Though rhetoric was rarely practised in Sparta, her priestesses were usually schooled to convey religious oratory and Lysandra applied this learning to put her case to the Legate. Not only could she take the auguries and provide spiritual guidance to his soldiers, she told him, she was also skilled in rudimentary medicine.
It was this that had convinced him. A good commander’s first concern is for his soldiers, and any assistance in the hospital tent was not something to be dismissed out of hand. Admittedly, he had been somewhat grudging with his consent, but he had acquiesced.
Her small tent was billeted with the Sixth Century, First Cohort and their reaction to her presence was surly at best. To most soldiers a woman was good for one thing only, yet her position as a priestess of the Virgin Athene protected her from any amorous advances. A lusty bunch they may have been but soldiers were superstitious enough not to risk displeasing the fickle gods.
It had been a hard task to win them over but Lysandra, already used to the brutal life of the priestesses’ agoge, had not shirked her duties. She rose at dawn with the men, exercising when they did and even lending a hand to dig the palisades on occasion.
The willingness to get her hands dirty had initially been treated with derision by the tough, cynical legionaries and thereafter became a matter of amusement. One middle-aged soldier, Marcus Pavo by name, always seemed to take special care to tease her.
Once, she recalled, he had commented that her ‘tits were small enough to fool any recruiter into thinking she was a boy’.
Lysandra responded that she had seen him emerging from a swim in the Parapamis River and was sure that he too was still a boy, judging by his ‘equipment’. That she bore their jibes with good humour and responded with her own laconic wit in time caused men of the Legion to regard her as a sort of mascot. Their acceptance had meant more to her than she cared to admit; she had become one of them, a trusted augur and priestess and even friend to some, Pavo among them.
Then, on a routine voyage across the Hellespont, the storm came: Poseidon’s wrath had dragged the entire century to the bottom, choosing to spare only her. Pavo had tried to swim out to her — to save her before his own exhaustion overtook him.
His desperate gasps for help as his armour pulled him under still haunted her dreams. In this violent twist of fate, the Earth-Shaker had stripped a priestess of his hated sibling Athene of her friends, her freedom and her dignity. In saving her life, he spat in her eye; Lysandra would rather she had perished with the rest than have to live the life of a slave.
She began to slow her run, realising that she was almost at the end of her laps. Her reverie had turned as black as her circumstances. Lysandra cast a glance at the statue of Roman Athene once again, and wondered why she had been consigned to this cruel fate. The serene marble face gave no answers.
V
They were pushed hard.
From dawn till dusk, the new captives were subjected to a punishing regimen of callisthenics that left them stumbling exhausted into their tiny cells at the day’s end. Here they were shackled and left till cockcrow, when the drills began again.
Though she prided herself on her physical fitness, Lysandra found the savage regime challenging. The day began with laps of the ludus, alternately jogging and sprinting; this type of exercise was known to make the lungs bigger and the legs stronger. A light breakfast followed, for those who could keep it down, and then the real work of the day began. The novices were not given swords to work with because, as Stick constantly reminded them, their bodies had to be strengthened first. And that would take several weeks.
They hung from bars, pulling with their arms until their chins touched the wooden pole from which they were suspended, or lay flat on the ground, sitting up each time Stick barked the order. Many such simple exercises were repeated over and over.
Lysandra and the Germans had been merged into a much larger group of women, other recent acquisitions to Balbus’s famillia, and all were put through their paces under the exacting eye of the trainers. Many faltered and were encouraged to greater exertions with the aid of the vine staff or birch rod. It was not only Stick responsible for these arbitrary thrashings; the trainers were rotated on a regular basis and Lysandra came to distinguish between the harsh-but-fair and the unfairly harsh.
There was Nastasen, burnt black as coal by the hot sun of his savage Nubian homeland. A huge man, his body thick with cords of muscle, he had strange, wiry hair growing in wild locks. He had taken an intense dislike to Lysandra for reasons unknown to her. She bore his animosity with stoicism, speaking little and working hard. Yet Nastasen still took delight in administering the lash to her, even though she was confident of her own excellence. She took some satisfaction from receiving her punishments in silence, knowing that her refusal to be moved would frustrate him.
Most popular amongst the barbarian women was Catuvolcos, a young Gaul given more to haranguing the women than beating them. His gladiatorial career, Lysandra learned, had been cut short by a sword thrust to the knee. Catuvolcos went easy on them most of the time, especially the tribeswomen, with whom he shared a kinship.
Titus the Roman, middle-aged and tough as a leather cuirass, was an exacting taskmaster, not shy with the whip when it was called upon, but not over-zealous. Unlike the other trainers Titus was not a former gladiator but an ex-soldier and a free man who had never tasted slavery. He was also old enough to have had his fill of inflicting pain for its own sake. Lysandra realised that he was out to instil discipline and toughness in his charges, not to break their spirits. Those of the women who could speak Latin swiftly dubbed him ‘The Centurion’.
It quickly became clear to Lysandra that there was a distinct cultural divide in the large group of newcomers. The barbarians, be they German, Gaul, Briton or from farther-flung tribes beyond the Euxine, went about together.
Then there were many women of the South and East: Egyptians, Syrians, Ethiopians and their ilk. They set themselves apart from the rest, babbling incessantly in their staccato tongues.
Lysandra found herself amongst Romans, Italians, Sicilians and even some Hellenes. Unfortunately, none of these were Spartan and, though they tried to converse with her, she found in their inane talk yet further proof that Sparta was indeed the greatest polis in all Hellas. She was courteous to them, but she had nothing in common with these seamstresses, these wives who, before the ludus, knew nothing of toil and hardship.
In time, none spoke to her at all.
In the pitch black of her cell Lysandra prayed nightly for deliverance but Athene was deaf to her entreaties. She knew why: she was a slave, and the goddess would not condescend to succour one such as she. Beyond the beatings, beyond the daily toil of the ludus, this was the pain she found hardest to bear. To a Spartan, admission of suffering, even to oneself, was the gravest dishonour.
Yet, in the darkest hours, she began to wonder if she could consider herself Spartan at all.
The crash of the cell doors being flung open brought Lysandra to wakefulness. She sat up on her pallet and stretched, wincing as the recent stripes on her back pulled slightly. In time the door to her own prison was unlocked to reveal the huge form of Nastasen, his grinning face full of contempt.
‘Why is it your cell stinks worse than any of these other animals?’ he sneered.
Lysandra got to her feet and shrugged. ‘Perhaps because the stench you leave in here never seems to fade.’