other arm wrapped about herself, as a child.
“But why am I working myself up over yesterday's spit? She's under the ground and he'll be too. They'll pit him for Alcibiades, and no wriggling free this time.”
I asked if she loved Polemides.
“l love everyone, Cap'n. Can't afford not to.”
The hour was late. Clearly Eunice was as spent as I. I assured her I would speak to Polemides about his son and do all I could to secure her own entry to him, to exhort him in person. I recalled the fee she had left unclaimed and proffered it doubled. Was she certain she wished to brave the street at this hour? I could easily have a room made up for her. She thanked me, but no, better she not distress those with whom she resided. At the gate as I assigned an attendant with a torch to accompany her way, impulse prompted a query.
“Can you enlighten me, madam, with a woman's view of Alcibiades? How did he strike you, not as a general or a personage, but as a man?”
She turned with a smile.
“We race of women crave glory, Cap'n, just as you men. But where does our greatness come? Not from him we conquer but him we bear.”
I was seeking, I said, to understand Timaea of Sparta-the queen who had not only permitted herself to be seduced but boasted of her infidelity.
Eunice discovered no mystery to this occasion. “There wasn't no woman in the world, not Timaea of Sparta or Helen herself, who could stand before that man and not feel the god's command crying from her belly. What children his seed would give me! What sons!”
The woman drew her cowl; then, lifting the veil to set it in place, she paused and turned back.
“Do you really want to know about Pommo?”
I assured her most earnestly I did.
“His heart opened twice in his youth,” she spoke, her glance no longer toward myself but averted soberly aside. “His sister and his bride. When the Plague took 'em, he buried their bones, but not their memory. What woman of flesh can compete with that, sir?
And them both dead, so she can't even talk 'em hard.
“That's him, Cap'n. And it's Athens too. Plague and war took her sons' hope. Yourself too, sir, unless I misread your eyes.”
I absorbed this gravely, struck by its toll of truth.
“If you need anything, madam, make no shame to call. That which I can, I shall.”
She set her veil in place and, turning, made ready to step off.
“Alcibiades gave 'em hope, didn't he, Cap'n? They felt it in their bellies like women, looking past all his faults and crimes. He had eras. He was eras. Nothing less could take the city and make her over new.”
XL
It was fall [Polemides resumed] before Telamon and I reached Miletus, via Aspendus and the Coast Road through Caria. I counted the calendar differently now; not by days, but by Aurore's term. She was due in forty-three days, by the ticks carved in the haft of my nine-footer. I warned my mate not to count on me, for when the hour came I'd be at Samos by her side.
“Hope is a crime against heaven,” Telamon reproved me as we trekked the gale-buffeted highway, where you packed your shield inboard at morning and outboard after noon and which rumbled at all hours with enemy caravans trucking war materiel and regiments of cavalry and foot. Every bridgehead was being outposted, every landing site fortified. “You were superb once, Pommo, because you despised your life. Now hope has made you worthless. I should quit you, and would but for our history.”
The coast towns through Caria were all Spartan-garrisoned.
They had changed, Miletus most of all. Under Athens the city had celebrated a festival called the Feast of Flags. Housewives draped the lanes with jacks and standards; guilds and brotherhoods massed in the squares; the town was gay night long with street dances and torch races and the like. Now that was over.
Housefronts squatted, sallow and stark. On the docks men worked their business and nothing more. You wore red, everyone, some rag or kerchief to show obeisance to Sparta. The greeting was no longer “Artemis,” the goddess's blessing, but “Freedom!” as from Athens' tyranny. This salutation was compulsory.
The Spartan garrisons ruled under martial law, with a curfew, but the affairs of the cities were run day to day by the Tens. These were political committees of the wealthier citizens, estate holders and such, which answered not to Sparta, but to Lysander. Under Athenian rule, civil cases must be tried at Athens, where the vultures of the courts picked the colonials clean. Now such shenanigans looked benign. In Lysander's courts each civil trespass was reckoned a crime of war. Breach of contract was dereliction, laziness treason. Even if the Tens wished to be fair, in a boundary dispute, say, between a crofter and his landlord, a lenient judgment might set them up for denunciation as democrats, partial to Athens. The fist must fall hard.
All Ionia had become a camp of war. Lysander had made dead ends of all other trades. Nor did he abide indiscipline within his company. Corporal punishment dominated; every quay sprouted its stocks and whipping post. One heard the boatswain's cry, “Fall in to witness punishment”; the lanes rang with the swish of the birch and the crack of the cat. Along the wharves laggards must labor in twenty-pound collars or shuffle about, hobbled by shackle-and-drag. Delinquents stood at attention daylong with iron anchors on their shoulders.
We saw Lysander gallop past once, on the Coast Highway south of Clazomenae. His party was a dozen, preceded by a guard of Royal Persian Horse, Prince Cyrus' men. You had to salute as he passed, or the buck cavalrymen would rough you up. Telamon admired Lysander. He was a professional. He had whipped this mob of civilians into a corps of fighters and taught them to fear him more than the foe. “Freedom!” We greeted mates on the street, a red rag round our necks.
Lysander had moved his bastion to Ephesus. The place was magnificent. Telamon sought out his old commander Etymocles, in whose service he technically remained. This officer's term had expired, however; he had been rotated home, replaced by Teleutias, who would later raid the Piraeus to such brilliant effect.
“Are you spies?” was the Spartan's opening query.
“Only him,” replied my mate.
“Blast! I had hoped to spit you both.”
Teleutias had other foxes to harry; he dispatched us straight to Lysander. The navarch, it turned out, had intelligence of both our cases, including my indictment and flight. I had been convicted, he informed me. I had not known this. He laughed. He was handsome, I had forgotten how much so, and his self-assurance, abundant in the days when he served without portfolio, appeared amplified tenfold by his accession to supreme command.
“You are sent by Alcibiades,” he observed without rancor. “With what instructions-my assassination?”
“To attest, sir, the fidelity of his call for alliance against the Persian and the faith of his overtures to you.”
“Yes,” Lysander observed, scanning his papers, “I have this from Endius in detail, and two other covert embassies from your master.” His glance searched mine, marking offense at that terminal word. With effort I governed my aspect. As for Telamon, the insult hadn't been coined which could induce him to renounce self- command.
How were we fixed for cash? Lysander scribbled a chit. He ordered his Persian aide, in Persian, to secure us accommodation, at the six level, for colonels.
“The Games of Artemis will be celebrated day after tomorrow; I will address the army. Be in attendance. Alcibiades shall have his answer at that time.”
Ephesus, as you know, is one of the great harbors of the East.
That massive seawall called the Pteron, the Wing, is a wonder of the world. At that time eight hundred of its ultimate eleven hundred yards had been completed, broad enough topside for two teams to pass abreast. Scaffolding sheathed the entire extent of construction, with cofferdams at intervals to sink the footings. The sea
