by P. K. Lentz
“But it is.” Agis poked him with the blade. “If you were raised well, then you are your own harshest critic. So tell me, Styphon, why did you bring shame upon yourself by surrendering so many Equals under your command to Athenian irons?”
Despite his best efforts, Styphon let his own black eyes fall from the king's penetrating, regal stare as he replied: “I believed it best for Sparta, sire.”
“You mean you deemed the outcome of the war more important than that of a single battle, is that right?” the king offered. “And also more important than your own honor?”
“Yes, sire.” Styphon began to sense that this was not a true interrogation at all, but something else. A performance...?
“What right-minded Spartan could argue that the opposite was true?” This question was rhetorical, but the next—directed not at Styphon but at the Equal to his right—was not. “What is this place where we stand, soldier?”
“Piraeus, sire,” the Equal answered eagerly.
“And where are your unit's barracks?”
“Athens, sire.”
“Athens, hmm?” Agis raised a brow theatrically. “Then I dare say we must have won the war, did we not?”
“Yes, sire,” the man replied. This answer was less enthusiastic, as the Equal perhaps realized he was being patronized.
“And I hear that the man who led the force which broke down Athens' gates was this very man whom some have called a trembler, this Styphon.” The king removed his sword from Styphon's neck, but kept it aloft and shook it while he raised his head to address all present. “Let any Equal who would question Styphon's honor be prepared to back up his words with hard evidence, or else face this blade!”
Styphon's face flushed, but not with pride. It was without question an honor for any man to have a King of Sparta proclaim his worth, but it was also much better that a disgraced man earn back his countrymen's respect by his own deeds, not be given it back by decree. But once spoken, Agis' words could not be unsaid. How they fell upon the ears and hearts of the six Spartiates behind him, and those of the six times six whom those men would tell of this moment, and so on until all the army knew, was for the gods to decide.
Right now, the six gave no indication of their reactions, and even Styphon had no time to ponder his own before Agis sheathed his sword and took long strides up the beach, forcing the escort detail to hurry after him. The king's small entourage followed, too: five bodyguards, and walking in an empty space all his own, a small man in a black robe who was well known to any who knew Agis. The little man's brown head was shaved bald and his delicate features refused to give away his age. The tall staff he carried, topped with a fist-sized, opal-eyed bronze figure of a bull's head, flicked sand with each step. His name was Phaistos, but most men called him simply the Minoan, and he was said to have been found alone as an infant in the foothills of Kythera, the last son of a civilization long dead. The Minoan was a seer and diviner, and Agis, like the king's father before him, never went abroad without this black shadow a few steps behind.
The combined party made its way from the harbor to the nearby shrine of Poseidon to let Agis pour an offering of wine as thanks for safe voyage, after which they passed through the still-splintered gate which once had barred the way inland to Athens. The soon to be razed Long Walls, which had sheltered a generation of Athenians from their enemies, rose up twenty feet on either side of them.
Agis eyed with curiosity the Athenians who passed on their daily business to and from the harbor. The few looks which came back were fleeting; most wanted nothing to do with him or any Spartan.
“Has there been any sign of resistance to our rule?” the king asked Styphon.
“I would not wish to preempt the polemarch, sire.”
Agis looked crosswise at his escort. “Brasidas will tell me what he tells me. Right now I am asking you.”
Styphon remained quiet, considering his reply.
“I can surmise the answer by the way you and your men watch the crowd,” Agis remarked. “So you may as well tell me, phylarch.”
“It's enomotarch now, sire,” Styphon corrected.
“Congratulations,” the king said. “Last I checked, my rank was still somewhat higher.” Putting aside for now the matter of Athenian resistance, he laughed. “An unenviable position, to be torn between superiors. Do you bow to seniority or follow the chain of command? It is a choice that the Lawgiver in his wisdom left for each Equal to decide for himself, when and if the moment comes.” He flashed Styphon a smile. “Very well,” Agis conceded, “I will hear the answer from Brasidas. You might tell me one other thing, though.”
The king's heavy pause hinted to Styphon that the question to come would be even more sensitive than the last.
“The witch, Eris,” Agis began. Her very name was a thorn in Styphon's ear. “What became of her?”
Styphon despaired to speak of the she-daemon. In their first encounter, he had watched Eris slaughter a dozen veteran Spartiates as if they were children wielding birch whips. Even now he wondered if Eris would not swoop down from the Long Walls and take his head if he misspoke. But the asker was Agis, and he dared not try the king's patience or spoil his evident good will, mixed blessing that it was.
“She was felled by Athenian spindles at Eleusis,” Styphon reported. “After slaying her rival, who fought for Athens.”
“So I was told. But what became of her corpse?”
“It lies in Apollo's sanctuary, a cave on the north face of the acropolis.”
“Curious,” the king said with obvious interest. “Why has it not been buried? Or burned?”
With only slight hesitation that he hoped was not detectable, Styphon lied, or at least withheld the truth from his king. He had to, for Brasidas had sworn him, and a very few others, to secrecy on the matter of his witch's apparent ability to shrug off death.
He thus answered with a refrain which almost qualified as a Spartan nursery rhyme: “It is not my place to question my superior's will.”
Agis accepted the deflection. “It matters not. Merely a curiosity.” His words lacked the ring of truth and clashed with his dark tone of moments ago. “It is not in every war that we see a goddess fighting on our side. Or whatever she was.”
They walked the rest of the way to Athens in relative silence. When they reached the broken gates which had hung open since their breaching forty days ago, the gazes of Agis and his royal guards were on the crowded city beyond, particularly the white crags of its temple-crowned acropolis. They were laying eyes on these homes and holy places of their intractable foe for the first time, and they could hardly help but be struck with either awe at its grandeur or disgust at its prodigality. Maybe a mix of both.
The king, for his part, took on a philosophical air and lamented idly, “Perhaps it would be best not to tear down the walls which shield such beauty.”
They continued on past the fire-blackened hillside which had been the seat of Athens's toppled democracy. It was near there that bald Phaistos the Minoan, with a rapid thump-thump of his bull staff, caught his master up and asked, “Lord King, might I go offer sacrifice at that shrine of which we earlier spoke?”
“Hmm? Yes, by all means,” Agis answered him distractedly. “Take my guards with you. I am well protected, it would seem, against this Athenian resistance which may or may not exist.” He shot a sly smile at Styphon, and then his gaze flicked to a wall nearby where two Helots had just begun to paint over graffiti of a giant capital letter Omega.
Flashing his own toothy smile, the Minoan seer bowed his hairless head, waved his staff at Agis's five spear-wielding bodyguards and scurried off ahead of them, virtually swimming in his black robes.
* * *
Brasidas had made his office in the red-roofed Tholos, the administrative headquarters in which Athens kept its civic hearth. Standing to either side of the cylindrical building's stone steps were larger than life-sized marble figures of the goddesses Hestia and Peace. Styphon paused beneath the latter
and yielded so that Agis might mount the stairs first.
But Agis, whose eyes had not stopped taking in the sights and passersby the whole of the trek, likewise halted. He drew Styphon aside and leaned in close. “There is a special task with which I would charge you once this meeting is done,” he whispered.
“But name it, sire.”
“These Athenian women interest me,” he began, leaving Styphon with little doubt as to where he was headed. “Find one—no, two—and bring them to me tonight, dressed in fine silks and jewelry as is their custom, hair piled in curls.” He raised a cautioning palm and added, “Not virgins, and not by force, mind you. Find some wives or widows who will come willingly, in order to secure their property against seizure or win their families favor in the new order.”
Styphon was careful to remain stone-faced, as though the perverse request were perfectly natural. When the king was done, he whispered back, “That may prove difficult, sire. Athenians keep their citizen women locked away. Particularly these days.”
Agis turned away, dismissive of the excuse. “I have faith in you, Styphon,” he said, and clapped him on a thickly muscled arm before mounting the steps.
Styphon and the escort detail followed in his wake to the open double doors of the Tholos and proceeded into the round central chamber. Athenians, like most men outside of Sparta, were overly fond of embellishing their halls of government. Here in the Tholos, that tendency was illustrated, almost literally, in the murals of great Athenian triumphs from the mists of time, or ones they claimed credit for: over the Amazons, over the Centaurs, over the Persians. At the center of the tiled floor stood the perpetually burning civic hearth from whose embers all hearth fires in the city were lit. The priestesses who tended the flame, one of whom was stoking it now and glanced up blankly at them as they entered, had not flagged in their duties during the city's transition to new leadership.
Lining the Tholos' rounded walls were couches where the elected public officials of Athens' defunct democracy had taken their meals when on duty. Currently occupying one couch was a group of Athenians whom Brasidas had appointed as minor bureaucrats in the transitional government. The arrival of a party of Equals silenced their hushed conversation. They looked over and offered respectful nods.
Had Agis worn anything about his person to indicate his status, they likely would have raced over and competed with another to lick his cloak clean of salt. Instead, he was just another Spartiate, an object of fear.
The office of Brasidas was in a sub-chamber which once had served some or other official of the abolished democracy. Before they reached it, the polemarch appeared in its open doorway, sank to one knee in keeping with custom, and then came forward, smiling, extending his arms for an embrace.
Agis accepted the greeting and, at least for those few moments, they appeared as Lykourgos intended, as brothers, instead of what they truly were: a young king who had not yet managed to inscribe his name alongside those of his esteemed predecessors in the annals of history, and the older man of lower birth whose name already was spoken in Sparta with great pride.
Their rivalry had come to a head some months ago when the Elders had voted to put Brasidas in command of the invasion of Attica, rather than Agis, who in line with tradition had led it the three years prior. Some number of the Elders on the council would have seen tradition upheld, but enough were either afraid of Brasidas and his white witch or enamored of the pair's promises to strip Athens, by means of technology, of her twin advantages: control of the seas and her Long Walls.
Not even Agis could argue that Brasidas and his false goddess had failed to deliver.
Right now, as they broke off their embrace, whatever tension there was between them remained hidden.
“The sea god treated you well, sire?” Brasidas asked cordially.
“The god, yes, and your man here, too,” Agis answered.
Once more, Styphon wished the king would hold his tongue, however good his intentions. Indeed, Brasidas used an instant when Agis's eyes were not upon him to cast Styphon a glance which held the promise of questions to come.
Spartans were not ones for small talk. These were two of the most powerful men in Sparta, and thus in Greece and perhaps the world, and there remained unfinished business in their city's recent victory: resistance in Athens and, of course, the thousand or so holdouts still under siege at Dekelea. The door shut behind them so they might discuss such matters, while Styphon's mind set to work on a problem of his own: how in the name of Apollon's asshole was he to find a pair of Athenian wives willing to whore themselves?
* * *
3. Aspasia
Before long, Styphon settled on an answer to his question, or least had decided where to go in the hope of finding one. Although plenty of Athens' many brothels, almost exclusively owned and staffed by foreigners anyway, had welcomed and even competed for Spartan business since the conquest, one in particular had emerged as the conquerors' favorite. It was the one run by Aspasia, an Ionian woman who was the former consort of late Perikles, and some said co-leader of the city with him by means of nocturnal whispers in his ear. So well-known had her name become that it was even known to all in Sparta.
This fame, one might say, had ensured her downfall, for to Athenians, even more than most Greeks, a famous woman was an infamous woman. Since her influential lover's death, Aspasia had become mistress of a brothel renowned not just for the quality of its girls but also its ability to accommodate nearly any price range. Spartiates, of course, being forbidden by law to possess currency and only able to scrape up a coin here and there in a city which was not to be sacked, favored cheap whores over refined hetairae. Aspasia had been among the first to offer discounts to Spartiates, a wise move which accounted for her establishment's present popularity.
Styphon knew the location of Aspasia's den, despite having never been a customer of it or of any other brothel in Athens. Going there, he entered, and the sight which greeted him within the parlor was that of a pale, nude brunette reclining on a couch alongside an Equal from his regiment, an under-thirty by the name of Geradas. On seeing Styphon, his immediate superior, Geradas quickly pushed the girl's hand out from under his chiton hem, threw his crimson cloak over her and cast eyes down in shame. By law, Equals were expected to exercise utmost physical discipline, but in practice, particularly when on campaign, a blind eye was turned to small vices.
Caught with chiton raised, Geradas doubtless hoped for leniency, even if he had no right to it. His hope was granted, and Geradas' only punishment today would be the scowl of mild disapproval leveled at him by his enomotarch as he passed. Styphon's priorities lay elsewhere. It was better that no one even knew he had come.
A white-skinned woman, all assets visible through her drape of pale blue silk, sensuous smile on her painted lips, approached and laid her hand on Styphon's collarbone, grinding her thinly veiled sex on his thigh. “Let us fuck like beasts,” she said in a breathy approximation of the Lakonian dialect.
Styphon pushed her away—gently, since, after all, he was here to ask a favor. “Where is Aspasia?”
“The Lady does not see clients personally,” the girl answered. Her affected dialect had vanished, replaced by Ionian, which she spoke with some island accent. “And if she did, you could not afford her.” She pouted. “Am I not good enough?”
“It is not my own need which brings me here.”
The prostitute sighed, then reluctantly turned away to vanish through a purple curtain at the parlor's rear, one of its scant few surfaces not adorned with pornographic paintings. Foremost among these was the mural on the coffered ceiling depicting a giant Aphrodite with a phallus penetrating the chasm between her splayed legs.
Standing in this place of decadence, which was perhaps not the lowest point to which a free woman could fall (that being street-walker) Styphon thought of the daughter he barely knew. Andrea was, what, eleven now? To avoid the bleak fate of children whose fathers were deemed cowards in Sparta, Andrea had be
en removed to Athens by Thalassia and Alkibiades, in whose care she had lived for more than a year. Styphon had asked Thalassia for that favor in return for the promise of reciprocation one day, the granting of some future favor unknown.
He could not know whether he would one day regret the bargain.
Now that her father's fortunes were turning, Andrea could safely dwell where she belonged, and so Styphon had sent her back to Sparta with a letter placing her in the care of neighbors and distant relatives. Seeing as he was standing under naked Aphrodite's gash, Styphon spoke a short, whispered prayer to that goddess to keep Andrea from harm and one day to give her a good husband and fruitful womb.
As he finished, Aspasia appeared from behind the curtain. The one-time most powerful woman in Athens was past the prime of her womanhood, a fact that her minimal application of cosmetics made no attempt to hide. She wore her age well, but it struck Styphon, as it must have struck many who met her, that regardless of her years she was a plain woman, round of face with mousy dark hair divided into thick plaits. Her expensive embroidered garments by no means lacked modesty. Without knowing otherwise, Styphon likely would never have marked her as a courtesan.
Aspasia smiled warmly. “What can I do for you this fine day, Spartiate?”
Her tone and the sparkle in her brown eyes were such that one could easily see why she was proficient at her trade: she could make a man, even one who looked down on her, feel as though pleasing him was its own reward.
“A superior bids me obtain two girls,” Styphon said, avoiding mention of the king. “But not just any.” He described Agis's request.
Aspasia's plump lips, subtly painted, pursed in thought. “Tricky,” she mused. “Many women are worried what will become of their men and homes in the new tyranny. I may be able to find some takers. But if not, I have girls who can look and act as citizens easily enough. I doubt that your superior, whoever he is, could tell the difference.”
“Deceive if you must,” Styphon said. “Just do not make me party to it. What is the fee?” He suspected that tradition dictated some sort of dance take place over price in a place like this, but he was no dancer.