Tides of War (15 page)

Lysander claimed to remember me from the Upbringing, extremely unlikely as he was three age-classes ahead and in an elite training battalion. I remembered him, however. Of the four Firsts a youth could win in his commission year, in Wrestling, Chorus, Obedience, and Chastity, Lysander took three. His birth, however, was so mean, and he was seen so to curry favor with his betters, that such qualities failed to gain him the swift ascent they remarked. Peace further retarded his career. He was thirty-five or about; he should hold a lieutenant-colonelcy of infantry. Instead he was just a cavalry captain, the least prestigious element of Spartan arms. In fact nothing about him impressed me this night so much as his good looks, which were nearly as arresting as Alcibiades’. He was tall, with steel-colored eyes and hair falling to his shoulders. That this individual would one day preside over the dismemberment of the Athenian Empire and reign as a god over the entire Hellenic world seemed in this hour impossible of conception.

Lysander detailed the prospective errand. Telamon and I were to convey to Sparta a fledgling owl in a cage, a gift from himself to Cleobulus, chief of the war party. The real chore, however, was to deliver a dispatch, which for fear of discovery must be committed to memory and imparted to its addressee only. This was a plea to the Board of Magistrates to take seriously the intrigues of Alcibiades. The ephors must act, and act swiftly, for the measures set in motion by this solitary Athenian, Lysander professed, had placed the very survival of Sparta at
hazard. When I balked at performing this, fearing it would work harm to my countrymen, Lysander laughed. “Remember, you can always tender this intelligence, and all else you see and hear at Lacedaemon, to your friend”—meaning Alcibiades—“for love or profit.” To this day I recall the text.

Lysander knew Alcibiades. From summers in boyhood, when Alcibiades and his brothers visited their
xenos
, guest-friend, Endius at Sparta. As a youth Lysander, as I said, had been penniless; he had secured tuition to the Upbringing only as a
mothax,
a “stepbrother” or sponsoree, dues paid by Endius’ father, named Alcibiades. You may reckon to what extent such subordination galled the youth’s pride and fueled the acrimony he bore lifelong toward his rival.

I ran this job and others, courier chores mostly. At Sparta one indeed felt a sea change. The war party had seized ascendancy; the young men (and, more telling, the women) clamored for action that would restore Spartan pride. A battle was coming. You could smell it.

The army took the field twice that summer, both full call-ups under King Agis. When the second fizzled at the very gates of Argos, the Spartans turned upon their own king in fury at his fecklessness. Alcibiades leapt upon this. Rousing the allies, they took Orchomenos, securing the plain and passes north of Mantinea and cutting off Sparta from her allies beyond the gulf. Tegea and Orestheum now stood vulnerable as well. The fall of these was unthinkable to Spartan arms, as they opened the entire Eurotas valley. Yet still the ephors did not act. The knights and colonels thought their king a dunce or a coward, and
no one trusted the freed helots who now constituted a significant portion of the army. The cauldron bubbled just shy of the boil.

One night Telamon came with a job. We would run it on horseback with two Athenian shields, Rabbit and Chowder, so named for his incapacity to keep a meal down at sea. The task was to descend downvalley to Tegea, twelve miles; from there to escort in secret the commander of the Spartan regiment on-site, Anaxibius, to the fort at Tripolis, where he would receive orders from the home government. We must have him there at the second watch and back to Tegea by dawn.

Lysander did not inform us of this, but Alcibiades was at that hour at Tegea. He was there with his freed Messenians, addressing the Council.

We located the Spartan and got off. Before the party had ridden a mile, however, a runner from Lysander intercepted us. Plans had changed; we must divert to the shrine of Artemis on the Tegea–Pallantion road.

Our Spartan, Anaxibius, was a full colonel and in nowise averse to employing the ash of his staff upon the tardy or slow of wit. Twice he cracked Chowder across the ribs, demanding to know who the hell had trained us and what kind of a cocked-up operation we were running.

We reached the sanctuary well into the second watch. Clearly our irascible charge would not be back by dawn. Nor, mounting the steps, could Lysander be discovered. “By the Twins!”—Anaxibius smote the stone with the butt of his staff such a blow as nearly ruptured the drums of our ears—“I’ll flay you all for this insolence, and that bastard
mothax
in his turn.”

From behind a column emerged Lysander, alone save his squire, called Strawberry after a birthmark. He beseeched the colonel’s pardon, who yet clutched his staff before him and continued to beat it upon the stone, taking in vain the names of abundant divinities. Lysander appealed to him to desist, as troops were encamped about and the racket might be taken as an alarm. “Take your staff to me, sir, if you wish, but hear the message I am ordered to impart.”

Anaxibius at last lowered his lumber. In that instant Lysander snatched forth his own blade and, striking upon the colonel’s undefended
right, fetched him such a blow, backhand, as to cleave his neck to the bone and in fact nearly decapitate him. Anaxibius dropped like a sack from a wagon; fluid gushed as from an overturned pail. Our four gaped as Strawberry spun the fallen form facedown on the stone and, plunging again and again into its back the bared steel of a nine-foot spear, inflicted such wounds as could only be read as the blows of cowards and assassins.

Weapons filled my mates’ hands; our squad had formed up, backs to each other, certain that our own murders were next, at the hands of other concealed confederates of Lysander. No sound came, however. No squads materialized from shadow. If indeed there was a camp about, no stir arose from it.

“What a waste.”

Lysander broke the silence, indicating the corpse of his countryman. He spat blood. He had bitten his lip through, accidentally, as one does frequently in such exigencies. “He was a good officer.”

“For whose murder we four will be accounted.” This from Telamon, indicating himself and our party.

“Not by name,” was our employer’s cool rejoinder.

Lysander knelt, examining what had been a man and was now meat.

One came by degrees to grasp his perfidy’s object. The colonel’s assassination would be passed off as the work of agents of Athens. We who had been dupes need neither be named nor apprehended; the act alone would suffice to ignite outrage at Sparta. The home government would shuck its sloth and rise, in time to snatch Tegea from the brink.

“Will you murder us now, Captain?” Telamon inquired.

Lysander rose, pressing at his cut lip. He had, by his demeanor, never entertained such a notion.

“Men as yourselves, who stand apart from the fealty of statehood, are invaluable to me.”

He nodded to his squire, who accorded us our pay.

“Then we will require more than this,” spoke Telamon.

Our patron laughed. “I’m flat.”

“We’ll have the horses, then.”

Lysander approved this.

Rabbit had crossed to the portico; he motioned all clear. My own blood, which had run chill for all this interval, now refound its course and heat. “Who slaughters his own, Captain,” I heard my voice address the Spartan, “scorns God as well as man.”

Lysander’s eyes met mine, as steel-black as I recalled. “Take your man’s portion, Polemidas, and leave heaven to me.”

I would not have been at Mantinea save for my brother. He was at Orchomenos with Alcibiades and got a message to me.

One must understand the topography of the Peloponnese to reckon the peril to the Spartan state had she failed to carry that day. From Mantinea the Argives and allies, had they been victorious, would have swept down the plain to Tegea, then south to Asea and Orestheum, from which the entire Eurotas valley lay open to the sword. Sparta’s serfs would have risen, in numbers ten times their masters’. Slaughter by hoe and mattock would have confronted the lads and women of Sparta. Joined by whatever remained of the Corps of Peers, the defenders would have resisted to the last breath, perishing in a bloodbath unprecedented.

I arrived the morning of the battle, in the train with Telamon and our Messenians, so wretched with septic fever that I must be borne on a wagon with the infants, the pregnant camp wives, and the spare spearshafts.

I had never seen so many troops, and of such quality. Once as lads, Lion and I had larked after the runners in the torch race of the Panathenaea. From the statue of Love in the Academy where the competitors light their brands, we paced with them through the Sacred Gate, across the agora, past the Altar of the Twelve Gods, lapping the Acropolis to the Heracleum, every foot of which thronged with humanity. That was nothing beside Mantinea. The entire army of Argos stood to hand, led by their elite, the Thousand, along with the corps of Mantinea, regiment after regiment, the Cleonaeans and Orneaeans, the allies and hired troops of Arcadia, with a thousand
heavy infantry of Athens, dispatched in “defensive posture,” so as not to poach upon the Peace. Further, it seemed, every jack of the Argolid who could hurl a dart or sling a stone had collected, making five and six light-armed for every heavy infantryman.

We crossed with our Messenians behind the marshaling troops. I was sick and puking like a dog. I must arm, however, or never face my mates again. I was just commencing, abetted by Eunice, when Lion reined in above. He bore a courier’s pennant and trailed a second mount, a mare which, he reported, had thrown her rider.

I must mount as a dispatch runner. Such office, at Alcibiades’ orders, would not be left this day to pages but only officers. Alcibiades was on-site not as a commander (he had failed of election this term to the Board of Generals at Athens), but only as an envoy. Such distinctions were academic, of course, as any post he held became the hub and marrow simply by his occupation of it. Here was how the battle kicked off:

There had been a false start three days prior, a full-dress advance aborted by Agis a stone’s toss before contact. The Spartans had withdrawn south to Tegea. No one knew what they were up to. Attempting to flood the plain, the allies heard. The month was Boedromion; there wasn’t a course strong as an old man’s piss in either river. A day passed; then another. The allies took fright that Agis would pull something truly harebrained. They came down off Mount Alesion, an impregnable position, into the throat of the plain, just north of the Pelagos wood. Word came that the Spartans were advancing from the south with every spit and jigger they could carry. That was when I arrived. The allies had formed up, two miles across, barring the plain.

Now a fresh rumor started: the Spartans had turned back. There would be no battle; our side would haul out too. The regiment above which my brother and I perched had marshaled beneath pear trees, the only crop left untorched by the Spartans because they were not ripe, and the troops from boredom had begun gnawing the stony culls. These made men crap like geese. By twos and threes troops fell from formation, ostensibly to heed nature’s call but in truth to get a jump on packing for decampment.

Suddenly one saw dust.