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

XLVIII

We returned to Teas, Telamon and I, to discover ourselves fallen from favor with the Spartans. Purges must be made from time to time of those undertaking such errands as we. Philoteles got us out one jump before the next rotation, with orders to trek north to Alcibiades' new domains and “assess the situation.”

Alcibiades had three castles near the Straits, at Ornoi, Bisanthes, and Neonteichos. These were the strongholds gotten for him by Timandra with loot skimmed, it was said, from the Samos fleet.

We beached on the same strand of Aegospotami into which, in less than a twelve-month, Athens' final blood would drain.

The Odrysian Thracians detain without exception every foreigner landing on their soil. They impound your kit and compel you to get drunk. Their drink, coroessa, is a syrupy liquor, potent as fire, which pours like resin and which they imbibe neat. One must not resist its effect but yield and become as ass holed as possible. This is how they determine your aedor, “wind” or

“breath,” which is to them the supreme and all-defining attribute of a man. We underwent this ordeal with the passengers of two ferries beached before us. Three gentlemen apparently lacked breath. The Odrysians packed them off with the next boat; they simply would not let them in.

Escorts arrived from the interior to take us on. These were youths, spectacular horsemen with foxskin boots and bridles of silver. “What prince do you serve?” Telamon asked, admiring their spirit.

“Prince Alcibiades,” our guide declared.

The lad boasted that his master's fortune, got from raiding the tribes east of the Iron Mountains, exceeded four hundred talents. If this was true, Alcibiades held more wealth than the treasury of Athens, bereft now even of her final emergency reserve. Spartans and Persians paid court to him, the youth bragged, and Prince Seuthes himself stood his sanction. We inquired what type of troops he commanded, expecting peltasts and irregulars, tribesmen who would melt away at the first snowflake.

“Hippotoxotai,” the youth replied in Greek. Mounted archers. We exchanged a glance at this wild tale. Some miles farther our guide reined us in, overstanding a heathland valley. There across an expanse that would have swallowed Athens whole the turf stretched sundered by hoof strikes and littered end-to-end with camp debris, through which women and dogs ranged, scavenging.

Great barrows had been thrown up for sacrifice; we saw stands before which troops had passed in review and dikework ponds where streams had been dammed for the watering of horses in the thousands.

“Hippotoxotai,” the youth repeated.

We rode all day. This part of Thrace is treeless. Rather the ground is swarded with species of low flowering hedges which find the cold hospitable; these heatherlike ivies produce carnelian berries, quite pretty, and provide a carpet over which horses may gallop at speed and upon which one sleeps, wrapped in his pelt mantle, with the bliss of an infant. Peaty rills gush beneath beetling prominences, so cold a draught numbs your teeth and leaves fingers sensation less. Tribal territories are bounded by these courses. To water one's horse on the land of another is a declaration of war, and that in fact is how they do it.

Fleas abound in Thrace, even in winter. They infest every covert from beards to bed-wrappings; nothing short of a plunge into ice may dislodge them. Horses are runty, tough as rawhide; they can pack their own weight all day and fear nothing save the swell of the sea's edge, or perhaps the salt stink of it, which takes them mad with fright.

For myself, I debarked in the country upon as doleful a frame as I had ever known. The place cheered me. It was like dying and going to hell. Nothing could be worse, so you might as well perk up. I believe it exercised a similar tonic on Alcibiades. The people had a vigor. Their gods were refreshingly uncouth. And the women.

In raiding cultures a man packs with him all he wishes not to lose.

These flea-biters ranged with sisters, mothers, daughters, and wives, all itching for trouble. One would think a man of my history would lose appetite for the female. But such is the ungovernable nature of that captain between our thighs that life, or heat at least, does implausibly return. I found myself content to be on campaign again. The soldier's life agreed with me. I was watching a Thracian dame milk a bitch (they mix dog's milk with millet to make a porridge for their babes) when it struck me that I was interested in something. The supreme mystery of existence is this: that, perceiving it for what it is, we yet cling to it. And existence, despite all, discovers measures to reanimate our despoliated hearts.

The words for wind and sky are one in Thrace: aedor, a god's name, which is neither feminine nor masculine but of such antiquity, they say, as to antedate gender. Thracians believe the world upheld not by earth, but sky, elemental and everlasting. They chant this hymn:

Before earth and sea was sky

And sky endures, them past.

In you too, Man, breathes aedor first And takes leave last.

Wind is of profound substance in the protocol of Thrace. The natives are never unaware of its “beat” or “nose,” as they call the quarter from which it blows. No man-at-arms may stand upbeat of his better. The nobler takes the beat at his back; the lesser endures it in his face.

Camps are laid out by wind, and a prince's retinue forms up by beat. With Seuthes this was above a hundred, each stationed about his principal in a hierarchy as elaborate as the court of Persia.

Only one foreigner ever mastered the nuance of the Knights' order of Thrace. Need I name him?

We had bypassed his coastal castle, seeking him inland beyond the Cold Ford, the second tier of mountains, where he had gone, our buck informed us, on a salydonis, a combination hunt and rite by which a lesser lord pledges fealty to a greater and upon which the Spartans, Endius' legation, had accompanied him as a way of assessing the troops Alcibiades and Seuthes proposed to ally with them. For two days we encountered no one, not even herders for the sheep, whose fleeces in that remote province are undyed by their holders, as the code of hospitality permits any to take what he needs. Then at midmorning a solitary rider appeared on the skyline, a thousand feet above us, advancing across our vision with the fearless grace of a young god. The rider descended the slope by traverses as we mounted toward him.

When the prince came closer, however, we realized it was a girl, in hide buskins like a man. One was struck by the gloss and amplitude of her mane, shiny as sable, and which she wore tied in a knot at the crown, while tendrils flew about her face in the wind.

“Stay here,” our guide commanded. “Face into the beat.” He trotted to greet her. The foot-bearers overhauled us. “Who's this sparrow?” Telamon inquired.

“Alexandra,” our cub replied.

This was Seuthes' woman, no mere bed companion but his bride and queen. She did not deign to acknowledge our party's existence but parleyed apart with our guide. I asked if women traveled alone in Thrace.

“Who offends her, sir, makes himself a banquet for crows.” We had been warned never to stare at another man's woman. In this case it was impossible. The princess's hair shone, glossy as a marten pelt, and her eyes mated it like jewels. Her horse, too, complemented her color as if she had selected him, as a city woman a gown, to set off her eyes and skin. The beast seemed to sense this as well, so that the two, animal and woman, constituted one creature of spectacular nobility, and both knew it.

We reached Alcibiades' camp that night. Endius was there, with a party of Peers, colonel or higher. Seuthes had ridden to the interior, raiding. Alcibiades commanded four nations, thirty thousand men, the greatest army west of Persepolis.

We rode out next day to observe the training. The horse troops present were Odrysian and Paeonian, five thousand, with another ten thousand Scythian archers and peltasts. The Greek officers who served as cadre had rigged a mock fort on a strongpoint of the plain, which expanse spread calf-deep in snow, and across which ranged that army of wild dogs which track the Thracian hordes, scavenging their scraps. The exercise called for two wings of cavalry to assault from the south, upbeat, while the third struck from the north, supported by the infantry. In no time it broke down to blood madness. The Thracians could not grasp the concept of practice. They began firing in earnest and must be waved off by frantic Greek officers. The savages possessed one object only: to impress their princes with their individual daring and horsemanship. One espied any number standing atop their mounts at full gallop, slinging lances and axes; others clung side-style, firing arrows beneath their animals' necks. Only a miracle prevented a bloodbath, and now, drill aborted, each bogtrotter wanted his weapons back. Into the fracas these desperadoes descended, brawling merrily over their kit while calling in kin and kind to back them.

The carousal and copulation after dark defied depiction.

Bonfires made boulevards across the plain, ringed with figures capering ecstatically to tom-tom and cymbal. One could not but fall in love with these wild, free fellows. But as one picked his way across the camp, stepping over the forms of sodden fornicating louts, he understood why these, the most numerous and valorous warriors on earth, had never carved a scratch on the waxboard of history. Their dogs possessed more discipline.

I returned with Endius and Telamon to the podilion where Alcibiades remained awake. These huts of hide and turf are circular, low and wonderfully commodious, excavated so that one descends as to a badger's den. A soup-pot fire keeps them cozy even in a blizzard. Mantitheus and Diotimus were there, with the Cat's Eyes, Damon and Nestorides, now fur-swathed, and about a dozen I recognized as officers, good ones, of the Samos fleet.

“Welcome, outlaws and pirates!” Alcibiades greeted the party.

The politics went on all night. I snoozed between two bearhounds.

At last near dawn the parley broke, and Alcibiades, ascending through the smoke, motioned me outside to the air.

He had learned of my bride's decease and my own warrant of murder. There was nothing to be said and he didn't try. Rather he tramped at my side on the ground frozen to iron. I have never

experienced trepidation, in battle or at hazard of any kind, as in his presence. Despite all, one feared disappointing him. Do you understand, Jason? His will was so formidable, his intelligence so keen, that one must summon all resource just to take counsel and not play the booby. He indicated the men in slumber about the camp. “What do you think of them?”

“As what?”

His laugh shot a plume upon the air.

“As fighters. As an army.”

“Can you be serious?”

He made his case as we walked. The element Athens has lacked, debarring her from exploiting her success at sea, is cavalry. You forget money, I appended.

“Cavalry produces money,” Alcibiades retorted. “Give me Sardis and I'll coin money, enough to bear us to Susa and set us in camp before Persepolis.”

Now it was I who laughed. “And who will train these invincible battalions?”

“You of course.” He set his hand upon my shoulder. “And your mate Telamon and the other Greek and Macedonian officers I have here already and those who will come.”

We had mounted to a summit from which, across forty miles, could be glimpsed the lightening sea. Two forces contended for the Aegean, Alcibiades testified: Athens on one hand, Persia and Sparta on the other. “Here is a third force-and irresistible. Which nation outnumbers the Thracian? Which is more warlike? Who possesses more horse, or may strike more swiftly? Thrace brings all these, lacking only…”

“You.”

A third power allied with either side must tip the balance, he declared. He was in secret negotiation now with the Persian Tissaphernes, who had had his wings clipped by Cyrus and burned to pay him back. “Tissaphernes hates Lysander and will sow that malice with the Crown, against which Cyrus must advance, as is self-evident, the instant of King Darius' death. This is why the prince wraps himself in Lysander's mantle. But his plan will miscarry. Spartans may take Persian gold but never Persian service; here is a draught not even Lysander can make them swallow. He has earned Endius' gall by throwing him over for Agis.

Neither can move without Athens, and Athens, quit of me, possesses none with the stomach to speak aloud the name Lacedaemon. Each for his own reasons must look to a Third Power, or conjure one if it did not exist.”

But how would he bring in Athens? “This is a bridge twice burned, Alcibiades. The demos will never accede to a regime, of whatever might or promise, presided over by you.”

He did not answer at once, rather glanced abroad the camp, across whose frost-bound sprawl squires, arising, began now to beat the snow from their master's tents, while grooms, thumping limbs across fleece-mantled chests, spread fodder for the horses and transport beasts, which in turn set up that cacophony of bawl and bray which is to the campaigner as the cock's crow to the husbandman.

Any other, scanning this hyperborean stadium, must query that fate which had driven him, after twenty-six years of war, to these barrens at this remove from civilization's quick. Yet for him such notion was so alien as to be unthinkable. That site on which he stood was ever, and must be ever, the hub and axis of the universe.

“One has no need of Athens. I will draw her best to me, one man at a time, as I have drawn you. Look there to the camp. I already claim the ablest marine cadre in the world, the boldest cavalry commanders, the most skilled shipwrights. Money will buy sailors.

Seuthes' timber will build ships.”

Yes, if you can control him.

“Seuthes is keen, Pommo, but he is a savage in awe of me. Where I have moved throughout the war, the nexus of enterprise has followed. Now it will follow me to Thrace; I will compel it. Seuthes cannot summon it on his own and he knows it. For the time being this affords me influence. The army may be his, but mark to whom it turns for command.”

He indicated the awakening camp.

“Alcibiades!”

“Commander!”

Captains hailed him; mounted officers spurred his way; others advanced at the double to receive his orders.

“We will take the straits,” Alcibiades continued, meaning the Propontis at Byzantium, which conquest he had already accomplished with a tenth these numbers. “But we will not cut off Athens' grain or exact concessions, rather continue to supply her at our whim.”

He would do it, I could see, and I must with him. But who will hold these savages, who worship the wind and come and go as ungovernably? “Even yourself, Alcibiades, are not so vain as to imagine they will stick for you.”

He regarded me wryly. “I'm disappointed in you, old friend. Can you be as blind as these Thracians to what stares you, and them, in the face?”

And what would that be?

“Their own greatness.”

He meant he would lift them to it. “They will not stay for my destiny, Pommo, but their own. For their nation poises like an eagle at the brink of the sky, lacking only the daring to launch and ascend. I will give them that. And when they have seized it, by all the gods, the feats they will perform will transfigure the world.”

You have heard the stories, Jason, which say he had gone mad, or native. He danced all night, men claimed, to cymbal and timbrel.

Liquor taken neat had stolen his wits. I myself saw his horse tethered in an alder copse alongside Alexandra's. It was fact that Seuthes grew distant, then hostile. Athens wooed the prince shamelessly, granting citizenship to his sons and dispatching to his court poets, musicians, even hairdressers. Toward the end, reports claimed, such irregularities infiltrated Alcibiades' speech as “the alchemy of acclaim” and “the plain of intercession,” the latter constituting, he averred, that field upon which gods and mortals mingle and convene. He warranted to rule by

“commanding the mythos” and designated his philosophy “the politics of arete.”

He began to refer to himself in the third person, they said, and invoke his own spirit as if it were a god. Sorcerers and warlocks sat to each hand. He declared it achievable to stop the sun. His flesh he mutilated, some recited, scorning the stuff as but a mantle to transcend or discard. I witnessed him sacrifice all night, more than once, to Hecate and Necessity. They say Timandra was his mentor in such deviation, a succubus herself and no woman but hellspawn.

In thrall to her, men alleged, he debarred all from his society to dream and convoked wizards to divine these phantoms' import.

He claimed once that he could fly, and had soared to Phthia on wings of quicksilver, conferring there with Nestor and Achilles.

In spring he sent me to Macedonia to procure masts and ships' timbers. There chance set in my path Berenice, Lion's camp woman, by heaven's grace in sheltered circumstance, wife of a teamster. She had endured unimaginable sufferings since Syracuse, yet through all had preserved her lover's historia. This she restored to me, with the chest, the same which holds it now, carved by her new husband. I liked the fellow. He was an unplaned plank, much as his predecessor. He had come from work “down south,” trucking goods in secret out of Attica. Athens' own generals were caching their movables, he reported, so certain were they of the ruin to come.

I was still there, at Pella in Macedonia, when report came of the final calamity at Aegospotami. In the days before the battle, after Lysander had taken Lampsacus and drawn up his two hundred and ten battleships across the strait from Conon's hundred and eighty, he came down from his castle, did Alcibiades, to the strand where his countrymen's fleet lay. He was garbed in fox skins, they said, hair unbound and falling to midback. Forty horsemen of the Odrysians provided his lifeguard, accoutered more savagely than he. He would bring fifty thousand horse and foot, he pledged, and strike Lysander by land, if Athens' generals would ferry him.

Lampsacus he would recapture for them, entreating nothing. But they drove him off.

“You command here no longer, Alcibiades.” This was the speech of the general Philocles, that villain whose concept of the warrior's code included putting forward the motion, carried so infamously by the Assembly at Athens, to strike off the hand of every enemy sailor taken captive.

Thus was Alcibiades, for the third and final time, banished from the society of his countrymen. Sixteen months later, as that party which bore his murder trekked in his trace upon this selfsame sand, Endius with sorrow remarked that derangement which was at once Alcibiades' curse and genius, and to which, unforswearing, he held true all his life.

“Nations are too puny for him. His self-conception supersedes statehood, and they are dwarves in his eyes who will not step in his train off the precipice of the world. He is correct of course; that is why he must be made away with.

For his vision is the future, which the present uncompelled may not now, or ever, abide.”