A rainy night, the boys landed with thirty men, Antiochus lying offshore with four fast triremes. They towed off not one ship but two, naming them Panther and Lynx. These kits became holy terrors. They pitched their hulls black and painted cat's eyes on their prows. They ran the night missions that struck every other skipper with dread. It was these, lads not yet twenty-four, who severed the chain at Abydos, laying the harbor open to the raid that burned half the wharf district, assassinated a score of mayors and administrators, and kidnapped out of his mistress's bed Pharnabazus' secretary and all his notes. But their chief athlon, the exploit that brought the fleet its cavalry, was the carrying off of the three hundred women.
These were two slave parties, a hundred and fifty in each, whose movements the lads had detected and whom Alcibiades had ordered held under observation up and down the coast beneath Mount Coppias. The women were captives, Odrysian Thracians, digging irrigation works. He sent the brothers in at dusk with twelve ships. The lasses ran out to them, into the sea, shrieking with joy, while their Persian masters lobbed ironheads at the raiders, then scooted like hell up the Caicos Valley. The “Cat's Eyes” brought the maidens back to Sestos, thinking Alcibiades meant to sell them to the whoremasters. Instead the commander had them bathed and oiled, with orders to the fleet that they be treated as gentlewomen.
Here was the gift for the Thracian princes.
He sent the lads first, to inform the savage nobles that Alcibiades wished to meet with them and appointing time and place. He himself took the women in four galleys escorted by a dozen men-of-war, the girls themselves garlanded as brides, to efface all shame of captivity and render them legitimate consorts for the princes to bestow upon their favorites, to the wild strand of Salmydessos, where he presented them to Medocus, Bisanthes, and Seuthes, the great princes of the plains.
By the twin gods, those whores' sons knew how to say thanks.
They set up Antiochus and the lads with brides on the spot, brooking no protest, and brought down five hundred horses out of the hills, a gift for Alcibiades and the cavalry. Have you ever seen five hundred horses, Jason? It is a sight. We of the support party wished only to corral the beasts and make our exit before these savages changed their minds.
Except now comes the bolt. Alcibiades turns the princes down.
He will not accept the horses. Worse, he informs Seuthes, the prince has insulted him by offering these animals instead of what he knows his guest really wants. The hour is deep past midnight. A hundred bonfires blaze; our ships wait, shored on the strand with tribesmen cavorting all over, men and women drunk as coots, while an army a thousand times our party swells out of sight across the plain. More ominous yet, our host lord Seuthes is a mad buck, blind soused, as all habitually in that country; they don't trust decisions unless they make them drunk. And, as all Thracians, recipient of boons, he is honor bound to outdo them in generosity first; if he cannot come up with a better gift than he has received, what looms but a bloodbath? Alcibiades repeats that the prince has offered offense by his present and turns to us, the two score of his escort, commanding that we launch and begone.
Seuthes won't let us. He orders the horses brought forward and commences haranguing his guests, and his own tribesmen, on the magnificent qualities of these beasts, which all know the Athenians need desperately, possessing few cavalry of their own and at the mercy of Pharnabazus' Royal Persian Horse every time they advance inland out of sight of their ships. The prince has worked himself into a lather of incendiary dudgeon. What kind of a man, he demands of Alcibiades, what kind of commander turns down wealth like this, if not for his own use and glory, then for that of the gallant warriors entrusted to his charge?
Alcibiades weaves to his feet, as ass holed as his host, and proclaims that he would in fact be the wealthiest man in the East if the prince will give him what he wishes instead of the horses. And what is that? the buck demands.
“Your friendship.”
At one breath Alcibiades is sober, so cold and composed you realize he has not misplaced his wits for an instant, and the look on his face snaps-to every bandit round the blaze. If I take these horses now, he declares, I sail with a splendid gift but I myself remain poor. If on the other hand I leave the horses with you, their masters, and depart with your friendship-and now he crosses before Seuthes, who has gone as sober as he-then I count among my wealth not only these valiant mounts, for I may call upon them from my friend anytime I wish, but mighty warriors to fight from upon their backs. For my friend will not send me his horses and leave me to face my enemies empty-handed.
Now, Seuthes is no fool. He knows this man across from him has rigged it all from the instant he first saw the women. He recognizes the genius of it and recognizes that Alcibiades knew before and knows now that he would recognize it. He wants this genius, does Seuthes, and knows he's got a mentor now if he'll make him his friend, to counsel and instruct him in the acquisition of it. The kid embraces Alcibiades. Ten thousand tribesmen whoop.
Our party goes limp with relief.
And he did come with his horses, Prince Seuthes. Not five hundred but two thousand, when the fleet and army took Chalcedon and Byzantium, bottled up the straits, and drove the Spartans to their blackest ebb of the war. But I have gotten ahead of myself and overshot a tale, and a turning point, which must be recounted.
Passing down the straits, a month after the great victory at Cyzicus, the flag party was met by a dispatch cutter from Samos.
The night was moonlit and she signaled by flare; the vessels have to in midchannel. The state galley Paralus, the cutter reported, had this day arrived from Athens with news that a Spartan legation had approached the Assembly, seeking peace. A great cheer erupted from the men, clamoring to learn the terms proposed, which were an armistice in place, each side to withdraw from the other's territories, repatriating all prisoners. Another cheer, and a cry from the crews that they would soon go home.
“The Spartans are at Athens now?” Alcibiades called across to the cutter.
“Aye, sir.”
“Who leads the embassy?”
“Endius, sir.”
Fresh cheers arose.
“The Lacedaemonians have singled you out for honor, Alcibiades. Why else send Endius, your friend?” This from Antiochus, Alcibiades' helmsman and among the exiles who had shared his seasons at Sparta. “It shows they see you, even technically an exile, as foremost among the Athenians.”
Thrasybulus' Endeavor had come up to leeward and now hove-to within earshot. Her steersman called across. Did this indeed mean we could go home? Alcibiades made no answer, only held motionless in the moonshadow of the sternpeak.
“Here is no offer of peace,” he spoke soberly to the officers on the quarterdeck and the stern oarsmen close beneath at their benches, “but a ploy to sever you and me from the people of Athens and ruin us all.” He turned to his quartermaster: “Make signal to all, continue to Samos, and to Thrasybulus, follow us alone.” Then to Antiochus at the helm: “Take us in now, there, to Achilleum.” ~
XXX
The plain of the Scamander sprawls as sere and wind-scored today as it did seven hundred years past, when Troy fell beneath Achilles' spear. On the strand where Homer's Achaeans beached their undecked fifties, Athenians and Samians now made shore in their bronze-rammed two-hundreds. That stream of “whirling Xanthos” still flows, where Achilles in his valor drove the Trojans to flight. Our parties had overnighted on the site a dozen times, transiting in and out of the Hellespont, but never till this eve had our commander directed us inland to the mounds.