The party always comes back with wounded, and this works hell on the ship. Even one man gutted and wailing turns every other's bowels to squash, and it's worse if he's blinded or burned.
God forbid a man catch iron in the privates; his mates huddle dread-stricken and only action, at once and to save their skins, keeps the aspiring demagogues among the crew from whipping the men to the brink of mutiny. You can flog them. You can hawse hole them. You can have the marines single out one and make an example. But a ship of war runs on heart as much as sweat. There must be love among the men or you're finished.
XXXIX
I had a number of other obligations that day [Grandfather continued], several relating to Socrates, whose date of execution stood apart only four risings of the evening star; it was well past midnight when at last I reached home. To my astonishment, Eunice awaited, alone in the forecourt, with a mantle about her shoulders against the chill. She had been there all day, she reported, since vacating the prison. My wife had given her supper and set at her disposal an attendant to conduct her home, but the matter upon which she called was urgent, she declared, so she had elected to remain. She must speak to Polemides. It could not wait.
I was exhausted and desired nothing more than a bowl of wine and a warm bed, but I sensed a chance at last to get to the bottom of things. “Who has filed this murder charge against Polemides?” I demanded in a manner both sudden and truculent. “Not the name on the indictment-I know that-but the real prosecutor. Who is behind this, and why?”
Eunice rose with indignation, disclaiming all intelligence. She commenced pacing, then muttering, at once breaking into a spate of profanity.
“At what house are you staying?” I demanded, employing not oikos but oikema for its connotations of the brothel.
That of Colophon, she replied in anger, the son of Hestiodorus of Collytos. This was, I knew, a nephew of Anytus, who was prosecuting Socrates and the bitterest foe of Alcibiades in the past.
It was Colophon's brother Andron who had taken the prosecutor's oath that he was a phratry-mate of the victim, and had sworn out the writ of elapsement to permit prosecution after passage of time.
“And do you share this Colophon's bed as well?”
The woman wheeled in anger. “Is this a law court? Since when am I on trial?”
“Who wants your husband dead, Eunice? Not this rogue or his brother, who will be content to snatch his land and pack him off to exile. Some other wants his finish. Who?”
She met my eyes with an expression I will never forget. I felt myself stumble, as one, in Hermippus' phrase, who stubs his toe upon the truth.
It was she. How? I insisted. By making a powerful man your lover? Or did you seek out those you knew possessed motive to eliminate your husband and only lead them to the crimes they needed to effect his arrest?
She wept then. “You cannot know, sir, what it is to be a woman in a man's world…”
“Is this how you acquit homicide?”
“The children are mine. He will not take them from me!”
She sank upon the settle and began to sob. At last the tale gushed forth. Its seed was her boy, named Nicolaus after Polemides' father. The lad was sixteen and bursting with the venturesome sap of youth. As boys raised with numerous “uncles” in their mother's bed, Nicolaus had come to idealize the father whose society he had shared only intermittently, a sire moreover whose proximity to great events had rendered him more glamorous in his issue's imagination. Nor was this notoriety diminished by his father's imprisonment for murder.
The lad, Eunice revealed now, had run away and enlisted twice, under false names with counterfeit papers. Collared by the Guardians of the Yards, he fled again, into the harbor lanes of Piraeus, where his father shared a bed with the widow of a mate of the fleet. To this site Eunice had tracked her son, but could not make him come home. Some hard-up outfit would take him; it was only a matter of time before he would ship out, certainly to his death. Only his father could dissuade him. I must help. I must!
The uproar of this plea had drawn the watchman, on this eve the cook's boy, a bright lad named Hermon. It was late and cold.
“You must eat, lady. Please. Come inside.”
I instructed the boy to lay a fire in the kitchen grate. Eunice I assisted within, fetching a fleece for her feet and placing a chair for her beside the brazier. You know this quarter of our compound, my grandson; it is a snug harbor; the charcoal makes it toasty in moments.
I may have failed, in my narration, to do justice to this woman and the empathy her person evoked. For though her speech was rough, it was straight- forward. One must admire her survival if nothing else. Heaven only stood witness to the trials she had endured, packing her children in barbaric precincts at the limits of the earth. Even her present object, to shield her son from war, could be called noble if one made allowance for the means. Nor was she uncomely, it must be said, but possessed that species of fleshy concupiscence that a woman acquires sometimes past her prime, when the toll exacted by hard experience has settled her at ease within her own skin. A sailor would say she still had the goods. I found myself drawn in sympathy to her. I could picture her and Polemides together. Perhaps it was not past my powers to effect a reconciliation, even at this hour. I confess, watching her settle in before the grate, that for moments I wished I had known them in their heyday (and my own), them and their mates of the
coop and the harbor.
Eunice broke the silence. “What part is he up to?” In his story, she meant.
I told her Samos and Ephesus. She chuckled darkly. “I'd give a lot to hear that string of fiction.”
The lad brought bread and boiled eggs; this seemed to fortify Eunice. She had abated somewhat her hostility and suspicion.
“What if I could get the charges dropped?” she offered. “I'll screw anyone I need to, and I have cash for bribes too.”
Too late. The trial date was set. “Polemides knew all along, didn't he? That it was you behind the charges.”
The woman's look acknowledged this likelihood.
“He doesn't hate you, Eunice, I'm certain of that.” I promised to employ all my efforts to get him to help; I believed he would. Yet sorrow clouded her features. I felt moved and wished to comfort her.
“May I ask a question, madam?”
“You've done little else, Cap'n.”
I inquired of her life with Polemides. What had been the best time? When were they happiest together? She eyed me skeptically.
Did I mock her? “The best for us was the best for Athens. Samos and the Straits. When Alcibiades brought his victories.
“At last she settled, and applying the fleece across her lap in such a way as to permit the brazier's glow to warm one side and the wool's heft the other, she took a sip of wine and began.
“We had a cottage at Samos. Pommo brought us out from Athens, me and the kids. It was a pretty place, called the Terraces.
Every door on the lane was full; the men was all with the fleet. It was swell days, Cap'n. Swell mates. The way the cottages was carved into the hill you could cut out little gardens, that was why they called it Terraces. We grew melons big as your head, and flowers; pansies and bluejackets, shepherd's capes and wild hearts. The chimneys had those ironwood ptera on top, wings, that turn like weathercocks and make that sweet moan when the wind pipes through 'em. I hear that sound now, it breaks my heart.
“You never saw so many little boogers. All the girls was carrying or just dropped; there was bawlers and crawlers underfoot everywhere. You wanted kids, 'cause you never knew how long you'd have your man. And they was beautiful, Cap'n. Not just my Pommo, though he was at his pick and prime, but all of 'em. So young, so brave. They was always carrying wounds. Ashamed not to be. A man would row with a broken leg or blinded, a 'starfish' across his gut, you know this, sir; that's how set they was never to let their mates down. They called fractured skulls 'headaches.' I remember the doc's advice to one concussed cross-eyed: 'Sit down.'