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relenting, told us in a sweet sad voice of her wedding. She had been planning it in her head all night. What dress she would wear, what style of garland, which goddess she would dedicate her sacrifice to. She had been thinking for hours, she told us, of her slippers. She had all the strapping and beadwork worked out in her mind. They would be so beautiful, her bridal slippers! Then her eyes clouded and she looked away. “This shows what a fool I have become. No one will marry me.”
    â€œI will,” I proffered at once.
    She laughed. “You? A fair chance of that!”
    Foolish as it sounds to recount, to my boy’s heart these careless words stung like no others in my life. I vowed that I would marry Diomache one day. I would be man enough and warrior enough to protect her.
    For a time in autumn we tried surviving on the seacoast, sleeping in caves and combing the sloughs and marshes. You could eat there at least. There were shellfish and crabs, mussels and spinebacks to be prised from rocks; we learned how to take gulls on the wing with stakes and nets. But the exposure was brutal as winter came on. Bruxieus began to suffer. He would never let his weakness show to Diomache and me when he thought we were looking, but I would watch his face sometimes when he slept. He looked seventy. The elements were hard on him in his years; all the old wounds ached, but more than that he was donating his substance to preserve ours, Diomache’s and mine. Sometimes I would catch him looking at me, studying a tilt to my face or the tone of something I had said. He was making sure I hadn’t gone crazy or feral.
    As the cold came on, it became more difficult to find food. We must beg. Bruxieus would pick out an isolated farmstead and approach the gate alone; the hounds would converge in a clamorous pack and the men of the farm would emerge, on guard, from the fields or from some rude falling-down outbuilding; brothers and a father, their callused hands resting on the tools which would become weapons if the need arose. The hills were infested with outlaws then; the farmers never knew who would walk up to their gate and with what duplicitous intent. Bruxieus would doff his cap and wait for the woman of the house, making sure she took note of his milky eyes and beaten posture. He would indicate Diomache and me, shivering miserably in the road, and ask the mistress not for food, which would have made us beggars in the landsmen’s eyes and prompted them loosing the dogs on us, but for any broken item of use that she could spare—a rake, a thrashing staff, a worn-out cloak, something we could repair and sell in the next town. He made sure to ask directions and appear eager to be moving on. That way they knew any kindness would not make us linger. Almost always the farm wives volunteered a meal, sometimes inviting us in to hear what news we bore from foreign places and to tell us their own.
    It was during one of those forlorn feedings that I first heard the word “Sepeia.” This is a place of Argos, a wooded area near Tiryns, where a battle had just been fought between the Argives and the Spartans. The boy who bore this tale was a farmer’s visiting nephew, a mute, who communicated through signs and whom even his own family could barely comprehend. The Spartans under King Kleomenes, the boy gave us to understand, had achieved a spectacular victory. Two thousand Argives dead was one figure he had heard, though others had it at four thousand and even six. My heart exploded with joy. How I wished I could have been there! To have been a man grown, advancing in that battle line, mowing down in fair fight the men of Argos, as they had cut down by perfidy my own mother and father.
    The Spartans became for me the equivalent of avenging gods. I couldn’t learn enough about these warriors who had so devastatingly defeated the murderers of my mother and father, the violators of my innocent cousin. No stranger we