First, We Count the Food
After Father gave his blessing, I was officially allowed to learn the spear. No more trailing after Telekles to hunt for deserted spots, no more jumping at every footstep for fear Mother would catch me swinging a stick. It was entirely a good thing. It was supposed to be.
"That's her, right? The one who fought at Methone?"
"Shh. She'll hear you."
Spear in hand, I bowed my head low.
Fuck.
It was far more mortifying than I'd expected.
The first few days had been even worse. Every time I went out to train, boys passing by would steal glances at me, and some laughed outright. One even watched me hold a spear like it was some rare festival spectacle. And the girls were no better — the ones I used to run and wrestle with started crowding around one day, all of them wanting a turn touching my spear.
"Arista. Did you really kill someone?"
"Who told you that?"
"Everyone's saying it. Everyone."
The least reliable intelligence source on the face of the earth.
I smacked away the hand reaching for my spear shaft.
"Don't touch."
"Why not? You wanted to touch Telekles's at first, remember?"
"How do you know that?"
"Telekles told me."
That little bastard.
Smacking the back of Telekles's head that evening was a given.
"Ow! What now?"
"Stop blabbing. About me wanting to touch your shield."
Telekles thought for a moment, then tilted his head.
"Was that supposed to be a secret?"
"Not exactly. It's just embarrassing."
"Killing a man isn't embarrassing, but that is?"
My hand stopped mid-swing. Telekles must have caught how wrong it sounded, because he shut his mouth too.
"...That came out wrong."
"As long as you know."
An awkward silence hung for a beat, and I raised my spear first, if only to break it.
"Let's go again. I'm in a bad mood now."
"Why take it out on me?"
"Because you're the one who put me in one."
In the end, Telekles grumbled but squared up anyway.
And so more days passed, then ten, then more still.
I grew used to being stared at. The people who had once gawked whenever I so much as picked up a spear went back to their own business before long. It wasn't as though thunder cracked or a temple collapsed the moment I gripped one. After that, I was apparently just the strange daughter of an odd household doing strange things, and that was that.
Then one day, a girl I ran with crouched down beside me and asked:
"What was the war like? They say you screamed at night."
I tried to brush it off, but the shameful little addendum froze me where I sat.
"Who told you that? About the screaming."
"A girl who lives near your house."
Seriously, why is this town so damn small? The girl studied my face, then asked, more carefully this time:
"Were you scared?"
The old me might have postured and played tough. But I wasn't in the mood, so I simply nodded.
"How scared?"
"Scared enough that I never want to go through it again."
She tilted her head as if the answer didn't add up.
"Then why do you keep learning the spear?"
The answer didn't come easily. It was a question I'd asked myself more than once, after all. Why, after being that terrified — after killing a man and lying sleepless for days — was I still holding a spear?
I thought for a moment, then answered.
"If it ever happens again, I want to be less scared this time."
She nodded with an expression I couldn't read — understanding, or not — and then said abruptly:
"Can't I hold it just once?"
"No. It's heavy."
"You carry it, though."
"..."
Now I was the one with nothing to say.
My spearwork had improved in the meantime. By a very little.
"Shoulder. Foot."
"I know! I'm fixing it!"
"If you know, fix it."
Telekles's mouth was as insufferable as ever, but my spearpoint no longer wobbled all over the place the way it used to. I tripped over my own feet less even with the shield up, and when Telekles shoved from the side, I could hold my ground a round or two.
Of course, the very moment I let myself believe I'd improved—
— WHAM!
Down I went, shield and all. Telekles standing over me with a smirk was the cherry on top.
"You lasted longer than last time."
"Was that a compliment? Why does it feel so awful?"
Grip as I did, it had genuinely been a compliment. By now I could tell his praise apart from his insults.
Father sometimes helped with training as well. Telekles still did the actual teaching, but there were days Father would stop as he passed by. I was oddly tense at first — permission was one thing, being judged was another.
That day, too, I was thrusting with my shield raised when Father spoke.
"Your feet are slow."
"Telekles said it was my shoulder."
"Both are wrong, so fix both."
He delivered that horrifying verdict far too easily. Telekles, watching, laughed from the sideline.
"What are you so happy about?"
I muttered it and reset my stance. Father watched my feet for a while, then said:
"Is this how you fought at Methone?"
At the question, strength crept into my grip without my meaning it to.
"No, Father. I just stabbed blindly."
"That's how it usually goes."
Father nodded and walked on. It wasn't praise, and it wasn't comfort either — and yet, strangely, the words stayed with me. They sounded as though I hadn't been a hopeless exception all on my own.
After Father moved on, I took my stance again.
"Hurry up."
"You just ate dirt. How are you this smug?"
"So this time I just won't fall."
"I've lost count of how many times I've heard that one."
Noisy bastard.
There had been a time I truly thought that way. The problem was, a person couldn't live by the spear alone.
Even after permitting my training, Mother hadn't lightened my chores one bit — if anything, she'd piled on more.
"Why is this my job?"
I asked, tapping the stack of records piled beside the jars.
"I hear you did well at Methone. Counted grain well, they say."
Brasidas. That man passed along even the parts nobody needed to know.
Mother set yet another stack of records down in front of me.
"Then the one who's good at it should keep at it."
"I'm learning the spear too, you know."
"You're not at it all day, are you? Then this can fill your spare time."
What I hated most was having no rebuttal to airtight logic.
And so my mornings went to trailing Mother, my days to the household work, and whatever scraps of time remained went to the spear. Wasn't this busier and more draining than my past life? And yet somehow it didn't chafe the way it used to.
Back then, most of what I did had been done on someone's orders. Mother still gave the orders now, but at least I could see where the grain I checked went, and who ended up eating it. And after counting the water jars at Methone with my own hands — after learning firsthand just how much they mattered — even the tallies beside the jars read a little differently now.
How many mouths would this feed?
The question kept creeping in.
Mother watched me at it and asked, with an odd look on her face:
"Why are you counting numbers again?"
"I was working out how many days a hundred people could eat on it."
Mother's hands went still.
"Why? Playing at war?"
"No. It's just — if we hadn't had this at Methone, I think it truly would have been a disaster."
I rapped my knuckles on the jar, and Mother studied me a moment before returning to her work.
"Then keep an even closer eye on it."
And that was the whole of it. Why is this household so hopeless at paying a compliment?
Still, one thing had become perfectly clear. I used to believe a soldier was simply someone skilled with a spear. Having lived through Methone, I knew better now. A hundred spearmen cannot march on an empty stomach, and if there are no hands to carry off the wounded, there will be no men left for the next fight either.
I had known all of it in the abstract. But knowing a thing and seeing it with your own eyes are worlds apart. And, strangely enough, that truth left my past-life self feeling rather ashamed.
As time went on, what happened at Methone drifted further away, little by little.
Of course it hadn't vanished entirely. Some nights I woke with my heart hammering like a madman's; sometimes the sound of a knife going through meat stopped my hands cold. But not every day. Three days, then five. And then, at some point, a whole week passed without a single dream.
That morning I was feeling inexplicably good, so I picked a fight with Telekles first.
"I think today's my day. Wrestling."
Telekles looked at me and laughed.
"Want me to throw you again?"
"I'm not the person I used to be."
— THUD!
But there was the sky.
...
Telekles leaned his face in over mine.
"And what, exactly, has changed?"
"Shut up."
Still, I wasn't quite what I had been. Back then I couldn't land a single move before hitting the dirt; now I could hold out a few exchanges. I'd even come close to sweeping Telekles's leg. Close being the operative word.
"Again."
I pushed myself up and squared off, but Telekles shook his head.
"That's it for today. I have somewhere to be."
"Where?"
Telekles tipped his chin toward the entrance of the yard.
"Father's asking for me."
Only then did I register that outside was more stirred up than usual. One of the household hands was hurrying back and forth, and Mother had her eyes fixed on the entrance.
"War again?"
As Telekles gathered his cloak and said it, my heart quickened — just a little. The war had already begun, yet after months shut up inside Sparta, it had somehow receded into the distance again.
I set down my spear and followed him.
"Why are you following?"
"Because I want to know. I'll only watch."
"Every time you 'only watch,' you cause a disaster."
"One trip to Methone and you hold it against me forever."
We bickered our way down the road, and the moment we passed through the gate, we both fell silent at once. Because there was the familiar crimson cloak.
No way.
The man speaking with Father turned his head.
Brasidas. The first time since Methone.
Seeing me, he said, with a face that was anything but glad:
"Still alive, then."
"As you can see."
Father's eyebrow twitched. Definitely because of my tone.
But Brasidas paid it no mind. He looked at the spear resting beside me and said:
"So you did keep up the training."
"Thanks to a certain someone, Father found out about everything."
"Was it meant to be hidden?"
"At the time, yes."
Telekles glanced back and forth between the two of us.
"Why are you two so chummy?"
"We're not."
At my instant reply, Brasidas let out a dry snort. That expression of his never boded anything good.
While I was thinking exactly that, Father asked:
"What brings you?"
Only then did the amusement drain from Brasidas's face.
"I need someone."
Father inclined his head toward Telekles, as naturally as if to say, take him and go.
Telekles barely reacted. The look of a man who'd seen it coming.
Figures. Military business, then.
But then Brasidas tipped his chin — toward me. This time, every gaze in the yard swung my way.
"...Me?"
"Yes."
I straightened before I knew it, and Brasidas spoke to Father.
"I'm told she knows the Methone warehouses and the state of the stores there. Reads a ledger, too."
"Somewhat."
Even as I answered, my heart was pounding. For months since Methone, I'd kept training with the spear, and it had left me strangely unmoved. And now Brasidas himself had come to take me with him.
War.
The word surfaced before I could stop it, and my eyes drifted to the spear in my hand.
Brasidas's gaze followed mine.
"You won't need the spear."
"Pardon?"
The heart that had been racing a moment ago sank straight down.
"Then why take me at all?"
"What was the thing you did best at Methone?"
"..."
Ominous. No way. Surely not. Please.
As if he could read every one of those feelings, Brasidas said, perfectly composed:
For a long moment, not a single word would come out of me. It wasn't until Telekles started laughing beside me that I came back to my senses.
"Are you laughing?"
"No."
"You were."
The corner of his mouth was curled upward. That little shit.
I looked at Brasidas, half hoping it was a joke, but one glance at his face said otherwise. Of course it wasn't.
I gazed quietly down at the spear in my hand, then leaned it against the wall at the edge of the yard.
Fuck.
Why did every road that brought me closer to war keep ending at a warehouse?