The Isle of Stone

by Nicholas Nicastro

  The helots had learned from bitter experience that the Hidden Service struck mainly at night. They therefore avoided the dark, and if forced to travel, went around in groups. Paths through forest were absolutely shunned; stockpens were abandoned to jackals and children undergoing the Rearing. Epitadas would therefore need some luck and a lot of patience to take his prey.

  In the long hours of waiting Epitadas worked himself into a lather of indignation at the presumption of the helots. As descendants of Herakles, the Spartiates had always owned Laconia by birthright. This right had been contravened for centuries as his ancestors wandered the north, but now they had returned for good. Every hour this helot, this detested descendant of a race of squatters, strode those furrows constituted an affront to his blood overlordship. This was a claim that transcended mere legality—it was divinely sanctioned and was its own justification for everything that must follow. That the helots were permitted to be useful to the Lacedaemonians was a conditional privilege whose alternatives were dispossession or, if necessary, annihilation. How this tall helot had the temerity to thrive on his plot of borrowed land was a conundrum only the gods were sufficient to unravel. In the meantime, Epitadas was obliged to carry on the war.

  The helot youngsters, less careful, were easier to put under the knife. He knew one man, a highly respected Spartiate on the brink of election to the Gerousia, who specialized in killing children. Epitadas did not exactly disapprove of this practice: in this generational struggle, a dead boy was as good as a dead warrior. Those with their hearts in the right place must be excused their enthusiasm. For his part, Epitadas had many opportunities to take the youngest son of the farmer he coveted. The boy, who was as thin and downy as a yearling swan, was kept home long after the age when the Lacedaemonian masters went to the Rearing. The helots, in their moral squalor, did not understand that boys must be parented by the city. They were also ignorant of the importance of older men’s intimacy. The boy belonged solely to his parents, beloved, stroked, cooed at to a sickening extreme.

  On the son’s eighth birthday his father gave him a ewe to tend. In the stubble of the fields he would drive the sheep back and forth with a little ashwood stick, tapping her lightly on the flanks as his father had taught him, never straying far from the house. The ewe bleated, ears twitching, whites showing around the barred slits of its eyes. Epitadas could have taken the boy on any of a dozen occasions when his mother, standing at the window, shifted her attention to her housework.

  But the taking of small children held no interest. Those who knew Epitadas knew his defining quality to be impatience—he was in a hurry to achieve the destiny envisioned for him. In this regard he saw no impropriety in the way his mother had provisioned him during the Rearing: she was only speeding him toward the success he would have taken for himself. Other mothers fed their children too, but none of his rivals had grown so strong, so quickly. Should a colt destined to take the olive wreath be forced to grow on inferior fodder?

  The night came when the boy left his pet tied outside. Epitadas descended from the hillside, sensing an opportunity. He was not alone: the single wolf was visible by its eyeshine, crouching behind the rungs of the drying rack. The ewe, perceiving the threat, jerked its tether. Her bell sounded in a way the helots understood. Epitadas heard a commotion within the house, saw the door open, and the lank figure of the father framed against the glow of the hearth fire.

  Men’s eyes also shine when they observe a lighted place from a dark one—Spartiates were taught to conceal this by focusing their gaze on a point slightly away from their object. The helot strode into the yard grasping a flaming brand, his pace slowing as he searched the dark. Epitadas watched sidelong with wide, unwavering eyes, his black pupils reflecting nothing. The ewe lowed; nearby, a lazy blink briefly eclipsed the blazing stars of the wolf.

  The ethos of the Hidden Service called for using the smallest, dullest knife that would do the job. Epitadas liked to think he outdid the others with a weapon that was a piece of shop discard, an iron prong no more substantial than a belt buckle. From behind, it entered the helot’s neck with a slapping sound, followed by a wet, farting exhalation as he drew the thing across the windpipe. Epitadas had to reach up to make the kill; he laid the helot on the ground with the satisfaction of rendering him not so tall after all.

  He would be long gone when the men of the village found the body. As he ascended the hill, with his brother the wolf bounding not far behind, the cries of the helot women would waft up behind him like plumes of curing smoke from a very good hunt.

  2.

  In the opening year of the war, six campaign seasons before the siege of Sphacteria, the Dog Tail Battalion, having suffered no combat casualties, returned from the first invasion of Attica. The only deaths were by misadventure: a Nigh-Dweller was crushed under an apple tree he had cut down with too much zeal, and a low-caste Spartiate, relegated to the shame of riding with the cavalry, fell from his mount onto a fence of sharpened logs. Though King Archidamos proceeded slowly, making clear his army’s position each day, the Athenians stayed snug inside their fortifications and would not fight. As the season wore on, the king had the Lacedaemonians march under the Long Walls with their heads exposed, spears on their shoulders, shields lowered. The guards on the Athenian ramparts, selected by Pericles himself for their coolheadedness, looked down on this challenge with perfect equanimity, as if observing a migration of sea turtles. The monotony of a whole season consumed by burning fields and felling trees left the Lacedaemonians desperate to risk their lives in battle.

  Antalcidas was thirty-two years old when he at last contemplated taking a wife, but he seemed younger. He was then part of a dwindling cohort of unmarried males over thirty. Zeuxippos, who was by then too frail for anything but giving advice, reminded him that his responsibility lay in taking on a young protégé of his own. As his hair grew out and the lines on his face deepened, Antalcidas became an object for furtive glances from the new propaides, who leaned to their fellows to inquire what mess he attended. But he never felt up to the task of mentoring. By his own reckoning, he had yet barely proved himself on the battlefield, while knowledge of the helot blood in his veins did nothing for his self-confidence. To be exposed for a fraud would dishonor not only himself, but anyone he took under his wing.

  Something similar applied to the prospect of his marriage. Damatria did what her station demanded, sending his way the daughters of Spartiates who would think well of attaching them to the largest estate in Laconia. Ever gallant, he entertained these women, though they all left him cold.

  “What was wrong with gentle Elephantis,” his mother asked him in a letter cut in wax, “that you would treat her with such little regard? I thought her teats worth the liability of her face. And think of the expense you’d save on a wet nurse . . . !”

  Grinding his teeth, he rubbed out her message and sent the tablet back without inscribing a reply.

  On those occasions when he was in the city he found his thoughts going back half a lifetime, to the girl in the chorus at the Harvest Festival. Sparta was not a big place—in time nearly every face became familiar in form if not by name. Yet in all those years he never saw her. Was it a peculiar kind of fate that kept them strangers? Or was she outwardly so changed by the intervening time that he had seen her already, but not recognized her? He was not under the impression girls changed that much in their maidenhood—or did they? Was she married? Honored in death from childbearing? A figment lasting only a day in the spell of his devotional enthusiasm? These thoughts occurred to him.

  And then, just when he had stopped looking for her, they met on the path between the villages of Mesoa and Pitana. It was early in the new year, just after the Festival of the Unmarrieds, when bachelors like himself did penance for their childlessness by performing choral dances in the freezing marketplace. After, with the sun showing weakly through the trembling poplars, reefs of dark cloud fled over the olive terraces to drop their burdens of snow on the mountai
nsides. He was concealed from the chin down by the military cloak wrapped around his body and she with her himation fashioned into a hood to cover her ears. Still, a look of recognition came over both as they approached each other.

  “So there you are,” she said, matter-of-factly.

  Though Antalcidas knew exactly who she was, he was momentarily embarrassed by the force of his own reaction. He nodded his head in mute denial.

  “No? Forgive me then, elder. . . .”

  He searched her face as she moved to pass him by. The years had drawn her face longer, with care lines parenthesizing her eyes. She was still fair, but the sweep of hair beneath her hood had turned amber as she passed into mature adulthood. Yet this was undeniably the same face that lived in his memory—the same eyes, wide-set around the same thin, straight nose, the painted lips above a chin whose upper line bowed oddly, like a shallow omega. Her eyebrows were neatly plucked lines as liquidly expressive as the ripples on a pond. As she slipped past, the end of her left brow seemed to meander, dangling and inquiring, above the corner of her eye.

  “Wait,” he said, suddenly afraid he would lose her again. “What’s your name?”

  “What an impertinent question! Have you told me yours, Antalcidas?”

  Too distracted to take her joke, he stood with his mouth open. She read his lapse as if he had taken affront. Leaning forward, she laid a reassuring hand on his elbow as she said, “Andreia, of Pitana.” Her voice was pitched girlishly high, but rang like a well-cast bell; the slight pressure of her breath stirred his beard hairs as if a sparrow had flown under his chin.

  “Of course I know your name,” she continued. “You are Antalcidas, son of Molobrus and Damatria, also known as Stone, one-time eromenos of Zeuxippos the Ephor. You testified against Thibron in the trial that led to his exile—out of jealousy according to some, for the sake of the truth according to others. Your first action was in Sciritis, where you charged alone against a gang of Arcadian slingers. After you set the Arcadians to flight, you let your leader, Praxitas, steal the glory of your victory, but no one believes him now. Today you command a platoon in the Dog Tail Battalion. You have a strong javelin throw and fair skill with the sword. But you truly excel with the spear.”

  She looked at him with obvious self-satisfaction. “How do I know all this? If you men only knew! We girls know everything about the city’s warriors. Lots and lots of details about every one of you!”

  Confounded, he could think of nothing more to do except to point his chin ahead. “I am going to Mesoa.”

  “Extraordinary news! Good day, then.”

  “Good day.”

  She seemed to take a perverse pleasure in the awkwardness of their parting, as if it had gone exactly as she had imagined it would. Antalcidas walked on, not quite sure if he had enjoyed the encounter. Into his head rushed all the things he might have said to her instead; it occurred to him that he had appeared the fool, and that he might never redeem himself. He must ask Doulos for advice on what to say to women. Some Greeks had made studies of such matters.

  In the next days he found many more occasions to walk between Mesoa and Pitana. As Andreia did not appear, he was left to the kind of thoughts that often preoccupy young men in his position: imagining what his life would be like with this particular woman at his side. The images were trivial and profound, and came hurtling upon each other. In the Kynosoura house, he stares at her at her reading, the end of her tongue showing as she concentrates; their arms brushing as they walk, they promenade into the market with smiles on their faces, well aware of the other Spartiates staring; after she is here, retying her girdle with fingers sticky from pomegranate juice, she is there, writhing in the pool of her own water as she delivers him a purple, pucker-lipped infant.

  He was activated three days later, when half his battalion was garrisoned in Corinthia to dissuade the Athenians from mischief on the Isthmus. In the spring the troops returned to Laconia for only a short time before the summer invasion of Attica was to be launched. These periods of idleness when he was neither training nor on campaign wore heavily on him. Apart from his board with the Hill Wolves, he was mostly alone because he had cultivated no genuine friends in the city. He was too proud to see his mother because of her disrespect, yet too insecure in his origins to mix easily with anyone else. If his loneliness did not kill him, he reasoned, it would only make him stronger.

  In the spring the verges grew wildflowers, the air so redolent with the scent of violets that Persephone would have blanched. He was on the Pitana road again, but walked in such a state of perfumed distraction that he forgot to expect Andreia. She was almost upon him when he recognized her. This time she was bareheaded and wore a short tunic that showed her arms and legs—the limbs he had once watched, fretting with lust, as they bent in tribute to Phoebus. So busy was he in staring at these tapering stems that he made no greeting.

  Her eyebrow afloat, she said, “I see you’re on your way to Mesoa again.”

  Antalcidas looked up to reply, but his tongue could only flop in his mouth like a landed fish. Now that she was hoodless, he saw that she had the long hair of an unmarried woman.

  As if reading his thoughts, she reached up to twist the blond ends around her finger.

  “Shall we walk for a while?” she asked. Hollowed by disappointment, an endless expanse of black broth and inanity stretching before him, he could only nod and follow her.

  3.

  They took one of the cart roads toward the foothills of Taygetus, picking their way around the wheel ruts. On the estates around them the helot sharecroppers tramped behind their plows, drove their wains of manure, or stood curious, swabbing their foreheads as they regarded the odd pair walking west from the city. Unlike in certain other parts of Greece, strolling was not a typical pastime in Laconia.

  Andreia was indeed unmarried. Her mother had died trying to give her husband a second son. Her father, Ramphias, son of Clearidas, was only a few years older than Antalcidas, but had already risen to the position of Spartiate judge on the Nigh-Dweller island of Cythera, off Laconia’s south coast. He had gone there at the beginning of the new year, and would stay until the next. In a tone more rueful than self-pitying, she granted that she walked a lot because Pitana was full of Ramphias’ relatives, some of whom claimed the right to keep watch over her. Certain others, including some of the males, asserted rights even more presumptuous.

  “All that would be more bearable if Sparta offered any diversion at all,” she said.

  “There are festivals,” he replied. “There are parades.”

  “Oh yes, we Lacedaemonians love our parades! It seems we are always either preparing to march, marching, or returning home from a march, year in and year out. And we never find it tiresome, do we?”

  This struck Antalcidas as a strange thing for the daughter of a prominent Spartiate to say. Reading him, she explained that while she had the typical upbringing of a Spartan girl, her tastes were corrupted by her father’s Athenian guest-friend, who often came to Laconia on state business. During those visits he would describe to her the charms of his native city.

  “The music! The paintings! The drama! When he invited us to travel back with him, I longed to go, but my father took my eldest brother instead. When he returned, do you think he described one temple to me, or a single sculpture? No—his only response was to sneer, and tell me that I was fortunate not to go, because Spartan ways are best!”

  “They are,” he said.

  “But of course . . . it goes without saying. So why say it? Why should our superiority drive us to sneer and not to understand? Why are we so content to be so ignorant?”

  Such confusion! Looking at her, Antalcidas believed he could perceive her sickness of spirit in those tremulous features, that threadbare beauty that seemed barely to cover her mortal bones. She shared with sophists and children the fault of posing too many questions. Insofar as doubt was the undoing of man, she was dying as surely as any hoplite facedown on the battlefield
. And yet . . . what would so utterly disqualify the woman in the eyes of most eligible Spartiates filled him with a powerful impulse to save her. To that end—as much as his lust—he followed as the conversation waned and they passed on to roads that narrowed to tracks, and then to mere paths sloping up between stands of arbutus and pine. Goats milled under the boughs, either flicking their ears in idle contentment or rearing up on their hind legs to reach the spring buds. They turned to the intruders, with eyes as opaque as pans of milk, staring as if whatever might happen held no significance, something common in the world, and therefore innocent in its inevitability. He would kiss her and yes, they would commence their sorrow. A love, like any other new bud, to unfurl and be nipped.

  Her lips were softer than her face promised. Nothing was angular about them, nothing hard beyond but the teeth that opened to reveal what he did not yet know how to fill. With his nostrils at her cheek, he smelled iris; with the passage of what could have been hours, he opened one eye and saw a honeyed emerald peeping back. Her lips pulled into a smile.

  Out of curiosity, he had kissed some of the women his mother had delivered to him. After a handful of these experiences he presumed that he had mastered the skill; it struck him as marginally of interest, more appealing in the anticipation than the doing. Yet with Andreia he realized he knew nothing. A kiss, he learned, could become like drinking seawater, each drop urging the consumption of another. What had barely seemed consequential before now seemed to have a deep, indescribable meaning. He meant to ask her what she was smiling about, but found his mind emptied by the prospect of tasting the neck she presented to him. When they pulled apart an amount of time had vanished that he was not aware; they were standing in a spot a hundred feet from where they had begun, the dirt in between marked by the course of their footprints spiraling around each other.