Gods of Men, Where the Spartans are Made

ONE
Sparta – Gerastios/March, seven years later
Eponymous year of Lakedaimonias – 448 BC
‘Fear will wither you upon a vine of shame,’ the Paidonomos slurred from the corner of his deformed mouth. He forced his words into comprehensible forms from somewhere deep inside himself, almost bypassing his throat altogether, he continued: ‘You must endure in silence and without complaint. This is the Spartan way. You will endure and flourish, or you will fail and perish.’ He limped along the rank of shivering seven-year-olds, voiceless and paralysed with fear as the Cyclops’ malevolent eye slowly roved their rictus faces. They dared not look at him … one look and they would be turned to stone.
The boys were already enduring the freezing cold, shivering with chattering teeth, with nothing to keep them warm but the coarse homespun grey tunics and blankets they had been given this morning when they arrived from their warm homes. Away from their mothers who exchanged their tears for pride, and away from their warrior fathers who had prepared them as much as they could for the next thirteen years of the Rearing. An eternity to Lysander and the other children who could not comprehend such a span of years that stretched far beyond the years they had already lived.
Their mothers had raised them the Spartan way, clothing them in coarse robes, making them go unshod in spring and summer and autumn. Their fathers and uncles, cousins and older brothers had taught them discipline, how to hunt, how to march, how to fight – how to obey. But with all their learning, nothing could prepare them for the trials that now lay before them.
‘… Fear,’ the Cyclops continued, ‘is the fire in which all tremblers burn…’ His good eye, black as pitch, moved along the rank from boy to boy. ‘Fear is the mother of all cowards and traitors! But do not worry, children, here is the place where Fear is tamed! Here is the place where the Spartans are made!’
Here is the place where the Spartans are made! The words hung in the air like the words of God.
The snow was still thick on the high ground along the upper foothills, at least knee deep in some places; the snow-daubed limbs of defoliated trees reached out like the clutching grasps of an army of Hundred Handers, those one-eyed monster warriors of Tartaros. Ascending the rocky slopes, their startled forms appeared frozen in Medusa’s deadly gaze.
Lysander looked up to the sacred Five Fingers peaks of Mount Taygetos, like an ivory crown around its Pyramid summit, hewn by Apollo millennia ago and piercing the leaded sky. Fear is the fire in which all tremblers burn, he thought, the gnarling of his own fear rumbled deep in his belly. Here is the place where the Spartans are made. His eyes followed the dark jagged fissures in the snow, like open veins marking the courses of the streams, rivers and brooks that snake down the mountains and foothills he knew so well, flowing into the tranquil Eurotas River just three stades to the east. Here is where fear is tamed.
He looked over to the sanctuary temple of Artemis-Ortheia, and the mysterious Ephebeion, down near the river, where the older boys train behind its high walls, forbidden to all men but the gymnasiarchs who oversee them and the Paidonomos who commands them. The sanctuary and Ephebeion would become an island when the snows melt, swelling the Eurotas to feed the valley plains as it has always done since the beginning of time.
Paidonomos, Kleisthenes the Cyclops, was by far the scariest, ugliest man who ever walked upon the world as far as the boys were concerned. Almost all the right side of his face drooped down in fleshy folds of hairless pink skin that resembled melted wax when it solidifies. His dark boggle eye bulged from its socket, sharp as a needle. He drawled from the right corner of his drooping bottom lip, like a slavering wolf among lambs, eyeing the flock with calculation and care, picking out the weak and marking the strong as he clung to the shaft of a Persian spear, he had taken in battle from the dead hand of a Persian immortal he had decapitated in single combat in the plain of Thebes. Now it served for a staff and his trophy.