Tides of War, a Novel of Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian War

XVI

The farm survived, thanks less to my brother's exertions and my own than to the abundantly donated counsel and assistance of various uncles and elders, not to say their liberal advances in equipment, skilled labor, and cash. We had not realized, Lion and I, how sorely missed we had been and how bereft our family, as so many others, in the aftercourse of plague and war. Nothing is so irreplaceable as youth, and none so dear as the prodigal. They could not do enough for us, our senior kinsmen, and wished only to see sons and more sons. My aunt made the trek from the city just to satisfy herself that we were well; stationed beneath the sunshade on her hired carriage's bench, she looked on Lion and me, bare-backed and dirty as dogs, digging a trench for a runoff channel. “Now I can die content.”

I failed to present Eunice that day, nor, calling upon Aunt in town later that month, did I include my mistress. Thus initiated another of those beastly rows, between myself and her, which endure night long and leave one lacerated to the quick.

“What do I lack, Pommo, that you won't take me past your aunt's door? Is my skin not soft enough? Perhaps you fault the shapeliness of my calves. Well, these lines would not show in my face, my friend, or sinew in my shanks, had I not humped at your side through hell and damnation, you ungrateful hound! I am not a citizen, is that it? Then by God, make me one! Pull strings. Engage your fancy friends who make white black and turn it back again!”

Fury boiled from her, long-censored and suppressed.

“I'll tell you why you won't present me to your aunt. Because she seeks a bride for you even now, as she found your virgin Phoebe years ago. Someone proper, of proper Athenian family, with whom you may have children whose names may be set upon the rolls, not alien brats such as a foreign bitch like me would drop, who may not vote or sacrifice or claim their education when you croak in war.”

She discovered me one noon in reflection beside the family tomb; now the fancy took her, that I craved my dead bride and not her. I was ashamed of her, Eunice declared. She was not suitable.

She did not fit.

One night she bolted from our bed in a state.

“You will put me aside now.”

I was dead fagged and wanted none of this. “What are you talking about?”

“You will be a gentleman. You will set me aside.”

I ordered her back to sleep. She struck me, hard, with the flat of her hand. “There are too many in this bed, Pommo. I cannot sleep beside the ghost of your bride. One of us must go!”

From my lips I heard: “Then go.”

The woman struck me in fury. “I will tell you something: she is in the grave, your child bride. Your sister, too, is dead. While I live.”

I punched her full in the face, as hard as I would a man. She crashed to the wall and dropped. I felt horror to have struck her, a woman, but at the same time I blamed her entire. Only she could drive me to such extremity.

“You feel shame to be with me.” Eunice spat the blood from her lips. “You hold in contempt the life we have led and wish to dismiss it as if it never happened. Well, it happened, Pommo. It happened. I have been your wife in fact if not in law, and you have been my husband. You are my husband.”

She began to sob. I knelt beside her, proffering comfort with words but in my heart wishing only to be gone, or have her so.

“What will become of me? Will I bear a child at last, or continue to abort myself as you command?”

She begged me to take her out of Athens, apart from family expectations and mobilization for war. There were places we had seen in our travels, safe places. Let us go! We have all we need with just our hands and hearts…

Though I knelt so close that her knee rose between mine and her hands set upon my forearm, my heart held isolated and apart, with leagues of silence dissevering.

“You will put me aside, Pommo. I read it in your eyes. But it is not me you part from, only yourself. What I have set before you, no woman will again. Go, then. I won't stop you. But I will make this prophecy, and it will prove true.

“You will eat,” she declared, “but ever go hungry. You will drink and still be dry. You will fuck and find no pleasure. You will stand before the fork, but it will make no difference which pass you take.

All will bear you nowhere, till you come to yourself and come home to me.”

Jason, my friend. I have had greased bronze heads shot into my guts and, worse, pulled out. I have had walls of stone collapse on top of me. But never had any blow hammered me to the heart like the words of this woman.

It would make a better story to say that she walked out then, or I. In fact we stayed together another eleven months. She bore a son and was with child again when I signed as a lieutenant of marines on the Pandora under Menestheus, the Titan squadron commanded by Chaemedemus, the Thunderbolt division under Alcibiades.

The farm had failed that winter. Lion's wife Theonoe made her divorce. With notes overdue and children yet to support, my brother could not turn down three months' mustering bonus and a year, at least, of officer's pay. He shipped as a platoon commander under Lamachus. Telamon took a unit of fifty, Arcadian mercenaries like himself. The farm my brother and I let to our uncles; I assigned half my wages to Eunice and made over the bonus to my grandfather, a start on the debt we owed for his, and all our family's, aid.

I could not make my living on the land. That was only a soldier's dream. Where else was there to go, for me or any of us, except back to war?