the boar, which lay in a slick of its own blood like a great ship aground on the rocks. Its mouth was open in midgasp; the tongue a wine-colored bulb, tusks gleaming, great ears spread wide like the wings of some bristle- haired bird. The boar’s legs, meanwhile, were bent in an almost delicate posture, as if he had just stooped to nuzzle some tender morsel in the dirt.
Ramphias regarded Antalcidas. The latter was still out of breath, his eyes flashing white as his excitement ebbed. The governor could see that he was clenching his left hand in a fist, and that it was bleeding-probably because the boy had gripped the spear too far up the shaft as the boar thrashed on the point. But such injuries were part of the reward for hunting boar on foot. It was a good kill, it seemed; one he would have been glad to witness.
They agreed that it would be best to send the boar to the table of the Eurypontid king as he prepared to lead the invasion of Attica. Ramphias’ servants had brought in enough other game to sustain them in camp: a dozen hares, a red deer fawn, and a stork. As the three of them sat around the fire, metalware chimed from the governor’s tent as the valet made the preparations, Antalcidas looked up and saw the glow of a half dozen Spartiate camps scattered across the lap of Taygetus. A constellation of five more twinkled on Parnes across the valley. A twelfth flame, a reflection of their own, danced in the eyes of the boar as it hung otherwise invisible in the gloom.
“Crowded up here tonight,” Ramphias remarked at the distant fires. Indeed, there seemed to be more citizens in the mountains than in the city, which looked dark by comparison. But Antalcidas knew that this was an illusion; the cressets on the ridge of the Acropolis were only obscured by trees, and the wives of Laconia were almost certainly not idle that hour. In all, the view comforted him-a Spartan cosmos to mirror the immortal one above.
They served the stork first, roasted with a sauce of rue, pepper, raisins, and honey. This was a finer sort of dining than he had ever known in the city-so good that, in other contexts, it would qualify as subversive. Yet it was not uncommon for Spartiates to eat better on the trail than at home. It was the guilty little secret behind their passion for hunting.
After stripping the bones Ramphias and Epitadas discussed another sort of gratification. The governor’s second wife, it seemed, was quite a bit younger than he, yet had failed to bless his house with a boy. Proceeding elliptically, as if he was stalking a large bear, Ramphias worked his way around to a proposition:
“… If you value your manhood you should avoid the trap of bureaucracy… With every dispatch I write I can feel my balls shrinking… The Cytherans are on the sea-lanes, so they are too close to the Asians… I’ve heard it on good authority that they prefer to chew their wives’ privates… climate most dispiriting. .. we need a little new blood in the house…”
As he took the governor’s meaning, Antalcidas felt an impulse to recede into the darkness. Ramphias, misreading him, raised a hand to reassure him. “Not that I wouldn’t ask you to stand in for me, dear son… though we feel you are already a part of the family, so you can understand, I think!”
“What is your wife called?” Epitadas asked.
“Arete-and I think you will find her quality befits the name. She came to me genuinely spotless.”
Epitadas looked into the fire, betraying no sense of surprise or anticipation, his perfect ease saving the moment from awkwardness. It was as if the governor had asked him to borrow his sharpening stone. In fact, his cocksmanship had become something of legend among the older Spartiates, many of whom turned to their younger countrymen as need arose. Epitadas’ looks and connections made him a popular choice.
“As for your elder brother here, I say we can expect great things. Don’t worry about losing that old spear, my boy-I’ll find you a better one from my own collection. One that has pierced the hides of a few helots over the years, you can be sure!”
He clapped a hand on Antalcidas’ shoulder, meaning to praise him honestly. Yet as Ramphias rhapsodized over the old-fashioned helot-hunting that was once so popular, a vault seemed to be sealed behind the young man’s eyes. It was too late-as the excitement of his kill receded, he faded beyond reach again. Ramphias then understood, as surely as he knew anything, that while he and Antalcidas might become aligned by marriage, it would never be as friends.
6.
On the appointed day Andreia consecrated her shorn locks and all her girlhood dolls to Artemis; the bride’s procession led to the fountain of the Temple of Aphrodite-in-Fetters, where Andreia purified herself with her marriage shift billowing in the water around her like a saffron cloud. Antalcidas likewise performed all the rituals expected of him-the ritual bath, accepting the insults of his messmates-until the time came for the banquet at Ramphias’ house. As Damatria would be there, he made only the briefest of appearances, excusing himself right after the sesame cakes were distributed. He declared his virtue according to the formula, “I have forsworn the good and found the better,” and made his escape as his mother made her approach. From her expression it seemed she wanted to tell him something, but he didn’t wait to hear her out.
The traditional moment of possession came when the bride, hair dressed like a new recruit, wearing a man’s work shirt, waited in the groom’s bed to be “taken.” On this wedding night the newlyweds, who were already more than familiar, did more mocking than lovemaking. By the light of the handmaid’s torches, Antalcidas watched Andreia turn buttock to him. “Elder, teach me,” she begged in the piping voice of a schoolboy; he, sharing the joke, replied in the orotund style of Zeuxippos, “What a fine, tight ring!” The eavesdroppers outside, whose presence was as traditional as the wedding dress and sesame cakes, were very confused by what they heard.
With Andreia’s arrival the Kynosoura farmhouse at last came to life. The gifts from Damatria and Zeuxippos came out of storage and were carefully placed; the bride’s trousseau required three men to lift it to her women’s quarters upstairs. When he left for the summer invasion there was a thick carpet of bear’s foot growing outside the door. On his return it had all been replaced by a kitchen garden of basil, marjoram, mustard, and woody thyme, fringed with beds of chamomile, pennyroyal, sage, and other medicinal herbs he did not recognize. After weeks invested in chopping and burning the fields of Attica, he dropped his spear and fell to his knees in his own yard, admiring each tender shoot raised by her hand. She came out to greet him with the fragrance of mint leaves on her breath and a new fullness around her hips. He asked the question with his eyes, and she answered by grasping her breasts through her chiton and saying to him, in a voice pregnant with happiness, that her breasts had begun to fill.
Their first child was born during the second winter of the war. Andreia suffered through the delivery, but was rewarded with a daughter who did not cry at the world but arrived instead with a look of quiet astonishment. Ramphias consoled Antalcidas for the misfortune of siring a girl; the new father, charmed by the glow of reddish down on her smooth head, was delighted. A daughter, he knew, could never earn citizenship and so could not be sanctioned with betrayal of her grandfather’s helotry. Provided she married respectably, her descendants would be forever safe from his shame.
In their happiness, they called her Melitta-a name unheard of among the women of Laconia. It was only the beginning of their exceptionalism. In a thousand ways, from the way Andreia chose to grow her hair long, to the scrolls of foreign writings they collected, to their pledge to permit Doulos to educate Melitta in the classics, they sought to find new ways to be Spartan.
“Let this house be an island of philosophy in a complacent sea!” Andreia declaimed to the hills, with her hand in his and their daughter at her side. It was a metaphor that would come to seem prescient to him when, years later, on another island miles to the west, loneliness and boredom drove him to savor the memory again.
7.
A few weeks after Antalcidas and Doulos left for Attica, Andreia received a guest at their house. Damatria came over the hill from her estate without attendants, dressed in a simple linen chiton with her hair bound in woolen fillets, like a farmgirl. She carried a flat harvesting basket, and in the basket was a bouquet of wildflowers.
