Yet at the time I scarcely felt anything. I stacked his body with all those others, and crawled out of the gallery, and vomited up the bean bread that had been my evening meal, and settled down to get what rest I could in the little time remaining before another day.
And as the days passed, and passed, and passed, and the towns-folk who had used to come to stare at us ceased to come because the smell from the quarry mouth had grown too foul, the chief thing I felt about him was envy. It would be easier to be dead than living; at least one could stay lying down.
Only when at last they let the survivors of us out to slavery above ground, and we crept out like tattered ghosts from the half land of Hades, into a world where colours were too bright and voices too loud, and spaces too wide, and I saw the Adonis flowers, the little blood-red anemones of the spring fluttering among the rocks at the quarry entrance, I knew that I was leaving Astur behind me, deserted; never to see the spring again, or fondle the warm soft hollows behind a hound’s ears; never to go home. Then I felt all that I had not felt before, and paid for the months of feeling nothing …
Oh well, I had the pigs. Only I missed my friends. The society had been better in the stone quarries.
There were men in Sicily — some from the garrison at Catana, some Sicilian, who helped quite a number of us away. One heard whispers; but I didn’t pay much heed. And then, more than a year after I came up from the quarries, one day it was my turn. I got a message — no matter how — concerning a faulty bolt on the door of the shed where I was caged at night, and a fishing-boat that would be at a certain place at a certain time; and with the message, gold enough for passage money and a cloak to hide my lash-scarred back.
And so, three years after the army had left for Syracuse, I came ashore from a trading vessel at Piraeus; and stood on the jetty and looked up and saw the blink of light, four miles away, that was the sun striking on the blade of Athene’s upraised spear.
That was about the only thing in Athens that was as I remembered it. For the rest, I walked up between the Long Walls into a city of old men and boys and the odd cripple, and silent close-veiled women doing their own shopping — and very poor shopping at that, for the stalls in the market seemed to have scarcely anything to sell — because they had neither menfolk nor slaves to do it for them. Every face I saw was gaunt and pinched; clearly the city was on the edge of famine. It seemed to me a strange city, even before I reached our house and found that my mother was dead and the place sold up.
I remember standing in the street and wondering what I should do now. My friends had mostly died in Sicily, and I could not bear the thought of going to their houses and coming face to face with families who would be looking, not for me, but for sons who would not be coming back. Finally I decided to go up to Kymon’s perfume shop. It had always been a favourite meeting-place, and it would be a likely spot, always supposing that it was still there, to find out how things were in the city, and maybe get news of any friends I still had. All Athens seemed so strange and lacking that I half expected it to have crumbled away like so much else. But it was still there, and looking much as it had always looked, from the outside, save that the blue pillars had chipped and faded and were badly in need of a coat of paint. But inside, it was empty. The first time that ever I had seen Kymon’s shop empty of customers.
The old man must have been out, and it was the son Timotheus who got up when I came through the door. He was about my own age, but with a game leg that had kept him clear of the call-up. Except for some guards down at Piraeus, his was almost the first face of my own generation that I had seen since I landed that morning. He stood with one hand on the selling-table, and looked at me — and suddenly I realised what I must look like, and waited for him to order me out into the street, that being the right place for beggars. But instead, after a moment, he said, ‘From Syracuse?’
‘How did you know?’ I said.
‘There have been quite a few of you, these past few months,’ he said, ‘and more than one has found his way here. I’ve begun to know the look.’
‘But you don’t know which one I am,’ I said; and then, as he hesitated, ‘I’m Arkadius, lieutenant of marines. I used to buy iris perfume here when I could afford it.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘it is unpardonable of me to forget an old customer,’ and limped round to take my hand, and then drew me in to a cushioned bench. I sat down on it wearily, my legs feeling suddenly weak.
‘I’ve changed,’ I muttered. ‘Nobody would know me in Athens now.’
‘Some of the change will wash off,’ he said. ‘Vasso will bring you hot water.’ And he smiled, ‘Oh we’re very grand, we still have a household slave, like the very rich folk. She’s too old to run away to the Spartans, and too old to sell — even if we could find a purchaser who could feed her better than we can.’
He fed me, though after I had washed, and apologised that he could not give me fresh garments, for he had given his spare tunic to one of my kind a few days before. He said the name, but it was no one I knew.
And then I realised that I was probably eating his supper. The stone quarries and the pigs had made me forget my manners. I did not beg his pardon, because I knew that would only make him uncomfortable, but I remembered to thank him; which I had not done before, and said that I must be going.
‘Where!’ he said.
‘I don’t quite know. I went home when I arrived this morning, but my mother is dead and our house sold up. I did not like to go to the homes of any of my friends.’
There was a rather painful silence. And then Timotheus said that I must stay there for the night, anyway. The shop could see to itself for the evening, there would be no customers anyway, nobody could afford to buy perfumes these days. So I stayed — and asked if anything had been heard of one or two of my friends who had left the stone quarries alive, or escaped capture; but he only shook his head.
‘Well, it seems the sooner I get back to the ships the better,’ I said. ‘I only saw about a squadron as we came in, is that all we have now?’
‘Just enough ships and just enough men to defend the harbour and the Long Walls,’ he said. ‘Every ship and man that can be spared is at Samos, keeping the seaways clear.’
‘Then I’d better make for Samos.’ It all seemed oddly dream-like; but my heart snatched at the hope that in Samos I should see a few faces that I knew.
And then I remembered something that had alerted me at the time and then passed out of my head. ‘Timotheus, on my way here, I thought I heard Alkibiades’ name spoken two or three times in the streets as though there was some special news of him, or …’ I did not know how to finish the sentence.
He was silent for a moment, then he said, ‘I did not quite know how to tell you that part. It cannot be a name that sounds very happily in your ears. Alkibiades is coming back. He sent word to the senior officers at Samos, offering to come back and bring the help of Persia with him, on the one condition that the Democratic government is overthrown. The Admiral Paesander and some other officers are over here now; they spoke to the Assembly yesterday and we have voted for his return, at the price he demands.’ And then he added pleadingly, ‘You can’t altogether blame him. The Democrats — the leaders anyway — condemned him to death on a trumped-up charge — they drove him into the arms of Sparta.’
‘That’s the talk of a man who stayed at home. Oh, I know it must have been bad in Athens all this while. But I was in the stone quarries; I saw my friends die there. I can blame him a good deal.’
I saw him wince, and realised that that was an ugly taunt to throw at a lame man who had probably eaten his heart out to march with the rest of us. But just then I didn’t care.
‘To overthrow the government! Great Gods, man! Athens has been a democracy for a hundred years!’
‘The Government has mishandled the war,’ he said. ‘Most of the men’s clubs are Oligarch in secret already. They are sick of the muddled rule of the many. They think that at least in war-t
ime the government is better in the hands of a few skilled men who know their jobs. I don’t think it’ll be skilled men we’ll get, only rich and powerful ones.’
‘And you still cast your votes for his return.’
‘We need him, Arkadius, he’s our only hope.’
He had been looking at his hands on the table before him while he spoke. But suddenly he looked up, full at me. And I saw his eyes.
I said, ‘Need him, yes, it seems so; but want him is another word for it! Great Gods! Timotheus — you too! What’s the matter with us all?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I once heard an old man say that men had created Gods in their own image. Maybe we of Athens created Alkibiades in ours. He’s part of us, woven into our soul, we may hate him, but without him we are barren and lost.’
*
So I went down to Piraeus again next day to look for means of getting to Samos; and there I had a stroke of luck. The Paralos, which had brought Paesander to Athens was due to sail, taking him and the other envoys to Miletus for Sardis, and one of the marines had gone sick. It was not Samos, but at least it was out of Athens, and there would probably be a chance of leaving her and getting across to Samos before she sailed on the return trip with Alkibiades abroad.
We made Miletus, and lay for fifteen days, I, biding my time, while the envoys went up to Sardis. At the end of that time they returned, in foul tempers, with Paesander the foulest of them all. Tissaphernes, it seemed, had demanded impossible terms. It was quite clear that Alkibiades had tried to trick them. The Paralos was ordered to Samos instead of returning to Athens at all. At the time, not knowing that Samos was riddled with Oligarchic plots, I wondered why.
My first sight of Samos I shall never forget. Even in late autumn, the city seemed to be basking like a great pale-coloured cat between wind-ruffled blue sea and tawny hills. And as we rounded the headland with its high rock-perched citadel, and came in under shelter of the mole, the harbour and waterside was all that Piraesus had used to be; and I thought — Oh Gods, how I thought — of the day the fleet sailed for Syracuse … We had passed one squadron on patrol outside the harbour mouth, exchanging signals with the leading Trirarch; but inside, the harbour was rich and running over with shipping, the Samian fleet and the whole new Navy of Athens, in peak condition like chariot horses ready for their race. And all along the foreshore, from the great Temple of Hera away to the westward, out to the citadel on its spur, was the bustle of a great seaport. Troops and seamen and citizens coming and going among docks and rope-walks and warehouses; ships drawn up on the strand for careening or refit.
Paesander and his fellow envoys landed first, and disappeared, presumably to their own quarters in the town, or to some council or other to make report of Alkibiades’ perfidy. And we landed next, and were marched off to the Athenian camp, under the plane trees between the city walls and the Temple of Hera.
At Rhegium we had camped in much the same way between city walls and temple; but then we had been there on sufferance, shut out from the city. Here it seemed that the city was not only open to us, but that we were its masters.
Samos in those months was a place to go to the head like wine. And here, more even than in Athens, one heard the name of Alkibiades at every turn. The embassy’s news was out within the hour, so of course that wasn’t surprising. What was surprising was that there was a feeling abroad that despite what had happened, still somehow, at some time, he was coming. It was tangible, something that breathed out from the men who felt it. It was all too heady for me, fresh from my Sicilian pigs.
But in Samos I found, here and there, a man I knew from the old days before the world fell to pieces. Notably some days after Paesander had gone on by another ship to Athens, I came upon Ariston, a fellow lieutenant of marines some years older than myself, who I had served under before I gained my own lieutenancy. We came face to face halfway up a street as pretty and indigestible with gilding and coloured marble as the sweets children buy at festival time. And like Timotheus, he did not know me. When I told him who I was, he said, ‘But the Arkadian was three years younger than me.’
‘We aged rather quickly in the stone quarries,’ I said.
After that, he swept me into one of the wine-shops that are everywhere in Samos city, and would have poured enough wine into me to put a mule driver under the bench, as though he hoped in that way to wash the quarry-dust and the stink of dead men out of my throat. But I had little taste for wine at that time. Afterwards we wandered out into the barley terraces and olive gardens beyond the citadel headland, and sat in the sun, where the next terrace kept the wind from our backs; both glad to have found each other, for we had been good enough friends in the old days; and both wanting to be quiet.
For a while, we talked of small unimportant things, not much of the Sicilian campaign. Ariston was never one to trespass in another’s private places; and I was grateful to him for that. But presently he asked my ship, and when I told him the Paralos, he spoke of Alkibiades and the failure of Paesander’s mission.
I said, ‘Everyone speaks of Alkibiades; his name blows on the wind, here in Samos.’
‘It’s a very potent name,’ Ariston said.
‘The Gods know it. But they — the people, the troops, are speaking as though he was still coming. I’ve heard them, Ariston.’
He was silent a short while, staring out towards Ionia, which in the evening light seemed very near across the straits. Then he said, ‘Arkadius, when I first realised that it was you, back there in the street of the Golden Grasshopper, the obvious thing seemed to be to celebrate and — well, celebrate, with Samian wine. But then I began to think. I want to talk to you, and that’s why I brought you out here where there are no ears to listen. You’re right, the people do speak of Alkibiades as though he might still be coming. That’s the Oligarchs’ doing. They are putting it about that if the Democrats here in Samos are swept away, and Alkibiades presented with the accomplished fact, he may yet come back. And even without Persian help, Alkibiades could win the war for us, as he has been winning it for Sparta these three to four years past.’
‘I should think that might even be true,’ I said.
‘Very likely. But the Oligarchs aren’t interested in whether it’s true or not. They’re interested in overthrowing the democracy and putting themselves in power.’
‘I’m no Oligarch,’ I said, ‘but I suppose that’s natural enough in a way. Samos has always been an oligarchy until a few years ago, and you can’t blame men for wanting to get back what they’ve lost.’
‘Only these are not the same men who lost it,’ Ariston said.
I stared at him. ‘Not the same men?’
‘Oh no, the men behind the present Oligarch clubs are not the old landowners. They’re the men who were in the forefront of the democratic revolt, three years ago, and then abandoned it as lightly as they’ll abandon Alkibiades once he has served his purpose. They’re simply out for what they can get; and the Gods help Samos, and Athens, if they get it.’
I felt stupid. I had grown unused to using my brain. ‘Paesander?’ I said, after a moment.
‘Paesander is the perfect political opportunist. He’ll take what offers, and use it in whatever way seems to promise the best advantages to himself. It’s almost a game of skill with him.’
‘What will happen?’ I asked, after a little.
‘It’s a situation in which anything might happen.’
‘But surely nothing much can, while the Athenian fleet’s here. They’re still Democrats, aren’t they? All those rowers out of the slums of Athens, never forgetting or letting anyone else forget that they’re free citizens with the vote.’
‘About three-quarters of the fleet are Democrats, as always,’ Ariston nodded. And then he said abruptly, ‘Where have you been all day?’
‘Asleep, most of it. I was out on night manoeuvres with the scout squadrons.’
‘So you won’t have heard that except for the Paralos, the Vixen and my own H
esperus, the fleet is ordered out on another pointless sortie against Chios tomorrow at dawn?’
In the silence that followed, I remember the sea sound of the wind in the olive trees, and the gulls calling.
Then Ariston said, ‘Keep your wits about you, and don’t go too far from the town when you’re off duty.’
On the way back, he said, looking at my plain hoplite’s uniform that had been issued to me out of the war chest at Piraeus, ‘My second has just got promotion. If I have a word with your Trirarch and with my own, would you like to take his place? You’ll get a lieutenancy of your own again soon, but meanwhile?’
‘I’d like that,’ I said, and we gripped hands on it.
*
Two days later, when my transfer was through, Ariston sent me down to the arsenal to deal with a hitch in the supply of three barrels of javelin heads. Getting javelin heads out of a master of armament is always like drawing teeth; as a breed they seem unable to grasp the fact that a throw-spear used at sea is in the nature of things generally a throw-spear lost.
In the arsenal the air was warm and heavy after the gusting-up of the thin north-easter outside; thick with the smell of sailcloth and pitched rope. And down the shadowy sides of the long building loomed the unshipped figureheads and stacked oars, the arms’ racks and the great bronze rams with their fangs wrapped in old sailcloth for safety. From the waterfront below, I could hear men at work on the slipways, and the calling of the gulls and the lapping and slapping water. And then from somewhere behind in the town, a distant murmur that swelled into a crackle of angry shouting.
The master of armament (I had managed to get past the clerks and arrive at the great man himself) broke off in what he was saying about javelin heads not growing on bushes and the barrels having to be signed for in triplicate anyway, and we listened, meeting each other’s startled and questioning gaze.