constituted one creature of spectacular nobility, and both knew it.
We reached Alcibiades' camp that night. Endius was there, with a party of Peers, colonel or higher. Seuthes had ridden to the interior, raiding. Alcibiades commanded four nations, thirty thousand men, the greatest army west of Persepolis.
We rode out next day to observe the training. The horse troops present were Odrysian and Paeonian, five thousand, with another ten thousand Scythian archers and peltasts. The Greek officers who served as cadre had rigged a mock fort on a strongpoint of the plain, which expanse spread calf-deep in snow, and across which ranged that army of wild dogs which track the Thracian hordes, scavenging their scraps. The exercise called for two wings of cavalry to assault from the south, upbeat, while the third struck from the north, supported by the infantry. In no time it broke down to blood madness. The Thracians could not grasp the concept of practice. They began firing in earnest and must be waved off by frantic Greek officers. The savages possessed one object only: to impress their princes with their individual daring and horsemanship. One espied any number standing atop their mounts at full gallop, slinging lances and axes; others clung side-style, firing arrows beneath their animals' necks. Only a miracle prevented a bloodbath, and now, drill aborted, each bogtrotter wanted his weapons back. Into the fracas these desperadoes descended, brawling merrily over their kit while calling in kin and kind to back them.
The carousal and copulation after dark defied depiction.
Bonfires made boulevards across the plain, ringed with figures capering ecstatically to tom-tom and cymbal. One could not but fall in love with these wild, free fellows. But as one picked his way across the camp, stepping over the forms of sodden fornicating louts, he understood why these, the most numerous and valorous warriors on earth, had never carved a scratch on the waxboard of history. Their dogs possessed more discipline.
I returned with Endius and Telamon to the podilion where Alcibiades remained awake. These huts of hide and turf are circular, low and wonderfully commodious, excavated so that one descends as to a badger's den. A soup- pot fire keeps them cozy even in a blizzard. Mantitheus and Diotimus were there, with the Cat's Eyes, Damon and Nestorides, now fur-swathed, and about a dozen I recognized as officers, good ones, of the Samos fleet.
“Welcome, outlaws and pirates!” Alcibiades greeted the party.
The politics went on all night. I snoozed between two bearhounds.
At last near dawn the parley broke, and Alcibiades, ascending through the smoke, motioned me outside to the air.
He had learned of my bride's decease and my own warrant of murder. There was nothing to be said and he didn't try. Rather he tramped at my side on the ground frozen to iron. I have never
experienced trepidation, in battle or at hazard of any kind, as in his presence. Despite all, one feared disappointing him. Do you understand, Jason? His will was so formidable, his intelligence so keen, that one must summon all resource just to take counsel and not play the booby. He indicated the men in slumber about the camp. “What do you think of them?”
“As what?”
His laugh shot a plume upon the air.
“As fighters. As an army.”
“Can you be serious?”
He made his case as we walked. The element Athens has lacked, debarring her from exploiting her success at sea, is cavalry. You forget money, I appended.
“Cavalry produces money,” Alcibiades retorted. “Give me Sardis and I'll coin money, enough to bear us to Susa and set us in camp before Persepolis.”
Now it was I who laughed. “And who will train these invincible battalions?”
“You of course.” He set his hand upon my shoulder. “And your mate Telamon and the other Greek and Macedonian officers I have here already and those who will come.”
We had mounted to a summit from which, across forty miles, could be glimpsed the lightening sea. Two forces contended for the Aegean, Alcibiades testified: Athens on one hand, Persia and Sparta on the other. “Here is a third force-and irresistible. Which nation outnumbers the Thracian? Which is more warlike? Who possesses more horse, or may strike more swiftly? Thrace brings all these, lacking only…”
“You.”
A third power allied with either side must tip the balance, he declared. He was in secret negotiation now with the Persian Tissaphernes, who had had his wings clipped by Cyrus and burned to pay him back. “Tissaphernes hates Lysander and will sow that malice with the Crown, against which Cyrus must advance, as is self-evident, the instant of King Darius' death. This is why the prince wraps himself in Lysander's mantle. But his plan will miscarry. Spartans may take Persian gold but never Persian service; here is a draught not even Lysander can make them swallow. He has earned Endius' gall by throwing him over for Agis.
Neither can move without Athens, and Athens, quit of me, possesses none with the stomach to speak aloud the name Lacedaemon. Each for his own reasons must look to a Third Power, or conjure one if it did not exist.”
But how would he bring in Athens? “This is a bridge twice burned, Alcibiades. The demos will never accede to a regime, of whatever might or promise, presided over by you.”
He did not answer at once, rather glanced abroad the camp, across whose frost-bound sprawl squires, arising, began now to beat the snow from their master's tents, while grooms, thumping limbs across fleece-mantled chests, spread fodder for the horses and transport beasts, which in turn set up that cacophony of bawl and bray which is to the campaigner as the cock's crow to the husbandman.
Any other, scanning this hyperborean stadium, must query that fate which had driven him, after twenty-six years of war, to these barrens at this remove from civilization's quick. Yet for him such notion was so alien as to be unthinkable. That site on which he stood was ever, and must be ever, the hub and axis of the universe.
“One has no need of Athens. I will draw her best to me, one man at a time, as I have drawn you. Look there to the camp. I already claim the ablest marine cadre in the world, the boldest cavalry commanders, the most skilled shipwrights. Money will buy sailors.
Seuthes' timber will build ships.”
Yes, if you can control him.
“Seuthes is keen, Pommo, but he is a savage in awe of me. Where I have moved throughout the war, the nexus of enterprise has followed. Now it will follow me to Thrace; I will compel it. Seuthes cannot summon it on his own and he knows it. For the time being this affords me influence. The army may be his, but mark to whom it turns for command.”
He indicated the awakening camp.
“Alcibiades!”
“Commander!”
Captains hailed him; mounted officers spurred his way; others advanced at the double to receive his orders.
“We will take the straits,” Alcibiades continued, meaning the Propontis at Byzantium, which conquest he had already accomplished with a tenth these numbers. “But we will not cut off Athens' grain or exact concessions, rather continue to supply her at our whim.”
He would do it, I could see, and I must with him. But who will hold these savages, who worship the wind and come and go as ungovernably? “Even yourself, Alcibiades, are not so vain as to imagine they will stick for you.”
He regarded me wryly. “I'm disappointed in you, old friend. Can you be as blind as these Thracians to what stares you, and them, in the face?”
And what would that be?
“Their own greatness.”
He meant he would lift them to it. “They will not stay for my destiny, Pommo, but their own. For their nation poises like an eagle at the brink of the sky, lacking only the daring to launch and ascend. I will give them that. And when they have seized it, by all the gods, the feats they will perform will transfigure the world.”
You have heard the stories, Jason, which say he had gone mad, or native. He danced all night, men claimed, to cymbal and timbrel.
Liquor taken neat had stolen his wits. I myself saw his horse tethered in an alder copse alongside Alexandra's. It was fact that Seuthes grew distant, then hostile. Athens wooed the prince shamelessly, granting
