Sappho Read Free Page A

heard he was struck in the buttocks.” This raised a general laugh and, encouraged by his audience, he continued. “The shaft of a spear was driven upward through his bladder and you might say when it burst, he drowned.”
    Someone nudged him. “The girl is his.”
    â€œOh, Skamandronymos of Eresos, you say?” he said, suddenly polite. One had to be circumspect where the upper class was concerned. “Now that’s a different matter. He jumped on the Athenian boat as if for the sport of it. And hurled fire upon their decks before he was overpowered.”
    Sappho walked on, stopping beside a maidservant busy with the preparation of mint. “How did Skamandronymos of Eresos die?”
    â€œIt was dreadful, that. A spear entered his eye and was driven downward, crashing among his teeth, knocking them every which way, cutting out the root of his tongue. And the Athenians burned him in his armor.”
    Another slave joined in. “I have it from one who was there that he was hit on the forehead, just at the rise of the nose. The bone cracked, and they say his two eyes, dripping gore, fell at his feet, and he crawled around trying to find them. Then they burnt him in his armor.”
    â€œYou don’t know at all, do you?” The small dark girl glared at them malevolently. “May strange dogs lap your blood from gutters in the street.”
    â€œWhat! Who is this miserable dark dwarf?”
    Sappho stared them down. “In death there is a happy place reserved for heroes. My mother told me.”
    â€œHush,” one slave told the other. “She is of a great house by the way she speaks.”
    â€œIf not how she looks.” The other giggled.
    Sappho’s nurse had come looking for her. She laid hold of the slaves and shook them as though they were dust cloths. “Know-nothings! She is Sappho, beloved daughter of the Lord Skamandronymos, and a guest in this house.”
    The arrival of messengers with laurel in their hair brought everyone to the courtyard. The messengers were given wine and when they had breath to speak cried, “Honor to Father Zeus, first in power!” They told that the bodies of their slain comrades were in the hands of compatriots. A great funeral pyre had been raised on the sand, a hundred feet high and in all directions a hundred feet. The bodies were washed, anointed with sweet oils, and wound in fresh cloaks. Their friends covered them with locks of their hair before carrying them by ladders to the apex of the mound, now surrounded by flayed sheep and oxen. Against the bier, jars of honey and unguents were piled. Six proved horses were killed and placed at the bottom of the burial hill. For each cup of wine drunk by their friends, one was spilled to the dead. And at the last it was the aureate wine of Lesbos that quenched the flames.
    When the cremation was complete, the heroes’ bones were separated from those of the offerings and laid, each in a golden krater, between layers of fat. They were wrapped in linen, and earth heaped over them covered by close-set stones.
    The women wept as their loss was brought freshly before them, and servants led the messengers to food and rest while singers began extolling the fallen so that all might hear.
    The child Sappho was carried to a room where a bed had been set up for her. Dreams born of Night sucked her beneath five thicknesses of darkness to Tartarus, the deepest pit under Earth, as far beneath Earth as Heaven is high. She saw her father and held out her arms to him. But he was pale and the sinews that bind together flesh and blood were no more. He did not approach her but sorrowfully shook his head, murmuring, “Little Pebble. Little Pebble.”
    She ran after him, wanting him to scoop her up in the old playful embrace. But her outstretched arms penetrated through Skamandronymos.
    She woke screaming. It was the hour when the morning star brings light. True dreams pass through gates