Gorgo
Chapter One
NOW: 490 B.C.
Only the stench of rotten fruit greets me when I enter the house of King Cleomenes of Sparta. Cloying and sweet, it is not figs spoiled in the summer sun. It is death.
“Hello?” I let myself through the atrium and into the open-air courtyard. Crows, beckoned by the scent, circle in the blue sky above. “Hello? Is anyone here?” In response, one plucky crow with black, oily wings swoops down and lands heavily on a citron tree. It lets out a great “caw,” pointing me toward the closed door on the other end of the courtyard. I approach the door and open it to enter the king’s favorite chamber for work and relaxation, the andrōn. The window is shuttered to keep out the scavengers, but there is enough light to see the outline of the room’s sole occupant.
Cleomenes lies on the table that had served during his life and reign as his worktable. Then, he kept it covered in scrolls, reed pens, wax tablets, and dirty cups stacked on each other with dried bits of wine pasted at the bottom. Now, the table only holds his wasted body wrapped in a filthy cloth. He lies on his side, curled into a ball like a sleeping baby. I struggle to imagine him as a babe in my grandmother Cassia’s arms. With a mewling mouth and ten tiny fingers and toes, he grew into a mighty king beloved by all. So different than the wreckage before me now.
My throat issues a strangled cry that surprises me, and I quickly pull myself together. I am grateful and puzzled that no one is here to witness my outburst. The king is dead. No matter how or where he died, the women of his family and the high-ranking women of Sparta have an obligation and should be present.
When Cassia passed, legions of women and their helots bustled about. They worked in concert to cleanse and anoint her body, and then they beat their breasts and pulled their hair in lamentation. The house vibrated with weeping and shrieking. After we buried her body in the yard behind the house, we feasted in her honor. The whole affair lasted three days. Where is everyone now?
Korinne should be here with me at the very least, but she is never around when I need her most. I am being maudlin, which I detest. I grind my teeth to staunch my emotions. I have work to do. If only I knew where to start. What was I supposed to do first? I should have paid better attention to Cassia’s funeral.
The events of the day have unmoored me. The king’s youngest brother, Brotus, arrived at my door before breakfast to bring me the grim news. Before he could speak, I asked him, “Uncle, how does Sparta fare?”
“Niece,” he said, his voice strained and without his usual sunny warmth. “Our King Cleomenes is dead—”
“The crows told me already,” I snapped. Their noisy caw-caws began as dawn lifted the sun into the sky, but that didn’t explain my aggression. I wanted to remain in denial. The king couldn’t be dead. “Answer my question.”
“Sparta is resilient.”
“Sparta is resilient,” I agreed, though I didn’t believe my words. How would our people overcome this loss after so many other losses? Would the people come to love King Leonidas as much as King Cleomenes? And what about me? Could I be the leader of our women? They first would need to forgive us for arresting the king. Would they? Would I if I had been born in their sandals and our stations reversed? I had so many questions flooding my mind, making the bridge of my nose ache.
As we stood in the courtyard, I lifted my face to the sky. A sliver of the moon looked down at me, a porthole to the world of the gods. I imagined the goddess Artemis observing me with keen eyes and sharp judgment. I pulled my chin down to Brotus. I wanted to appear strong even if my insides felt spongy and soft, like the earth after the winter rains. I invited him to break bread with me and share hero stories of our king.
I called for a helot to bring us black soup and barley bread, but she brought a wide-eyed stranger. Sweat dripped down the stranger’s long, sinewy legs.
“I come with a message for King Cleomenes. Is this his palace?” The man spoke with a husky northern accent and directed his words only to Brotus.
“There are no palaces in Sparta,” Brotus snorted.
“You stand in the king’s childhood home,” I said, trying to catch the foreigner’s eye. “He lived here with his mother until his own coronation day. Please, stranger, we are members of the king’s family. Give us your message, and we will relay it to the king.”
“My message is for men. Send her away.” he said to Brotus.”
“I do not have that authority. If you want your message to reach the king, you need to address her,” Brotus advised.
“But she’s a woman,” the courier wrinkled his nose. “Why would she be interested in the business of men?”
I pinched my eyes together. The foreigner's words called to mind another accented stranger who had come to Sparta many years before and issued those exact words. Why would she be interested in the business of men? “Courier, I do not know where in the north you hail from, but you are in Sparta where men and women are often interested in the same topics. Now speak to me, for I am Gorgo of Sparta, daughter to King Cleomenes, and descendant to the hero-god Hercules.”
The courier raised his pointy chin to Brotus, who only leaned back on his heels, nodding. The man cleared his throat, considering his words before launching into his tale. He ran from Athens to bring us the terrible news. Persian forces have landed on the beach at Marathon. Athens urgently requests military aid from all her neighbors. His eyes finally landed on mine. “Will you send military aid to defeat the Persian menace? Of all our neighbors up and down the Peloponnese, we need the Spartan Army most. It is the strongest and most fearsome. We cannot win without your support.”
His words hurtled toward me with the strength of a lightning bolt. I pulled my himation tight against my chest until the edges of the bronze fibula I wore dug into my skin, reminding me of its presence. “Thank you, I will deliver your message to the king. But Sparta cannot commit troops for at least three days.”
He spat on the ground and cursed me. Athens could not hold off the Persians much longer. Athens and the surrounding territories would fall if we waited three days to muster our troops. Still, I could not do anything more. I turned away from the runner and let Brotus explain the situation. “There’s been a death.”
Now, as I sit in the room with the dead king, hot tears spring to my eyes. They are not for the deceased, or they are not only for him. They are for the courier’s message—the Persians have invaded Athens—on the heels of the king’s death. One event alone is portentous, but together, these twin calamities are cataclysmic. I sit feeling heavy with the enormity of both situations while horror sweeps up my legs, torso, and arms, keeping me rooted to the stool. I am paralyzed with a thought: it is no coincidence that both catastrophes have joined.
Why would she be interested in the business of men? It is no coincidence that the courier used the same phrasing as the Ionian ambassador, Aristagoras of Miletus. I do not like thinking of him or when he visited Sparta nine harvests ago. Over the years, I have developed tricks to cordon off my thoughts and memories of his time in Sparta, but now my breath catches, and I fear I cannot keep it caged any longer.
A scuffling outside of the andrōn jolts me forward. The distraction helps me safely stuff my hot tears and the memory behind a rock. A goose slaps the tiled floor of the courtyard with its bright orange webbed feet. It honks and flaps its wings while rushing toward the citron tree, now weighed down by a murder of ravenous crows. The goose is a ruthless guardian, and one by one, the crows vault into the sky, where they continue to circle for a supper they are denied.
When the goose spots me, it lunges forward with the same alacrity it showed the crows. Its speed and patterned feathers—a flurry of grey, brown, black, and white—are terrifying. “Back, back, back,” it screams, and I do as it commands.
“Shoo,” I say, but it continues honking, flapping, and rushing until I am up against the courtyard wall.
“No, Bertie, no!” Behind me, a girl jumps between the goose and me, stopping it in its tracks. She is maybe eight or nine years old, barefooted, and wears a leather helot’s cap. She is far too young to work without supervision, but her actions and assurance tell me she belongs. The slave girl begins tossing breadcrumbs down at Bertie’s feet, and the bird forgets my presence and pecks at the bread.
“Pardon, ma’am,” the girl says, giving a little curtsy. “I know I shouldn’t have let her out of her pen, but I thought she could keep out the crows.”
“She did a good job,” I said, peeling off the wall. “Is she your pet?”
“Yes, ma’am, from an egg King Cleomenes gave me.”
“King Cleomenes gave you this goose?”
“Yes. He named her Bertie,” she says. A secretive smile slides across her lips.
I let my mouth hang open, and I must remind myself to close it. The king never allowed me to have a pet. “And what does the king call you?”
“Helene, ma’am.”
“Where is everyone, Helene? Where is your mother—Elissa, right?” Though I have never met this girl, she resembles another house slave, Elissa.
The girl’s cheeks redden, which brings out the freckles scattered across her nose, and I can see her father, a barn helot, come into focus. Her eyes plummet to the ground. “I don’t know where they’ve gone or when they’ll be back.” She is lying, of course, and I’m about to tell her so—do the king’s slaves think they can stage a coup? But she looks down her long nose, her mother’s nose, with earthy brown eyes that are hers alone, “I am here. I am here to serve you and our new king.” She reminds me of my younger self, and I feel a smile tug at the corners of my mouth.
“Very well.” Her determination and courage buoy me. If she can do her job, I can do mine, even without the women of Sparta. “Bring me water, clean linens, herbs—rosemary and oregano—and oil. Can you manage that?”
“I can.” She bows and is off.
“And keep Bertie guarding the courtyard,” I call over my shoulder before returning to Cleomenes.
The andrōn sings with memories. In this room, the king tutored me on geography, history, war principles, literature, and more. We sat for hours at the worktable he now lays upon, where he taught me to decipher scytales he received with cryptic messages from his generals or foreign leaders. The messages were meaningless on their own, but once the king wrapped the encoded leather around a cylinder, he revealed the message. The king had dozens of rods of varying widths, as each of his correspondents wrote their message for a specific cylinder. As I kept a mental catalog of which baton belonged to whom, the king would share with me the strengths and weaknesses of every message writer. This was of utmost importance to him—I needed to know how to size people up quickly and accurately.
He extended this lesson to Petteia, his favorite strategy game, played at the limewood table by the window. If I became grumpy because I played poorly or not at his level, he drove me to move past the sensation quickly. ‘You have time to outwit me yet, but not if you stew over the past mistake. There is always the next game. Don’t let your weakness spoil your grand plan.’ he would say. ‘Instead, focus on my weaknesses—if you can discover them,’ he would add with a wink.
He imbued his lessons with stories from the battlefield. King Cleomenes excelled on the front lines, and he always sought a way to return. I suppose that’s why most of the lyric poetry and epic tales he consumed dealt with war. We idled many winter nights by the hearth; the king would sit in the klismos while I curled like a cat at his feet as he read from my favorite story, Song of Illium. Like a rhapsode, he voiced all the parts.
Sadness clutches my heart while guilt assails my mind. The dreaded memories from the past surge forward, much like Bertie did in the courtyard but amplified. My knees buckle under the pressure. I have battled against this echo from the past for nine harvests, but today, I am tired. I haven’t slept well since the king’s guards hauled him off to the jailhouse, and last night, I didn’t sleep a wink. Now, he is dead. My king, my tutor, my father is dead. And I am alone.
Where is Korinne and Elissa? Where are the women of Sparta? Have they forsaken me—no, not me, but our family—have they abandoned the Agaid House?
It is too late for speculation. The past has begun to assault my vision, and I feel dragged backward, though my feet never leave the ground.