The Isle of Stone

by Nicholas Nicastro

  Spartan attacks were grindingly gradual things, with coherence and precision valued over momentum. With plenty of time to watch the approach of the crimson juggernaut, Sparta’s enemies often broke before they were touched. But the Argives, still nursing their ancient grudge against the Lacedaemonians, stood their ground with locked shields.

  “Argos never yields to the Lacedaemonians because she has never forgotten the Battle of Champions in Thyreatis,” Zeuxippos once told Antalcidas. “A century ago, after many battles for the domination of the Peloponnese, we met the Argives outside of Hysiae for a final reckoning. This time we agreed to settle matters the old-fashioned way, with a contest of three hundred handpicked champions from each side. The battle was fought for an entire day in every way possible, from serried phalanxes to individual duels by sword, knife, and bare knuckles. When it was over, divine Hesperus rose over a field with 597 corpses and three survivors, two Argive and one Spartan. The latter could barely stand because of spear wounds to the leg. Yet steadfast and true to his legacy, he offered battle. The Argives laughed at him and went off to their camp to celebrate what they took to be their triumph.

  “The drunken Argives returned to consecrate their victory with a trophy. But they were too late: the Spartan had, all by himself, constructed one of his own out of upturned spears and abandoned Argive arms. They sent heralds in protest, demanding he take it down. But the Agiad king, Anaxandridas, ruled that his champion had indeed been left in sole possession of the field, and was by custom entitled to the victory. The Argives blustered, threatening to tear the trophy down, but in the end dared not, for fear of the gods. Since that day the battle has stuck like a bone in the Argive throat—and the Lacedaemonians have never lost a battle.”

  This story was told to youths to teach them the need to finish a task once begun. His father’s end was not quite so glorious. As the phalanx advanced on the enemy, Molobrus had the misfortune to stumble on a stone and go down. The Lacedaemonians, trained to avoid at all cost breaks in their lines, could do nothing other than close the gap and march over him. After the first seven ranks had passed, the rear guard felt nothing of him but an indistinct softness in the place where he had fallen. In driving the Argives from the field, the Lacedaemonians suffered only a handful of casualties. One of these was Molobrus, whose crushed remains were identified from the wooden dogtags pounded into the mud.

  By all accounts Damatria took the news exceptionally well. A wife of Sparta was not expected to tear out her hair, slash her face, rend her clothes, or engage in any of the other acts of conspicuous grief indulged by women of other cities. Instead, she was expected to take news of her husband’s death in battle as the highest sort of honor. Damatria accordingly went around with her finest clothes and a smile on her face. The neighborhood children festooned her house with wild anemones and roses from the meadows around the city; in return, she had her servants deliver gifts of sweets door-to-door. For its part, the state contributed an honor unique to fallen veterans: the dead man’s family had the right to inscribe his name on his tombstone.

  Damatria did not have to pretend to be in good humor. To be spared her husband’s interference in her domestic affairs, not to mention his permanent absence from her bed, were blessings too delicious to contemplate. Molobrus had at last contrived to make himself useful. Still, Damatria spared no expense on his grave, nor on the regular observances there, such as libations with precious oils. That she could afford to do so was beyond question, as she was able to produce a written contract between Molobrus and herself stipulating that all his property, including his share of the ancient portion granted his family by Lycurgus himself, went to her alone. To the annoyance of Lampito and her relatives, the agreement was duly witnessed by three citizen adults, and therefore perfectly legal.

  Being still of childbearing age, she remarried with what all agreed was patriotic speed. The owner of the estate bordering hers, Dorcis, son of Nicolochus, had been Molobrus’ patron when he was a Yearling. As a widower nearing the end of his years of active service in the army, Dorcis had frequent occasion to be home and watch this one-eyed beauty march around her property in her sun hat, declaiming commands to gangs of terrified helots. He sent her a stream of gifts—a dressed wild boar, a cutting from a rare apple tree from Asia that produced fruits with golden skin and red flesh, a fine wine jug from Athens covered with painted lovers—that made plain his admiration.

  While Molobrus lived she did nothing to encourage him. In this she was somewhat unusual: extramarital couplings that enhanced the chances for procreation—legitimate preferred, illegitimate if necessary—were more than tolerated in Sparta. And if the long-absent husband gave his consent to share his young wife with an older man, such as his childhood patron, the act was not thought adulterous at all, but more properly a stroke of civic philanthropy. Damatria had seen them herself, those patriotic wives with compliant husbands, making their pious rounds of the temples with rouged faces and a swing in their hips. With her experience limited to a rape and the oafish pokings of her husband, she found it all incomprehensible.

  Molobrus’ death, and her wealth that followed, changed her view. The estate she inherited was only a fair one, sufficient to feed the household and pay Epitadas’ mess one day. Dorcis’ holdings were more impressive, including twice the land and steady income from several potteries and shipping interests out of Gytheion. Combining their properties would make the largest estate in Kynosoura. Accordingly, when Dorcis came to visit bearing a cart full of jars of imported Thasian black wine, she allowed him to tap one of the vessels to share a taste. As they drank together in the glow of the evening, Damatria let her eye wander over the rim of her cup and linger on his.

  The next month they were married.

  Their honeymoon was a revelation. Dorcis was nearing sixty but was left with all the appetites of a boy a third his age. With his unctuous smile and full head of hair, he presented a tempting prospect for lonely women all over the village. For the first time in her life Damatria experienced a degree of satisfaction in the bedroom—and a girlish possessiveness she would never have expected in herself.

  “You’re not betraying me with that slut Gyrtias, are you?” she asked him one day when he came home with a faintly fucked-out look.

  “Certainly not,” he replied, reaching down to adjust himself down there.

  “Good. Because if you’re lying, you’ll lose those balls.”

  Dorcis believed she was serious, but couldn’t help himself. With her conquest his enthusiasm for his new wife was flagging. Damatria kissed like a teenager who had never learned how, and her empty eye socket, which she hid under a patch during their courtship, was now too often on display for his comfort. He credited himself, though, for telling the literal truth about their married neighbor, Gyrtias.

  His taste ran instead to pretty helots who worked in his kitchen and gardens. Erinna, an eighteen-year-old, was unusual among the Messenian girls for her shameless gaze. She shot him with it when she carried baskets of figs across his path, and she shot him again when she fetched water. She challenged him until, during a rushed knee-benders in the root cellar, with his face in hair stinking sweetly of mint and sheep manure, he ground the pride out of her. The other girls were aware of it all, either not meeting his eyes or going out of their way to do so, and Dorcis was so flush with his mastery that he grew indiscreet enough to make a gift to his nymph in sackcloth. It was just a bit of lacework from the cargo of one of his Cretan freighters. But when Erinna wore the cloth on her head one day, Damatria needed nothing more to guess the truth.

  She confronted him that very night. “Do you deny it?” was the first thing she asked, too furious even to say the words that made up her accusation.

  “Hmm?” he responded as he unwrapped his cloak, knowing full well what she meant.

  “You don’t deny it. You can’t. I only wish that the gods will strike me dead for being so foolish as to attach myself to you!”

  She gave pious p
unctuation to this statement by spitting into a fold in her frock. He eyed her, tempted to insist on a denial, but strangely encouraged by the speed at which she had diverted her anger at herself. He frowned.

  “All right, what of it? She is only a helot. Besides, am I expected to change overnight? You must have known about me already.”

  “I knew nothing. I don’t talk to anybody.”

  With a shrug that he intended to be rueful, he turned to unlace his riding shoes. Damatria chewed a finger as he left, looking confused, and then with a certain coolness reached out to slash his eyes with her nails. He caught her easily, spinning her around and pinning her arms. She then felt, with a frisson of disgust, his erect manhood pressing against the small of her back.

  “Accuser, be sure thou do not offend,” he said, resting the pad of his left thumb against her surviving eyeball. He pressed until she gasped. “Do you understand? Say something. Shake your head.”

  She shook her head for yes—she understood.

  He shoved her to the floor. Surprised, humiliated, Damatria looked up at him in frank disbelief.

  “See the ephor if you want to make something of this,” he finally told her. “But I think not. You may have been ignorant of me, but I know about you. What you really want has always been clear.”

  Thus Damatria learned the true nature of the creature she had married. It was a bitter lesson, invited by the tenderness she had foolishly shown him. It was not a mistake she would ever repeat.

  Dorcis thereafter made no effort to hide his infidelities. At night Erinna’s voice—or the voice of a woman she took to be Erinna, for she had never heard her speak—was audible through the floor of her upstairs apartment. The next morning Dorcis would speak to Damatria in a friendly way, as if nothing had happened. This seemed to be his way of suggesting that his betrayal bore no significance to him, and therefore shouldn’t to her.

  At this point Damatria did what any practically minded Greek wife would do. Seizing a lead tablet, she pried the metal out of its wooden frame and, by bending one end back and forth, came away with the strip about three inches wide by six long. She then took her bronze stylus in hand and etched onto the lead every malicious hope she could imagine for Dorcis and his helot whore:

  Bôrphorbabarborphorbabarborphorbabarborphorbabaie. O divine Hekate under the earth, bind Dorcis whose mother is Leonis, and Erinna whom he beds, so that their ardor goes as cold as this lead, and that his penis may droop, and her vagina go as dry as the earth that covers this prayer to you, and to you, O Meliouchos Marmaraôth. May they be bound, that Dorcis may burn only for Damatria, who desires him not, and Erinna burn only for that which is shown by the pulled-back foreskin of the he-goat, so that they forget each other, and share passion no more.

  It wasn’t enough just to compose such a curse, fold it up, fix it with a nail, and drop in some well to send it on its way to the goddess. Though she judged her letters to be good, and her use of the charmed formulae adequate, she would enhance her chances for success by finding a magician to pronounce the right words at the time of its deposition. For that she would have to make her inquiries around the marketplace, and so was obliged to nurse her fury through to the morning.

  She had a dream that night about three girls traveling to the Apollo sanctuary at Amyclae in a carriage wreathed with carnations. All of the youngsters, who had all just been cropped for their wedding night, laughed like drunks with every dip of the carriage wheels on the road. In their hands they bore their own shorn hair, the locks they had been growing since infancy, gathered tenderly in brushes that were fastened at the center with iron rings. In the sanctuary, under the great columnar image of the god, Damatria consecrated these remnants of the girlhood that would end with the mystery they all blushed about, but already understood. Her hands shook as she put her offering in the ground and buried it. Then she dreamed that she sang, in a voice of such ingenue purity that she shed tears in her sleep, the maiden song of the virgin bride.

  She was jerked awake by the fear that she had made a terrible mistake. Lighting a lamp, she picked up the lead again and added a line to the curse:

  And may any other women he desires or will desire be thusly bound.

  7.

  Damatria soon learned that the hearts of men, fathomless as they are, cannot match the inscrutability of the gods. Her fitful sleep caused her to rise late the next morning. Before she left for the market, she was informed that Dorcis had to be carried home from his morning ride.

  “Why has he been brought back?”

  “It seems he has suffered a grave accident—” began the slave.

  And so she heard, as she stood with her binding spell still undelivered in the fold of her cloak, that her husband had been badly hurt when his horse, at a gallop, put a hoof through a rabbit hole. The horse did not go down, but Dorcis was thrown face-first into the ground with his hands still tangled in the reins. Of the extent of his injuries the slave was unprepared to say. Damatria rushed down the corridor to his quarters, making a show of the appropriate concern, but inwardly wondering why her prayer had such good effect before the goddess received it. Had someone else cursed him first? If so, was it another lover she had yet to learn about?

  The figure on the couch had a face like a boxer’s after some endless, evenly matched bout. The brow was bloated and split like a rotten fruit showing its pulp, the mouth caked with the lees of dried blood flecked with dirt. When he cracked his bluish, raked lips, there was nothing hanging from his upper gums but sharp little serpent’s tongues of enamel. The rest of his teeth were left behind where they had implanted in the ground. The orbits of his eyes were stuffed with pinkish bulbs swollen enough to hide all but the tips of the lashes. When she saw him, Damatria could not help but pull up short and, in her shock, make a small, sharp inhalation. And though Dorcis’ face could hardly form an expression that was recognizably human, he gave a little turn of the head as he heard and recognized her through his cauliflower ears.

  She ordered all the servants to leave. Removing her street cloak, she stood over him with a wet cloth in her hands, struggling to decide where to begin cleaning him. Except for that single movement of his head, Dorcis lay so passively that it was hard to tell if he was awake. She wrung out the cloth in the bowl and wet it again, at last going to work on the skein of scratches that ran from his solar plexus to the bottom of his chin. That was when he spoke at last through his broken teeth, his voice wheezing, childish.

  “I see one of us here is happy.”

  Damatria said nothing, determined to show neither satisfaction nor hysteria at his misfortune.

  “Why have you tied me down?” he asked. As she began to wipe the blood from his mouth, she glanced down at his body: he was naked except for a breechcloth, and there was nothing at all holding him down.

  “By Herakles loosen the bonds, woman! I can’t budge my arms or legs!” he cried.

  In the coming days his condition did not improve. He could not move any of his limbs, though he did have feelings of pinching, twisting, and burning in them. She summoned what passed for a physician in Sparta, who could only say that the accident had damaged her husband’s spine. A foreign doctor, a visitor from Elis who happened to be in the city, came, poked and prodded, and made his diagnosis: the injury had blocked the circulation of phlegm from the torso to the brain.

  “Have you seen this before?” Damatria asked.

  “Oh yes. It is not unknown after certain falls.”

  “Can you cure him?”

  “By mortal arts, no. I suggest you pursue other remedies. Perhaps, if you can move him, Asclepius will manifest the correct course in his sanctuary. . . .”

  “But if he can’t move, how can he observe the rites? The ablutions . . . the sacrifice?”

  The Elean shrugged.

  Had Damatria been inclined, she might have taken advantage of Dorcis’ helplessness to punish his treachery. Instead, she made a decision that surprised the household: she reassigned Erinna from
the kitchen to be Dorcis’ personal attendant.

  By the expression on the helot’s face it seemed that she believed her new duty would be easy, even pleasurable work. Believing at first that his condition was due only to lack of stimulation, she would strip slowly for him. With sluttish expertise, she unfurled her hair, leaned over his bed with breast in hand, and fed her aureole to him like a grape. Damatria watched this comedy through the window, enjoying it right down to the bitter end when the girl exhausted herself with all her useless yanking and blowing.

  Damatria knew better. Tending to the invalid for a mere two weeks—cleaning his every inch, checking every crevice for dried feces, directing the flow from his torpid penis into the pan—reduced her to despair in a way unknown since her first days with Antalcidas. She particularly came to hate those random occasions when his penis came to life, for there was no way then to contain the ragged stream of urine that spurted onto his chest, his bedclothes, or in the air. Erinna, too, came to show that same panic in her eyes as the repulsiveness of her lover wore on her. Dorcis had gone overnight from a powerful lord to an incontinent, mewling shell, the odor of old age permeating him. Damatria walked in on them once as rigid Dorcis bewailed his fate, vowing never to eat again, and Erinna stood with her arms and hands drenched in piss, crying, “Then be a man! Stop eating and die already!”

  Damatria closed the door, taking with her a certain satisfaction. She had, after all, taken no petty revenge, but only given her husband exactly what he wanted.

  With Dorcis indisposed, his wife was now in complete control of his estate. Giving orders in his name, she commenced to reorder her universe according to her tastes. The straggling grove with his family’s ancient olives came down first. The trees, after all, barely produced fruit anymore, and she needed the land to extend the wagon trail to service the most remote of her helot tenants. She likewise disposed of the vineyard. There was far more potential profit, she believed, in growing wheat for a market increasingly weary of barley bread. This gamble paid off the next season, when her grain sales and exports swelled her accounts. With this enhanced credit she purchased more land, more ships, until her estate was not only the largest in Kynosoura, but in all of Laconia.