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wastes surrounding the cropland, sleeping in the day when it was warm, moving at night like the shades we were. From the ridgelines we watched the Argives move in below, repopulating our groves and farmsteads with the excess of their citizenry.
    Diomache was not the same. She would wander away by herself, into the dark glades, and do unspeakable things to her womanly parts. She was trying to dispatch the child that might be growing inside her. “She thinks she has given offense to the god Hymen,” Bruxieus explained to me when I broke in upon her one day and she chased me with curses and a hail of stones. “She fears that she may never be a man’s wife now but only a slave or a whore. I have tried to tell her this is foolishness, but she will not hear it, coming from a man.”
    There were many others like us in the hills then. We would run into them at the springs and try to resume the fellow-feeling we had shared as Astakiots. But the extinction of our
polis
had severed those happy bonds forever. It was every man for himself now; every clan, every kin group.
    Some boys I knew had formed a gang. There were eleven of them, none more than two years older than I, and they were holy terrors. They carried arms and boasted that they had killed grown men. They beat me up one day when I refused to join them. I wanted to, but couldn’t leave Diomache. They would have taken her in too, but I knew she would never go near them.
    â€œThis is our country,” their boy-lord warned me, a beast of twelve who called himself Sphaireus, “Ball Player,” because he had stuffed in hide the skull of an Argive he had slain, and now kicked about with him the way a monarch bears a
skeptron.
He meant his gang’s country, the high ground above the city, beyond the reach of Argive armor. “If we catch you trespassing here again, you or your cousin or that slave, we’ll cut out your liver and feed it to the dogs.”
    At last in fall we put our city behind us. In September when Boreas, the North Wind, begins to blow. Without Bruxieus and his knowledge of roots and snares, we would have starved.
    Before, on my father’s farm, we had caught wild birds for our cote, or to make breeding pairs, or just to hold for an hour before returning them to freedom. Now we ate them. Bruxieus made us devour everything but the feathers. We crunched the little hollow bones; we ate the eyes, and the legs right down to the boot, discarding only the beak and the unchewable feet. We gulped eggs raw. We choked down worms and slugs. We wolfed grubs and beetles and fought over the last lizards and snakes before the cold drove them underground for good. We gnawed so much fennel that to this day I gag at a whiff of that anisey smell, even a pinch flavoring a stew. Diomache grew thin as a reed.
    â€œWhy won’t you talk to me anymore?” I asked her one night as we tramped across some stony hillside. “Can’t I put my head in your lap like we used to?”
    She began to cry and would not answer me. I had made myself an infantryman’s spear, stout ash and fire-hardened, no longer a boy’s toy but a weapon meant to kill. Visions of revenge fed my heart. I would live among the Spartans. I would slay Argives one day. I practiced the way I had seen our warriors do, advancing as if on line, an imaginary shield before me at high port, my spear gripped strong above the right shoulder, poised for the overhand strike. I looked up one dusk and there stood my cousin, observing me coldly. “You will be like them,” she said, “when you grow.”
    She meant the soldiers who had shamed her.
    â€œI will not!”
    â€œYou will be a man. You won’t be able to help yourself.”
    One night when we had tramped for hours, Bruxieus inquired of Diomache why she had held herself so silent. He was concerned for the dark thoughts that might be poisoning her mind. She refused to speak at first. Then, at last