"This is my home. This is where I was born... This is my world, where I was formed, where I come from, who I am." -- Ellen Gilchrist
Sparta had never been Iolaus’ favorite place to visit. And thus, by extension, Hercules found he rarely enjoyed himself there. A distracted, defensive, and sulky golden hunter did not a good traveling partner make. And, anyway, he was a naturally diplomatic, peace-seeking man – even if he was also a warrior – and so it was unlikely he would ever feel completely at home in a place that bred war and warriors like other parts of Greece bred livestock. Though, he did find it funny that his friend – fiery and feisty, you-can-take-your-opinion-and-shove-it Iolaus – was born in such a repressed, authority driven society.
He didn’t think Iolaus looked or acted much like any Spartan he’d ever met in his life. It was especially noticeable looking at him beside one of the big, stony-faced men. Like when they dropped by delivering something for his brother. They hadn’t lingered. Just did their business and then been brushed out the door with the typical Spartan brusqueness. One particular fellow had escorted them to the edge of the city and nodded them away, but not without a particularly scathing look thrown in the smaller warrior’s direction.
“You can find your way from here, right?” he asked them, and his tone indicated that if they required anything further from him they would be living in vain hope. His expression spoke volumes as to what he thought of visiting Thebans, even one who was something like a god. Hercules had been treated with a kind of cool disdain for most of their time there, and Iolaus with an even more insulting indifferent dismissal.
Normally, Hercules would have expected his partner to shoot off his mouth in response, but now he stood soundlessly beside the demi-god with his lips pressed thin and tight – much as he had the last few days. It was a little worrying. But they hadn’t had a single ugly “misunderstanding” over a misplaced word or look and so Hercules had gone with it, saving the mystery for some more appropriate time.
“You didn’t tell him you were a citizen,” Hercules commented offhandedly as they watched the ramrod straight back disappear into the subdued, businesslike city crowd. And he hadn’t, for their whole time there.
Iolaus shot his partner a heated look. “I grew up in Thebes,” he said firmly. And then, quiet and cold, “And anyway, I was never a citizen.”
The demi-god cast him an inquiring glace, but at the moment Iolaus’ face was as blank and impassable as their escort’s had been. And he let it go. Because though he didn’t know everything, what he did understand was that there were some things that ought never be pushed.
They set up camp some distance from the city, making good time as they headed back to Corinth. Hercules who had been in a mellow, contented mood following their peaceful success, had rolled over and dropped off almost immediately. Feeling far less restful, Iolaus kept a quietly miserable vigil over the fire late into the night.
Being in Sparta had worked loose carefully buried memories. Fishing in their pack, he withdrew a fist-sized sack that held all of his independently owned possessions. There was little inside: a few gold and copper loops he had collected over the years, scraps of parchment with messages from friends, and the tangled chain which had been a gift to Ania on their wedding day. Near the bottom his fingers brushed cold metal, and he pulled it out, grimacing.
It glinted in his palm, an opaquely glossy, polished disc of iron, just smaller than a dinar. Engraved into its surface was the image of a Spartan shield. He remembered it like an old ghost; the piece had been worked into his father’s sword, just at the base of the blade on one side.
He massaged the smooth metal between his palm and fingers. His mother had given him the disc after his father had died, placing it gently in his hand with a conflicted kind of pride. She had been born in Sparta, and though she rarely spoke of the place or inquired about his own memories there, he thought maybe the little symbol meant something to her still.
The night of that bestowal, she had shown an unusual loquacity about their past in Sparta. Possibly she sensed there was little enough time left for such things. Maybe she thought that in the wake of Skouros’death, both of them might better tolerate the mixed bitterness of their life with him.
Iolaus clinched his fist around the metal, thinking about what he knew.
She’d felt lucky that much of the Spartaite had been gone to war when her mewling, unspeakably tiny little boy had been born, palely anemic and veiled in streams of blood that plastered down his sparse mop of ringlets like a cap. There’d been a remorselessly severe famine during the early months she’d carried him, and so she’d known, as mothers sometimes did, that if the child survived that he would never pass the Spartan inspection. So she’d kept to herself how close she was to delivering the baby, counting on the barely identifiable bulge on her meager frame to help her conceal the truth. She hadn’t even called a midwife to help her, and birthed him on the floor of her shack, biting through a cloth to hold back her moans.
He’d been so fragile when she’d finally picked him up, and in that moment she’d been sure he’d never make it past a few days. But then she’d looked past the wandering milky blue eyes of a newborn, and beneath them she’d seen her son’s stubbornness. She wasn’t surprised when he lived.
But small. He’d always been small. Born small; a lithe little scrap of a creature, thin and lean limbed even in infancy – though perhaps it was the shortage of any real food in those times. He mixed in with his sisters like another lamb in the flock, hardly distinguishable from them in the early times of androgynous babyhood. It only took one look into his face to tell him apart, though. One look into quietly firm azure, and there was her boy.
Iolaus.
She’d named him on a whim, since his father hadn’t been there to pass different judgment. Technically, she should have waited. But that could have left the boy months or years without anything to call him, and everyone knew what bad luck that was. Nameless was soulless. And so he was Iolaus.
He didn’t remind her at all of his father, which was both a blessing and a grave disappointment. The man was dark and the child was light, more gold than blond like her girls. The man was a solider, and the boy was a faerie – he could disappear for hours only to come up upon her in absolute silence so that she would turn around and find him there like he’d appeared out of the air. Though the other man in her life had at times shocked her, he’d never startled her.
But then, Skouros had never been a subtle presence. Spartan soldiers rarely were.
Skouros. The husband she had been given to, as a sort of reward for them both. He because of faithful service to the Spartan state, and she because as her father had been a perioeci, she was considered something better than a simple helot. A good gift for an adopted son of an the state – a strong, worthy man in need of some sons. So they’d been married. Or something like a marriage.
Her dissatisfaction could have been considered ungrateful; many woman of her status endured much worse. And it wasn’t as though he was particularly violent with her, but only that he never lingered. He regarded her with a kind of helpless, brutish indifference she wasn’t sure he could help. Those blank eyes had seemed distant even when she first met him, resigned but daring to hope for a magnanimous if not a loving man. Unexpectedly, he had smiled at her faintly out of eyes that were rings of soft storm grey, looking at her with what she thought was a kind of wistful hope. He’d been a man grasping for something he didn’t understand even then, and in the end both she and her family had disappointed him in whatever he was longing for.
Disappointed. She would never forget the day he met his son.
She had been cooking when he came in. The wind had long since carried in the noise and the smell of an approaching campaign returning home, but it was a time of relative calm, and many legions of soldiers had been returning. She’d not seen her husband for more than a year, and so she had no real cause to expect him now.
The heavy crunching footfalls were her first clue, and she paused in her work, fingers clinching against the lean rabbit her little toddler had dragged in, like a feral cat dragging a mouse in from a night prowl. She didn’t know how he caught them, and he just looked at her with his great blue eyes when she inquired. The boy looked barely old enough to be on his feet, but he still spent much of his time outdoors. She knew he snitched what he could from wherever he could. But when the battered apple or half-eaten pastry, (or soldier’s tact), was put in her hand it somehow didn’t matter that the pitiful rations weren’t theirs or how much it terrified her to think of her son stealing among the Spartan soldiers. All that mattered was that the mewling little mouths were silenced and they all lived another day. How could she scold him when they needed his bounty – from both the wood and the men. Her prayer was that stealing was all he resorted to for bread.
The children had been outside when Skouros came in, but he didn’t have any interest in them anyway. He’d stayed long enough for her to feed him, to stand across from him during that short, tense meal. It was as he was leaving, crunching down the path, that he passed his children. They had been attracted by the horse, but parted like water when the big man approached. Then he paused. The number of curly heads did not match his expectation.
His first disembodied words had been, “He’s too young to be my boy.”
Infidelity was a death sentence. Tearfully, wrung out with the stress with which she had anticipated this scene, she protested, “No, h-he’s just small. Just a little small. But a good, strong boy. A son.”
He had marched over to where the children stood like prey animals, staring wide-eyed. The eldest girl-child tried to tug her brother away with them, but the tiny boy wouldn’t be moved. He met his father’s gaze for the first time with more curiosity than fear.
“My son,” the father said, and her heart tore at the still uncertain sound of his voice, the reserved judgment. She hadn’t dared to hope he would suddenly become paternal. He’d barely acknowledged his girls. But this was the boy that he wanted, the legacy she knew he wished to see grown up a warrior, some young Spartan’s training mate, armor barer, or sword brother.
She felt of thrill of frightened uncertainty thinking of that future; she feared her delicate little dryad wouldn’t make a solider.
Her heart jolted when the great, huge arms reached abruptly for the boy. She rarely held him, but he clung instinctively to his father’s thumbs as he was suddenly swept to the man’s great height. The solider did not press him to his chest, did not cradle him; she wasn’t sure he knew how. She knew only how small he seemed sitting in his father’s large, calloused hands, his whole body cupped in those clinched digits. The boy sat now with a stony, untouched quiet. Her strange, brave child.
And then she watched the warrior’s face clinch with disgust, saw the hands bunch too tight around the boy. Iolaus writhed, struggling to get loose. His father had ceased the awkward, something-like gentle hold he’d maintained only a moment before and had him by the legs and forearms like a colt, or a lamb. His free hand roamed the child, his eyes cold for the inspection. Tracing little bones and fine, breakable features. His palm was large enough to envelope the infant’s whole face and head.
When he was finished it seemed that he was only too glad to loose the creature, his lip curling as he all but tossed the child away from him. Judgment made his eyed wild as he glared down at his son in the dust. Judgment. He hadn’t been good enough from the first moment. Skouros spat upon the earth, “Not my boy,” he said before stalking off. The mother watched his stiff, tortured, retreating back along with the child on the ground.
When the man was out of sight Iolaus picked himself up wordlessly and wandered off toward the wood, rubbing at the blood smeared on his chin without a sound. Skouros hadn’t returned for two days, and then he hadn’t stayed long. She’d been left as pregnant and bankrupt as the last time he left her.
It was just a little crushing. She had wanted Iolaus to finally be enough.
It would have been childish to blame Iolaus for their life and her unappeasable, broken husband. Unfair to resent the boy for not meeting unattainable standards. And she tried not to. But sometimes it slipped through in little ways. Like the way she favored her girls, or her tendency to snap at him a little more often, or pretend she didn’t see him when he tugged at her skirts, underfoot. So he spend a lot of time away from her – out of doors under the trees, watching the other men and boys at their training, in whatever mysterious games he played or deeds he did – and it built up that bit of out-of-the-ordinariness that seemed to hang around him. Honestly, she was surprised her little wanderer had even been home when Skouros had come to collect them.
Unceremoniously, he had informed her he had received a temporary position. They were going to Thebes.
The trip had been one of their better times. She’d managed to forget about all the disappointments, the hard times. She saw the firm set of his shoulders, the so-human satisfaction on his chiseled face as he took them to his first post, taking /his family/ to a home away from the dimly felt servitude of Sparta. The half-dared hope in his eyes had reminded her of the man she married.
She watched as Skouros allowed his son to hold the reigns of the placid, gentle horses, holding the child between his knees with one large hand braced across his chest to secure him. Watched him look on his girls as he rarely did, smoothing the run away curls from the smallest’s temple. She remembered the almost dotting hand on her bulging belly, once more large with his hope. Hope. One more chance at a son.
She’d managed not to see the first time he struck the boy he already had, later on that same trip, hard across the face for fumbling a heavy pack. She wanted too much to believe that life was going to be better. She didn’t know that, soon, hope was going to be all she had.
Iolaus built the trembling fire, unable to face the cold shadows on such a night. During his childhood he’d feared his father, and resented his mother. Moving to Thebes had not healed his family. His father had gone on to great things once he was free to build his reputation and rank. He would be famed as one of the great Grecian generals of his time. He’d be remembered. Iolaus remembered him too.
He recalled particularly one frosty evening. Iolaus had been sitting close to the hearth, shivering but unwilling to draw the attention of his father by tending the flame. Winter had never been a good time for his family. Wars ceased when the weather was too foul even for murder, and though they suffered in Skouros’ absence, sometimes Iolaus thought they suffered even more in his presence. That night the man had been leaning back in a chair near the fireside, drunk and darkly moody. Who knew what had inspired his words?
“You’re the son of a bastard helot and fatherless bastard,” he told his son. And then he’d laughed bleakly. “Quite a lineage, boy. You should make peace with that.” The advice had seemed ironic to Iolaus, even then. He didn’t think his father had ever been at peace with anything, much less himself.
In the present, Iolaus drew up his hand, forcing his fingers to come unglued and reveal the token his father had left. He’d been clinching the image so hard that the shield had been pressed temporarily into his skin like a weal. He sat staring at it for a moment longer, before trusting the metal fiercely into the embers – hot now, and fever-bright, like his pain – and watched while symbol slowly come apart in the fire.
He couldn’t regret what he’d taken from Sparta – his journey began there, and nothing could change that. But his life was different now, something he’d made for himself with Hercules. He’d live it how he liked.
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