“On the whole, yes, but there is no compulsion about it. I think what horrifies outsiders about Sparta is that it is all enforced by law and custom and is so, well, brutal.”
“But it was Kallixenos who hurt you,” Leonidas pointed out. “And Spartans aren’t really all the same. In fact, the reasoning behind us all having a kleros of the same size and all dressing in the same manner is that then the real differences—those of character rather than mere wealth or station—are more evident. On the surface, Kallixenos is a well-educated, well-mannered young man. I imagine that his good clothes and good looks deceive many about his true nature.”
“Yes,” Lychos admitted; “but so do your clothes and looks deceive, Leonidas. When we see you, muscular and tanned and standing straight as a spear, we see only a stupid Spartan hoplite, but you are far more subtle and complex than you appear to be.”
“I suppose we all are,” Leonidas concluded. They left it at that and drifted off to sleep.
They were back in Athens by midmorning. As on the day before, the household had been awake for hours, but the masters were nowhere to be seen. The kitchens were already steaming and busy with the preparation of the evening meal, and Leonidas was reminded of the old schoolmaster he had met the day before. He asked Lychos what he thought of the whole situation. “I can’t take him with us. Euryleon and I will walk back to Sparta. Could he travel with one of your father’s freighters?”
“I’m sure it could be arranged, if that is what you want. Now I’d better go find my father and reassure him I am all right.” Lychos went deeper into the house; and Leonidas mounted the stairs up to the attic room, where he found Euryleon sprawled across his bed, snoring. He was half dressed, and Leonidas, in disgust, shook him hard. “Wake up, you drunken fool!”
Euryleon started out of a deep sleep, sat up sharply in alarm at the rude awakening, and then groaned and grabbed his head. “By all the Gods! What have they done to me?” His breath stank of both wine and vomit.
“Nobody did anything to you!” Leonidas answered in disgust. “You did it to yourself!”
“Don’t remind me!” he moaned and then cried in alarm, “Help! I’m going to be sick!” He clapped his hands over his mouth and his belly heaved, but he swallowed it down. Sweat glistened on his forehead.
“Mantiklos! Alkios!” Leonidas called for the two helots.
They came stumbling in, disheveled and rubbing sleep from their eyes.
Euryleon was moaning again. “I think I’m going to die.”
“Stop it!” Leonidas ordered. Then, turning to the two helots, “Go fetch water and a bowl he can be sick in!”
Euryleon was swaying in agony. “My head feels like it’s going to fall off!”
“Well, it isn’t much use to you, so it wouldn’t be much of a loss,” Leonidas reasoned.
“Don’t shout at me so!” Euryleon pleaded, although Leonidas had not raised his voice. “You don’t know what this is like!”
“What, in the name of Kastor, happened last night after I was gone?” Leonidas wanted to know.
“I don’t remember!” Euryleon whimpered, shaking his head. “I don’t remember a thing!”
It took them half an hour to get Euryleon on his feet and down to the baths and another half-hour, after he’d vomited a couple of times, to clean him up. Alkios brought him dry bread from the kitchen to settle his stomach, and he slowly started to feel better. Leonidas insisted on their going to the gymnasium. Euryleon was in no state to argue. Docilely he followed along behind his former eirene and current section leader. They went in silence, surrounded by the cacophony of the great city.
Leonidas let his eyes sweep along the shops, spilling their wares into the streets almost like refuse. Real refuse lay underfoot, making the pavement slippery and treacherous. Slaves and craftsmen haggled and bickered loudly all around them. People pushed and jostled their way forward, shoving aside the old and the infirm without so much as an apology. More than once Euryleon and Leonidas had to jump out of the way of someone riding recklessly through the narrow streets. Apparently the very affluence that enabled a man to keep a horse entitled him to ride down anyone in his way. There were beggars, too, cripples and old crones pleading for their “orphaned” children. Leonidas supposed that not everything they said was true, but surely no one went begging for the fun of it? There was, in short, desperate poverty living beside the glorious wealth of the men like their host and in the shadow of the gaudy acropolis.
Leonidas felt as if he had gorged himself no less than Euryleon had; he had gorged himself on new impressions, sights and smells and sounds. He looked up toward the acropolis, and it had lost its splendor for him.
“I think it’s time we went home,” he told Euryleon.
His friend stopped. “You don’t want to go to the gymnasium?”
“I mean, home to Sparta. We’ll go to the gymnasium now, but tomorrow we should start for home.”
Euryleon nodded and they continued.
Beyond the city walls the air was better and there was less congestion, although the many carts and wagons turned up the dust badly. The two Spartans left the road to walk beside it. They stopped for water at one of the many fountain houses, and reached the gymnasium to find it almost empty. It was still before noon, too early for most Athenians.
It was only on the way back from the gymnasium that Euryleon remarked out of nowhere, “She said women can’t enjoy sex. She said there was nothing for them to enjoy.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The girl last night.”
“I thought you said you couldn’t remember.”
“I can’t—or not much of it. But there was this girl. I guess she was one of the flute girls.”
“And she said she didn’t enjoy sex? If you believe that, you’ll believe anything!” Leonidas scoffed.
“But that’s just it, Leo. She didn’t. You could see. Her face was just painted on and her eyes … they were …” Euryleon was frowning, looking for the right words. He decided: “They were like the eyes of the fish they feed us all the time here. There was no life left in them at all. She let anyone do anything they wanted to her, even the most disgusting and humiliating things; and she endured it all from anyone and everyone without the slightest sign of repugnance or even shame, but without a flicker of pleasure, either. It was horrible.”
Leonidas looked at his friend, but Euryleon wouldn’t meet his eye. He was looking down at the dusty road, and he looked tired and sad and much older than the day before. Leonidas nodded. “We’ll go home tomorrow.”
Chapter 12
The Stone Wall
Laodice was in the kitchen making cheese. Since Polychares had brought home a wife this past winter, she spent more of her time cooking. Polychares’ bride, Melissa, had taken over the bulk of the other household chores, the cleaning and washing and mending. Laodice was pleased with Melissa, and with her eldest son for his good sense in choosing her. She was not the prettiest of the helot maidens who had made eyes at her eldest son, but she was one of the brightest. More important, she was hard-working and ambitious. She had not married Polychares because he would inherit so much, but because she wanted to make even more of what he had. From the first day, she had offered to take over the heavy work so Laodice could concentrate on the cooking that brought them extra income. With the help of Laodice’s two daughters, who at ten and eleven respectively were starting to be a real help in the household, Melissa kept the whole house and their clothes in the best order and sparkling clean.
Laodice glanced out the kitchen window toward the Eurotas, where she could hear the distant voices of her daughters. They sounded as if they were protesting something. Melissa was hard on them sometimes, chasing them around and scolding them to do their share of the work, but Laodice supposed she had been too lenient on them—just as she had been with Crius.
She still could not get over how well things had turned out for Crius. For a helot boy with crippled hands to end
up living in the gymnasium and training with sons of Spartiates was a miracle of sorts. She knew Crius was happy—even if he missed her food and his former freedom. He complained, of course, that they were hard on him in the gymnasium and that the food was terrible. He complained that the boys hated him because he could beat them all, and that he had no friends. The trainer only used him as you would a whip or drum or any other device to make his real charges perform better. But Laodice did not listen to his complaints. Things could have been so much worse.
Nor was she frightened for her girls anymore. Again she looked out the window and tried to get a glimpse of them. After the incident with the poor girl who had been captured by the Argives, Laodice knew once and for all that Leonidas would never touch them. More than that, he would protect them from other male predators. The mere fact of being Leonidas’ helots ensured that no other Spartiate, much less a helot, would dare take liberties with them. No one wanted to make an enemy of an Agiad prince, and people knew instinctively which Spartiates looked after their helots and which didn’t.
Dangers still lurked, of course. The perioikoi lived enough outside the close-knit community not to necessarily know the unwritten laws. More seriously, many strangers passed along the road to Epidauros Limera. But at least here in the heartland of Lacedaemon, only a couple of miles from the drill fields of the Spartan army, they did not have to fear raids or pirates.
Laodice paused for a moment in her work to think again of Kleta, who had been ravished, tortured, and enslaved by the Argives. When she first saw her in the stocks, Laodice had been reminded of her own rape twenty years earlier. She had identified with Kleta. After Leonidas had paid for Kleta’s release and brought her home, however, she came to realize how much worse Kleta’s experience had been. This insight had helped Laodice put her own trauma into perspective. Laodice’s humiliation had lasted only a single day. Melampus had sent for her one night after he had been drinking with “customers.” They had each raped her in turn. She had gone home to her parents, and her father had rejected her. But already the next day, Pelopidas had declared his willingness to marry her, and the hurt and shame could be buried and ignored until grass grew over it. Kleta, in contrast, had been used by the Argives for two weeks—tortured, humiliated—and when her family turned her out, there had been no honorable man to marry her and let her return to a normal life.
It was good that Leonidas had found a place for her to work far away from here, Laodice concluded. Despite her pity for Kleta, it would not have been right to have her living in the same house with her daughters. At some point they might have become too curious about her past—or Kleta’s bitterness might have infected them.
Laodice turned her attention back to the cheese, but her thoughts soon drifted to Pantes. She was also going to be strict with him, she told herself, pounding her cheese firmly. Pantes was doing very well with his carpentry, which also brought in extra income. In fact, he was doing so well that he had notions of renting a shop in the city and starting a carpentry workshop. He promised to still give his father half of what he earned until he reached age twenty-one, but he did not want to live at home. He said he would get more commissions and sell more if he had a shop in the city, and it was hard to deny this. But Laodice suspected that the real reason he wanted his own establishment was so he, too, could take a wife and start a family.
No girl would want to be the third woman in a household, subject to both Laodice and Melissa, but there were lots of girls eager to marry a young craftsman with his own shop and apartment. Yet how were his father and brother to get along here on the kleros without Pantes’ strong back and hands? Pelopidas wasn’t getting any younger, and they had more and more work to do as they reclaimed more of the land that had been left to go to seed in the years of vacancy. More land meant more income and security. It was more certain income than what Pantes could earn with his carpentry. Besides, Pantes was full of grandiose plans and dreams. His father and elder brother often had to curb his extravagance and bring him back to earth. Laodice feared that on his own, he would buy too much wood and spend too much time building pretty cabinets in the hope of finding a customer, rather than taking mundane commissions for the repair of wheels or the construction of workbenches. She feared, too, that a wife would not want to see 75 per cent of her husband’s earnings go to someone else—50 per cent to Leonidas as the master, and then half of what was left to Pantes’ parents. It was a recipe for trouble and strife.
The cheese finished, she set it in the pantry to cool and checked the milk supplies. They now had two cows and no less than six goats for milking. They were definitely prospering—better than she had ever dreamed when they left Messenia five years ago. No sooner had she thought this than she heard muffled shouting, and her heart missed a beat. She could tell instantly that something terrible had happened. She should have known better than to take the Gods’ goodwill for granted. Nothing can go so well for very long!
She left the pantry and stepped into the kitchen yard, raising her head to decipher the direction from which the shouting came. She could make out the whinny of a horse, the barking of a dog, a man shouting, and what sounded like a girl screaming hysterically. Her daughters!
She ran through the kitchen and out the back door, but she had not gotten more than a few feet before she saw Pelopidas coming toward her with the limp body of a child in his arms and a dog yapping at his heels. Beyond him two horses were running around, one of them with a broken leg that swung loose inside the intact skin of his long lower leg while he threw himself around on three legs in panic and pain. The other horse was galloping around in alarm, whinnying in apparent sympathy with his wounded comrade. Polychares was running down from the upper barley field to catch the horses, leaving the oxen standing before the plow, while Melissa was trying to help another boy, who was sitting in the mud near the stone wall to the next estate. One of her own daughters was shrieking hysterically—apparently at the sight of the wounded horse.
“Chryse! Hush this instant!” Laodice called to her silly daughter, and started toward her husband. As he came closer, she realized that the body in his arms was not one of the boys of the agoge, as she’d assumed, but one of the Spartan girls. They wore the same short chitons and went barefoot like the boys, but no one shaved their hair, so this poor creature had a long red braid.
Recognition dawned. “It’s little Gorgo!” she exclaimed, coming up beside her husband and falling in beside him. “What happened?”
“She was riding that big mare over there and tried to jump the stone wall. The mare hesitated, but she pressed it on. The mare refused at the last minute, throwing her over the wall and snapping her own leg in the process. The other mare refused, too, and ran away, dumping the other girl on the ground; but she isn’t seriously hurt, just bruised.”
They were back inside the courtyard, Gorgo’s dog at their heels, and Laodice pointed for her husband to take Gorgo right up and into the master’s bedroom. Although the master was rarely here, he did maintain a well-appointed room, and it was the only appropriate place for a Spartiate. Laodice stripped the pretty woven covering she had made herself off the bed, and her husband lay the little girl down on the clean linen sheets. As he did so, Gorgo groaned and stirred, to the relief of her rescuers.
“How badly is she hurt?” Laodice asked, as she stroked Gorgo’s face and started her own inspection. She had clearly hit her head and was bleeding from the abrasion on her temple. She also appeared to have broken her collarbone, and her left hand was swelling up already.
“We must send for a surgeon,” Pelopidas concluded. “I’ll go at once.”
Laodice nodded. “Tell Melissa to bring the other girl here, too, and fetch water and clean linens!”
Her husband nodded, and Laodice gently straightened Gorgo’s chiton and stroked her forehead as she groaned again. Her dog pushed his way forward and tried to lick his mistress’s face and hand. Laodice let him, knowing it was just concern and might actually help revive
the patient. Inwardly, she was thinking that this is what came of girls being given too much license! The girl should never have been riding a horse, much less jumping stone walls! But that did not make Laodice less sympathetic to the little girl on the bed.
Gorgo’s eyes fluttered open and she looked, frightened, into the dim room. “Where am I?” she asked, and then before anyone could answer, “What happened to Goldie? Is she all right?” She wanted to sit up.
Laodice held her down. “Lie still. I think you have broken several bones. We have sent for a surgeon.”
Jason whined and raised his paw onto the bed, so that Gorgo turned and smiled at him. “Jason!” But when she went to pet him, she gasped and looked at her hand, only now becoming aware that several fingers were broken.
At that moment Melissa entered with the other girl. Gorgo saw her and called out at once, “Phaenna!”
Phaenna was dirty and disheveled from her fall, and she had a scraped and bleeding knee and elbow, but she was not really hurt. She ran forward to Gorgo. “Are you all right? I was afraid you were dead or had broken your neck!”
“What happened to Goldie and Shadow?” Gorgo countered.
Phaenna burst into tears. “Goldie broke her leg! It snapped clean in two. They’ll have to kill her!” she sobbed.
Gorgo sat bolt upright, grimacing at the pain, but with her eyes wide with horror. “No! Oh, no! Poor Goldie!” And then another thought struck her. “My father will kill me!” she wailed, and tears started down her face—whether from pain, grief, or fear was unclear.
“I told you we shouldn’t take a horse without his permission!” Phaenna retorted, and burst into a new flood of tears.
“And old Kallias will get in trouble, too!” Gorgo realized next. As her sense of guilt grew, her tears flowed stronger.
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