The Isle of Stone

by Nicholas Nicastro

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  I - A Hush in the Brazen House

  II - Redoubt

  III - The Theory of Joy

  IV - The Terror

  V - She-of-the-Tapering-Ankles

  VI - The Squeezing Place

  VII - Cyclops’ Spectacles

  VIII - Dispatches

  IX - The Starlings

  X - Ekphora

  Acknowledgements

  List of Characters

  Praise for Nicholas Nicastro’s novels

  The Isle of Stone

  “From its explosive first pages, The Isle of Stone draws you into the gritty reality of Sparta during the Peloponnesian War. Nicastro writes powerful prose, but this is no exercise in debunking With drama, passion, and a sure touch for the facts, Nicastro reveals the heroism behind the humiliation of the shocking day when some of Sparta’s unconquerable soldiers surrendered. His images of life and death under the Mediterranean sun hit you like the glare of a polished shield.”

  —Barry Strauss, author of The Battle of Salamis: The Naval Encounter That Saved Greece—and Western Civilization

  Empire of Ashes

  “Great historical fiction. Nicholas Nicastro paints an entirely believable portrait of the world of Alexander the Great, with the period detail and nuance that gives the reader a true feel for the time period. Even better, he resists simply regurgitating our common understanding of Alexander, and instead presents an unexpected and at times startling picture of a hero we thought we knew, but perhaps did not. Empire of Ashes is both fast-paced and scholarly, a difficult combination to achieve, but Nicastro succeeds beautifully.”

  —James L. Nelson, author of The Only Life That Mattered and Reign of Iron

  “Empire of Ashes manages to be many things at the same time. The book is a grand historical epic combined with a court-room drama and political intrigue. Believable characters rise off the page in clear, evocative language. Nicastro has a talent for capturing the attitude and motivations of historical times, and creating stories which tell us something about our current time and situation. The result is a captivating and compelling page-turner.”

  —Pamela Goddard, Ithaca Times

  “A great read. I loved the style and thought the framing device of the court case was fascinating and gripping. The sights, sounds, and social life of ancient Athens came to life for me in a way that few historical novels seem to manage. The characters were carefully and convincingly created and forced me to make various judgments about them, and then revise them, just as real people do. The action scenes were great too. Grim and gritty and vividly brought to life. All in all a great achievement.”

  —Simon Scarrow, author of The Eagle and the Wolves and The Eagle’s Conquest

  and Nicholas Nicastro’s other historical thrillers

  “Nicastro takes you by the scruff of your neck and yanks you into the action of history.”

  —Ithaca Times

  “An effective storyteller [with] a deft command of the language.”

  —The BookPress

  “Nuanced, insightful, and thoroughly believable. . . . Nicastro does what the artist can do and the historian cannot; probe the inner mind of the historical [figure]. . . . Carefully researched, accurate in tone and detail.”

  —James L. Nelson, author of the Revolution at Sea Saga

  “This maritime historical novel fairly shimmers with furtive lustiness and wry humor. Embellishing John Paul Jones’s early naval intrigues and sexual liaisons, Nicholas Nicastro preserves the true spirit of a mercurial and moody hero.”

  —Jill B. Gidmark, University of Minnesota Professor of English

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  First published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library,

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  First Printing, December 2005

  Copyright © Nicholas Nicastro, 2005

  Map copyright © Jeffrey L. Ward, 2005

  All rights reserved

  eISBN : 978-1-101-09701-4

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  To Dr. Fred Keating, teacher, for his patience, good

  taste, and timely encouragement

  Historical Note

  The Peloponnesian War was the war to end all wars in antiquity: a conflict of unprecedented scope, length, and destructiveness, after which nothing was the same. Fought over a period of twenty-seven years, it pitted Athens and her sometimes-reluctant imperial subjects against a league of Peloponnesian states led by Sparta. This novel dramatizes one of the war’s key campaigns—the entrapment and siege of hitherto undefeated Spartan soldiers on a narrow island in the west of Greece. The incident turned out to be a high point of the struggle for the Athenians, who still lost the war.

  Readers unfamiliar with this subject may be confused by the varying ways the ancients referred to the Spartans and their allies (“Lacedaemonians,” “Laconians,” “Peloponnesians,” “Spartiates,” “Equals,” et al). By way of clarification, “Lacedaemon” and “Laconia” are alternative names for the fertile valley region in the southern Peloponnese that encompassed the city of Sparta. Although all Lacedaemonians were Peloponnesians, the region of the Peloponnese included a number of other important city-states that were part of the Spartan bloc. Describing a force as “Peloponnesian” therefore emphasizes a prepond
erance of Spartan allies within (though at least some Spartans were usually part of such armies or fleets).

  The term “Spartiate” is a more restrictive one than “Lacedaemonian.” It refers to those adult males in the Spartan population who attained the status of full citizenship by completing the requisite course of education (the agoge or “Rearing”), being elected to a communal mess, and attaining the age of thirty. The number of full-blown Spartiates amounted to only a small minority in the city population and the army. This shortage of elite manpower obligated the state to accept into service noncitizen Lacedaemonians, including resident aliens called perioikoi (“circum-habitants,” here designated as “Nigh-Dwellers”), ex-citizens stripped of their citizenship for conduct or financial reasons, and, in extreme circumstances, state slaves (“helots”) who served in exchange for their freedom. Spartiates referred to one another as homoioi, which I follow certain authorities in translating as “Equals.” Those who had graduated from the agoge, but were not yet thirty years old, belonged in an informal age-class called the hebontes (rendered here simply as “under-thirties”).

  The precise organization of the Spartan army has long been a subject of debate, including as it did a number of subdivisions that are unclear in nature and changed with time. For my purposes here I have remained agnostic on these questions. Since the names of the subdivisions are numerous and unfamiliar, I have opted to translate them into rough modern equivalents (e.g., “platoon” for the Spartan enomotia of thirty-six men, “battalion” for the lochos of one thousand, etc.). Similarly, the names of age-groups in the Rearing, which would have sounded archaic even to classical Greeks, have been changed here to the closest equivalents in American idiom: West Point class monikers (“Firsties,” “Cows,” etc.). My apologies to the purists.

  A mixture of ancient and modern units of measure is used in the text. For the sake of convenience, modern units are used when they were more or less similar to their ancient counterparts (e.g., feet, hours, months). Verisimilitude has been served by including a number of antique units that are common in the relevant historical sources. Most prominent here is the “stade,” a Greek unit of distance approximately equivalent to six hundred modern feet (and from which the word “stadium” is derived).

  The common monetary unit is the Athenian “drachma,” which is equivalent in value to six “obols.” The superordinate units are the “mina,” worth one hundred drachmas, and the “talent,” equaling six thousand drachmas. We know that a decent house in a suburb of Athens in the late fifth century BC would set the buyer back five hundred to one thousand drachmas (or five to ten minas); a gallon of olive oil, more than three drachmas; a good pair of shoes, about ten drachmas; a healthy adult slave, three hundred to five hundred. Still, for various reasons, expressing the value of a drachma in today’s currency is not as straightforward as finding modern equivalents for, say, distance. According to an oft-cited rule of thumb, the wage for the average laborer in classical Athens was one or two drachmas a day. A talent, therefore, works out to the equivalent of almost twenty years of work, or in modern terms something like a million dollars.

  As for the calendar, the reader will notice there are no absolute dates given for the events depicted here. This is due to the simple fact that no universal system existed until recent times (and arguably, does not exist even today, given that the Chinese, Muslim, and Jewish calendars are still in use). Instead, years were designated either by counting the years since some important event, or on the basis of who held important magistracies at that time (in Athens, years were named for the so-called “eponymous” archons). For instance, the historian Thucydides dates the beginning of the Peloponnesian War to “the forty-eighth year of the priestess-ship of Chrysis at Argos, during the ephorate of Aenesias at Sparta and in the last month but two of the archonship of Pythodorus at Athens . . .” (2.2.1). This works out to the early summer of 431 BC by modern reckoning. The focal events of this book are the Great Earthquake in Laconia in 464 BC, and the battle at Pylos and subsequent siege of the island of Sphacteria, which took place over a seventy-two day period in the mid to late summer of 425 BC.

  Finally, to help the reader navigate a plethora of similar-sounding Greek names, an index of characters is included at the back of the book.

  The living are stretched bows, whose purpose is death.

  —Heraclitus

  I

  A Hush in the Brazen House

  1.

  In the early morning of her wedding day, Damatria went out to the privy hole behind her father’s house. She had just cut her hair in short, boyish style, in preparation for the traditional first-night visit from her betrothed. Squatting, she imagined the smell of Molobrus as he pressed down on her, reeking of the barracks, of swine blood and vinegar from the mess table. He would fumble down there, and she would need to guide him in the process of her deflowerment. How ignorant of women were the brave lads, who lived their youths naked on Taygetus but trembled, lost as lambs, in the foothills of the Mount of Venus! What responsibilities womanhood entailed, ruling these men of Sparta.

  She was struck at once by a certain unsteadiness. After bracing herself against the ground, she realized it was the earth itself that was moving, not she. It was just a mild dislocation at first, as if she was perched on the wrist of a giant who was repeatedly clenching his fist. Then came a sick-making pulsation, wave upon wave, as if the earth became liquid. This went on for a few uncommonly vivid minutes, consuming her attention, until the waves ceased and she rose uncertainly to her feet, arms outstretched, as if expecting to plunge into the betrayed solidity below.

  Her father’s house lay at the outskirts of the village of Mesoa. Where the structure had stood, there was now a cloud of plaster dust over a neat pile of debris. No houses stood intact anywhere she could see, though there were a number of other figures who were, like herself, standing unscathed. She met the gaze of the wife and mother who lived in the house next door; mute as a post, she was holding the handle of a broken water jug, her eyes reflecting a faint bemusement with the reordered landscape. The woman seemed not to register the interleaved walls of the house before her, where minutes before her infant had delighted in lifting his tiny head. Damatria looked to the skyline of Taygetus over the valley, ordinarily so comforting in its familiarity. This time, in a way she could not describe, even the mountain seemed changed.

  She returned to her house and regarded its ruins. The roof appeared to have fallen in first, followed by three of the masonry walls in turn. Her father had been sleeping in the room at the front. He was on his couch, his lips smeared with the flesh of oversoft figs; she recalled how, before she went out, his chest heaved up and fell one time, as if making up for a history of shallow breaths. His walking stick was next to him, and it stood there still, resting against the house’s last standing wall. Seeing the stick dispelled her reverie—the wreck instantly became a real place again, and the tangled mass beside the wall, a grave made by pitiless hands.

  The timbers were long and half-buried, and the cobbles were heavy. She made painful progress at her excavation as the sun climbed above the peaks. Sparta was a quiet place on nonfestival days, and her people never wept or screamed at misfortune, but the quality of the silence after the earthquake was unnerving. The birds had stopped singing and never resumed; she could hear guttural exertions from next door, as intimate as the sounds of lovemaking, as her neighbor dug into the debris of her own house. Isolated, Damatria jumped when a voice suddenly spoke to her.

  “Are you the only one?” asked the soldier. He was standing on the road, a sword at his side, a blazon of fresh blood trailing from beneath his helmet. Damatria thought he must be a fool, believing he could defend himself from the great Earthshaker with a sword.

  “My father is here,” she replied, indicating the wreckage.

  The soldier stared at the pile. “By order of the ephors,” he said, “the people shall show their dignity.”

  She made no response, as if
such a reminder was beneath her notice.

  The soldier moved on, then stopped, resting his hand on the grip of his weapon. “You should know . . . the disorder has encouraged some of the helots.”

  “If that is true, why are you standing here prattling with women? Go and be a man!”

  The soldier hung his head and left. She bent to her digging again, scattering the stones around her as the afternoon waned, heedless of the cuts made in her hands by exposed nails. Suddenly—beneath a broken tile—a foot. Damatria paused, the sight affecting her more than she could immediately bear. She fell back on her haunches, regarding it, unsure whether to proceed.

  This was to be her wedding night; by sunset, she was supposed to be seized by Molobrus’ family and brought to her future home. Perhaps by now she would have been in the traditional belted chemise, awaiting the furtive attentions of the groom. She should not expect to be taken as a woman the first time, or even the first several times, the old wives advised. Shorn of her hair like a young recruit, the Spartan bride had to understand the mechanics of barracks love. Damatria had long imagined this and the other nights that followed, as she would initiate Molobrus, in subtle but due course, into the way between male and female. The end of the process would put him inside her in fruitful fashion at last. For it would only be at that time, perhaps months into a good Spartan marriage, that bride and husband were supposed to see each other’s faces by daylight.

  Did Molobrus’ little house in Limnae still stand? Did her matrimonial bed contain only rubble? She must have stayed that way, thinking about such things, until she fell asleep. When she awoke, her head was in the dirt, with a glow from the west shining in her eyes. She realized, with some shame, that after all those hours she had exposed nothing more of her father but that single foot.