“We had a pot on our lane. You put your money in; who needed took and put back when he had it. No one stole. You could leave it out all night. If a mate died, his funeral come from that pot. There was no gangs or cliques; everyone was your friend. You didn't need no amusements. Just to be together with such mates. Nobody cheated; nobody owed nothing. We had all we needed-youth and victory. We had the ships, we had the men, we had Alcibiades.
And wasn't that enough, Cap'n? Wouldn't that be good enough for most men?”
Eunice peeled an apple as she spoke this; she slung the skin sizzling into the grate.
“Not Polemides of Acharnae. Not him. He found another woman, did he tell you? Not a tramp. A lady. That's right, he married her, and had the cheek to tell me to keep off from the wedding. What do you think of that? He turns over his pay to me, half a duck a day, as if that sets all square. A boy and a girl, his own, and he chucks 'em without so much as a kiss-my-ass.
“He would be a gentleman farmer, see, like his father. There's a laugh! He tried working the land with me and didn't know pig shit from pork sausage. But he tells me now that's his dream; he'll make it pay this time.
“I killed a man with an ax for him. Did he tell you that, Cap'n?
At Erythrae. Split this whore's son open, blind soused and coming after Pommo. Gimme that ax again, I'll sling it into the soup.”
She fell silent and for long moments held stationary, one hand holding the fruit absently beside her cheek, the other arm wrapped about herself, as a child.
“But why am I working myself up over yesterday's spit? She's under the ground and he'll be too. They'll pit him for Alcibiades, and no wriggling free this time.”
I asked if she loved Polemides.
“l love everyone, Cap'n. Can't afford not to.”
The hour was late. Clearly Eunice was as spent as I. I assured her I would speak to Polemides about his son and do all I could to secure her own entry to him, to exhort him in person. I recalled the fee she had left unclaimed and proffered it doubled. Was she certain she wished to brave the street at this hour? I could easily have a room made up for her. She thanked me, but no, better she not distress those with whom she resided. At the gate as I assigned an attendant with a torch to accompany her way, impulse prompted a query.
“Can you enlighten me, madam, with a woman's view of Alcibiades? How did he strike you, not as a general or a personage, but as a man?”
She turned with a smile.
“We race of women crave glory, Cap'n, just as you men. But where does our greatness come? Not from him we conquer but him we bear.”
I was seeking, I said, to understand Timaea of Sparta-the queen who had not only permitted herself to be seduced but boasted of her infidelity.
Eunice discovered no mystery to this occasion. “There wasn't no woman in the world, not Timaea of Sparta or Helen herself, who could stand before that man and not feel the god's command crying from her belly. What children his seed would give me! What sons!”
The woman drew her cowl; then, lifting the veil to set it in place, she paused and turned back.
“Do you really want to know about Pommo?”
I assured her most earnestly I did.
“His heart opened twice in his youth,” she spoke, her glance no longer toward myself but averted soberly aside. “His sister and his bride. When the Plague took 'em, he buried their bones, but not their memory. What woman of flesh can compete with that, sir?
And them both dead, so she can't even talk 'em hard.
“That's him, Cap'n. And it's Athens too. Plague and war took her sons' hope. Yourself too, sir, unless I misread your eyes.”
I absorbed this gravely, struck by its toll of truth.
“If you need anything, madam, make no shame to call. That which I can, I shall.”
She set her veil in place and, turning, made ready to step off.
“Alcibiades gave 'em hope, didn't he, Cap'n? They felt it in their bellies like women, looking past all his faults and crimes. He had eras. He was eras. Nothing less could take the city and make her over new.”
XL
It was fall [Polemides resumed] before Telamon and I reached Miletus, via Aspendus and the Coast Road through Caria. I counted the calendar differently now; not by days, but by Aurore's term. She was due in forty-three days, by the ticks carved in the haft of my nine-footer. I warned my mate not to count on me, for when the hour came I'd be at Samos by her side.
“Hope is a crime against heaven,” Telamon reproved me as we trekked the gale-buffeted highway, where you packed your shield inboard at morning and outboard after noon and which rumbled at all hours with enemy caravans trucking war materiel and regiments of cavalry and foot. Every bridgehead was being outposted, every landing site fortified. “You were superb once, Pommo, because you despised your life. Now hope has made you worthless. I should quit you, and would but for our history.”
The coast towns through Caria were all Spartan-garrisoned.
They had changed, Miletus most of all. Under Athens the city had celebrated a festival called the Feast of Flags. Housewives draped the lanes with jacks and standards; guilds and brotherhoods massed in the squares; the town was gay night long with street dances and torch races and the like. Now that was over.
Housefronts squatted, sallow and stark. On the docks men worked their business and nothing more. You wore red, everyone, some rag or kerchief to show obeisance to Sparta. The greeting was no longer “Artemis,” the goddess's blessing, but “Freedom!” as from Athens' tyranny. This salutation was compulsory.
The Spartan garrisons ruled under martial law, with a curfew, but the affairs of the cities were run day to day by the Tens. These were political committees of the wealthier citizens, estate holders and such, which answered not to Sparta, but to Lysander. Under Athenian rule, civil cases must be tried at Athens, where the vultures of the courts picked the colonials clean. Now such shenanigans looked benign. In Lysander's courts each civil trespass was reckoned a crime of war. Breach of contract was dereliction, laziness treason. Even if the Tens wished to be fair, in a boundary dispute, say, between a crofter and his landlord, a lenient judgment might set them up for denunciation as democrats, partial to Athens. The fist must fall hard.
All Ionia had become a camp of war. Lysander had made dead ends of all other trades. Nor did he abide indiscipline within his company. Corporal punishment dominated; every quay sprouted its stocks and whipping post. One heard the boatswain's cry, “Fall in to witness punishment”; the lanes rang with the swish of the birch and the crack of the cat. Along the wharves laggards must labor in twenty-pound collars or shuffle about, hobbled by shackle-and-drag. Delinquents stood at attention daylong with iron anchors on their shoulders.
We saw Lysander gallop past once, on the Coast Highway south of Clazomenae. His party was a dozen, preceded by a guard of Royal Persian Horse, Prince Cyrus' men. You had to salute as he passed, or the buck cavalrymen would rough you up. Telamon admired Lysander. He was a professional. He had whipped this mob of civilians into a corps of fighters and taught them to fear him more than the foe. “Freedom!” We greeted mates on the street, a red rag round our necks.