Our men cried his name and hurled themselves at the champions who defended him. The prince's knights dueled with breathtaking valor, the riders' prowess exceeded only by that of their mounts, specimens trained to maintain cohesion flank to flank and to rear and strike both with fore hooves and the spiked armor on their chests. The look in their eyes I shall never forget.
“Kill him!” Antiochus bellowed from Tyche's stern.
Now through the mob punched cavalry and heavy armor, Alcibiades and Adeimantus. Marines pressed about, crying that they had Prince Cyrus trapped. At once an alteration overcame our commander both wondrous and profound. Though beneath his breastplate his clavicle had been fractured, as we learned later, such an injury as would carry away any man with incapacity and pain, he straightened and elevated his eighteen-pound shield upon that forearm above which the bone had been shattered.
He went after the prince. So did everyone. We were driven, all, before that tide which was the mass of flesh and armor being propelled toward the Pteron's extremity by the advancing press of Spartan and Peloponnesian reinforcements surging from the shore.
Now came Lysander at these battalions' fore. He called to Cyrus to make for him. Break through, I will preserve you! A space separated the two, packed shield-to-shield with Athenian marines, such orphans as myself off marooned men-of-war and our commanders, Alcibiades and Adeimantus with the last of the cavalry. Ships roared, afire port and starboard; warhorses' muzzles seemed to belch live steam; men's cries ascended in a din ungodly.
“Do you see, men of Greece?” Alcibiades cried toward the foe. “A Spartan fights at the barbarian's shoulder!”
“For freedom from thou, prideful villain!” Lysander bawled back.
The Spartan dug his knees into his mount and slung, so proximate across the press that the shaft of his javelin traversed barely thrice its length before seating with thunderous concussion upon his enemy's shield. Alcibiades took the stroke flush on his shattered arm. The warhead tore through the bronze and split the oak beneath, penetrating to a handsbreadth of his flesh.
“He is wounded!”
Men of both sides cried in exigency, Spartans and Persians rallying to press for the kill; Athenians and allies closing yet more densely, if that were possible, to erect a wall of their own flesh before their commander. An infantryman at Alcibiades' side elevated before him the shield his strength could no longer bear.
Darts transfixed the hero's back. Shafts riddled Alcibiades' mount.
Clouds flew about his head.
Lysander's knights heaved upon him. Alcibiades slung his ax across a sward of plumes and pike blades. I myself was within feet of the Spartan, so close I could see his beard beneath the cheek pieces of his helmet, as he beat the weapon apart with his shield.
“Sling there, Lysander!” Alcibiades bellowed, indicating Prince Cyrus. “Sling there and stand with Leonidas!”
He meant of course the Spartan king who had fallen with such valor at Thermopylae, two generations past, defending Greece from the Persian.
Lysander frothed with fury. “Can you court the crowd even now, thou actor!”
“He is here, thy king Leonidas-and marks thou traitor to Greece!”
Our marines made a last rush for Cyrus. Missiles rained from ships and seawall; prince and knights fell back. uKili him!”
Antiochus trumpeted above the melee. The youth gave place toward the Pteron's end, driven by the Athenian press.
“Men of Persia,” Cyrus cried in his tongue (or so it was translated for us later), “it is up to you now to decide if your prince will live or die.”
Without a heartbeat's demurral Cyrus' champions flung themselves and their steeds upon the spearpoints of the Athenians, driving these back by their magnificent sacrifice and creating an interval for their master. Cyrus spurred. Prince and mount broke through, lapped in deliverance by the bronze of Spartan knights.
Here came the terminal push. Mass against mass, each division straining to hurl the other into the sea. All utterance ceased. Men did not shout or even groan. Even the horses no longer made cry, but that sound arose which constrains all who have known battle to start from their slumber in terror.
The foe were too many, we too few.
We fell back. The ships took us off. The assault was over.
Alcibiades got off aboard Tyche. Men pressed about him, Antiochus recounted to me later, motioning toward the conflagration and acclaiming his triumph.
He rejoined nothing at that hour. Only past dawn ashore at Samos, bathed and bound by the surgeons, did he summon to his side, in confidence and apart, Adeimantus, Aristocrates, Antiochus, Mantitheus, and myself. We must take thought now, he admonished, for our lives apart from him.
“With this night,” he said, “my star has fallen.” There is an anecdote of Lysander in the aftercourse of the battle. It is recounted that on remuster at the Artemisium, when reports accounted forty-four of eighty-seven triremes burned or destroyed, with the shipyards, repair works, and all construction ramparts of the Pteron, he was confronted not alone by Prince Cyrus, who must account the produce of his father's gold, but by representatives of the Spartan ephorate, technically his superiors, who chanced to be present from the home government.
“And what do you call this, Lysander?” these officers demanded of their admiral, indicating the ruin of the port.
“I call it what it is,” Lysander is said to have replied. “Victory.”
XLII
These journals of the younger Pericles [Grandfather continued] it has been my honor to preserve, along with this ensign of Calliope, sacrificed subsequently in the fight at the Blue Rocks, and Endeavor, whose helm was his at the Arginousai Islands. This was the last command he ever held. But such, my grandson, we shall get to presently.
To return to Polemides, whom we left at the inception of the raid. He had successfully fled Ephesus, he told me, exploiting darkness and the disorder wrought by the assault. His burns and their attendant shock caught up with him, however, in the country south of the city. He must seek cover.
In the raid's wake Lysander's coast guard had doubled watches and patrols. Rewards were posted for all stragglers of the Athenians; locals, boys, and even women swelled the manhunts.
Polemides survived on the flesh of mice and lizards spiked in the canals in which he had gone to ground, and leeks and radishes grubbed at night from the kitchen gardens of housedames.
Warships of Athens transited on night reconnaissance; he made signal and once attempted swimming out, but his strength failed.
He hid, he said, like a rat.
The term of his bride Aurore came and went. He had a child now or so presumed, but did not dare daylight, seeking a ship or even to post a letter. Though he declined as ever to confide to me such as he deemed overpersonal, it took scant imagination to conceive his distress, in terror for his life, whose preservation he now sought most desperately for the sake of his bride and child; with the consternation of being unable to reach her side for the birth; and the grief he had occasioned her, who could not know if he even still drew breath.
I was at Athens then. The city was sobered and chastened, groaning awake with a hangover from its bout of passion with Alcibiades. As a respectable matron recinches her girdle and reclaims her dignity after the excesses of the Dionysia, so did the city of Athena shudder and splash its face, embracing collective amnesia. Did we really say that? Do that? Promise that? Those who had capered most shamelessly to their new master's pipes now came to themselves and, repenting this license, snapped out to the bracing chill of abjuration. So that, the more abjectly a
