This is Sparta
We climb the hill together, Alexandra and Mano and I, along with the others – twenty all told, our hair curled and scented with incense, clutching our offerings to Helen. Helen the goddess; Helen the princess. Helen the whore. I hold a statue of chryselephantine, a girl naked and bejewelled, a precious thing my father tells me came from Egypt. Egypt lies across the Aegean, a land of wonders, further even than Cyprus. Some say Helen went to Egypt. We say she returned to Sparta. Why else would we honour her? I hope Helen thinks my gift a worthy offering. If she do not – what? A fruitless marriage, a life without honour; passed over for some other woman worthy of the goddess. If she shows herself to us, our gifts have been accepted. This is all I have been told. I am afraid to behold the goddess.

Mano turns to me when I lag behind, pressing my statue to my chest, fearful now to part with it. She takes my hand. “Come on, Hebe, don’t be scared.” I follow her, reluctant, the incense heavy on my temples and in my nostrils. At the head of the procession march auletes, flute-girls, playing unaccustomed tunes. I am used to wedding hymns or frantic songs to Dionysus, taut with the beat of the tympanon. This melody is different: older, more haunting. The word for it is pothos. Yearning. Did Helen yearn for Sparta, when she stood on the walls of Troy and beheld an empty, foreign plain? Tonight, if I see her, I shall ask.

Mano is tugging at my hand, eager to arrive. She has been looking forward to these festivities for months, since her blood first came. I, for whom the blood is still an unnerving novelty, am less certain. The song changes: it is wilder now, presaging what is to come. In front of me, Alexandra dances through the gorse, her robe slipping from one shoulder to expose the curve of her white breast. She cries out, iau iau, and the other girls echo her.

The light is fading, the attendants’ torches spark like the god’s thunder in the dusk. Mano’s face is wine-dark. The shrine rises out of the purpling horizon, stark and black. There is a feast within, and wine in terracotta amphorae. More than this: there is Helen. I am fourteen. Tonight is the proof of my existence.

At the hill’s crest the attendants will leave and we will become women, together, through the long night. First, though, there is the business of our hair. Mano and I are the last to reach the entrance to the shrine, where the others have gathered. Their excited chatter flies above our heads like the beating of wings, insubstantial. When we have all gathered the lead attendant mounts the stone steps and turns to face us. She is flanked by two slaves, their faces impassive. They have seen this before. “Girls,” says the attendant, “girls of Sparta. Tonight you become women of Sparta, mothers of warriors and men.” She holds a razor in her right hand. “Who will be first?”

I was not first; the ground at my feet is covered with hair. Most of the hair is brown, though there are tendrils of blond shining like gold in the heap. Blond haired girls are sacred to Helen. My hair is not blond. The attendant rests a hand on my shoulder. “It’s finished,” she says, “go to the sacrifice.” My head feels light, unburdened; I run a hand over my scalp and feel the soft prickles against my palm. A woman’s head, ready to rest on a woman’s body. There are only two girls left, the rest have already gone to the sacrifice. I follow.

The bull is unsuspecting. It nods its huge head when the oatmeal is sprinkled, blows hot breath from wet nostrils. Why a bull for Helen? The bull is the creature of Theseus, who raped her. Why not a swan?

I have witnessed many sacrifices, but I still gasp when the knife hits home. We all gasp together like the surge of the sea, and the taste of copper fills my open mouth. Then we set to butchering the creature, twenty of us, slicing sinew and muscle, up to our elbows in entrails and gore. The bull’s blood is slick and glorious on my bare arms. I raise a wrist to my mouth and lick at the wet salt warmth. Mano smiles at me. “I knew you would relax.”
“A Spartan is never relaxed,” I reply, half-serious, “but always on his guard.”
“Her guard, you mean.”
“Both.”

After the appropriate parts – the thigh bones, the innards, the tongue – have been burnt as an offering to the gods, and the meat is roasting over a shallow fire pit, we gather our gifts for Helen and process to the inner sanctum. The smell of burnt flesh is still strong in my nostrils, but the place’s holiness is tangible nonetheless. A statue looms in the semi-darkness, barely illuminated by the single pitch torch we may bring to the goddess.
“Helen,” breathes Alexandra.
She is tall – taller than any man I have seen, and beautiful. Her eyes are hollows in her sandstone face. Her hair is carved ringlets, her necklace stony beads. Reverently, we file up to her, trying not to jostle, hushing the giggles of those for whom the solemnity is too much. We will be women. We do not laugh. When I bend to place my statue at her feet, setting it in a groove worn smooth by countless other offerings from countless other girls, I feel a light hand brush the back of my new-shorn neck. Helen, or maybe just the wind.

Now the formalities are over. All that remains is for us to dance away our girlhood, footloose in the rocky hills of Sparta, to dance until all that remains is a hard shell to birth children and bear up. I have never been good at dancing. The night’s one promise remains unspoken: Helen may come, between the torches and the wine, golden-glimpsed in darkened corners or beneath the straggling firs. I drink my wine, unmixed and thick as honey. The music has started again: far down the mountain, the aulos-girls play up to heaven and to us. Alexandra dances with Meroe; Mano dances with Adea. I dance awkwardly, alone, through the rushing of the night as the flutes pipe higher and higher and mix with a drum that may be the beating of my heart. Once I am a woman, I shall never dance again. The thought makes me frenzied, frenzies us all as we stamp the gorsey hill. The cry rises up: Eleni. O Helen.

Near dawn, the wine is all drunk and many sleep where they have fallen, white limbs tangled in girlish embrace. Mano claims to have seen her, from the corner of her streaming eyes, lurking shy amidst the bushes. My Helen is not shy: Mano was drunk, that’s all – Meroe too, when she said she danced with her, all golden tresses leaping in the torchlight and lips stained with glistening fat from the sacrifice. I have wandered afar, the torches’ embers barely smouldering in the distance. Fir trees enfold me like bedclothes but I cannot sleep. I have not seen her. How can I be a Spartan woman? The blood is not enough, nor will the pretended rape suffice, when my father’s choice of husband spies me in my boy’s garb and takes me to his bed. This second blood, the blood of lost virginity, makes me a woman only. Without Helen, it is nothing.

Dawn is already beginning to streak the sky with red when I sink to my knees, exhausted. I have given up. I will never be a woman. The thought comforts as it terrifies. And then I see her. She stares straight up at me, shorn and beautiful, and my heart leaps like a foal leaving its mother’s side for the first time. For a long time we gaze at each other. She is not frightening, as I thought. Her face is sad. I reach out to her but she ripples and fades. I withdraw my hand: one may not touch a goddess. Gradually, she returns, takes shape.
“Do you yearn,” I ask, “for Sparta?”
“Always,” she replies.

It is late morning when I wake, my head close to a still pool of water that reflects the sun. Alexandra is prodding me with a stick.
“Get up, sleepy head,” she laughs, “we’ve to be at the city by noon.”
I rub sleep from my eyes. “I saw her,” I say. “Helen, I mean.”
“We all did,” says Alexandra. “How could we be women if not?”
She has changed, overnight; I know that she will not dance back to the city but stride, her thighs conveying the power that resides in her. I get up, go back to other women. They stride down the hill to Sparta.

I stride too.