Yet the day Andreia dreaded came on with pitiless speed. Over the weeks she and Lampito had exhausted the known remedies, both practical and divine. She hired a professional root-cutter to gather medicinal herbs under the light of the full moon. With Damatria’s word as credit, she spared no expense on ointments, including one made with truffles, silver rust, crushed black ants, and the gallbladder of a freshly killed brown bear. She sent expensive dedications to the Sanctuary of Asclepius at Epidauros, and inquired about bringing an adept of the healer-god to tend little Molobrus in Kynosoura. But when they turned to this last recourse it was too late for the priest to arrive in time.
They came for the prescreening at dawn the day before the judgment. The official of the ephorate was as dreary looking as his errand, regarding the child with eyes fishy and lifeless. Andreia prayed inwardly to Apollo as he made the examination—the first time she had done such a thing in her life. She chose to consider her appeal answered when she learned that Molobrus had been slated as number two in the judgment order—that is, only the second most likely to be rejected.
“So it seems our little boy is not the least promising of the bunch!” she crowed.
“So it seems,” replied Lampito.
Andreia kept up her optimism on the morning of the judgment. Lampito accompanied her as far as the borders of the sanctuary of the Brazen House, helping her to rewrap Molobrus’ swaddling clothes before Andreia went on alone.
“You might as well boil the barley for the baby’s lunch,” Andreia declared, a smile fixed on her lips. “We won’t be long away.”
After she was gone, Lampito spied a squad of under-thirties gathered under a tree, with two infant-sized baskets at their feet. When she approached them they fell silent, watching her anxiously; Spartan youths learned early to beware attracting the attention of stern old women.
“I assume those”—she indicated the baskets—“mean you are the guard for Langadha gorge.”
The leader stood up straight. “We are, elder.”
She searched the recesses of her cheeks with her tongue, then bowed her head and disgorged a silver lump into the palm of her hand. The soldiers leaned in to see what she had there: a silver tetradrachm of Argos, thick as a child’s finger, the wolf’s head emblem on its obverse glistening with her spit. She let them stare at the thing, feeling the thrill of its illegality make a palpable circuit through them. Then she closed her hand.
“I think you can find somewhere to spend this, next campaign,” she said, handing the coin to the leader. The others hung on him, jabbing their fingers to get a feel of it.
“This is for the boy, the son of the trembler. Break his neck first. Don’t make a mess of it.”
5.
The under-thirties, accompanied by a magistrate and half a dozen helot bearers, made the procession up to the gorge before sunset. The soldiers marched with arms ready; in the long history of the city no one had ever interfered with their errand, but the Spartans did not believe in tempting a first occurrence.
For the walk up from the valley floor the helots carried the two baskets. Since not even the Lacedaemonians, who longed to hear the wails of dying adversaries, wished to rouse the cries of what they carried, the helots, on pain of flogging, stepped with care lest they jostle the fated contents.
When they approached the rim, the soldiers took the baskets away. Helots, after all, could never be allowed to kill Spartans, even defective ones. As the end neared, the guard captain felt the hard curve of the Argive coin, tucked in his tunic, warm with the heat of his hand—and fretted. For some time now he realized that he had forgotten which of the two boys was the son of Antalcidas. He was twenty-eight and as mindful of matters of virtue as anyone on the verge of full citizenship. Not to follow through on his promise to Lampito, though illegally made, gave him a vague sense of dishonor. Yet he could not make a spectacle of his confusion in front of the magistrate.
The latter was walking ahead, gazing idly at the hard gray pinnacles that stretched like boney fingers over the place of forgetting. While boys undergoing the Rearing ranged all over the Taygetos, all of them acquired a deep aversion to this spot, seldom looking into the depths where they knew the sons and daughters of Sparta were swallowed up. Their imaginings peopled it with ghosts and ghouls, with faces laid open like melons after sword practice, or mangled pieces of animated cadaver twitching and crawling over the streambed. When the boys grew up, most surrendered their fantasies, but not their dread of the gorge. The magistrate was an exception: with duty taking him up there almost every week, he strolled almost leisurely, peeping down as he whistled the melody of some half-forgotten camp song. He interrupted his performance to spit into the sacred chasm, and then turned back to the guard captain.
“Are your feet stuck in mud? Let’s get on with this business before we have to fetch firewood in the dark!”
When the other had resumed his strolling, the captain stepped off the trail and removed the cover from the basket. He didn’t look at the face within, and didn’t hesitate. Taking the head in one hand and the shoulder in the other, he wrenched them obliquely apart until he heard the crack of the vertebrae. Then, unwisely, he looked down at what he’d done.
The boy’s skull was mottled with skin ulcers that were responsible for his rejection. His face, however, was perfectly formed, down to the delicate flutes of his nostrils, the whisper of eyebrows, and the tiny pink lips that now parted for his last breaths. In the brief moment he could bear to look, he saw the death rattle and the ball-less whites of his eyes rolled under half-closed lids, and covered the basket. No one could say he had not tried to fulfill his promise.
6.
If not for the absence of his mother, travel in the warm, rocking basket would have been pleasant to Molobrus. It lulled him, over the miles of his life’s journey to the place his fathers had chosen for him, his brows furrowed with the effort of dreaming. He saw the nimbus of gray that he had learned was his mother, her head bent, pouring tears as her fingertips glistened blood from the scoring of her cheeks. He saw another shape in the gloom, still less distinct, who also wept, though he sensed not for any knowledge of a son borne up from her dark, benthic core. He went upward, ever upward, through the soft gates that waited to strangle him, up into the light, the trail, the judgment, and the mountain. Had he known the gorge awaited, he might have wondered to what fresh heights this new caregiver would send him.
When the moment came, instinct triggered a reflex that made him grab for some secure object. Thick arms spread and gathered in empty air; his bladder voided as he fell. After this the sensation seemed familiar—a long-lost weightlessness. In peace, he remained curled into a ball, his feet crossed at the ankles, his right thumb in his mouth, his eyes turned away from the light, for all the time left to him in the world.
7.
The Athenians were hard-pressed to find places for their guests. As criminal penalties at the time more often included death, fines, or exile, prison space was minimal in the city. The likelihood of another Lacedaemonian invasion discouraged the keeping of captives in camps outside the city walls. High-ranking Spartiates like Antalcidas and Frog were therefore kept in a small jailhouse near the marketplace, while less valuable prisoners, such as the under-thirties and the handful of surviving helots, were boarded out to the storage pits and basements of wealthy citizens. The latter, though scattered, did not want for company: it became a popular amusement for hosts to cap the entertainment at their drinking parties by showing their guests the shackled Spartans in their cellars. Cleon kept no fewer than six in his fine home in Scambonidae; Demosthenes a token two. Nicias took none, though his basement was the biggest in town.
Demosthenes earned the military victory on the island, but Cleon reaped the success. The latter’s jingoist populism became the dominant political force in the city. The prisoners, he argued, could be used as a check on Lacedaemonian aggression: if the enemy dared invade Attica again, they would watch their countrymen’s throats sl
it and their bodies strung up on the walls. Sure enough, the Spartans sent no invasion the following summer. Instead, they sent a procession of envoys, each newcomer prepared to concede a little more than the last. Cleon—who most now believed could do no wrong—enjoined the Assembly to dismiss the negotiators. With the Athenians holding what they believed were almost three hundred trump cards, they were content to wait for even greater rewards.
Though the Spartans sought the return of their prisoners, their more immediate concern was the Athenian navy. The Athenian ships, based now in Pylos, struck more freely than ever, sacking and burning from the borders of Argos in the east to Helus in the south to Messenia in the west. The Athenians introduced more Messenian exiles into Pylos, encouraging them to ravage the land and free as many of the natives they could find. The Spartan response betrayed their desperation: they organized companies of roving cavalry and archers. Naturally, with no proper citizens willing to do such dishonorable duty, only low-caste Nigh-dwellers and indigent Spartiates joined the new forces.
Meanwhile, Nicias burnished his reputation by leading a successful invasion of Cythera. The loss of this island, where Ramphias had once been governor, cost the Lacedaemonians any semblance of control of their seacoasts; they could hardly spare the troops to protect their territory, much less another adventure to Attica. Yet the Athenians would not negotiate. The mood in Laconia fell to its lowest ebb since Xerxes the Persian threatened Greece with a million men, fifty years before.
The gods have a taste for intervening in such times. On this occasion, during the tenth summer of the war, they puffed Cleon up with such confidence that he coveted another, more ambitious military command. Bringing his powers of persuasion to bear on the Assembly, he was rewarded with a force of thirty ships and several thousand Athenian and allied troops. The green conqueror sailed Thraceward and, after some early successes at Torone and Galepsus, erected trophies to his glory; proceeding around the treacherous waters beneath Mount Athos, he next took it upon himself to liberate the Athenian foundation of Amphipolis, a strategically set town then occupied by allies of the enemy.
This was a harder nut to crack. Opposing him for this siege was Brasidas, son of Tellis, who was a new sort of Spartiate commander—bold, resourceful, comfortable with operating far from home with foreign allies. Against such an adversary, Cleon grew timid, refusing to attack until he could gather all the reinforcements he could. Sensing weakness, Brasidas seized the initiative, storming out with inferior forces to rout the Athenians. In the battle the Spartiate and the demagogue were both killed: Brasidas in delayed fashion after suffering a mortal wound; Cleon cut down from behind as he ran away from the battlefield. Thus ended the remarkable career of a tanner’s son.
The antagonists were alike in being little mourned in their home cities: in Laconia, Brasidas’ freelancing was viewed with suspicion by his elders, while most Athenians found the manner of Cleon’s death—a career politician pretending to be a soldier, meeting his end with a javelin in the ass—as compellingly ridiculous as his oratory. The most important consequence of the battle, however, was that the jingoes were out of the way of a peace settlement. Nicias and the Agiad king Pleistoanax took the lead among their respective cities, negotiating a treaty and joint alliance that was supposed to last for fifty years. One of the key provisions of the agreement was that all prisoners, including the Spartans captured at Sphacteria, were to be let go at last.
8.
After three years in the state jailhouse, Antalcidas had spent more time in bright, cosmopolitan Athens than any of his elders. More time, in fact, than his Atticophile wife, who had so long lectured him on Athenian civic excellence. Of course, his experience there was only of his prison cell and a short patch of exercise ground. The former was windowless, and the latter had a view, partially obstructed by smoke and ramshackle roofs, of the Squeezing Place to the southwest and a cornice of the Propylaea to the east. This was the extent of his sightseeing in the largest, richest city of Greece.
When they were released, no one came from Laconia to escort the prisoners back home. This worried the under-thirties, who hoped that the ephors would understand that they surrendered on orders of their superiors. The Spartiates knew better—Frog, who wore his shame lightly, absorbed himself in organizing the march, refusing to speculate on what reception they should expect. Antalcidas, for his part, envied Epitadas for his honorable exit. He could count on one hand his reasons for not following his brother: namely, his wife, his son, settling accounts with Frog. The latter concerned him most the day they set out on the road home.
There was unease in the ranks when Antalcidas did not join his countrymen for the march. As they proceeded along the Eleusis road, suspicion rose that they were being tracked by something as invisible as the wind and unavoidable as night. “The Athenians are betraying the treaty,” Frog declared, but no one believed him. For what was on their trail was nothing as clumsy as an Athenian. Instead, the Lacedaemonians had the strange sense of being like helots under observation by an operative of the Hidden Service.
The air of doom seemed to gather and congeal around Frog; the under-thirties, without knowing why, moved away from him. Despite their night training, the tension over what followed them made the Lacedaemonians afraid of the dark. Frog took to sleeping in trees with a heavy rock. If what trailed him had a name, he would have guessed it was “Antalcidas,” but in a broader sense the specific adversary didn’t matter. Too many of his comrades wanted him dead for the decision he had so loudly owned for himself, in front of witnesses. When someone suggested he rush ahead to procure a sword at Megara, Frog scoffed, saying, “No Megarian sword should keep a man from his Fate, if he chooses to face it.”
They found him the next day at the foot of his tree. His throat had been slit with a very short blade, perhaps even a sharpened stone; his tongue was cut out and, by evidence of the wet spot nearby, was left in the dirt. The crows had claimed their gift before the body was found. Frog could only have been dead for a few hours, but his corpse was swollen, the face chalky, as if he had been rotting for much longer.
Antalcidas proceeded south. The upheavals of the war had disrupted wagon traffic, leaving most of the roads unrutted but trampled by the prints of thousands of bare marching feet. Though he had traversed the mountains into the Peloponnese many times, it had always been in the company of an army. Now, as a lone traveler, he saw the road stretch thin and insubstantial through those spaces, and the sound his breathing something small and absurd in the enormity of silence around him. It was as if the gods had exhausted their palettes in rendering the fuller, more frivolous landscapes of other lands, and for Greece been forced to make the most with pure black, the green of ripening olives, and earth. He saw the blankness in his own shadow—a shadow that was uncompromising, sharing not a shred of gray with him.
Outside Nemea he stopped at a farmhouse for water. The master, who regarded him narrowly from under thick, tufted brows, seemed to recognize him as a Lacedaemonian. When Antalcidas asked for a drink, the Nemean accompanied him to the wellhead, going on about the “peace of Nicias.” His real purpose, though, was to ask a question: how could it be that the Spartans had given up at Sphacteria?
“That must be old news by now, friend,” Antalcidas replied. “That was years ago.”
“It was, but you’re the first Lacedaemonian we’ve seen this far north since word came. I’m hoping you can explain it.”
Antalicidas drank; out of the corner of his eye, on the ground, he could see the shadow of the farmer’s wife as she listened from around the corner. He drained the cup, handed it back to the Nemean, and took up his staff to resume his trip.
“Some answers are not worth the effort of asking,” he said.
Two days later he topped the pass through Sciritis and gazed down into the haze-dressed valley of Laconia. Despite what his intellect told him to expect, he found his breath quickening at the prospect of arrival. In Athens, he had spent much of his time alone, y
et had always felt the energy of the place—a low rumble, like the pulse of the earth—rising up from the pavement stones. Near Corinth, he looked up and saw the tentacles of commerce, eternal and lucrative, reach up the acropolis to wrestle with the thousand sacred courtesans who served Aphrodite there. As he passed to the west, he could turn back at night and trace the path by the procession of customers’ torches snaking up the illuminated citadel.
But in Laconia all was quiet. Crossing the Eurotas bridge, he came to the first of her five villages, Limnae, and found it little more impressive than a hundred country hamlets he had seen on the road. It was midmorning, and the household helots were out doing the marketing for their masters. None of these met his eyes as they passed; nor was he acknowledged by the knots of schoolgirls on their way to lessons.
Sparta was small enough, though, that one would always recognize someone within a few moments of going out on the street. No sooner had this thought entered his mind than he saw a familiar face. It was, in fact, someone from his deep past, whom he had not encountered in all the years since his childhood. Antalcidas, walking by the man, raised a chin to a man with a conspicuous mole on his right cheek.
“Rejoice!” he hailed the former packmate he once knew as Birthmark.
Antalcidas was arrested by a series of expressions that came over the other’s face. First there was surprise—an involuntary widening of the eyes and mouth, a hint of amusement at the pranks of Fortune. Second came the imposition of a memory: Birthmark seemed suddenly afflicted, his legs unable to slow the pace that carried him onward. Finally, there was disapproval: a sanctimonious darkening around the eyes, and a deliberate speeding of his step as he completed the act of ignoring the comrade who had greeted him.
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