The Isle of Stone

2

In the opening year of the war, six campaign seasons before the siege of Sphacteria, the Dog Tail Battalion, having suffered no combat casualties, returned from the first invasion of Attica. The only deaths were by misadventure: a Nigh-Dweller was crushed under an apple tree he had cut down with too much zeal, and a low-caste Spartiate, relegated to the shame of riding with the cavalry, fell from his mount onto a fence of sharpened logs. Though King Archidamos proceeded slowly, making clear his army’s position each day, the Athenians stayed snug inside their fortifications and would not fight. As the season wore on, the king had the Lacedaemonians march under the Long Walls with their heads exposed, spears on their shoulders, shields lowered. The guards on the Athenian ramparts, selected by Pericles himself for their coolheadedness, looked down on this challenge with perfect equanimity, as if observing a migration of sea turtles. The monotony of a whole season consumed by burning fields and felling trees left the Lacedaemonians desperate to risk their lives in battle.

Antalcidas was thirty-two years old when he at last contemplated taking a wife, but he seemed younger. He was then part of a dwindling cohort of unmarried males over thirty. Zeuxippos, who was by then too frail for anything but giving advice, reminded him that his responsibility lay in taking on a young protege of his own. As his hair grew out and the lines on his face deepened, Antalcidas became an object for furtive glances from the new propaides, who leaned to their fellows to inquire what mess he attended. But he never felt up to the task of mentoring. By his own reckoning, he had yet barely proved himself on the battlefield, while knowledge of the helot blood in his veins did nothing for his self-confidence. To be exposed for a fraud would dishonor not only himself, but anyone he took under his wing.

Something similar applied to the prospect of his marriage. Damatria did what her station demanded, sending his way the daughters of Spartiates who would think well of attaching them to the largest estate in Laconia. Ever gallant, he entertained these women, though they all left him cold.

“What was wrong with gentle Elephantis,” his mother asked him in a letter cut in wax, “that you would treat her with such little regard? I thought her teats worth the liability of her face. And think of the expense you’d save on a wet nurse…!”

Grinding his teeth, he rubbed out her message and sent the tablet back without inscribing a reply.

On those occasions when he was in the city he found his thoughts going back half a lifetime, to the girl in the chorus at the Harvest Festival. Sparta was not a big place-in time nearly every face became familiar in form if not by name. Yet in all those years he never saw her. Was it a peculiar kind of fate that kept them strangers? Or was she outwardly so changed by the intervening time that he had seen her already, but not recognized her? He was not under the impression girls changed that much in their maidenhood-or did they? Was she married? Honored in death from childbearing? A figment lasting only a day in the spell of his devotional enthusiasm? These thoughts occurred to him.

And then, just when he had stopped looking for her, they met on the path between the villages of Mesoa and Pitana. It was early in the new year, just after the Festival of the Unmarrieds, when bachelors like himself did penance for their childlessness by performing choral dances in the freezing marketplace. After, with the sun showing weakly through the trembling poplars, reefs of dark cloud fled over the olive terraces to drop their burdens of snow on the mountainsides. He was concealed from the chin down by the military cloak wrapped around his body and she with her himation fashioned into a hood to cover her ears. Still, a look of recognition came over both as they approached each other.

“So there you are,” she said, matter-of-factly.

Though Antalcidas knew exactly who she was, he was momentarily embarrassed by the force of his own reaction. He nodded his head in mute denial.

“No? Forgive me then, elder…”

He searched her face as she moved to pass him by. The years had drawn her face longer, with care lines parenthesizing her eyes. She was still fair, but the sweep of hair beneath her hood had turned amber as she passed into mature adulthood. Yet this was undeniably the same face that lived in his memory-the same eyes, wide-set around the same thin, straight nose, the painted lips above a chin whose upper line bowed oddly, like a shallow omega. Her eyebrows were neatly plucked lines as liquidly expressive as the ripples on a pond. As she slipped past, the end of her left brow seemed to meander, dangling and inquiring, above the corner of her eye.

“Wait,” he said, suddenly afraid he would lose her again. “What’s your name?”

“What an impertinent question! Have you told me yours, Antalcidas?”

Too distracted to take her joke, he stood with his mouth open. She read his lapse as if he had taken affront. Leaning forward, she laid a reassuring hand on his elbow as she said, “Andreia, of Pitana.” Her voice was pitched girlishly high, but rang like a well-cast bell; the slight pressure of her breath stirred his beard hairs as if a sparrow had flown under his chin.

“Of course I know your name,” she continued. “You are Antalcidas, son of Molobrus and Damatria, also known as Stone, one-time eromenos of Zeuxippos the Ephor. You testified against Thibron in the trial that led to his exile-out of jealousy according to some, for the sake of the truth according to others. Your first action was in Sciritis, where you charged alone against a gang of Arcadian slingers. After you set the Arcadians to flight, you let your leader, Praxitas, steal the glory of your victory, but no one believes him now. Today you command a platoon in the Dog Tail Battalion. You have a strong javelin throw and fair skill with the sword. But you truly excel with the spear.”

She looked at him with obvious self-satisfaction. “How do I know all this? If you men only knew! We girls know everything about the city’s warriors. Lots and lots of details about every one of you!”

Confounded, he could think of nothing more to do except to point his chin ahead. “I am going to Mesoa.”

“Extraordinary news! Good day, then.”

“Good day.”

She seemed to take a perverse pleasure in the awkwardness of their parting, as if it had gone exactly as she had imagined it would. Antalcidas walked on, not quite sure if he had enjoyed the encounter. Into his head rushed all the things he might have said to her instead; it occurred to him that he had appeared the fool, and that he might never redeem himself. He must ask Doulos for advice on what to say to women. Some Greeks had made studies of such matters.

In the next days he found many more occasions to walk between Mesoa and Pitana. As Andreia did not appear, he was left to the kind of thoughts that often preoccupy young men in his position: imagining what his life would be like with this particular woman at his side. The images were trivial and profound, and came hurtling upon each other. In the Kynosoura house, he stares at her at her reading, the end of her tongue showing as she concentrates; their arms brushing as they walk, they promenade into the market with smiles on their faces, well aware of the other Spartiates staring; after she is here, retying her girdle with fingers sticky from pomegranate juice, she is there, writhing in the pool of her own water as she delivers him a purple, pucker-lipped infant.

He was activated three days later, when half his battalion was garrisoned in Corinthia to dissuade the Athenians from mischief on the Isthmus. In the spring the troops returned to Laconia for only a short time before the summer invasion of Attica was to be launched. These periods of idleness when he was neither training nor on campaign wore heavily on him. Apart from his board with the Hill Wolves, he was mostly alone because he had cultivated no genuine friends in the city. He was too proud to see his mother because of her disrespect, yet too insecure in his origins to mix easily with anyone else. If his loneliness did not kill him, he reasoned, it would only make him stronger.

In the spring the verges grew wildflowers, the air so redolent with the scent of violets that Persephone would have blanched. He was on the Pitana road again, but walked in such a state of perfumed distraction that he forgot to expect Andreia. She was almost upon him when he recognized her. This time she was bareheaded and wore a short tunic that showed her arms and legs-the limbs he had once watched, fretting with lust, as they bent in tribute to Phoebus. So busy was he in staring at these tapering stems that he made no greeting.

Her eyebrow afloat, she said, “I see you’re on your way to Mesoa again.”

Antalcidas looked up to reply, but his tongue could only flop in his mouth like a landed fish. Now that she was hoodless, he saw that she had the long hair of an unmarried woman.

As if reading his thoughts, she reached up to twist the blond ends around her finger.

“Shall we walk for a while?” she asked. Hollowed by disappointment, an endless expanse of black broth and inanity stretching before him, he could only nod and follow her.