“Get up!” he said with a swift kick to my stomach.
Now I had an idea what this was all about. This was to determine who led the crickets. Chilon could spout fancy words about teamwork, but when it came to deciding who led the herd, it all came down to a contest between two individuals, nor was Pausanias concerned about niceties like fair play.
It wasn’t much of a contest. Not that it was meant to be. The outcome had already been preordained. As Pausanias flailed away at me and I tried to block his blows, I tasted my own blood. My nose was broken, both my eyes bruised shut, and at least one of my ribs cracked. What hurt worst of all was a blow I took to the chin that made me bite my tongue. Finally a punch came to the side of my head that shut down further thought. Everything went black. My eyes rolled up in my head and I went down hard, out cold. What happened after that, I’m not really sure.
When I woke I was so light-headed, I felt like a clam that a seagull picks up from the beach and soars with high in the sky, dropping it to crack open on the rocks below. Was this what it was like to be dead? No. When I tried opening my eyes the sun hurt. The throbbing pain in my tongue and my ribs meant I was still alive. I closed my eyes and my mind swam like the time when I was a child and had spun round and round so many times I got dizzy, felt a brief euphoria and fell over.
When my head finally stopped spinning, I squinted through my swollen eyelids and realized I was being carried in someone’s arms. Was it Hermes, god of thieves and travelers, come to carry me to the Blessed Isles? Whoever it was, he was big and strong, and carried me with no more effort than I was newborn lamb. No, it was not a god. Through my sore nose I sniffed the stink of a sweating man. It felt like I flew among the clouds because he carried me so high off the ground. Peering up at the man’s face, I saw a bushy blonde and grey-streaked beard. The fashion among young Spartan men was to keep the beard trimmed closely and shave the upper lip. Not this man. I looked up an untamed, bushy beard that gave him the appearance of a wild man. When he felt me squirm in his arms he glanced down and slowed his pace. I recognized his piercing blue eyes. The lines around them showed the weather of more than fifty summers and yet he was still as powerful as a much younger man.
I was being carried by a Lacedaemonian hero.
Othryades was famous as the only survivor of the Battle of Champions. It was a fight people still spoke about with awe. Early in my grandfather King Anaxandridas’s reign, three hundred hand-picked Spartiates were pitted against three hundred of the best warriors from our most-hated Dorian rival, Argos, for the control of a strip of land called the Thyreatis. When the dust settled, Othryades was the only man left standing on the field. He almost died of his wounds, but survived and won eternal fame.
When I tried to speak, he slowed to a walk. “You’ll be all right laddie. You’re alive.”
I wanted to ask where he was taking me, but found out soon enough. He picked up the pace and ran at an easy lope through endless rows of olive trees. Though they might all look the same, they’re not. I recognized the place. We were on the king’s land. Though Anaxandridas would be in the city, my grandmother Chrysanthe would be out at the farm. She was an unusual old woman. In a way, she was like one of the black cows out in her pasture; tough as boiled leather on the outside, but sweet as milk on the inside. My grandmother was considered odd by some because she refused to live in Pitane Village. Instead she preferred to stay out on the family farm where she supervised the field helots and tended her huge gardens.
Othryades hurried through rows of grape arbors; prime land that had been in the hands of Agiad kings for fourteen generations. According to the lawgiver Lycurgus, the kleros given to every Spartiate was supposed to be equal in size, but that wasn’t the case. The farms inherited by people like my grandparents and noblemen were many times the size of those owned by the common foot soldier. From comments I’d overheard when serving the men in the mess halls, I knew that in addition to the farm, Anaxandridas owned an iron mine in Geronthrae and a copper mine in Prasiae. Neither of which meant much to me, but as I would learn in time, they meant a great deal to my father and my uncles. The land would all go to my father if Anaxandridas’ favor counted for anything. And if the land went to my father, one day it would come to me.
A dozen field helots that tended the grapevines were finishing their work for the day, saw us and came to see who Othryades had in his arms. According to Spartan law, the helots that tended our fields and flocks turned over half of the produce to their Spartan masters and kept the other half to meet their own needs. Laconia was so bountiful, what they gave us was enough to feed the Spartans so we could devote all of our time to military training. Some Laconian helots hated us and called us oppressors (those tended not to live long), while the rest accepted their lot in life and were quite loyal.
A black-bearded helot farmer named Elais, looked at me with concern. “Who would do such a thing?”
“They’ve already been dealt with. Go home now children.” Later I would learn Othryades broke Nessus’ wrist and blackened both of Dephilius’s eyes. He hit Xenon so hard it broke his gorgon mask, gouging a deep cut across his face that he would carry as a scar the rest of his life.
Othryades found Chrysanthe out in her garden, where she was down on her knees with a small shovel, digging weeds out of the ground from around a tomato plant. She was a stout, strong woman with surprising energy for one her age. She kept her long grey hair pulled back severely from her face, revealing a toothless pair of gums and piercing blue eyes. No other Spartan woman I have ever known would deign to do such physical labor, they would consider it beneath their dignity and leave it to the helots, but ever since I was little I’d heard my grandmother say that it was a woman’s sacred duty to bring forth life, and her greatest joy seemed to be watching things bloom and grow.
Grandmother heard Othryades’ footsteps and looked up at him scowling like he was a pesky beetle on her precious roses. When at last she recognized the hero of the Battle of Champions, the wrinkles around her eyes lit up as if Demeter, the goddess of good harvests, walked among her rows of lettuce.
“What are you doing here?” She rose stiffly, brushing the dirt from her knees. She took one look at me and dropped her little shovel. “Bring him inside the house.”
Surprisingly fast for an old woman, Chrysanthe led the way down a row of cucumbers, past her well-tended flowerbeds of red and yellow peonies, violets, irises, lilies and larkspur. She was at constant war with rabbits and moles and favored me because I hunted them for her as diligently as a barnyard cat.
Grandmother took Othryades inside the two-story stone farmhouse. What had always impressed me about the place was the inner courtyard, where the balcony was lined with shields taken by my ancestors in battle. One of the things I liked best about my grandfather was listening to his stories about the kings who had captured the shields as trophies. There was a dented hoplon painted with the fork-tongued Argive snake taken by my great-grandfather Lindius. There was an old oblong shield, taken by an ancestor named Polydorus from a Messenian king named Aristodemus. The bronze was engraved with raised scenes of war and peace like the famous aspis of Achilles. There were battered round bucklers from Tegea, Elis and the island of Samos, a cobweb strewn crescent-shaped pelta shield from Thrace, a tattered figure-eight shield from Mycenae painted with a Cretan bull, and a rectangular, wooden defender from Egypt that was as big as the front door. I looked up at them as I always did, in awe of my Spartan forefathers who had hung them from the balcony.
As Othryades set me down on the great oak table in the center of the megaron, my grandmother lit an oil lamp and snapped at a little girl my age, a house helot named Zoe, to fetch a bowl of water. Zoe was as skinny as a corn stalk, with tar black hair, smudges of dirt on her face and a leaf in her hair. “Run girl! Out to the well! Move faster or I’ll take a cane to you.” Terrified, poor little Zoe bolted from the courtyard. Grandmother smiled toothlessly, giggled and added, “Isn’t she cute?” Then she began examining my wounds.
Zoe quickly returned carrying a black Corinthian bowl painted with a gold image of Helen, of Helen of Troy fame. As my grandmother wet strips of linen and cleaned the blood from my cuts, Zoe stood by the table staring at me with a pair of glistening, doe-like eyes. Whenever I visited the farm the little helot girl followed me everywhere. I’d played many a prank on her to escape her big, watchful brown eyes. In the winter when the crickets slept in the farm’s wooden barn, Zoe always managed to find me. On cold nights, to keep warm the herd slept like a brood of puppies, leg over leg, heads on each others’ shoulders. I woke many a chill morning with Zoe curled up like a kitten at my side, all of which led to much teasing by the crickets, especially Pausanias. As she looked at me sadly, I naively realized that for some odd reason she liked me.
“Is he dead?” the girl asked fearfully.
“No he ain’t dead. But you will be if you don’t stop being a nuisance,” my grandmother scowled. She snapped at the girl to pour some fresh broth into the cauldron on the tripod over the fire. As Zoe ran to do as she was told, Chrysanthe dabbed my swollen eyes with a cool linen cloth as gently as she was tending a rose petal in her garden. “Who did this?”
“Who else,” Othryades answered.
“He’s a bad seed,” Chrysanthe said, “like his father.”
“This is for the boy’s victory at the Planistai. Won with Cleomenes’ daughter no less.”
“This is about the succession,” my grandmother said bitterly. “They are afraid Gorgo and the boy will marry and there goes the oracle’s prediction about Kleo’s heirs ruling Sparta.”
“For the gods’ sake, they’re only children.”
“Well, it’s begun. The boy will have to grow up quick if he wants to survive.”
“Pausanias had help: three of his father’s followers.”
At that age I only vaguely understood that Xenon owed his patronage to my uncle. Kleombrotus had recognized Xenon’s skill as a killer and had mentored him, trained him and refined his abilities. Everyone owes their allegiance to someone, be it a king, senator or an aristocrat. Sparta demanded we swear allegiance to the State, but the entire Hellenic world was still built on patronage. Poor men owed rich nobles for paying their debts. Men owed other men for working their land, using their nets, training them, adopting them, marrying their daughters, protecting their families … it went on and on. All male citizens of rank, including men like Cleomenes, Dorieus and Kleombrotus had their underlings that would do whatever they were told.
I slowly realized my grandmother was right. This wasn’t about leading a herd of little boys. This was bigger than that. This was about the throne. Having three of his hounds gang up on me was Kleombrotus’ way of showing the Lacedaemonians that the Delphic Oracle was right. His heirs would rule. Not Cleomenes’ daughter. And certainly not me.
“Whatever happened to honor?” my grandmother sighed. “Pausanias can’t beat the boy by himself, so Kleo resorts to foul play. That black-hearted demon says little, but he is always plotting. The gods curse the day I spawned that harpy. I should have drowned him with the sick kittens in the barn. Did you have words with his three minions?”
“More than words.”
“Good. And Pausanias? Kleo will stick a knife in you if you laid a hand on his precious heir.”
“I would have liked to have taught him a lesson as well, but didn’t. Instead I let him know that if word of this incident gets out, he will lose the respect of the Equals. Not that Kleo will care.”
“He’s like his brothers. Kleo cares only about the throne and he’ll do anything to get it. The thing that irritates me is that if he does, he’ll get the farm too.”
“What he really wants are the mines.”
“I warned Anaxandridas,” grandmother sighed. “I told him he was making a mistake by favoring Dorieus in front of the whole city. It’s driven our enemies to Cleomenes and its twisted Kleombrotus’s soul.”
“And Leonidas?”
“Don’t let his handsome face fool you. He’s just as ruthless as his twin. The only difference between them is that Leonidas will smile at you first before he guts you.”
When grandmother went off to the hearth to fetch a bowl of broth, terrified I might not be fit to be a Spartan, I whispered to Othryades. “I was afraid.” In Sparta, courage was everything. The best fate a Spartiate could hope for was to die bravely on the battlefield. It gave you the respect of your peers and immortality among the Lacedaemonians. My greatest fear was to dishonor my family name by giving in to dread Lord Ares’ twin sons, Deimos and Phobus, the gods of fear and panic.
The bushy bearded man considered my words. “We are all afraid sometimes boy. Fear can keep you alive. It’s a matter of how you handle it. Today you choked it down and stood up to four of them. That’s brave.”
It was?
“Don’t think too much,” Othryades said firmly. “Keep such thoughts far away or like a fever they will infect your mind. Act on what needs to be done, and you’ll be fine.”
That night I slept on a pallet of clean straw in one of the servant’s rooms on the second floor of the farmhouse. If my side didn’t hurt every time I breathed, it would have been an enjoyable evening. I hadn’t slept inside a house in five years. Even though my wounds throbbed, I felt spoiled. I lay looking up at the timber ceiling comforted by the knowledge that I was not alone. Othryades and my grandmother made strong allies.
After I fell asleep, Zoe sneaked onto my straw pallet. Usually when she tried this I was out in the barn with the crickets and much to everyone’s amusement, I would toss her out of the loft to land in a pile of hay below. Though annoyed that she woke me, as I was about to kick her across the floor, I paused to look into her doe-like brown eyes that were studying me so intently. I admit, there was something hypnotic about her gaze. I stared back into her eyes like I was staring into a fire.
“You will get well,” Zoe whispered her eyes never leaving mine. “You will have your revenge. One day you will break one of Pausanias’ bones.” Her voice picking up strength, she added, “You will venture to the ends of the earth. You will become a great warrior, feared among nations. You can be a king. All you have to do—is want it.”
“And how do you know this?” I asked through my battered lips.
“Helen told me.”
She didn’t mean just any Helen. She meant the Helen, Helen of Troy, who had been dead for hundreds of years. Helen had a cult following and Sparta’s oldest, most impressive temple out in the foothills of Parnassus. Lacedaemonian women loved to tell the story about the helot wet nurse who was in charge of an ugly Spartiate baby. The woman took the infant to Helen’s temple every day and prayed to improve the poor child’s appearance, which Helen did, as the girl grew up to be one of the most beautiful women in the city.
Unlike my father, who scoffed at such tales and said they were created by priests to trick people into giving generously at the temples, I believed the stories. Zoe was an Achaean like Helen, so maybe she did talk to her. Though why the most beautiful woman who ever lived would want to talk to a dirty helot girl didn’t make much sense. I told her to be quiet and sleep.
Although I would never admit it to myself or my age-mates, there was something comforting about the warmth of Zoe’s body beside me. It was like sleeping with my grandfather’s big, floppy hunting dog Bluetooth. Deep in the night the girl snuggled up against my broken rib, causing me to wake and react violently. Even though I was stiff and sore, I kicked her across the floor, causing her to knock over a potted plant, making me wince. Grandmother would yell at us both for damaging her beloved gardenias.
The next morning my father visited the farm. I awoke to find him standing over me, looking suspiciously at Zoe who was curled up on the floor behind my back. He nudged her awake with his toe and she fled like a feral cat. She stumbled and fell over the broken pot, never once taking her wide eyes from Dorieus. She looked up at him in awe, like she’d seen Ares, dread god of war.
“St
and up!” he snapped at me. “Get up. That’s it. I heard what happened and feel no pity for you. You’re an idiot. Why in the gods’ name did you tell the herd to flee? Didn’t you learn anything from the Planistai? What kind of commander tells his men to run? Don’t say a word. I don’t care if there were ten of them. Get used to it. You are always going to be out-numbered. If I’d caught you, I would have beaten you much worse just for running. You deserve what you got. Let this be a hard lesson. Stay with your men! Or you’ll never make much of an officer, much less a king.”
The entire incident was quickly forgotten. The day I left my grandparents’ farm and began limping back to the Pitane Village, as I walked along two ruts made from countless carts that served as a road, an armed hoplite named Agenor came racing toward me on horseback. Agenor was one of the kings’ royal bodyguard, called the Hippeis. As he flew by he yelled:
“The Agiad king is dead!”
3. The Garden of the Hesperides
After the death of Anaxandridas, the Spartans kept to the law, and made his eldest son Cleomenes king.
Herodotus, The History
The Spartans adhere to their own customs at the death of one of their kings. Horsemen were sent throughout Lacedaemonia, to every village, every seaport and every helot’s hovel, informing the people that a king had died. On the first day, in the villages of Pitane, Limnai, Mesoa, Kynosoura and Amyklae the free women went about striking copper kettles causing an unsettling din meant to drive away evil spirits. On the second day, a city magistrate selected a man and a woman from every household in the five villages and required them to go into official State mourning. The woman cut off their hair and wailed loudly, while the men scratched cuts into the cheeks of their faces. They threw dust upon their clothes, rolled in the dirt and went around looking somber. On the third day, the official State mourners and the leading men who dwelled around Lacedaemonia, called perioicoi, were compelled to attend the funeral ceremony where the king’s body was burned atop a great pyre. The women threw their hair into the fire, the perioicoi beat their foreheads and everyone walked around saying that Anaxandridas had been the best king ever.
The Wandering King Page 5