Alkibiades goes into a queer silence, seemingly a long way off in some wilderness of his own, and wanting no company but his own shadow on the grass. I leaves him to it, judging that there’s nothing else to do unless I wants trouble. And there’s trouble coming sooner or later without any help from me. The beer’s strong in Sparta, and the Helot girls hot and willing, so I’m not lonely.
My Lord stays in his wilderness the best part of a month, and then one morning he comes out of it and whistles for me to go down for a morning swim with him, exactly as if he’s never been away.
Afterwards, we sits among the tall feathery reeds on the river bank, and dries off in the growing warmth of the sun. Oh, the good warmth of the sun, after the fiery cold of the Eurotas coming in green spate from Taygetus’ melting snows! Alkibiades lies on his back, whistling to the river birds. And I looks at him, and an odd thing happens behind my eyes; perhaps because of the time he’s been away on his own business, suddenly I sees him — I mean sees him — as though he’s someone I haven’t seen before. I sees the leanness of him and the flat hollow of his belly below his ribs, and the clear brown of his skin, and the little white scar on his left temple that he brought out of the fighting at Potidea. I sees his gold-and-copper streaked hair and rough like a stallion’s mane in need of grooming, and the paler brown of the lower part of his face, where he’s shaved off his beard to follow the Spartan fashion.
I says, ‘Until you open your mouth you could pass for a Spartan, now — one of the fair ones. Well, you’ve been practising hard enough all winter, with all this exercising and cold bathing and hard lying, and keeping a wooden face and speaking in two words at a time.’
He says, watching the flight of a bird overhead, ‘It’s something to do.’
‘You’re wasted. You should have been on the stage,’ says I.
*
We’re halfway back to the city when we hears the women wailing. And we both checks in our tracks. We’ve both of us forgotten till that moment it’s the first day of the Hyakinthia. I have known two more feasts of Hyakinthos since then, and got to know the way of it. All that first day the women wail and the whole land mourns with Apollo and makes sacrifices to their own dead along with the boy they say Apollo loved and slew by accident while teaching him to throw the discus. On the second day they rejoice, for Apollo caught the boy’s escaping life between his cupped hands and breathed his own strength into it and changed it into a blue flower springing in the grass. So on the second day they sing and wear garlands for Hyakinthos risen.
Alkibiades turns on his heel and walks off in the opposite direction without a word. And I wonders if he’s remembering the women wailing for Adonis through the streets of Athens and down to Piraeus on the day the fleet sailed for Syracuse. So I don’t follow him.
The Queen
I was eleven years old when they betrothed me to Agis; but I had known almost as long as I could remember, that I must be Queen of Sparta one day. I did not mind; but it would have been no matter if I had. It was my proud destiny. My sister Dionyssa and I were the only two of the right degree of kinship in the Royal Houses, and I was the elder by almost two years.
Agis is thick-necked and heavy in the shoulder. His hair grows low on his forehead and always looks dusty. And when he is angry his eyes go little and red like a boar’s. He smells like a boar too, at times. But he is boar-brave also, a fine soldier when once he starts to make the ground move under him; and no true Spartan woman should ask more of her man than that. I asked no more. I should be a Queen of Sparta. I was well enough content.
That was until the Hyakinthia; the seventeenth Hyakinthia of my life. I had not thought that that year I should be still among the maidens who take the new robe to Apollo Amyklae; for most women are wives at sixteen, and Agis was already forty; ten years past the age at which most men leave living in barracks to sleep openly with their wives. But he was — he is — one of those who do not change from the ways of their young manhood when young manhood is passed. Everyone knew that while King Pausanius had become so much a family man that he seldom even dined in Mess except during the men’s festivals, King Agis still turned to the boys’ barracks for his needs, and was in no hurry to take a woman into his bed. I was in no hurry either; I was happy; being not yet awake.
I was happy, that second day when mourning was over, to be still with my sister and the other maidens who carried the sacred robe that we had all shared in weaving through the winter. We had been out in the woods since before dawn, searching the lower glens of Taygetus for the blue hyacinth flowers that bear, shadowed at the heart of each petal, the God’s cry of grief — Ai, Ai — for his slain darling. It was still cool in the Taygetus woods, the streams running cold as ice under the fern, and my fingers had grown damp and chilled seeking the sappy stems among the grass in the clearings. We came back wearing the garlands that we had woven up there under the trees, and bearing the blue flowers piled high in our rush baskets. And the lightness of heart was in us that comes always with the second morning of the Hyakinthia.
In the market-place, between Kings’ Houses and the Temple of Athena, the crowds were gathering, and men called to each other ‘Hyakinthos is risen!’, and called back ‘He is risen indeed!’ Every shrine and altar in all Sparta was spilling over with blue — blue — blue. And everywhere was the music of flute and cithara. We went to the weaving shed and took the new robe which had been cut from the loom last night, and hung it carefully on its mast and cross-piece, and carried it out to the waiting people.
In the weaving shed the light was dim and diffused, but as the early rays of the sun struck upon it, it kindled into coloured flame, red and black and gold woven upon the deep blue-violet of grapes at vintage; the lyre and the bow and all the emblems of Apollo, and in the midmost part of it, the figure of the God himself, poised with his discus in the instant before the throw.
The procession was already forming; first the priests, with the sacred flute players, and the puzzled beasts garlanded for sacrifice. Then after an empty space, the Queen’s chariot being edged into position, and chosen girls from all over Lacedaemon with their flat rush baskets piled and spilling over with the blue that was the colour of the day. We took our places behind the Queen’s chariot, and as we did so, out from the forecourts of the Kings’ Houses rode first Agis and then Pausanius, with their bodyguards about them, the Ephors walking stiff and stately behind, to take their places in the emptiness left waiting for them. The flutes shrilled, and already the women along the wayside had begun to raise, very softly as it goes at first, the Hymn to Apollo.
So we wound our way out of the city; the dry smell of the dust-cloud mingling with the cool sweetness of the hyacinth flowers; and singing as we went, took the way to Amyklae. And I thought, ‘Next year, maybe, I shall ride in the Queen’s chariot beside Gargo.’ And the sudden joy rose in me till it was sharp as pain, that I was not yet Queen of Sparta, that for this one time more it was given to me to walk among the other girls with the knot of my girdle not yet loosed, and dance the Sun Dance of the Youths and Maidens.
We came to Amyklae in the loop of the river; Amyklae in the level cornlands, shut in by dark woods of kerm oak and Apollo’s own laurel, where the God slew his boy-love. The meadow was crowded, as always on that day of the year, but a broad lane had been left clear, stretching before us to the dark waiting Apollo standing against the curve of the woods; and a wide space clear about him, as though he cast a bright shadow in which men feared to tread.
The Kings dismounted, and their horses were led aside; Gargo stepped down from her chariot, slowly, for she was heavy with child again. And the procession moved on following the shrilling of the flutes.
One must not look to right or left, but be aware only of the God.
He is very ancient, our Apollo, almost black with age and weather, for no shrine holds its roof over him to keep out sun and rain. From the far side of the meadow, he seems no more than a great baulk of timber, a column growing broader towa
rds the head, and deep-rooted in the grass as the kerm oaks behind him. Then as you draw nearer you begin to see the carven head and shoulders of him, and the proud, erected phallus; and then the smile on the closed lips, the secret, half-moon smile, and the painted eyes that are more than painted eyes, wide and far-gazing, coming to meet you and draw you towards them.
And all the while you must answer with your whole heart to the silent Call of the Lord Apollo, and be aware of nothing else. It was the fourth time I had walked among the maidens at the Hyakinthia, and always, until now, I had been able to put away from me all awareness of the crowds pressing along the way, to let the flute music flow into me, and fill myself with the presence and the calling of the God so that all else passed by me as a dream. But that day I was aware of all things, of the flutes and the rising dust and the scent of the blue flowers in my garland, and of the crowd and something that seemed to be coming out to me from the crowd, disturbing me to my finger-tips. I must not look round, I must keep my gaze straight before me, to meet the summoning gaze of the Lord Apollo; but I saw them as we passed, out of the tail of my eye: faces — and faces — and faces, pressing in …
I had made my wreath in a hurry, for we had been long in the woods gathering the hyacinths; and as we came close to that inner open space where the crowd ended, a flower fell from it. I felt it go from me in loss. My flower, as though it had been something of myself; and there was a quick movement on the crowd’s edge as we passed, and a swoop of shadow on the grass, and I knew that someone had caught it up from under the feet of those who came after.
The flutes shrilled into silence, and we halted, and up at the head of the procession, where the Kings and priests were, there was a murmur of prayer and invocation, a sudden movement and the bleat of a ram cut short, and then the smell of the burnt offering mingled with the drift of storax and frankincense on the air; and the voices raised to Apollo. And we moved forward until we stood among the priest-kind, and the offering burning on the altar before the waiting God, strong and terrible with his courteous close-lipped smile. And then again the voices and the flutes fell silent, and again we moved forward, the chosen three of us who bore the sacred mantle. The priests had already taken away the remains of last year’s garment; and where it had lain in fallen folds about the feet of the God. I saw the new dark stains, wet splashed and fresh-blood smelling, above other and older stains that had sunk year by year into the grass. I had never seen those stains before, but today it seemed that I saw all things, was aware of all things … The High Priest took the new robe from its cross-bar and began to swathe it about the sacred figure. And I remember now the silence; the little wind stirring the kerm oak tops, and the yellow flowers of the laurel booming with bees. And we were piling the hyacinth flowers already wilting in the noon sun, over the bloodstains on the grass, where the ram had died, until the feet of Apollo were lost in a spreading stain, a whole lake of pulsing blue.
We made the Round Dance, the Sun Dance, maidens together with youths on the edge of becoming warriors, spinning with the sun; and I knew that for me it was the last time; and I longed for the dance never to break its circling over the grass. But it broke when the time came, and the hands of the boy on either side of me were gone from mine.
The procession re-formed to carry last year’s mantle, stained by the winter rains, tattered by the wind, back to the city. Soon the rags of it, stiff here and there with the blood of the sacrifice, would be bound about the King-tree of every olive garden, to bring a rich yield at the harvest.
The crowd pressed forward as we passed, crying to us, ‘Hyakinthos is risen!’ and we gave back the answer, ‘He is risen indeed!’ And the flutes took it up so that it became the chant of the return, flung to and fro between us like a shining golden ball …
And among all the faces of the crowd that beat upon me like a wave, I saw one, blue-eyed under a lion-coloured crest of hair.
Alkibiades, the Athenian. One saw him everywhere, in the gymnasium, about the city, among the men setting out on the hunting trail, coming up from bathing with his wet hair bright in the sun. I had even felt a little sorry for him, thinking what it would be to be cast out by Sparta and driven to help her enemies for the sake of revenge. But indeed both his exile and his revenge seemed to sit so lightly on him that after a while I had ceased to feel sorry.
Yet in that moment I saw him as though for the first time; as though a shadow had fallen from my eyes. I saw the blazing blue of his eyes, reaching out to pierce me, and the laughter at the corner of his mouth; and my fallen hyacinth flower caught into the shoulder knot of his cloak.
The King
It was early summer when the messenger I had been waiting for so long, brought in word that the Athenians had attacked the coast above Parasiae.
We were at supper in Mess at the time. Alkibiades was there, and he sprang up like a man hearing the trumpets for the onset; and shouted that his plan had worked and the truce was broken, pounding his fist on the table-boards until the beer cups jumped. That’s the worst of these Athenians; no control, all laughter and tears, and as impatient as women. He seemed to think that now, instantly, all his other plans must be put into operation, whereas, having learned in a hard school that such things must be taken at marching pace and not at the blind run, we knew that the time had not yet come to do more than deal with the raid itself. (And make sure, of course, that all the world understood that the truce had been broken.)
We dealt with it handsomely; but for the rest, we held our hands. And indeed the Higher Command were proved right, for long before we could have got an expeditionary force into Attica, news came that Athens had got together another five thousand men under their last remaining General of any ability — Demosthenes the name was. And after that of course we must hold back to see how Gylippos did in Sicily in the face of this new Athenian thrust. Nobody but a fool would get the flower of our fighting men pent up in Dekalia, and then have Demosthenes prevail — or even bring off the Athenian army safe back to Athens, after all. It seemed possible from the first that his real purpose was to evacuate the Athenian troops, if their situation grew hopeless. All this had to be taken into account, and watched.
Meanwhile we put in a hard winter of preparation, not that our men needed much extra training, they are always at the finest peak of fighting condition; but the Gods know that there are matters enough to be dealt with before so great a step as the invasion of Attica must be.
Alkibiades never began to understand all this. They are all alike, those Athenians; just as I say, always in a hurry and all born above themselves. Look at the way they rushed into the Syracuse business in the first place. And Alkibiades was Athenian, sure enough! He came to me the year before, to join the raid on Argos. He might have understood his true position in Sparta after the answer he got then; but his kind never learn.
As soon as the Council decided that the time was indeed ripe, and the orders were issued for Dekalia, the fellow came demanding speech with me. I was busy with the muster rolls. He had became maddening as a hornet through the past year, though we remained outwardly on good terms; and I all but sent back word that I had too much on my hands to see him. But suddenly I was minded to make his position clear to him once and for all. So I bade the guards let him through.
He came swashbuckling in past their parted spears, trailing his pride behind him like one of those golden Persian pheasants trailing its tail. And he came and stood over me in my own quarters, with the whiteness of a late sleet squall melting on the shoulders of his cloak. And my old hound bitch went and thrust her muzzle into his hand.
I whistled her back, and she wagged her tail to show that she heard, but did not come.
He laughed and said, ‘Women! They’re all faithless or too damned faithful for comfort! I’ll come straight to the point. I learn that we are marching for Attica at the full of next moon. Many of the captains have already received their orders. I have received none as yet.’
I said, ‘The orders have g
one to all who are concerned in the matter.’
It was pleasant to watch his eyes go blank for a moment. Then he said in a tone of polite enquiry, ‘And I am not included in that company?’
I said, ‘Why should you be included in it? You are not Spartan, skilfully though you have played the part this year and more.’
He said, ‘The whole Dekalia plan was mine in the first instance.’
‘It was. And we are acting on it. What more would you have?’
He said, ‘My rights! To go with the force to Dekalia.’
Left to myself, I think I’d have taken him. It would have been amusing to see whether he would really fight against his own people when it came to it, eye to eye and hand to hand. But the Council of Ephors had decreed otherwise. So I said, ‘You mistake your position in Sparta, my friend.’
We were both standing by that time, facing each other across the table with the muster rolls. He said, ‘I have sometimes wondered what it is, myself. Will you make it clear to me, Agis the King?’
I said, ‘I will make it clear past all mistaking. We have treated you with the courtesy due to a guest among us. You are no more that that; and there are those, particularly among the Council, who feel that you are something less. You came to us for sanctuary, and to bring us certain information and advice for the ruin of your own state. We are acting on the information, we are following the advice, which seems to us good. But your usefulness is over; you have nothing more to offer us that is of any value.’
He broke in, leaning forward across the table, so close that I could see the sweat-beads starting among the hair-roots on his forehead: ‘Nothing more of value? Which among you knows Attica as I do? Who else can tell you what the Athenians are thinking? What move they will make to counter a move of yours? Leave me here in Sparta, and you leave your best weapon behind you!’