Do we our souls consign.
In Sicily summer's end produces days of blistering heat, succeeded by nights of bitter cold. We were permitted no bedding or fire; the site was open to the elements. Many bore wounds of battle, others suffered with disease; now under sharpening exposure these failed. That state called aphydatosis set in, in which the organs, for want of liquid, cease to function. The brain cooks in its skull. One cannot draw piss. Vision fails; limbs go racked by palsy.
Tours were conducted from the city, children in school uniforms attended by their pedagogues, to look upon those who had sailed to enslave them and been brought low by the valor of their fathers. Captives would be hauled forth and the children would break their teeth out with hammers. In the quarries men were melting away by scores every night. Yet such is the nature of existence that any site, hell itself, becomes with time home. The men had got to know the place. One knoll became the pnyx; a hollow the theatron. There was an agora and a Lyceum, an Acropolis and an Academy. The day was given shape by this fanciful geography, as men assembled in “the marketplace” and passed on to “the wrestling schools.” To pass the time they taught one another. One skilled in smithing would impart the principles of his practice; others shared instruction of joinery, mathematics, music. Lion taught boxing. He could not demonstrate; this would draw attention from the sentinels. So he lectured beneath his breath to students under the pitiless sun.
They caught one teacher, a choirmaster, and cut his tongue out.
That put a crimp in our college. But the despair which succeeded could not be endured. Lion resumed. He taught gymnastics and isometrics, concentration exercises and endurance drills. He lectured on the humors of the blood and that saturation of the tissue that must be sustained over time for the athlete to build the stamina for the Games. This is what road drills are about, and rowing, and the Long Course. Its landscape, he taught, is what trainers call the precinct of pain.
“I was taught as a boy that a goddess resides there, silent, in that sanctuary at the pinnacle of pain. This goddess's name is Victory.
Look around you, cousins. We reside in that precinct now. And she is with us, this goddess. Even here, my friends, we may give ourselves to her and be lifted by her wings.”
Someone informed. We never knew who. The Syracusans roped Lion topside and tortured him three days. What they did to him I will never repeat, except to say that it was not as evil as what they performed later.
They dumped him back down. I held him all night, while others kept him warm with their bodies. Five days later he began teaching again. No one would come. “I will instruct the air, then!”
And he did. I took station before him, the only act of my life in which I truly take pride. Others stood too, knowing they were signing his death warrant and their own.
The Syracusans hauled Lion topside again. When they dumped him again, I was certain he was dead. I held him against the cold, swathed in every rag our mates could muster. Sometime after midnight he stirred. “What a thing of trouble this body is. It will be a relief to shuck it.”
He slept an hour, then came to with a start.
“You must carry on my historia, Pommo. You're the only one I trust.”
I fell asleep, cradling him. When I woke he was cold.
Once when we were boys our pack had played bowl hockey on that field called the Aspis which runs outside the walls adjacent the sanctuary of Athena Tritogeneia. Do you know the place, Jason? There is a downgrade on the Carriage Road where the carters allow their wagons to gather way, building momentum for the ascent west of the gate. I was nine then, as were my mates, but Lion, only six, had beseeched us so passionately as to be permitted to join our game. Suddenly a ball, struck loose, bounded for the freighters' track. Lion took after it. I spotted his dash from across the field. He was not oblivious, as another boy might be, sprinting into the path of a teamster's rig whose massive oak wheels rumbled in their unchecked rush. He was simply without fear. I flew across the turf, tackling him at the terminal instant. Amid the carter's curses I hauled my brother to his feet and slapped him bloody, adding my own invective, coarser than the teamster's, for scaring me so to death. When Father interrogated the lad that night on the origin of his blackened eye, he would give up nothing.
I received a thrashing nonetheless and a second next evening when from my brother's innocent lips sprang a brilliant replication of my tirade of the previous day.
Here in the quarries, however, I could not preserve him from his own valor.
I buried him, such as one could, in the deepest precinct, where the goddess dwelt. All speech is superfluous to his elegy, save a plain recital of his deeds. He was, excepting none, the bravest soldier and finest man I ever knew.
Next morning my name was called. They hauled me up by the tackle. Death still held terror for me, I am ashamed to confess. Yet what grieved me most was that I would not survive to payout Alcibiades. “God preserve me, let me cry out no names.”
The swing arm hauled me over the quarry's lip. Men's teeth littered the ground by hundreds. It was hot. Flies swarmed in masses atop patches on the earth, blood doubtless, or fragments of flesh, fingers, and toes. I could see benches, upon which several men were strapped, disemboweled yet still alive. Rude tables sat beside these, upon which implements were spread as at a dentist's or physician's. I recognized cleavers and bonebreakers.
The uses of the other tools I could not surmise. Across a space stood a colony of execution posts. All were vacant at the moment, their sides and the limestone at their bases black and swarming with flies. Behind this stood tents and a circle of stone where the guards took their meals. There was a miniature slaughter area to the side, for pullets and doves for their grub. The adjacency of these charnel tracks for men and fowl struck me ludicrous. I laughed aloud.
A guard walloped me across the kidneys. He shoved me forward.
Others demanded my name. I must repeat it over and over while they scoured the roll. “Polemides the son of Nicolaus of Acharnae, yes?”
Yes.
“Son of Nicolaus?”
Yes.
“Of Acharnae?”
Yes.
“This is the man. I will take him.”
A new voice spoke these last. I turned toward it and discovered a sturdy youth with a strawberry blemish, a brace of javelins across his back and a Lacedaemonian xyele at his hip. He was a warrior's squire of the Spartans. He came round before me, extending a wooden bowl in which slopped a base of wine and a heel of barley. “Don't drink it straight or you'll pass out. Soak it with the bread.”
My wrists were unbound, pins hammered from my shackles.
“Who are you?” I prayed of the youth.
“Eat your bread,” he commanded.
I peered into his face, which I had seen before, I was certain, but could not remember. For his part the youth measured me, absent compassion, assessing what strength I yet possessed and what demands might be made upon it.
Book V
XXV
