He pushed the matted locks from his brow as he peered into the mist.
His hair was thick with salt, and his eyes smarted from the greenwood
fire on the poop. The four slaves who crouched beside the
thwarts-Carians with thin birdlike faces-were in a pitiable case, their
hands blue with oar-weals and the lash marks on their shoulders
beginning to gape from sun and sea. The Lemnian himself bore marks of
ill usage. His cloak was still sopping, his eyes heavy with watching,
and his lips black and cracked with thirst. Two days before the storm
had caught him and swept his little craft into mid-Aegean. He was a
sailor, come of sailor stock, and he had fought the gale manfully and
well. But the sea had burst his waterjars, and the torments of drought
had been added to his toil. He had been driven south almost to Scyros,
but had found no harbour. Then a weary day with the oars had brought
him close to the Euboean shore, when a freshet of storm drove him
seaward again. Now at last in this northerly creek of Sciathos he had
found shelter and a spring. But it was a perilous place, for there
were robbers in the bushy hills-mainland men who loved above all things
to rob an islander: and out at sea, as he looked towards Pelion, there
seemed something adoing which boded little good. There was deep water
beneath a ledge of cliff, half covered by a tangle of wildwood. So
Atta lay in the bows, looking through the trails of vine at the racing
tides now reddening in the dawn.
The storm had hit others besides him it seemed. The channel was full
of ships, aimless ships that tossed between tide and wind. Looking
closer, he saw that they were all wreckage. There had been tremendous
doings in the north, and a navy of some sort had come to grief. Atta
was a prudent man, and knew that a broken fleet might be dangerous.
There might be men lurking in the maimed galleys who would make short
work of the owner of a battered but navigable craft. At first he
thought that the ships were those of the Hellenes. The troublesome
fellows were everywhere in the islands, stirring up strife and robbing
the old lords. But the tides running strongly from the east were
bringing some of the wreckage in an eddy into the bay. He lay closer
and watched the spars and splintered poops as they neared him. These
were no galleys of the Hellenes. Then came a drowned man, swollen and
horrible: then another-swarthy, hooknosed fellows, all yellow with the
sea. Atta was puzzled. They must be the men from the East about whom
he had been hearing. Long ere he left Lemnos there had been news about
the Persians. They were coming like locusts out of the dawn, swarming
over Ionia and Thrace, men and ships numerous beyond telling. They
meant no ill to honest islanders: a little earth and water were enough
to win their friendship. But they meant death to the hubris of the
Hellenes. Atta was on the side of the invaders; he wished them well in
their war with his ancient foes. They would eat them up, Athenians,
Lacedaemonians, Corinthians, Aeginetans, men of Argos and Elis, and
none would be left to trouble him. But in the meantime something had
gone wrong. Clearly there had been no battle. As the bodies butted
against the side of the galley he hooked up one or two and found no
trace of a wound. Poseidon had grown cranky, and had claimed victims.
The god would be appeased by this time, and all would go well.
Danger being past, he bade the men get ashore and fill the water-skins.
"God's curse on all Hellenes," he said, as he soaked up the cold water
from the spring in the thicket.
About noon he set sail again. The wind sat in the north-east, but the
wall of Pelion turned it into a light stern breeze which carried him
swiftly westward. The four slaves, still leg-weary and arm-weary, lay
like logs beside the thwarts. Two slept; one munched some salty figs;
the fourth, the headman, stared wearily forward, with ever and again a
glance back at his master. But the Lemnian never looked his way. His
head was on his breast, as he steered, and he brooded on the sins of
the Hellenes. He was of the old Pelasgian stock, the first bords of
the land, who had come out of the soil at the call of God. The
pillaging northmen had crushed his folk out of the mainlands and most
of the islands, but in Lemnos they had met their match. It was a
family story how every grown male had been slain, and how the women
long after had slaughtered their conquerors in the night. "Lemnian
deeds," said the Hellenes, when they wished to speak of some shameful
thing: but to Atta the shame was a glory to be cherished for ever. He
and his kind were the ancient people, and the gods loved old things, as
those new folk would find. Very especially he hated the men of Athens.
Had not one of their captains, Militades, beaten the Lemnians and
brought the island under Athenian sway? True, it was a rule only in
name, for any Athenian who came alone to Lemnos would soon be cleaving
the air from the highest cliff-top. But the thought irked his pride,
and he gloated over the Persians' coming. The Great King from beyond
the deserts would smite those outrageous upstarts. Atta would
willingly give earth and water. It was the whim of a fantastic
barbarian, and would be well repaid if the bastard Hellenes were
destroyed. They spoke his own tongue, and worshipped his own gods, and
yet did evil. Let the nemesis of Zeus devour them!
The wreckage pursued him everywhere. Dead men shouldered the sides of
the galley, and the straits were stuck full of things like monstrous
buoys, where tall ships had foundered. At Artemision he thought he saw
signs of an anchored fleet with the low poops of the Hellenes, and
sheered off to the northern shores. There, looking towards Oeta and
the Malian Gulf, he found an anchorage at sunset. The waters were ugly
and the times ill, and he had come on an enterprise bigger than he had
dreamed. The Lemnian was a stout fellow, but he had no love for
needless danger. He laughed mirthlessly as he thought of his errand,
for he was going to Hellas, to the shrine of the Hellenes.
It was a woman's doing, like most crazy enterprises. Three years ago
his wife had laboured hard in childbirth, and had had the whims of
labouring women. Up in the keep of Larisa, on the windy hillside,
there had been heart-searching and talk about the gods. The little
olive-wood Hermes, the very private and particular god of Atta's folk,
was good enough in simple things like a lambing or a harvest, but he
was scarcely fit for heavy tasks. Atta's wife declared that her lord
lacked piety. There were mainland gods who repaid worship, but his
scorn of all Hellenes made him blind to the merits of those potent
divinities. At first Atta resisted. There was Attic blood in his
wife, and he strove to argue with her unorthodox craving. But the
woman persisted, and a Lemnian wife, as she is beyond other wives in
virtue and comeliness, excels them in stubbornness of temper. A second
time she was with child, and nothing would content her but that Atta
should make his prayers to the stronger gods. Dodona was far away, and
long ere he reached it his throat would be cut in the hills. But
Delphi was but two days' journey from the Malian coast, and the god of
Delphi, the Far-Darter had surprising gifts, if one were to credit
travellers' tales. Atta yielded with an ill grace, and out of his
wealth devised an offering to Apollo. So on this July day he found
himself looking across the gulf to Kallidromos bound for a Hellenic
shrine, but hating all Hellenes in his soul. A verse of Homer consoled
him-the words which Phocion spoke to Achilles. "Verily even the gods
may be turned, they whose excellence and honour and strength are
greater than thine; yet even these do men, when they pray, turn from
their purpose with offerings of incense and pleasant vows." The
Far-Darter must hate the hubris of those Hellenes, and be the more
ready to avenge it since they dared to claim his countenance. "No race
has ownership in the gods," a Lemnian song-maker had said when Atta had
been questioning the ways of Poseidon.
The following dawn found him coasting past the north end of Euboea in
the thin fog of a windless summer morn. He steered by the peak of
Othrys and a spur of Oeta, as he had learnt from a slave who had
travelled the road. Presently he was in the muddy Malian waters, and
the sun was scattering the mist on the landward side. And then he
became aware of a greater commotion than Poseidon's play with the ships
off Pelion. A murmur like a winter's storm came seawards. He lowered
the sail, which he had set to catch a chance breeze, and bade the men
rest on their oars. An earthquake seemed to be tearing at the roots of
the hills.
The mist rolled up, and his hawk eyes saw a strange sight. The water
was green and still around him, but shoreward it changed its colour.
It was a dirty red, and things bobbed about in it like the Persians in
the creek of Sciathos. On the strip of shore, below the sheer wall of
Kallidromos, men were fighting-myriads of men, for away towards Locris
they stretched in ranks and banners and tents till the eye lost them in
the haze. There was no sail on the queer, muddy-red-edged sea; there
was no man on the hills: but on that one flat ribbon of sand all the
nations of the earth were warring. He remembered about the place:
Thermopylae they called it, the Gate of the Hot Springs. The Hellenes
were fighting the Persians in the pass for their Fatherland.
Atta was prudent and loved not other men's quarrels. He gave the word
to the rowers to row seaward. In twenty strokes they were in the mist
again...
Atta was prudent, but he was also stubborn. He spent the day in a
creek on the northern shore of the gulf, listening to the weird hum
which came over the waters out of the haze. He cursed the delay. Up
on Kallidromos would be clear dry air and the path to Delphi among the
oak woods. The Hellenes could not be fighting everywhere at once. He
might find some spot on the shore, far in their rear, where he could
land and gain the hills. There was danger indeed, but once on the
ridge he would be safe; and by the time he came back the Great King
would have swept the defenders into the sea, and be well on the road
for Athens. He asked himself if it were fitting that a Lemnian should
be stayed in his holy task by the struggles of Hellene and Barbarian.
His thoughts flew to his steading at Larisa, and the dark-eyed wife who
was awaiting his homecoming. He could not return without Apollo's
favour: his manhood and the memory of his lady's eyes forbade it. So
late in the afternoon he pushed off again and steered his galley for
the south.
About sunset the mist cleared from the sea; but the dark falls swiftly
in the shadow of the high hills, and Atta had no fear. With the night
the hum sank to a whisper; it seemed that the invaders were drawing off
to camp, for the sound receded to the west. At the last light the
Lemnian touched a rock-point well to the rear of the defence. He
noticed that the spume at the tide's edge was reddish and stuck to his
hands like gum. Of a surety much blood was flowing on that coast.
He bade his slaves return to the north shore and lie hidden to await
him. When he came back he would light a signal fire on the topmost
bluff of Kallidromos. Let them watch for it and come to take him off.
Then he seized his bow and quiver, and his short hunting-spear, buckled
his cloak about him, saw that the gift to Apollo was safe in the folds
of it, and marched sturdily up the hillside.
The moon was in her first quarter, a slim horn which at her rise showed
only the faint outline of the hill. Atta plodded steadfastly on, but
he found the way hard. This was not like the crisp sea-turf of Lemnos,
where among the barrows of the ancient dead, sheep and kine could find
sweet fodder. Kallidromos ran up as steep as the roof of a barn.
Cytisus and thyme and juniper grew rank, but above all the place was
strewn with rocks, leg-twisting boulders, and great cliffs where eagles
dwelt. Being a seaman, Atta had his bearings. The path to Delphi left
the shore road near the Hot Springs, and went south by a rift of the
mountain. If he went up the slope in a beeline he must strike it in
time and find better going. Still it was an eerie place to be tramping
after dark. The Hellenes had strange gods of the thicket and hillside,
and he had no wish to intrude upon their sanctuaries. He told himself
that next to the Hellenes he hated this country of theirs, where a man
sweltered in hot jungles or tripped among hidden crags. He sighed for
the cool beaches below Larisa, where the surf was white as the snows of
Samothrace, and the fisherboys sang round their smoking broth-pots.
Presently he found a path. It was not the mule road, worn by many
feet, that he had looked for, but a little track which twined among the
boulders. Still it eased his feet, so he cleared the thorns from his
sandals, strapped his belt tighter, and stepped out more confidently.
Up and up he went, making odd detours among the crags. Once he came to
a promontory, and, looking down, saw lights twinkling from the Hot
Springs. He had thought the course lay more southerly, but consoled
himself by remembering that a mountain path must have many windings.
The great matter was that he was ascending, for he knew that he must
cross the ridge of Oeta before he struck the Locrian glens that led to
the Far-Darter's shrine.
At what seemed the summit of the first ridge he halted for breath, and,
prone on the thyme, looked back to sea. The Hot Springs were hidden,
but across the gulf a single light shone from the far shore. He
guessed that by this time his galley had been beached and his slaves
were cooking supper. The thought made him homesick. He had beaten and
cursed these slaves of his times without number, but now in this
strange land he felt them kinsfolk, men of his own household. Then he
told himself he was no better than a woman. Had he not gone sailing to
Chalcedon and distant Pontus, many months' journey from home while this
was but a trip of days? In a week he would be welcomed by a smiling
wife, with a friendly god behind him.
The track still bore west, though Delphi lay in the south. Moreover,
he had come to a broader road running through a little tableland. The
highest peaks of Oeta were dark against the sky, and around him was a
flat glade where oaks whispered in the night breezes. By this time he
judged from the stars that midnight had passed, and he began to
consider whether, now that he was beyond the fighting, he should not
sleep and wait for dawn. He made up his mind to find a shelter, and,
in the aimless way of the night traveller, pushed on and on in the
quest of it. The truth is his mind was on Lemnos, and a dark-eyed,
white-armed dame spinning in the evening by the threshold. His eyes
roamed among the oaktrees, but vacantly and idly, and many a mossy
corner was passed unheeded. He forgot his ill temper, and hummed
cheerfully the song his reapers sang in the barley-fields below his
orchard. It was a song of seamen turned husbandmen, for the gods it
called on were the gods of the sea....
Suddenly he found himself crouching among the young oaks, peering and
listening. There was something coming from the west. It was like the
first mutterings of a storm in a narrow harbour, a steady rustling and
whispering. It was not wind; he knew winds too well to be deceived.
It was the tramp of light-shod feet among the twigs--many feet, for the
sound remained steady, while the noise of a few men will rise and fall.
They were coming fast and coming silently. The war had reached far up
Kallidromos.
Atta had played this game often in the little island wars. Very
swiftly he ran back and away from the path up the slope which he knew
to be the first ridge of Kallidromos. The army, whatever it might be,
was on the Delphian road. Were the Hellenes about to turn the flank of
the Great King?
His hair was thick with salt, and his eyes smarted from the greenwood
fire on the poop. The four slaves who crouched beside the
thwarts-Carians with thin birdlike faces-were in a pitiable case, their
hands blue with oar-weals and the lash marks on their shoulders
beginning to gape from sun and sea. The Lemnian himself bore marks of
ill usage. His cloak was still sopping, his eyes heavy with watching,
and his lips black and cracked with thirst. Two days before the storm
had caught him and swept his little craft into mid-Aegean. He was a
sailor, come of sailor stock, and he had fought the gale manfully and
well. But the sea had burst his waterjars, and the torments of drought
had been added to his toil. He had been driven south almost to Scyros,
but had found no harbour. Then a weary day with the oars had brought
him close to the Euboean shore, when a freshet of storm drove him
seaward again. Now at last in this northerly creek of Sciathos he had
found shelter and a spring. But it was a perilous place, for there
were robbers in the bushy hills-mainland men who loved above all things
to rob an islander: and out at sea, as he looked towards Pelion, there
seemed something adoing which boded little good. There was deep water
beneath a ledge of cliff, half covered by a tangle of wildwood. So
Atta lay in the bows, looking through the trails of vine at the racing
tides now reddening in the dawn.
The storm had hit others besides him it seemed. The channel was full
of ships, aimless ships that tossed between tide and wind. Looking
closer, he saw that they were all wreckage. There had been tremendous
doings in the north, and a navy of some sort had come to grief. Atta
was a prudent man, and knew that a broken fleet might be dangerous.
There might be men lurking in the maimed galleys who would make short
work of the owner of a battered but navigable craft. At first he
thought that the ships were those of the Hellenes. The troublesome
fellows were everywhere in the islands, stirring up strife and robbing
the old lords. But the tides running strongly from the east were
bringing some of the wreckage in an eddy into the bay. He lay closer
and watched the spars and splintered poops as they neared him. These
were no galleys of the Hellenes. Then came a drowned man, swollen and
horrible: then another-swarthy, hooknosed fellows, all yellow with the
sea. Atta was puzzled. They must be the men from the East about whom
he had been hearing. Long ere he left Lemnos there had been news about
the Persians. They were coming like locusts out of the dawn, swarming
over Ionia and Thrace, men and ships numerous beyond telling. They
meant no ill to honest islanders: a little earth and water were enough
to win their friendship. But they meant death to the hubris of the
Hellenes. Atta was on the side of the invaders; he wished them well in
their war with his ancient foes. They would eat them up, Athenians,
Lacedaemonians, Corinthians, Aeginetans, men of Argos and Elis, and
none would be left to trouble him. But in the meantime something had
gone wrong. Clearly there had been no battle. As the bodies butted
against the side of the galley he hooked up one or two and found no
trace of a wound. Poseidon had grown cranky, and had claimed victims.
The god would be appeased by this time, and all would go well.
Danger being past, he bade the men get ashore and fill the water-skins.
"God's curse on all Hellenes," he said, as he soaked up the cold water
from the spring in the thicket.
About noon he set sail again. The wind sat in the north-east, but the
wall of Pelion turned it into a light stern breeze which carried him
swiftly westward. The four slaves, still leg-weary and arm-weary, lay
like logs beside the thwarts. Two slept; one munched some salty figs;
the fourth, the headman, stared wearily forward, with ever and again a
glance back at his master. But the Lemnian never looked his way. His
head was on his breast, as he steered, and he brooded on the sins of
the Hellenes. He was of the old Pelasgian stock, the first bords of
the land, who had come out of the soil at the call of God. The
pillaging northmen had crushed his folk out of the mainlands and most
of the islands, but in Lemnos they had met their match. It was a
family story how every grown male had been slain, and how the women
long after had slaughtered their conquerors in the night. "Lemnian
deeds," said the Hellenes, when they wished to speak of some shameful
thing: but to Atta the shame was a glory to be cherished for ever. He
and his kind were the ancient people, and the gods loved old things, as
those new folk would find. Very especially he hated the men of Athens.
Had not one of their captains, Militades, beaten the Lemnians and
brought the island under Athenian sway? True, it was a rule only in
name, for any Athenian who came alone to Lemnos would soon be cleaving
the air from the highest cliff-top. But the thought irked his pride,
and he gloated over the Persians' coming. The Great King from beyond
the deserts would smite those outrageous upstarts. Atta would
willingly give earth and water. It was the whim of a fantastic
barbarian, and would be well repaid if the bastard Hellenes were
destroyed. They spoke his own tongue, and worshipped his own gods, and
yet did evil. Let the nemesis of Zeus devour them!
The wreckage pursued him everywhere. Dead men shouldered the sides of
the galley, and the straits were stuck full of things like monstrous
buoys, where tall ships had foundered. At Artemision he thought he saw
signs of an anchored fleet with the low poops of the Hellenes, and
sheered off to the northern shores. There, looking towards Oeta and
the Malian Gulf, he found an anchorage at sunset. The waters were ugly
and the times ill, and he had come on an enterprise bigger than he had
dreamed. The Lemnian was a stout fellow, but he had no love for
needless danger. He laughed mirthlessly as he thought of his errand,
for he was going to Hellas, to the shrine of the Hellenes.
It was a woman's doing, like most crazy enterprises. Three years ago
his wife had laboured hard in childbirth, and had had the whims of
labouring women. Up in the keep of Larisa, on the windy hillside,
there had been heart-searching and talk about the gods. The little
olive-wood Hermes, the very private and particular god of Atta's folk,
was good enough in simple things like a lambing or a harvest, but he
was scarcely fit for heavy tasks. Atta's wife declared that her lord
lacked piety. There were mainland gods who repaid worship, but his
scorn of all Hellenes made him blind to the merits of those potent
divinities. At first Atta resisted. There was Attic blood in his
wife, and he strove to argue with her unorthodox craving. But the
woman persisted, and a Lemnian wife, as she is beyond other wives in
virtue and comeliness, excels them in stubbornness of temper. A second
time she was with child, and nothing would content her but that Atta
should make his prayers to the stronger gods. Dodona was far away, and
long ere he reached it his throat would be cut in the hills. But
Delphi was but two days' journey from the Malian coast, and the god of
Delphi, the Far-Darter had surprising gifts, if one were to credit
travellers' tales. Atta yielded with an ill grace, and out of his
wealth devised an offering to Apollo. So on this July day he found
himself looking across the gulf to Kallidromos bound for a Hellenic
shrine, but hating all Hellenes in his soul. A verse of Homer consoled
him-the words which Phocion spoke to Achilles. "Verily even the gods
may be turned, they whose excellence and honour and strength are
greater than thine; yet even these do men, when they pray, turn from
their purpose with offerings of incense and pleasant vows." The
Far-Darter must hate the hubris of those Hellenes, and be the more
ready to avenge it since they dared to claim his countenance. "No race
has ownership in the gods," a Lemnian song-maker had said when Atta had
been questioning the ways of Poseidon.
The following dawn found him coasting past the north end of Euboea in
the thin fog of a windless summer morn. He steered by the peak of
Othrys and a spur of Oeta, as he had learnt from a slave who had
travelled the road. Presently he was in the muddy Malian waters, and
the sun was scattering the mist on the landward side. And then he
became aware of a greater commotion than Poseidon's play with the ships
off Pelion. A murmur like a winter's storm came seawards. He lowered
the sail, which he had set to catch a chance breeze, and bade the men
rest on their oars. An earthquake seemed to be tearing at the roots of
the hills.
The mist rolled up, and his hawk eyes saw a strange sight. The water
was green and still around him, but shoreward it changed its colour.
It was a dirty red, and things bobbed about in it like the Persians in
the creek of Sciathos. On the strip of shore, below the sheer wall of
Kallidromos, men were fighting-myriads of men, for away towards Locris
they stretched in ranks and banners and tents till the eye lost them in
the haze. There was no sail on the queer, muddy-red-edged sea; there
was no man on the hills: but on that one flat ribbon of sand all the
nations of the earth were warring. He remembered about the place:
Thermopylae they called it, the Gate of the Hot Springs. The Hellenes
were fighting the Persians in the pass for their Fatherland.
Atta was prudent and loved not other men's quarrels. He gave the word
to the rowers to row seaward. In twenty strokes they were in the mist
again...
Atta was prudent, but he was also stubborn. He spent the day in a
creek on the northern shore of the gulf, listening to the weird hum
which came over the waters out of the haze. He cursed the delay. Up
on Kallidromos would be clear dry air and the path to Delphi among the
oak woods. The Hellenes could not be fighting everywhere at once. He
might find some spot on the shore, far in their rear, where he could
land and gain the hills. There was danger indeed, but once on the
ridge he would be safe; and by the time he came back the Great King
would have swept the defenders into the sea, and be well on the road
for Athens. He asked himself if it were fitting that a Lemnian should
be stayed in his holy task by the struggles of Hellene and Barbarian.
His thoughts flew to his steading at Larisa, and the dark-eyed wife who
was awaiting his homecoming. He could not return without Apollo's
favour: his manhood and the memory of his lady's eyes forbade it. So
late in the afternoon he pushed off again and steered his galley for
the south.
About sunset the mist cleared from the sea; but the dark falls swiftly
in the shadow of the high hills, and Atta had no fear. With the night
the hum sank to a whisper; it seemed that the invaders were drawing off
to camp, for the sound receded to the west. At the last light the
Lemnian touched a rock-point well to the rear of the defence. He
noticed that the spume at the tide's edge was reddish and stuck to his
hands like gum. Of a surety much blood was flowing on that coast.
He bade his slaves return to the north shore and lie hidden to await
him. When he came back he would light a signal fire on the topmost
bluff of Kallidromos. Let them watch for it and come to take him off.
Then he seized his bow and quiver, and his short hunting-spear, buckled
his cloak about him, saw that the gift to Apollo was safe in the folds
of it, and marched sturdily up the hillside.
The moon was in her first quarter, a slim horn which at her rise showed
only the faint outline of the hill. Atta plodded steadfastly on, but
he found the way hard. This was not like the crisp sea-turf of Lemnos,
where among the barrows of the ancient dead, sheep and kine could find
sweet fodder. Kallidromos ran up as steep as the roof of a barn.
Cytisus and thyme and juniper grew rank, but above all the place was
strewn with rocks, leg-twisting boulders, and great cliffs where eagles
dwelt. Being a seaman, Atta had his bearings. The path to Delphi left
the shore road near the Hot Springs, and went south by a rift of the
mountain. If he went up the slope in a beeline he must strike it in
time and find better going. Still it was an eerie place to be tramping
after dark. The Hellenes had strange gods of the thicket and hillside,
and he had no wish to intrude upon their sanctuaries. He told himself
that next to the Hellenes he hated this country of theirs, where a man
sweltered in hot jungles or tripped among hidden crags. He sighed for
the cool beaches below Larisa, where the surf was white as the snows of
Samothrace, and the fisherboys sang round their smoking broth-pots.
Presently he found a path. It was not the mule road, worn by many
feet, that he had looked for, but a little track which twined among the
boulders. Still it eased his feet, so he cleared the thorns from his
sandals, strapped his belt tighter, and stepped out more confidently.
Up and up he went, making odd detours among the crags. Once he came to
a promontory, and, looking down, saw lights twinkling from the Hot
Springs. He had thought the course lay more southerly, but consoled
himself by remembering that a mountain path must have many windings.
The great matter was that he was ascending, for he knew that he must
cross the ridge of Oeta before he struck the Locrian glens that led to
the Far-Darter's shrine.
At what seemed the summit of the first ridge he halted for breath, and,
prone on the thyme, looked back to sea. The Hot Springs were hidden,
but across the gulf a single light shone from the far shore. He
guessed that by this time his galley had been beached and his slaves
were cooking supper. The thought made him homesick. He had beaten and
cursed these slaves of his times without number, but now in this
strange land he felt them kinsfolk, men of his own household. Then he
told himself he was no better than a woman. Had he not gone sailing to
Chalcedon and distant Pontus, many months' journey from home while this
was but a trip of days? In a week he would be welcomed by a smiling
wife, with a friendly god behind him.
The track still bore west, though Delphi lay in the south. Moreover,
he had come to a broader road running through a little tableland. The
highest peaks of Oeta were dark against the sky, and around him was a
flat glade where oaks whispered in the night breezes. By this time he
judged from the stars that midnight had passed, and he began to
consider whether, now that he was beyond the fighting, he should not
sleep and wait for dawn. He made up his mind to find a shelter, and,
in the aimless way of the night traveller, pushed on and on in the
quest of it. The truth is his mind was on Lemnos, and a dark-eyed,
white-armed dame spinning in the evening by the threshold. His eyes
roamed among the oaktrees, but vacantly and idly, and many a mossy
corner was passed unheeded. He forgot his ill temper, and hummed
cheerfully the song his reapers sang in the barley-fields below his
orchard. It was a song of seamen turned husbandmen, for the gods it
called on were the gods of the sea....
Suddenly he found himself crouching among the young oaks, peering and
listening. There was something coming from the west. It was like the
first mutterings of a storm in a narrow harbour, a steady rustling and
whispering. It was not wind; he knew winds too well to be deceived.
It was the tramp of light-shod feet among the twigs--many feet, for the
sound remained steady, while the noise of a few men will rise and fall.
They were coming fast and coming silently. The war had reached far up
Kallidromos.
Atta had played this game often in the little island wars. Very
swiftly he ran back and away from the path up the slope which he knew
to be the first ridge of Kallidromos. The army, whatever it might be,
was on the Delphian road. Were the Hellenes about to turn the flank of
the Great King?