Halo

by Zizou Corder

  She felt cut off. It was as if the horror of it had severed her from her previous life. The innocent girl who had played with Arko in the sea, who had picked figs and played the flute and never seen what slavery is, seemed a girl of long ago. The lost look in Thanus’s eyes, Thalia’s howl of sorrow, and bewilderment of the little children, the sound of the bodies dropping to the ground… those things had changed her.

  Sparta was her enemy now.

  And yet – the heartless Spartan, the sworn soldier, the cruel boy who thought nothing of life or death, was the same boy who had pulled her from the water, watched over her, and cleaned her wound.

  ‘So,’ she said quietly, in a hard voice, ‘was that your initiation ceremony? Are you a man now?’

  He said nothing.

  ‘Now that you’ve murdered two innocent men, six to one…’ she continued, in the same tone.

  Nothing.

  Then, ‘How’s your head?’ he said quietly.

  ‘Leonidas,’ she said, and her voice was calmer. ‘I don’t understand. Why did they kill those people? Thanus – the Helot – told me you just go around killing them when you feel like it and it sounded true when he said it, but – Leon-idas, you’re not a bad person. Why would you do that?’

  ‘They’re only Helots,’ he said. ‘Don’t get your chiton in twist.’

  ‘What do you mean only Helots? They’re human beings…’

  ‘Hardly!’ he said.

  ‘Of course they are!’ she said.

  ‘They’re the enemy,’ he replied.

  ‘Some enemy,’ she said. ‘What harm can they do you? They’re just conquered slaves on a farm. You’re the warriors, the mighty Spartan Hoplites – or you will be soon.’

  ‘There are ten of them to every one of us,’ he said calmly. ‘We have to keep them in line.’

  ‘Who says?’ asked Halo, and he turned to look at her curiously.

  ‘Everybody knows that,’ he said.

  ‘And that makes it all right to kill those men, just run up on them in the night and kill them for nothing? What do the Gods think of that?’

  ‘The Gods love Sparta,’ he said gently, as if explaining the obvious. ‘Those men were Helot rebels. Helots are the enemy and every man is honour-bound to kill his enemy. There is no blood guilt.’

  Halo had been brought up to believe that if you were so unfortunate as to have got yourself an enemy you were honour-bound to make friends with them as soon as possible.

  ‘Well, I suppose I should thank you,’ she said sarcastically. ‘For not killing me…’

  He stood up suddenly, and stretched. His cloak fell back. For a moment she saw something gleaming on his muscular back in the moonlight – long pale marks, criss-crossing… scars. She wondered how he had got them. She wasn’t going to ask him, that was for sure.

  She lay in silence. She was thirsty, but she wasn’t going to ask for water either.

  One of the other boys snored suddenly. Leonidas glanced over and smiled. ‘That’s Dienikes,’ he said. ‘He’s my cousin.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t have family,’ she said. ‘I thought you all just joined the army in your seventh year and had no family any more…’

  ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘It’s the opposite to that. It’s that we are all family.’

  She was colder than ever. Soon it would be getting light again. She shivered into her cloak.

  ‘Get some sleep,’ he said.

  She had one more question, which she was almost afraid to ask. But she had to.

  ‘What are you going to do with me now?’

  He was silent for so long that she thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then he said, ‘I’m taking you back to Sparta.’

  A few days ago she would have been pleased. Now, Sparta was nothing but the home of this strange, mean, violent way of being.

  ‘You could have just left me with the Helots,’ she said.

  He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Why not?’ she asked.

  He smiled and bit his lip. ‘We are not the only band out in the woods tonight,’ he said, very softly. And she understood. At least – she understood that another band might have killed her. But that didn’t really answer her question.

  She had to know. She was scared to ask him. But she did.

  ‘Why are you protecting me?’ she whispered.

  He was quiet again. ‘I really don’t know,’ he said. ‘I suppose I must like you.’Then he turned and shot her a look which even in the dark went right through her.

  She was staring at him, her eyes wide.

  ‘You’re a very odd… um… boy,’ he said, with a little laugh. ‘And you say very unusual things. I… would be interested in talking to you more.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Why?’ she asked. Her belly was full of butterflies. Why had he hesitated before he said ‘boy’? He must know she was a girl. After all, he had pulled her from the river… She couldn’t take her eyes off his face.

  ‘Because you question what I know to be true,’ he said. ‘That’s interesting. Explaining why you’re wrong makes my knowledge stronger.’

  Oh, sweet wise Athena, she prayed silently, guide my tongue.

  ‘And what if,’ she said, ‘I prove you wrong?’

  ‘If,’ he said, snorting softly with laughter at the idea.

  But you are wrong, she thought. You are so wrong.

  She could hardly keep up. Scitas was half-dragging her behind him. ‘Come on, little Tattooboy!’ he shouted. ‘Keep up!’ She was determined, but her knees were almost buckling, and her head still throbbed under the clean bandage Leonidas had put on it. These boys were unstoppable. Their dusty feet were even harder than hers; their sinewy legs longer as they strode their matching stride, their stomachs tougher, their needs fewer. Their voices lifted up ahead, a stupid song they kept singing:

  ‘Why do you live, when all are dead?

  Are you a coward? You’re not my son.’

  Then: ‘With it, or upon it; with it, or upon it…’That was the chorus. It was about a soldier’s shield, his hoplon: how it was better to be dead and laid out on your hoplon than alive having lost it to the enemy. They kept shouting it out, keeping step with it once they were on a good enough road. It made Halo feel sick.

  She was hungry, too. These boys hardly ate, and when they did the food was disgusting. They didn’t seem to need water either – which was as well, because Halo couldn’t exactly pee standing up, like them – and they weren’t going to let her go off on her own to pee, were they? They seemed to need no privacy, and peed like animals, without even thinking about it.

  Thinking about it made her want to go. She was not going to ask Scitas to stop. She held it as long as she could. Finally, when she was nearly wetting herself, she called out.

  ‘Leonidas!’

  ‘What?’ he shouted back, not slowing down.

  ‘I – need to stop.’

  ‘What for?’ Still no slowing down.

  OK then, she thought. She gritted her teeth.

  ‘I need to pee!’ she yelled, in front of all them.

  ‘So pee then,’ cried Scitas. ‘I don’t see why you need to tell Leon about it.’

  But Leonidas had stopped now. He looked back at her, and she stared him right in the face. He was almost, but not quite, grinning at her.

  ‘Is it the custom of your people to pee in private, little one?’ he said, with elaborate courtesy.

  She narrowed her eyes at him. You pig, she thought. You definitely know I’m a girl. You mocking pig.

  ‘Yes, Leonidas,’ she said. ‘It is.’

  ‘Then let me accompany you behind a tree,’ he said, ‘where I can turn my back and hold the end of your rope and stop you running away without disturbing the peace of your… activities.’ He took the rope off Scitas, who had doubled up laughing.

  When they came back from behind the tree the whole troupe were singing a new song:

  ‘Look and see!

  The little flea,

>   has to go

  behind a tree

  too special to pee

  in companeee…’

  ‘Unlike you,’ she shouted back, ‘happy to poo in your own stew…’ It wasn’t very good, but it was the best she could come up with. They shouted with laughter. She hated them.

  As the day grew warm, they threw off their cloaks. She saw that all their strong backs carried the same shining white scars as Leonidas’s, gleaming against their sun-brown flesh. Even their skin was tough, she thought. Perhaps their minds are like that too – toughened.

  It took two days to get back to Sparta, by which time Halo was exhausted and hungry and thirsty and convinced that Spartans were different from any other kind of human she had seen so far. And far nastier.

  Xαπτερ 12

  At first sight, Sparta was nothing special. It looked like Zakynthos Town, only bigger, and with a shining river instead of the sea. It was like a bundle of small country villages that had overlapped each other: thatched roofs on dry muddy-looking houses, a few red-tiled roofs. There were no city walls, no gates surrounded by guards. Rough rutted tracks. Some listless trees. Some dusty-looking training grounds on the outskirts, where she could see the tiny distant bodies of soldiers and cadets exercising. Tiny gleams of metal glinted across the valley, and she heard the distant sound of barked orders.

  As they approached the town, they passed close by one of the training grounds. Halo peered and stared curiously as they passed. She knew nothing of military life, of training, of fighting. What she saw did nothing to dispel her ignorance: a small group of upright, muscular, long-haired men supervising as about twenty boys of her own age apparently attempted to push down a large, ancient-looking tree with their shields. The boys were piling on top of each other. Their muscles were tight with effort, their bodies wedged against each other, their shields each in the small of the boy in front’s back. Their heads were lodged and buried in the backs of each other’s necks, their bare feet struggled to find purchase on the dusty ground, and their sweating shoulders heaved. The ones at the front must be completely squashed, she thought. And those shields are big. How can they breathe? Surely they must stop…

  But they didn’t stop. They just continued to heave, to push, to push, to heave. The tree, it was clear, was not going to be pushed over. But the sweating, dusty boys continued to heave, and the men continued to observe. As Halo came closer, she could hear them shouting out.

  ‘You girls!’ one was yelling. ‘You puppies! You little soft puppies! You’re not even pushing as hard as your mothers did to get you out! You could hardly push a piece of meat across a plate at this rate! You think that’s how Leonidas held Thermopylae? Pushing like a puppy? Get a move on, you babies, or the Athenians will use you to mop up their gravy!’

  And the boys pushed, and pushed, and pushed.

  Then as they drew level, Leonidas called out a greeting. The man who had been shouting turned. He had a broad, sun-reddened face, a big nose, and sweeping eyebrows.

  ‘Leon!’ he called cheerfully. ‘Lads!’ He called them in.

  Halo hung back behind the others, horribly aware now of the rope at her wrists. It had been hard enough to bear out in the countryside, but here, with new people to see the shame of it, it hurt all over again.

  ‘All well?’ said the man to Leonidas. He was dressed like the boys: muscles, scars, a cloak flung back. Like them, he was strong, confident, relaxed, cheerful. He was clearly in charge, but no one behaved in the quiet, subservient way that she had seen in Zakynthos Town, when the fishermen or the slaves had spoken to Aristides.

  ‘All well, Melesippus,’ said Leonidas, and the smile he gave the man was fresh and clear.

  ‘Come to the syssition tonight and tell us all about it over supper,’ said Melesippus. ‘But what’s this?’ He nodded towards Halo.

  ‘Captive,’ Leonidas said. ‘Some foreign boy, lost. He’s quite bright. I thought we might find a use for him.’

  Melesippus looked her up and down, and Halo drew herself up straight. I’m a boy, I’m a boy, I’m a boy, she hissed silently, inside her head. It was very hard to maintain the idea in front of all these half-naked, very male people. How could she possibly get away with it? What if they made her run around with no chiton like the rest of them? What if they wanted her to push trees in a gang?

  But she was pretty sure that was just for the born Spartans. Only they had to be soldiers.

  Melesippus was peering at her forehead. ‘Eastern,’ he said. ‘Funny, he doesn’t look it. Tattoo’s definitely eastern though.’ But he wasn’t that interested. ‘Take him to Borgas,’ he said. ‘He’ll do as a sparring partner for the Juniors.’

  ‘Is he big enough?’ said Leonidas idly.

  ‘Show us your muscles, boy,’ Melesippus said to her.

  I’m a boy I’m a boy I’m a boy.

  She held up her arm, and flexed her biceps, making it look as big as she could.

  Melesippus looked at Leonidas. ‘He’ll do,’ he said.

  Leonidas gave her a nudge, and they moved on.

  Eastern!

  Eastern?

  What did he mean by that? Was she not even Greek then?

  ‘Leonidas,’ she said quietly, as he moved her along. ‘What would he mean by eastern?’

  Leonidas shot her a look. ‘From the east, at a guess,’ he said drily.

  She looked daggers at him.

  ‘Now be quiet,’ he said, ‘and observe the glory that is Sparta.’

  She looked around at the mud-clad buildings, the irregular roads and the dusty roofs. No one would think, to look at this scrappy town, that it was the mighty Sparta, second only to Athens itself for fame and glory.

  She became aware of a kind of shuddering, though, a regular pounding, underfoot.

  And then, from up ahead, she heard a sound. The shuddering became a firm step – or a thousand steps – there was a clashing, a hiss… and above it the harsh piercing note of a flute…

  They turned a corner in the road, and what came into view she never forgot for the rest of her life.

  At first, for a moment, her eyes tricked her and she thought an immense animal was advancing on her – a gigantic monster reptile, a dragon sent by the Titans, a gargantuan millipede armoured with bronze scales glinting in the evening sun – but it wasn’t. It was more terrible. Gleaming and rippling before her marched row upon row, rank upon rank, of tall and mighty fully armed Spartan warriors. Hundreds of muscle-bulging left arms bore hundreds of great bronze shields, overlapping to form the unbreakable wall of the phalanx. Hundreds of proud and upright heads rose identical inside hundreds of brazen helmets, hundreds of human faces behind hundreds of masks of impassive metal anonymity. Hundreds of helmets bore hundreds of tall, cruel, curved crests, making giants of the men within. And hundreds of sunburnt right fists bore hundreds of tall spears, endless ranks of spears, pointed to the sky.

  Just as Halo arrived, a shout of command went up on the summer air.

  In one single swift hiss of movement, hundreds of Hoplites snapped their spears to the attack position – and every spear was pointing straight ahead, steady as if they were set in iron, held by the hundreds of mighty arms – and advancing.

  Towards her.

  She shrieked. She couldn’t help it.

  How Leonidas’s friends laughed. Scitas actually fell over. ‘Eeek!’ he kept shouting, imitating her. ‘Eeek! It’s an army! Eeek!’

  ‘The glory that is Sparta,’ Leonidas said mildly. ‘You didn’t think I meant the buildings, did you?’

  Halo gathered herself together. Her chest was heaving.

  Of course they were just exercising – parading, training. They weren’t going to hurt her.

  Not this time, anyway, a little voice inside cautioned.

  As the group moved on past the training ground, Leonidas whispered close in her ear, ‘You’re going to have to toughen up, little one…’

  Was he teasing her or advising her? She couldn’t tell. She bi
t her lip and kicked crossly at a stone. She would have to toughen up.

  Leonidas was still talking: ‘And over there, you can see our fine temples – Artemis Orthia, up there –’ he was gesturing – ‘and Athena of the Brazen House.’

  Halo stared at the temples and offered up a heartfelt prayer as her heartbeat calmed down again: Artemis, Athena, protect me, show me what to do in this strange place.

  Around the temples stood statues of the Gods – at those she peered interestedly. She had not seen statues before, though she had heard about them. She couldn’t tell which God was meant to be which, though. In her own mind she had such clear images of them: golden Apollo, tall and strong with a laughing face; Dionysus with his black curls and wicked little smile – looking a bit like Leonidas, actually; Hera, with her strong white shoulders and serious look; Artemis, long-legged, clear-eyed and brown from the sun; Athena, with her grey eyes and and expression of quiet amusement at the follies of humanity; Demeter, who to Halo’s mind just looked exactly like Chariklo.

  But the Spartans, it seemed, did not see the Gods the same way that Halo saw them.

  There was one she didn’t recognize at all; blank-faced, male, tall. Leonidas caught her staring at it. He grinned at her.

  ‘You don’t recognize him?’ he said mockingly.

  ‘No,’ she replied.

  ‘That’s Phobos,’ he said.

  The other boys turned and looked, smirking.

  ‘God of fear!’ hissed Leonidas, with a laugh.

  God of fear!

  ‘Why would you worship fear?’ she blurted.

  ‘Oh, you don’t want to underestimate fear,’ Leonidas mused. ‘Fear can cut the strings in your knees so you fall weeping to the ground… or it can do that to your enemy… Fear can make you reckless, so put yourself and your brothers at risk by being macho… Fear spawns a loop of fear that only skill and practice can break – fear is only human. Why, little foreigner, do you want to study phobologia? Will you be training as a Hoplite? Do you want to know the secrets of esoteric harmony – how to release fear from your muscles, from your face, from your soul? And exoteric harmony? How to be united with your brothers like limbs on a beast? Will you undergo the Harrowing, and learn what Phobos can do for you?’