Free Hunger's Brides by W. Paul Anderson Page A

expressed it then, I was so hurt and shocked by something in it. Troubling enough that the envoys were so like-minded, so
gracious
. It would take years to understand, of course—yet how much more disturbing that in their golden age they were so much like us in ours. I wasn’t ready to accept that they truly felt as we feel, but they spoke and thought like the very finest of us. This was not some wild-beardedtribe in Canaan—they could have been sitting at our table. Graciously, amiably Terrible things happened, I knew. Earthquakes, floods … But here was the first, most terrible sense of a wrongness in the machinery of the world. A thing out of true. A bent cog that might be turning now in me.
    The most bloodthirsty general of all the Tartars could have given the order to exterminate the Melians. But this was Thucydides, a
stratēgos
, one of the Ten. This was no earthquake, no eruption, no flood, such as we had here in this valley—our volcanoes were Necessity.
This
was only strategy. Navies do not inspire loyalty, though they might command it….
    â€œIt was the greatness of Athens that inspired the states to follow her, wasn’t it Abuelo?”
    As I spoke, I kept my head bowed, ashamed of my hot, sticky face. I watched instead Grandfather’s big hand where it lay over my wrists. Of vague surprise was that such a knobby, knuckly hand as his should be as pale as my wrists and palms. The skin was faintly spotted like an old pelt, and between the knuckles a pale, purplish-blue. The knuckle and index finger bulged out beyond the normal width, as if the finger of a bigger hand were sewn on and wrapped in a dressing. Much of the time his hand hovered a little, trembling, a soft patting that only occasionally brushed my skin—an ungainly bird uncertain where to light.
    One thing above all others had badly shaken me. Even though Thucydides did not give that order, he would still have counselled it. Even if he did not counsel it, he had given orders like it during his own time as an admiral.
He knew
. Yet by the time he wrote, so many years later, he had seen in that hour not just the end of all that was Melos: for by then the great poets, the beautiful minds, were dead and Athens was broken. Euripedes in 406, Sophocles in 405. Socrates executed in 399, and Thucydides himself soon to be assassinated. Athens killed them both in a year, but not before he had seen his failure. He wrote with the same unsparing eyes, even then.
    In all that time, he had still not learned mercy, even toward himself.
    I saw an old man seeing this in exile, who had still not surrendered to grace, made peace with his lack of charity, and who used it to wound himself, knowingly. Mercilessly. And so wounded us.
    â€œHe knew,”
I blubbered out. But for the first time in my life, words had failed me. I had not cried like this since my father left. “Abuelo, he knew it was wrong.
He
was—and still he didn’t feel sorry.”
    Isabel had stopped on the way to the kitchen. She stood just behind Grandfather and asked what the fuss was about.
    â€œThucydides,” he mumbled.
    From the corner of my eye, I could see her shake her head. “I told you, the child is too young.” Then she walked swiftly past us to the kitchen.
    â€œThen I am too, Isabel,” he called after her. “Too young.”
    I had been staring at that pale
salchicha
† of a finger and trying not to look up at her. I fancied I saw a haplessness in it … like a little elephant trunk, that blank expanse just below the elephant’s eyes where the trunk seems grafted on.
    Grandfather’s tone is what finally made me look up at him. His face was turned towards the light out in the courtyard. His head was tipped a little back, as if to keep the world from spilling from the delicate chalices of his eyes. I had never seen an adult cry, or even near to it. Amanda cried easily. Her chin would pull her upper lip down,