Chương 117: Interlude - Thysía

Interlude Thysía The tyrant of this valley keeps fewer men than the village he holds. What holds the village is not the men. It is the clerk who keeps the tally, and the smith who mends the spears, and the neighbour who carries the order to the next house because he could think of no reason to refuse. Kill the tyrant and the machine stands where it stood, oiled and patient, waiting for the next hand to lift it.

— Codex of the Long Watch, Field Observation, 6th Century, Thrace The Piraeus Port Authority had run the harbour out of a long room on the first floor with a chart of the Saronic Gulf pinned across one wall, and General Dimitrios Mavros had screwed a map of Attica over it. The corners of the chart still showed at the edges, the sea lanes and the depth soundings and the ferry routes out to islands that no longer ran.

He pushed a coloured pin into the coast below Vari and kept his thumb on the head of it while he read the sheet in his other hand. Six officers stood around the long table behind him. The paraffin lamp had been trimmed down to save the oil. All six were standing; no one had been given permission to sit.

"Read it again," Mavros said. Captain Karras brought up the sheaf of papers he was holding. He was a short thick man with a voice built for a parade ground, and he had never learned to lower it indoors.

"Anavyssos, cleared and held. Two sites at Keratea, we tried, we did not hold them. Vari, contested from this evening. Eleven dead in the week, sir."

"How many were ours?"

"Two, sir. The other nine were conscripts." Mavros wrote something on the corner of the sheet and handed it back to him.

"Then say nine and two. The numbers do different work."

"Vari," Mavros said.

"What is at Vari."

"A pack in the pines, above the old church. Boars. They have a den up there and they are working down into the village." Karras looked up from the sheet.

"Andreadis has one squad on the road below the houses. He cannot take the den with one squad and he cannot leave, or the pack will have the village. He asks for support." Karras looked down at the paper again.

"The runner came in half an hour ago, sir. I can have two squads on the coast road inside the hour. It is twenty-two kilometres, five hours on foot, six with the packs. They reach the village by the early afternoon." Mavros went back to the map. He took a second pin out of the box, turned it in his fingers, and did not put it anywhere.

"The column goes to relieve Andreadis at thirteen hundred," he said.

"The runner came in at noon."

"Sir, the runner came in thirty minutes ago. I signed him in myself. If I send the column now they are on the ground by midday," Karras said.

"The runner came in at noon." Mavros repeated the same words at the same pitch and the same volume.

"The column goes at thirteen hundred. March discipline, standard intervals, standard halts." The room held very still. Karras looked at the general's back for a moment, and then down at the sheet in his hands.

"Málista," he said.

"The runner came in at noon. The column forms at thirteen hundred. At a march they reach Vari by dusk."

"See to it," Mavros said.

"And Karras. The runner from Vari goes on harbour detail. I want him at the docks for the next month." Mavros dropped the second pin back into the box. Major Sotiriou was standing at the end of the table with his hands behind his back. He was the oldest man in the room by ten years and the only one whose uniform still had all its buttons. He gave a quick nod but said nothing.

"Sotiriou. The Council sits on Thursday. What will they give me."

"Antoniou will give the stone." Sotiriou chose his words with some care.

"Getting men will be the hard thing. First he asks for a survey of the coast, before he signs for a standing force. The survey takes three weeks. At the end of the three weeks he asks who is paying for the men. The Archbishop asks what a standing force does for the churches. Papadakis wants every site written down before anybody clears it, and that makes the clearing slow."

"And the vote?"

"On the wall extension and the garrison expansion." Sotiriou shrugged.

"Three against one, sir. Like always."

"Like always," Mavros agreed, and sat back from the map.

"When Philip took Macedon he was twenty-three years old. His brother was dead on an Illyrian field with four thousand of his soldiers, and he was left with a bad army and enemies on every border. Illyrians from the west, Paeonians from the north, Thracians backing one pretender, the Athenians backing another." Mavros looked at the men.

"Karras. What were the free cities doing at the time." Karras did not look up from his sheet.

"I do not know these things, sir." Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!

"They were meeting." Mavros turned round.

"They met about him for twenty years. They passed excellent resolutions. Demosthenes stood up in the Athenian assembly and told them precisely what Philip was and precisely what he intended and he was right. He was right every single time. And the assembly was late every single time, because a republic votes, and a vote requires a quorum, and a quorum requires attendance, and attendance requires a crisis large enough to fill the benches.

By the time the crisis was sufficient, the instrument was already built and the vote was academic." He took a pause to meet the eyes of his officers.

"That is not a story about a great man. It is a story about how long a committee takes to agree that the man at the door is actually at the door." He motioned to the pines above Vari.

"Philip spent those twenty years drilling farmers into a phalanx and buying the passes one at a time. By the end of it there was no assembly in Greece that could stand against the machinery he had built. Everything that came afterwards, Persia and Egypt and the whole shining rest of it, is a footnote to that one advantage." He looked around the table.

"I have read the minutes of every session this Council has held since we formed it. Four hundred and six votes." Mavros picked up a paperweight and spun it on the table.

"We hold less coast than we held in the spring, we have buried more men than we have recruited, and on Thursday three civilians are going to explain to me that what the situation requires is a survey. The republic is a fine instrument and it is an instrument for peacetime." He stopped the spinning paperweight with a finger, and his eyes were hard now.

"Seirá. There are boars in the pines above Vari tonight that stand as tall as Karras, and things worse than boars on the roads between here and Corinth. I am not going to be the man who lost this country because he was waiting for a form to come back." The flame in the lamp guttered and the lieutenant reached over and turned it up without being asked.

"Anavyssos is getting empty. The farms above Keratea are empty. The people who lived in those places are walking into Athens carrying what they could pick up, and they are standing in the streets." He looked at Karras.

"The wall extension. When you put the request to the Council on Thursday, ask for a third more stone than the engineers' estimate. And a third more men to lay it. Tell them the wall has to hold and tell them about the dead conscripts." Karras wrote it in the corner of his sheet.

"Málista, sir."

"Dismissed. Sotiriou, Karras, you stay." • • The four junior officers filed out, and Mavros motioned the two officers to sit.

"Andreadis," he said.

"Two squads and a medic. This is the third time he has asked."

"It is, sir," Sotiriou said.

"He is a good officer."

"He is, sir."

"He does not get them." Karras did not move. Sotiriou looked at the general for a moment and then asked, "General. I will speak plainly." Mavros waved his hand to motion him to continue.

"The runner from Vari came in a little before first light." Sotiriou leaned forward.

"Vari is twenty-two kilometres and the coast road is open. The reinforcements would have reached by midday. Now they are leaving midday."

"It is," Mavros said. He turned the week's tally over, wrote two numbers on the back of it, and pushed it across with his finger resting under the second one.

"Nine and two. Nine conscripts and two of ours, in one week, on one stretch of coast. Now tell me what the Council did about it."

"Nothing, sir."

"A threat that is handled quietly and well is not a threat," Mavros said.

"It is a maintenance cost. The men who handle it receive a letter of commendation and a request to file their report in triplicate, and the Council writes a survey for next month and puts the papers in a drawer. Nobody hands a man a city because he keeps the drains clear." He let the words settle.

"A threat that costs lives is a different instrument. The survivors walk into Athens and stand in the streets where the Council can see them. Conscripts die and the Council writes a letter of condolence. Every garrison man who falls at a site the Council failed to reinforce is a debt the Council carries to the next vote. They do not act on reports. They act on blood."

"We are what will hold Greece and bring it back to the Age of Pericles." Sotiriou said nothing to that, and Karras had found something to look at on the wall.

"What we do is distasteful but necessary. Only blood will get us the men, the stone and the rock." He shook his head slightly.

"The Council will give us what we want, not because anybody will love me. Because there will be nobody else in the room with a plan, and they will be frightened, and frightened men are generous. I have already said that to you once this morning."

"The men are ours, sir," Sotiriou said.

"Yes," Mavros said.

"That is precisely why it works." He stood up.

"I have sent men across open ground under fire, Major, and so have you, and neither of us wrote a poem about it afterwards. A general spends men. He spends them for a ridge, or a road, or a bridge he is going to lose again inside a week. I am spending them for a country that will still be standing in a hundred years, and I am telling you the price of it out loud instead of pretending I did not know what it was."

"That is more than the Council will ever do for the country, and they are going to bury just as many." Karras gathered the remaining reports from the table and squared the edges against the desk.

"Column at thirteen hundred, sir?"

"Thirteen hundred," Mavros said. Karras tucked the stack under his arm.

"Málista." • • The sun was past its peak when Lieutenant Fotis brought the report from Vari. Mavros was marking a position on the map and did not acknowledge him for several seconds. Fotis held the report flat against his thigh and waited.

"Go ahead," Mavros said.

"Fourteen dead, General," Fotis said.

"Seven garrison, seven from the village. The pack came down from the pines. Captain Andreadis held the line above the village for two hours before they broke through on the southern flank." He checked the paper.

"The column reached Vari just before dark. The site was contained by nightfall."

"Andreadis," Mavros said.

"Alive, sir. Eleven men standing," Fotis said.

"He asks if he must try to take it back, sir."

"He is not to. Tell him to bring in his wounded and hold the coast road, and tell him that I said that he did well." Mavros set the report down.

"Is that everything?"

"Sir," Fotis said hesitantly.

"One more thing, report from the harbour. Four foreigners are staying in Kastella, in the house of a local family. They came up from Nafplio some weeks past. Now they have walked out to Sounion and back, on foot. The men say it is strange."

"Everybody is walking somewhere," Mavros said.

"Concentrate on the coast." When Fotis had gone, Mavros picked up the box of pins and counted what was left in it, then wrote out a requisition for more.