The End of Sparta: A Novel (37 page)

Then Erinna noticed Nêto’s stare and scoffed. “The bow is not for you, so let down your guard. Leather is not for men alone. Not for a woman’s show, but to protect my arms. How else can I string and fling the arrows? Don’t raise your nose too high about my tools. At least not if you want a fresh rabbit or two for our dinner—and maybe a stag as well before we reach Messenia.” This Erinna was supposed to be, Alkidamas also had warned Nêto, something more than a poet, a woman who could strike verse or strike down a good-size man with equal skill. Nêto prided herself that she had stacked too many stones with Chiôn ever to have gone soft, and that her arms were taut after plowing and seeding the fields of the dead Staphis. But Erinna was more manlike, yet not mannish altogether. As she got up to throw some wood on the fire, Nêto noticed that Erinna’s limbs were like those of Lophis, lean and stringy, and yet her breasts and backside were full.

Erinna sensed all this, and turned back to Nêto. “Don’t believe the poets like Hipponax or Euripides of Athens that we are a helpless sort. Women are not mad like Medea or Kassandra, or bloody bitches like Klytemnestra, or eager to die as was Antigone. Only men like your Hesiod on Helikon or Sophocles and Euripides sing of such nonsense.” She laughed and cupped her hands under her large breasts. “What do I care that men line up in the phalanx or have the rudder of the ship in their hands. While they boast and babble, there are plenty of cracks in their granite for women like me to flow through. They can no more stop me than dam off the streams that cascade down the mountain.”

She restrung her bow and pulled out a feather arrow. “So, yes, we women of spirit do almost anything we want. No children, no man, no vote? Sad perhaps, but do menfolk take this quiver from me, or tear up my scrolls? Hardly. Or tell me what I can sing or when? No, while they scurry around in their men’s
kosmos
, and mount their wives and whores, they leave us alone. The smart ones like us, why, we simply live in a parallel world—right under their noses. Yes, just as two lines that don’t cross or the wandering planets that march across the sky side-by-side never meet. So no pity for me. I am as free as the cranes on the shore that the duck hunters will neither eat nor trap as they strut by in their beauty.”

Before Nêto could stop her, she finished with a final outburst. “Maybe we women don’t even need our one Pythagoras. I think he’s just a name for the world of numbers and order that we discovered on our own. But no mind—I told Alkidamas I would do three great things. Get his Nêtikê to Mantineia and perhaps to Ithômê as well. Start my school. And if this Nikôn kills Spartans, help raise the countryside against the Spartans. So are an odyssey, a war, and poetry enough, my Nêto—or is there to be more still from your Amazon Erinna?”

Nêto laughed, “And fourth—kill Gorgos, whom the helots fear as Kuniskos. Do that and I’m happy.”

Erinna shook her head at that command, for she had heard this past year of a Kuniskos, who put fear into the children of Messenia and had an eye for helot women for his sport and worse. Now she moved quickly around their small camp with her bow on her shoulder to patrol its edge, bringing her small sword out of her pack. “Don’t utter the name Gorgos. It is bad omen. Look, I fear demons and worse will come to the call of the evil sound. Maybe wolves or a man-bear, Nêto. We will watch for them all. I am happy to see your hilt at last peek out from your own bundle.”

What an odd woman, this Erinna, at the same time looking to kill, talking of helots, singing her poetry, serving the world of men, idolizing the general Epaminondas—all as she cooked and paced and broke into song, and went out beyond their fire to find a rabbit. She was a Prometheus who in two blinks came back with a skinny hare, hit with a shaft through its shoulders. As Erinna skinned the animal, Nêto moved a little more distant from the fire to watch her from the far side of the camp. She remembered Alkidamas’s final warning at their parting: “You may find Erinna not of your taste, but strangers will want their way with you, to rob and kill you both, to mount you on your march down. And your new protector can seduce or slit a throat with equal measure. You are too dour, Nêto, as well, and think only in lines and angles, while Erinna sings of things of the other world that do not follow your
logos
of numbers.”

They looked for shadows beyond the fire as they sipped their broth. In her brief quiet Nêto thought it better to blurt it out and ask her strange companion whether she was widowed, even though she knew she had never married. Erinna flashed back. “Will I bite you, Nêto? Is that your worry, that I am the mate of the man-bear? Or do you wish to see whether I have burned off a breast like the Amazons? Or do you think I have no private parts like the statues of women in the houses of the rich? Why hide what you already know—that I taste no man’s flesh, and find my
erôs
with those like you and me? Why not? What higher form is there for a woman than the love of the like kind, whose bodies are really our own?”

She then laughed out loud. “Did not gruff Platôn—or was it foul-mouthed Aristophanes—say it was a search for our second half? Men anyway are a nasty brood. They come stinking of the hunt, with blood and entrails on their cloaks. They use us as the playthings that we are, only when finished to turn over to snore, to fart and grunt. No, none of that was for me.” The she smiled, “Most are not like our Epaminondas. So why not sleep with whiter, softer flesh than with cuts and scars and worse among the burnt and rough? But no worry, my Nêtikê. Baukis is gone. I have no time any more for
erôs
. If you worry about those unwed, go ask our Epaminondas why he too has not married—and why he has not heard of Erinna, his devotee, who sings his praises and would kill or die to see his dreams as fact among men. Or better yet, look in the mirror glass and ponder why you too have no partner.”

At that, a barking erupted in the brush beyond the firelight. Nêto got up. She pulled out her blade and scouted out the source of the sound. A dark shape, with a tail shaped like a wolf’s, appeared, moving in and out of the rocks. Had Erinna seen the wild thing when she hit her rabbit? Or was it a trick the god was playing on Nêto’s eyes? Erinna ignored her friend’s restlessness. “But don’t worry, Nêto. When I saw you, I knew you weren’t one of us. I first thought your long legs and those man muscles made you an Amazon. I believed Alkidamas that you are still a virgin. But I see it not for the dislike of men—but perhaps for the like, or maybe worship, of one man you hold back.” She followed the girl and then gave Nêto a pat on her rump.

“I am going to the new Messenê with you, Nêto. As Alkidamas says, to start a thinking-place, what they laugh at in Athens as a schoolhouse, one for women who need no men, or at least need to do their own chores on the farm and hear within themselves the voices of the Muses. New Messenê will need us.” She stared beyond the fire in search of the night beast as she talked. “But all this you will see. For five days more we will be partners in our phalanx of two. I won’t press myself on you—as if your false protector would become the very thing I was to protect you against. But yes, I will put an arrow through your Gorgos—whoever or whatever or wherever this gorgon of yours is.”

Nêto turned back to the fire to slice off some of Erinna’s rabbit. “I need shielding from no man or woman. But there is a night-wolf out there and maybe my Gorgos as well, and it will take us both to cut him down. Yes, on this trip the two of us will need each other. For food and water, at least.”

Much of the way they had kept to the scrub oak of the low hills and dared not go into the long walls of Megara. Islanders were coming into the port there—and at Aigosthena and up to Perachora on the gulf. A few northerners going south tried to get the two to join their camps, but most backed off when they saw the blades on the shoulders of the two women, unsure whether the two might be two beardless ephebes eager to mix it up. Erinna flung a couple of arrows at three wayfarers with sticks and packs who were closing the distance behind them and full of threats and taunts. When the shafts whizzed over their heads, they tailed off into the scrub. “Thieves and worse,” she laughed, as she hung her bow back over her shoulder.

After another day of hiking, now with the Isthmos in their faces, the shadowy night-beast grew closer to the scent of the women. The four-leg had trailed them for three or four stadia, on a parallel course on the higher ridges where the olive groves ended. Both had seen it, or at least its outline, and had taken turns on the watch this night. Erinna warned of their danger. Was it the man-bear of Kithairon or a worse monster from Helikon? “Nêto, I think it is no bear, but a dappled wolf. My eyes are better than yours and I can see the big wolf has left his pack. Tonight he comes by the fire. He’s either a man-wolf or a wild dog that has the thirst madness. He will only get bolder when he scampers to Arkadia and he meets his own kind in the packs up on Lykaion, the mountain of the man-wolves. This follower of ours is as bad as the man-bear, if not his brother in evil. Draw that long knife. I string my bow. It has the man-wolf mania and his fangs will turn us into something like himself. Lichas no doubt sent it. Or your Gorgos.”

No sooner had Erinna pointed out the shadow than the wolf circled at the edge of their camp. Suddenly the wild thing broke out of the dark, changed course, and ran, heading right toward their fire with teeth bared. Nêto froze. She could not lift her knife in time. But then as the animal neared, she pointed to Erinna, “Put down the bow. Stop. Stop!”—just as the large dirty hound charged her at full run and jumped up to her bosom and knocked her flat.

“Porpax, Porpax. No wolf. No wolf. My Porpax, Porpax of Helikon.” Nêto wrestled with her dog with the bared fangs. Nêto laughed. “Living in the high caves on rabbits? Or on worse up on Kithairon? But you’re home with me, your Nêto—and ready for our long march.” The dog was growling but at least put his head down, as Erinna kept her bow taut.

“He may well have been your dog. But who knows what sort of flesh this Kerberos has tasted? He’s changed to man-shape and back many times, I wager. We could cook a meal from the ticks and fleas on his raggedy fur. Nêto, Nêto—let this hound rejoin his new kind. He’s gone over to the other side, either a wolf or worse. Or let me put an arrow through his head and kill off the demons in his black heart.”

“Oh, no, he is my Porpax all right,” Nêto laughed. “We will find no better guard than his long fangs.” She patted the monstrous hound. “You’ll see. He can smell Lichas ten stadia away and has Gorgos in his nose already.” The aged hound had hard sinews and plenty of scars on his legs and back—and a taste of the wild that put him on the edge between feral and tame. His wandering on Kithairon had suited him since he left Nêto that night when she bore home Lophis. A year on the mountain had taken three off his frame. In his growling after the loss of Sturax, he killed a wolf, a young one with sharper fangs but half a head smaller. Then the farm dog took over the wolf brood that feasted on the goats of the highland shepherds. With his age and a near year in the pack, Porpax had lost his paunch and the jowls beneath his fangs.

Still, Porpax was not quite gone over to the way of the wolf. And in the morning this unlikely three—aged hound, helot virgin, and Amazon poetess—trotted along between the gulf and the Aegean. Erinna had planned to meet a few girls from Sikyon. Her friends were to hike them through the harbors of Lechaion on their right and Kenchreai to the left, all the way to sanctuary at Nemea. There the two would head due south to Argos—the same trail that Ainias and Proxenos would follow in the winter to come with their red stakes. As they all headed toward Akrokorinthos, Nêto was spinning long tales to the mute hound. She went on about how often he must have tried to leave his wolves to reach Helikon, about how Zeus had once turned King Lykaion into a wolf and the guard dog Kerberos in Hades, and how Charôn on the Styx would meet them all with his wolf ears.

Erinna put all her silliness to verse—“Nêtikôn and her talking dog”—in her low singing. Then Nêto announced, “Our dog is reborn and I name him Kerberos. Yes, he is guard dog of the underworld now. Our Porpax has become Kerberos of the three heads. If Gorgos can become Kuniskos, why cannot my Porpax be renamed Kerberos? When the two meet—and I am told at night in visions that they will—may the best dog win.”

Soon the two women and the new Kerberos met the friends of Erinna. Three of them approached in cloaks, carrying two more cloaks for Nêto and Erinna, the women now all dressed out in deep green hoods, in the garb of pilgrims of the goddess Hera. The throng told strangers and the toll-men of Korinthos on the Nemea road that they were escorting the granddaughter of Chrysies, a new priestess for Hera at the sanctuary of the Argives near the sea. Most let the women be, once they saw Kerberos and feared the wrath of the goddess should her servants be touched. At the sanctuary of Zeus, the three guides left Nêto and Erinna at the guesthouse in Nemea, with a map of the road carved into an
ostrakon
, leading south into the valley of the Argives and then west over Mt. Parthenion to the three poleis and the valley of Mantineia.

Nêto reminded the innkeeper to be on watch for Proxenos the Plataian and a Stymphalian in the late autumn who would warn them all of a vast army to follow before the new year. The two set out southward over the pass into the Argolis, keeping the Heraion on their left and the
aspis
of the Argives on the right. They passed into the long walls and then beyond to the pyramid at Kenchreai, where they slept. “Keep away from Lerna and the Hydra,” the Argive guards at the garrison laughed. “The air is bad over there on the swamps and their monsters bring fever to all who get near.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Erinna countered. “We believe in no tall stories of Herakles and his hydras and whatnot. We know that the sickness comes from bad air that hangs over the stagnant water there, not the bite of monsters in the night. Anyway we have no wish to head to the sea but instead to the high peaks of Parthenion, even with Pan and his Satyrs. The mountain protects virgins and there is no sickness on its heights. Even the hoofed god up there will leave us be. Once we reach the summit, then even we can’t get lost since Tripolis and the valley of the Mantineians soon will be in sight below.”