The Isle of Stone

6

On the appointed day Andreia consecrated her shorn locks and all her girlhood dolls to Artemis; the bride’s procession led to the fountain of the Temple of Aphrodite-in-Fetters, where Andreia purified herself with her marriage shift billowing in the water around her like a saffron cloud. Antalcidas likewise performed all the rituals expected of him-the ritual bath, accepting the insults of his messmates-until the time came for the banquet at Ramphias’ house. As Damatria would be there, he made only the briefest of appearances, excusing himself right after the sesame cakes were distributed. He declared his virtue according to the formula, “I have forsworn the good and found the better,” and made his escape as his mother made her approach. From her expression it seemed she wanted to tell him something, but he didn’t wait to hear her out.

The traditional moment of possession came when the bride, hair dressed like a new recruit, wearing a man’s work shirt, waited in the groom’s bed to be “taken.” On this wedding night the newlyweds, who were already more than familiar, did more mocking than lovemaking. By the light of the handmaid’s torches, Antalcidas watched Andreia turn buttock to him. “Elder, teach me,” she begged in the piping voice of a schoolboy; he, sharing the joke, replied in the orotund style of Zeuxippos, “What a fine, tight ring!” The eavesdroppers outside, whose presence was as traditional as the wedding dress and sesame cakes, were very confused by what they heard.

With Andreia’s arrival the Kynosoura farmhouse at last came to life. The gifts from Damatria and Zeuxippos came out of storage and were carefully placed; the bride’s trousseau required three men to lift it to her women’s quarters upstairs. When he left for the summer invasion there was a thick carpet of bear’s foot growing outside the door. On his return it had all been replaced by a kitchen garden of basil, marjoram, mustard, and woody thyme, fringed with beds of chamomile, pennyroyal, sage, and other medicinal herbs he did not recognize. After weeks invested in chopping and burning the fields of Attica, he dropped his spear and fell to his knees in his own yard, admiring each tender shoot raised by her hand. She came out to greet him with the fragrance of mint leaves on her breath and a new fullness around her hips. He asked the question with his eyes, and she answered by grasping her breasts through her chiton and saying to him, in a voice pregnant with happiness, that her breasts had begun to fill.

Their first child was born during the second winter of the war. Andreia suffered through the delivery, but was rewarded with a daughter who did not cry at the world but arrived instead with a look of quiet astonishment. Ramphias consoled Antalcidas for the misfortune of siring a girl; the new father, charmed by the glow of reddish down on her smooth head, was delighted. A daughter, he knew, could never earn citizenship and so could not be sanctioned with betrayal of her grandfather’s helotry. Provided she married respectably, her descendants would be forever safe from his shame.

In their happiness, they called her Melitta-a name unheard of among the women of Laconia. It was only the beginning of their exceptionalism. In a thousand ways, from the way Andreia chose to grow her hair long, to the scrolls of foreign writings they collected, to their pledge to permit Doulos to educate Melitta in the classics, they sought to find new ways to be Spartan.

“Let this house be an island of philosophy in a complacent sea!” Andreia declaimed to the hills, with her hand in his and their daughter at her side. It was a metaphor that would come to seem prescient to him when, years later, on another island miles to the west, loneliness and boredom drove him to savor the memory again.