The day finally arrived for the judgment of children born to mothers of the Dymanes tribe. Seven women, stern faced and unaccompanied, gathered with their babies in front of the Shrine of Athena-of-the-City. This was called the Brazen House because the sturdy, four-square structure was decorated with bronze reliefs from the history of the Dorians. Between one plaque depicting Herakles’ capture of the Hind of Ceryneia and another the defeat of the Messenians, the oldest surviving members of Damatria’s tribe, Arcesilaus, son of Areus, Alcander, son of Pausanias, and Nicander, son of Cleomenes, had installed themselves on stools. Sadly, the earthquake had cost the city so many of her elders that these judges were not so old after all-Alcander was not yet sixty.
The order of presentation was determined by a preselection by the magistrates. The weakest candidates for survival were brought up first, so that the judgment could end with the state’s happy endorsement of the stronger. Damatria was disappointed to learn that her son was picked third-too late in the round for her to be sure of the result.
The first child presented was a girl with a cleft palate. Arcesilaus glanced at her once, exchanged a few words with his colleagues, and nodded to the guards. A basket was presented to the mother; with a stricken look, she placed the infant inside and covered its face with a cloth. In exchange, they handed her a barley cake for Eileithyia so that she might assuage her grief with a dedication. A dutiful Spartan mother, she offered a proud, if threadbare, smile. The grimace vanished from her face when, as the basket was borne away to the gorge, the contents began to cry.
The second candidate was a boy. There seemed nothing outwardly wrong with the child until Arcesilaus tested his vision. Making him focus on a single finger moving laterally, Arcesilaus found the left eyeball at first tracked the target but then veered in the opposite direction. The boy’s mother flushed with either fear or embarrassment: this was a defect she had not found. The elders murmured amongst themselves. Arcesilaus repeated the test, got the same result, and conferred again. To Damatria’s surprise, the elders let the boy pass. The earthquake had changed more than the shape of Mount Taygetos.
Damatria presented Antalcidas, who was sleeping. She shook him awake. Arcesilaus regarded him, stroking his beard as the boy’s head rolled on his tiny neck. They felt his grip, counted his digits, tested his reflexes.
“This one’s eyes seem irritated,” Alcander remarked. “Have you been bathing him in unmixed wine?”
“I have.”
Arcesilaus shook his head. “Mothers should wash their boys in wine at half strength, not neat. Understand?”
She looked away, saying nothing. This was not going as she hoped: the elders were smiling at the boy, evidently pleased at his vigor despite the ignorance of his mother.
“Listen to his voice,” she said. “His lungs are weaker than the other children.”
Nicander scratched his freckled pate. “His cry sounds healthy to me.”
“His movements are slow. And he nurses poorly.”
“The nursing,” thundered Arcesilaus, “is something you must teach him!”
“I have tried.”
“Try harder.”
“Esteemed Equals,” she sighed, “who knows this child better than I? Please…”
Arcesilaus’ eyes widened. Anticipating what she meant to say, the other mothers regarded her with something close to horror. Damatria tried to continue, but couldn’t.
“There is nothing wrong with this boy. Rejoice in your good fortune,” Arcesilaus pronounced. With that, his gaze shifted to the next candidate. Antalcidas had been passed.
Damatria drifted a few steps away, her useless eye throbbing in its socket. Seeing the other women with their cherished babes made her dizzy with revulsion. The sound of Antalcidas’ little breaths, his cloying smell, his very weight on her arm, filled her with unspeakable indignation. She whirled back at the elders.
“I see that wisdom is dead among you. Before the gods, then, hear me: one day, one way or another, this child will grow up to be the shame of this city! Remember that a Spartan mother told you this, when you lacked the courage to act!”
After this disaster she took the boy home and put him on the floor. She left him there a long time as she sat and thought. Might she have disposed of him earlier, she wondered, while sickness remained a plausible excuse? Could she still do so? Her mistake, she decided, was to leave her salvation in the hands of others. She resolved that she would not move until she knew what she might do to tolerate the prospect of her own future.
3.
Antalcidas was quiet at first, turning his head back and forth across the blur of the rafters above. At length he felt a discomfort in his stomach. He began to whimper, kicking off his blanket as he rooted for the nipple against his cheek. Feeling nothing, his fear rose, though he could not understand it as such, and he began to cry. His voice, scratchy and croaking, resounded through the soft tectonics of his skull, magnifying his dejection. He was alone.
He cried some more, grew tired, and stopped. In the silence he felt his need again, and went from quiet to full-on bawling in an instant. But then he stopped just as suddenly, and when the hunger ailed him again he produced only a murmur. What had been a bright blur above him was now an opaque gloom. Opening his mouth to root, he produced a yawn.
When he awoke he saw nothing but blackness. He had somehow lost his blanket, and felt a damp rigidity pressing against his back. His bladder had emptied as he slept, the fountain of his own water soaking him. In that instant his cold, his loneliness, and the discomfort in his stomach fused into a single knot of misery. He poured his heart into a long, arcing wail, and then a staccato of piercing sweeps. As he screamed, his face burned red and wet as his tiny fists punched the air. He cried with such violence that his breathing could not keep up. He choked, wept, choked. No one came.
Other voices came to him from beyond the walls. Across vastnesses he could not yet conceive, his brothers and sisters whispered to him from their stony cradles. They were collected at the bottom in their thousands, tender humeri scattered in the stream, toothless jaws rolled and polished by the water. Bits of scalp clung to some, covered with fine hair, residues of blood mingled across the boulders. Like Antalcidas, the bones lay in silence, but did not lack for attention from the rats and jackals that suckled their soft ends. As their mothers lived their days nearby, weaving their shrouds of forgetting, the children of Sparta lay gathered against that hard but eternally accepting bosom, calling to him.
Then something loomed at him from out of the dark. He felt it snatch him up, and through his tears he saw the gathering of a luminant mass, a moonscape of light and dark that resolved into his mother’s face. What he could not recognize, though, was the peculiar shape of her mouth as she brought him close. For the first time, as she offered her breast, she was smiling.
4.
Damatria had realized a single, sustaining prospect-to have a truly legitimate child. To that end, she attacked her husband in a procreational frenzy. Molobrus kept up as best he could, but showed fear in his eyes as she bared her legs for the third, fourth, fifth go in a night. Even in his ignorance he could sense there was no pleasure in the act for her, only the obstinate purpose of a commander marshaling his forces for some greater end.
A son was born the following summer. Molobrus took an afternoon to come home from the barracks, looked down at young Epitadas, and pronounced himself pleased. But to Damatria his arrival marked the time of her own rebirth, of joys that were finally unmixed. Her months of shame, of lies of omission, were over.
She responded with a tenderness that surprised Lampito. The infant’s wine baths were diluted to one-sixth strength and less. While Antalcidas lay without cover in a basket across the room, Damatria took Epitadas to bed with her. His hunger and chills, his teething, and the softness of his blankets, were constant matters for concern. One day, when Lampito looked in on them, she was pleased to see that Antalcidas had begun to pull himself upright
