The Flowers of Adonis by Rosemary Sutcliff
I laughed at that; and it takes a good deal to make me laugh. ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘whatever value you have for us is in the past. There is nothing you can teach the Spartans when it comes to actual push of spear. And do you think I’d let my men’s lives hang by such a slender thread as your faith-keeping? You have betrayed your own state.’ I saw that he was going to cut in again, and I thrust on. ‘And we lay no blame to you for that; revenge is every man’s right. Nevertheless, betrayal is a habit that grows in the heart. You will be better here, out of the way of temptation!’
He said, ‘As a prisoner, in fact.’
‘Free to come and go within the borders of Lacedaemon. But remember that Sparta has a very efficient secret police.’
‘And needs it,’ he said softly. And I understand well enough that he meant it for an insult; but any fool can see that a good secret police is necessary for the well being of a state such as ours; and before I could think where the insult lay, he straightened back from the table, and smiled and stretched himself like a sleepy cat. ‘It seems that I am to have a dull time of it. What shall I do to amuse myself in the coming months?’
‘Anything you please,’ I said.
And he looked at me through a long hard moment’s silence, smiling still. Then he said, ‘I will, Agis my dear friend, I will.’
And he turned, and strolled to the door and out between the guard’s parted spears.
The bitch came back to me then; I kicked her in the belly to remind her that she was mine; and she yelped and cowered away into a corner. But she came out, whimpering and sniffing, when I called, and came to crouch under the table against my legs.
The Queen
Afterwards I scarcely thought of him again. Only from that second day of the Hyakinthia I began to be restless, to feel always that I was waiting for something. I did not know what; but my body knew. It was as though the sap was rising in me and did not know how to break free into flower. My old nurse recognised the signs, I suppose, for I heard her saying to one of the other women slaves, ‘I have seen heifers like that, when they are ready for the bull. It will pass when her man takes her.’ But I did not think that it was my wedding to Agis that I was waiting for.
I waited almost a year; and then Sparta began making ready to march on Attica, and suddenly my marriage day was a fixed and settled thing. Agis would be leading the war host, and it is the duty of every Spartan going to war, more than all others it is the duty of the King, to leave behind him children to take his place if he should be killed; at the least a wife with child.
So Agis would have to turn from the boys’ barracks at last; at any rate until I was safely breeding. Once I heard three young men of the guard talking together. One said, ‘I wonder if he can?’ And the second shrugged. ‘Well, he’s got upward of two months to practise.’ And the third said, ‘He’ll need them. It’s my belief he’s never lain with a woman before.’
And sometimes I caught the women whispering, who would break off as soon as I drew near. I began to understand what lay ahead of me, and be a little afraid. My nurse said, ‘He will do his duty by you, for that is his duty to Sparta; and many women would be glad to have a husband who will make so few demands on them.’
The time passed, and my new tunics and the veils that I should wear when I was a married woman, were ready in my olive wood bridal chest; and with them the earrings and the pair of heavy gold bracelets that had been my mother’s, and the fine wolfskin rug for the bride-bed, which by custom I must bring with me to my husband’s house. Agis had already paid to my father the remainder of the bride-price left over from our betrothal. And the thin petalled crimson anemones were in flower.
Three days before my wedding, I took a little pot of wild honey and a handful of corn bound in a napkin, and with Dionyssa for company (one may take a single companion, though no more), I went up into that narrow hidden glen of the Taygetus gorges where no man cares to go, to the Place of the Lady. Nearly all girls go there before their weddings. The Lady is very old, older even than Apollo Amyklae, older than the city of Sparta. She was here long and long before we conquered the land; and the Helot girls come there still. It is the one place in all our land where it matters more to be a woman going to a man, than it does to be a Helot slave or the Queen of Sparta. Some of us go half laughing, but still we go.
I made the sacrifice — it is only a Little Sacrifice; no blood fresh spilled, but only the smearing of the honey on the breasts of the black stone, and the pouring of the grain before her. I made the ritual gestures and spoke the prayer, and tied my ribbon of crimson wool among the others already there, to the branch of the terebinth tree that arches over the place; and then we came away.
It was dark and chill in the woods — the woods of Taygetus do not generally seem to me so, but I have heard others who have been to the Place of the Lady speak of the same chill. And when the ground began to level under our feet and we came out from the trees on to the track leading back towards the city, the hollow land seemed very wide and filled with light, light that was caught like golden dust in the air. There was a faint haze of green over the cornland, and here and there on the edges of the olive gardens the white feathering of an almond tree breaking into flower. Somewhere in the woods a cuckoo called. Soon it would be the Hyakinthia again, but I should not walk free among the maidens this year.
Only a stade or so from the place where we had joined it, the track rounded a grove of very old wild olive trees and crossed one of the streams that came down to feed the Eurotas, and there we came on a man sitting by the way just short of the log bridge and rubbing his ankle. I knew Alkibiades before he looked up.
I stopped beside him and said, ‘You have hurt your foot?’ It was the first time I had ever spoken to him.
He looked up at me ruefully. ‘The stupidest thing, I have twisted it on a stone. It is a small matter, I do not think that I have pulled the tendon.’
If he had not said that, I would, I might, have gone on and perhaps sent back a slave to see if he needed help. But anyone who has ever trained in the gymnasium or on the running track knows the trouble that a pulled tendon can cause, especially if it is walked on before being properly strapped. So I said, ‘Let me look at it.’
‘It would not be fitting,’ he said stiffly — but I could have sworn that there was laughter somewhere behind the stiffness.
‘It would not be the first racetrack injury that I have dealt with,’ I said. ‘I am not one of your shut-away Athenian women.’ And I squatted down and held out my hands for his foot.
‘So I should guess,’ he said, ‘even if I had not seen you running with your sisters and the young men on the training grounds.’
‘To every land its own ways,’ I said. ‘Give me your foot.’ And he let me have my way.
‘One day,’ he said, ‘far enough from here, I shall tell people that I have had the Queen of Sparta kneeling at my feet.’
‘Timea,’ my sister said, ‘we must go on. It is growing late and there is still so much to do.’
I said to my sister, ‘There is time enough for everything,’ and to Alkibiades, ‘I am not yet Queen of Sparta.’
‘You will be in three days,’ he said.
My heart had begun to beat in little sharp bangs high under my collarbones, and for a moment there seemed a faint mist before my eyes.
I had the napkin in which I had carried the corn and the honeypot: I held it out to my sister. ‘Dionyssa, go and wet this in the stream.’
She shrugged, and took it and went down the bank. The stream was only a few paces away, but as she stooped to the water her back was towards us, and the branches of a half-fallen oleander came between us and her. Alkibiades leaned toward me and said, ‘I still have your flower.’
‘My flower?’
His hand moved as though unconsciously to the breast of his tunic. ‘The flower that fell from your garland at the Hyakinthia.’
‘How foolish! What use can it be to you?’ I said; and he laughed suddenly,
‘Maybe it will bring me luck,’ he said.
And I knew that he was teasing me because he saw that I wanted him to say that it was precious to him because it was from me. And yet I do not think I believed for a moment that he still had it, and was half minded to bid him show it to me. But I knew he would have some tale ready on the instant if I did; and truth to tell I did not care whether he had it or not. I loved the audacity of him; and the laughter rose in me to meet and mingle with his, for the waking joy in me that chose laughter because it must either laugh or weep. Yet I do not think that there was any sound to my laughter; it was part of the world and the shining moment and the sudden flash of gold on the air as an oriel flew out from the smoky shadows of the olive trees and darted away downstream.
Then Dionyssa came back rather prim and cross, with the dripping napkin, and I bound it tight about his foot and ankle, while he watched me, and I knew that I must not look up and meet his eyes.
When it was done, he thanked me, and got to his feet, putting his weight testingly on the bandaged one. ‘You will be wasted as Queen of Sparta; I could walk a hundred stades on this, now.’
‘Can you walk as far as the city?’ I said.
And he said gravely, ‘If I may walk it with you and your little sister.’
So we all three walked back to the city together; and he never once forgot to limp, all the way.
8
The Queen
The day of my wedding came. A strange brooding day with little flurries of wind that blew from all quarters, raising the dust and making a rainy sound among the olive trees; and long calms in between when the air lay heavy against one’s forehead and was too warm for so early in the year.
‘Earthquake weather,’ said our old cook-slave; but to her every day that was not like any other meant earthquake weather; so nobody took any notice of her. The household was much too busy.
At first light the slaves brought the garlands of myrtle and arbutus to wreath the wooden pillars in front of our house. The olive wood chest containing all my bride gear, including now my distaff and spindle, was brought out from the women’s quarters together with the wolfskin rug, and carried away to the King’s House. I watched it go, feeling that something of myself had gone with it and I was already beginning to be a stranger in my father’s house.
My mother and Panthea, my nurse, baked the little sesame cakes which I must eat for my last meal in my father’s house and the first in my husband’s, so that I should be fruitful and bear many sons for Sparta. They went about it crying a little as most women do at such times, even the women slaves cried too, and they all ran about doing three things at once. But for me there was nothing to do but sit in the women’s apartment with my hands in my lap and wait for the time to pass, and watch those little uneasy dust-devils in the inner courtyard.
Twilight came at last, and Panthea brought me a lamp and set a platter of sesame cakes on a low table at my side, saying, ‘Eat, and bear a hundred sons.’
I ate, though they turned to sawdust in my mouth and were hard to swallow. In the King’s House now they would be holding the marriage feast. I wondered if they were giving Agis plenty of sesame cakes, too. And then suddenly, almost for the first time since I was a child — except sometimes on the running track at the end of a race — I felt sick, and could eat no more.
My nurse tried to coax me, but when she saw that in truth I could not, she was kind, and shooed away Dionyssa and my girl friends who had come pressing round me. ‘I have seen it so with many brides in my time. Tomorrow she will be proud and happy, and when next she feels sick, it will be time to start asking Artemis for a boy … But now I must be making her ready.’
I have heard that in other states of Hellas the marriage customs are quite different from ours; the bride is present at the wedding feast, wearing fine robes and veiled in saffron. But we still keep to the older way, remembering the days when a man must carry his chosen woman away by force; and we make a ritual pretence at disguising the bride and hiding her away before the bridegroom’s coming.
So Panthea and my mother bound my hair up close about my head — in my grandmother’s day they used still to cut it off — and dressed me in a boy’s tunic, and took me up to the loft above the women’s quarters, and left me there alone. I might not even have a light; but I bored a hole in the thatch with my finger and let a thread of moonlight through, because I could not breathe the thickness of the dark.
It seemed a long time that I crouched there waiting; so long that it felt as though the night must be three parts worn away, only that the flake of moonlight had not moved a hand’s span on the straw. I watched it, the white light and the tiny shadow of a bent cornstalk; the light trickling down it on to another stalk, and the shadow changing. It was very hot under the rafters, and it seemed to grow hotter and more airless instead of cooler as time went by. I wondered if there was a storm brewing; but no dimming came over that trickling white drop of moonlight. Below me the house was by turns silent and filled with soft whispers, and breaths of excited laughter.
And then I heard the voices and the footsteps coming up the street. They checked beneath our garlanded porch; and there was a beating on the door, and Agis’ quick harsh voice demanding Timea, and my father’s deeper voice denying that there was any daughter of that name in his house, and then the scuffle as the bridegroom and his companions thrust him aside. It was all part of the ritual, no more, but suddenly as I heard them questing like hounds through the house, the terror of the hunted woke in me, and it was all I could do to bide still in the straw. They were calling to each other from room to room; and then a shout told me that they had found the loft ladder.
Red torchlight burst up through the hole in the floor, turning my silver moon-fleck as thin as skimmed milk. There was a rush of feet, and then the feet of one man alone, on the rungs. His shoulders blotted out the torchlight sending a great gout of shadow before him. He came, not hurrying, not hesitating, and as he came I shrank back into the straw. He climbed clear of the ladder head, and stood for a moment with the torchlight and the thick voices beating up about him from below; his head lowered and swinging a little from side to side like a boar’s. I could feel his small red eyes looking for me in the dark. Then he gave a grunt, and came striding across to me, his hands coming before him.
His hands came down on me, spread and crook-fingered …
It is allowed to a woman to put up a fight at her carrying off, so long as she yields at the last, and I have known some women make their men pay heavy for their capture. But I did not dare, because I was afraid of what would happen if I once began; afraid that I should not be able to stop, and so be carried from the house at last clawing and biting, pitiful like a captured wild-thing. So I let him catch hold of me, and tried not even to tense as he swung me up from the straw. He was rough and clumsy, his hands seeming to shrink from me even as his grip tightened, and he flung me up across his shoulder. The boar stink was on him, and the stink of neat wine. He turned back to the ladder. And all without one spoken word between us. He is not a tall man, My Lord King, but strong; in those days he was very strong, and I felt the strength of him, the hard slow beat of his heart, the heat of his body, and the ease it was for him to carry my weight, even though his feet were made unsure by the wine. He carried me down into the tossing torchlight and the faces crowded in the inner court below.
It was all like a dream, vivid but confused. Faces that were all eyes or gaping mouths, hands that reached out of nowhere. Yet I remember it all so clearly, every detail. I remember how he carried me out between the garlanded pillars of my home, and the scent of myrtle and rosemary mingled with the resin smell of the torches.
The companions closed about us, each with his spear in his right hand and a torch held high in his left, so that there seemed fire all about me, fire and faces and the male glint of spears. And I remember in my hurrying dream, looking up at the moon, as we turned f
We came to the King’s House, and there too the scent of the bridal garlands hung heavy in the air as scent hangs before a storm. He carried me in through the foreporch and across the outer court where the stables and storesheds are. The horses were restless; I heard them stamping in their stalls, but it might have been only the sounds of coming and going so late in the night that disturbed them. At the entrance to the inner court, Agis checked and turned to his companions, and said, ‘The King thanks you. The bride is safe. There’s still wine in the Mess Hall, go back and quench your torches in it.’
Often the closest friends and mess-mates of the bridegroom escort him to the door of the bridal chamber, and there is laughter and men’s jesting, and sometimes even, one especial friend must hold the door after the groom has carried his bride within. But no one attempted to follow Agis through the inner gate. He was the King, and in any case he had no close friends.
He carried me across the inner courtyard, his footsteps sounding sharp-edged and alone, the torchlight falling away behind us. There was a scurrying of slaves in the moon-shadows, and I saw lighted doorways ahead. He carried me over a threshold, across a long chamber and up three or four steps that I knew must lead to the women’s quarters; and just within another door, he set me down, and snatched his hands away from me the instant my feet touched the ground.
Strange women slaves came forward, and he said, ‘Get her to bed and then get out.’ And turned on his heel and tramped off, never once looking at me.
The strange women brought me into a further sleeping chamber. They stripped me of my boy’s tunic and unbound my hair and rubbed spikenard between my breasts and on the palms of my hands. And all the while I felt a gathering uneasiness in the room. It was not the women, uneasy of me and the new pattern my coming must bring to the household, as at first I had thought that it might be. It was not personal at all. Suddenly it came to me that the uneasiness was not within this one room alone, but filled the whole night.