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

which got all long over her teeth and rolled under them a little. This wasn’t like that at all. It was quiet, and still.
    After a moment he turned to me that big face of a medieval lion. I must not blame my mother, he said.
I must not, but I did
. There was something now I must never mention to anyone. Did I swear? he asked. His eyes were so beautiful then, green as wet grass. I’d have promised anything.
    â€œYour mother has never learned to read.”
    â€œBut … Abuelo …”
    This seemed incredible. This was utterly mystifying. She was intelligent—that much I knew.
    â€œYes, Angelita, very intelligent. You are right. Something in the letters made her furious—physically sick, and furious. We tried for years. She jumbled everything. It was the most painful thing between us. Some of the worst moments of her life were at that desk in there. So try,
señorita
, to be more understanding. And a little thankful for what you have.”
    I have returned to Melos and Thucydides a dozen times at least since that day. And each time they reveal something new to me. The war ended in the defeat of Athens, and as the Melian envoy had foreseen, her fall served as a lesson to the world. For if right is only a question between equals, so also is loyalty. In the hour when Fortune ever so lightly tips the scales to Sparta, the confederacy under Athens must dissolve as if built upon a pedestal of sugar. The Spartan confederacy had held precisely when the Athenian did not: when the scales were tipped against them;whereas Athens sued for peace at the first reversal. Six years after that, they violated, being practical men, the terms and principles of the treaty they had asked for. In 404 they surrendered completely. Sparta broke Athens, and the war broke Greece.
    I have read the Athenian poets many times since then. I believe that the Athenian emissary, a practical man, was wrong about loyalty and right, and wrong about the message sparing Melos would have sent the confederate states. For already the greatest poets and dramatists of Athens had prepared the states to follow her in a show of mercy to Melos. Homer, they would have followed precisely
for
love of honour. Euripedes, in repugnance for savagery. Aristophanes, towards the pleasures of peace. Aeschylus, through the awe of suffering. 9 Most of all they would have followed Sophocles, who was already eighty, and had shown all Greece that to know the mind of any god, most especially Ananke, † was to earn her undying hatred.
    The Melians insisted on seeing right; Thucydides refused to see things as they might be. Athens betrayed herself by surrendering to expediency; Thucydides betrayed her by making it pass for necessity. He had made his sacrifices to an impostor. This is what I felt but could not find the words to say. Thucydides, more than anyone else except perhaps Grandfather, made a poet of me. How furious I was with him, so clear-eyed when I was not, so unsentimental where I could not be. So bent was he on opposing the
Iliad’s
cant of honour and glory—
he
would be the one to unmask it; he, for one, would not be gulled.
    It seemed to me that day he was a kind of priest, with terrible, clear eyes. Eyes that had seen plagues and holocausts and exile, eyes that had watched Athens die and, themselves dying, had calmly watched his own executioner smile….
    So, in truth, I was not so very different from any child in each of the ages since the last ABCs were taught on Melos. After the last die had been shaken loose from the last pedestal, after the last Melian bone had been made dice, we learned our ABCs from Athens. Yes, we had learned also in the infancy of the world, but Athens was our first school.
    To each generation since, the little building blocks, the dies, the primers.
    And since that day at the little table outside Grandfather’s library, I have had the most maddening time keeping it all straight: when a die is cast, is it