shoulders of no greater breadth, yet I make no shame to say he scared me witless. ulf you're so certain he'll betray you,” I inquired, “why not kill him now?”
“He's of use to me, as I him. For the present we are thick as brothers.”
At his side Strawberry motioned; we were being observed.
Lysander led off, beneath the acacias that front the Running
Course and the little bronze of the god Laughter. We passed down the Amyclaian Way to the Ribbon, that straight track where the girls train, barefoot in their singlets. “Stop here.” Lysander indicated a site beneath thorn trees with grass for his horse to crop.
“You must understand what will happen.
“Sparta will ally herself with Persia. The price will be the Greek cities of Asia. We will sell them out to Darius in return for gold and a fleet to finish Athens. Alcibiades will produce this for us. No Spartan, myself and Endius included, could pull it off. That accomplished, Alcibiades will betray us. He must and will. He will move heaven and earth to get home and redeem himself in his countrymen's eyes.
“Now the tricky part. Three forces will seek his destruction. His countrymen who hate him, his enemies in the Spartan camp, and whatever far-seeing Persians recognize the double cross he has in store for them.”
Lysander turned toward me.
“You will keep him alive, Polemidas,” he said, employing my Laconian name. “You and the marines I will hire and you will train.” “You mean until you yourself require his slaughter.”
The Spartan drew up at this. It was clear that neither I nor my hollow righteousness arrested his interest. Yet the question itself bore consideration. For a moment his stony mien relented and, discovering in me not so much a fellow to whom he might confide as a proxy standing in for some wider constituency, met my eye an instant, with regret.
“It will not be myself who requires our friend's extinction, Polemidas, but that solitary god to which he himself proffers worship. “
“And what god is that?”
“Necessity.”
XXVII
At this point in the recounting of Polemides' tale,
[Grandfather interjected] a fortuitous turn transpired. My detectives, Myron and Lado, appeared at my study one evening, beside themselves.
“Sir, we have found her! The woman!”
What woman?
“Eunice! The woman of your client, the assassin.”
This was indeed news, as I had from Polemides believed her dead. She is here, Myron insisted, with her children, and has agreed-for a sum-to speak.
An interview was arranged and conducted at my town house in the Piraeus. Little came of it, however, beyond the discovery, achieved serendipitously when she misspoke herself, that she, Eunice, was known to and known by that Colophon the son of Hestiodorus who had brought the charges of murder against Polemides. More, Eunice confirmed, she had herself witnessed the killing, which took place at a kapeleion, a rough tavern, at Samos during the twenty-third year of the war. Though I pressed vigorously, she would speak no more to either subject and in fact made off in such haste as not even to collect her fee. Nor had she, or an agent, returned to claim it.
Of this I informed Polemides at our interview next day at the prison. He reacted without surprise to this report of the presence in Athens of the mother of his children. 'Nothing about her surprises me.” Did he wish to see his son and daughter? Perhaps I could prevail upon Eunice, compensate her if necessary, to effect a reunion. The prisoner's response abashed me. 'Did you actually see the children? Did she state categorically that she had them?” When I replied in the negative, he grunted and broke the matter off. The best I could deduce, more from the man's evasions than his attestations, was that boy and girl had last been in his custody, flown from their mother's. This had been within the year apparently, at Acharnae, on Polemides' family estate, Road's Turn.
I pressed the query. If indeed I could locate the children, would their appearance be welcome?
“Let them not see me in this place.”
There was no window in the cell but an opening in the roof through which a rectangle of sunlight fell upon the northern wall.
Polemides turned away to this spot, which he could reach shackled as he was, then faced back toward me. At once I recalled seeing him, years past. In much the same posture, with the identical expression, he had stood in armor in the bows of a longboat as its bumpers touched at Samos and he stepped off onto the dock, which that forenoon teemed with sailors and soldiers in the thousands, seething with anticipation. Three marines followed Polemides, one fore and two aft. Shielded by these advanced onto the quay Alcibiades. “You were his bodyguard, Polemides,” I remarked this unexpected recall. “I remember you. On the quay at Samos, the day he came back.” The prisoner did not react, held, I felt, by reflection upon his children, now nearly grown no doubt, and whatever disquietude preoccupied him on their account. I, however, struck by this recollected vision, felt myself piped back to that site and that forenoon.
The fleet lay at Samos then. The war was in its twenty-first year.
The time was seven, perhaps eight months, subsequent to the conversations in Sparta which our narrator had last recounted.
Let me recite briefly events in the interval.
Alcibiades, as our client related, had indeed sailed from Lacedaemon to Ionia, he and the Spartan Chalcideus, now fleet admiral of the Peloponnesian navy. This force was then a ragtag regatta of outdated triremes and penteconters contributed by Sparta's allies, primarily Corinth, Elis, and Zacynthus, with a few galleys built at Gythieum and Epidauris Limera and crewed by volunteers, mostly fishermen and draft evaders. There was not a Peer in the lot.
Nonetheless within two months Alcibiades and Chalcideus brought into revolt against Athens not only Chios, with her squadrons of warships (who herself brought over Anaia, Lebedos, and Aerae), but Erythrae, Miletus, Lesbos, Teos, and Clazomenae as well as Ephesus, with her great harbor, later Lysander's bastion.
By these coups Alcibiades had deprived Athens of a third of the tribute of her empire, critically needed in the wake of Syracuse.
Worse, these strongholds, now in enemy hands, threatened the grain routes from the Pontus, without whose produce Athens could not survive.
If these colors were not grim enough, reports now came that Alcibiades had made contact with the Persian governor Tissaphernes and brought him under his spell. Tissaphernes was satrap of Lydia and Caria under Darius the King. In addition to limitless treasure, he commanded the war fleet of Phoenicia, two hundred and thirty triremes (when Athens could man little above a hundred) crewed by Sidonians and Tyrians, the finest sailors of the East. Should Alcibiades incite his patron to bring these up on the Spartan side, the sequence of Athens' doom would be ordained.
The lone report which stirred promise involved Alcibiades as well. This was the gossip that he had seduced and impregnated the lady Timaea, wife of the Spartan king, Agis. Nor did this gentlewoman, reports testified, exert care to conceal the affair.
While in public she called the babe in her womb Leotychidas, in private she named him Alcibiades.
She was out of her head in love with the man.
Why did this inspirit us at home? Because it held out hope that Alcibiades could not keep from his old tricks and would fall inevitably by his own hand, beneath the rage of Agis and the party of hard-line Spartans.
This of course is exactly what happened. Within five months he had added sentence of death, pronounced from Sparta, to that same distinction already worn of Athens.
