Tides of War (10 page)

From his years upon the land my father had acquired expertise of herbs and
kataplasmata,
poultices and purges, splints, bindings, even surgery, all the folk-derived veterinary usages the husbandman learns seeking to keep his stock sound and thriving. More beneficial stood his manner of proffering comfort. One simply felt better in his presence. My father revered the gods in the simple, straightforward manner of his age. He believed; his friends believed in him; it worked. Soon their friends were calling too. In this manner Nicolaus of Acharnae, bereft of the income of his estate, found himself competent to support his new household in the city. He chucked his farmer’s boots and hung out the physician’s shingle.

With the rise of the Plague my father’s services became much in demand. My sister Meri took upon herself the role of nurse, accompanying him on his rounds. I was in the city then too. I had married and had a young son. Often I, too, traveled with my father and sister, more to provide security under arms in the remote precincts they were called to than to assist in any medical capacity.

I detested the sick. I was afraid of them. I could not but feel that they had drawn their distress upon themselves by their own delinquent actions, concealed from mortals but known to the gods. And I dreaded contagion. I stood in awe of my father’s and sister’s intrepidity to enter these dwellings of the doomed. I recall one midnight, summoned to some
shantytown quarter, a hive of tent cloth and wicker, where ventilation stood nonexistent and the vapors of the dying loitered noxiously, stinking to heaven. The madness of the street-spawned Theseus religion stood at its zenith then. The lane was plastered with crimson bull’s horns. Every wall read
Proseisin
: “He is coming.” The tenement itself teemed with immigrants, ancients and babes, those foreigners who had flocked to the city in her decades of abundance and now in her affliction remained marooned, dying like flies. Not all the gold of Persia could have induced me to enter that hellhole. Yet in they trooped, my father and sister, armed only with a hidesack of herbs and that handful of inadequate instruments of physic—the listening stick, the lancet, and the speculum.

Let me show you something, Jason. It is my father’s casebook; I have kept it all these years.

In the margins my father notes his fees. Those circled are the ones who paid. One may scan twenty and thirty cases without finding a mark. But skip down. The months pass. Economy now informs the notes.

I was twenty-three then. I was not ready to die, or to stand idly by while those I loved succumbed. Yet what could one do? The helplessness ate your guts. My mother’s father took his own life, yet uninfected by the scourge; the patriarch could not endure to outlive yet another generation of those he loved. My father and I bore his bones away in a child’s phaeton, out through that gate called Lionheart heretofore, now the Gate of Tears, to our tomb in the country. Half a hundred parties of the bereaved trekked with us; the queue stretched to the Anaceum. The
Spartans, the season’s ravagement completed, had withdrawn, save the odd cavalry patrol. One tracked us along the Acharnae Road. Their lieutenant called to us to see reason and seek peace. “This is not war,” he cried, his knight’s heart outraged at such horrors visited upon children and women. “It is hell.”

For myself I had witnessed little of the nobility of war so eloquently advertised by this officer’s countrymen, my schoolmasters. In Aetolia we burned villages and poisoned wells. In Acarnania our blades were employed to slaughter sheep, not staying even to strip the beasts of hide or fleece, but dumping them throat-slit into the sea. The only real battle I had seen was at Mytilene under Laches, the ablest amphibious commander of the war, save only the Spartan Brasidas and Alcibiades.

The latter had won his second prize of valor, in the raid on the Spartan harbor at Gytheium, and was to collect another at Delium, saving the life of your master Socrates, this time as a cavalryman—all in all a “triple,” on land, sea, and horseback. By then, too, he had entered his first chariot at Olympia, though his driver had spilled and failed to finish.

I saw none of Alcibiades during those days. The Plague had hit his household hard. In addition to Pericles, whom rumors reported stricken, he had lost his mother, Deinomache, an infant daughter of his wife Hipparete, and both sons of his lover Cleonice, who herself had perished not long after. His cousins, Pericles’ sons Paralus and Xanthippus, had fallen, and Amycla, the Spartan nurse who had remained loyal, even when her country called her home.

Without the walls awaited war; within, pestilence. Now arose a third scourge: one’s own countrymen, made desperate by the first two. The poor cracked first. Driven by want, they took to plundering the homes of those of middling wealth, which stood vulnerable owing to their banishment of watchmen and stewards, all save the most trustworthy, who themselves took to crime to pay a physician or an undertaker, which professions amounted to the same thing. What good was money if you would not live to spend it? A gentleman would perish, bequeathing his treasure to his sons; these, anticipating their own imminent extinction, ran through their patrimony as fast as their fists could scatter it, abetted by every species of parasite and bloodsucker, seeking the juice as it spilled. You saw it, Jason. Disease would carry off a man’s wife and children; bereft of hope, he sets his own flat alight, then lingers
in numb
katalepsis,
nor disclaims his offense to the brigadiers hastening onto the scene as the blaze consumes the tenancies of his neighbors. Near the Leocorium I saw a man hacked to pieces for this felony. Others set fires purely out of malice. After dark, flame-spotting became a spectator sport.

My brother served then with the infantry under Nicias in Megara; he and others shuttled regularly with dispatches. Again and again he urged me to get out. Enlist as a marine, take oars on a freighter, anything to vacate this antechamber of hell, the besieged city. He had sent his wife Theonoe and their babes to her kinsmen in the north; my own bride and child remained in Athens.

“They’re dead already,” Lion addressed me with passion. “Their graves are dug. Father and Meri too, and us with them if we’re mad enough to stay.” This upon an evening when he and I drank alone, not for pleasure, but shamelessly, to render ourselves insensate. “Listen to me, brother. You’re not one of those pious nincompoops who see this scourge as a curse from heaven. You’re a soldier. You know one does not make camp in a swamp or drink downstream from a shithouse. Look around you, man! We’re kenneled like rats, ten crammed in space for two, the very air we breathe contaminated as a terminal ward.”

This was how one spoke then. You remember, Jason. One tolled the truth with the candor of the condemned. Civility rode the greased sluice into the gutter, succeeded by scruple and self-restraint. Why obey the laws when you were already sentenced to death? Why honor the gods when their worst was nothing beside what you already bore? As for the future, to turn to it with hope was madness, to contemplate it with dread only made your present plight more unbearable. What object was served by virtue? To conduct oneself with patience and thrift was folly; heedlessness and pursuit of pleasure, common sense. To defer desire was absurd; to succor the afflicted, the fastest way to bring on your own end.

Despair begat boldness, slow death the courting of extinction. Gangs roamed the streets, armed with paving stones and wagon staves, weapons they could cast aside or claim harmless when the constables collared them, which they never did. These thugs scrawled insults on the public halls, defacing even the sanctuaries of the dead, and none stood up to them. With each act of insolence uncondemned, this scum grew more brazen. They hunted foreigners, the weaker the better, and
beat them with a barbarity unprecedented. More than once my father and sister, hastening to one in need, were compelled to tend some fellow bludgeoned in the gutter and left to die. The white robe of the sisters of mercy lent protection on their rounds, yet there arose those who donned this garment to gain access to a home, to ransack it even as the occupants cried out to them, dying. I saw one female stoned on the very threshold she had plundered, the mob making off with the villainess’s loot while her blood yet ran upon the pavement. Arms had been outlawed, and all firebrands, even courtesy torches to light one’s way home. The penalty was death for those caught bearing firesticks and tinder.

The randomness of extinction brought out all that was worst in men, and all that was best. My sister Meri organized in our home sessions of council, clearinghouses for nurses and physicians seeking any diet, regimen, or curative that brought relief. No course was too outlandish. The fever that consumed the sick brought such torments that the sufferer could not stand on the skin the touch of even the lightest cloth. You entered a home and everyone was naked. The afflicted, on fire with fever, plunged into public fountains, then others, desperate with thirst, drank the water. Night’s cool brought no surcease, as the pain merely of lying upon one’s bed drove sufferers to madness. Physicians prescribed baths and diuretics; they bled some, purged others. Nothing worked.

The doctors looked worse than the dying. My wife would feed these scarecrows, growing more gaunt each day herself. Soon the search for remedials became supplanted by the quest for drugs to blunt the pain, then, whispered, merciful means of dispatch. People drank bull’s blood or swallowed stones. I myself became recruited to this dolorous trade. I scoured the sailors’ markets for morphia and dogbane, hemlock and belladonna. My sister instructed me in the concoction of potions to carry off the dying. Soon these became too costly to secure.

My infant son took ill. His cries, heart-scoring, ceased not night or day. My wife rocked the babe, crooning, as she, too, weakened. When their pain became unbearable, Meri dosed them with nightshade, the last she had, to bear them away.

My cousin Simon, now a captain in the cavalry, had come to stay with us, bringing his wife Clymene and infant twins. Then his brow, too, began to burn. He fled one night, taking only his horse. Within
days Clymene began to fail, crying for him; I scoured all his haunts, even those we shared in childhood. One midnight, despairing, I determined to seek out Alcibiades, at his town estate on the Hill of the Knights.

The streets then, even those of the wealthy, had become corridors of horror. Neighbors had perished, abandoning their pets; others who could not feed their animals or grew too sick to care had let them loose. Now packs of dogs ranged wild. These would not go after corpses, their beasts’ wisdom enjoining, but hunted the living, even indoors, clawing at shutters and pouring in over thresholds while their howls and snarls, ungodly, echoed down the vacant lanes. I ran this gauntlet for what seemed hours, at last drawing up before Alcibiades’ gate.

Lanterns blazed; no watchman attended. Gay music sounded from within. Crossing the courtyard, I saw a man of my age, unknown to me, cavorting in a dry fountain, cupping from behind the ungirdled breasts of a prostitute. Another sprawled in the shadows with a
porne
on her knees before him.

I advanced into the interior. The place was torchlit and pullulating with revelers. Drums beat. A procession, chanting, jigged about the court. Upon a dais stood a congress of men and women clad as acolytes and bearing wands of willow. They enacted a burlesque of the rites of Thracian Kotyttos, the orgy goddess.

Here arose Alcibiades, at the fore, performing in mockery the office of priest, or should I say priestess. He was dressed in women’s robes, lips painted, his curls bound in lampoonish caricature of the sacred style. He was barefoot, dead drunk. I advanced before him, demanding the whereabouts of my cousin.

Alcibiades stared. He had no idea who I was. The dancers capered wantonly about him. “Who is this intruder who dares trespass, uninitiated, within the hallowed precinct? Kneel, supplicant, and show reverence of the goddess!”

I demanded again my cousin.

Alcibiades recognized me now. He elevated his staff, which I saw was a cook’s stirring paddle, for soup.

“Bow, interloper. Display deference to heaven or, by my vested powers, I’ll have you blown senseless.”

Two whores twined about his knees. He directed one forward; she
lurched upon all fours, clutching at my cloak, beneath which from its baldric hung a
xiphos
sword.

“And comes this stranger armed as well? Impiety! What punishment for this?” Alcibiades flung his wine bowl in sham outrage. “Attend, postulants, to this party-pooping heretic! He has observed, as Menoetius says,

Now I saw my cousin. “Get out of here, Pommo,” he commanded me, emerging from the daisy chain of prancers.

“Not without you,” I replied.

“Pommo, you swine!”

This from Alcibiades, descending from his perch and draping a merry arm about my shoulders. “Once upon a siege, my friend, you played the spoilsport and I commended you. But see, the tables have turned. It is our country now which stands embattled and immured.”

He tugged the whore before me to her feet. “What do you think of this?” he pronounced, and tore her garment to the waist. “Not impressed? How about this?” He stripped her naked. The girl made no effort to cover herself but faced me in the eye, prideful in her beauty.

“Let him alone, Alcibiades,” my cousin put it.

I noted Euryptolemus advancing to intercede.

“You’re not queer, are you, Pommo?” Alcibiades declaimed. “We can address those needs as well!” He motioned to the shadows, summoning boys.