, and the two dissolved in laughter.

Aristides was embarrassed. He looked at me, and then looked away, and then walked out of my garden, calling for Nikeas. I followed him, passing a yawning Leda under the archway. She paused to smile at me – a full-face smile – and then I caught sight of my Athenian exile.

He kept walking – out of my house, out of the gate, towards the town wall. I followed him, and eventually caught him up.

‘It is unseemly,’ he muttered.

‘Have you given her the necklace?’ I asked.

That gave him pause. ‘No,’ he admitted.

‘Or anything else from the time we were away?’ I asked.

Aristides glowered. ‘She was behaving like . . . like . . . a man.’

I shrugged. ‘Your wife is making friends with the
Queen of Sparta.
The rules for women in Sparta are very different.’

He put his hands on his hips – fidgeted – and put them down by his sides. Finally he turned and started walking back to my house. ‘You are right, of course,’ he muttered. ‘But she is always . . . so . . . reserved.’ He turned. ‘I love her . . . dignity.’