The Isle of Stone

by Nicholas Nicastro

  “Wait, what do I do again?” asked Rehash.

  “I said, guard against the countermarch! New kid, you come with me too . . . on the double!”

  As they scattered, each of the boys picked out a handful of stones from between the broken barley stalks. Antalcidas didn’t understand what they were attacking—until they all crept through the grain and fixed their target.

  The “scarecrow” was a solitary helot, walking along the verge with a hoe across his shoulders, a sun hat on his head.

  Birthmark led his party through the barley a short distance ahead of the helot. He paused, synchronizing his approach with the flankers and the rear guard. The helot halted too, cocking his head as if he’d heard something, bringing the hoe down in blocking position across his body. There was a pause as hunters and quarry held still; Antalcidas had stalked hares on his own, in the grove behind his house, but had never before felt his heart beat with such anticipation. And then it began: the squad closed in on three sides with rocks on high, letting loose a collective squeal that seemed more rodentlike than dangerous. But there was no avoiding the ferocity of the attack as the stones pelted the helot from all sides. His hat fluttering off his head like a wounded bird, he collapsed to the dirt with his face covered. Birthmark and his more brazen foot soldiers came in close to hurl their missiles from inches away. The helot, who seemed to have some experience with these things, convulsed on the stubble to avoid the blows.

  They tortured him with every rock they could find, and when they ran out of rocks they tried sticks, pebbles, and cow chips. Climbing to his feet, the helot uncovered his face to see where he might run. That was when Birthmark served up his last surprise—a shard of granite he had held back just for that moment. It struck the helot square in the mouth. An arc of blood, like a libation uncapped, poured out of him. He escaped into the woods adjoining the next field. Frog and Beast moved to go after him, but Birthmark called them back.

  The boys gathered around the splash of helot blood and broken teeth on the ground, cheering. Birthmark broke into the middle of them.

  “Quiet, all of you! What do you have to celebrate? Doing your duty?”

  “That’s one scarecrow who won’t raise his head for a while!” declared Frog, a seemingly neckless, dimpled lad. He picked up the stump of a broken incisor and tried to fit in into the gap in his own mouth.

  “Maybe. But there are always more slaves than men like us. Remember that.”

  “Look! New kid didn’t throw!”

  They all looked to Antalcidas—the only one of them who still had a sizable rock in his hand. As they all scrutinized him he burned red with embarrassment. The rock dropped from his fingers.

  “Well, I’d say we’ll be calling you Grub for quite a while yet,” Birthmark said.

  7.

  For the next month, Antalcidas had no contact with the world of adults, but instead lived as freely as some wild thing sprung straight from the soil. No one came to feed the boys, but at the height of summer the trees and gardens and vineyards were heaped with food for the taking. After gorging themselves on fruit, they would go down to the swift Eurotas to drink, and then lie on the rocks as the rays of the summer sun filled them with warm indolence. Twilight was the time for deer and jackals to venture out, and so too for the squad to use the shadows to stalk helots. Soon enough Antalcidas was in the forefront of these attacks, coming at last to relish the look of terror on the faces of grown men as he came screaming upon them. The excitement plucked every string of muscle and tendon with the music of unabashed, consequence-free cruelty. With such power, he not only lost his fear of the dark, but came to take night and cold as his natural allies.

  One by one, the amenities he had grown up with—a roof, hot food, clothes—became distant, even absurd to contemplate. The sound of human speech itself was stripped away, becoming in those days a rare thing to be indulged only for purposes of organizing war parties. In time they at last stopped calling him “Grub” and named him “Stone,” after his deadeye accuracy with a thrown rock. But Antalcidas, having learned the essential unimportance of words, no longer cared what he was called.

  He stopped missing his home. After two months of sleeping under the stars, he could visualize the constellations more easily than the features of his mother’s face. Looking up from his bed of rushes, he imagined he had a new family all around him; the lines of an old poem of Alcman, still sung by the older boys, echoed in his mind:

  The upland gorges are sleeping, laid among peak and crag Hushed by rushing waters As the nation of beasts enwombed in the black earth Keep the silence . . .

  His packmates all came to look alike, their faces and knees caked with the same dirt, their feet hardened by the same calluses, their eyes burning with the same appetites. Older men coveted them when they glimpsed them in the forest, like prize game. Birthmark taught the younger lads to masturbate like men, standing up as if to piss, legs together. In the end they deposited their seed all together in a communal hole in the ground. Antalcidas wrung what he could into these viscous masses, imagining perhaps that the mingling of masculine essences would give life to the soil, like the warriors of Theban Cadmus sprung from the earth out of dragon’s teeth. Women who came upon these wet spots puzzled over them; men who had gone through the Rearing understood—and smiled.

  By the fall Birthmark—whose real name Antalcidas never learned—passed into the lowest of the senior age-groups. Beast took over as their leader, and boys younger than Antalcidas entered the pack after him. He bullied them in turn, calling them “Grub” just as he had been. Helping his inferiors to struggle, adapt, and finally to mature made him believe in his own wisdom. Besides learning where the best berries grew, and which leaves to chew to settle an upset stomach, and where to obtain the sharpest cutting stones, he imagined he understood at last how a boy acquired manly virtue.

  But he still had a lot to learn. Just as the chill of autumn mornings bit harder, the single cloak Endius had given him had become reduced to moldy, moth-eaten uselessness. It was no longer so easy to find fruit on the trees. The olives were not ready yet, and not many grapes were left on the vines after the harvest. Beast showed them how to stave off the pangs by chewing thyme leaves. He also showed them that, in a pinch, crickets and ants were edible (the former tasted like dry sticks, the latter like almond). But it was hard to eat his fill of these. The hunger gave him a constant headache; he found himself attracted again to settled places, where he thought he might steal some bread or cheese.

  The boys were sometimes diverted from this torment by the intermittent presence of Thibron, son of Proclus. A smiling, handsome figure with preternaturally white teeth, Thibron was a Firstie—a member of the highest age-class, poised to leave the Rearing and embark on his career as a fighting member of the army. One of the duties of a Firstie was to school his juniors with advice and games. Thibron kept Beast’s pack on the run with a steady stream of physical challenges, calling on each of them to exceed the exploits of the rest. “Which of you can climb this tree the fastest?” was a typical dare. Others were less innocent, such as “Who can take a punch in the chest from Beast and not flinch?” or “Who can stay facedown in the river the longest?” or, most ingeniously, “Who can bring me some hairs from the leg of Isidas the Ephor?” Fulfilling these tasks broke up the monotony of long afternoons in the hills. It also gave Thibron an air of diabolical excitement—when he appeared, no one was sure what might happen.

  But there were even greater dangers on the roam. The worse thing that could happen was to blunder into a gang of older boys, who would make them pay for their lack of discretion. This happened only once, during an afternoon when Beast led them down to the Eurotas to drink. Their favorite spot was occupied by a pack of fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds. During the chase Frog was caught from behind. Antalcidas heard him scream as the enemy gathered to kick him. Circling around, Antalcidas found a good round stone and, without thinking of the consequences, threw it at one of Frog’s torment
ers. The rock struck its target square in the back.

  “Ow! What was that?”

  “Somebody threw something.”

  “Where?”

  They peered into the woods, but Antalcidas was well hidden among the laurel and holly oak. He had another stone in his hand, in case they came after him.

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “Somebody’s in there—I can smell him.”

  “C’mon, let’s go,” said their leader, looking down on the supine Frog. “This little shit isn’t worth it.”

  After each offered a parting kick, they left him on the ground. Antalcidas crept up, eyes and ears open in case their withdrawal was a trap.

  “Are you all right?” he asked Frog. “Can you walk?”

  The other boy moved his limbs, said something unintelligible, but otherwise made no response. Antalcidas turned him over to examine his chest and stomach. There were red marks there that would soon ripen into footprint-sized welts.

  “Stone, what are you doing?” asked Beast, who was suddenly standing behind him.

  “He’s hurt.”

  “Got the wind knocked out of him. Hey, did you throw rocks at them?”

  Beast had a look on his face as if he’d caught Antalcidas using a girl’s spindle.

  “I did . . . but only because there were so many.”

  “I didn’t hear that.”

  “What was I supposed to do? There were five of them!”

  “Listen, rocks are fine for punishing helots. But in battle, against real enemies, you don’t demean yourself by couching behind a bush and throwing things. Don’t you know anything?”

  “I know you weren’t there to help.”

  But Beast was already walking away, shaking his head.

  After the new year they heard again from the boy-herd. The pack was summoned to the crest of the acropolis, where it was met by Endius and a man they did not know. Endius had the boys sit on the slope below them, obliging them to behold their teachers framed against the open sky. The boy-herd wore a simple tunic with one shoulder bared; the other man was dressed for war, with crimson cloak, short sword hanging from a leather baldric, and conical field cap made of felt on his head. His shield rested against his leg, its great lambda insignia—for “Lacedaemon”—facing out.

  “Those who have lived thus far, congratulations,” Endius said without welcome or preamble. “The first part of your education is over. Today you will begin to learn what you need beyond survival. You will learn what it means to be a citizen of Sparta. Listen.”

  He looked to the soldier, who leaned forward as if he was about to draw his sword. But instead he confronted them with a poem:

  I would not say anything for a man nor take account of him For any speed of his feet or wrestling skill he might have not if he had the size of a Cyclops and strength to go with it Not if he could outrun Boreas, the North Wind of Thrace not if he were more handsome and gracefully formed than Tithonos, or had more riches than Midas had, or Kinyras too, not if he were more a king than Tantalid Pelops, Or had the power of speech and persuasion Adrastos had, not if he had all splendors except for a fighting spirit. For no man ever proves himself a good man in war unless he can endure to face the blood and the slaughter, go close against the enemy and fight with his hands. Here is courage, mankind’s finest possession, here is the noblest prize that a young man can endeavor to win, and it is a good thing his polis and all the people share with him when a man plants his feet and stands in the foremost spears relentlessly, all thought of foul flight completely forgotten, and has trained his heart to be steadfast and to endure, and with words encourages the man who is stationed beside him—

  “When I first heard these verses of Tyrtaeus,” said Endius, “I was a child precisely as old as you are now, sitting in exactly the same place. The telling was done in just the same way, by a Spartiate as honored as Aeimnestus who stands here today, for the very same purpose. Savor this moment, boys, for it is given to none of us to hear Tyrtaeus for the first time twice. And like Aeimnestus, you will come to know every word of ‘The Code of the Citizen’ as well as you will know the fourth hour of a night watch, or what it feels like to take your place in the bronze-girt line. It has been this way since the sons of Herakles first conquered the kingdom of the Atreids, and so it will be thousands of years after we are all heaped on the pyre.”

  The boy-herd looked to the soldier, who picked up his shield and, with a comradely nod to the pack, departed. To hear that the reciter was Aeimnestus, the very man who had killed the Persian general Mardonius at Plataea, inspired each boy to look on him with new eyes. Those ropes under his skin were the very tendons that bound the muscles of heroism; those were the glossy locks that fell across the shoulders of legends. Looking down, Stone beheld the horn-nailed, callused feet of a veteran campaigner. In the proud, self-sufficient vacuity of Aeimnestus’ eyes, he got his first look at a life dwarfed by its own renown—though it would be years before he understood this. For now, the moral of the man’s mere presence, that such honor was within the grasp of anyone in the pack, was as compelling as anything written by poets.

  Endius gave the boys their first official orders. They were to memorize and recite the first twenty lines of the “Code” by the next day. Omission or inaccuracy, he warned, would tell on the backs of those who failed. The same went for those who flouted the state’s demand for them to learn their letters, and the dances of their fathers, and all the observances that sustained their city in the eyes of the gods. Then he asked the pack a question:

  “For what purpose is the Spartan system?”

  The abstractness of the question, and the sudden demand that they use their wits, at first kept the boys silent.

  “My father said that his father told him that we suffer the Rearing to learn discipline,” said Redhead. “So the answer is discipline, then.”

  “Too many words,” replied Endius. “Never prattle. And you’re wrong: discipline is never a goal, but only the means. Anyone else?”

  “Victory?” Rehash ventured.

  Endius kept looking, as if this answer wasn’t worth a reply.

  “Virtue?”

  “Who said that?” asked Endius.

  Stone raised his hand.

  “I ask again, who said that?”

  Antalcidas stood up. “I said it.”

  “That’s better—never hide in the crowd, boy! If something’s worth saying, it’s worth standing on your feet and taking credit for it. Understand?”

  “Yes!”

  “You said virtue. That’s closer to the truth, but still not right—virtue comes as naturally to the well-reared Spartan as fruit to the trees, but it is not itself the goal. Anyone else?”

  No one spoke.

  “There are two right answers. I’ll tell you one of them: freedom. The Spartan citizen is as free as any mortal can be of enslaving passions. Most binding of all are the pleasures that men pursue. To teach you these truths, all children of citizens must suffer the Rearing, without regard to their families’ honor or wealth. Remember this when you are hungry, or cold, or if you are lucky, facedown on the field of battle: you suffer because it makes you free.

  “As for the other right answer—that is one you will have to learn on your own. It will not be told.”

  With that, Endius announced that he would answer precisely two questions. The youths looked at each other, as if unsure of what to ask or how to ask it. Beast shoved the nearest boy to him and snarled, “Come on now—any grub questions?”

  Cheese straightened up and spoke, measuring out his words sparingly. “It is said that other Greeks live in proper cities. Why do our people still live in villages?”

  “What you call ‘proper cities’ are the conceits of mortals,” replied Endius. “The Lacedaemonians live in their five villages, and other Greeks in their cities. The Persians have the biggest settlements of all. Yet where do finer men dwell than here? Thebans and Corinthians assemble in vast meeting halls. Yet are the de
cisions of our elders any less wise for their meeting in the forest, where they are undistracted by roofs and statues and other vanities? The Babylonians have a city wall half a stade tall, and they have been conquered many times. We have no wall, yet we have never known an enemy soldier to plant his foot in our soil. Sparta’s walls are the bodies of the men who defend her.”

  “How large is our territory?” asked Frog.

  “You have seen the boundary yourself. It lies at the tip of Aeimnestus’s spear. Wherever he carries it, that is the territory of Sparta.”

  The pack was dismissed. Their suffering, and therefore their freedom, was enhanced by a spell of cold weather that shrouded Taygetus and the folds of their tunics with frost. They forgot their discomfort by running through the woods, flying under the opposing limbs of the trees, lashing the trunks with fennel stalks. As Stone charged, he struck a young laurel, scattering the leaves behind him as he sang the words Beast had taught him:

  I would not say anything for a man nor take account of him For any speed of his feet or wrestling skill he might have not if he had the size of a Cyclops and strength to go with it . . .

  8.

  The raising of Epitadas consumed almost all Damatria’s attention until it was time to let him go. In those years she fed him, bathed him, swaddled him, and taught him with the fierce possessiveness of a lover. She rarely let Lampito hold the child; Damatria had no patience at all with Molobrus’ paternal fumbling. Of his other kind of clumsiness, the one that afflicted him in the bedroom, she no longer took notice. The act interested her only insofar as it resulted in the salvation that was Epitadas.

  In a most un-Spartan manner, she took pleasure in her son’s cooing helplessness. The freshness of his smell possessed her, as in the night she tended to his little cries, his spit-ups, his chubby arms held out to her. Upon the spectacle of his first steps, she wept. For four years she nursed him, seeking privacy so she could gaze into his eyes. The power of his suck kindled a sensual glow that Molobrus’ blunt pokings could never match.