The Isle of Stone

3.

They took one of the cart roads toward the foothills of Taygetus, picking their way around the wheel ruts. On the estates around them the helot sharecroppers tramped behind their plows, drove their wains of manure, or stood curious, swabbing their foreheads as they regarded the odd pair walking west from the city. Unlike in certain other parts of Greece, strolling was not a typical pastime in Laconia.

Andreia was indeed unmarried. Her mother had died trying to give her husband a second son. Her father, Ramphias, son of Clearidas, was only a few years older than Antalcidas, but had already risen to the position of Spartiate judge on the Nigh-Dweller island of Cythera, off Laconia’s south coast. He had gone there at the beginning of the new year, and would stay until the next. In a tone more rueful than self-pitying, she granted that she walked a lot because Pitana was full of Ramphias’ relatives, some of whom claimed the right to keep watch over her. Certain others, including some of the males, asserted rights even more presumptuous.

“All that would be more bearable if Sparta offered any diversion at all,” she said.

“There are festivals,” he replied. “There are parades.”

“Oh yes, we Lacedaemonians love our parades! It seems we are always either preparing to march, marching, or returning home from a march, year in and year out. And we never find it tiresome, do we?”

This struck Antalcidas as a strange thing for the daughter of a prominent Spartiate to say. Reading him, she explained that while she had the typical upbringing of a Spartan girl, her tastes were corrupted by her father’s Athenian guest-friend, who often came to Laconia on state business. During those visits he would describe to her the charms of his native city.

“The music! The paintings! The drama! When he invited us to travel back with him, I longed to go, but my father took my eldest brother instead. When he returned, do you think he described one temple to me, or a single sculpture? No-his only response was to sneer, and tell me that I was fortunate not to go, because Spartan ways are best!”

“They are,” he said.

“But of course… it goes without saying. So why say it? Why should our superiority drive us to sneer and not to understand? Why are we so content to be so ignorant?”

Such confusion! Looking at her, Antalcidas believed he could perceive her sickness of spirit in those tremulous features, that threadbare beauty that seemed barely to cover her mortal bones. She shared with sophists and children the fault of posing too many questions. Insofar as doubt was the undoing of man, she was dying as surely as any hoplite facedown on the battlefield. And yet… what would so utterly disqualify the woman in the eyes of most eligible Spartiates filled him with a powerful impulse to save her. To that end-as much as his lust-he followed as the conversation waned and they passed on to roads that narrowed to tracks, and then to mere paths sloping up between stands of arbutus and pine. Goats milled under the boughs, either flicking their ears in idle contentment or rearing up on their hind legs to reach the spring buds. They turned to the intruders, with eyes as opaque as pans of milk, staring as if whatever might happen held no significance, something common in the world, and therefore innocent in its inevitability. He would kiss her and yes, they would commence their sorrow. A love, like any other new bud, to unfurl and be nipped.

Her lips were softer than her face promised. Nothing was angular about them, nothing hard beyond but the teeth that opened to reveal what he did not yet know how to fill. With his nostrils at her cheek, he smelled iris; with the passage of what could have been hours, he opened one eye and saw a honeyed emerald peeping back. Her lips pulled into a smile.

Out of curiosity, he had kissed some of the women his mother had delivered to him. After a handful of these experiences he presumed that he had mastered the skill; it struck him as marginally of interest, more appealing in the anticipation than the doing. Yet with Andreia he realized he knew nothing. A kiss, he learned, could become like drinking seawater, each drop urging the consumption of another. What had barely seemed consequential before now seemed to have a deep, indescribable meaning. He meant to ask her what she was smiling about, but found his mind emptied by the prospect of tasting the neck she presented to him. When they pulled apart an amount of time had vanished that he was not aware; they were standing in a spot a hundred feet from where they had begun, the dirt in between marked by the course of their footprints spiraling around each other.

They were fortunate not to be seen. The theory in Laconia was that familiarity breeds contempt, and contempt sickly children, so the bride and bride-groom in a Lacedaemonian marriage were not supposed to be acquainted. The Spartan male’s most important spouse, the one to which he gave the first thirty years of his life, was the state. The betrayal of this matron was necessary to propagate the citizenry, but was not to be taken lightly.

Until her father returned no formal arrangments were possible. Over the next months he and Andreia were obliged to be discreet, stealing time together in his empty farmhouse. Dramatic, she dropped her clothes on the beaten floor and stepped free like Aphrodite striding from the surf. She was pale and thin for a Laconian girl, with the breasts of an adolescent, but when he took her in his arms her forehead rested flush into the crook of his neck, and his fingers precisely encompassed the angles of her shoulder blades. Smelling her, he felt a sensation within like a sweetness on his tongue that could never melt, the dripping of a fluidity into his core-impressions, he had to grant, that bore advantages over lying with old Zeuxippos.

She stripped him with impatience and swung astride, raking his chest with dirt-flecked nails and an expression of feline voracity on her face. He watched her with her eyes screwed shut, face turned up, away, anywhere but facing him. It struck him that giving this performance was somehow more comfortable for her than the act of looking into his eyes. When she was done, which was often before he was, she took the reclining posture of a symposiast and tried to ensnare him in discussions of politics and philosophy.

“You have been farther abroad than me, so please tell me-for what are the ways of the Spartans?”

Having been prepared for this question during the Rearing, he replied with all the confidence of the best student in the class: “Freedom, of course. And joy.”

She laughed. “You recite that as if the boy-herd taught it to you!”

“He did. What of it?”

“What of it, dear Antalcidas?” she exclaimed, then kissed every one of the knuckles on his right hand before she added, “Look at us here, hiding in this house. Are we free?”

“We are, in the ways that are proper to mortals.”

She shook her head as if bidding him to explain. For anyone else, he wouldn’t have tried.

“For those as imperfect as men, there is only a choice of miseries. But so far as it takes nothing to excess, the Lacedaemonian system is the envy of all the Greeks. Our aristocracy has stood for a thousand years without tending to tyranny. Every one of our citizens may vote in the Assembly; anyone can become an ephor or earn a place on the Gerousia. What, then, can the rantings of democrats teach us? All states will pass away in their time-some sooner than others. But I promise you that men will always look back on the Spartan constitution with wonder.”

She was looking at him agape. It was the longest contiguous string of words he had yet produced in her presence.

“The one you should speak to is Doulos…” he concluded. “The boy is very content to waste his time in debate.”

She laughed. “Doulos, your helot? I wonder what freedom he claims.”

“Is it so bad to have his fate? What helot ever starved, or was ever denied mastery over his own house?”

“You seem so confident you know what the helots want!”

“Why didn’t your father take you with him to Cythera?” he asked, bidding against hope to change the subject.

She sat up, grasping her knees against her chest. “I don’t know. .. except maybe that he never trusted a Nigh-Dweller in his life. He probably believed there was no more wholesome place for me than here.

…”

As if to add perversity to irony, she ran her fingertips up the inside thigh of her lover-not-her-husband.

“You sound alike, you and my father. So certain of yourselves, when you’ve seen nothing else of the world!”

“And your precious Athenians, with their mobs and demagogues. Is that what you want to praise? Come, be plain!”

Standing, he pulled her to her feet and into his arms. Electing to be languid again, she let her head fall to the right and exposed her neck. Antalcidas jerked her back to attention; meeting his eyes for only an instant, she slid off to the left. He pushed her back to front and center-face to face at last, she stared at him with an expression of gathering fright.

“What is it?” he asked.

She shuddered, jumped up, and ran from the room without pausing to retrieve her clothes. He went to the door to watch her go: stitchless, she walked down the road, straight toward an old man in a hay cart. As Andreia threw back her shoulders in determined nonchalance, the old man did not turn his head at first, waiting until she was past to take in the view of what followed.