John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

“You haven’t suffered,” Agathon tells me. “That’s the problem.” Not like him, thank God, not by betraying everything I ever loved without lifting a goddamn finger. He made his beautiful Iona ugly, and drove his wife Tuka home to Athens, and all by mere Nature, without a malicious thought. He’ll wreck me too, if his luck holds out. I should strangle him, and save the whole human race!

Curious how my mind wanders, these last few days.

I watched a terrible thing once. Why it should come back to me so forcefully now is not exactly clear. A man sees horrors enough in Sparta. Nevertheless—

I was up near the shrine with the children — Kleon and Diana — exploring. Kleon was about nine, I think; Diana something like seven. It was before the revolution — if you can really date the beginning of such things. We’d been climbing the ancient stone path all morning, a path just wide enough for a cart (We saw one on the path, far below and behind us. It did not occur to me to wonder, at the time, at its coming up toward the trees with its load of sticks.) The stones of the path had been worn smooth as old coins by generations of Helot laborers, donkeys, cows, and goats. Here and there tufts of grass and bright blue flowers pushed up between the stones. The bluffs soared up to our left, rising from the edge of the winding path and cluttered with huge boulders that looked like wolves’ heads, sleeping bears, the bones of giants. It reminded me a little of Athens. Between the boulders there were patches of short, brittle grass and twisted, dwarfish trees. Beyond the wall to the right of the path — where the wall itself had not fallen away — the bluffs rushed down toward a chasm where one of the streams that feeds the Eurotas rattles over little falls, pauses a moment in deep still pools, then swirls away past stones and the roots of trees. I held Diana’s hand, Kleon walking to the left of me and a little ahead, his heels just out of reach of my crutch. All the way up we’d seen almost no one — only four old Helot peasants fishing in the stream below.

We came around a sharp turn in the path, and there, high above us, stood Menelaos’s shrine. It was clean and white and solemn as a ghost on its cliff overlooking dark-green wooded slopes, its four front pillars set against the chasm like fists. Beyond the pillars, below the wide roof, the shrine sank away into darkness. We paused, startled by the suddenness of the shrine’s appearance. It seemed that the place might indeed be the home of a god. Then we hurried on, climbing toward it.

When we reached the place there was no one there, only the rows of darkening columns, the torch rests (but there were no torches), and at the center of it all, the sculptured altar. The fire was out, and there was no priest. The children talked in whispers as we moved through the place; as for me, I talked hardly at all. It was as if the air were filled with omens I couldn’t read. And it was, maybe, though the coincidence of place and event was accidental.

Diana said, “Daddy, listen.”

We stopped walking. Nothing but the wind in the trees above the shrine. We took a few more steps. I was aware of the floor’s hollow boom. We listened again.

She said, “There’s somebody coming.”

And now I too heard it, children’s voices, chatting, casual, coming from somewhere in the trees to the north, beyond the outer row of columns. For some reason — it may have been something I heard without knowing I heard it — I took their hands and quickly led them away from the altar and out into the sunlight and through it to the trees to the east of the shrine, and there we stopped to see what would happen.

“Is something wrong?” Kleon asked.

I shook my head. But something was. I couldn’t put my finger on it.

A group of Helot children broke out of the trees and ran laughing and talking toward the shrine as though it were a place where they played often. There were — I don’t know — maybe ten of them, all very young, ragged and dirty, children of the lowest class of semislaves. Most of them were girls, and one of them, I remember, carried a handful of limp wild flowers. As they ran through the sunlight toward the shrine, the hackles of my neck rose and I knew before I saw them that there were others besides ourselves watching. I knelt down, in the shadow of the trees, and laid down my crutch and pulled Kleon and Diana to the mossy ground beside me, motioning for silence. They watched in fright, and I knew that in a moment Diana would scream. I closed a hand over each child’s mouth and held on relentlessly. Four Spartan boys, dressed in the loincloths of their war exercises, came out of the trees stealthily and ran in a crouch toward where the children played. They were smiling, the Spartans. It was unbelievable, nightmarish: not human. I heard the screams of the Helot children as the Spartans reached them, and the same instant I saw the Helot men coming out of the trees and from under the altar. One of the Helot children lay in a pool of blood — dead, I was certain. But now the Spartan boys had seen the men and understood. Ambushed. The Spartans could have run, but they turned and faced the Helots, witlessly brave, as usual. The Helot men surrounded them and killed them with their clubs and work knives. And now the cart we had seen on the path came up to the shrine as if casually, and the Helots lifted out the sticks — their children silent now, terrified and numb — and lifted in the dead Spartans, bright red with blood, and put the dead Helot child in with them, and covered the bodies with sticks. They splashed water on the blood-spattered floor of the shrine and worked quickly, efficiently with rags, cleaning up all signs. After that they vanished into the trees. The whole thing had taken perhaps ten minutes. I listened to the rumble of the cartwheels on the stones of the path, going down again to the valley, slowly, slowly. The driver looked asleep. Kleon vomited.

That night the children lay wide-eyed, shivering. Two servants carried in the harp for us, and Tuka played.

Lightly, at a Helot party later, I mentioned the incident to Iona.

“Horrible!” she said, then whispered, “but what do you expect?”

Also this:

One night at a party at Dorkis’s — a dark, ugly party, cloying funereal roses and ferns, because the revolution was on now, the laughter and chatter rang hollow and thick as the jokes of trapped miners — Tuka told Iona’s oldest boy that Iona was in love with me, that she was leaving Dorkis, and that Iona’s basic problem — the reason for her drunks, her indifference to her family, her bold activity in the senseless rebellion — was that Iona was insane. All this came out very casually, I understand. Casual as the blue-black welt, the fire- scarred fingers of the testy little man who sat in the corner of the room, never speaking, starting wildly whenever a new guest knocked at the door or a cup fell to the polished stone floor and shattered. The boy, Miletos, was fifteen: a beautiful, curly-headed innocent. It was his first adult party, the first time he’d drunk wine with his parents’ strange friends. (There were no Spartans there that night, and no Athenians but ourselves.) He was in the kitchen cutting cheese to take in to the others, and Tuka was helping him. She’d always been fonder of him than of all the rest of Dorkis’s family put together, because he was the gentlest and, she thought, the wisest of them all, and handsome besides: he made her remember her own youth, her own ideals. She wanted to protect him, save him from pain and disillusionment like her own. He must have understood that as plainly as I did. He must have understood everything, in a way. If he was baffled by what he felt around him — the emptied, silent streets outside, and here in the charged dimness of the room, the hothouse closeness of his mother’s feeling for me and mine for her, his father’s wise preference for noninterference (watching the party with an absentminded smile and thoughtful eyes), and Tuka’s jealousy — baffled or not he nevertheless understood it all, and if he were older he would have accepted the bafflement, as the rest of us did, as one of life’s conditions. But he was young and did not know about that, and he knew Tuka’s feeling for him, which he could not help but return because she, too, was beautiful, and he knew that she was, besides that, brilliant: she spoke, always, with keen wit and absolute authority, and everyone listened to her. He knew by her every gesture now — her sailing over to help him with the cheese, her flashing of the special dimpled smile reserved for the few she really loved, and her teasing (“Miletos, hand over that weapon before you saw your arm off”) — that he could ask in safety about the thing that was troubling him more than anything out in the larger, more dangerous world of stealth and war. Perhaps he was troubled more than usual that moment, and less inhibited; he wasn’t used to wine in such doses.