The Great King (26 page)

We embraced, but we’d just been together for two weeks, and Jocasta gave my hand a squeeze – like a massive embrace from that very proper aristocratic lady. I heard it all over again, but Aristides was resigned and clearly was working to bring Jocasta to this point of view. I had never seen open discord between them, but Jocasta was sufficiently moved to disagree – flatly – with her husband in front of a third party. Aristides looked hurt.

I pretended not to be there.

Eventually, Jocasta walked away to see to a servant’s injury. Aristides waited until we could hear her bare feet on the marble of the foyer, and then he leaned close.

‘I have to say this, my friend. Themistocles and I are not friends – but I have accepted this exile. I will go with you to the Great King. Athens cannot be seen to send an ambassador. But a man in exile – a conservative?’ He nodded.

And I understood.

It had always seemed odd to me that, whatever their differences, these two leaders of the resistance party were at loggerheads. I had smelled the rat, but I hadn’t come to the correct conclusion.

‘You should tell Jocasta,’ I said. ‘She keeps all your other secrets.’

I said it deadpan, and he, being Aristides the prig, didn’t find it funny. But I did.

Eventually, I left, being unwilling to invite myself to dinner. I’d had three cups of wine and I wore no weapon, and so I picked up one of Aristides’ sticks by the door and flourished it at him. ‘I need to borrow one,’ I said.

‘He never leaves home with them,’ Jocasta said. ‘But every time he visits our farms outside the walls, he walks home with a new one.’

‘I like them!’ Aristides said ruefully.

You might think that, as one of the richest men in the world, Aristides could be allowed to own as many walking staffs as he liked – but if you think that, you’ve never been married.

They were waiting in the near-dark, just north of Aristides’ house, and they had knives.

I slipped through Aristides’ house as silently as a thief and left by the back gate, which Jocasta held for me while looking as if she doubted my sanity.

I poured a little oil on the fire by saying, ‘Your husband has something to tell you,’ and once out through the back gate I walked through the alley – used only by slaves and tradesmen – with twelve-foot stone walls towering over me on either side. It was almost dark.

I lay down at the corner and looked around it at ground level. That’s how I know there were four of them, all well armed. I assumed they were sent by bloody Cleitus, of the Alcmaeonidae. I didn’t feel like fighting three younger men, and besides, I didn’t need to fight them.

I slipped across the alley and vanished into the sacred precinct of the unfinished temple of Olympian Zeus. The Pisistradae had started it and left the drums for the columns lying around like children’s toys. Young couples came to . . . well, to use the columns. I was treated to more than my share of erotic breathing as I crossed the space, and emerged on the east slope of the acropolis, which I skirted. Twice I doubled back in the dense street grid, and I sat in one of the fountain houses, watching my back trail. Things you learn as a slave stay with you for life.

That night I ate with Paramanos and my people – and with Giorgios and Nicolas, returned from their pilgrimage. Next day I attended the Athenian assembly and voted against ostracism for Aristides.

We lost. Aristides was exiled for ten years.

His exile did not include forfeiture of any property – his wife could continue to live on the east slope of the acropolis and his managers could continue to run his farms. By Athenian standards, it was lenient, if you left out the crushing unfairness of it. The problem was that men like Aristides had had the habit of making themselves tyrants for more than a hundred years. Aristides had it all – money, good looks, a war record, and oratory skills. I suspect that, even if he had not been chosen as the secret ambassador, he would have had to go. Perhaps the secret mission to the Great King was a sop.

Frankly, Athenian politics always appals me. They punish the best men and raise fools.

Mind you, in the same assembly, I voted
in favour
of spending the year’s excess from the silver mines on building new triremes – the second or third year they’d done that. I must have been one of the few men in that assembly to vote that way – against ostracism, in favour of the fleet. Most Athenians saw these as conflicting interests, because they were too close to the problems.

Well.

Late that afternoon,
Lydia
swept into Piraeus with a hull full of hides and Ionian wine, and the next morning I had her laded with white Athenian leather, fine bronze wares and pottery. I arranged a farewell dinner with Phrynicus, and sailed away west, for Sparta.

I don’t remember anything about the sea voyage. I suspect it was fraught with the usual perils and probably had as many irritated rowers and magnificent dolphins as every other trip across the Aegean, but what I remember is Sparta itself.

I suspect that most people do not imagine Sparta as beautiful; Athens is beautiful – she has the acropolis and two hundred years of magnificent architecture. Plataea is beautiful because of Kitharon and because of the green fields that stretch away, the visible signs of Demeter’s blessing to man and Hera’s blessing to Green Plataea.

Sparta is also beautiful. Did she not give birth to Helen? And are not the women of Lacedaemon all Helen’s daughters? High up the vale, with mountains rising on either hand, the carpet of olive trees rolling across the valley – Sparta has a unique wonder.

But I cannot abide the helots. Or rather, the Spartans themselves. On every hand in Sparta, one sees them – and they are somehow more wretched than slaves in Athens or Plataea. Perhaps that is merely my own prejudice, but few helots are ever freed, and the enslavement is racial, not by chance or war-capture. Many have been slaves for so many generations that they think their state is natural – as do their masters. I admire Sparta for many things – but the enslavement of the helots casts a shadow, and that shadow, to me, is at the core of who they are.

I left Brasidas on the ship with Sekla. Spartans are less forgiving than other Greeks in matters of skin colour. I took only Alexandros and Hector, and we purchased horses by the beach at Gytheio where
Lydia
was selling her wares. When we came in stern first, there were a pair of Carthaginian triremes on the beach to trade, and two more over by the Migonion. But they wanted nothing more from us than to buy our goods, and there was not a sign of Dagon. I rode north to Sparta with no greater concern than to pick up my passengers and make haste before the autumn storms hit.

We entered the city on the main road, as well paved as the Panathenaic way, and rode past the temple of the Dioscuri, which was every bit as elegant as anything in Athens – the local stone lent itself to the remarkable quality of the Peloponnesian sunshine. It was high summer, and just before midday, when most Spartan citizens rested in the shade, and even slaves seemed to dart from shadow to shadow. The three of us wore straw hats with brims so wide we seemed to be in tents.

The agora was as busy as any in Greece – the goods unloaded on the beach at Gytheio were already on sale in the capital. In the agora, the midday sun was ignored – there were hundreds of men and women moving about, and long awnings. It was here that I saw the main difference between Sparta and Athens. Sparta has magnificent temples but too little shade, and Spartans are too proud to pretend to need a stoa. In fact, I saw mostly helots sitting under the old oak trees that ringed the agora. Citizens stood proudly in the sun, as if daring Helios to do his worst.

I wore a big hat.

We dismounted at the edge of the agora, and it was there that I got my first taste of helot life. An adolescent Spartiate – probably in the last years of the Agoge – demanded water from a helot woman, and when he didn’t get it fast enough, he said, ‘Obey, bitch,’ and struck her.

Instead of screaming for help, she cringed away and fetched him water.

Perhaps it was not a representative incident. Perhaps I misjudge them.

At any rate, we asked directions.

If I expected a palace for the two kings, I was wrong. The kings live well – they have the kind of staff one associates with the richest Athenians. But their homes are private houses, and Leonidas lived in a beautiful house with three wings around a courtyard with its own olive tree and a small fountain. The courtyard had three arcades of columns, one on each side, for shade. A wall and a set of barracks for slaves, and a small warehouse, took up the fourth side of the complex.

We were ushered in by a helot butler, and brought into the courtyard. There we were served a marvellous water, full of bubbles from some god-touched spring. The helots served Hector as freely as they served Alexandros and me.

Alexandros smiled at Hector. ‘I think you are in for an easy few days.’

I laughed. ‘Am I such a hard master? But perhaps we could send him to the Agoge.’

Another helot came in. ‘Masters, the Lady Gorgo wishes you to know that she will join you directly.’

Indeed, the lady herself followed hard on the slave’s message. She was dressed simply, in a long yellow chiton pinned in the Dorian manner. She wore a girdle of gold tied with a Herakles knot and wore a diadem in her hair.

‘Ah, Helen,’ I said. I said it lightly.

Her eyes crossed mine the way a man’s do when he is ready to draw a weapon.

‘In Sparta, no woman is ever compared to Helen,’ she said. She nodded agreeably. ‘Pardon me. Your words took me aback, and I should have nothing for you but praise. The king is at exercise and will join us soon, as will some of your other friends here.’ She nodded pleasantly enough to Alexandros and to young Hector.

I intervened to make introductions. ‘My lady, this is my captain of marines, Alexandros, a gentleman of Plataea, and this is my hypaspist, Hector, son of Anarchos, now also a citizen of Plataea.’

‘Ah, Green Plataea. I intend to make a pilgrimage to the temple of Hera in the spring.’ Gorgo smiled. ‘I love to travel. But I thought that you had another captain of marines?’

I was a little shocked that she should mention him. ‘I have several ships,’ I said.

By this time, slaves were appearing with nuts, honeyed almonds and wine. Gorgo led us, as if in a procession, through the courtyard to another wing and in under the portico to a tiled alcove not unlike the edge of the Athenian paleastra – stone benches like those athletes use. The benches lined two walls, so that quite a number of people could sit and converse – a very civilised notion.

We sat and munched nuts.

‘We must speak of payment,’ Gorgo said quickly, as if discussing a distasteful ailment with a physician. ‘I realise that a man does not run a ship the length of the Inner Sea for nothing.’

I had already discussed this in Athens with Cimon and Aristides – and Jocasta, who was more interested in the life of the Spartan queen than any story I’d ever told her. We’d agreed that I would charge the Spartans nothing.

This is politics. Generosity matters. In fact, I could ill afford to sail for several months without making a profit, but with some ‘help’ from rich Athenians, we – the Athenians, in this case – could appear generous and supportive.

‘I will carry a cargo each way,’ I said airily. I met her eye – so odd to look a woman in the eye every time you spoke. I think that’s why Gorgo reminded me so much of Briseis. ‘I do not intend to charge you anything for taking your heralds to Susa.’ I nodded. ‘Think of it as little Plataea’s contribution to the defence of Greece.’

This obviously pleased Gorgo a great deal, and she took my hand and pressed it.

Leonidas returned from exercise, wearing only a chlamys, like an Athenian ephebe. His body was as near perfect as a man’s can be – although his lower legs and shins were a mass of ugly bruises.

I took his hand. ‘Pankration?’ I asked.

The King of Sparta laughed. ‘How did you guess? And worse tomorrow.’ He raised his eyebrows briefly in an expression of self-knowledge. ‘It is harder at my age to pretend to be a hero of twenty-five.’ In fact, the Agiad King of Sparta was nearer sixty than fifty.

I nodded ruefully.

‘You should come!’ Leonidas said. ‘Many men here would seek to measure themselves against you.’

I laughed. ‘I’m sure they’d beat me black and blue,’ I answered.

‘Better you than me,’ said the king.

Leonidas was introduced to Alexandros and to Hector, who was open mouthed with wonder at being in the presence of the Great King of Sparta. I confess that I was more than a trifle awed myself.

He turned to me and sat on the bench where Gorgo had been sitting. ‘You know I sent a delegation to Delphi last year?’ he asked. ‘I wanted to hear from the oracle what was to come for us if we resisted. And do you know what she answered?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Good, because if you did, I’d have quite a breach in my security arrangements.’ The king smiled ruefully. He was very easy to like – he had a kind of magnetic charm coupled with humour that was very appealing. He nodded and lowered his voice. ‘She said that if Greece was freed, she would owe her freedom to Green Plataea. And she said, “
The strength of bulls or lions cannot stop the foe. No, he will not leave off, I say, until he tears the city or the king limb from limb
.”’

I winced. ‘That’s . . . not the prophecy I’d have wanted to hear,’ I agreed.

Leonidas shrugged. ‘The gods do as they will. But when I heard that you spoke Persian and had ships, I wondered if you were the tool by which Green Plataea would serve Greece.’

I suspect I grinned. ‘I’ll do my best, o King,’ I said, and bowed.

I had expected to pick up my two heralds and go, but in fact we dawdled a week in Sparta, and I’d have stayed longer. There is much to love there, as I, as a man who enjoyed watching women, must tell you that there are more beautiful women in Sparta than most places, and when you stare at them they stare back. One old hag of thirty, fresh from hard exercise and wearing nothing over her loveliness but a chiton of linen, caught my eye and shocked me by crossing the agora and asking me my name.