There was no time for more self-doubts. Leonidas sprang onto the plank when his turn came and went up it as fast as he could on all fours. The plank was stained scarlet near the top, but there was no Argive at the railing anymore. He stepped onto the wet deck over the corpse of his enomotarch, who had been rolled into the gunnels, bleeding from a score of wounds. The men who had preceded Leonidas, however, had already pushed the Argives halfway down the foredeck. Leonidas had time to draw his sword and pull his shield off his back and onto his arm before he met the enemy.
Between him and the line of fighting men were a half-dozen other corpses—or bleeding bodies. Most were Argive, but as Leonidas stepped over one in Spartan scarlet, blood bubbled out of the man’s mouth and nose and he coughed. It was Aristandos, and he had a sword thrust clear through his guts, just below the end of his cuirass. His eyes were wide open and they met Leonidas’. They seemed full of reproach—or was it just amazement? Leonidas had no time to reflect upon it. He flung himself into the melee on the foredeck, driven in part by the fear that he had somehow shirked his duty. If he had volunteered, he would be lying on the deck coughing up his guts.
Gradually, the Spartans forced the Argives off the foredeck and onto the narrow gangway that ran down the center of the ship to the mast, and then beyond to the quarterdeck. There was room for barely three men with their shields, and with the column already eight deep, it hardly made sense to just throw himself behind the others. Leonidas glanced down the length of the ship. The banks of oars were empty, the sides of the ship abandoned as the Argives clustered on or near the central gangway, trying to repel the Spartans advancing along it. Leonidas jumped down onto the nearest oar-bank and then, with long, running strides, leaped from one oar-bank to the next until he reached the stern. Slinging his shield onto his back, he scrambled up onto the quarterdeck, thereby positioning himself to the rear of the fighting Argives. As he paused to catch his breath and pull his shield back onto his left arm, he was joined by Euragoras.
The deputy enomotarch shouted into his ear, “Wait for the others! This isn’t the Iliad!”
Within minutes, however, eight of them were collected on the quarterdeck, and Euragoras had them form up three across to advance against the Argives from the rear. Some of the enemy, when they realized they were being attacked from behind, jumped down into the oar-pits and then tried to scramble over the sides of the ship to escape. A small group fought with the dangerous frenzy of men who know they are going to die and wish only to take as many of the enemy with them as possible. The battle for the ship was soon over.
By midmorning all the fighting was done. Company casualties were “just” five men dead and eleven seriously wounded. For the sake of five ships loaded with valuable plunder including gold and silver, cloth and weapons, the price was not exorbitant. Then again, one of the enomotarchs had been killed, and the second badly injured falling from an assault plank.
As they collected to bury the dead in a grave dug into the bluffs above the gorge facing north to Sparta, Leonidas was conscious of being badly shaken. He felt no euphoria whatsoever over their victory. The bravest had paid the highest price—from the enomotarchs to the foolish Aristandos. The Spartan rear rankers had come away almost unscathed, while the most cowardly of the Argives had escaped altogether and would terrorize the countryside until they were hunted down like mad dogs and killed one by one. There was a good chance his company would be here all summer clearing them out, Leonidas reflected with a sigh. He had trained all his life for this, and with consternation he realized he didn’t particularly like his profession.
Chapter 6
The Runaway
Gorgo’s third little brother died, too. It was late autumn. The winter solstice was approaching, and the weather had turned bleak. Her mother’s laments merged with the howling of the winds coming down off Taygetos, and Gorgo’s father escaped by going hunting in Messenia. Gorgo tried to play with her elder brother, Agis, but they quarreled (as they often did). So as soon as the rain stopped, Gorgo ran away.
She did not intend to stay away forever. She planned to come home as soon as she heard her father was back. Meanwhile, she took a sack of food to keep her for a day or two and headed for Amyclae. She wanted to go first to the great Temple of Apollo and bring the God her most precious possession, a pretty stone a stranger had given her. She thought she would talk to the God and convince him to stop killing her baby brothers so her mother wouldn’t be so unhappy. When her mother was unhappy, her father stayed away, and then they were all unhappy.
When she reached the southern outskirts of the city, she was distracted by a flogging. One of the boys from the agoge was down in the sandpits about to be flogged for some transgression. Not being in a particular hurry, Gorgo joined the spectators. As usual, the crowd consisted mostly of the other boys in the miscreant’s own herd and any other herd that happened to be passing by, along with a sprinkling of idle citizens and the odd stranger. You rarely saw perioikoi or helots at the floggings, because they generally had business to attend to when passing through Sparta, and the floggings were too common to interest them. The boys and citizens watched because they knew each other and were supposed to take an active interest in who had done what and how well they stood up to their punishment. The strangers, however, came to gawk, because the concept of flogging citizens’ children in public was unique to Sparta and widely abhorred in the rest of the world.
The boy who was to be flogged was at that awkward age between “little boy” and youth. He was clearly older than Gorgo herself by several years, but it was hard to tell if he had passed his fox time already or was just on the brink of it. He was shaved, of course, and skinny and dirty and, this being the end of the year, his chiton and himation were in very ragged condition.
Gorgo had never seen Spartan boys his age look any other way, and she was not offended by his appearance. She calmly found a place on the surrounding wall to sit, folded up her cloak as a cushion, and settled down with her feet dangling. Taking an apple from her sack, she sat swinging her legs, waiting for the entertainment to begin.
It was a moment or two before she realized that the men behind her were strangers and they were talking about her. They spoke Greek with a funny accent, and one of them said in disgusted outrage, “Why, that’s a girl!”
“Probably just some slave girl,” an evidently older man answered.
“With a purple himation?” the younger man countered, scandalized.
Gorgo looked down at her cushion, feeling a little ashamed of herself. She had taken her best himation because it was the warmest and softest and she liked it best, but now that the stranger drew attention to it, she felt a little guilty, too. It was dyed with the most expensive dyes and had a gold border. She knew her mother would scold her if she tore it, lost it, or got it too dirty.
At once she felt a hand roughly shake her shoulder. “Girl! Where did you get that cloak? You stole it, didn’t you?”
“Why should I steal it?” Gorgo asked back angrily, looking up at the strangers with her brows drawn together in indignation. They were dressed like perioikoi women, in bright-colored chitons with fancy embroidered borders and short himations of equally gaudy design. They smelt of musk oil. But the worst thing about them was that the younger man was fat. Gorgo had never seen a fat young man before, at least not that she could remember. The youth who had noticed her, however, was too young to grow a beard but apparently old enough to carry a sword, because he did—and he was all white flab. Gorgo gazed at him in horror—to match his own, as he realized that she was not only a girl, but a girl who stared him straight in the eye.
“How did a stray like you come by such a fine cloak, then?” the young man demanded.
“It was given to me!” Gorgo answered truthfully.
“A little whore, are you, then? With patrons who give you pretty things?” the youth sneered. “Let me see your wares!”
“We don’t have whores in Sparta!” Gorgo told the stranger
indignantly, full of innocent conviction.
“What? No whores? Father, what am I to do for entertainment tonight?”
“Stop demeaning yourself by chattering with slave girls. The flogging is about to begin,” his father answered sternly.
Gorgo, too, turned her attention back to the sandpits where the boy, now stripped naked, was taking up his position, with his back to the audience and his hands firmly grasping the bar between the stands. Two of the mastigophoroi, assistants to the headmaster of the agoge, waited at the ready, with canes cut from river reeds in their hands.
A woman from the crowd—Gorgo guessed it was the miscreant’s mother—asked what the boy had done wrong. She was told that he had used a citizen’s horse without his permission and then—and this was the real crime—on returning it had not seen that it was properly walked out or watered. Gorgo was indignant. Why even she, at eight, knew better than to do that! In fact, the only reason she hadn’t taken Shadow with her on this adventure was because she had been afraid she wouldn’t be able to take care of her properly while she was away from home. She directed her attention to the boy in the pits with a sense of witnessing the administration of justice.
The boy braced himself, and except for an inevitable twitch and lifting of the neck and head, he withstood the first blows steadfastly.
“Look at her!” the stranger whispered behind her. “She looks like she’s enjoying this!”
Gorgo stiffened, realizing she was being talked about again.
“Aren’t you?” the father answered. “Admirable discipline these Spartans have. Admirable.”
“But look at the girl! It’s unnatural for a girl to watch something like this! No girl should witness a boy getting humiliated!”
“It’s more unnatural for those matrons over there!” his father countered.
“To them he’s just a boy,” the youth replied unconcerned, still obsessed with Gorgo. “But this girl is younger than he is. How will she respect him after seeing this?”
Gorgo was grateful to hear an elderly woman intervene. “That depends on how he bears himself. If the boy bears up well, he gains in reputation, and if he does not he is shamed, as he should be. That is exactly why our girls should watch—so they can choose husbands worthy of them!”
“Choose their husbands? You let brainless girls choose their husbands?” The youth found this idea so ridiculous, he burst out laughing.
“Our girls aren’t brainless,” came the dry retort, but the youth and his father were both laughing too hard to hear it.
Gorgo couldn’t take it anymore, however. She jumped down from the wall, grabbed her himation, and fled.
She followed the river path beside the Eurotas, still heading south, away from the city. The path weaved amid the reeds, imperfectly following the banks of the river. Here and there other paths crossed it, used by people going to the river to wash or swim or fish. Gorgo passed a number of helot women working knee deep in the muddy water and beating at their dirty clothes with river reeds. She also passed a number of boys from the agoge, lying on their bellies and fishing (or attempting to) with their hands or with small, self-made nets and spears.
The further she went, however, the less disturbed she was by people. Instead she encountered frogs and storks, mice that dashed for cover into the reeds, and hawks that wheeled overhead. She was quite happy until she heard an eerie mewing sound coming from the river. The sound was so full of pain—almost like the whimpering of her dying brothers—that it sent a chill down her spine, and she stood stock-still in the towering reeds, frightened. Was it the spirit of her brother, whom she had neglected and resented, come to haunt her? Or maybe some helot girl who had turned out her unwanted baby on the riverbank?
She stopped and listened again, torn between the desire to run away and the duty to go and see what it was. Running away would be cowardly. Gorgo did not want to be a coward. Cowards were disgusting! And what if it was a helot baby? Helots belonged to the city. No helot girl had the right to throw a healthy baby away. Gorgo pictured herself rescuing the child and taking it to the ephors and being praised for saving a life for the city. But what if it wasn’t healthy? What if the baby was blind or deformed? Gorgo took a step backward, and then was so ashamed of herself for her cowardice that she plunged through the reeds, ignoring the mud and the mice. Her headlong plunge brought her to a burlap bag lying on the sandy bank—and moving.
Something inside it was still alive. But it was not a child. It was too small for that.
Gorgo reached out and pulled the bag toward her. There was something heavy in the far end, but in the middle something moved and mewed. With the knife she carried in her belt, she slit the bag open and revealed three dead puppies and one lone survivor. It stumbled out of the bag, lifting its wet head to sniff the fresh air and blinking in the light of day. Gorgo fell in love instantly. She swept the puppy into her arms, and it started trying to suck milk from her soft white flesh wherever it could. When she lowered her face to it, the puppy reached up and tried to suckle from her neck, her ear, her nose.
Shouldering her supply sack, Gorgo purposefully retraced her steps back to the main road. Here, as expected, she soon came upon a tavern, and she entered with the intention of asking for milk for the puppy. In the doorway, however, she stopped dead. The room was filled with men, and some instinct said that these were not the kind of men who filled her father’s andron or the many syssitia along the road. They smelled and they stared. Gorgo backed out—and she didn’t for an instant think she was being cowardly. Her appearance and retreat was met with a volley of laughter and rude comments from the men in the tavern, but she was forgotten as quickly as she had appeared.
She continued down the road to a smithy. The smith was working beside his forge and one could hear the clang of the hammer on glowing metal, while several horses, held by a helot boy, waited patiently in the yard. Gorgo went past the forge and to the back of the cottage. Here a woman was tossing slops to a pig in a pen while fowl pecked around the kitchen yard. “Hello!” Gorgo began.
The woman looked up and straightened, watching Gorgo warily.
“May I have some milk for my puppy?” Gorgo asked.
“Your puppy? Come show us!” The woman gestured Gorgo over.
Gorgo obeyed, holding out her puppy.
“What did you do? Rescue it from the river?”
“Yes, the other three drowned, but you see how strong he is? He survived and he deserves to live.”
“He’s got a white hind leg; that’s bad luck. Throw him back,” the woman advised.
“NO! I rescued him and I’m going to keep him!”
“Well, that’s up to your mother, I daresay, but I’m not wasting any of my precious milk on a worthless pup!” the woman replied, and turned her back on Gorgo to indicate the subject was closed.
Gorgo stood for a moment, considering a protest, but then gave up and headed for the next tradesman’s cottage.
Eventually she did get milk for her puppy. The kind woman who gave it to her also taught her to soak the corner of a rag in it and then offer this to the puppy to suck on. Unfortunately, after the puppy had had enough to drink he urinated on Gorgo, so she had to go wash herself in the river—which was very cold this time of year. It was also getting dark and the wind had picked up.
Although she dried herself off and wrapped herself in her himation, Gorgo’s teeth started chattering, and the puppy was whimpering again, too. She held it close, suddenly aware that she was miles and miles from home and it was getting dark and she was cold and hungry and all alone. She looked around and saw nothing familiar. She started to fear she had missed the turnoff to the Temple to Apollo in her search for milk.
Gorgo was afraid. As the light of day faded rapidly, she remembered all the stories they told about wolves and rebellious helots. She remembered that the Messenians, who had slit the throats of the girls and boys in the agoge, had come at night through the Taygetos mountains that loomed up ominously on her rig
ht. She had to seek shelter. She made for the light of a torch burning beside a building of undecipherable purpose. When she reached it, she discovered it was an inn.
Her appearance in the door went unnoticed at first. She approached the counter, where a heavy woman was serving out wine and savory-smelling meals. At once the woman demanded unkindly, “What have we here? If you’ve come begging, you’ve come to the wrong place. Go on! Get out!”
“I’m not a beggar!” Gorgo protested. “I just need a place for the night.”
“Alone? Who’s paying, then?” The woman looked around as if expecting to see the girl’s father or brother appear, perhaps having gone to stable the horses after sending the girl in ahead.
“I walked down from Sparta alone. My father’s hunting,” Gorgo tried to explain. “But he’ll pay you when he gets back.”
“Sure he will!” the woman replied sarcastically. “Now get out before I throw you out!”
The exchange had drawn attention to Gorgo, and again strangers started talking about her. “These Spartans really do just let their daughters run around wild, don’t they? Why, they must be like bitches in heat when they reach maturity, lying with anyone and everyone they meet on the street.”
“I wish we’d run into some of those. All I’ve seen is filthy little runts like that!” another dismissed Gorgo with contempt.
A third man, middle-aged with a graying beard, stood up and came over to Gorgo. Squatting down before her, he asked: “Are you lost, child?” His voice was gentle and his face kindly.
“No; I just don’t know where I am!” Gorgo answered, harvesting a laugh from everyone who had heard her reply.
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