Tides of War (51 page)

“And do you share this Colophon’s bed as well?”

The woman wheeled in anger. “Is this a law court? Since when am I on trial?”

“Who wants your husband dead, Eunice? Not this rogue or his brother,
who will be content to snatch his land and pack him off to exile. Some other wants his finish. Who?”

She met my eyes with an expression I will never forget. I felt myself stumble, as one, in Hermippus’ phrase,

It was she. How? I insisted. By making a powerful man your lover? Or did you seek out those you knew possessed motive to eliminate your husband and only lead them to the crimes they needed to effect his arrest?

She wept then. “You cannot know, sir, what it is to be a woman in a man’s world
…
”

“Is this how you acquit homicide?”

“The children are mine. He will not take them from me!”

She sank upon the settle and began to sob. At last the tale gushed forth. Its seed was her boy, named Nicolaus after Polemides’ father. The lad was sixteen and bursting with the venturesome sap of youth. As boys raised with numerous “uncles” in their mother’s bed, Nicolaus had come to idealize the father whose society he had shared only intermittently, a sire moreover whose proximity to great events had rendered him more glamorous in his issue’s imagination. Nor was this notoriety diminished by his father’s imprisonment for murder.

The lad, Eunice revealed now, had run away and enlisted twice, under false names with counterfeit papers. Collared by the Guardians of the Yards, he fled again, into the harbor lanes of Piraeus, where his father shared a bed with the widow of a mate of the fleet. To this site Eunice had tracked her son, but could not make him come home. Some hard-up outfit would take him; it was only a matter of time before he would ship out, certainly to his death. Only his father could dissuade him. I must help. I must!

The uproar of this plea had drawn the watchman, on this eve the cook’s boy, a bright lad named Hermon. It was late and cold. “You must eat, lady. Please. Come inside.”

I instructed the boy to lay a fire in the kitchen grate. Eunice I assisted within, fetching a fleece for her feet and placing a chair for her beside the brazier. You know this quarter of our compound, my grandson; it is a snug harbor; the charcoal makes it toasty in moments.

I may have failed, in my narration, to do justice to this woman and the empathy her person evoked. For though her speech was rough, it was straightforward.
One must admire her survival if nothing else. Heaven only stood witness to the trials she had endured, packing her children in barbaric precincts at the limits of the earth. Even her present object, to shield her son from war, could be called noble if one made allowance for the means. Nor was she uncomely, it must be said, but possessed that species of fleshy concupiscence that a woman acquires sometimes past her prime, when the toll exacted by hard experience has settled her at ease within her own skin. A sailor would say she still had the goods. I found myself drawn in sympathy to her. I could picture her and Polemides together. Perhaps it was not past my powers to effect a reconciliation, even at this hour. I confess, watching her settle in before the grate, that for moments I wished I had known them in their heyday (and my own), them and their mates of the coop and the harbor.

Eunice broke the silence. “What part is he up to?” In his story, she meant.

I told her Samos and Ephesus. She chuckled darkly. “I’d give a lot to hear that string of fiction.”

The lad brought bread and boiled eggs; this seemed to fortify Eunice. She had abated somewhat her hostility and suspicion. “What if I could get the charges dropped?” she offered. “I’ll screw anyone I need to, and I have cash for bribes too.”

Too late. The trial date was set. “Polemides knew all along, didn’t he? That it was you behind the charges.”

The woman’s look acknowledged this likelihood.

“He doesn’t hate you, Eunice, I’m certain of that.” I promised to employ all my efforts to get him to help; I believed he would. Yet sorrow clouded her features. I felt moved and wished to comfort her.

“May I ask a question, madam?”

“You’ve done little else, Cap’n.”

I inquired of her life with Polemides. What had been the best time? When were they happiest together? She eyed me skeptically. Did I mock her? “The best for us was the best for Athens. Samos and the Straits. When Alcibiades brought his victories.”

At last she settled, and applying the fleece across her lap in such a way as to permit the brazier’s glow to warm one side and the wool’s heft the other, she took a sip of wine and began.

“We had a cottage at Samos. Pommo brought us out from Athens, me and the kids. It was a pretty place, called the Terraces. Every door on the lane was full; the men was all with the fleet. It was swell days, Cap’n. Swell
mates. The way the cottages was carved into the hill you could cut out little gardens, that was why they called it Terraces. We grew melons big as your head, and flowers; pansies and bluejackets, shepherd’s capes and wildhearts. The chimneys had those ironwood
ptera
on top, wings, that turn like weathercocks and make that sweet moan when the wind pipes through ’em. I hear that sound now, it breaks my heart.

“You never saw so many little boogers. All the girls was carrying or just dropped; there was bawlers and crawlers underfoot everywhere. You wanted kids, ’cause you never knew how long you’d have your man. And they was beautiful, Cap’n. Not just my Pommo, though he was at his pick and prime, but all of ’em. So young, so brave. They was always carrying wounds. Ashamed not to be. A man would row with a broken leg or blinded, a ‘starfish’ across his gut, you know this, sir; that’s how set they was never to let their mates down. They called fractured skulls ‘headaches.’ I remember the doc’s advice to one concussed cross-eyed: ‘Sit down.’

“We had a pot on our lane. You put your money in; who needed took and put back when he had it. No one stole. You could leave it out all night. If a mate died, his funeral come from that pot. There was no gangs or cliques; everyone was your friend. You didn’t need no amusements. Just to be together with such mates. Nobody cheated; nobody owed nothing. We had all we needed—youth and victory. We had the ships, we had the men, we had Alcibiades. And wasn’t that enough, Cap’n? Wouldn’t that be good enough for most men?”

Eunice peeled an apple as she spoke this; she slung the skin sizzling into the grate.

“Not Polemides of Acharnae. Not him. He found another woman, did he tell you? Not a tramp. A lady. That’s right, he married her, and had the cheek to tell me to keep off from the wedding. What do you think of that? He turns over his pay to me, half a duck a day, as if that sets all square. A boy and a girl, his own, and he chucks ’em without so much as a kiss-my-ass.

“He would be a gentleman farmer, see, like his father. There’s a laugh! He tried working the land with me and didn’t know pig shit from pork sausage. But he tells me now that’s his dream; he’ll make it pay this time.

“I killed a man with an ax for him. Did he tell you that, Cap’n? At Erythrae. Split this whore’s son open, blind soused and coming after Pommo. Gimme that ax again, I’ll sling it into the soup.”

She fell silent and for long moments held stationary, one hand holding the
fruit absently beside her cheek, the other arm wrapped about herself, as a child.

“But why am I working myself up over yesterday’s spit? She’s under the ground and he’ll be too. They’ll pit him for Alcibiades, and no wriggling free this time.”

I asked if she loved Polemides.

“I love everyone, Cap’n. Can’t afford not to.”

The hour was late. Clearly Eunice was as spent as I. I assured her I would speak to Polemides about his son and do all I could to secure her own entry to him, to exhort him in person. I recalled the fee she had left unclaimed and proffered it doubled. Was she certain she wished to brave the street at this hour? I could easily have a room made up for her. She thanked me, but no, better she not distress those with whom she resided. At the gate as I assigned an attendant with a torch to accompany her way, impulse prompted a query.

“Can you enlighten me, madam, with a woman’s view of Alcibiades? How did he strike you, not as a general or a personage, but as a man?”

She turned with a smile.

“We race of women crave glory, Cap’n, just as you men. But where does our greatness come? Not from him we conquer but him we bear.”

I was seeking, I said, to understand Timaea of Sparta—the queen who had not only permitted herself to be seduced but boasted of her infidelity.

Eunice discovered no mystery to this occasion. “There wasn’t no woman in the world, not Timaea of Sparta or Helen herself, who could stand before that man and not feel the god’s command crying from her belly. What children his seed would give me! What sons!”

The woman drew her cowl; then, lifting the veil to set it in place, she paused and turned back.

“Do you really want to know about Pommo?”

I assured her most earnestly I did.

“His heart opened twice in his youth,” she spoke, her glance no longer toward myself but averted soberly aside. “His sister and his bride. When the Plague took ’em, he buried their bones, but not their memory. What woman of flesh can compete with that, sir? And them both dead, so she can’t even talk ’em hard.

“That’s him, Cap’n. And it’s Athens too. Plague and war took her sons’ hope. Yourself too, sir, unless I misread your eyes.”

I absorbed this gravely, struck by its toll of truth.

“If you need anything, madam, make no shame to call. That which I can, I shall.”

She set her veil in place and, turning, made ready to step off.

“Alcibiades gave ’em hope, didn’t he, Cap’n? They felt it in their bellies like women, looking past all his faults and crimes. He had
eros.
He was
eros.
Nothing less could take the city and make her over new.”

It was fall
[Polemides resumed]
before Telamon and I reached Miletus, via Aspendus and the Coast Road through Caria. I counted the calendar differently now; not by days, but by Aurore’s term. She was due in forty-three days, by the ticks carved in the haft of my nine-footer. I warned my mate not to count on me, for when the hour came I’d be at Samos by her side.

“Hope is a crime against heaven,” Telamon reproved me as we trekked the gale-buffeted highway, where you packed your shield inboard at morning and outboard after noon and which rumbled at all hours with enemy caravans trucking war matériel and regiments of cavalry and foot. Every bridgehead was being outposted, every landing site fortified. “You were superb once, Pommo, because you despised your life. Now hope has made you worthless. I should quit you, and would but for our history.”

The coast towns through Caria were all Spartan-garrisoned. They had changed, Miletus most of all. Under Athens the city had celebrated a festival called the Feast of Flags. Housewives draped the lanes with jacks and standards; guilds and brotherhoods massed in the squares; the town was gay nightlong with street dances and torch races and the like. Now that was over. Housefronts squatted, sallow and stark. On the docks men worked their business and nothing more. You wore red, everyone, some rag or kerchief to show obeisance to Sparta. The greeting was no longer “Artemis,” the goddess’s blessing, but “Freedom!” as from Athens’ tyranny. This salutation was compulsory.

The Spartan garrisons ruled under martial law, with a curfew, but the affairs of the cities were run day to day by the Tens. These were political committees of the wealthier citizens, estate holders and such, which answered not to Sparta, but to Lysander. Under Athenian rule,
civil cases must be tried at Athens, where the vultures of the courts picked the colonials clean. Now such shenanigans looked benign. In Lysander’s courts each civil trespass was reckoned a crime of war. Breach of contract was dereliction, laziness treason. Even if the Tens wished to be fair, in a boundary dispute, say, between a crofter and his landlord, a lenient judgment might set them up for denunciation as democrats, partial to Athens. The fist must fall hard.