Tides of War (44 page)

“That being said, Endius will assume that simultaneous to this embassy to himself I also dispatch ambassadors to the court of Persia reproposing alliance with them, as I know his countrymen have messengers on the track now to the Great King. Say only that I must play my hand as he his, but Necessity casts the final ballot; someone must trust someone sometime. God willing, it will be he and I.

“Find out what you can of the parties at Lacedaemon, but do not press him on this. He will know what can be done, nor do we need to. Inquire, however, of the feasibility of recruiting Lysander, or even Agis. I welcome either or both. Endius will realize of course that such an alliance between our cities will produce further war between us if it succeeds. Tell him I would rather fight that war then than this war now, which can only destroy us both and leave our mutual enemies triumphant by default.”

What if Endius required me to return with him to Lacedaemon to repeat this overture to others of his party?

“Do so. My needs are for the most and best intelligence you can acquire. No sight-seeing now. If you are spotted at either city, our foes will know you come from me and to whom I have sent you. The audacity of the stroke gives it a chance. The faintest glimmer, premature, dooms it.”

He issued me money and passwords, assigning a ship to bear me as far as Paros, from which I must proceed on my own. I drew up upon departure. “Are you serious about this, Alcibiades? Or am I hanging my ass over for some ruse or gambit?”

As ever when he laughed, his face regained the flush of youth.

“When we return home, Pommo, which we shall in due course, Athens will hand herself to me on a plate. We will stand then upon the utmost promontory of peril, as expectations of such an order will be released as to make their disappointment a calamity surpassing even
Syracuse. Do you know why I call the men and the fleet the Monster? Because they must be fed, tomorrow and the next day, and if they are not, they devour you and me and then themselves.”

He pronounced this lightly, as a gambler long since wagering home and treasure sets without qualm his own life upon the cast. I perceived then, and believe now, that his intrepidity was of an order not of men, but of gods.

“Defeating the enemy is child’s play alongside feeding this monster, which itself is nothing alongside the
demos
of Athens, the Supreme Monster, particularly inflamed as she will be upon our return in glory. Do you understand, my friend? We must place before this monster an enterprise worthy of her appetite.”

He laughed, bright as a boy. “This is how destiny works. As this, tonight at the intersection of Necessity and free will.”

I heard a rustle from the chamber and, turning, glimpsed in shadow a female form advance and recede.

“Now go, old friend,

Passing that tavern calling itself Conger Eel, I descried young Damon, alone, drunk and getting drunker. I asked where his girl was.

“I am an imbecile,” he declared. “And merit an imbecile’s desserts.”

That girl was Timandra, in whose garments Alcibiades’ corpse was wrapped so few years later, in Phrygia, there being no other swathings with which to devise a shroud.

She was twenty-four, then on the straits. She entered his keep and no woman displaced her. She was what he needed; he knew it and she, at once. Those parasites who could not be chased even by armored marines, this slip of a lass scattered with but a glance. Other than his wife while she lived, I never heard Alcibiades defend a woman save in jest or irony. Now his eyes darkened with such wrath at the least affront to this girl that captains of a thousand approached on tiptoe, lashes lowered as boys. She was like the dove of Trapezus, mated with an eagle, who became an eagle herself.

Much has been made of Alcibiades’ lawlessness in his private life, by which his traducers meant that he would fuck an eel if it would hold still long enough. You have met Eunice, Jason. She is no eel, but he took her to his bed one night, or she went of her own, at Samos a year prior to Timandra’s advent. This was her way of striking at me, when blows would not suffice, for lack of attendance upon her and her children, of which laxity I was surely culpable. I could not fault her, who was helpless as all women before the tempests of her heart, but must confront him who ought to know better, which prospect engendered no small apprehension, I confess, even in one as myself who, if possessed of no grander accomplishment, at least may say he feared no man face-to-face. Not that I thought my commander would invoke authority against me, as he would never bend to such, but that upon the passion of the instant he might aim a blow. Such a prodigy was he as athlete and antagonist that I possessed, I felt, only a middling chance, myself armed and he empty-ended. Of course nothing of the sort fell out. Calling him
to account, on a moment alone beside the hulk works, his response was of such grave rue that my anger failed at once, replaced, as you may believe or not, by sorrow on his account. For his incapacity to govern his appetites was the single failing that made him feel mortal.

“She told me she was no longer your woman, that you had cast her into the street. Her pretext for entry to me was want of money.” He met my eye. “I knew it was a fraud and went ahead anyway, such a dog am I.” Then, dropping his hands: “Here, flatten me where we stand, Pommo, and I’ll make no matter of it.”

What was I supposed to do, strike our fleet commander, there beside the strip yards?

“You don’t even remember her name, do you?”

“My dear, I don’t remember any of their names.”

Two evenings later I was training on the seawall when Mantitheus passed in a racing eight, working with ephebes fresh from home. “Got a clean set of spruces?” he called across, meaning the forest-green dress cloak of the fleet marine force. “The pleasure of our company has been requested. And bring your gentleman’s manners!”

This was how my second wife was introduced to me, or me to her to put it exactly. She was the daughter of our Samian host of that evening, by name Aurore, whom I loved at once and with all my heart, though her time as my bride was barely a year before heaven took her, such has been my fortune. I never learned what Alcibiades told her father of me, or how it was communicated. But upon the instant of this gentleman’s welcoming Mantitheus and myself at his threshold, it was as if I were a prince anointed.

This was how Alcibiades made up his transgression, do you see? It was the malformation of his destiny, and our own, that he must make up so many.

Timandra could not change him, but she took him in hand. They did not share the same room on the straits; she would not abide it, absent marriage, nor would she consent to such union, though he appealed for it strenuously. He must come to her bed and return to his own, unless she permitted. Nor did she install her lodgings adjacent his, to spy on him, but in the opposite wing, and as offices as well as quarters. She had means of her own which she managed, but her primary vocation upon entering his domain was to facilitate his practice, not of
affairs of war, which were and must be his, but of matters of his well-being and efficient functioning.

Once, ambassadors of the Persians, Mithridates and Arnapes, called upon Alcibiades at his villa on Dog’s Head Point and, being welcomed by Timandra in flawless Aramaic, took her for either the general’s interpreter or his lover and brushed past her, seeking his offices. She had the marines jerk them up at swordpoint, and when the envoys expressed outrage and demanded her credentials, she told them:

“Gentlemen, it has been my observation among those whom men call great, that these may be addressed in only two ways—either to serve or to contest. In neither of these estates may the great man discover one to whom he may in safety unburden his heart. This is the service I afford our commander, and you, who have had abundant acquaintance of the great, may judge its worth.” She smiled. “Yet I have acted in overhaste to detain you thereby by force. Consider yourselves free, gentlemen, to pass as you wish.”

The envoys tendered that obeisance the Persians call
ayana,
proper to a prince or minister. “Summon us when you wish, lady, but please accept, until we find more material means of expressing it, our regrets at this infraction.”

From girlhood this Timandra had been pursued by suitors, offering, through her mother the courtesan Phrasicleia, worlds and universes to possess her, much as men had courted Alcibiades in his youth. Perhaps this was a bond between them, an understanding. One would say, observing them in public, that they conducted themselves as chastely as brother and sister; yet it was clear that each was passionately devoted to the other.

Timandra domesticated Alcibiades, if such a word may be applied, and lent order to the often chaotic practice of his genius, managed as it was entirely in his head. But the sword of her advent had an under-edge, which was that the apparition of this female, wielding such influence at the epicenter of a coalition of war, contributed to an atmosphere about Alcibiades that smacked of royalty. What was she anyway? A queen? An imperial gatekeeper?

Yet it must be said that someone had to shield him from the siege of distraction which drew him apart from the business of the fleet. For Thrasybulus and Theramenes, though of equal rank, never experienced
such inundation of celebrity. They may walk abroad unmolested by the throngs of petitioners, supplicants, and rank-fuckers whose importunities tormented their counterpart without cease.

But to return to my embassy to Endius. It took a month to reach Athens by the required route; by then the Spartan mission was gone, repudiated by Cleonymus and the demagogues. I set off at once to overhaul them, but they had crossed the Isthmus; I must enter the Peloponnese on my own, at last catching up at the border fort of Karyai.

Endius listened gravely to my recitation of Alcibiades’ message, rejoining nothing. Next dawn Forehand appeared, bearing a message for Alcibiades in Endius’ hand, whose dispatch, the squire stated in distress, was an act of either extraordinary devotion or plain recklessness. Fearing for his master should the letter be intercepted, Forehand refused to depart. I broke the seal. I myself destroyed the letter, committing its contents to memory, to shield this Peer of Lacedaemon whom I had always respected but for whom, till that day, I had felt scant affection.