The Isle of Stone

4.

Mystified by her behavior, he made no move in the next few days to find her. After that he was in the field training for a week, preparing for the next invasion of Attica under King Archidamus. Experts from Syracuse were brought in to demonstrate the craft of sapping fortifications. The Lacedaemonian army was brought up by battalions to watch the Syracusans undermine a makeshift wall erected out of old ashlar blocks. Though their techniques worked well enough, the mood in the ranks was contemptuous. Digging in the dirt was for slaves and barbarians. Nor did the Syracusans show how they might bring down Athens’ Long Walls with the enemy raining arrows down on the sappers.

When he returned, his idle time wore heavier on his hands than ever. The table conversation among the Hill Wolves struck him as more than typically inane-it centered not on whether Athens would be defeated, but how long it would take. The diners reasoned that if the enemy wanted to stay inside their walls it was a sign that they were desperate. It was further held that if the Athenians came out to fight it was also evidence of desperation. Antalcidas thought that even in Lacedaemon there must be some rule against accepting two mutually exclusive propositions at the same time. Or was he infected by Doulos, prattling on about the sophists and their logic?

Andreia was waiting for him in the farmhouse. When he took her, she seemed to go to pieces in his arms, this part shaking with desire, that aquiver with loathing. He tried to soothe her by stroking her cheek like Zeuxippos had once done for him, when he was despondent for losing a footrace. But this tenderness only unnerved her further. “Don’t do that!” she cried. “Don’t ever do that!” Then she retreated to the far corner of the room to bury her face in her hands.

How to question a woman about her feelings was not part of the kit of Spartan manly virtues. Antalcidas did his best, though, by declining to give up on her. Taking her upset to be like an elusive sort of animal, he decided to wait until it broke cover. The vigil went on and on-she did not look up until the turtle-doves fell silent in the eaves and the bats began to stir. When she spoke her voice was calm, as if she had been marshaling her words for a long time.

“I don’t know why you must look at me like that.”

“Like what?” he asked.

“If you would only have me without looking at me, without touching. You’d think you’d never had a woman before, the way you use your eyes to look at me!”

“What else should I do?”

“What everyone else does. It is not for the men of Sparta to see so much, to touch me like you do! To fuck and be fucked-that I understand. Want to take me like one of your boys? I expect that. But all this sweet gazing, this patience, these whispers in my ear that I love so much…”

Her voice unsteadied. Collecting herself, she finished:

“I can’t help but think of it all as… indecent.”

Antalcidas laughed out loud at her. And so because the Lacedaemonians were not known for making tender love to their women, she was unnerved at his devotion? How ridiculous! So at last she stood exposed as all noncomformists must be-conventional to her core.

He seized an ankle and dragged her across the floor to him. On her face was an expression halfway between weeping and relief; when he came close to kiss her again, as dearly this time as he’d seen his mother caress Epitadas, she shed blissful tears that streaked both their faces.

“Don’t laugh at me,” she said, blushing as he set back on his haunches to admire her. “It’s easy for someone like you to break the rules-a Spartiate through and through.”

“Is that what I am?”

She leaned forward to shove him.

“You’re cruel!”