Antigone's Wake Page 14

  “That was strange.”

  Borrowing Timaeus’ spear, Cleathes went to where the rock landed and tested the ground with the butt-spike. It rang like a drum every time he hit it.

  Within an hour a gang of diggers was there, swarming over the area with handpicks. Beneath the soil, they found a layer of loose rubble, like the tailings from a mine. Menippus arrived with Artemon just as the workmen came down on the vault of a concealed structure. As they uncovered more of it, Artemon had himself placed at the north end, sighting along its length toward the mass of Mount Ambelos and the city beyond.

  “It’s Eupalinus’ tunnel,” he announced. “The head of it, most likely, before it goes under the mountain.”

  Menippus said nothing, but had a look on his face much like Polycrates discovering his lost ring.

  Word was dispatched to Pericles, but before the Olympian could arrive to take charge, the Athenians had pried off one of flat stones that formed the roof of the passage. Excited, they dropped inside. Their exploration had an inauspicious start: one man had to be pulled out immediately, having broken a leg stumbling into the water channel hewn into the floor along the west wall.

  As it was described to Dexion, the tunnel was tall enough for a helmeted man to stand upright, but because of the water channel there was room only for the party to go through single file. Undeterred, the Athenians pushed inside, fantasies in their heads of surprising the Ionians on the other end. On they rushed into the empty heart of the mountain, their torches dancing as they ran, their spirited battle cries echoing through the six stades of the tunnel’s length. And so they achieved the distinction of being the first Athenians inside the Wall. That they also happened to be many feet underground was nothing more than incidental.

  They were three-quarters of the way through the tunnel when their torches lit up a wall of Samian spears. The defenders rushed forward, attacking the faces of the surprised Athenians.

  Dexion heard the sound of this fight all the way from the north end: desperate, high-pitched screams, the bright ring of iron tips on bronze. An Attic voice yelled, “Get out of the water!” Like some giant set of lungs shifting from exhalation to inhalation, the direction of the air through the tunnel suddenly reversed.

  “General, should we send more men?” someone asked. Dexion looked up; a shieldman was looking at him, waiting for an answer. He opened his mouth — he would have gone in himself, and alone, if the act would have ended the war early. But he was preempted by the voice of Pericles.

  “Menippus!” thundered the Olympian. “What is this? Did you order an attack?”

  Menippus only stood there with his hand on the butt of his sword. In truth, he had not expressly ordered the assault, but was still responsible for its outcome.

  Pericles was rarely so angry in public. With eyes blazing and the cords of his neck snapping free, he summoned Menippus to him like a reproving parent. Menippus obeyed, but Pericles continued to shout into his face as if he were standing on the other end of the Pynx. “Could they have made a better trap for us? Could they defend anything more easily than men coming one at a time? Did you order this?”

  Speaking in a far lower voice, Menippus managed to calm Pericles down. Dexion noticed, however, that the sound of the battle below had subsided, and that none of the men who went down had returned. Hanging down from above, he peered down the length of the tunnel. Since the passage seemed to jog left about halfway down its length, he could see nothing more than a faint glow in the extreme distance.

  He discovered Pericles looking at him with disapproval.

  “Send a message to the Ionians. Ask them for leave to collect our dead.”

  *

  Samian girls had learned that they could count on Eupalinus’ tunnel. War or peace, siege after siege, hundreds of them had for generations lifted their jars, walked to their local fountain houses and dipped into an endless supply of cool, clean water. It had become like a birthright, every bit as dependable as the arrival of spring. Little need, then, had the Samians for the contrivances of other, less affluent towns, such as wells and catch basins for rainwater.

  None were prepared, then, when the water ran red with the blood of the Athenian soldiers killed in the tunnel. As the flow from the spigots turned foul, the younger girls abandoned their jars and ran screaming through the town. The Samian men, convinced by the commotion that the enemy had broken through the walls, charged fully armed from their houses. Troops from elsewhere in the city had to be brought in to clear the streets of bellicose males and ululating females. It was only a second apparition, as unprecedented as the first, that settled the unrest: some time after noon, when the day’s heat was at its height, the flow to the spring houses slowed, sputtered, and stopped. The Athenians had cut the water supply to the city.

  Though he was a student of the Milesian school of natural philosophers, old Callinus had a streak of sympathy for the tradition that would later be associated with the Cynics. To him, contrivances like Eupalinus’ tunnel were nothing more than vanities — artefacts of human pride that were destined to fail, for his part, he always drank as sparingly as he ate, using only water collected from the cisterns of his own house, or fetched by his slaves in simple skins direct from springs outside the city. He would hardly miss the aqueduct. But the rest of the Samians, who shared neither his philosophy nor his economy, would indeed miss it.

  Callinus went out into the city to see the people’s distress firsthand. They were used to seeing Callinus walk the streets dressed in nothing more than a thin cloak and the dust of the road on his skin. Over time, they had come to be amused by him, pointing and laughing at their “beggar general”. With the opportunity lost to break the siege, and the tunnel in enemy hands, the mood this time was as dark as the shadow of Mount Ambelos.

  Walking into the marketplace, he saw most of the stands were bereft of customers. The men walked around with their hands playing nervously around the hilts of their swords; the women, whose Asiatic tastes could usually be counted on to add color to the scene, were drably dressed, their jewelry long since surrendered to the cause, their heads shaved to provide caulking material for the navy. In the middle of the market, another pile of hair, collected this time from the heads of the children, was being bagged for transport to the ships.

  He was regarding this when the Athenian request arrived to collect their casualties in the tunnel.

  “Let them be welcome to that honor,” Callinus told the messenger, “if they will send Dexion to speak with me.”

  *.

  The tunnel was just as Sophocles expected — cold. With the flow of water now stopped from the extramural side, it was nothing more than a hole, dead like the anteroom of Hades. As he pushed farther underground, he became uncomfortably conscious of the mass of rock that stretched above his head. The underworld, it seemed, was not only dark and frigid, but a kind of vise, crushing the imprisoned souls within. Chilled as much by such thoughts as by the tunnel’s atmosphere, he drew his cloak more tightly around himself as he walked.

  By the faint light of his lamp he could see the glint of the ancient toolmarks on the stone. He could also see the glint in the eyes of the rats that turned on his approach, scattering like routed shieldmen before him. The tunnel jogged left, then right; he passed through the place in the center where Eupalinus’ two work crews, toiling from either side of the mountain, met at last. The notion of working under such conditions, in frigid, subterranean darkness, lungs tormented by dust, made him very glad he was a producer of plays.

  Earlier that morning, Menippus’ slave Dorus came to deliver an invitation to Pericles’ tent. Obeying the summons, he found Menippus there but not Pericles. The Olympian’s pallet was tidy, his armor stacked, his cup and utensils piled neatly for the steward. Without meaning to, Dexion craned his neck to see if their owner was concealed nearby. Menippus looked up from his papers, snorted.

  “There’s been a message from Callinus. He wants to talk, but only to you.”

&nbs
p; “To me?”

  “Yes, that was my reaction, too.”

  Of course, there was no question of refusing the assignment. But he had also been considering the possibility of going home to Nais. It was unnerving to have that option abruptly rendered moot — as was the prospect that Callinus, a man he had never met, would decide whether he would ever again see his wife alive.

  “You will meet him in the tunnel,” Menippus said. “Go alone, and unarmed. I assume I don’t have to tell you not to negotiate, just listen to what he has to say. Don’t give away the store!”

  With Artemon’s scribblings, and Menippus’ prickly gift for metaphor (“don’t give away the store” indeed!), there seemed to be more than one poet on the Athenian side. What sort of man the enemy general was became obvious when Sophocles suddenly felt he was no longer alone in the tunnel. Raising his lamp, he discovered Callinus leaning there, observing him from the darkness.

  “Is this an ambush?”

  Sophocles’ voice did not echo in the tunnel — it congealed into a hollow reverberation that hung around his head like a wreath of smoke. Callinus gave a pained smile, rays of wrinkles spreading from the corner of his eyes.

  “If we meant to harm you, Dexion, you would not be alive now to ask that question.”

  “Ah, but then the Samians would revert to form, breaking their oaths.”

  Ignoring the insult, the other opened a water skin and drank from it. Then he offered it to Sophocles.

  “I wonder if you can grasp the absurdity for us, to have to bring water into this, the greatest aqueduct in the Greek world!”

  “But you must have known we would find it, one way or another.”

  “Some of us did,” replied Callinus. “But some of us preferred to take the counsels of hope.”

  The poet inspected Callinus’ face. With its heavy brow, lively eyes and leathery darkness, it seemed like the face of a marketplace idler — someone who spent the day challenging strangers to impromptu debates in the stoa. But before long he sensed that there was a silence about the Samian that belied the first impression. If he gave off an air of sophistic contention, it was the kind that smoldered from within, as if he were self-sufficient in all wisdom and all foolishness. Dexion racked his memory to find a face to compare it to, and could only think of Aeschylus himself. The comparison made Sophocles feel twenty years younger — and twenty years callower — as he faced the prospect of negotiating with the man.

  Then, with Sophocles in mid-appraisal, a vault seemed to shut behind Callinus’ eyes, and it was down to business.

  “Some people are impressed with your work,” he said, “but I must tell you I’m not. What play has ever won a war, or fed a child? You Athenians spend a fortune on the drama, and derive no obvious benefit. It is the curse of the Greeks.”

  “And yet, I gather you invited me here for a reason.”

  “If I can say anything for you, poet, it is that you must know the stories of our race. And so I tell you, no city has oppressed the Greeks as much as your Athens. Think of Homer — in ten years of investing Troy, did Agamemnon’s army ever surround the city, hoping to starve a free people into surrender? No! They left the city open for all to enter, even the allies of the enemy. I wonder what the poet would say about those who style themselves the heroes of our day!”

  “He would say that the Samians compare little to great, when they liken themselves to the city of Priam,” replied Sophocles.

  “What a pale shadow of that glory you are. Petty, vindictive Athens! What a squalid comparison you make, when you work your engines in the middle of the night on innocent women and children! Did you think we would be awed, to see sleeping babes murdered in their sleep? Tell me how you would justify this, Dexion! Unloose that silver tongue!”

  Sophocles flushed when he thought of the Shieldbreaker. He frowned, replied “This silver tongue only moves at the sight of silver.”

  Callinus dug into a fold in his cloak, pulled out a silver tetradrachm, and tossed it on the floor.

  “There — an owl of your own city! Tell me your excuse, now.”

  “I’m obliged to make excuses no more than you are. You, who conspired against the government of the people, who attacked our fleet by stealth, and who hide from your obligations behind walls! Are these the acts of honorable men? And remember, it is not only the Athenians who have sailed here — we have the Chians and the Lesbians on our side, too. Do they share our arrogance, Callinus? Does everyone, just because they oppose you?”

  “Chios and Lesbos,” replied the other, almost spitting with contempt, “will sign up for whatever cause enriches them. And you, Dexion, should stick to the orchestra! You make a mediocre politician.”

  “What proposal should this mediocre politician bring back to his people?”

  Callinus shifted on his feet, the disappointment plain on his face.

  “You will withdraw all your forces, pledge non-interference in Samian affairs. After a short interval to restore our fleet, we will return as full partner in the Delian League, contributing ships like before.”

  “And?”

  “And that is all! You haven’t conquered anything yet.”

  Sophocles retrieved the stater and pocketed it.

  “That doesn’t seem like much of an improvement over your last offer.”

  “You forget that we demanded restitution for our losses, and a gift for Hera.”

  “Yes, you could hardly ask for restitution when you’ve been busy burning your own farms! Fair enough. I will take back your message. But you’ll need more than an old scribbler to convince the Athenians to accept such a traitorous bunch back into the alliance.”

  “You’ll have no more trouble than me, convincing the Samians to let Pericles leave this place alive. Remember Dexion, all the world doesn’t share your estimate of your own greatness.”

  Chapter VII

  THE SOUND OF THIRST

  “For an army, like a city, hangs wholly on its leaders, and when men do lawless deeds it is the counsel of their teachers that corrupts them.”

  — Neoptolemus, Philoctetes, 1. 380

  *

  The day before Sophocles went to sea he found himself beset by anarchic desires; though he’d sworn to honor his good fortune in deceiving Nais by avoiding Aspasia, he found his thoughts wending toward Pericles’ house before his feet followed suit. There was time for one last fall, he reasoned — one last reason to hate himself before the long, cold night. He hid behind a corner, ashamed of himself, until he could approach the door without being seen from the street. When the houseboy showed him into the parlor, he was not a mature man of fifty-five but a child in want, red-faced and desperate to have it over with.

  She wasn’t alone. Lysicles was there, and from their proximity’ to each other he could see they hadn’t been discussing rhetoric. There was a sheen on her skin that seemed to gather in strength in her eyes, like a cluster of stars standing forth from the twilight. From the way the silk clung to each curve of her body, he believed she must literally have rolled from her bed, pulled on the sheerest thing to hand, and traipsed out to humiliate him.

  “May Poseidon protect you,” the sheepseller said as he pumped Dexion’s arm. “I have half a mind to throw my affairs to the wind and follow you fellows out.”

  “Yes … why don’t you?” he replied, perhaps making his antipathy too plain. Lysicles returned a thin smile, then on his way out cast his hostess a glance into which Sophocles read volumes of implications. Aspasia, who was devouring a fig, wiggled her nose at him.

  When he was gone, she came up and attached herself to his hip, one silk-clad leg cocked along his midriff. “Thank you for showing up when you did,” she said, her eyes closed as she rested her head on his shoulder. “I was beginning to think he’d never go.”

  “Do you greet all your unwelcome guests dressed like that?” She looked at him. “You sound like him!” she cried, pulling up her hair to show she meant high-domed Pericles. But when she saw the stink all
over his face, she turned sincere. “How could you think that! He is his master’s dog, and thinks he has the run of the house. But not of me.”

  He kept his eyes on her until she smiled. “Not that he hasn’t asked for it,” she granted. “But I can do better.”

  She led him to her bed. There he found the blankets were unmussed, and if the odor of sheepseller somehow adhered to a woman’s body, he didn’t detect it. Yet when it was done he still sat up, perturbed in that way he got when a dancer missed his mark, and a performance was ruined. He fingered the scroll beside her bed, thinking only at the last moment to check the name.

  “Whose work is this? Agathon? Euripides?”

  It was one of his. With that, he crumbled, concealing himself in her arms. She took him in, holding him safe within her perfumed pliance, and whispered, “I worry about you, my poet. I worry about you. How I worry … ” And there he stayed until they lit the lamps at crossroads shrine, and he pulled himself free in the flickering gloom to wrap himself for the street again, and begin the long walk to the home he loved, but could not abide.

  *

  Soon after Eupalinus’ aqueduct was cut the guards detected a strange noise from beyond the Samian walls. It was scarcely perceptible at first, making many who heard it wonder if it was only the kind of torment sent by the gods when they make the ears ring in a silent place, or the body throb from some invisible ailment. But then it gathered in intensity, until all the Athenians could hear it plainly from their tents, day and night. It was nothing other than a low, collective moan, resembling the sound produced by the women of a grieving household, but much deeper and wider in scope. Not exactly cheerful, it disturbed many of the Athenians. After a week, though, it was like the hiss of the wind and the chirping of the crickets, so constant it became easy to ignore.

  Sophocles fought this temptation. As he lay concentrating on it, he perceived that the sound seemed to rise and fall through the day, reaching its peak in the hottest part of the afternoon. Below its surface the sound had variations, like a theatrical chorus singing distractedly, half in conversation with itself. Yet there were also higher notes in it, higher and more childlike than any heard on the stage.