Tides of War by Steven Pressfield

Author:Steven Pressfield
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780553904062
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-01-30T10:00:00+00:00

Book V

ALCIBIADES IN SPARTA

XXV

THE SOLDIER IN WINTER

It was half a year before I reached Lacedaemon. My health broke down on the crossing to Rhegium and again on the trek from Cyllene; I must be settled on a sharecroft of Endius’ kleros, his estate, at the north end of the Eurotas valley. I did not see Sparta herself till spring.

All winter I lay abed, with my fare in my fist as the Lacedaemonians say. The skin stretched thin as paper across my breast. A skeleton stared back from the glass. From Sicily my legs bore twenty-seven unhealed wounds—punctures, undercuts, and peel-backs, including two of three fingers’-breadth above both Achilles tendons. Ribs were cracked in a dozen places, the crown of my skull so contused that when the hair was shaved to be scourged with lye, the flesh showed purple and peeled in layers like an onion. I must eat and sleep. My benefactors, an elder couple of the land, settled me in the room that had been their son’s and left me to my rest. Days I lay in the sun of the south-facing court, evenings before the fire, bundled in the borderless mantle of the countryman. There was an antique hound of the farm, Kicker by name; as strength returned I ventured at his side, forked on my staff like a fossil, upon the winter hills.

Nights were long and I dreamt often. I felt old, ancient as Cronos. Shades passed before my vision, my own among them; I saw father and sister, Lion and Simon and my wife and babe; with them I held converse nightlong of such profundity as must reform my soul forever, yet when I woke these had dispelled, gossamer as smoke. I retained nothing. Shadow and sun were one to me, as visions intruded at their will and not the widest daylight could dispel them. I saw again the wounded in the Great Harbor and the dying as the troop trekked out. Again I trudged in column to the Assinarus. A hundred nights I woke in terror, only to confront this fresh indictment: that of my own survival. By what grant did I endure above the earth when so many better than I had been banished beneath it? The panel parted one midnight; Alcibiades arose before me. So vivid stood his apparition, down to the wolf’s-fang brooch he had won at Potidaea, that I was certain he inhabited the chamber in the flesh. He and not Lysander, I was informed, had been the agent of my preservation. I did not thank but reviled him. “Why did you save me? Why me and not my brother?”

“Your brother wouldn’t have come.”

The truth of this lanced me to the quick. I sought to lunge at my tormentor, to throttle his witness at its source; but my limbs would not obey me. Such grief wrung my heart as to strangle all speech and stir.

“I needed one at my side,” Alcibiades pronounced, “who had passed through the same portal I had.”

In daylight I could countenance my cowardice and even extenuate it.

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