Tides of War (43 page)

Thrasybulus protests, sick of war and eager to accept this offer of armistice. “The enemy honors you, Alcibiades. All it takes is you to clasp his hand and peace is ours.”

“My friend, the Spartans’ intent is not to honor me, but by this wile to make our countrymen fear my ambition. They slant their favor toward me to inflame Athens’ fears that I, returning with the victories this fleet has won, will set myself up as tyrant. If they win—that is, incite the
demos
to displace me—that is Sparta’s victory. This is her design, not peace.”

We must have more victories, he declared. “More, and more after that, until our forces possess the Aegean absolutely, the straits and every city on them, with the grain routes clamped tight in our grip. Till then we cannot go home.”

It took scant imagination for those about the fire to conjure the bastions of Selymbria, Byzantium, and Chalcedon, each formidable as Syracuse, and the trials we must endure to take them. Thrasybulus slung his lees into the embers. “You mean
you
can’t go home, Alcibiades. I can.” He rose, unsteady on his shoring timbers.

“Sit down, Brick.”

“I will not. Nor take your orders.” He was drunk, but plain-spoken and fit to have his say. “You may not go home, my friend, till you garb yourself in such a mantle of glory that none dare fart within a furlong. But I can go. We all can, who are sick of this war and want no more of it.”

“None may go. You least of all, Brick.”

The men looked on, torn between their commanders. Alcibiades saw it.

“Friends, if your eyes cannot perceive Necessity’s dictates, I beg you to trust mine. Have I led you anywhere but to victory? The Spartans dangle
peace before your noses and you snap at it like winter foxes. Peace to them means respite to rebuild for war. And us? Since when do we, or any victor, quit the field owning less than at contest’s commencement, when that and more stand plump for the taking? Look around you, friends. The gods have led us to this plain, where Greek vanquished Trojan, to direct us to their will and our destiny. Will we die in our beds, praising peace, that phantom with which our enemies swindled us, who could not defeat us in fair fight upon the sea? I despise peace if it means failing our destiny, and I call upon the blood of these heroes to witness.”

He stood, addressing Thrasybulus. “You accuse me, my friend, of hunting glory at the price of devotion to our nation. But no such contradiction obtains. Athens’ destiny is glory. She was born to it, as we her sons. Do not devalue yourselves, brothers, accounting our worth as meaner than these heroes’ whose shades eavesdrop upon us now. They were men like us, no more. We have won victories equal to and greater than theirs, and will win more.”

“Those you call us to emulate, Alcibiades,” the younger Pericles spoke, “are dead.”

“Never!”

“Sir, we encamp beside their tombs.”

“They can never die! They are more alive than we, not in occupation of fields of Elysia, where Homer tells us

but here, this night and every, within ourselves. We cannot draw a breath absent their exemption, or close our eyes save to see their heritance before us. They constitute our being, more than bone or blood, and make us who we are.

“Yes, I would stand among them, and bring you with me, all. Not in death or afterlife, but in the flesh and in triumph. You command me to look, Brick, to these about the fire. I am looking. But I don’t see chastened men, or meek. I see that valiant quick to which invincible battalions may be drawn; a corps of kinsmen who may say when death comes, as it must to all, that they have left no drop within the bowl. We clash tonight as brothers. What could be better? To gather on this site among brave and brilliant friends! And who grander to stand among than these of yore? But one may not enter their company for the price of an iron spit. The toll is everlasting glory, won for that which one loves, at the risk of all he loves. I for one will pay that fare gladly. Let us dine with these, brothers, who brought fire to the East and claimed it for their own.”

Thrasybulus stood across, remarking the embers, which his mate and fellow commander had kindled to the blaze.

“You scare the breath out of me, Alcibiades.”

I was in Athens
[Grandfather now narrated]
when Alcibiades took Chalcedon, Selymbria, and Byzantium, as he said he must and would
.

The first he surrounded with a wall from sea to sea, and when the Persian Pharnabazus came against him with his troops and cavalry while simultaneously Hippocrates, the Spartan garrison commander, rushed upon him from the city, Alcibiades divided his forces and defeated them both, slaying Hippocrates. At Selymbria he had mounted the walls himself with an advance party, confederates within having colluded to betray the place, when, one among them failing of nerve, the others must give the signal prematurely. Alcibiades found himself cut off, supported by only a handful, with defenders swarming to overwhelm him. He had the trumpet sounded and, commanding silence, ordered the inhabitants to surrender their arms and receive clemency, this mandate issued with such authority as to make the foe believe that his army had already taken the city (which was nearly true, as his Thracians, massed in their thousands, clamored to sack the place entire), that the citizens consented to submit the state if he would only call off his dogs. And he kept his pledge, maltreating no one, only requiring that the city return to alliance with Athens and hold open the straits in her name.

He took Byzantium by the following stratagem. Having circumvallated the city and blockaded it also by sea, he made public that other urgent concerns must call him away and, embarking with a great show all beneath the city walls, he sailed and marched off, returning that night in darkness to overwhelm the slackened and unsuspecting guard.

He had now achieved all he had said he would, secured the Hellespont and beaten every force pitched against him. He had covered himself with such glory, as Thrasybulus had professed, that he may at last come home.

I was in Athens then, recovering from my wounds of Abydos. Twice the sawbones carved timbers off my peg and each time suppuration assaulted the
unexcised tissue. My wife nearly came undone with the fright of it. It was not so hard on me. I was a hero. Those who had procured Alcibiades’ banishment and those who had by their acquiescence abetted it now sought to ally themselves with me and every other officer associated with his triumphs and those he, Thrasybulus, and Theramenes continued to send home like so many bouquets. Soon they, the commanders, would come home too. Athens burned for them as a bride for her beloved.

Our client Polemides, it turned out, appeared briefly at Athens as well, which episode must be related, as its consequence affected if not the course of the war, then a direction she might have taken had events transpired otherwise.

Polemides resumed his tale on the twenty-eighth of Hecatombaion, Athena’s Day, by coincidence the date his own son—named Nicolaus after his father—appeared at my door, beseeching me to take him with me to the prison. But this chronicle must hold a moment. Let us return to the Hellespont…and Polemides’ narration:

News of Endius’ peace mission
[Polemides resumed]
had reached the straits two days before Alcibiades’ ships returned from their detour to the tombs. Many celebrated, believing the war over. I had tied the skin on pretty good myself, when a summons interrupted the spree. I was instructed, by Mantitheus in Alcibiades’ name, to pack my kit, informing no one, and report to him at his command post, late, after the secretaries had departed.

I recall the night as well for another reason, an encounter with Damon, the young Cat’s Eye. I must put a point here, that is, my own retirement from service to Alcibiades personally. I had begged off; I couldn’t take the pimping. I now served the younger Pericles on the
Calliope
.

It was like this. Many competed to provide their commanders with feminine flesh. Certain officers had become professional procurers, importing from as far as Egypt. Any beauty stumbled on in the field would be tossed in a bag and presented at his superior’s threshold. Sometimes our commander needed two or three a night, just to get to sleep. That was his business. But I could no longer station myself at his doorstep, fending spurned mistresses and aspiring suicides. He laughed when I proffered my resignation. “I’m astonished you lasted so long, Pommo. You must love me more than I thought.”

This night, returning after the secretaries, I encountered the Cat’s Eye, Damon. He had a girl with him, his fiancée, he said. He wished to show her off to Alcibiades. Would I let him in first? I glimpsed enough of the maid’s face to see she was a beauty, though no comelier than any of scores who had worn a groove in the courtyard heretofore. Damon and the girl went in. I waited. My turn came.

The place was cleared out, not even junior officers or marines present.

“An embassy was dispatched to Endius this morning on the
Paralus,”
Alcibiades began, “to convey the generals’ official response to the Spartan proposal of peace. You’ll be unofficial. From me only.”

I would carry no papers, Alcibiades informed me, register at no frontiers, and impart my intelligence to no one save Endius himself. Interrogated upon my task, I may give any story so long as it was false. Alcibiades asked if I knew why he sent me and none other. “Because Endius will believe you. You need do nothing, Pommo, only be yourself. A soldier on a soldier’s errand.”

It came down to this: if Alcibiades could deliver Athens, could Endius deliver Sparta—to end the war and fight as allies in the conquest of Persia?

He laughed. “You don’t even blink, Pommo!”

“I have known you a long time.”

“Good. Then listen closely. After Cyzicus, when we slew Mindarus, I had expected the Spartans to send Endius out in his place, or Lysander, who are far their ablest commanders. That they have made Endius peace envoy means his party has fallen. Lysander will abandon him, if he hasn’t already.

“You need waste no time convincing Endius of the wisdom of the course I propose; he has grasped it for years. His reaction, however, will still be suspicion. He will think I seek to command this coalition. Tell him I yield to him, or whomever he appoints in his stead, and if he laughs, which he will, and says he knows I scheme already to displace whatever luckless son of a whore sails across my bows, laugh back and tell him he’s right. But that will be then, and such whore’s son will have had time to prepare.

“Tell him the ephors have outsmarted themselves electing him as envoy; now I may not come home until I have swept my country’s
enemies from the sea. He will know this. The point is that then will be too late. If he can bring his country over, it must be soon, or the
demos
at Athens, inflamed by the victories I will bring them, will make such demands as Sparta may never accede to.

“If Endius asks you of Persia and her vulnerability, tell him what you have seen with your own eyes. No Persian fleet may stand up to Athens’ navy, and no land force to Sparta’s army. Darius ails. Succession struggles will tear the empire apart.