4.
Mystified by her behavior, he made no move in the next few days to find her. After that he was in the field training for a week, preparing for the next invasion of Attica under King Archidamus. Experts from Syracuse were brought in to demonstrate the craft of sapping fortifications. The Lacedaemonian army was brought up by battalions to watch the Syracusans undermine a makeshift wall erected out of old ashlar blocks. Though their techniques worked well enough, the mood in the ranks was contemptuous. Digging in the dirt was for slaves and barbarians. Nor did the Syracusans show how they might bring down Athens’ Long Walls with the enemy raining arrows down on the sappers.
When he returned, his idle time wore heavier on his hands than ever. The table conversation among the Hill Wolves struck him as more than typically inane-it centered not on whether Athens would be defeated, but how long it would take. The diners reasoned that if the enemy wanted to stay inside their walls it was a sign that they were desperate. It was further held that if the Athenians came out to fight it was also evidence of desperation. Antalcidas thought that even in Lacedaemon there must be some rule against accepting two mutually exclusive propositions at the same time. Or was he infected by Doulos, prattling on about the sophists and their logic?
Andreia was waiting for him in the farmhouse. When he took her, she seemed to go to pieces in his arms, this part shaking with desire, that aquiver with loathing. He tried to soothe her by stroking her cheek like Zeuxippos had once done for him, when he was despondent for losing a footrace. But this tenderness only unnerved her further. “Don’t do that!” she cried. “Don’t ever do that!” Then she retreated to the far corner of the room to bury her face in her hands.
How to question a woman about her feelings was not part of the kit of Spartan manly virtues. Antalcidas did his best, though, by declining to give up on her. Taking her upset to be like an elusive sort of animal, he decided to wait until it broke cover. The vigil went on and on-she did not look up until the turtle-doves fell silent in the eaves and the bats began to stir. When she spoke her voice was calm, as if she had been marshaling her words for a long time.
“I don’t know why you must look at me like that.”
“Like what?” he asked.
“If you would only have me without looking at me, without touching. You’d think you’d never had a woman before, the way you use your eyes to look at me!”
“What else should I do?”
“What everyone else does. It is not for the men of Sparta to see so much, to touch me like you do! To fuck and be fucked-that I understand. Want to take me like one of your boys? I expect that. But all this sweet gazing, this patience, these whispers in my ear that I love so much…”
Her voice unsteadied. Collecting herself, she finished:
“I can’t help but think of it all as… indecent.”
Antalcidas laughed out loud at her. And so because the Lacedaemonians were not known for making tender love to their women, she was unnerved at his devotion? How ridiculous! So at last she stood exposed as all noncomformists must be-conventional to her core.
He seized an ankle and dragged her across the floor to him. On her face was an expression halfway between weeping and relief; when he came close to kiss her again, as dearly this time as he’d seen his mother caress Epitadas, she shed blissful tears that streaked both their faces.
“Don’t laugh at me,” she said, blushing as he set back on his haunches to admire her. “It’s easy for someone like you to break the rules-a Spartiate through and through.”
“Is that what I am?”
She leaned forward to shove him.
“You’re cruel!”
5.
The hunters bounded through the undergrowth in breechcloths and buskins, their eyes showing the same lethal fixity Lacedaemonians always brought to the killing business. The boar, which had been on the run for more than an hour, had tried to slip away into a thyme thicket. The scent raised by its movements betrayed its position to the other hunters standing downwind, their spears ready. Whooping and clapping slats of wood together, pulling their line together into a moving wedge that would further confine their prey, the helot beaters drove the animal downhill.
A gloom fell as a storm front rose over Taygetus, frowned, and loosed a steady rain on the foothills. The hunters waited visorless, drying their eyes with forearms spotted with blood drawn by brambles and the resinous bark of pines. Epitadas listened to the cacophony descending toward him, with the boar somewhere ahead. A willow nearby caught the edge of the unsettled air and seemed to sigh over the bloodletting to come.
“Epitadas, take my shield side,” commanded Ramphias, though he held no shield and Epitadas was not obliged to follow his commands. With his deep, stentorian voice and round-faced jollity, the old governor had the charm of everyone’s favorite uncle. Epitadas took position on his left.
“But where is my future son-in-law?” Ramphias asked.
“Antalcidas follows his own commands.”
The governor had organized the hunt to acquaint himself with the family of his daughter’s betrothal. With the patriarch an invalid, he paid his respects to the widow with mixed feelings: the lady Damatria controlled a vast estate, but there was also something not quite couth about her, with her unflinching gaze and her Asian embarrassment of jewels. Oddly, she confessed to know nothing of Antalcidas’ intentions, yet she was far from irate at her ignorance. She showed only the most perfunctory interest in the qualities of the woman who would share her son’s house. Her biggest concern, it seemed, was over whether Ramphias had any other daughters who might suit her youngest.
The brother struck him as exactly the kind of young man of which the city needed more. Good-looking, fearless by all accounts, and hungry for approval, Epitadas already understood all the code words of Spartan political discourse, such as “security” (domination), “piety” (license), and “patriotism” (when to shut up). He knew how to laugh at the right jokes, and wink at the wrong ones. Truth be told, he wished Andreia was worthy of a groom of his quality, but when it came to disposing of daughters, one couldn’t be particular.
His first impressions were not changed by their experience on the hunt. Epitadas knew how to flatter and how to accept the generosity of his betters. He knew to stay on the shield side of his host, and would certainly allow the older man the honor of the kill. Antalcidas, by contrast, was a cipher; at the campfire he said nothing, and on the trail he tended to wander off with no warning. Ramphias had heard that he had acquitted himself well in battle. If this was the best of the new generation, the governor thought, then Lacedaemon was in serious trouble.
He heard a commotion in the buckthorn above; something was charging, heavy-footed but fast, up the slope. In the instant before they charged after it, he met eyes with Epitadas: both knew that the boar was backtracking on the beaters, who had begun to scatter in fear. In another moment the animal would break through their line and escape.
Ramphias followed the younger man over a goat trail in the direction of the melee. The noise reached a climax just as Epitadas glimpsed a gathering of helots through the brush. Bushwhacking, it seemed to take an eternity as the action unfolded in obscurity ahead of them. “Stand fast, boys!” the governor cried as he tore his spear from vines that seemed to reach out to entangle the point. “Don’t let him through! We’re coming!”
They broke into a small clearing ringed with vertical cypress. Like the trees, the beaters were standing quietly in a circle. Epitadas stopped, allowing his host to take command of his servants; Ramphias plunged ahead, expecting to hear excuses about how the boar was allowed to slip away. But when the helots parted for him he saw the boar was not gone, but lying dead at Antalcidas’ feet.
“What happened?” the governor asked, his voice laced with more disappointment than he could help.
This man who would marry his daughter was in the center, still out of breath, with the ashwood shaft of his spear-the one Zeuxippos had given him-broken in his right hand. The rest of the weapon was sunk into the neck of
