Tides of War (56 page)

The exit of Alcibiades was hailed at Athens
[Grandfather continued]
with a relief verging upon the ecstatic (or so my wife reported by letter received at Samos that fall), such had become the people’s trepidation, not alone of that tyranny they imagined they had so serendipitously eluded but of the unaccountability of a single all-powerful commander whose conduct of the war had become at best idiosyncratic and whose style of generalship, the hallmark of which had become the conspicuousness in high places of his cronies and his lover, had begun to border upon the regal. The Assembly replaced Alcibiades with a college of ten generals, to impede any attempt at concentration of power, and sent out as well a supplementary body composed of the ten tribal taxiarchs, serving as ships’ captains, to act as a further check on recurrence of excess. If these curbs were not enough, the Assembly buttressed the fleet by drafting a number of past generals to command single ships. Illustrious names now bedizened the trierarchs’ roster
. Thyone
made a passage in convoy to Methymna; two vessels ahead sailed
Alcyone,
commanded by Theramenes, while to flank rowed
Indefatigable
under the great Thrasybulus.

It succeeded. Command was now dispersed across the entire political spectrum; rivalry receded; order was restored. Scarcity and hardship chafed less, shared by such a company. So many crack foreign sailors had deserted to the enemy that for the first time a fleet of Athens must advance to battle inferior in seamanship to the foe. This sobered the force further. Crews trained with a will; discipline was enforced internally, by shipmates, not imposed by officers. I may say of all my overseas tours this aggregation of ships and men was, if not the most brilliant, certainly the most able.

The departure of our supreme commander had as well profound consequences for Polemides, who learned of it, he told me, while yet in hiding in the aftermath of Ephesus.

With Alcibiades out of power, Polemides could not go home. Road’s Turn
would be lost if it wasn’t already, and with it all means of support for his brother’s children and his own. His conviction for treason would stand. He was a hunted man now, by both sides. Even to cross to Samos to join his bride and child carried grave risks. He was caught, as the poet says, between the earth and the sea.

The estate of my father-in-law, Aurore’s father
[Polemides recounted],
comprised some twenty acres in the hill country remote from the port of Samos, on the north slope above Pillion Bay. One approached from the city side via the Heraion Road. I had chosen to land, however, at the island’s most remote point, on the bay side, while it was yet dark, a headland called the Old Woman’s Tit. I had got from the mainland to the islet of Tragia, then at last, a month and more past the time of my bride’s term, ferried the final leg by a lad of fourteen named Sophron in his father’s bumboat he had stolen. The boy asked no payment, nor even inquired my name, undertaking the hazard, he professed, purely for the adventure of it.

I mounted via the back track, steep and stony, and had worked a lather by the time the sun, and the welcome tiles of the farmhouse roof, hove into prospect above. One could see the compound from a distance: the pair of stone steadings, the hillward trace between, and the lane of camphor trees that mounted to the house itself. The family tombs were sited upon this track, and as I passed I noted, hung upon the lintel, two
epikedeioi stephanoi,
the wreaths of tamarisk and laurel offered in the islands to Demeter and Kore in intercession for the dead. Has the old man passed off? I wondered. Perhaps Aurore’s grandfolk, who inhabited cottages of the downslope enclave. I hurried on, minding myself not to permit my own joy at this much-behindhand homecoming to obtrude upon another’s grief. From the distance of a stone’s sling I spied my brother-in-law Anticles, with his dog Ironhead, striding into view from the corner of the steading. Two drystone dikers waited upon him with their mawls and stringers. “Has the garden wall taken another tumble?” I called in salute. Anticles turned and saw me. Such an alteration deformed his features as to choke my greeting in midbreath. His elder brother Theodorus turned into view from the hillward trace. He
took one look, bent in midstride, and seizing a stone in each fist, advanced upon me.

“You.”

This was his solitary word.

“What has happened?” I heard myself cry.

Stones screamed past my ears. “You are not welcome here.”

I let fall kit and arms and, spreading palms wide, beseeched clemency in the name of the gods.

“May hell take you,” Anticles spat, “and the evil you have brought upon our house!”

Both brothers advanced. Even the dikers rose. I could hear the dogs clamoring.

“Where is Aurore? What has happened?”

“Get quit, thou villain!”

A stone of Theodorus struck my hip.

I begged the brothers to tell me what had happened. Let me speak to Aurore. “She is my wife, and the child my own.”

“Attend them there.” Theodorus indicated the tombs.

All who have been soldiers know these, Jason: such hours when pain of flesh or spirit surpasses the heart’s capacity to endure it. I shook myself, as in a nightmare. How could these, my brothers, advance upon me with such hatred? How could those wreaths be for them I so loved?

“Leave this country!” Anticles strode upon me, brandishing his staff. “By the gods, if you cross again within my sight, that hour will end your life or mine.”

I withdrew. Where the farm’s limit fell away to the bay, two lads of the neighbor’s were clearing brush. From them I learned that my bride had succumbed two months previous. Poisoned. The child in her womb had perished with her.

Somehow it had become postnoon. I mounted the hill again. At the fence the dogs cut me off in a pack. Anticles roared down, horseback.

“What may I do, brother,” I beseeched him, “to requite this woe….”

He made no answer, only wheeled his mount in place, regarding
him who stood beneath with such rue as one may donate not to another of humankind, but to a wraith or specter, life-fled yet present, denied repose beneath the earth.

“You have stolen the sun from our sky, you and he who sent you. May your days, and his, be ever as lightless as you have made ours.”

Polemides broke off at this point and was unable for long moments to continue. When at length he recovered himself, he declared that he had had a change of heart regarding his trial. He no longer wished to contest the indictment; he would plead guilty. He had been deliberating upon this for some time, he acknowledged, but had not until this moment come to it as the course of honor. His lone regret was that his affairs had consumed so much of my time, proffered, he acknowledged, with such generosity and regard. He begged my pardon.

I was seized with outrage at this defection and lit into the man in fury. How dare he exploit the empathy of my heart and defame by enlisting it in his cause the memory of beloved comrades? Did he think I undertook this chore lightly? Because I admired him or deemed him worthy of deliverance? I despised him and all he had done, I declared, and had donated my advocacy only that the narration of his self-dishonorment may serve as a manifest of infamy to our countrymen. His cause had ceased to be his own the moment he sounded me to assist him; how dare he break off shy of the mark? Yes, die, I heard my voice exclaim, and good riddance! I strode to the door and pounded upon it, calling for the turnkey.

Naught but echo met my halloo. It was the hour of the man’s supper, I realized; he would be across the way at the refectory. I could hear our client behind me, chuckling. “It seems you have become a prisoner as well, my friend.”

“You are a cur, Polemides.”

“I never pretended otherwise, mate.”

I turned back, already recognizing beneath wrath’s receding flush how profoundly I had come to care for this villain. The veteran’s features declined into a smile. He acknowledged the aptness of the verdict I had pronounced upon him, remarking that its single shortcoming was its failure to go far enough.

He continued not with words, but by withdrawing from his chest two articles of correspondence which, one could not but infer from the way he handled them, he had re-perused recently and whose contents had affected him profoundly. He passed them to me.

“Sit down, my friend. You’re going nowhere for a while anyway.”

The first item was a letter from him to his great-aunt Daphne, dated some months subsequent to the final destruction of the Athenian fleet at Aegospotami, that calamity which made inevitable the city’s capitulation and, after twenty-seven years, her defeat at the hands of the Spartans and their Persian and Peloponnesian allies.

At that time Polemides, he told me now, stood in the service of Lysander, with convictions for treason and murder imposed from his homeland. He writes to his aunt at Athens, instructing her to prepare for the siege and surrender to come: