The Isle of Stone

by Nicholas Nicastro

  When the day came for him to take the Rearing, she felt as if a piece of her heart was being cut out. She made Endius come three times, telling Epitadas to hide in the fields on the first two occasions. By the time his surrender could no longer be avoided, she left it for Molobrus to hand him over. Damatria watched him leave from a safe place, her hands grasping her milk-swollen breasts, too full of rage to let a sound escape the contorted mask of her grief.

  She had to know where Endius took him. She followed them through the barley farms east of the villages, over the pelleted sheep tracks, to a hollow formed by two cypress-clad hills. An altar to mirthless Demeter lay in the center, its mass built up from centuries of solid ash tarred by dripping animal fat, scorched hair and bones and, on this occasion, the tears of a single Spartan mother as bereft as the goddess facing her daughter’s exile to the underworld. From there she watched the boy-herd take the boy into the field to meet his fellows.

  After a few days tracking the pack, Damatria learned its movements and could predict with fair accuracy where her son would be at any moment of the day. The paradox of it, that the movements of a group meant to be in a perfect state of freedom could be so easily forecast, was not lost on her. It was of use, though, in her efforts to keep the boy fed. Heedless of the scandal it would cause, she supplemented Epitadas’ diet in secret, bringing him baskets of bread, apples, figs, almonds, olives, and cheese. The boy learned where to find his mother in the woods. They met without exchanging words—Damatria keeping watch for intruders, Epitadas stuffing the provisions into his mouth as fast as he could. On occasion, their eyes would meet. In her glance, there was the urgency of a need that transcended any prospect of shame; in his, Damatria saw neither thanks nor affection, but only the appetite of a starving animal.

  From her vantage nearby, she could see the fruits of her crime. Where the other boys became undersized on their scanty diet, Epitadas came to tower over them all. In six months he outweighed boys three years his senior. With these advantages he dominated the competition, ruling his pack with intimidation backed by capricious outbursts of force. Damatria would watch him humiliate the other boys, strike them down, kick them, grind their faces into the dirt. She wished it didn’t need to be so, and hoped that one day he would not take such joy in it, but mostly she was thankful it was Epitadas who gave the beatings and not the other way around. Then she set her mind to the pleasurable task of thinking in what other ways she could enhance his supremacy.

  II

  Redoubt

  1.

  Thirty years later, in the seventh year of the war between his city and Sparta, Demosthenes the Athenian invaded enemy territory with five ships and a thousand men. He did it midway through a trip around the Peloponnese, touching land in the extreme southwest of Sparta’s dominion under cover of a storm.

  The Athenians beached their vessels in a vast bay in the old kingdom of Messenia, beneath the capital of Homeric Nestor, just down the coast from the horseshoe strand where Prince Telemachus once sought news of his father, Odysseus. Millennia later, near modern Pylos, a combined British, French, and Russian naval force would help assure Greek independence by annihilating a Turkish fleet there. Centuries after that, the oily waters were plied by tankers whose size and ugliness would exceed the ancient imagination, but inspire no poetry. These gave way in their time to German and American holidaymakers escorted around Navarino Bay in motorboats, seeking camera-ready pathos among the drowned sarcophagi of six thousand Turkish sailors.

  Unlike Telemachus or the tourists, Demosthenes came ashore with vengeance in mind. The region of Messenia had been the conquered territory of the Lacedaemonians for centuries, its population confirmed in its generational servitude. As the Athenians walked lightly on the beach, imagining the very ground might recoil from their weight, their eyes sought out their general, seeming to ask him, “O Demosthenes, do you know what trouble you invite by bringing us here?”

  To which the general answered, “Of course.” He understood that the passage around the Peloponnese, with its storms and rocks, was exhausting enough in peacetime. As his men waited for fair weather, they might take their rest, cook a meal, or make repairs to their ships. Demosthenes had no plan, except that they should stay awhile and annoy the Lacedaemonians with their audacity. He would undertake no attack, he pledged, but conduct only those defensive operations that would allow them to escape. “But for now, let us do what the enemy has done to us for seven years,” he told them. “Let them know what it is to have invaders on their territory! Let them wear themselves out with worry for a change!”

  With these declarations Demosthenes made them forget their fears. The Athenians saw they had come to a sandy beach on the northern limb of a crescent bay some three miles in extent. An elongated island sheltered the bay from the Ionian Sea, leaving only two outlets: the narrow strait before them, and a somewhat wider passage beyond the island’s southern end. A cobbly promontory to their west protected their flank; behind them stretched a marsh, half-salt, that precluded attack from the mainland. The only unimpeded approach was along the narrow bridge of sand that formed the beach to the east. To even the most tactically innocent of the Athenians, the spot seemed a promising defensive position. The lack of fresh water was the sole disadvantage.

  “What is this place called?” someone asked.

  “The beach and the hill the Lacedaemonians call Koryphasion. Before them, this was the Pylos of King Nestor, who went to Troy. And before him, it was the dwelling place of the cows stolen from Apollo by Hermes. They say the stockade is still here, in a cave under the rock.”

  “And the island?”

  Demosthenes tossed his head.

  Some Athenian soldiers took off their armor. After they had stood around for some time, distressing the pebbles with their toes, they resolved to prepare cooking fires, and at last to swim in the bay and play ball games. These diversions drew sneers from the ships’ carpenters, who were obliged to tend to the inevitable cracked and chipped oars, popped strakes, loose oar tackle, and any of the thousand other things that went wrong with triremes at sea.

  An alarm was sounded by Demothenes’ lookouts on the promontory. Three figures were seen standing on the rock, looking down on the Athenians. The hoplites swam back to don their armor and loft their spears. They stayed that way, at attention, until it became clear that the intruders were just three young boys—probably Messenian helots from a nearby village. Even this knowledge did not reassure the Athenians, for the boys would no doubt return to their homes to report what they had seen, and it would not be long before the Spartans learned of their enemy’s presence. Or so it seemed to everyone except Demosthenes.

  “I would not count much on the Messenians’ loyalty to the Lacedaemonians,” he ventured. “In fact, I would say our secret is more safe here than if we had landed in Attica, at the estate of some aristocrat!”

  Exactly as he predicted, the helot boys did not run off to warn their parents. Instead, one of them—the smallest—clambered down the crags to have a look at the visitors. He was naked except for a sweat-soaked leather fillet around his head, and he seemed to weave and slip through the nettles with the ease of a snake. Closer, and the Athenians could see the scar on his arm of an iron brand—a mark of his helotry—standing pale against the flush of his exertions.

  “Are you Athenians?” the boy asked.

  Demosthenes presented himself with palms upturned.

  “We are,” he said, “and therefore come as allies of the Messenian people.”

  “Are you here to fight the Lacedaemonians, or are you going to run away like all the others?”

  “We will do what is necessary to preserve our honor.”

  The boy reversed himself and started back up. At what seemed like a safe distance, he turned and shouted down to the beach:

  “What took you so long?”

  This question, though it had come from a mere boy, had an encouraging effect on the Athenians. The blessing of the local Mes
senians could only improve their position, for the invaders would need local supplies of food and fresh water if they decided to stay. What little was stored in the ships was needed for the trip to Corcyra, where the admiral, Eurymedon, expected Demosthenes’ help in breaking the Peloponnesian siege on the capital.

  Demosthenes did not so much order his men to fortify the Pylos beachhead as allow the idea to germinate in their own minds. His only command was a quiet one to his lieutenant, Leochares, to retrace the path the helots had used to approach them and keep watch on it. This was, after all, the sort of thing a responsible commander would order. He would then retire for the night to his hole in the sand, where he would fold his limbs carefully so as not to break them, as this responsible commander had for some time been convinced that his legs were as fragile as the clay stems of one of those high-pedestaled drinking cups. This was no metaphor: ever since his defeat in Aetolia the year before, he had become convinced that no pair of greaves could hide the fragility of those legs, which would shatter if he stepped on them too abruptly. Leochares and the rest of his men had noticed the tentative way that he had come to walk, placing his feet just so, and had supposed it had to do with some old battle wound. Little could they suspect that their general had in his mind an image of himself toppled, helpless among his own shards.

  That night Demosthenes was visited by the same dream that had tormented him for months. In his sleep, he is back in those blasted hinterlands the day he lost his entire army. His men cry to him from the canyons. Rising up, a winged thing, he goes to them and finds only gnawed bones. His enemy that sad day, the Aetolians, did not fly, but knew the lay of the mountain paths. He awoke to his daytime command a ball of nerves and sweat.

  His men constructed a barricade across the narrowest point of the strand. With their bare hands, they excavated a trench and used the sand to make a berm. Saplings from the edge of the marsh were cut, shorn, and fixed into the sand with sharpened sides out; the obstacle was topped with cobbles gathered from along the beach.

  “Save the straightest poles and the biggest stones for later,” Demothenes advised, somewhat cryptically.

  The barricade, in addition to their command of the heights of Koryphasion, and the marsh at their backs, made the Athenians more or less secure from the land. Demothenes was pondering their exposure from the bay when the helot boys returned, this time bearing three sacks. These contained a supply of milled barley, a jar of unmixed wine, and a skin of fresh water.

  “There will be more,” said the boy, “as long as you keep to this beach, and do not come into the village.”

  “I understand we must not endanger your people,” Demosthenes assured him.

  The boy took an appraising look around. “You still have some work to do, then.”

  The Athenians laughed at the child’s presumption as he darted back up the rocks. When this died away Demosthenes shouted the last outstanding question in his mind:

  “Can you tell us, boy, what that island is called?”

  “Sphacteria!”

  2.

  The inevitable occurred on the third day, when Lacedaemonians were sighted some distance down the beach. There were three of them, shieldless, with their cloaks wrapped tightly around their lank forms. The Athenians could feel the eyes on them, appraising the strength of their defenses. And though his men so far outnumbered the enemy one thousand to three, a wave of disquiet rolled through their ranks, confronted as they were now by the certainty that a fight must come. With the exception on their glorious stand at Thermopylae, the Lacedaemonians had not lost a significant engagement in more than two hundred years.

  “Tell us now, O Demosthenes, what we should do!” cried one hoplite.

  “How can we fight these Lacedaemonians on their own territory?” asked another.

  “Is there still time to escape, Demosthenes?” asked a third.

  Demosthenes mounted on the bronze ram of a ship, climbing carefully so as not to damage his clay limbs. The Greeks, who were busy arguing with each other, did not notice him until he began to speak. The riot died down by stages, and every pair of eyes fell on him.

  “Athenians, all of your questions have answers. But I ask you, are these the questions you want to ask? Are they worthy of you? Or should we all be facing our fates with different questions on our lips—ones that will redound to the glory of our city? Shall we not ask, instead, how our adversaries will take a prepared position when they are so loathe to risk the lives of their precious Spartiates? Instead of taking this place to be enemy territory, shall we not ask how we may make it Athens’ own?

  “No doubt you are thinking that our forces are few, while the Lacedaemonians will attack us by land and water with every able body they can muster. In such cases it is wise not to think about the odds against us, but to get on to the fight with as little reflection as possible. Did Militiades fret about Persian numbers at Marathon? Did your grandfathers count the enemy fleet at Salamis before charging their ships against it? You know the answers to these questions already.

  “In any case, I will say two things about the size of the forces for and against us. First, numbers are irrelevant if an army cannot bring its advantage to bear against the opposition. With no way to reach us on land, the Lacedaemonians will no doubt come at us from the bay. But can you imagine those clodhoppers, who never glimpse a body of water bigger than a river, presuming to fight their way in from the sea? Do you imagine we will let them?”

  Panic fading, the men laughed at the image of the waterlogged Spartans.

  “Second, it is not we who are outnumbered, but the enemy. For never forget where we are—this is the kingdom of Messenia, a land of proud Greeks who have chafed in the Spartan yoke since before the days of Solon. This land is filled with our allies, men who would eat a Spartan raw if they had the chance. Our allies have but to be mobilized, and the first step will be the defense we put on here.

  “And so for many reasons we have but one choice today: to govern our fears, to stand our ground here, and save ourselves. Does that answer your questions?”

  The Athenians gave a thunderous cheer that reverberated off the heights of Koryphasion, and set to work.

  The stretch of beach they needed to defend measured less than two stades. Using the heavy stones they had formerly put aside, they made submerged obstacles to block an enemy landing. In the places that were too deep for stones they anchored three of their ships broadside to the shore, and filled them with dry grass to help them burn in case the Peloponnesians tried to tow them away. The stones and the ships were disposed so as to funnel the enemy craft into just a few narrow approaches. These were the places where the outnumbered Athenians hoped, with luck, to defend themselves.

  As most of the Athenians were sailors and not hoplites, there was a shortage of weapons among them. Demosthenes sent his unarmed men into the marsh to gather green wood and willow fronds; with these they fashioned wicker shields. Straight branches served as pikes, and smaller stones as missiles. Demosthenes ordered the straighter, heavier piles to be positioned where he expected the Peloponnesians to force their way ashore. With these he intended his men to push the enemy ships away before they reached water shallow enough for their hoplites to disembark.

  As they made these preparations, the Athenians kept watch on the horizon. Columns of smoke from enemy fires began to multiply by the third day; horse-men were seen riding back and forth on the shore, no doubt with dispatches coordinating the coming attack.

  On the fourth day a fleet of sixty Peloponnesian ships sailed through the south passage into the bay. With their arrival Demosthenes’ garrison was surrounded: it could not escape by land, and the ships could easily be used to block the bay’s two entrances. To tighten their grip, the Lacedaemonians ferried a garrison onto Sphacteria, to prevent escape or relief via the island. The soldiers there would be in an excellent position to take any prizes or prisoners that might wash up.

  But Demosthenes had never meant to make a secret of his li
ttle fort on Spartan territory. Before the Peloponnesians blocked the northern strait, he sent out two ships to find the Athenian fleet at Zacynthus. This was a calculated risk that reduced his force by three hundred rowers, but for Demosthenes the decision was foregone. Once the enemy disrupted his supply of food and water from the helot village, outside relief would be his only hope. Nor did he believe that Eurymedon could conceivably deny such aid.

  When he at last came to rest, he was startled to dream of Aetolian mountaineers running along a ridgeline, trailing long ropes decorated with Athenian heads like beads on a string. In the way of certain visions, he could see both near and far at the same time; the living heads were breathing and blinking as they bounced along the goat paths.

  He lay with the ground around him soaked with sweat when welcome news at last came down from Leochares. A force of forty Messenians from the local villages had come down to fight for him. They wore little more than breechcloths and the scars on their arms, and were armed with farming implements, but the expressions on their faces left no doubt of their zeal to kill Lacedaemonians. Hailing them, he found the Messenians even more laconic than the Laconians. Only later, when the three boys returned with more supplies, did he learn that these forty men were all parentless bachelors, with no family to suffer retribution for their acts. Demosthenes assigned them the task of reinforcing the archers defending the barricade.

  The Athenians had arrived at Pylos dreading battle with the Lacedaemonians. Now that they had managed to make a fight inevitable, they wanted it to come as soon as possible. A hush of expectation came over the fort whenever a Peloponnesian ship set out across the bay; the place was abuzz when enemy troops showed themselves on the high ground of Sphacteria across the strait. But for another two days the enemy did nothing more than observe, probe, and blockade. Just two ships were enough to seal the northern channel; the southern one was far wider, but did not need to be physically blocked as much as guarded. The Peloponnesians stationed ten ships at a camp there, prepared to charge out and take broadside any Athenian vessels that attempted to enter.