Black Gruel

Sparta, 520BC

There was dew all over the ground and it had seeped through my bed of dried grass and dampened my tunic, which was already black and grimy with weeks of sweat and dirt.

Thanks to the full moon and the insistent scratching of some small animal, I'd hardly slept . The scratching reminded me of my hunger, but I felt too tired to get up and trap it. A few of the boys I'd trained with could locate a burrow even on an overcast night. They seemed to have charmed ears and feet that could see even the underground, without the light of the sun. They were the boys who had started hunt and fight for food before they could even talk and who now, at fourteen, were expert at all the arts of war and ambush, hunting and tracking.

I must have drifted off to sleep about an hour before dawn. I had dreams of a wolf that mewed like a kitten but that stared at me with the filmy eyes of an eel. I went to stab it with my sword but found that it was covered in gouts of blood already, as if it had been attacked by a lion or another of its own kind. It seemed to want my sympathy, and I reached out to pat it. At that moment the wolf vanished and I was surrounded by my old classmates from the gymnasium -- all glaring at me with hatred and pointing to my dress, which was an absurd purple woman's tunic, and my fingers wore so many golden rings that I could not move my hand.

It was then that I woke. No doubt I had cried out something in my sleep, for in the moment of waking I saw a six or seven crows flutter up into the safety of an oak's top branches.

The sun was obscured by new clouds, and a fine mist bleached the general landscape. The woodland area that had sheltered me since the beginning of my apprenticeship still clung to night's shadows, but the valley meadows glimmered a deathly grey. Although I couldn't see it now, I looked in the direction of a farm I'd scouted yesterday and heard the grunt of pigs being fed.

[to be continued]