“Where did you get these words?” she asked. “Who's been speaking to you?”
“Kynegeiros,” I always said. Which made her think the words came from him. When he denied it the first time — I was ten, he was fifteen — our father had him beaten. Some of the words were evidently impious.
“Tell me about the words,” my brother told me later, while I helped him with his back. “Don't tell them.” We gathered and crushed in a pestle the foxglove and sorrel, and I applied the paste to the welts he couldn't reach.
What I told him caused him concern. He questioned me about whatever else I may have noticed by way of omens or signs. He talked about how to know if I was speaking only with myself. I became his new responsibility. He gave himself over to it, his resentment plain.
Even so, I didn't stop. In the mornings I'd scratch Onus and Dyad in the loam of our herb garden. He'd explain their meanings. When our other brother Anacreon or our father happened near, we went about our business, the scratchings our secret.
But when we were alone again, he'd say, “Who's giving you these?” I didn't know, I told him. Where was I hearing them? he'd ask. In my head, I'd tell him. This caused him to hold his forehead with his fingertips.
Once he asked how I felt when they arrived. I didn't know. Did I hear a voice, or see the words in my head? I didn't know.
So he broke my wax tablet and was angry with me for a week. It scared me. And pleased me. Maybe, I thought, I was headed down the wrong path. Now, words from elsewhere still marshal themselves, rebel or obey me, send their havoc out into the world, and my reward is the laurel wreath. But back then, I spent my time alone in the hills above our house, telling myself that if I couldn't read the meaning of such signs, I could at least learn something about my world.
Anacreon also kept track of my strangeness, but with more hostility. He was the firstborn and eight years older. Usually I told myself that I had one brother who understood and one who didn't, but the week Kynegeiros was angry I wandered around alone, collecting signs to ask him about later, once he'd begun speaking to me again: the wind on a ridge line like a rush of voices, or patterns in a poplar's bark that repeated themselves in one of its taproots. When he finally took me back, I asked him: did my difference mean I was one of the elect, or cast out? He cuffed me for my presumption. I didn't persist, but decided to act, and to let the inner spirit follow the outer shadow. I had him cut my hair in what he said was the ancient Doric style: close-cropped at the forehead and long in the back. I modeled as many of his behaviors as I could, the way children learn about the clean hand and dirty hand and which you keep to yourself. Both of my brothers took pleasure in their manners, speaking only when addressed. They were respectful with their gaze, their greetings commendable.
After matricide had especially disturbed him, he asked me to remember the first time the words had appeared. Did I remember? I thought I did: a morning when I was three or four, in a powdery season of little rain. I'd had barley dust on my hands. He'd been seated nearby. He must have been eight or nine. He'd been watching Anacreon working a rasp up and down an ash shake for a javelin. As I watched him watch, my heart rose and fell, rose and fell, and no one knew. A word appeared before me: starfish. A crow dropped to the ground and both my brothers made note of it and Kynegeiros shooed it away.
I asked if he remembered. He didn't, but held his wrist as if trying to immobilize one hand with the other. When he let go, he said that he did remember the way my expressions, at that age, had been comically severe.
My brothers and their friends played their war games at the edge of our wheat field. When I followed they chased me away.
When I returned they chased me away again. At home I attempted descriptions of the architecture of the stalks, the leaf blades sheathed around the stem or the spikelets' airy intricacy. Just being in the field made a force in my chest levitate. But my excitement went too far and somehow upset my family. I tried to confide in Kynegeiros when I caught him alone, but it repulsed and alarmed him that I was so tireless in search of attention, as if he'd found a spider in his soup.
He was already forced to spend time in my company, responsible for ensuring that I arrived, daily, at alphabet lessons and music. When he came of age at sixteen, I marched alone with other boys in ranks from the music master's house to the physical trainer's palaestra. I sang “Pallas, Terrible Stormer of Cities” and “Ajax on His Rock” and played the hedgehog game. I missed him. At home in the afternoon, where I was allowed to watch him play knucklebones or wrestle Anacreon, I sang and resang songs for him. I pretended that I was also sixteen.
That year he commissioned a first helmet like our father's, a variant on the Corinthian design. I was permitted to lift it from its peg and run my palms through the brush of its crest. I coped with the excitement by breathing through my mouth.
And my head was becoming an open gate that the world streamed through. Brothers muscles honey wine stones. Honey brothers muscles stones wine.
He lost patience with me again because of it. In the afternoons they shut me into the outer courtyard, but I followed their games by keeping my eye to the gate latch. They played at quail-tapping. The bird when rapped on its head sometimes stood its ground and sometimes backed out of the ring. They cheered it on or cheated by scaring it, exchanging coins on the basis of its behavior. I watched and sang battlefield paeans and imagined civic crises that would call forth a muster of even the youngest boys.
Anacreon loved the sea and spent his free time assisting the fishing fleet. Kynegeiros helped, but sometimes went his own way. When he did, I followed, reciting lists like figs, limes, almonds, olives, and lemons that soothed me and displaced the pressure of other lists that, arrayed in squadrons, so unsettled my brother. To lose me he leapt walls or rushed up high, gravelly hillsides. When he succeeded, my day was ruined. Eventually I'd continue on, miserable. I'd follow flying beetles riding the hot air up those same hillsides, or investigate the drowsings of hornets.
When I found him again, our eyes met like bones jarred in sockets. What did I want?, he'd demand, and again disappear. I always wondered, by what miracle was the dust and the rock around me transformed into speech? When he talked to me it was like a duet in which the other voice was silent. When I thought of him it was like a sign from god that I wasn't ready to read.
But whenever he talked to Anacreon about me, he'd say, My Aeschylus this, and My Aeschylus that. Anacreon spoke to him of me the same way: Your Aeschylus this, Your Aeschylus that.
Our decision to wait six days was not unanimous. Every knot of two or more citizens has become a discussion group. Hellenes have, after all, made arguing black is white a sport. My brother and I when not engaged in drill have walked the shoreline, both for training and to keep our own counsel. Sometimes we walk until Phosphorus, the morning star and light-bearer, leaves Hesperus, evening and western star, behind. Should we have stayed behind our city walls? Could we continue to wait for the Spartans? Should we have attacked while more of the enemy was disembarking? And why had they waited? Concern for their cavalry and its vulnerability to our camp's shelter in the sacred grove? Or were we drawn here, so that our city could be betrayed and given over, like Eretria? The last three nights there's been a waxing moon above the bay. When it wanes, the Spartans' Karneian festival will end and they'll begin their march to us. We walk every night through the wavelets combing in onto the sand. We walk until the watch fires are banked down. Stretches of the shore are a seafarer's junkyard, with stove-in and disintegrating small boats offering up their salt-eaten and mealy spare parts along the high-tide mark.