Chapter Thirteen

When the youths began dispersing to their stations, Dienekes with his squire, Suicide, moved out to the road, joining a company of other officers assembling to proceed to the ekklesia, where they were to assist in the organization of the coming funeral games. A helot boy approached Dienekes there, before the mess, dashing up with a message. I was on the point of departing with Alexandros for the open porches around the Square of Freedom to take up my berth for the night when a sharp whistle summoned me.

To my astonishment it was Dienekes.

I crossed to him swiftly, presenting myself respectfully upon his left, his shield side. Are you acquainted with the location of my house? he asked. These were the first words he had ever addressed directly to me. I replied that I was. Go there now. This boy will lead you.

Dienekes said nothing more but turned and departed at once with the body of officers toward the Assembly. I had no idea what was required of me. I asked the boy if perhaps there was some mistake, was he sure it was I who was required? It's you, all right, and we'd better make the pebbles fly.

The town house of Dienekes' family, in contradistinction to the farmstead their helot families worked three miles south along the Eurotas, stood two lanes off the Eventide Road, on the west end of the village of Pitana. It was not conjoined to other dwellings, as many in that quarter were, but isolated at the edge of a grove beneath ancient oaks and olives. It had itself been a farmhouse at some point in the past and possessed yet the unadorned utilitarian charm of a country kleros.

The house itself was unassuming in the extreme, barely larger than a cottage, less prepossessing even than the house of my own father in Astakos, though its courtyard and grounds, nestled within a grove of myrtle and hyacinth, arose like a haven of refuge and charm. One arrived upon the site at the terminus of a series of flower-girt lanes, each seeming to draw one deeper into a space of serenity and seclusion, passing, as one went, the dappled clusters of other Peers' cottages, their hearths aglow in the evening chill, with the peal of children's laughter and the happy yapping of their hounds spilling over the founded walls. The site itself, and its bowered environs, could not have appeared farther removed from the precincts of training and of war, nor offered more contrast and comfort to those repairing from them.

Dienekes' eldest daughter, Eleiria, who was eleven at the time, let me in the gate. I perceived low white walls surrounding an immaculately swept courtyard of plain tile brick, decorated with flowers in earthen pots upon the sill, jasmine bloomed along the unvarnished beams of an axehewn pergola; wisteria and oleander nestled trim upon the face; a stonework watercourse, no wider than a handbreadth, gurgled along the northern wall. A servant girl whom I did not recognize waited beside a plaited wicker garden seat in the shadows.

I was directed to a stone bowl and told to rinse my hands and feet. Several clean linen cloths hung upon a bar; I dried myself and rehung them scrupulously. My heart was hammering, though for the life of me I could not have said why. The maiden Eleiria ushered me inside to the hearth hall, the solitary room, other than Dienekes' and his wife Arete's bedchamber, of which the house was comprised.

All four of Dienekes' daughters were present, including a slumbering toddler and a newborn; the second-eldest, Alexa, now being joined by her sister, both of whom sat to the side and proceeded to card wool as if it were the normal activity for the middle of the night. These maidens were presided over by the lady Arete, who sat with the infant at her breast upon a low uncushioned stool adjacent the hearth.

I discerned at once, however, that it was not Dienekes' lady upon whom I was to attend. Instead, at her side, and more toward the meridian of the room, sat the lady Paraleia, Alexandras' mother, the wife of the polemarch Olympieus.

This mistress began without ceremony to interrogate me on the harrowing her son had received not half an hour earlier in the mess. That she knew of this event at all, and so immediately, was surprise enough. Something in her eyes warned me I must choose my words with care.

The lady Paraleia declared that she was keenly cognizant of and held in profoundest respect the proscription against revealing any exchange spoken within the precincts of a Peers' mess.

Nonetheless I might, without violating the sanctity of the law, yet vouchsafe to her, a mother understandably concerned about her son's welfare and future, some indication, if not of the precise words and actions of the aforesaid event, then perhaps some portion of its tone and flavor.

She inquired by way of motivation, in the identical understated tone with which the Peers of the mess had interro-gated Alexandras, who it was who governed the city. The kings and the ephors, I replied at once, and of course the Laws. The lady smiled and glanced, just for a moment, toward the mistress Arete.

Yes, she said. Surely this must be so.

This was her way of letting me know that the women ran the show and that if I didn't want to find myself permanently back in the farmers' shitfields, I'd better start coughing up a satisfactory dose of information. Within ten minutes she had gotten everything there was to get. I sang like a bird.

She wished, the lady Paraleia began, to know everything her son had done in the hours after he had defied her wishes in the grove of the Twins and set off to follow the army to Antirhion. She grilled me as if I were a spy. The lady Arete did not interrupt.

Her eldest daughters never lifted their eyes toward me nor toward the lady Paraleia, yet they remained in their modest silence riveted to every word. This was how they learned. The lesson today was how to grill a boy in service. How a lady did it. What tone she took, what questions she asked, when her voice rose with a hint of threat and when it lowered to assume a more confidential, candor-evoking tone.

What rations had Alexandras and I taken? What arms? When our food ran out, how had we acquired more? Did we encounter strangers along the way? How did her son comport himself?

How did the strangers respond? Did they show him respect worthy of a Spartan? Did her son's demeanor command it?

The lady assimilated my responses, revealing nothing herself, though it was plain at certain junctures that she disapproved of her son's conduct. Only once did she permit actual anger to invest her tone, that when I acknowledged under compulsion that Alexandras had not secured the name of the boat captain who had ferried and betrayed us. The lady's voice shook. What was wrong with the boy? What had he learned all these years at his father's table and in the common mess? Didn't he see that this reptile, this fisher cap-tain, must be punished, executed if necessary, to teach these scoundrels the price of playing perfidy with the son of a Peer of Lakedaemon? Or if prudence dictated, that he, this boatman, could be exploited to advantage? If war with the Persian came, this blackguard, turned informer, could prove an invaluable source of intelligence for the army. Even if he attempted through falsehood to play the traitor, this could be discerned and valuable knowledge acquired. Why didn't my son find out his name?

Your servant does not know, lady. Perhaps your son did and his servant was unaware of it.

Call yourself I Paraleia scolded me sharply, You're not a slave, don't talk like one.

Yes, lady.

The boy needs something to wet his throat, Mother. This from the maiden Eleiria, with a giggle. Look at him. If his face gets any redder, he'll burst like a pomegranate.

The grilling went on for another hour. Adding to the discomfort I felt on this hot seat was the effect of the lady Paraleia's physical appearance, which bore an uncanny resemblance to that of her son. Like him, the lady was beauti-ful, and like him, her beauty took the unadorned, underplayed Spartan form.