The helot skirted the southern slopes of the city acropolis on his way east, toward the river. Looking up, she saw that the Brazen House was still standing. The altar was below the crest of the hill, but she could see a curl of smoke rising above the temple gables as the Lacedaemonians gathered from every village to propitiate the gods. She would have been there too, if not on the present errand. Another black wave broke over her, making the light breeze seem to burn her skin. The handleless sickle from her father’s house had somehow found its way into her right hand.
The helot disappeared from view as he descended to the banks of the Eurotas. She concealed herself in the rushes and crept forward to observe him. Removing his clothes, he waded in as deep as his waist, breathing hard as he entered the swift, cold water. He scrubbed his penis with a handful of dirt from the banks, then bent down to rinse the knob. The act filled Damatria with disgust for the squeamishness of men: in her haste, despite her degradation, she had not washed any part of herself, inside or out. She watched, feeling a kind of forlorn contempt for the helot’s utter exposure, his damnable obliviousness. Cleansing himself of me! Her fingers gripped the rusty blade until they bled.
The helot floated on his back, as if savoring the taste of freedom for the first time. With a child’s curiosity, he paused to inspect fragments of wood or wattle from shattered buildings as they floated by. When at last he pulled himself out of the water, he dressed and returned along the path by which he’d come. Damatria posted herself amid the plane trees, and knowing he would not be expecting her, hardly bothered to conceal herself.
He passed by without taking any notice of her.
She swung her sickle against the back of his head, lodging the broken end in the base of his skull. His body made sounds as it entered-a gasp of astonishment, a pop of dislocated bones, followed by a cluck of dismay. She wrenched his head around, watching him grimace and flutter his eyes in pain or stupefaction. She didn’t know which; she didn’t care.
2.
The earthquake destroyed all but a handful of buildings in Laconia. The death toll ran into the tens of thousands, but the ephors saw no profit in advertising the city’s weakness and sanctioned no official count. What could not be hidden, though, were the large numbers of children killed of every age-class. Many boys were collected in the doomed gymnasia in the morning hours. Since every Spartiate adult was held to be protector and educator of every free-born child in the city, citizens gathered en masse to dig out the victims. Foreigners and helots, however, were kept away from such scenes. The sorrow of the Lacedaemonians was not for outsiders to witness.
When in doubt the Spartans mobilized for war. As aftershocks battered the city and unrecovered bodies stank in the streets, all five battalions of the infantry mustered in their appointed places. Mourning ceremonies halted for the families to comb their shattered storerooms for supplies to feed the troops. The soldiers practiced spearmanship, maneuvering to the pipes, and night fighting under columns of smoke from the fires of continuous funerals.
The thirty members of the city Gerousia, or executive council, convened in a goat pen and voted to declare war on the helots. Along with the usual immunity this conferred on any Spartiate who wished, for any reason, to kill a helot, the measure included the activation of the Hidden Service. Young men specially trained for these gangs were excused from their units and went into hiding. At night, they would sneak into the helot villages and murder any males they encountered; most often the victims were the most intelligent helots, or the most respected, or the strongest, or the finest artisans, or any that showed some distinction that might prove remotely threatening.
But these precautions failed to prevent an eventuality worse than the earthquake itself: the helots in Messenia, taking advantage of the misfortune of their masters, revolted. They were soon joined by several of the more restive Nigh-Dwellers and a few helots of Laconia proper. At a time when many of the granaries were already damaged, exposing the grain to rot, the helot farmers stood up and walked away from their fields. In a galling reversal, roving gangs of rebels made it impossible for decent citizens to travel at night. The army was forced to fight everywhere against the majority of the population of Laconia. The old men could not remember a less secure time in the life of the city.
All this seemed very far from Damatria. She was still haunting the ruins of her house when Molobrus’ father and two brothers came to see if she had survived. As they led her away, she was still not sure she could reassure them. Certainly, there was a “Damatria” who lived-a figure in a play with the almond-shaped eyes and straight teeth, the ingenue who still ate, breathed, smiled, and looked with virginal tremulousness on the mystery of her wedding night. According to this plot, she had stayed at her father’s side during the disaster, and her left eye was put out by a falling brick. In this character she vested all the proprieties to which she could never quite conform herself. Disfigured but dutiful, she seemed to her new family a model of durable innocence; the match with Molobrus was declared by all to be a more pleasing prospect than ever.
The other Damatria was not a virgin at all. The violence of the rape had torn her inside and out. In the streets, the sight of any face that even remotely resembled the helot caused her to be physically ill. At night, when she most wished to escape her memories, the dark half of her world did not remain so, but exploded with the same riot of phosphorescent colors she saw when he first crushed her eye. The spectacle forced her to relive the moment over and over, until she grew to dread the attempt to sleep.
And so she went on simulating her former life, taking her place in Molobrus’ Limnae house, pretending to conspire in his schemes to steal hours away from the barracks. The joy of these conjugal moments was lost to her. The hot anonymity she once imagined was repulsive, and Molobrus was too fascinated with her crushed features to preserve the usual mystery. He brought his round little face close to hers, whistling to himself as he examined her wound. She, in turn, looked back in smiling disappointment at his soft cheeks, so obvious in their failure to produce a man’s growth of beard. Everything turned out to be harder than she imagined, with only a single exception: she didn’t have to fake a virgin’s fear of penetration.
She became aware of her pregnancy a few weeks after the earthquake. For the sake of her sanity, she hoped that the child was Molobrus’. She subsisted on this hope for nine months, indulging her mother-in-law’s compulsion to give advice:
“For the child’s sake, you must not only bathe him in wine, but scrub his body with pinecones,” Lampito advised her. “A baby’s softness is better lost sooner than later.”
“And if a girl comes?”
She frowned as if Damatria had done something akin to kissing her husband in public. “Sparta needs spears now,” she said.
Of that, there was no doubt. After three months of fighting, the immediate environs of Sparta were mostly safe, with some of the compliant helots assigned to rebuilding. But the uprising was far from over in Messenia. Troops were dispatched west through the Taygetos passes on a daily basis; they returned almost as frequently, as the old saying went, “either carrying their shields or on them.” It was rumored that the Messenians fought as if the intervening three centuries of their subjugation had never occurred. A startling proportion of Lacedaemonian deaths were from festered human bites.
Upon the birth of her son, before he could even be cleaned, Damatria demanded to see his face. Lampito laid his bloody form on his mother’s belly, trusting that he would show enough Spartan vigor to claim the breast. The child inched up her body with clumsy but strong thrashing movements, like some swimming reptile. When he reached her breastbone he gazed up at his mother. There-unmistakable in the balled pucker of his rooting lips and thickly lidded eyes-she found herself confronted again with the face of her rapist.