LII
I passed Socrates' final day [Grandfather continued] in his cell with the others. I was exhausted and dozed. I had this dream: Weary and wishing to attend our master with the clearheadedness he deserved, I hunted through the prison for a recess in which to catch a catnap. My search delivered me to the carpenter's loft. There, horizontal, spread the tympanon on which Polemides would this day meet his end. “Go ahead, sir.” The carpenter motioned me in. “Take a snooze.” I lay down and fell at once into a blissful slumber. I awoke with a start, however, to discover officers binding me to the instrument. My wrists and ankles were fettered beneath the cramp irons; the chain strangled me about the throat. “You've got the wrong man!” I shouted. But my cry was throttled by the iron. “I'm the wrong man! You've got the wrong man!”
I snapped-to to discover myself in Socrates' cell. I had cried out and disquieted him. He had taken the hemlock already, I was informed, and, awaiting its effect, had settled to rest upon his pallet, compassed by those who loved him, his face shrouded beneath a cloth. I begged the company's pardon. It was clear that agitation was the last thing our master needed. In distress I excused myself and hastened from the cell.
It was late in the day. As I emerged at the head of the Iron Court, I glimpsed a woman and a boy vacating toward the vestibule.
Eunice. This was odd, as Polemides had thus far refused to see her.
Had something happened?
At once the lad reappeared. Polemides' son Nicolaus. He had not been departing, only assisting his mother upon her way. He strode straight up to me and took my hand, narrating his gratitude for my exertions on his father's behalf. A sea change had overtaken the youth. Though lank and cranelike as ever, he had acceded to manhood. He greeted me equal-to-equal, so much so that I found myself abashed and, seeking to allay what I imagined to be his distress, addressed him to this effect: that though his mother had been the engine of this grief, he must recall that her object was his own preservation, that is, to keep him from harm, running off to war.
The boy regarded me queerly. “That is not how the land lies at all, sir. Has my father not told you?”
His mother, the lad insisted, had not engineered anything. She was no instigator of this prosecution but its pawn. That perjurer Colophon who had brought suit against my father, the youth said, acted as stooge for those who had hired him, Polemides, during the reign of the Thirty, to assassinate Alcibiades.
“These villains, learning of my father's return to the city, feared exposure for their crimes. They have put the squeeze on my mother, reckoning her vulnerable as a noncitizen, and compelled her to provide particulars of that accidental homicide in Samos, years past, by which the rogues have secured my father's sentence of death.”
Polemides had delivered his confession, the lad informed me, in return for a warranty of citizenship for Eunice and the children, made to him in secret by his prosecutors, who apparently possessed the sway to pull it off. He had been loath to reveal this to me lest I, in outrage at the cost to himself, seek to expose it.
There is a bench beside the steps which lead from the Iron Court. Weariness now overcame me. I must sit. The lad took the place at my side. Darkness fell. Brands were lit and set within their hangers.
I came to myself after some while, roused by a commotion across the cloister. The keeper stood in heated skirmish with Socrates' dear friend, Simmias of Thebes, who had this moment been summoned apparently from the cell. Had the master expired?
I crossed at once with the boy. The porter now joined this affray, whose core of contention was, to my puzzlement, horses. “You may have hired them, sir,” porter and keeper protested to Simmias,
“but it's our necks if they're found out.”
Simmias tugged me aside in consternation. “By the gods, I have cocked up, Jason.”
Some days earlier, he explained, confident of securing Socrates' assent to a design of escape, Simmias had engaged several gentlemen of dubious reputation to hire mounts and purchase the silence of guards and informers. This course he had set in motion, Simmias accounted, before Socrates had with such finality repudiated it. “Can you credit it, Jason? With all else the scheme has slipped my mind entirely!”
“I don't understand, Simmias.”
“Horses and escorts are here! What shall I do?”
Simmias was clearly distraught; no doubt he had been fetched from Socrates' cell only moments prior, by the porter in a state of alarm and demanding immediate action. Simmias failed yet to rally his reason. All that animated his purpose, clearly, was to return at once to our master's side and, above all, not to stand truant at the hour of his passing.
“Leave this to me, Simmias.”
“By heaven's mercy, Jason! Will you manage this for me, my friend?”
There are frontiers one crosses, our client had once observed, without understanding of what he does. This was not one of them.
To Polemides and to our master the demos had debarred clemency.
Now by fortune's hand a fresh magistrate had been appointed, and that arbiter was myself. Who would reprieve the transgressor, if not me? Who would account him absolution, when he himself had cast the black pebble? Perhaps heaven had granted, through his surrogateship, occasion to pardon all, myself included.
I turned to the lad. “Your father claims he has made peace with his own execution.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Can you change his mind?”
The boy seized both my hands in his. “But what of you, sir?” He feared that informers, learning of my part, would set my life at peril.
“Whose silence must be bought, has been bought.”
The keeper had overheard all and now nodded his concordance.
I released the lad's grip. Away he tore to his father's side.
Should I, too, seek Polemides, for farewell, or track Simmias' footsteps to our master's chamber? I regarded the porter. He was already dispatching his own prentice to communicate to the escort riders, who awaited no doubt in some abutting starless lane, the change in plans. I asked if this discommoded him. “Horses is horses,” he replied. “Who sits 'em is no account to me.”
The porter had become anxious, however, and the keeper as well, as any upon the instant of felony's commission.
“Best if you begone, Cap'n.”
And leading across the court, he conducted me without.
LIII
Our master's body was released next day to his companions; we interred his bones within his ancestors' tomb at Alopece. I cannot cite that date as the one upon which I lost all heart for politics; any man of reason had despaired for years of the demos's capacity to rule itself. Within the twelve-month I had quit the city, with wife and daughters, and taken up residence in the country at Holm Oak Hill. Here I have remained.
For thirty-nine years from my twentieth birthday, I donated all of flesh and treasure to our nation. Youth and manhood I accorded, and broke my health in Athens' cause. Three sons I sacrificed to her corps at arms, and two more she stole in paroxysms of civil derangement. Through pestilence and privation she robbed two wives of the measure of their days.
As a naval officer I performed the trierarchy seven times. I have served as councilor, magistrate, and minister. My country I have represented on deputations abroad and affixed my name in her cause to instruments of peace and war. Once I tallied our clan's contributions to the state. The toll came to eleven talents, roughly the produce of all our holdings over twenty years. I do not repent such impost and would gladly bear all again in the cause of our country. I still call myself a democrat, though, as my wife, your grandmother, would have it, a
