Alcibiades raced back to Ephesus, drew the fleet up at the harbor mouth. But Lysander was too shrewd to come out. The now-completed Pteron sealed the bastion tight. Spartan and Peloponnesian troops held every foot of shore.
Sixteen days later came this report from Athens: the vote for the new year's Board of Generals had been tallied. Alcibiades had not been reelected.
Two dawns later he addressed the fleet in farewell.
He dared not return home for fear of trial; he must retire, to Thrace perhaps if the rumors of strongholds acquired by Timandra were true. He dismissed Indomitable's crew, permitting each man to seek another berth. One hundred fifty-four oarsmen and marines volunteered to share Alcibiades' fate; they would stick with him.
That night my vessel, Thyone, drilled beyond the breakwater, the Hook, conducting signal exercises with several Samian corvettes and dispatch runners. We came in late, making our reversion by cresset-light. As the craft swung stern-to, preparing to beach, we remarked a warship launch from the strand and gather way, under half-stick, against the tide.
We peered. The vessel bore neither running lights nor signal lamp; her crew rowed in silence, stroke sounded only by the tapstone. She was Indomitable.
It had been eleven months to the day from our fleet admiral's apotheosis at Athens to this skulking decampment to exile, by the dark of the moon.
Book IX
XLIII
The exit of Alcibiades was hailed at Athens [Grandfather continued] with a relief verging upon the ecstatic (or so my wife reported by letter received at Samos that fall), such had become the people's trepidation, not alone of that tyranny they imagined they had so serendipitously eluded but of the unaccountability of a single all-powerful commander whose conduct of the war had become at best idiosyncratic and whose style of generalship, the hallmark of which had become the conspicuousness in high places of his cronies and his lover, had begun to border upon the regal.
The Assembly replaced Alcibiades with a college of ten generals, to impede any attempt at concentration of power, and sent out as well a supplementary body composed of the ten tribal taxiarchs, serving as ships' captains, to act as a further check on recurrence of excess. If these curbs were not enough, the Assembly buttressed the fleet by drafting a number of past generals to command single ships. Illustrious names now bedizened the trierarchs' roster.
Thyone made a passage in convoy to Methymna; two vessels ahead sailed Alcyone, commanded by Theramenes, while to flank rowed Indefatigable under the great Thrasybulus.
It succeeded. Command was now dispersed across the entire political spectrum; rivalry receded; order was restored. Scarcity and hardship chafed less, shared by such a company. So many crack foreign sailors had deserted to the enemy that for the first time a fleet of Athens must advance to battle inferior in seamanship to the foe. This sobered the force further. Crews trained with a will; discipline was enforced internally, by shipmates, not imposed by officers. I may say of all my overseas tours this aggregation of ships and men was, if not the most brilliant, certainly the most able.
The departure of our supreme commander had as well profound consequences for Polemides, who learned of it, he told me, while yet in hiding in the aftermath of Ephesus.
With Alcibiades out of power, Polemides could not go home.
Road's Turn would be lost if it wasn't already, and with it all means of support for his brother's children and his own. His conviction for treason would stand. He was a hunted man now, by both sides. Even to cross to Samos to join his bride and child carried grave risks. He was caught, as the poet says, between the earth and the sea.
The estate of my father-in-law, Aurore's father [Polemides recounted], comprised some twenty acres in the hill country remote from the port of Samos, on the north slope above Pillion Bay. One approached from the city side via the Heraion Road. I had chosen to land, however, at the island's most remote point, on the bay side, while it was yet dark, a headland called the Old Woman's Tit. I had got from the mainland to the islet of Tragia, then at last, a month and more past the time of my bride's term, ferried the final leg by a lad of fourteen named Sophron in his father's bumboat he had stolen. The boy asked no payment, nor even inquired my name, undertaking the hazard, he professed, purely for the adventure of it.
I mounted via the back track, steep and stony, and had worked a lather by the time the sun, and the welcome tiles of the farmhouse roof, hove into prospect above. One could see the compound from a distance: the pair of stone steadings, the hillward trace between, and the lane of camphor trees that mounted to the house itself. The family tombs were sited upon this track, and as I passed I noted, hung upon the lintel, two epikedeioi stephanoi, the wreaths of tamarisk and laurel offered in the islands to Demeter and Kore in intercession for the dead. Has the old man passed off? I wondered. Perhaps Aurore's grandfolk, who inhabited cottages of the downslope enclave. I hurried on, minding myself not to permit my own joy at this much-behindhand homecoming to obtrude upon another's grief. From the distance of a stone's sling I spied my brother-in-law Anticles, with his dog Ironhead, striding into view from the corner of the steading. Two drystone dikers waited upon him with their mawls and stringers. “Has the garden wall taken another tumble?” I called in salute. Anticles turned and saw me. Such an alteration deformed his features as to choke my greeting in midbreath. His elder brother Theodorus turned into view from the hillward trace. He took one look, bent in midstride, and seizing a stone in each fist, advanced upon me.
“You.”
This was his solitary word.
“What has happened?” I heard myself cry.
Stones screamed past my ears. “You are not welcome here.”
I let fall kit and arms and, spreading palms wide, beseeched clemency in the name of the gods.
“May hell take you,” Anticles spat, “and the evil you have brought upon our house!”
Both brothers advanced. Even the dikers rose. I could hear the dogs clamoring.
“Where is Aurore? What has happened?”
“Get quit, thou villain!”
A stone of Theodorus struck my hip.
I begged the brothers to tell me what had happened. Let me speak to Aurore. “She is my wife, and the child my own.”
“Attend them there.” Theodorus indicated the tombs.
All who have been soldiers know these, Jason: such hours when pain of flesh or spirit surpasses the heart's capacity to endure it. I shook myself, as in a nightmare. How could these, my brothers, advance upon me with such hatred? How could those wreaths be for them I so loved?
“Leave this country!” Anticles strode upon me, brandishing his staff. “By the gods, if you cross again within my sight, that hour will end your life or mine.”
I withdrew. Where the farm's limit fell away to the bay, two lads of the neighbor's were clearing brush. From them I learned that my bride had succumbed two months previous. Poisoned. The child in her womb had perished with her.
Somehow it had become post noon. I mounted the hill again. At the fence the dogs cut me off in a pack. Anticles roared down, horseback.
“What may I do, brother,” I beseeched him, “to requite this woe…
He made no answer, only wheeled his mount in place, regarding him who stood beneath with such rue as one may donate not to another of humankind, but to a wraith or specter, life-fled yet present, denied repose beneath the earth.
“You have stolen the sun from our sky, you and he who sent you.