possess to be effective one man like Lion who is unacquainted with fear, who arises cheerful each morning despite all hardship, ready to shoulder another's load with a laugh and turn his hand to all tasks, however mean or humble. A unit lacking a man like Lion will never endure, while one with such a mate may be beaten but never broken.
Our father's letters caught up to us at Potidaea. We were summoned, Lion and I, to the tent of Paches' adjutant, a captain of Aexone whose name I cannot recall. The officer read aloud two pleas of our father, confirming my brother's age at sixteen years three months and pleading for his immediate discharge, with a pledge to pay all fines and fees of transport. “What have you to say, young man?” our captain demanded.
Lion straightened to his full height, such as it was, and swore by the waters of Styx that his years were not only twenty but twenty-three. Our father, he testified, though well-meaning, had come unhinged following the devastation of our district and now feared, understandably, the loss of his sons; thus this appeal from Athens, presented with such touching and plausible conviction.
When the captain summoned witnesses from our home district who testified to the truth of the letter, Lion refused to buckle. It was not age that made a soldier, but passion and heart! Our commander cut him short. I have never seen one so inconsolable as Lion; the sight was almost comical of him slouching aboard the galley home.
Payout for my brother's misdemeanor fell upon me, as it should, his elder. I was fined three months' pay and banished from line duty, assigned command of a platoon of boys, foresters. We were issued not arms but axes and packed off with the mules and logging sledges.
You were at Potidaea, Jason. I remember you. You came in with Eurymedon in the terminal spring, the squadrons bearing the relief parties of the cavalry and the replacements for the assault troops carried off by the plague. You were lucky. You missed the winter.
Winter in our fathers' time was the off-season. Who even dreamt of fighting in the snow and ice? Summer was the time of war; in Sparta men didn't even have a word for summer; they called it strateiorion, campaigning season. But a siege cannot be prosecuted in sunshine only. Thus a new calendar for a new kind of war.
It was a porous siege. On the line the troops had more intercourse with the enemy than with their own countrymen. We sold food and firewood; the Potidaeans traded treasure. Gold first, then jewelry and linen. They sold their armor and their swords.
From midwinter they were peddling their daughters.
By the gods, it was cold up there. Piss steamed on the air and turned to ice before it hit the dirt. To dress in armor made the skin peel in patches where it touched the freezing bronze. The glory of dying for one's country lost whatever pale luster it had possessed, especially to croak of plague or pestilence or some perverse mischance, a blind-luck bows hot lobbed from a battlement, only to have the campaign decided in spring by treaty and everyone suddenly allies again. We camped there, frozen and miserable, while the city of the Potidaeans loomed at the neck of the promontory, frozen and miserable as we.
The three northern gates, those that gave out upon the landward side, stood barred only in daylight. With nightfall they became avenues of skimmers, scavengers, and scum. You could see their tracks in the snow, broad as boulevards. Our company was commanded by a bribe-commissioned captain named Gnossos.
Here is what we did. For every eight trees logged, we turned over four to the army; the other four went to the foe. They paid our captain in women. Not whores but respectable wives and daughters of the city. They were ploughing us for firewood. I refused to permit my lads to take part in these orgies, in which it was not uncommon for one female to service a dozen men before returning through and under the walls to the city. Such degeneracy, countenanced by their superior, would debase what little warrior spirit these striplings possessed. In addition, overscrupulous as this may sound from a man of my subsequent deeds, I could not bear to witness the ravagement of person this commerce inflicted on the women themselves.
I was hauled up for this. Behind my back my bucks began calling me “the Spartan.” It was put about that I sided secretly with the foe and that my prudish intransigence was not only undermining the morale of youth but, defying as it did my commander's ordinance, was at best insubordination and at worst treason. In a clash with my captain the word “procurer” escaped my lips. I was cashiered.
I went for aid to Alcibiades. The army had engaged the enemy in full strength that autumn, an attempted breakout in force requiring the mobilization of our entire corps; Alcibiades had distinguished himself in this action and in fact been awarded the prize of valor, judged the bravest of the six thousand upon the field.
It took several months for the crown and suit of armor to be delivered. In fact he had just received the former this evening when I approached. He was celebrating with his tentmates.
Any encampment massed upon one site for a prolonged interval becomes, as you know, Jason, a city of its own. Its market becomes the agora, its training fields the gymnasium. The polis, battling boredom, throws up its own diversions and distractions, its characters and its clowns. There is a good part of town and a bad, a neighborhood one enters at his peril and a precinct of privilege and fame, which exercises its spell over all. Invariably one tent establishes itself for the brilliance of its occupants as the epicenter of the camp.
Alcibiades' tent, Aspasia Three (the main streets of the seven fortified camps ringing the city had been named each after a famed courtesan of Athens), had become this nexus. This was in consequence not alone of his celebrity but of the wit and converse of his tentmates, who included in their number of sixteen your own master Socrates (renowned then less as a philosopher than a doughty and stalwart campaigner, forty years of age), the celebrated actor Alcaeus, Mantitheus the Olympic boxer, and Acumenus the physician. These fellows were the most fun.
Everyone wanted to be with them. An invitation to dine at Aspasia Three was more highly prized than a decoration. For that reason I had avoided Alcibiades, not wishing to push myself uninvited upon him and also because I judged the status of our friendship to be cordial but remote.
Now, however, the gravity of my situation compelled me to come forward. I waited till that hour when the evening meal would be concluded, then hiked the mile to Aspasia Camp, seeking only a few moments of Alcibiades' time, perhaps to speak with him outside the tent and get him to put in a word for me with the brass.
I had thought I could simply rap at the post and get it over with.
To my surprise, and in contrast to the other snug-battened precincts of the camp whose lanes stood dark and vacated save the odd trooper dashing from one shelter to another in the cold, the court fronting Alcibiades' tent burned bright with torch and brazier, the intersection of the lanes milling gaily with a motley of off-duty officers and infantrymen, wine sellers, jugglers, sweets bakers, a party of acrobats in midperformance upon a stage of logs, and a professional fool, not to mention a number of gap-toothed trollops from the whores' camp, loitering in high spirits. The aroma of spitted meat augmented the cheer; bonfires blazed upon the earth, which had thawed and was churned by the press of celebrants. As I wedged through the crush, the tent flaps parted and there emerged to the air the most dazzling specimen of womankind I had ever seen.
Her hair was russet; her eyes of such violet they seemed to flash like diadems in the torchlight. She was mantled crown to toe in sable and escorted by two cavalry officers, six-footers, clad in the ermine-fringed cloaks of the enemy. Of the besiegers none attempted to lay hands upon them; in fact our lads drew the party's mounts before them, boosting them onto the horses' backs.
The lady trotted off not in the direction of the city, but up the slope toward that bluff called the Asclepium where, I later learned, a cottage of spruce had been erected for her use and her bodyguards'.
“That's Cleonice,” a fried-onion vendor volunteered.
“Alcibiades' girl.”
I would doubtless have remained marooned on the doorstep all night had not my host's cousin Euryptolemus chanced to pass, seeking the tent, and, recognizing me, tugged me forward. He informed me in merry spirits that the gentlewoman Cleonice was the wife of Machaon, the wealthiest citizen of Potidaea. Alcibiades had initiated a liaison with the lady, seeking through her husband to facilitate the betrayal of the town from within. “Now she's fallen in love with him and refuses to go home. She even claims to be carrying his child. What can one do?”
Euryptolemus, whom his companions called Euro, instructed me to wait while he ducked inside. Moments later I heard Alcibiades' laughter; the flaps parted and I found myself tugged clear of the mob and welcomed to the warmth within. “Pommo, my friend, where have you been keeping yourself? Not alone in the woods with those innocent boys!”
Alcibiades, I was informed, had appointed himself master of revels. He sat upon the bench of honor, with his crown before him, cheeks flushed with wine. He had been wounded; beneath his tunic one could see his wrapped ribs. He introduced me as his mate of the Boilers and ordered a seat and a bowl of wine. He had heard of my
