Worlds That Weren't

Alkibiades’ grin got wider. “Then let’s enjoy it, shall we? If we don’t enjoy ourselves while we’re here on earth, when are we going to do it?”

Nikias sent him a severe frown, the frown a pedagogue might have sent a boy who, on the way to school, paused to stare at the naked women in a brothel. “Is that why you staged a komos last night?”

“I didn’t stage the drinking bout. It just happened,” Alkibiades answered. After a night of revelry like that, his head should have ached as if a smith’s hammer were falling on it. It should have, but it didn’t. Victory made a better anodyne than poppy juice. He went on, “But if you think I didn’t enjoy it, you’re wrong. And if you think I didn’t deserve it, you’re wrong about that, too. If I can’t celebrate after taking Syracuse when nobody thought I could”-he didn’t say the other general had thought that, though he knew Nikias had-“when am I entitled to, by the dog of Egypt?”

Nikias muttered at the oath, which Alkibiades had picked up from Sokrates. But he had no answer. Alkibiades hadn’t thought he would.

The Peloponnesos is shaped like a hand, narrow wrist by Corinth in the northeast, thumb and three short, stubby fingers of land pointing south (the little island of Kythera lies off the easternmost finger like a detached nail). Sparta sits in the palm, not far from the base of the middle finger. Having rowed through the night, the Athenian fleet beached itself between the little towns of Abia and Pherai, in the indentation between the middle and westernmost fingers, just as dawn was breaking.

Alkibiades ran from one ship to another like a man possessed. “Move! Move! Move!” he shouted as the hoplites and peltasts and the small force of cavalry emerged from the transports. “No time to wait! No time to waste! Sparta’s only a day’s march ahead of us. If we strike hard enough and fast enough, we get there before the Spartans can pull enough men together to stop us. They’ve been ravaging Attica for years. Now it’s our turn on their home ground.”

To the east, the Taygetos Mountains sawbacked the horizon. But the pass that led to Sparta was visible even from the beach. Alkibiades vaulted onto his horse’s back, disdaining a leg up. Like any horseman, he wished there were some better way to mount and to stay on a beast’s back. But there wasn’t, or nobody had ever found one, and so, like any horseman, he made the best of things.

“Come on!” he called, trotting out ahead of the hoplites. “All of us against not all of them! How can we help but whip ’em?”

They hadn’t gone far before they came across a farmer looking up at the not yet ripe olives on his trees. He wasn’t a Spartan, of course; he was a Messenian, a helot-next thing to a slave. His eyes bugged out of his head. He took off running, and he might have beaten the man who’d won the sprint at the last games at Olympia.

“Pity we can’t cut down their olive groves, the way they’ve done to ours in Attica,” Alkibiades said to Nikias, who rode not far away.

“No time for that,” Nikias answered.

Alkibiades dipped his head. “We’ll do what we can with fire,” he said. But olives were tough. The trees soon recovered from burning alone; really harming them required long, hard axework.

The ground rose beneath the Athenians’ feet. Sweat rivered off the hoplites marching in armor. Alkibiades had made every man carry a jug full of heavily watered wine. Every so often, one of them would pause to swig. Most of the streambeds were dry at this season of the year, and would be till the rain came in winter. When the army found one with a trickle of water in it, men fell out to drink.

“They say the Persian host drank steams dry on the way to Hellas,” Alkibiades remarked. “Now we can do the same.”

“I do not care to be like the Persians in any way,” Nikias said stiffly.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Alkibiades said. “I wouldn’t mind having the Great King’s wealth. No, I wouldn’t mind that a bit. By the dog, I’d use it better than he has.”

Except for the track that led up toward the pass, the country around the Athenians got wilder and wilder. Oaks and brush gave way to dark, frowning pines. A bear lumbered across the track in front of Alkibiades. His horse snorted and tried to rear. He fought it down.

“Good hunting in these woods,” Nikias said. “Bear, as you saw. Wild boar, too, and goat and deer.”

If I’d gone back toward Athens and then fled as I first planned to do, I suppose I would have ended up in Sparta, Alkibiades thought. I would have wanted to harm Athens all I could for casting me out, and Sparta would have been the place to do it. I might have hunted through these mountains myself if I hadn’t hashed things out with Sokrates. The world would have been a different place.

He laughed. I’m still hunting through these mountains. Not bear or boar, though. Not goat or deer. I’m hunting Spartans-better game still.