The Isle of Stone

1.

He guarded his target with a militant ardor. As the helot paced his little patch of earth Epitadas lay watching, drinking in every detail of the way he moved. He chose him like an admirer would, as the most appealing of his type, and having marked him he would allow no one else to encroach. One day, as the helot stripped his clothes to haul a large stone from the path of his plow blade, Epitadas spied another young member of the Hidden Service crouching behind a hedge of wild plane. He allowed the newcomer to stay for the show-the sweat of honest labor, the pursing of buttocks, the unfurling of magnificent muscles-but after the helot removed the stone Epitadas ejected his rival with a whistle and a jerk of his head. The other turned in his direction with the promise of challenge in his eyes, but when he saw who claimed this helot, his resistance died. He slunk away. Epitadas, meanwhile, found a way to creep still closer, his eyes full of lust for the culmination that must come.

If the helot had been of any other race he would have been handsome. The brow was high and straight, undergirded by a fine, chiseled ridge that, in turn, sheltered eyes that twinkled through its shadow. Long hair was denied his class, but what remained was black and glossy with the humors of genuine, unwashed poverty. His short beard was as red as a freshly quenched blade in the armorer’s shop. Yet what was most impressive of all about him was his confidence: everything he did, from handling his plow ox to planting a hand on his wife’s wide rump, was done with the grace of effortless virility. He stooped when Spartiates were near, of course, eyes downcast, denying the mark of his natural aristocracy. But Epitadas saw what happened after, when the Spartiates were gone and the helot unreeled his spine to its superior height. He would have towered over his masters.

The helots had learned from bitter experience that the Hidden Service struck mainly at night. They therefore avoided the dark, and if forced to travel, went around in groups. Paths through forest were absolutely shunned; stockpens were abandoned to jackals and children undergoing the Rearing. Epitadas would therefore need some luck and a lot of patience to take his prey.

In the long hours of waiting Epitadas worked himself into a lather of indignation at the presumption of the helots. As descendants of Herakles, the Spartiates had always owned Laconia by birthright. This right had been contravened for centuries as his ancestors wandered the north, but now they had returned for good. Every hour this helot, this detested descendant of a race of squatters, strode those furrows constituted an affront to his blood overlordship. This was a claim that transcended mere legality-it was divinely sanctioned and was its own justification for everything that must follow. That the helots were permitted to be useful to the Lacedaemonians was a conditional privilege whose alternatives were dispossession or, if necessary, annihilation. How this tall helot had the temerity to thrive on his plot of borrowed land was a conundrum only the gods were sufficient to unravel. In the meantime, Epitadas was obliged to carry on the war.

The helot youngsters, less careful, were easier to put under the knife. He knew one man, a highly respected Spartiate on the brink of election to the Gerousia, who specialized in killing children. Epitadas did not exactly disapprove of this practice: in this generational struggle, a dead boy was as good as a dead warrior. Those with their hearts in the right place must be excused their enthusiasm. For his part, Epitadas had many opportunities to take the youngest son of the farmer he coveted. The boy, who was as thin and downy as a yearling swan, was kept home long after the age when the Lacedaemonian masters went to the Rearing. The helots, in their moral squalor, did not understand that boys must be parented by the city. They were also ignorant of the importance of older men’s intimacy. The boy belonged solely to his parents, beloved, stroked, cooed at to a sickening extreme.

On the son’s eighth birthday his father gave him a ewe to tend. In the stubble of the fields he would drive the sheep back and forth with a little ashwood stick, tapping her lightly on the flanks as his father had taught him, never straying far from the house. The ewe bleated, ears twitching, whites showing around the barred slits of its eyes. Epitadas could have taken the boy on any of a dozen occasions when his mother, standing at the window, shifted her attention to her housework.

But the taking of small children held no interest. Those who knew Epitadas knew his defining quality to be impatience-he was in a hurry to achieve the destiny envisioned for him. In this regard he saw no impropriety in the way his mother had provisioned him during the Rearing: she was only speeding him toward the success he would have taken for himself. Other mothers fed their children too, but none of his rivals had grown so strong, so quickly. Should a colt destined to take the olive wreath be forced to grow on inferior fodder?

The night came when the boy left his pet tied outside. Epitadas descended from the hillside, sensing an opportunity. He was not alone: the single wolf was visible by its eyeshine, crouching behind the rungs of the drying rack. The ewe, perceiving the threat, jerked its tether. Her bell sounded in a way the helots understood. Epitadas heard a commotion within the house, saw the door open, and the lank figure of the father framed against the glow of the hearth fire.

Men’s eyes also shine when they observe a lighted place from a dark one-Spartiates were taught to conceal this by focusing their gaze on a point slightly away from their object. The helot strode into the yard grasping a flaming brand, his pace slowing as he searched the dark. Epitadas watched sidelong with wide, unwavering eyes, his black pupils reflecting nothing. The ewe lowed; nearby, a lazy blink briefly eclipsed the blazing stars of the wolf.

The ethos of the Hidden Service called for using the smallest, dullest knife that would do the job. Epitadas liked to think he outdid the others with a weapon that was a piece of shop discard, an iron prong no more substantial than a belt buckle. From behind, it entered the helot’s neck with a slapping sound, followed by a wet, farting exhalation as he drew the thing across the windpipe. Epitadas had to reach up to make the kill; he laid the helot on the ground with the satisfaction of rendering him not so tall after all.

He would be long gone when the men of the village found the body. As he ascended the hill, with his brother the wolf bounding not far behind, the cries of the helot women would waft up behind him like plumes of curing smoke from a very good hunt.