Antigone's Wake Page 11

“I have to say that I’m surprised you, a poet, have taken part in this war,” the sacristan continued as he fanned himself with his writing tablet. “It is a very impious act. I remember your own words, in Philoctetes, ‘But of this be mindful when you lay waste the land: show reverence toward the gods. All things are of less account in the sight of our father Zeus. Piety dies not with men; in their life and in their death it is immortal.’”

  It grated on the poet’s ears to hear his own verses quoted back at him.

  “Have you been mistreated?”

  The man shrugged. “Not to speak of. But your Pericles acts out of calculation, not fear of the gods.”

  “Some say it is the Samians who flout the gods by breaking their oath of alliance.”

  “A promise to a liar is no bond.”

  “And what would be the value of our oaths, if we may pick and choose which to obey?”

  “You Athenians are a phenomenon! You profess to save us from being plundered — then you steal your allies’ money from Delos. You tell us you guarantee the freedom of the Greeks, yet you interfere when the Greeks form a government of their choosing.”

  “Did they form a government? Or have one formed for them?”

  “Some wonder why that question is your business.”

  Greeks arguing over politics was not a new thing in the world. The heat of that afternoon, though, made neither man anxious to waste his breath on immoveable opinions. The magistrate sighed.

  “It is, in any case, a sad business between our people. To have the Greeks war against each other, on the very doorstep of the Great King! Darius must be very amused.”

  The pilgrims had finally gotten their bull through the pylon. As they came closer, Sophocles could see that the animal’s face was daubed with blue paint, its horns gilded for sacrifice. The magistrate checked the drape of his chiton as he moved to greet them. He turned to Dexion.

  “I hope to sail to Athens again one day to see your next play,” he said. “I hope, though I fear everyone connected with this will come to a bad end. A very bad end.”

  Mounting the steps of the Hera temple’s east front, Sophocles passed between the carven bulk of the columns. The great iron doors had been wheeled open for the day. Stepping inside, he first saw nothing as his eyes adjusted to the faint, milky light filtering between the roof beams. There were no torches and only one lamp near the door to the treasury. The great image towered over him like an alabaster waterfall, defined only by undulations of sculpted drapery and flesh, until his gaze rose to the top, and the goddess stared down at him through crystal eyes. Though the air was hot, he shivered.

  The glint of gold caught his eye as he turned to go. Pausing, he saw a small table set up in a niche between the columns. He came closer. In the middle of the table lay a square of marble two fingers thick and about a foot on a side; in the center of the square was mounted a ring of solid gold.

  As baubles went, it was a crude piece, with no jewels and no carving, thick and finished with all the delicacy of a plough blade. It seemed made to fit a finger at least twice as thick as Sophocles’ thumb. The only decoration was some letters inscribed on the inside. As Sophocles cocked his head to read them, the hair rose on the back of his neck:

  πоλυκρατου

  He stood staring at the relic for some time, ignoring sensations of hunger, until he heard the sacristan levering the great doors closed for the day. Now that he had found it, he wanted to fix forever in his mind’s eye the sight of Polycrates’ famous gold ring.

  *

  Several more weeks into the standoff, the swollen Athenian contingent became as grave a threat to itself as to the enemy. Boredom took its toll on Pericles’ wise policies. Reports came back of farms pillaged by thugs with Attic accents, and Samian fishing boats learned to run at the very sight of Athenian warships. Discipline problems spread along the line, with fights breaking out over gambling, stolen supplies, lovers’ spats and, in the end, nothing much at all. Manoeuvres at sea were held to keep the ships and oarsmen in good condition, but the men knew these excursions amounted to make-work and trained without enthusiasm. Backtalk and griping rose. To citizen-soldiers like them, with farms and families at home to worry about, extended foreign campaigns had a definite whiff of betrayal.

  Meanwhile, one of the shieldbreakers was put out of commission when its crew, desperate from idleness, tried to launch a sack of human excrement into the town. The weight difference between an arrow and the unconventional load wrecked the action, showering the Athenian camp with shit. Purple with rage, Artemon had the crew flogged, the spectacle of which only increased the men’s discontent.

  Pericles at first pretended to take no notice of these problems. He had espoused a philosophy, rooted in the teachings of his friend Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, that all chaotic things had an inherent yearning for the refining influence of thought. A controlling mind, whether human or divine, could bring order to the complexities of a universe, a city, or an army. In the face of rising disorder, then, Pericles perfected his own self-discipline, trusting in the influence of his good example.

  His hand was forced at last when, despite his philosophic rigor, a serious altercation broke out between oarsmen from Athens and a ship’s crew from Salamis. The trigger was one of the wrestling matches called by the officers to help the men vent their spare energy. A bit too much was vented when one of the city men did not simply throw a Salaminian, but launched him into a thorn bush. When the ensuing brawl was over, two men were dead.

  A council was called, and Menippus made an announcement that surprised no one:

  “We’ve received word from our spies on the mainland. The Phoenician navy has been sighted off Caria. We must decide whether it would be better to fight them at sea, or wait for them here.”

  The generals looked at each other. Obviously, it would be safer to engage the Phoenicians on the open sea, where the Athenians’ superior training would tell, and where Samians could not sally out to reinforce them.

  “Agreed. A fleet will be prepared to intercept the Phoenicians — sixty hulls under our colleague Pericles. You will receive assignments for your squadrons later this evening.”

  Xenophon appeared to swoon in his seat.

  “Did you say sixty ships?”

  Menippus frowned. “Yes. Sending an inadequate force would be worse than sending none at all. Don’t you agree?”

  “Of course. But that would leave our line thin here. Half of my ships are laid up because certain others are hoarding their cordage — ”

  “Others need not be responsible for your mistakes,” snapped Lampides. “You started out with as many supplies as the rest of us.”

  “Wisely declared, by someone who never got a ship out at Tragia.”

  “Irrelevant.”

  “Talk sense to a fool, and he calls you foolish.”

  Sophocles raised a hand. “You can talk to my quartermaster about cordage,” he said. “We have plenty.”

  Chastened, Xenophon and Lampides fell silent. Dexion’s ships were the most damaged of all by the high sea at Tragia.

  “The division of the ships is correct,” resumed Menippus quietly. “The Samians have nothing left. But if they should come out, you should have more than enough to deal with them.”

  The next day oarsmen from sixty triremes were called back to their benches. From the walls it might have seemed like the Athenians were withdrawing, as more than half the army pulled up stakes and marched away. By nightfall the sky over the beaches glowed with their campfires.

  The full moon that night did not encourage the Greeks to sleep. By the first watch, most were still awake, and witnessed firsthand a troubling phenomenon: the moon was burning.

  It didn’t seem like an eclipse exactly — the moon was not so much hidden as drenched in a baleful red light. To the wondering eyes of the Greeks, it was as if she had wandered too close to some hidden source of heat, and was smoldering in the sky. The apparition set tongues fluttering the length of the bea
ch; the oarsmen who had been getting their rest were awoken by the uproar. The trierarchs — envisioning sailing into battle against the Phoenicians with spooked, exhausted crews — appealed to Pericles for help.

  The Olympian, half-asleep, strode to the water’s edge with his chiton knotted clumsily around his midriff. Hundreds gathered in silence behind him. With the surf breaking against his ankles, he stared up at the moon as the sanguinary glow spread completely across her face. Instead of a moon, it now seemed as if there was a gaping wound in the sky.

  Pericles spun around and walked back toward his tent.

  “What? Have you nothing to say?” someone asked.

  “Of course he won’t! It’s bad news!”

  “It’s a curse from Hera!”

  “Commander, tell us what it means!”

  The Olympian paused. “I’ll tell you what it means, boy, if you tell me what this means.”

  Pericles unwrapped a portion of his chiton. Stepping near one of the campfires, he held it up so the light shined through it: although the chiton was gray-white, the glow of the flame appeared crimson through the fabric.

  “Tell me: do any of you fear this?” asked Pericles.

  “No!”

  “Then you have nothing to fear from that” he declared, indicating the sky with a contemptuous chin-flick.

  It was an unprecedented performance for a general. The men, surprised not to receive the usual mystico-astrologic ratiocination, fell into confused debate. This, in turn, made them forget their fear. By the time most of them looked up at the moon again she — and the swagger of the Athenians — was restored to her former self.

  *

  Dexion and Poristes sat on a hill looking out over the azure ribbon of the mainland strait. Across the water, seemingly close enough for the Shieldbreaker to plant an arrow in its shoulder, stood the undulating gray body of Mount Mycale. bar to their right, where the straits opened up, the distant sails of Pericles’ fleet dissolved in the sultry air. Poristes handed the poet the wineskin they were sharing.

  “There was a time these eyes could make out the alpha on those sails, even from here,” said the captain. “That is, before a life spent squinting into the wind.”

  “Or staring at scrolls by lamplight,” said Dexion, who was so weary he had to rest the skin in the crook of his elbow to raise it. Poristes had mixed the wine, a Thasian black, with sweet water from the Imbrasos. Its taste was a curious combination of resin, fruit, and mud, like something one would suck direct from the horn of one of the Seleni. He let the skin drop, propelling the wine between his teeth; to his pleasure, a shard of almond that had been lodged between his molars washed free.

  “Do they have a chance of finding the Phoenicians?”

  “We would have found them, if they were coming,” said the captain, who was still disappointed that the Antigone was not selected for the expedition.

  “I’m glad you’re here.” Sophocles put an arm around Poristes, coaxing a bitter smile from his friend’s lips. “Anything not to listen to that blasted ship!”

  “Waves talk. And rocks, and dolphins, and clouds. And the wind, most of all. Be glad, dear friend, that you don’t have to listen to them, too!”

  Men bewail their own curses, thought the poet, while all around them swirl untold miseries that are almost always worse. Sophocles’ latest misery was his son. While the rest of the camp was arguing over signs in the sky, Iophon had spent the night trying to convince his father to let him sail with Pericles.

  “Don’t you believe me, dear father, when I tell you my only purpose is to fulfill the one you meant for me — to see war, and become the kind of man who is temperate and wise? Is there something in my face, in my voice, or in the words I speak that tell you I am somehow insincere? Tell me, and I will try to show you otherwise.”

  “I see no insincerity,” Sophocles agreed.

  “Then if you see I am in earnest, and if you have heard the lengths Pericles will go to preserve Athenian lives, and you understand that this war is perfect for our purposes — by what logic can you deny me?”

  “War is to the purpose of states, not men.”

  Iophon’s mouth fell open. It was beyond his understanding how such perfect proofs could founder on the rocks of parental stubbornness.

  “Then you are being unjust!” he cried.

  “Look, boy. I took you along for good reason, though not entirely for you to see war. There’ll be plenty of time for that later. Getting you away from those layabouts in the stoa was just as important.”

  Iophon stared back with eyes aflame. And like any Greek patriarch, Dexion would not deign to notice his son’s fury. But it hurt him nonetheless.

  “It is not your reasoning that I object to,” he continued, “but the way you speak of gaining wisdom. This war is no joke, boy. In time, it will give you more than you can handle. Why seek it out? Why tempt the hates? You’d do better to approach this with forbearance, and a sense of humility. It is the patient man that experience rewards.”

  “Do you mean the patience to sit and scribble about life, instead of living it?”

  What petty meanness! The eruption of it took the poet offguard and, at the same time, inspired him: he had not thought to give this quality to Haemon, or to any of the other defiant sons in his oeuvre. It was an omission he would remedy at his first opportunity.

  Iophon watched his question have its effect, then added, “You’ve always wanted that for me, to follow you. You don’t say it, but I know.”

  “I have counted on no such thing.”

  “Then I know you better than you know yourself. You might as well learn the truth then: I’ll never do what you do. I don’t want to. I don’t respect it.”

  Sophocles resented these words, but his anger was drowned in a great tide of sadness that seemed to pour from a hole in his heart. I know you better than you know yourself, the boy said. It was almost an echo of what the voice of Antigone had told him, down by the ships.

  “Pericles has no need for a petulant boy,” the poet declared. “You will stay by me here.”

  Poristes extended a hand for the wineskin. “Come now friend, don’t leave me dry.”

  Dexion surrendered the wine. As he watched the captain drink, he was so dogged by the image of Iophon’s contempt that he reached to take the skin back before Poristes was finished.

  “You’ve found your sea legs, I see,” said the captain as he handed it over. “Just remember to leave a little for me!”

  Dexion left matters as they stood for another night. After tossing and turning on his pallet, he rose and searched for Iophon. The boy was reclining in the no man’s land before the Samian walls. It was almost as if he was tempting an enemy archer to take a chance at clipping him.

  “What are you doing! Get up, you fool!”

  Iophon, with a motion as slow as flowing honey, poured himself to his feet.

  “You will not sail with the fleet,” said the poet, “but I’ve reconsidered your request to billet with Menippus. You may collect your things from the tent and report to him. And may the gods have more patience with you than I do!”

  Thrilled, the boy jumped in the air. Then he approached as if to give his father a hug — but at the last second reached out to exchange a manful handshake. Sophocles looked at his hand, grasped it.

  “I hope I won’t have reason to regret this,” he said.

  “It will all be over in a week.”

  Sophocles tried not to watch Iophon go, but couldn’t help but peek through the tentflap as he made his way to Menippus’ sector. As he receded, there were moments when it became hard to distinguish him from the other young soldiers and slaves walking around. Yet there were others when some small gesture, some tilt of the head or twist of the shoulders, brought the figure of the small boy back to him, running once again after lizards in the garden, or standing on his mother’s feet as he sucked on the linen of her skirts.

  It was an ambiguity he was used to with Photia. His son’s matu
rity troubled him far more, and he was tempted to send Bulos to drag him back, to gaze at him again and reaffirm his minority. He wrestled with this temptation until Iophon turned behind the bulk of one of Artemon’s engines, and did not emerge from the column of shieldmen exercising behind that. He was gone.

  *

  Just before dawn the next day, unfamiliar sounds — the clack of iron on wood, followed by a sliding noise, like a ship being towed through the slipway — was heard near the Samian wall. The ground was covered that night in a mist that rose in twisting tendrils like pale mirror-images of tree roots. The Athenian sentries peered through the gloom, speculating openly over what the sound was. Soon more recognizable clues appeared: the glint of setting moonlight on bronze helmets, and the crunch of armor on bodies hurtling forward. The original sound, it seemed, was the heavy maingate of Samos Town being opened for the first time since the invasion. The others were the first warnings of the enemy attack.

  Between the alarm and the clash of spears on shields, Dexion only had time for a few hurried breaths. To be killed there, run through by armored men as they simply flattened his tent, was a humiliating prospect. Jumping to his feet, he lifted his shield, fixed his helmet — but couldn’t find his sword in the dark. He turned this way and that, trapped between the impulses to get out immediately or find his weapon first. When he finally put his hands on the blade, he could hear the voices of men fighting mere yards from the flap. Some of them were shouting with an Ionian accent.

  He emerged to a vision he had previously seen only in spectacles mounted in the Painted Stoa. To the right and to his left, a front of enemy hoplites were surging, pressing forward with their shields. Between them, spearpoints darted out like the tongues of serpents; behind, more men were running, shouting, piling into the scrum. As the dawn sky brightened, the scene was livid with the glow of flames engulfing the Shieldbreaker. The sight of the battle, and the roar of it funneled through the tiny earholes of his helmet, left him momentarily stunned. He stood, sword and shield at his sides.

  And then he was in motion. An enemy shieldman had tumbled an Athenian to the ground and was about to finish him with his lizard-sticker. Sophocles was upon him before he could raise his eyes, slashing downward at the shieldman’s exposed forearm. The arm came neatly away, still gripping the spearshaft, splattered with blood from the stump. The man released the weapon with his good hand, his face contorted as he tumbled, submerged back into the chaos as if he were drowning at sea. The poet wheeled to his right for a fresh opponent. He didn’t give a moment’s thought to the prone man whose life he had saved.