The Last of the Wine (21 page)

The officer said, “I don’t take prisoners, Athenian. But tell me where your squadron is, and you can go free. See how few we are; we only want to save ourselves.” Two of the men looked at each other. I heard a sound from behind some rocks, where the rest were; there was a glow too from their fire. “Tell me,” he said, “and you can have your life.” I thought, “If I invent something, it only means being dragged along as a hostage, and a worse death at the end.” So I said nothing. Someone said, “Try sitting him on the fire.” The Captain said, “We are Hellenes here. Will you speak, Athenian?”—“I know nothing.”—“Very well. Who caught this man?” The hoplite came forward. “Finish your work.”

Two of them grasped my shoulders, and another hit me across the back of the knees with a spear-shaft, to bring me down. They held me kneeling. It was a bright cold night; the fire crackled and spurted, and in the sky the stars were like sparks from an anvil, white and blue. You never learn how much your courage owes to the wish for a good name among men, to the eyes of lover and friends upon you, till you are alone among enemies. If I had thought that to beg for my life would move them, I would have begged for it; but I would not be their mock. I thought of my mother, left alone with the child. My tongue felt dry and bitter in my mouth. I wondered how long it takes to die, when the sword is in. Then I thought of Lysis.

The captain beckoned the man who had caught me, and motioned with his hand. The man nodded and moved out of sight. I heard his armour creak behind me. My heart leaped in my throat and I said, “Wait.”

Someone laughed. One of the men holding my shoulders spat, and said, “Are you frightened, Athenian? My son was at Mykalessos, which your City sacked with the Thracians. Are you too young, ephebe, to be brave? He was eight years old.”—“May the child’s shade rest; blood for blood pays all. That man behind me, bring him in front.” The man at my back said, “Will you be better for that?”—“I think so,” I said. “I was told you Thebans understood these matters. Is it all one to you, then, whether your friend finds you wounded before or behind?”

They paused, murmuring to one another. Then a man who had come over from the other fire said, “I know that voice. Let me see him.” He picked up a burning stick and looked at my face. His I could not see, the flame blinding me; yet there was something I remembered. He said, “Yes, I know him. I have a score to settle with this one. Let no one trouble himself further; give him to me.” The officer said, “Take him and welcome, if it’s any pleasure to you. But do as he asked.” The man pulled me to my feet and showed me his sword and said, “Come.”

I wondered what it was he meant to do to me, that he was ashamed for the rest to see. He took me some way off, past rocks and some trees. The stars glittered and flashed. It was cold away from the fire. He stopped at last. I said, “Your friends are not here, Theban; but the gods are.”—“Let them judge between us. Do you know me?”—“No. What wrong have I done you?”—“Last summer I was taken by the Frontier Guard, I and my friend. There was a lad called Alexias; they said the Captain was his lover.”—“They said well. If your quarrel is with Lysis, I stand here for him. But he will kill you.”—“He sent us food at night; you brought it. My friend could not sit up to drink, so you raised his head.” I remembered then. “His name was Tolmides,” I said. “He wanted to raise a regiment of lovers and conquer the world. Is he here too?”—“He died the evening after. If you had been rough with him, I would have cut out your heart tonight.” He slid his sword under my bonds and cut them with a couple of jerks of the edge; his sword was sharp, and he was strong. “Are you that Alexias who was crowned for the long-race?”—“I am the runner.”—“All Athenians boast,” he said. “Prove it.”

When I got back to the camp, it was within an hour of dawn. The outpost, when I gave the countersign, would hardly speak to me. He said that Lysis had watched all night. I found him lying in his place beside the stacked arms, his armour by him, wrapped in his cloak. When I came near he did not open his eyes. I knew he was not asleep but angry. All the way back I had been thinking of him. I said to myself, “If I speak, we shall fall out. Let me be near him now, and he can be angry in the morning.” I got my cloak, and lay down beside him. I was tired, but could not sleep, and did not know whether he slept or not. I must have dozed in the end, for I woke to a cold dusk of dawn, and Lysis leaning over me.

Presently he said softly, for the rest were still asleep, “Are you much hurt?”—“Hurt?” I said. “No.”—“You are bruised all over, and covered with blood.” I had forgotten how roughly the Thebans had handled me. We got up, and went down to the stream to wash. A grey mist filled the valley and hung on the water. I was stiff all over, and cold. It was the hour when life burns low, and the sick die. His face looked grey with weariness; I understood his wish had been to let the troop look after itself, and to come seeking me. He said, “There is blood in your hair too,” and found the cut and washed it. I thought, “The love one feels at a time like this, must be truly the love of the soul.”

“If the man had killed you,” he said, “finding you with his wife, the law would have upheld him. Are you cold?”—“The water was cold.” He put his arm with his cloak about my shoulders. “Was it for this,” he said, “that we made our offering to the god?”

I said, “Yes, Lysis.” We stood by the stream, for it was too cold and wet to sit, and I told him. The first birds woke, and the face of the opposite mountain showed grey through the haze; the dark thorn-tree wept with dew. At last the sun shone red on the peak, and we heard the others waking; so we went back to rub down our horses, and make ready for the day.

I
N THE SPRING, KING
Agis came back to Dekeleia, and marched straight down into Attica again. Nearly all the farms which had been saved or missed before were burned this time, and Demokrates’ went among the first. Lysis got the news while we were in the City, and came to tell me.

“Rather than complain,” he said, “we ought to thank the gods we saved what we did. For that matter, Father can thank me for some of it. We picked the place bare a month ago, but he wouldn’t strip off the roof-tiles till I had been at him for days. There is the horse-farm in Euboea, which will bring something in as long as we can ship the horses. We shan’t starve; but it’s hard for a man of his age to take a change of fortune, and now he is sick again. Come home with me, I’ve something to show you.”

I went, and he unlocked one of the stables. The door creaked with rust. Inside was a chariot, covered with dusty cobwebs. The work was very grand in the old style, painted with figures from Homer, the carvings gilded. A bleached and withered garland hung on it, with faded ribbons; Lysis pulled it off, and spiders ran out. “That must be from the Pythian Games,” he said. “It’s ten years or more since we kept up the stud to race it; it ought to have gone long since. When I was a boy, our charioteer used to take me up at practice sometimes, and let me put my hands on the reins and believe I was driving. I had great notions of winning one day with myself up, as my grandfather Lysis did. I don’t want Father to see this before it has been cleaned. We’re selling it tomorrow.”

Not very long after this, I was brought at last the news of my father’s death.

It was Sokrates who prepared me for what I was going to hear, and led me to Euripides’ house. For he had one, like anyone else, in the City, not far from ours, though one hears everywhere lately a silly tale that he lived in a cave. This has grown, I suppose, from his having had a little stone hut built on the shore, where he went to work and be quiet. As to his being a misanthrope, I think the truth is that he grieved for men as much as Timon hated them, and had to escape from them sometimes in order to write at all.

He greeted me with gentleness but few words, looking at me with apology, as if I might reproach him, for having no more to say. Then he led me to a man whom, if I had not been forewarned, I should have taken for some beggar he had washed and clothed. The man’s bones were staring from his skin, the nails of his hands and feet broken and rilled with grime; his eyes were sunk into pits, and he was covered with festering scratches and with sores. In the midst of his forehead was a slave-brand done in the shape of a horse, still red and scabby. But Euripides presented me to him, not him to me. He was Lysikles, who had commanded my father’s squadron.

He began to tell me his tale quite clearly; then he lost the thread of it, and became confused among things of no purpose till Euripides reminded him who I was, and who my father was. A little later again he forgot I was there, and sat looking before him. So I will not relate the story as he told it then.

My father, as I learned, had been working in the quarries at the time of his death. That was where the Syracusans took the public prisoners after the battle, and where most of them ended their lives. The quarries at Syracuse are deep. They lived there without shelter from the scorching sun or the frosts of the autumn nights. Those who could work quarried the stone. They all grew grey with the stone-dust, which only the rain that sometimes fell on them ever washed away. The dust filled their hair, and the wounds of the dying, and the mouths of the dead whom the Syracusans left rotting where they lay. There was nowhere in the rock to dig them graves, if anyone had had the strength to do it; but because a fallen man takes up more room than one on his feet, they piled them into stacks; for the living had scarcely space to lie down and sleep, and in this one place they lived and did everything. After a time not much work was demanded of them, for no overseer could be got to endure the stench. For food they were given a pint of meal a day, and for drink half a pint of water. The guards would not stay to give it out, but put down the bulk and let them scramble for it. At first the people of Syracuse used to come out in numbers to look into the quarry and see the sight; but in time they grew weary of it and of the smells, all but the boys who still came to throw stones. If any citizen was seen from below, those who were not already resigned to death would call out to him, begging to be bought into slavery and taken anywhere. They had nothing worse to fear than what they suffered.

After about two months the Syracusans took away the allied troops from among them, branded these in the forehead, and sold them off. They kept the Athenians in the quarry; but at this time they removed the dead, among whom was my father. His body had then been lying there some weeks: but Lysikles had recognised it while it was still fresh.

On this he paused and drew his brows together, as if trying to recall what it was he had omitted. When his forehead wrinkled, the legs of the horse, which was branded on it, seemed to move. Then he remembered and offered me a condolence on the loss of my father, such as a man of breeding makes to a friend’s son. You might have thought it was I who had given the news to him. I thanked him, and we sat looking at one another. I had made his memory live for him, and he had made it live for me. So we stared, both of us, with an inward eye, seeking blindness again.

His own story he did not tell me, but I heard it later. He had passed himself off as an Argive, having picked up some of their Doric, and having been branded with them was sold. He had been bought for a small price by a rough master; and at last, preferring to starve in the woods, he had run away. When too weak to go further, he had been found by a Syracusan riding out to his farm. This man guessed he was an Athenian, yet gave him food and drink and a place to sleep; then, when he was somewhat recovered, asked him whether any new play by Euripides had lately been shown in Athens. For of all the modern poets, it is he whom the Sicilians value most. And living so much out of the way, they are the last to hear of anything new.

Lysikles replied that the year before they sailed, Euripides had been crowned for a new tragedy upon the sack of Troy, and the fate of the captive women. Whereon the Syracusan asked him if he could repeat any of it.

This is the play Euripides wrote just after the fall of Melos. I did not hear it myself; for my father, having thought his former work unorthodox, did not take me. Phaedo once told me that he heard it. He said that from the moment when he was struck down in battle, through all he saw on the island, and while he was a slave at Gurgos’s, that was the only time he wept. And no one noticed him, for the Athenians were weeping on either side. Lysikles had both heard the play and read it; so as much as he knew, he taught the Syracusan, who in payment gave him a bag of food and a garment and set him on his way. This was not the only case of the kind; Euripides had several visits from Athenians who came to tell him that one of his choruses had been worth a meal or a drink to them. Some, who had been sold as house slaves at the beginning, were promoted to tutors if they knew the plays, and at last saw their City again.

But for my father, who had liked to laugh with Aristophanes, there was no returning. I did not even know if a handful of earth had been sprinkled over him at last, to put his shade at rest. We performed the sacrifice for the dead at the household altar, my uncle Strymon and I; and I cut off my hair for him. In only a little while, when I became a man, I should have been offering it to Apollo. This was the god my father had always honoured most. As I laid the wreath on the altar, with the dark locks of my hair tied into it, I remembered how his had shone in the sunlight like fine gold. Though he had turned forty when he sailed for Sicily, the colour had scarcely begun to fade; and his body was as firm as an athlete’s of thirty years.

I told Strymon that my father had died of a wound in the first days of his captivity; for I could not trust his tongue, and this was the story I had given my mother.

Soon I was back in the field again; and this, I found, was as good a consolation as any. For however little sense there may be in it, while risking one’s life one feels that one makes an offering, and that the gods who afflict men with remorse are appeased.

Now that spring was here, the shipyards worked all day; ribbed keels stood everywhere on the slipways; here and there you could see a vessel ready, with torches burning half the night to light the fitters. It was a fine sight and put heart into you, till you saw what was ready to take the sea. Only one piece of news was dreaded now whenever a ship came in, that the island allies were in revolt.