“You might as well boil the barley for the baby’s lunch,” Andreia declared, a smile fixed on her lips. “We won’t be long away.”
After she was gone, Lampito spied a squad of under-thirties gathered under a tree, with two infant-sized baskets at their feet. When she approached them they fell silent, watching her anxiously; Spartan youths learned early to beware attracting the attention of stern old women.
“I assume those”-she indicated the baskets-“mean you are the guard for Langadha gorge.”
The leader stood up straight. “We are, elder.”
She searched the recesses of her cheeks with her tongue, then bowed her head and disgorged a silver lump into the palm of her hand. The soldiers leaned in to see what she had there: a silver tetradrachm of Argos, thick as a child’s finger, the wolf’s head emblem on its obverse glistening with her spit. She let them stare at the thing, feeling the thrill of its illegality make a palpable circuit through them. Then she closed her hand.
“I think you can find somewhere to spend this, next campaign,” she said, handing the coin to the leader. The others hung on him, jabbing their fingers to get a feel of it.
“This is for the boy, the son of the trembler. Break his neck first. Don’t make a mess of it.”
5.
The under-thirties, accompanied by a magistrate and half a dozen helot bearers, made the procession up to the gorge before sunset. The soldiers marched with arms ready; in the long history of the city no one had ever interfered with their errand, but the Spartans did not believe in tempting a first occurrence.
For the walk up from the valley floor the helots carried the two baskets. Since not even the Lacedaemonians, who longed to hear the wails of dying adversaries, wished to rouse the cries of what they carried, the helots, on pain of flogging, stepped with care lest they jostle the fated contents.
When they approached the rim, the soldiers took the baskets away. Helots, after all, could never be allowed to kill Spartans, even defective ones. As the end neared, the guard captain felt the hard curve of the Argive coin, tucked in his tunic, warm with the heat of his hand-and fretted. For some time now he realized that he had forgotten which of the two boys was the son of Antalcidas. He was twenty-eight and as mindful of matters of virtue as anyone on the verge of full citizenship. Not to follow through on his promise to Lampito, though illegally made, gave him a vague sense of dishonor. Yet he could not make a spectacle of his confusion in front of the magistrate.
The latter was walking ahead, gazing idly at the hard gray pinnacles that stretched like boney fingers over the place of forgetting. While boys undergoing the Rearing ranged all over the Taygetos, all of them acquired a deep aversion to this spot, seldom looking into the depths where they knew the sons and daughters of Sparta were swallowed up. Their imaginings peopled it with ghosts and ghouls, with faces laid open like melons after sword practice, or mangled pieces of animated cadaver twitching and crawling over the streambed. When the boys grew up, most surrendered their fantasies, but not their dread of the gorge. The magistrate was an exception: with duty taking him up there almost every week, he strolled almost leisurely, peeping down as he whistled the melody of some half-forgotten camp song. He interrupted his performance to spit into the sacred chasm, and then turned back to the guard captain.
“Are your feet stuck in mud? Let’s get on with this business before we have to fetch firewood in the dark!”
When the other had resumed his strolling, the captain stepped off the trail and removed the cover from the basket. He didn’t look at the face within, and didn’t hesitate. Taking the head in one hand and the shoulder in the other, he wrenched them obliquely apart until he heard the crack of the vertebrae. Then, unwisely, he looked down at what he’d done.
The boy’s skull was mottled with skin ulcers that were responsible for his rejection. His face, however, was perfectly formed, down to the delicate flutes of his nostrils, the whisper of eyebrows, and the tiny pink lips that now parted for his last breaths. In the brief moment he could bear to look, he saw the death rattle and the ball-less whites of his eyes rolled under half-closed lids, and covered the basket. No one could say he had not tried to fulfill his promise.
6.
If not for the absence of his mother, travel in the warm, rocking basket would have been pleasant to Molobrus. It lulled him, over the miles of his life’s journey to the place his fathers had chosen for him, his brows furrowed with the effort of dreaming. He saw the nimbus of gray that he had learned was his mother, her head bent, pouring tears as her fingertips glistened blood from the scoring of her cheeks. He saw another shape in the gloom, still less distinct, who also wept, though he sensed not for any knowledge of a son borne up from her dark, benthic core. He went upward, ever upward, through the soft gates that waited to strangle him, up into the light, the trail, the judgment, and the mountain. Had he known the gorge awaited, he might have wondered to what fresh heights this new caregiver would send him.
When the moment came, instinct triggered a reflex that made him grab for some secure object. Thick arms spread and gathered in empty air; his bladder voided as he fell. After this the sensation seemed familiar-a long-lost weightlessness. In peace, he remained curled into a ball, his feet crossed at the ankles, his right thumb in his mouth, his eyes turned away from the light, for all the time left to him in the world.
7.
The Athenians were hard-pressed to find places for their guests. As criminal penalties at the time more often included death, fines, or exile, prison space was minimal in the city. The likelihood of another Lacedaemonian invasion discouraged the keeping of captives in camps outside the city walls. High-ranking Spartiates like Antalcidas and Frog were therefore kept in a small jailhouse near the marketplace, while less valuable prisoners, such as the under-thirties and the handful of surviving helots, were boarded out to the storage pits and basements of wealthy citizens. The latter, though scattered, did not want for company: it became a popular amusement for hosts to cap the entertainment at their drinking parties by showing their guests the shackled Spartans in their cellars. Cleon kept no fewer than six in his fine home in Scambonidae; Demosthenes a token two. Nicias took none, though his basement was the biggest in town.
Demosthenes earned the military victory on the island, but Cleon reaped the success. The latter’s jingoist populism became the dominant political force in the city. The prisoners, he argued, could be used as a check on Lacedaemonian aggression: if the enemy dared invade Attica again, they would watch their countrymen’s throats slit and their bodies strung up on the walls. Sure enough, the Spartans sent no invasion the following summer. Instead, they sent a procession of envoys, each newcomer prepared to concede a little more than the last. Cleon-who most now believed could do no wrong-enjoined the Assembly to dismiss the negotiators. With the Athenians holding what they believed were almost three hundred trump cards, they were content to wait for even greater rewards.
Though the Spartans sought the return of their prisoners, their more immediate concern was the Athenian navy. The Athenian ships, based now in Pylos, struck more freely than ever, sacking and burning from the borders of Argos in the east to Helus in the south to Messenia in the west. The Athenians introduced more Messenian exiles into Pylos, encouraging them to ravage the land and free as many of the natives they could find. The Spartan response betrayed their desperation: they organized companies of roving cavalry and archers. Naturally, with no proper citizens willing to do such dishonorable duty, only low-caste Nigh-dwellers and indigent Spartiates joined the new forces.