She wanted me to bring my fleet to the aid of her city.
I related all this — less the salacious details — the next day to my Athenian and Spartan friends while we played Polis in the sunshine. I had had no sleep at all, and somewhere deep in the morning, Arwia had admitted to me that I’d been drinking drugged wine since the evening began.
Brasidas snorted his wine.
Bulis looked away.
Sparthius laughed his easy laugh. ‘Trust you to get a princess while the rest of us are bitten by insects.’
Aristides raised an eyebrow. ‘I will leave to the side the abrogation of your responsibility to your guest-friend for the preservation of his sister’s honour,’ he said coldly.
For perhaps the first and last time, Bulis rolled his eyes.
I looked down. ‘I promise you that the lady’s reputation will suffer no harm from me,’ I said. ‘Customs here are different.’
Aristides sniffed.
Bulis leaned towards me. ‘If the Babylonians are really ready to revolt,’ he said. He looked around.
Sparthius nodded. ‘Everything I see says that the Great King is ready to march on us in the spring. Everything is ready. Armies, food, roads, ships — the canal and the bridges.’
I nodded. ‘Everything but the adversary,’ I said. ‘We Greeks are not ready.’
Aristides rubbed the top of his head. ‘Just so,’ he said. ‘And we wouldn’t be ready in the spring if we flew home now under Hermes’ outstretched arms.’
Later that afternoon, Cyrus kept me from a nap that might have saved me and sat me down in the courtyard.
‘You spent the night with the Lady Arwia,’ he said.
I smiled a smug and probably unwise smile.
He nodded. ‘She is wicked, that one,’ he said. ‘She is a rebel, and the Great King should have shortened her by a head when he killed her husband. What did she tell you?’
I shrugged.
‘Come, brother. What did she ask you to do?’
I chuckled. ‘Modesty forbids,’ I said.
Cyrus smiled, then. ‘You pleasured each other? That is all?’
‘She asked me a thousand thousand questions about the Jawan and their lands, even when I was riding her,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘But no. . politics?’
I shrugged. ‘I heard her speak fifty kinds of treason. Who minds what a woman says, when she is willing?’
He nodded. Bluff, empty-headed, woman-using Arimnestos — eh?
‘I hope to see her again tonight,’ I said.
‘Indeed, your invitation — with all your Spartans and Athenians — is in the palace even now.’ He rose and we exchanged bows. ‘Tomorrow we will ride for Susa. I need to get my head out of this crotch of pests. Into the mountains where the air is clean and cool.’
There are women — I’m sorry even to repeat this, but I’ve had some wine — there are women who you desire with all your being — until you’ve had them, and then the charm wears away. In the cold light of day, you see a thousand flaws — sometimes in them, and sometimes in yourself.
There’s a brilliant Persian poem about it, which I can’t remember.
But Arwia was not one of those women. The thought of her inflamed me, and when I was in her presence, I was like a boy — unable to take my eyes off her, nor to behave myself.
She seemed to revel in it, and we flirted outrageously.
But she was so skilled as a hostess that she could flirt to the point of open licentiousness with me, and still make Aristides love her. He was not besotted, but he never spoke slightingly of her again. The Spartans were utterly charmed.
Something happened which, among other men, might have led to blood. I tell this that you may better understand the Spartans.
Sparthius decided he wanted her. He knew full well I’d bedded her the night before, but he set himself to win her — with humour, with flattery, with anecdotes. He showed his muscles, he won her laughter.
He was very good.
Nor did he hide his intentions from me. As Arwia was in no way ‘mine’, I didn’t make some feeble remark to that extent, but at one point, I did poke him sharply in the arm.
He grinned at me. ‘Let the best man have her,’ he said. ‘I’ve seldom seen her like.’
She entered fully into the spirit of the thing, too. Once she realised she had both of us captivated. .
There are some powers one should not grant to mortals.
With Aristides doting and Sparthius and I besotted, she began to target Bulis. He drank steadily, but his face remained carved in stone. I had seen him turn his head to hide his amusement at his friend, and perhaps at me, but with the lady he was careful, cautious and correct.
She had dancers. They danced. To say that they danced lasciviously would be like suggesting that the sun gives light.
First girls. .
Then boys. .
Then boys with girls.
At some point Aristides excused himself. It was all tasteful — none of your flute-girl tricks with vegetables — but he went for a turn in the garden.
The Spartans sat and watched.
I realised that Arwia was using her erotic dancers to measure them. I watched her watch them, and I thought — This is a very dangerous woman indeed. Dangerous, and yet. .
And yet, we were on the same side.
After the iced drink was served, Arwia went and sat by Sparthius. He reached for her and she laughed and slipped away and put a hand on his arm. She said something.
He laughed very hard.
Then she sat by Bulis. He met her gaze with level gravity. She whispered in his ear, and he nodded — and smiled.
And finally she went and sat by Aristides. From her neck, she took a magnificent necklace of lapis and gold. She put it in his hands. ‘This is for your wife,’ she said.
He tried to laugh. ‘How do you know I’m married?’ he asked.
‘Oh, for all I know, all these gentlemen have wives,’ she said lightly. ‘But you love yours.’
Aristides beamed. I had no wife, but I knew what she had just said, and I felt its justice.
A dangerous woman indeed.
An hour later I lay in her arms — under the stars. Under a billowing tent of gauze. With a bowl of iced fruit by my elbow.
Pah! I brag like a pimply boy. It was. . wonderful.
She lay back, snapped her fingers, and a slave disconcerted me enormously by appearing, wiping her all over with a moist towel, and vanishing into the perfumed darkness. A second slave began to wash me.
I almost leaped out of the tent.
She laughed. She laughed a great deal.
She grabbed my ankle and pulled me back into her arms. ‘I know you have no fleet,’ she said. ‘And I know that you cannot sail from Sparta to Babylon.’ She pressed her lips to my ear. ‘But let me pretend you can.’
I would like to take credit for what came after. But the truth is, Arwia saved Greece, and I had very little to do with it. We did spend the rest of the night pretending that I was going to lead a great army of Greeks through the Persian empire. She made suggestions about where they were weak, and I promised to rescue Babylon from bondage.
Oh, Babylon.
I never did learn what she said to Bulis. I know she told Sparthius that she was not woman enough to lie with both of us together. He laughed about that until his dying day.
The next morning, we rode away from the insects and the perfume and the sticky heat of love, and started up the roads into the mountains of Persia, on the last lap to Susa. Cyrus had a message from court. We were wanted.
Until then, Susa had seemed impossibly remote. Now we were less than two weeks away. And my Spartan friends, who were each as brave as men could be, suddenly seemed a little more detached. Bulis spent more time training Hector. It became a passion, pothos. Sparthius began to purchase strumpets in the way stations. He had never done any such thing.