The Isle of Stone

7.

Damatria soon learned that the hearts of men, fathomless as they are, cannot match the inscrutability of the gods. Her fitful sleep caused her to rise late the next morning. Before she left for the market, she was informed that Dorcis had to be carried home from his morning ride.

“Why has he been brought back?”

“It seems he has suffered a grave accident-” began the slave.

And so she heard, as she stood with her binding spell still undelivered in the fold of her cloak, that her husband had been badly hurt when his horse, at a gallop, put a hoof through a rabbit hole. The horse did not go down, but Dorcis was thrown face-first into the ground with his hands still tangled in the reins. Of the extent of his injuries the slave was unprepared to say. Damatria rushed down the corridor to his quarters, making a show of the appropriate concern, but inwardly wondering why her prayer had such good effect before the goddess received it. Had someone else cursed him first? If so, was it another lover she had yet to learn about?

The figure on the couch had a face like a boxer’s after some endless, evenly matched bout. The brow was bloated and split like a rotten fruit showing its pulp, the mouth caked with the lees of dried blood flecked with dirt. When he cracked his bluish, raked lips, there was nothing hanging from his upper gums but sharp little serpent’s tongues of enamel. The rest of his teeth were left behind where they had implanted in the ground. The orbits of his eyes were stuffed with pinkish bulbs swollen enough to hide all but the tips of the lashes. When she saw him, Damatria could not help but pull up short and, in her shock, make a small, sharp inhalation. And though Dorcis’ face could hardly form an expression that was recognizably human, he gave a little turn of the head as he heard and recognized her through his cauliflower ears.

She ordered all the servants to leave. Removing her street cloak, she stood over him with a wet cloth in her hands, struggling to decide where to begin cleaning him. Except for that single movement of his head, Dorcis lay so passively that it was hard to tell if he was awake. She wrung out the cloth in the bowl and wet it again, at last going to work on the skein of scratches that ran from his solar plexus to the bottom of his chin. That was when he spoke at last through his broken teeth, his voice wheezing, childish.

“I see one of us here is happy.”

Damatria said nothing, determined to show neither satisfaction nor hysteria at his misfortune.

“Why have you tied me down?” he asked. As she began to wipe the blood from his mouth, she glanced down at his body: he was naked except for a breechcloth, and there was nothing at all holding him down.

“By Herakles loosen the bonds, woman! I can’t budge my arms or legs!” he cried.

In the coming days his condition did not improve. He could not move any of his limbs, though he did have feelings of pinching, twisting, and burning in them. She summoned what passed for a physician in Sparta, who could only say that the accident had damaged her husband’s spine. A foreign doctor, a visitor from Elis who happened to be in the city, came, poked and prodded, and made his diagnosis: the injury had blocked the circulation of phlegm from the torso to the brain.

“Have you seen this before?” Damatria asked.

“Oh yes. It is not unknown after certain falls.”

“Can you cure him?”

“By mortal arts, no. I suggest you pursue other remedies. Perhaps, if you can move him, Asclepius will manifest the correct course in his sanctuary…”

“But if he can’t move, how can he observe the rites? The ablutions

… the sacrifice?”

The Elean shrugged.

Had Damatria been inclined, she might have taken advantage of Dorcis’ helplessness to punish his treachery. Instead, she made a decision that surprised the household: she reassigned Erinna from the kitchen to be Dorcis’ personal attendant.

By the expression on the helot’s face it seemed that she believed her new duty would be easy, even pleasurable work. Believing at first that his condition was due only to lack of stimulation, she would strip slowly for him. With sluttish expertise, she unfurled her hair, leaned over his bed with breast in hand, and fed her aureole to him like a grape. Damatria watched this comedy through the window, enjoying it right down to the bitter end when the girl exhausted herself with all her useless yanking and blowing.

Damatria knew better. Tending to the invalid for a mere two weeks-cleaning his every inch, checking every crevice for dried feces, directing the flow from his torpid penis into the pan-reduced her to despair in a way unknown since her first days with Antalcidas. She particularly came to hate those random occasions when his penis came to life, for there was no way then to contain the ragged stream of urine that spurted onto his chest, his bedclothes, or in the air. Erinna, too, came to show that same panic in her eyes as the repulsiveness of her lover wore on her. Dorcis had gone overnight from a powerful lord to an incontinent, mewling shell, the odor of old age permeating him. Damatria walked in on them once as rigid Dorcis bewailed his fate, vowing never to eat again, and Erinna stood with her arms and hands drenched in piss, crying, “Then be a man! Stop eating and die already!”

Damatria closed the door, taking with her a certain satisfaction. She had, after all, taken no petty revenge, but only given her husband exactly what he wanted.

With Dorcis indisposed, his wife was now in complete control of his estate. Giving orders in his name, she commenced to reorder her universe according to her tastes. The straggling grove with his family’s ancient olives came down first. The trees, after all, barely produced fruit anymore, and she needed the land to extend the wagon trail to service the most remote of her helot tenants. She likewise disposed of the vineyard. There was far more potential profit, she believed, in growing wheat for a market increasingly weary of barley bread. This gamble paid off the next season, when her grain sales and exports swelled her accounts. With this enhanced credit she purchased more land, more ships, until her estate was not only the largest in Kynosoura, but in all of Laconia.

Dorcis was not pleased with her management. To keep him occupied, Erinna would prop him up in front of the window, allowing him to witness the subversion of his legacy. At the destruction of his vineyard he screamed in impotent rage; with the demise of his ancestral olives he seemed to swoon, giving Erinna hope that he had at last dropped dead. He recovered, demanding in vain to see his wife. But Damatria’s days of jumping at the summons of men were over.

Her commercial success was only a means to a greater end. With scores of helot families paying their allotments to her, she could afford to make donations of wheat bread to all the preeminent mess tables, taking care to inform the Spartiates that the gifts were from “Damatria, daughter of Evagoras, mother of Epitadas.” The more traditional of the clubs returned the loaves, ostensibly because they would not give up their barley bread. More likely they simply resented the largesse of a woman. But enough of them accepted them to make her confident that her dear Epitadas would, in due time, be elected to one of the better messes.