Glory and the Lightning

by Taylor Caldwell

  Aspasia said with patience, “I have done so before, my teacher. But I will do it again. A republic, as Solon has said over a century ago, is government by written and permanent law, instead of government by incalculable and changeable decrees, which is democracy. A republic, he has said, is when the people obey the rulers and the rulers obey the laws. But in a democracy the rulers obey the mass, which is whimsical, violent and greedy. Hence chaos and finally the tyrant.”

  The wrangle continued. In Aeneas’ opinion the voice of the people was the voice of the gods, hence democracy. He now fell into the trap. A republic did indeed represent the people, but it believed too firmly in law, and did not take into thought the changing desires of those it governed. To which Aspasia replied, “Is law then—established just law which assures the people of a stable government and the respect of government for law—to become the light plaything, like a ball, in the name of Demos? Is it to be interpreted by whim by the self-serving and the naturally lawless and exigent, and by those who are ruled by their bellies and not by their minds, and have no respect for orderly government?”

  “You have but contempt for the people, Aspasia.”

  “I only observe, Aeneas.”

  Few of the maidens understood the controversy, but all were pleased by Aspasia’s composure and Aeneas’ wild anger. It relieved the monotony of dull lectures.

  It was now sunset and the class was dismissed. The western sky was a vivid and burning gold, seething with light, and the sea and the land below it lay in mute purple and shifting shadows. The leaves of the myrtle were plated with gilt, and the cypresses stood pointing in blackness against the sky and the palms were tremulous in the soft evening wind. From the earth there rose a passionate scent of jasmine and roses and cooling stone and water, and the fountains threw up frail arms touched with gold and lilac.

  Wandering in the garden before the evening meal Aspasia came on Cleo, who was sitting by a pool trembling with golden reflections. The young girl wore a short tunic the color of silver and her black hair was rolled on her nape. She looked at Aspasia shyly, and rose. Aspasia gazed at the pool in which iridescent fish swam idly, and then at Cleo.

  “Tell me,” she said, “what is your heart’s desire, Cleo?”

  The girl looked at her with wide eyes. Then she tittered. “I should like to be a hetaira like you, Lady.”

  “I have heard that you will be. Will that satisfy you?”

  The girl was bewildered. “But it is the most desirable of all things, Lady.”

  Aspasia sighed. She, herself, was a fool to expect anything but this reply, for Cleo knew nothing. Why am I always looking for intelligence in mankind, in which it rarely exists? she said to herself.

  She was conscious, as she increasingly was, these days, of a restlessness of spirit and a strong rising of something she could not as yet name. There was a loneliness in her, she who had never been lonely before, a longing without a form, an itch, a heat which was both profoundly physical and as profoundly spiritual.

  She stood watching the sunset and the wind lifted her hair and when it fell upon her shoulders it was like an embrace, and she sighed. Her yearning grew until it was like a vast hunger in her, but for what she yearned she did not as yet know. She was soon to be enlightened, and disastrously.

  CHAPTER 5

  The athletic tutor for the maidens suddenly died and Thargelia went to the slave market for a suitable replacement. She came upon a male slave of remarkable beauty, all red pouting lips and smiles and mirthful blue eyes. He also had a mass of auburn curls and muscles beyond description and the body of a young god. He was as sleek as oil and as burnished as bronze and had engaging manners and a felicity of tongue and a gleeful and gladsome countenance.

  What a treasure, thought Thargelia, with a warmth in her loins she had not experienced for a long time. She had tired, in this past year, of Echion and other of her mature lovers, who appeared to be suffering the fatigue of their middle years, while she, herself, was never fatigued by love. Sometimes they fell asleep in her arms, leaving her sleepless and distraught, and without satisfaction.

  However, she was a prudent woman and inquired why such a morsel of perfection was offered for sale, even though the price was high. The answer was that his master had discovered that Thalias was overly interested in the young sons of the household and so desired to sell him. Thargelia wondered why the master had not availed himself of such implied pleasures, then dismissed the thought. Would it not be possible for such a seductress as herself to educate him in the arts of normal affections? In any event, Thalias would be a safe athletic teacher for her guarded maidens.

  What Thargelia did not know was that the report on Thalias was untrue. The young slave had availed himself of the charms of both the master’s wife and his daughters, who had wept when he was taken away. He had also seduced all the women slaves, who wailed for days on his departure. Three were already pregnant. Thalias was a man of prowess, who was tirelessly erotic and potent. The master had thought of having him castrated, but his natural masculine nature revolted at this, fortunately for Thalias. As a castrated male Thalias would have no value except in an Oriental bazaar, and among effetes, and he was too valuable for this. So the master arranged for his sale—at a very high price—and discreetly kept the slave’s proclivities to himself. Let the buyer beware.

  Thargelia studied his athletic young body thoughtfully, both as the mistress of the courtesans and as a woman. She took him aside and questioned him. Her maidens must not develop muscles, for muscles on a woman were disgusting to men of discrimination. The athletics must be limited and intended only to round and firm a young female body. Thalias listened to this acutely, and his pretty eyes began to shine at the prospect, and being intelligent he held his tongue though his mouth watered. A veritable bower of beauties! He hoped they were also judicious. He told Thargelia fervently that he knew exactly what she desired, and Thargelia wryly remarked to herself that she anticipated that she could give him other desires, for herself. After all, she was most expert and had often turned the lovers of men into the lovers of women. She looked at his throat, like a brass tower, and at the muscles of his chest and his arms, and licked her lips. However, being cautious, she required that she examine him without his loincloth, to be certain that she would not be cheated. The inspection was all she could have desired. Thalias watched this inspection and understood perfectly. He would happily oblige the lady, then go on to more luscious conquests. He was naturally of a cheerful nature, and accommodating, and he knew how to please women and make them ecstatic and his slaves. His former mistress had been a splendid teacher, and ardent, and her husband had a hetaira, and she had hungered. What Thalias did not know about women was insignificant.

  Thargelia bought him. She bore him home in her own curtained litter and fondled him. He pretended to be modest and retiring but a certain phenomenon elated Thargelia, and she joyously deluded herself that her arts had aroused him as no woman had aroused him before, and that, therefore, after this, he would be her slave in her bed. She took him to bed at once in her house, and he shyly told her that she was the first woman who had made him aware of femininity, and that he doubted that any other could so awaken him. He performed excellently, and Thargelia sighed deeply with rapturous joy and contentment, and had his bed moved to her door. For a woman as astute as Thargelia this was amazing, but her female nature deceived her. She could not have enough of the young man, and her face bloomed and she felt young again and desirable. Thalias also enjoyed himself. When the curtains were drawn and the chamber scented, he hardly saw Thargelia’s wrinkles, for she had an exquisite and youthful body and she also knew the arts of love and had peculiar appetites which he satisfied. In the meantime, Thalias surveyed the maidens he taught and enjoyed them in anticipation, particularly Aspasia.

  Thargelia was candid with the young ladies, who listened to her with demurely cast-down eyes. Thalias, she said, was not interested in women, so they need not practice their arts
upon him, however innocently. She also hinted that he was not quite a man. The girls listened, not believing a single word, for slaves gossiped and they had heard rumors of Thargelia’s blissful cries in the night, and her vows of devotion. Moreover, Thalias wore a most complacent expression. It was evident that Thargelia could hardly bear him out of her sight, and would stroke his arm and his cheek even when she was among the maidens, and that her eyes would moisten with remembered exercises. She had gained an air of youth and vitality and sparkle and energy. The maidens noted this, and pondered, and looked at Thalias under their lowered eyelashes.

  As for Aspasia, who loved beauty, she found him physically entrancing. His youth appealed to her, who saw no other young men. She studied his body, his face, his chest. She conversed with him briefly at recess during the athletic lessons and the lessons with the bow and the arrow. She thought him intelligent to some extent, but he could not meet her mind and he would stare at subtleties. However, he was a beautiful animal in her opinion, and his touch, when he directed her at the bow, caused a sharp thrill to run along her nerves.

  What Thargelia did not know was that despite Aspasia’s fondness for her she was in enormous interior conflict, and in furious silent revolt. So Aspasia both loved and hated her mentor, and at times was even afflicted with a wrath for nameless revenge. There was also the fact that her body, usually controlled and contained, was experiencing the pangs of adolescence and desire. Sometimes, at night, she imagined Thalias in her bed and would sweat, both to her disgust and her awakening passion, and her hands would fumble helplessly in the air and touch her body. The violet shadows increased under her eyes and made her more alluring and delectable. Thargelia, not knowing the reason, was elated. Aspasia’s virginity would bring a tremendous price. There were Oriental potentates rich beyond imagining who would be infatuated with this wonderful maiden. Thargelia sent out delicate messages to the East. In the meantime Aspasia invoked her patron, Athene Parthenos, for a man of intellect and grace and understanding, and when she did so a coolness and remoteness invaded her body and she was content for a while, dreaming theories and abstractions, and long intellectual dissertations with a man of subtlety and philosophy. But she also thought of Thalias increasingly, for his flesh bedazzled her, to her distraction, and so her thoughts were in conflicting disarray, between corruption and intellect.

  The child, Cleo, was accepted into the school of the hetairai, and was given the chamber next to Aspasia’s. This was not to Aspasia’s liking, for she had discovered that Cleo adored her as well as admired her, and she noticed that the younger girl had begun to copy all her manners and gestures and even the intonations of her voice, imitating a certain way Aspasia had of inclining her head with soft mockery and enlarging her eyes with amusement and touching her lower lip with her thumb. Cleo’s big black eyes glimmered with strange lights when she looked at Aspasia. She had a pert appearance, most engaging, and a pouting pink mouth, which trembled when Aspasia spoke to her. She deferred slavishly to Aspasia, who found such sedulous attention irritating. When Cleo would touch her timidly her flesh would shiver, for girls did not attract her, and Cleo was not of notable intelligence in spite of a natural shrewdness. Others, more ruthless than Aspasia, would have taken advantage of this adoration. But Aspasia would have disdained to be so base.

  Once Cleo crept behind her as she sat thinking alone in the gardens in the shade of a mass of cypress trees, and Cleo lifted a lock of her hair and kissed it. Revolted, Aspasia rose and struck the girl silently across the cheek and left her. Cleo fell to the ground in a paroxysm of grief and desire and tore up handfuls of the grass and writhed, and wept. Glancing back over her shoulder Aspasia saw this and made a mouth of disgust and aversion, for she was not innocent in her mind. She thought of reporting these things to Thargelia, but she had a strain of compassion in her heart and did not want Cleo sent to the dormitory where such girls were rigorously trained to give pleasure to women. For she had guessed that Cleo was attached to herself alone, and she hoped that the child would recover from this aberration.

  When thinking of Thalias, Aspasia would also think of Cleo, but not with the same designs. For some time she shrank at the thought of exploiting the slavish younger girl in her own behalf. But as her desire for Thalias increased, despite efforts to suppress it, she gave Cleo more and more thought. The girl would do anything she would ask of her.

  Aspasia knew that she did not love Thalias; it was impossible for her to love where her mind could not rest also. But now she lusted for him with increasing desire. She would gaze at his strong sun-browned arms and her loins would thrill and become hot and tense. She imagined his body on hers and would almost faint at the prospect and she would arch her back and shudder. She remembered that Thargelia had taught that a woman should feel no such response to a man, for then all was lost and she might love him, to her calamity.

  One day Aspasia sought out Cleo and smiled at her with all her sensual and bewitching charm. Cleo, surprised at this condescension, was devastated and began to tremble and tears filled her eyes. Aspasia led her aside to the shade of a grove of green myrtle trees, hidden from the others, and she touched Cleo—though her own flesh winced—on the cheek and the throat. Cleo’s eyes misted. She gazed at Aspasia as one would gaze humbly at a goddess and could not believe this strange and sudden tenderness from one who had been avoiding her. When Aspasia bent her tall head and kissed her gently on the lips the younger girl swayed, and Aspasia, making a wry mouth to herself and feeling subtly ashamed, caught her and held her against her own body.

  She whispered in Cleo’s ear. “Some night, my love, when our guardians have left us, you will come to me.” Cleo trembled and timidly kissed Aspasia’s throat. It was a child’s kiss. What if she should permanently debauch Cleo’s nature? Aspasia paused in herself and then she thought of Thalias. She conversed in her own mind. Were not all the maidens taught the arts of love, without shame? Let Thargelia bear the consequences.

  After their athletic lessons in the afternoon, and their baths in perfumed oils and their massages, the maidens retired to their chambers to sleep, for sleep restored a woman’s fatigued body. But before this retirement Aspasia became particularly provocative to Thalias one day, and the young man’s thoughts became dizzy and he looked at her with a half-opened mouth and his face swelled and flushed deeply and he shivered. Aspasia smiled with all the arts she had been taught, and her eyes were ravishing. She leaned briefly against his shoulder, and let him see the swell of her young bosom, and she sighed. He closed his eyes and he shivered again, and seeing that they were alone he touched her breast and sweat drenched his countenance and his eyes became doglike both with passion and love. She permitted his hand to wander, and her own body responded with an ardor and a fire she had not even imagined before. Her eyelids drooped, her full red mouth moistened and her breasts swelled. She had an almost uncontrollable desire to draw him down to the green earth below them, but some maidens were approaching, laughing, with a teacher. She feigned to be interested in the adjustment of an arrow, aware of a cooling sweat along her brow. The sun blinded her and she felt that nothing existed but the middle of her palpitating body, which had become heavy, and at once languid and quickening. The imminence of Thalias was maddening, and there was suddenly nothing else in her world but her desire.

  She whispered, “Tonight?”

  He could not believe it. But he whispered almost inaudibly, “I share the chamber with Thargelia. In this garden then, in that grove of myrtles, under the moon, at midnight? Oh, my adorable one! It is not possible that you love me! Oh, by Castor and Pollux, that I might possess you even once—I would die of the joy! What is Artemis to you, or Aphrodite?”

  “Live. Do not die,” said Aspasia. The other maidens were chattering like a veritable swarm of swallows. “You are Adonis,” she said, and when his hand touched her intimately she felt as if she was bursting into flame and could hardly walk to leave him. Her flesh had grown ponderous and weak, clamoring for su
rrender and fulfillment.

  A little later she drew Cleo apart and said to her, “My love, I am devoted to Artemis, the goddess of the moon, the eternally virgin, and tonight the moon is full and I would worship her in silence in the gardens. I fear I cannot give myself to any man, but be as Artemis, removed from the embraces of men. I must invoke her for her assistance. Therefore, my dear, arrange your bed so any of our guardians, passing in the night with their lanterns, believe you sleep there, then lie in my bed with your head covered so that they do not see the darkness of your hair. Murmur softly, as if restive in the dim light, as I do. Sigh deeply, as I do. They will be deceived. You will do this little service for me, dearest lovely child? Your reward will be commensurate.”

  Cleo’s eyes were as adoring as those of Thalias, and as abject, and Aspasia felt chilled. She would keep her promise and give pleasure to this little one, after her own pleasure, and would restrain her aversion. She had been taught that one pays for everything in this life, and she intended to repay, however repugnant to herself or damaging to Cleo. She said, “Swear by the thunderbolts of Zeus that never will you betray me.”

  Cleo swore, in her child’s light voice, and Aspasia was satisfied. She gently removed Cleo’s little hand, which nestled against her breast, and left her. Aspasia had a very lively conscience, but she was learning that when a woman desires a man she has no conscience at all and only awareness of her appetites.

  She lay, rigid and trembling and sweating, on her narrow couch in her chamber, to which there was no door—it was only a cubiculum—until the guards had shone the lantern dimly in upon her bed, and she murmured restively as if slightly disturbed. The lantern light retreated down the hall, wavering on white walls, then dying. She smiled to herself. Her window was open, high on the wall, and the moon, pure argent light, flooded over her feet, and there was a passionate scent of jasmine in the warm air and the fragrance of grass and the aromatic odor of pines and cypresses. The fountains sang to the moon and somewhere a nightingale trilled poignantly and an owl answered in dolorous accents. Hot stone exuded its own peculiar arid but exciting scent, and now the roses sent forth their perfume as if touched by the trailing garments of Artemis, herself, with her white hounds at her heels.