She returned to her house and regarded its ruins. The roof appeared to have fallen in first, followed by three of the masonry walls in turn. Her father had been sleeping in the room at the front. He was on his couch, his lips smeared with the flesh of oversoft figs; she recalled how, before she went out, his chest heaved up and fell one time, as if making up for a history of shallow breaths. His walking stick was next to him, and it stood there still, resting against the house’s last standing wall. Seeing the stick dispelled her reverie-the wreck instantly became a real place again, and the tangled mass beside the wall, a grave made by pitiless hands.
The timbers were long and half-buried, and the cobbles were heavy. She made painful progress at her excavation as the sun climbed above the peaks. Sparta was a quiet place on nonfestival days, and her people never wept or screamed at misfortune, but the quality of the silence after the earthquake was unnerving. The birds had stopped singing and never resumed; she could hear guttural exertions from next door, as intimate as the sounds of lovemaking, as her neighbor dug into the debris of her own house. Isolated, Damatria jumped when a voice suddenly spoke to her.
“Are you the only one?” asked the soldier. He was standing on the road, a sword at his side, a blazon of fresh blood trailing from beneath his helmet. Damatria thought he must be a fool, believing he could defend himself from the great Earthshaker with a sword.
“My father is here,” she replied, indicating the wreckage.
The soldier stared at the pile. “By order of the ephors,” he said, “the people shall show their dignity.”
She made no response, as if such a reminder was beneath her notice.
The soldier moved on, then stopped, resting his hand on the grip of his weapon. “You should know… the disorder has encouraged some of the helots.”
“If that is true, why are you standing here prattling with women? Go and be a man!”
The soldier hung his head and left. She bent to her digging again, scattering the stones around her as the afternoon waned, heedless of the cuts made in her hands by exposed nails. Suddenly-beneath a broken tile-a foot. Damatria paused, the sight affecting her more than she could immediately bear. She fell back on her haunches, regarding it, unsure whether to proceed.
This was to be her wedding night; by sunset, she was supposed to be seized by Molobrus’ family and brought to her future home. Perhaps by now she would have been in the traditional belted chemise, awaiting the furtive attentions of the groom. She should not expect to be taken as a woman the first time, or even the first several times, the old wives advised. Shorn of her hair like a young recruit, the Spartan bride had to understand the mechanics of barracks love. Damatria had long imagined this and the other nights that followed, as she would initiate Molobrus, in subtle but due course, into the way between male and female. The end of the process would put him inside her in fruitful fashion at last. For it would only be at that time, perhaps months into a good Spartan marriage, that bride and husband were supposed to see each other’s faces by daylight.
Did Molobrus’ little house in Limnae still stand? Did her matrimonial bed contain only rubble? She must have stayed that way, thinking about such things, until she fell asleep. When she awoke, her head was in the dirt, with a glow from the west shining in her eyes. She realized, with some shame, that after all those hours she had exposed nothing more of her father but that single foot.
Resuming her work, she began to find objects from her quarters on the top floor. They were forlorn hints of her past life: a bronze mirror, bent askew; a handleless sickle; a clay lamp, now broken, from the souvenir booths near the Altis; a scroll of poetry by Alcman. By chance, she found the one illicit item in her possession-a sack of foreign staters. Possession of precious metal was still thought corrupting in Sparta, and was therefore illegal. That her Theban shields, Athenian owls, and Aeginetan sea turtles might see the light of day made her uneasy. She looked around for a place to hide them, until she was frozen by the figure of a man standing on the road, watching.
Thinking the soldier had returned, she asked, “Are you back for your courage?” When he made no answer, she began to worry that he had seen the coins. She held the bag behind her back as the stranger stepped forward.
By the way he stood-by that slightly stoop-shouldered posture, and the way he twisted his neck as if to peer up at her-she knew he was a helot. His face was in shadow, but his hair was cut short in the manner best to distinguish servants from their long-locked superiors. His body, knotted with muscles telling of heavy, repetitive work, lacked the lean balance of a true fighting physique. At the end of one of those arms was a balled fist, and in that fist was a knife.
He was on her before she could get away. The attack felt at first to her much like a wrestling match in the gymnasium, the kind of test of strength she never lost against other girls. She felt a surge of confidence as she struck the first blow and spun nearly free. Indeed, in her contempt for this helot she had no inclination to scream, for to do so would have been to acknowledge some inferiority. In the next instant she lost her chance to escape: as he brought the butt of the knife down across her temple, Damatria, puzzled, felt her knees give way.
She woke up before she dared open her eyes. It was either hours or seconds later-she could not tell. She was on her back in the dirt with the helot on top. He kept on trying to bend her knees around his midriff, but even in her half stupor Damatria begrudged any opening, pressing her legs down flat on the ground. And so she waited, her jaw clenched so tightly shut with the pain that she cracked the crowns of her teeth. The physical ordeal, however, was not as bad as the sense of black despair, flowing like a liquid shadow into her every corner. It surprised her, so deep a well of loathing did she conjure in herself. Looking up, she saw a crow perched on a branch, cocking its head to regard her from one side. In that moment she despised that bird, so assured in its freedom, as much as she hated her own weakness.
After the helot spilled into her he seemed to linger there with piggish satisfaction. Still unafraid, she tried to wiggle free until he regarded her with mild curiosity. For the first time, she got a good look at his face: everything about it was heavy, from the lips like fattened grubs to the broken nose to the thick lids of his eyes. She was staring into those eyes, scorning them, when the shadow of his chiseled arm blotted the sky and he brought a fist down on her face. A thousand blossoms bloomed of every color she had ever seen; the force of the blow made her aware that her skull was composed of many parts that were designed, but straining, to remain together.
This time she did not pass out. Through slitted lids, she watched him take his feet, straighten his tattered work shirt over one shoulder, and step over her to continue on his way. After waiting a few minutes, she sat up. The first thing she noticed was that her half-spilled bag of silver coins was left untouched beside her. The second was that no matter which way she turned, one side of her world was dark. Reaching up, she felt the jagged ends of the small bones around what was once her left eye: the topography of the orbit above her cheekbone was alien to her, and something broken and soft was draining down to wet the corner of her mouth.
She pursued the helot into the fields without making any conscious decision to do so. She was suddenly full of the spirit of Artemis, able to read the lay of the twigs and disturbed soil, tracking her quarry like she did small animals in her girlhood. His path ran through the heart of the village of Mesoa, which she hardly recognized because it encompassed not a single intact building. Instead, it resembled a mine or a quarry. Some of the people were digging through the rubble, as she had; others stood by, detached, as if on an excursion to a dead city.
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.
