me.
“You.”
This was his solitary word.
“What has happened?” I heard myself cry.
Stones screamed past my ears. “You are not welcome here.”
I let fall kit and arms and, spreading palms wide, beseeched clemency in the name of the gods.
“May hell take you,” Anticles spat, “and the evil you have brought upon our house!”
Both brothers advanced. Even the dikers rose. I could hear the dogs clamoring.
“Where is Aurore? What has happened?”
“Get quit, thou villain!”
A stone of Theodorus struck my hip.
I begged the brothers to tell me what had happened. Let me speak to Aurore. “She is my wife, and the child my own.”
“Attend them there.” Theodorus indicated the tombs.
All who have been soldiers know these, Jason: such hours when pain of flesh or spirit surpasses the heart's capacity to endure it. I shook myself, as in a nightmare. How could these, my brothers, advance upon me with such hatred? How could those wreaths be for them I so loved?
“Leave this country!” Anticles strode upon me, brandishing his staff. “By the gods, if you cross again within my sight, that hour will end your life or mine.”
I withdrew. Where the farm's limit fell away to the bay, two lads of the neighbor's were clearing brush. From them I learned that my bride had succumbed two months previous. Poisoned. The child in her womb had perished with her.
Somehow it had become post noon. I mounted the hill again. At the fence the dogs cut me off in a pack. Anticles roared down, horseback.
“What may I do, brother,” I beseeched him, “to requite this woe…
He made no answer, only wheeled his mount in place, regarding him who stood beneath with such rue as one may donate not to another of humankind, but to a wraith or specter, life-fled yet present, denied repose beneath the earth.
“You have stolen the sun from our sky, you and he who sent you.
May your days, and his, be ever as lightless as you have made ours. ”
XLIV
Polemides broke off at this point and was unable for long moments to continue. When at length he recovered himself, he declared that he had had a change of heart regarding his trial. He no longer wished to contest the indictment; he would plead guilty.
He had been deliberating upon this for some time, he acknowledged, but had not until this moment come to it as the course of honor. His lone regret was that his affairs had consumed so much of my time, proffered, he acknowledged, with such generosity and regard. He begged my pardon.
I was seized with outrage at this defection and lit into the man in fury. How dare he exploit the empathy of my heart and defame by enlisting it in his cause the memory of beloved comrades? Did he think I undertook this chore lightly? Because I admired him or deemed him worthy of deliverance? I despised him and all he had done, I declared, and had donated my advocacy only that the narration of his self-dishonorment may serve as a manifest of infamy to our countrymen. His cause had ceased to be his own the moment he sounded me to assist him; how dare he break off shy of the mark? Yes, die, I heard my voice exclaim, and good riddance! I strode to the door and pounded upon it, calling for the turnkey.
Naught but echo met my halloo. It was the hour of the man's supper, I realized; he would be across the way at the refectory. I could hear our client behind me, chuckling. “It seems you have become a prisoner as well, my friend.”
“You are a cur, Polemides.”
“I never pretended otherwise, mate.”
I turned back, already recognizing beneath wrath's receding flush how profoundly I had come to care for this villain. The veteran's features declined into a smile. He acknowledged the aptness of the verdict I had pronounced upon him, remarking that its single shortcoming was its failure to go far enough.
He continued not with words, but by withdrawing from his chest two articles of correspondence which, one could not but infer from the way he handled them, he had re-perused recently and whose contents had affected him profoundly. He passed them to me.
“Sit down, my friend. You're going nowhere for a while anyway.” The first item was a letter from him to his great-aunt Daphne, dated some months subsequent to the final destruction of the Athenian fleet at Aegospotami, that calamity which made inevitable the city's capitulation and, after twenty-seven years, her defeat at the hands of the Spartans and their Persian and Peloponnesian allies.
At that time Polemides, he told me now, stood in the service of Lysander, with convictions for treason and murder imposed from his homeland. He writes to his aunt at Athens, instructing her to prepare for the siege and surrender to come:
… factions among our countrymen will nominate themselves to procure what they will call the Peace. The nation's sovereignty will be given over; her fleet destroyed; Long Walls torn down. A puppet government of collaborators will be imposed. Acts of reprisal will follow. Perhaps by my return I may mitigate, at least for you and our family, the effects of the lawlessness which is certain to ensue.
You must get out of the city, Aunt, to the land. Take Lion's children. Can you locate my own? Please, get them to safety. The seal on this letter is that of Lysander's staff. It will protect you, but don't use it unless the issue is life-and-death, for others, our countrymen, will make you pay later.
Lastly, my dear, do not be present when Lysander's squadrons enter the Piraeus or you will see that which no patriot as yourself may bear without heartbreak: the child you raised, in the scarlet of the foe. I am beyond love of country and long past shame. I act only as others will and have, to preserve my own.
His aunt replies:
Thou shameless soul! How dare you apply care for my person as pretext for your perfidy? I wish you had perished in the quarries, or in some nameless scrape where you could still be called your father's son and not the agent of infamy you have so wickedly shown yourself to be. God grant I never look upon your face again.
You no longer exist for me. I have no nephew.
I passed the correspondence back to Polemides. His aspect conveyed clearly that he shared this condemnation articulated by his aunt, and to such a depth as to preclude contravention, at least now, at this hour. I felt him slip from me as a corpse upon dark water, when the boat hook fails of purchase and one's vessel, driven by its way, passes on, to put about no more.
The jailer returned; I was released. I crossed the Iron Court to Socrates' cell and passed, in that company, the remainder of the evening. Our master's days were now down to three. The sacred ship returning from Delos had been sighted off Sounium that morn; her arrival at Athens would put a period to the reprieve which had thus far postponed his execution. One anticipated the vessel this night. She did not turn up, however. A dream of Socrates had predicted this. A fair woman in white robes had appeared to him, he recounted to us gathered that evening, and addressing him by name, declared,
To the pleasant land of Phthia
On the third day shalt thou come.
A terrible despair gripped my heart, communicated in part from Polemides, whose recollection of the hours of our country's fall coincided with the pending execution of my master, which to me stood as a second and more calamitous overthrow, for it forecast, I felt, not alone the passing of our sovereignty but the ideal of democracy herself.
