Worse, David could see, the interval of chop, crest to crest, was between ten and twenty feet. In other words, such a sea as would hammer a great boat to break its back and would turn a small craft into a bobbing top. No sail could beat into a gale like this, and a following wind would tear the linen to scraps if it didn’t snap the mast or masts entire.
A coaster captain, whose name Telamon did not ask and who did not himself volunteer it, explained the rigors of navigation in such season. Sailing months, he declared, ran from the rising of the Pleiades, around the calends of May in most years, to the setting of Arcturus in mid-October. Beyond that date no one except skilled coasters ventured from any harbor, and these only into waters they knew intimately—and certainly never out of sight of land.
“Look about the harbor, brother. You see craft careened for refitting, replanking, and repainting. In shops you see sails being mended, rigging being rewoven, hanging tackle being refurbished and replaced. The sailing year is over! Not even a madman will put to sea at this season!”
Telamon listened patiently.
“There is a tale of old,” he spoke at last, “of King Philip of Macedonia, Alexander’s father. The king had got it into his head to besiege a certain city, whose citadel was sited at the summit of an eminence of such precipitous ascent, his generals assured him, that no attacking force could scale it in numbers sufficient to storm the battlements and overthrow the fortress. The track was so steep, his commanders told Philip, that it simply could not be mounted. The king only smiled. ‘Not even,’ he asked, ‘by an ass laden with gold?’ ”
Telamon set his last two golden eagles—the ones he had given earlier to David and Ruth—upon the tavern table.
Thirty-six hours later the party had acquired a captain and a vessel and, seven days following, had seen themselves deposited ashore, at midnight, within a nameless, mooringless inlet half a league south of the Lakedaemonian port of Gytheion.
They had reached Greece.
− 37 −
PELOPONNESUS
HELLAS HERSELF, THAT IS, THE land-bound territory as opposed to the island nations of the Aegean and Ionian Seas, is constituted of three types of principalities. First are the maritime states, sited upon ports or harbors, such as Athens or Corinth, which depend for their prosperity upon trade and seafaring. Second are the inland agricultural dominions, as Argos or Thebes. One may add such horse-pasturing kingdoms as Thessaly and Phthia.
The third type of province is the hill country. Cities are rare in these highlands. The population clusters, when it does, within villages, hamlets, and isolated outposts, some no grander than fortified strongholds. Such uplands are hospitable neither to the cultivation of grain or fodder upon any scale greater than that of subsistence, nor to the husbandry of cattle or swine. Olives fare poorly here. Even sheep and goats struggle for pasturage and must be protected at all times from thieves and predators.
These are the poverty-bound parts of Greece, the backwaters. The clans that inhabit these highlands, at least those of the Peloponnese, are of such antiquity that they speak a dialect neither Dorian nor Ionian, but Pelasgian. Here are clefts and hollows that neither the Spartans of yore nor the contemporary Romans dare enter, save under truce negotiated in advance with the hill chieftains and paid for, not in gold, which the highlanders scorn, but livestock and oil. Here a kin-group’s livelihood consists of hunting and fishing, and, for no few, banditry.
This, the girl signed, is my mother’s country.
No highways cross these eminences. Few are the throughways that merit even the name of road. One transits these wildlands by footpaths, most broad enough for a single man only, or “traces,” which are little more than game trails. Such regions are a jumble of valleys and peaks, many without a name, populated by wolf and hind, boar and eagle, and the type of grayish red fox called by the Romans vulpinos. Game of all kinds abounds in these uplands. Paths are level only when they track creeks and tributaries. Clearings are rare and small. One recognizes a native of such a region by his garb, which is frequently of animal hides, and his cap, which is often of fox-skin or wolf.
“How do you know this country,” David asked, “if you have never seen it?”
By sign the child made known that her mother had taught her, reciting tales upon many an evening. She knew, the girl communicated, every crease and run. Three ways meet, she signed, beneath two oaks. My mother’s village lies upon the overhill trace.
Both David and Telamon could by this time interpret the child’s language as clearly and immediately as speech.
“How far?” David asked.
But the girl only kept trekking.
Telamon’s physical state, which had been improving steadily since the Reed Lands, at this point took a turn for the worse. He had been able since Alexandria to make his way upon a pair of crooks. The accumulated impairment to his arms and shoulders now made this impossible. Worse, a form of paralysis had begun to afflict his upper extremities. His fingers would not close about a sword or dagger. He could no longer grip even a stone.
The month was now December. Storms descended from cloud-shrouded peaks. Hail and gale-driven sleet rendered the stony heights slick and treacherous. A type of frigid fog called in Greek amike fell upon the vales and glens with the descent of night, rendering even the most compact covert dank and wretched. Nights grew bitter and the hollows in shadow remained frost-bound till noon.
Telamon refused to slow down. He hobbled, clutching at branches and limbs for support. The boy and girl would tramp ahead, then hold in place until the man-at-arms caught up.
When they rested, the mercenary continued his instruction in the practice of arms.
The fourth noon they waded across a river.
“I know this place,” Telamon said. “Its name is Alms Ford.”
The watercourse was little more than a creek but one that from mid-crossing gave out onto a prospect of a furlong in either direction. The far bank held a wide strand, bright in the sun, with clean gravel underfoot.
“This was a mustering site,” said Telamon, “and may still be, for the clans of the creases that lie above this stream and whose tributaries feed into it.”
Girl and boy regarded the man-at-arms. “How do you know this?” David said.
“This is Arcadia. It is my country.”
The man-at-arms addressed the girl. “Your mother’s village of the three ways. I know it.”
The child Ruth made no pointed response. David found himself struck by this. Would not this girl, he thought, whose kin have no doubt inhabited these hills going back centuries, wish to query Telamon about this statement, which links his own origins to hers?
Yet Ruth put forth no sign. If anything, her glance seemed to turn away from, and even deliberately avoid, Telamon’s.
The mercenary himself looked away.
He addressed David.
“You’re wondering what crops grow in such country. I’ll tell you. Men. Soldiers. A youth coming of age in this place dreams of escape only. I swam out at fifteen. With what aim? To fight.”
Now Ruth did turn back. Both children attended intently. But Telamon offered nothing further on this subject.
Only at day’s end when the party had settled upon a defensible eminence and thrown together a supper of wild cresses and mountain trout hand-splashed from a brook, with a trench fire and a lean-to crafted snug against the night frost, did he relent.