There, on the border of the sacred ground, with the lights of dim-seen halls and colonnades below us against the pale sheen of the sea, our task was over, until the time came to escort the procession back to Athens.
There, too, we parted from Alkibiades. He dismounted and gave his horse to his groom, laid by his sword and helmet, and with the help of the staff lads, stripped off armour and linen tunic, until he stood naked and burnished in the light of the torches. He could afford to stand so, before troops and worshippers. His body had thickened a little with the years, but it was as hard as a hound’s, and there was no more fat on him than on a boy at his first Games, and he stood light and proud on the balls of his feet. He took from the Priests who brought it to him, the white robe of an initiate, and put on the myrtle wreath. They brought him a torch, and kindled it, and tied the yellow ribbon on his wrist and ankle; and he stepped in among the rest, and moved off with them, laying aside the General-in-Chief, to become just one of the white-robed figures singing under their torches, as they moved forward into the Sacred Precinct. In a few moments I could not even be sure which figure was his, any more.
We made camp along the stone pines outside the enclosure, posted scouts in case, even now, the Spartans tried anything, and got the cooking fires going while the cavalrymen watered the horses.
And there we kicked our heels through that night and the next day, and another night, while below in the Precinct of Demeter and Kore, Alkibiades and his fellows would be fasting and making the purificatory sacrifices. Many of us were initiates ourselves, and knew when they would be eating the sacred bread and drinking the hallowed wine; we knew, even if we had not heard the Herald’s trumpet, when it was time to enter the Hall of the Mysteries. But beyond the doorway, and once the torches are quenched, there seems no time; and so we did not know when the singing would begin; nor when the supreme moment, the Showing, would come; for to some of us it had seemed that we were in the dark for many nights and days, and journeying all the time; while for others, it had seemed no more than a breath of asphodel and the time it takes to move from one room into another. But it is forbidden to speak of these things.
We talked a little round the watch fires; once somebody struck up a song, and a few voices joined in, but it fell silent after the first verse. A few of us lay down to sleep, but not many; there was something in all that great hollow of the hills on that night of the year that seemed to hold off sleep.
In the dark of the night, far on towards dawn we heard the temple trumpets again, and far off and thin as the song of grasshoppers, the shrilling of the flutes. And below us suddenly the shore-line was alive with flecks and feathers of light, as the initiates took their torches down to the water and plunged in for the swim that ended the ritual. I remembered how, to me on my own night, the first touch of the torchlit water had been a cold white fire on my body not yet quite returned from the strange places of death and rebirth; and then had changed into the cool strong slap and swing of the sea, into bathing at night with torches, nothing more. And a great lightness and relief had come over me to find that the familiar world which I seemed to have lost for a while was still there, and I had splashed water that shone like flakes of fire over the girl dog-paddling beside me, and realised suddenly as we turned for land (keeping my torch alight had become only a game of pride and skill), that I had never been so hungry in all my life before. I wondered how many of the boys swimming back to land were feeling like that now. I wondered what Alkibiades was feeling, now that it was all over. But save perhaps for Socrates, I doubt if anybody has ever quite known what Alkibiades is feeling.
I had heard that they had come face to face, those two, in the Street of the Tripods, only a few days after our return, and looked at each other once, and passed by without speaking; and had wondered at the time, what the cost was to both of them.
‘Well, that’s over,’ said a voice, like an echo of my own thoughts, and Agathos, one of the Cavalry Pylarchs, loomed out of the darkness into the glow of the watch fire. ‘I wonder what the General-in-Chief is feeling.’
‘I know one thing I’d be feeling, in his place,’ I said, ‘and that’s triumph. He must know that this is his full acquittal by the Lords of the Mysteries. Also he’ll have enjoyed showing Gods and men, not only that the Lords of the Mysteries have acquitted him, but that he has forgiven them.’
‘And of course he’ll have given a superb performance, the Lord of Athens laying down his olive crown for a pilgrim’s wreath.’
‘Our greatest stage tragedian couldn’t touch it.’
We sat silent for a few moments, and then Agathos said at half breath, ‘If it came to making Alkibiades Tyrant of Athens —’
I looked round at him quickly. ‘Tyrant!’
‘It’s being talked of almost openly in the streets. People are sick of the hot air talked in the Assembly, the plots and counterplots; Oligarch and Democrat pulling Athens to pieces between them. After this, the first time the Mysteries have known their old glory in eight years, they’ll be in love with the idea.’
I had heard something, but had taken care not to listen. ‘Then we can only hope that Alkibiades won’t be.’
‘You don’t fancy our new General-in-Chief as supreme Master of the State?’
‘Democracy may not always be much of a way of government,’ I said, ‘but it’s the way for Athens no matter what she thinks she wants.’
‘Arkadius knows what is good for Athens, better than she does herself,’ he said, idly mocking.
‘Oh, go to Hades!’ I said, and rolled myself in my cloak and turned my back on him and tried again to sleep. There was only a short while left before daylight. But sleep was further than ever from me know. I have loved Athens, and the thought of her putting herself once more under the rule of a Tyrant made my belly twist with anger; but the thought of Alkibiades, who we had followed through the winter storms and the blue dolphin days from Samos to the Black Sea and back, with whom we had shared our wine by a hundred watch fires, behind whom we had swept into sea fight after sea fight, and stormed and taken towns, becoming no more than Tyrant of Athens made me want to lay my head in my arms and weep as a boy weeps — or a man for lost youth and lost love.
In the morning the worshippers came out from the Precinct, and we guarded them back to Athens along the Sacred Way, Alkibiades once more in his armour, riding the big Thessalian stallion at the head of his troops.
*
When we got back, the city was full of news. The Spartans had launched a new fleet of thirty triremes from Gythion, and the new Spartan Admiral, sent to replace Mindarus, had taken them over to Ephesus, which could only mean the beginning of new troubles in Ionia and the Islands. Tissaphernes had been removed from his Satrapy, and the new Satrap of Lydia was Prince Cyrus, a boy not yet out of his teens, a tremendous fire-eater and a great admirer of the Spartans. I began to smell open water again and feel the shock of the galley’s ram driving home.
I don’t suppose I was the only one in the fleet to do that or to feel in an odd way, glad. Athens looked as it had always done, but it was beginning to have a different smell; a sick smell. Too many crooked undercurrents, too many things happening in the dark. I was beginning to want to go back to war and the ways of fighting men, which I understand.
The Seaman
I was sitting in my usual corner of the Amber Dolphin with a couple of mates, drinking Chian wine and sweating it out again as fast as I put it in, in the sweltering heat that was beating up for the first of the autumn thunderstorms, and I looks up and sees Alkibiades standing in the street entrance. He jerks his head at me to come outside, and I downs what’s left in my cup and goes — most of the wine-shop turning round to gape at him standing there.
‘What is it, then?’ I says.
And he says, pleasant and conversational, ‘Come and get a bit of air, pilot.’
‘I’d sooner have another drink; come in and have one, too, and then we’ll find a couple of girls.’
‘I
don’t want a drink and I don’t want a girl; and no more do you. Come and stretch your legs, pilot.’
I says, ‘There’s going to be the father and mother of storms, before dark.’
And he grins. ‘Afraid of getting wet, pilot?’
And his face reminds me of the way it used to look during those last days in Sparta. So out I goes.
We walked straight through the city, in the still yellowish storm light, where everyone had come out to doors and windows and flat roofs to get what little air there was, until we came to the skirts of Lykabettus and began to climb. Cloud stooped low over our heads, and halfway up the thunder began to growl as though the storm were waking and stretching itself among the steep wooded gorges. There was a whip-crack of white lightning, and the rain began.
Like a lot of seamen, I don’t care for getting wet on dry land, not when there isn’t any need. It would be pleasant now in the courtyard of the Amber Dolphin, cooling down, while the rain hissed and pattered among the vine leaves. But Alkibiades climbed steadily on, and after one hopeful glance at his face in the next flare of lightning, so did I — grumbling a good deal under my breath, I’ll admit. Alkibiades climbed in silence, with his head back and his eyes wide to the lightning; it was enough to give a man the creeps!
We climbs right into the storm, up into the high saddle of Lykabettos, with the clouds all about us, blue-black and copper, and the lightning leaping from one to another and the thunder crashing about our shoulders, and Athens far below us hidden in the drifting storm-murk. We’re both long since drenched to the skin, and speaking personal, I’m chilled to the bone, which is another thing I don’t hold with on land. I shouts between crack and crack of the thunder, ‘Well, now that we’ve got here, can we go down again?’
For answer he sits himself down on a rock on the very edge of the level patch, where the hill drops away into nothingness. I goes to the edge and makes water into the rolling storm cloud below us.
It was the cold on top of all that wine, and we’d come up at too fierce a pace to allow of such things by the way.
‘I’m not certain that’s not blasphemy,’ Alkibiades says.
‘I’ll sacrifice to Zeus when I get down again, to be on the safe side.’
There’s another crash of thunder, and when it’s rumbled away, Alkibiades says, ‘It’s time we put to sea again, pilot.’
I stands over him, wrapping myself up in my arms and shivering. ‘Anything would be better than standing around on a hill-top in this deluge. Any new reason? Or just the same ones you had last time we talked of it?’
‘Several new reasons. Lysander is in Ephesus, for one — Did you know he was the new Spartan Admiral? — building ships as fast as the shipwrights can lay down the keels.’
‘I’ve heard of that one. You’d wonder what he was using for money.’
‘Persian darics, I should imagine. The word is that he — Lysander — has been up in Sardis, making friends with the new Satrap. All the world knows that young Cyrus is pro-Spartan to his finger-tips.’
Again the thunder crashed about us, and boomed and echoed itself away down the gorges. But the crown of the storm was past, and the rain was slackening.
When we could hear ourselves speak again. Alkibiades says, ‘I don’t like having the friendship between Athens and Persia that I’ve sweated to build up wrecked by a love affair between Lysander and the Persian Prince; and the sooner we go and do something about it the better.’
‘Agreed,’ I says. ‘Right then — give the orders, and the fleet’s ready for sea.’
He don’t answer at once, then he says through the softening rain, ‘I’ve had visitors after dark, more than once lately. They came to sound me out as to what I would do if the chance was handed to me to become Tyrant of Athens. The last one was as good as an offer — and that I think was genuine.’
‘Not the others?’
‘Not sure. I’ve had a feeling Cleontius or Kritias — maybe both of them; dirt breeds strange bedfellows — were behind at least one of the visits.’
‘The bastards!’ I says.
Alkibiades unfurls himself slowly and stands up and stretches. ‘It would be almost worth staying on and making a bid for it, just to see them squirm.’
‘But not quite?’ I says.
He shakes his head. ‘Not quite, pilot.’
‘And so you’ve dragged us both up here, and probably got us our deaths of cold, just to say that it’s time we got out of Athens. You couldn’t have done that somewhere out of the rain? In your own house, say?’
He said, looking out to where the storm-clouds were rolling away southward and bright rags of the sunset showing through, ‘I wanted the storm, pilot. A good storm clears the dark things out. It’s as good as hoarhound in the spring — very cathartic.’ He looked round at me; the storm light had gone, and just enough light came out of the west for me to see his face. He says, ‘And I wanted company. It had to be you or a dog, Antiochus, and I haven’t known the hunting dogs in my new kennels so long as I have known you … I find myself increasingly alone in Athens.’ And then he grins and says, ‘We’ll go back to my new house now, and get drunk.’
We went down the looping goat track, with the air cool after the rain, and full of the scent of thyme and wet grass, and the faint mist steaming up from the hot city, and the lamps pricking out. We were halfway down when he says, ‘How many sons have you, pilot?’
I was taken aback. ‘I don’t know; a few, I suppose, scattered round the seaport towns. None that I know of for sure.’
‘Sons are a mistake anyway,’ he says lightly. ‘I went to see mine today — thinking I’d better do my fatherly duty before leaving Athens. He’s almost ten. It’s odd, I had forgotten that he would be so old. His Uncle Callias has told how I misused his mother, of course.’
‘So I reckon he hates you. I wouldn’t worry. It’ll pass when he learns to think for himself.’
‘He didn’t seem to hate me. He was more curious. He had heard that there are pleasurable ways of hurting a woman beyond nature, and not unnaturally assumed that I had practised them on his mother. He wanted to know about them, and thought therefore that I’d be a good one to tell him. It was only when I did not oblige that he started screaming and tried to knife me. He’s extremely skilled, I gather, at crushing mice with a brick. His eyes were painted like something out of a boy’s pleasure house.’
And then I knew why Alkibiades had wanted the storm. I didn’t say anything. There didn’t seem anything to say. We walked on, down into the mist and the outlying houses.
The Citizen
I wouldn’t have gone especially to watch Alkibiades sail with a fleet of a hundred ships. The mood of Athens had changed, though it looked on the surface much as it had when we welcomed him home; I couldn’t put my finger on the change, but it was there; and whatever it was, I didn’t like it. But I had to be in Piraeus that day on business; a new consignment of rosemary oil and saffron perfume from Sardis, and I emerged from the warehouse just as a knot of rowers went past, on their way down to the jetty. Theron was in their midst, and called out to me to come and see them off. So I saw the fleet sail, after all.
It was a grey squally day, and the water out beyond the mole was white capped, running high enough almost to hide Aegina from where I stood. There was the usual crowd of friends and kinsfolk; but the city had not poured itself out to the dregs to see him away, as it had to see his return.
I said goodbye to Theron on the jetty before he went aboard the Halkyone, which was made fast alongside. He turned and flung up a hand to me in farewell, then disappeared below. The deck and outrigger hid the rowing benches from view, so I could not see him any more; but I waited on, all the same.
The water slapped against the jetty, and the air tasted wet and salt on my lips. I saw Alkibiades go past with his staff, muffled in his cloak and walking purposefully with his head down as a man walks in foul weather. He went down the jetty steps to the boat waiting to take him out to the fl
agship. And I remember he turned once, as the boat pulled away, and looked back. And for an instant I caught, as I had done that other time, the brilliant blue gaze, unquenched by the day and the chill at the heart of it. But his glance flicked across mine to someone standing at my shoulder.
I looked round quickly, and saw a short squat man of great physical strength, with the face of a satyr, the spread nose and thick-lipped mouth and bulging eyes. I had seen Socrates often enough to know him instantly, though never before, I think, at such close quarters. I saw the long look that passed between them as the gap of water widened; no smile, no signal of the hand, only that look. And then I felt an intruder and hurriedly glanced away, as from something that was not meant for other men to see.
I remembered the talk I had heard of those two, in my father’s shop eight years ago.
The boat was growing smaller, the distance narrowing between it and the flagship. I heard the trumpet sounding across the water as it came alongside. I saw the purple pennant run up at the stern — but it looked black in the distance and the sombre morning light.
Trumpets were sounding from ship to ship through the fleet, and the smoke of the offering went up from a hundred altars and the scent of frankincense and storax drifted ashore on the salt wind. On the stern deck of the Halkyone, I could see the Trirarch pouring the libation. They did not raise the Paean.
The Icarus was already under way; the row-boats were standing by as the ships along the jetties cast off, to warp them out into the channel. A flurry of spray from an oar flew into my face, and involuntarily I turned my head aside from it, and my eyes met the bulging eyes of Socrates. Never having been so close to him before, I had not known how kind they were, or how alight and alive and deeply concerned in all creation. There was a faint smile somewhere at the back of them, and I found myself answering it.