Nearly invisible helots brought wine and nuts.
I have no doubt belaboured this point, but if an Athenian matron had invited me to her house and met me in the garden with a chiton open down the sides, drinking wine neat and eating honeyed almonds, I would assume I was welcome to more than the nuts.
Gorgo did not seem that way. So I sat on a bench and repeated some of Sparthius’s jokes, and eventually she came to the point.
‘What have the kings told you? About the Great King?’ she asked.
I shrugged. ‘I’m not a Spartan, lady. I am not your ambassador.’
Gorgo wouldn’t be swayed. ‘You speak Persian.’ She raised an eyebrow — an impossibly attractive look, given the very slight unevenness of her eyes. Impossible to explain why, if you haven’t seen her. ‘Do you know that there is a Spartan king living in the Great King’s court?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Demaratus.’
She looked away — not as if evading me, but as if seeing events unfold. ‘He was deprived of his kingship — illegally,’ she said. ‘Bah. It had to be done. But he is not such an evil man. I wonder if you would carry a message to him from me.’
How in the name of all the gods had I got mixed up in this?
‘Of course!’ I said.
She gave me a wax tablet. It was blank. She smiled.
I didn’t want to know. I handed the tablet to Hector after summoning him.
We sat up for some time, and eventually she sat on her bench with her knees drawn up to her chest and listened as I spoke of Sicily. Somehow we got on to Athens.
‘How they hate us,’ she said.
I shrugged. ‘Athens and Sparta are similar enough that, like angry brothers, when they look at each other, they see only their own flaws.’
She grinned. ‘Did you make that up yourself?’
If Spartan men were boyish, Gorgo was very ‘girlish’. She was spontaneous and mercurial, and often hard to follow. But I smiled back. ‘In fact, just this once, I did.’
She nodded. ‘I like it. I should like to go to all the places you have been. Sicily. Athens. Perhaps Athens most of all.’
I laughed. ‘My friend Aristides — do you recall him?’
‘A fine man,’ she said. ‘My husband admires him.’
‘As do I,’ I answered. When he’s not an insufferable prig. ‘His wife longs to meet you.’
‘Really!’ she said. She giggled. But I think she was flattered. ‘You should ask her to meet me at Plataea. I go in the spring, to the temple of Hera. If Plataea is to be the saviour of Greece, I wish to know why.’ And she shrugged. ‘I have a son, but I should like another child.’ Her eyes met mine.
I didn’t get it. I still do not. Was that a proposition? I could not tell. But I began to think. .
‘You do not speak of Brasidas,’ she said.
It was the second time she’d brought him up.
I shrugged. ‘He’s my friend, but it does not seem to be in good taste to mention him.’
Gorgo nodded. She sat back. It was very dark, and the air itself was perfumed with summer.
My hands shook a little. I was preparing myself to kiss the Queen of Sparta.
‘I’m arranging to lift the ban of his exile,’ she said.
I sighed. ‘He will no doubt be delighted,’ I said. Somewhat annoyed.
‘He will no doubt throw my husband’s offer in his face like the stiff-necked bastard of a dog that he is,’ she said pleasantly. ‘But we owe you a great deal already.’
We were almost nose to nose. I could feel her breath on my face.
A hand came to rest on my shoulder.
‘Sir?’ Hector said. ‘Alexandros is very drunk.’
I got up and clasped her hand. In a flash, I had decided that. . that Hector’s arrival was from the gods.
She laughed. ‘You are a good man, Arimnestos.’
In the morning, we rode south. We were on the beach before darkness fell, and we ate lobster and fresh fish with the oarsmen, who had eaten and drunk their fill for a week and were, all taken together, penniless and hung over.
And we took another five days returning to Athens, because we had to land for food and water every night, and the wind was resolutely against us. I had a good load of Phoenician goods purchased by Sekla in the markets, and there were not many Athenian ships that called at Sparta. I hoped to be first into the Athenian agora with my goods.
Nor was I disappointed. Indeed, I never made it to the Athenian agora — a pair of middlemen, friends of Paramanos, bought my whole cargo, but my profit was enough to suggest that piracy was not the best way to make money at sea.
My Spartans were good passengers. They took turns at the oars when they saw that the rest of us did, and they were better than polite to Brasidas. He was the one who seemed rude — he was aloof with them in a way he never was with young Apollodorus or the others. And Sparthius continued to be a comic, while Busis was mostly silent. When he did open his mouth, it was to ask questions. He’d never been to sea before, and he wanted to know everything.
After we sold our cargo, I arranged that the Spartan heralds should be housed by Cimon, and I purchased a small, tubby merchantman. In our expeditions in the western Mediterranean and the Outer Sea, we’d learned how handy it was to have a store ship to carry water and food — even running to Sparta and back across the Gulf of Corinth had brought that lesson home, with wasted days crawling around the periphery. I gave the command to Megakles, and gave him Giorgios and Nicolas from the oarsmen and a couple of my Syracusan deck crewmen. We fitted the merchantman out with a cargo of Athenian luxury goods — mostly pottery — and a deep tier of water amphorae. I bought dried meat and dried fish and grain, and stored them in layers, mostly in pottery with waxed tops.
Moire and Harpagos came in with their ships, and I got them cargoes, although by now I was dealing in credit — Cimon’s credit. I was out of money.
I rode over the mountains to Brauron, and paid my daughter a final visit. She was tanned and hard muscled as only a young girl can be, and while she was happy to see me, she was anxious to go back to her friends.
I didn’t know enough about children then not to be hurt, but I let her go. I stayed the night with Peisander and on the way back I stayed with Jocasta and Aristides, who was ten days from starting his exile. He seemed quite light hearted. She did not.
Whenever I visited Aristides, there always came a moment when, by common consent, I would go off to the women’s area and sit in the late afternoon sun with Jocasta and help with her wool. It was when we talked — when she gave me her marching orders for her husband, usually.
‘The Queen of Sparta would like to meet you,’ I said.
Whatever she was going to say, it went right out of her head. She laughed. ‘That’s lovely!’ she said.
‘Queen Gorgo asked me to say that your husband is a fine man, whom her husband admires, and she’d be delighted to meet you at the temple of Hera at Plataea in the spring, after the feast of Demeter.’
She clapped her hands together. ‘I’m sure. . oh!’ she said. ‘I could see Aristides then, as well!’
I nodded. ‘I thought of that at sea. Come and stay with us — my daughter and me. Or with my sister Penelope and her husband Antigonus.’
‘Aristides has spoken of them. Is it really possible?’ she asked.
I grinned. ‘I’ll come and get you myself,’ I said.
She nodded. ‘I like having some hope of seeing him again. He’s very “stiff upper lip”. I’m not so cold.’ And then she leaned closer. ‘You know he’s coming to Susa with you,’ she said.
Piraeus, at dawn.
My ships had taken on stores at Zea and then been rowed around the night before to wait on the beach. My oarsmen were rowing heavily laden ships — they didn’t need the additional weight of a hull soaked all night in water.