The Isle of Stone

5.

The under-thirties, accompanied by a magistrate and half a dozen helot bearers, made the procession up to the gorge before sunset. The soldiers marched with arms ready; in the long history of the city no one had ever interfered with their errand, but the Spartans did not believe in tempting a first occurrence.

For the walk up from the valley floor the helots carried the two baskets. Since not even the Lacedaemonians, who longed to hear the wails of dying adversaries, wished to rouse the cries of what they carried, the helots, on pain of flogging, stepped with care lest they jostle the fated contents.

When they approached the rim, the soldiers took the baskets away. Helots, after all, could never be allowed to kill Spartans, even defective ones. As the end neared, the guard captain felt the hard curve of the Argive coin, tucked in his tunic, warm with the heat of his hand-and fretted. For some time now he realized that he had forgotten which of the two boys was the son of Antalcidas. He was twenty-eight and as mindful of matters of virtue as anyone on the verge of full citizenship. Not to follow through on his promise to Lampito, though illegally made, gave him a vague sense of dishonor. Yet he could not make a spectacle of his confusion in front of the magistrate.

The latter was walking ahead, gazing idly at the hard gray pinnacles that stretched like boney fingers over the place of forgetting. While boys undergoing the Rearing ranged all over the Taygetos, all of them acquired a deep aversion to this spot, seldom looking into the depths where they knew the sons and daughters of Sparta were swallowed up. Their imaginings peopled it with ghosts and ghouls, with faces laid open like melons after sword practice, or mangled pieces of animated cadaver twitching and crawling over the streambed. When the boys grew up, most surrendered their fantasies, but not their dread of the gorge. The magistrate was an exception: with duty taking him up there almost every week, he strolled almost leisurely, peeping down as he whistled the melody of some half-forgotten camp song. He interrupted his performance to spit into the sacred chasm, and then turned back to the guard captain.

“Are your feet stuck in mud? Let’s get on with this business before we have to fetch firewood in the dark!”

When the other had resumed his strolling, the captain stepped off the trail and removed the cover from the basket. He didn’t look at the face within, and didn’t hesitate. Taking the head in one hand and the shoulder in the other, he wrenched them obliquely apart until he heard the crack of the vertebrae. Then, unwisely, he looked down at what he’d done.

The boy’s skull was mottled with skin ulcers that were responsible for his rejection. His face, however, was perfectly formed, down to the delicate flutes of his nostrils, the whisper of eyebrows, and the tiny pink lips that now parted for his last breaths. In the brief moment he could bear to look, he saw the death rattle and the ball-less whites of his eyes rolled under half-closed lids, and covered the basket. No one could say he had not tried to fulfill his promise.