Alcibiades had rendered himself fugitive, thus, from Spartan, Athenian, Persian, and Thracian.
Our party pressed on. A peculiar bond had evolved between myself and Endius, as on occasion when one journeys in company great distances by horse. Each rode daylong at the other's shoulder, neither speaking nor glancing in his companion's direction yet each attuned to the other's mood and preoccupation. In camp Endius kept to his mates of Lacedaemon, then with morning's trail fell in again upon my flank. “Will you indeed murder him, Polemidas?” he inquired one nooning, his first words all day.
“Will you?”
I give thanks to God such is not my charge.”
Of that troop he and I alone seemed alive to the enormity in whose service we trekked. On another day he edged his mount alongside mine. “If you bolt ahead, or attempt to deal him warning, I shall kill you.”
I inquired if he made this threat in his own name or that of Lacedaemon. To my wonder he began to weep. “By the gods, what a catastrophe!” And he spurred, in tears, away to the van.
There is in Phrygia in the district of Melissa, where the Ephesus-Metropolis road bears east toward the central provinces, a place called Elaphobounos, Deer Hill, blessed by nature and the ordering hand of man. The prospect from the village, Antara, excellently contoured and cultivated, is among the most delightful in the world. Encamped at this site on an evening, my course came clear to me.
I could not perform this slaughter. I would make off this night, informing none, including Telamon, that he escape implication.
That which I could do for my children, I would, to carrying them with me on the tramp. I had set my resolve and even commenced transferring my goods from the pack stock to my own mount, when a great commotion arose across the valley.
A compound was afire. Men of the estate rushed upon our site in terror. We saw the boy, youngest of the five Odrysian brothers, dismounting breathless. Their party had doubled back from the west, the tale burst from him, having picked up the prey's trail, and skirted our camp in the night to beat us to him. “Etoskit Alkibiad!” the youth cried, gesturing toward the flames. “Alcibiades is taken!”
All sprang to their horses' backs. The party raced at a gallop, at terrific hazard to the animals and ourselves as the ground had been staked to receive vines and was pocked with trenches and voids.
One saw a house. A farm cottage. The brothers had apparently encircled it in darkness and piled faggots against its walls. The place blazed like a tinderbox. No doubt the flames had driven the quarry forth from his bed to such exposed position as permitted the hunters to shoot him down without hazard to themselves. My heels beat the ribs of my mount. The party raced onto the site. You could not see Alcibiades (he was obscured by the wall of the forecourt) but only the brothers. Two were horseback, at the gate, pouring bowfire point-blank from their elevated vantage. The others, and their attendants, occupied positions atop and behind the wall; these slung javelins and darts. The brothers, even at this remove, stood so flush upon the conflagration that their garments and hair caught and smoked.
I was first upon the court. The heat was monumental. My mount balked and pinwheeled; I sprang to earth.
Now I saw Alcibiades. He was naked, save shield and runt xiphos sword. His back was charred like meat. Shafts and missile bolts made a stubble field of his shield. The woman Timandra sprawled flat at his heels, a carpet or some heavy garment over her, cloaking her from the flames.
As our party roared upon the site, the brothers did not break off but intensified their attack, ejaculating in their savage tongue that the prize was theirs and they would slaughter any who sought to rob them of it. The Spartans and Persians overran them at once.
Endius, Telamon, and I rushed to the gate. The holocaust howled, sucking the breath from our throats. The Spartan dashed in first, snatching up the woman and bearing her from the court.
She clutched at her lover's limbs, crying something we could not hear. Telamon and I, elevating cloaks to our faces, ploughed in next.
Alcibiades turned toward our sound, as if to attack, then dropped the way a dead man does, not breaking his fall with the strength of his arms, but pitching face-foremost. His shield crashed first and then he, forearm yet within its sheath, plunged upon it. His skull struck like a stone. I have never seen a man shot through with so many bolts.
We hauled him from the inferno. I propped him upright on the far side of the wall. I had no doubt he was dead. My intent, deranged no doubt, was that these cowards not behold their prey stretched forth in the dust.
He was alive and sought to rise.
He cried Timandra's name, in such anguish as I have never heard.
She responded in equal affliction, from Endius' arms bearing her clear. Alcibiades relented, reckoning her safe. His hand clutched me by the hair.
“Who is it?” he shouted.
He was blind. The flames had taken half his face. I called my name. He could not hear. I cried louder, at his ear. I was riven with such distress as words may never compass. Behind, the Thracians put up a clamor ungodly, claiming their prize. The cottage continued collapsing by sections. Again I shouted into his ear.
This time he heard. His fist held me like a griffin's claw. “Who else?”
I told him Endius and the Persians.
A terrible groan escaped his breast. It was as if this was what he had expected and, expectation fulfilled, he recognized his fate. His grip clenched me fast.
“The woman…she must not be left undefended in this country.”
I swore I would protect her.
His great shield, the same he had borne down thrice nine years since our first blooding beneath those cliffs called the Boilers, rested yet across his chest and shoulders. I had set it thus to cover his nakedness. He shifted now, straining against its weight. With what strength remained he declined the bronze, exposing the flesh of his neck and throat.
“Now, my friend,” he said. “Take what you came for.”
Polemides here elevated his glance and met my eyes. For a moment I thought he could not continue, nor was I at all certain I wished him to.
Lysander had said of Alcibiades that in the end Necessity would bring him low. Perhaps she did, but it was my hand which drove the fatal blade. Nor did I slay a general or statesman, as history will memorialize him, but a man, hated by many and loved by more, myself not last among them. Set aside his feats and felonies. In this I honor him: that he drove the vessel of his soul to where sea and sky conjoin and contended there, without fear, as few before, save perhaps only your master, his first instructor.
Who will sail so far again?
And I, who took upon himself such freight of self-condemnation for my acts of the Plague and after, discovered myself experiencing on Deer Mountain, to my wonder, no such grief or remorse. I did not act so much as enact. Do you reckon the distinction, my friend? I was Alcibiades' own arm, as I had been since that night of our youth upon the storm-bound strand, striking that blow which he himself called down. Who is guilty? I and he, and Athens and all Greece, who have fashioned our ruin with our own hands.
Polemides finished. It was enough. No more need be narrated.
Later, within his sea chest, I discovered this correspondence in Alcibiades' hand. It bore no salutation and was salted with misspellings, indicative of a preliminary draft-to whom one may only guess. By its date, the tenth of Hecatombaion, it may be the last he ever wrote.
…my end, though it come at the hands of strangers, will have been purposed and paid for by my own countrymen. I am to them that which they esteem most and may endure least: their own likeness writ large. My virtues-ambition, audacity, emulation of heaven rather than prostration before it-are but their own, amplified.