The Isle of Stone

by Nicholas Nicastro

  “Isn’t this a time when we should be getting to know each other, with you on your way and me about to finish the Rearing? The time may come, you know, when we must serve together.”

  Antalcidas looked at him. Epitadas had grown up the handsomer of the brothers, with the tall frame and lean, quick features of the ideal Lacedaemonian warrior. He also had the longest beard—almost half a foot long—of any pregraduate he had ever seen. Even so, there was a look in his eyes, some mixture of fraternal admiration and jealousy, that struck Antalcidas as childlike still.

  “I think you must be thinking of what happened to Thibron,” Epitadas went on. “For what it is worth, I should give you what was due a long time ago, Brother—my thanks.”

  Surprising him, Epitadas then grasped his hand, and when that was done, pulled them together for an embrace. With this display Antalcidas lost his diffidence.

  “I wasn’t expecting your gratitude,” he said.

  “You have it anyway. And my confidence that we will always support each other, will we not?”

  “We will.”

  11.

  As difficult as Damatria’s younger years had been, her maturity was a succession of personal triumphs. In business she was indomitable: when she set her sights on acquiring or altering a piece of property, nothing could stop her. The Equals were as innocent as children about matters of finance, caring only about keeping score in the ways Lacedaemonians had for centuries. They had no conception of how the world had changed—of how the pressures of population and political unrest were filling Greece with thousands of unemployed mercenaries. Power in the very near future would not be measured in terms of who could mobilize the most citizens, but of who spent most wisely within the rising empire of money. The small sack of foreign staters she had once begrudged herself had now grown into a treasure chest bursting with cash.

  Her greatest competition in this came not from among the men, but from their wives. With the helots employed in the tasks left to wives of other cities, the good women of Sparta were free to sample many of the delights abjured by their dutiful husbands. As their spouses dined on bitter bread and pork blood, the wives grew plump on delicacies imported from the islands, Sicily, and beyond; while the men made do with tunics of crimson sackcloth, their women went around the markets in Egyptian linen and Persian silk. In their fortunate idleness, the wives had opportunity to learn much about the value of wealth.

  Damatria managed to enlarge her holdings at the expense of her neighbors, as well as acquire other estates in Messenia and on the island of Cythera. Her moneylending interests at the port attracted applicants from as far as Samos, until she owned a piece of virtually every ship plying the Aegean from Gytheion to Asia. Her gamble on the production of wheat had paid off so handsomely that she was providing bread for half the messes in the city. She even tried her hand, in partnership with Isidas, at bankrolling a four-horse chariot team for the games of the 85th Olympiad; in a suspicious decision, her team was awarded second place after crossing the line dead even with a chariot sponsored by none other than one of the Olympic judges. Barring scandal, whatever she put her mind to seemed destined for success.

  Yet as she grew wealthier Damatria grew less happy. With her husband under her strict control and his lover grown ugly under her burden, she had no enemies left to defeat. In the void that was left she had much time to consider the errors of her past ways—particularly the injustice she had done to her eldest son. For what had Antalcidas done to deserve the resentment she had heaped on him? With what, except the love of a devoted son, had he ever repaid her? Indeed, what was her rape next to the pain of a mother like poor Gyrtias, who had lost four sons not in glorious battle, but to disease? In the pit of the night, when she thought with fondness of the times when a small voice called out to her, she was filled with regret at how she had behaved. “If only you could come to me now, my dear baby!” she would say to her empty bedroom, her arms extended in the dark. But Antalcidas was gone then, on campaign beyond the mountains in Thyreatis, Doris, the Megarid, and the time when her self-reproach could mean anything to him was long past.

  Epitadas broke her heart in his own way. The fact that she had showered him with advantages had the effect of teaching him to expect her devotion. In those times when she was of no use to him—which were increasingly frequent—he seemed to regard her with the respect due to a used napkin. When she spoke to him, his face showed his impatience; when she sent him gifts of food he was known to give them away to helots and dogs. Salvaging her pride, she came to him and demanded the deference befitting a mother of Spartiates. Epitadas laughed, embraced her in a way that was faintly mocking, and asked what gifts she had brought him.

  And so, for different reasons, she could only rejoice at a distance at the success of her two sons. Thanks to her patronage, Epitadas was welcomed into the Spit Companions, and in the ensuing years became one of the most sought-after bachelors in the city. Antalcidas emerged as an able field commander in small engagements with Arcadians, Argives, and Phocians. He then surprised her by making a fine marriage with a Heraclid heiress named Andreia. This girl was too precious for her taste—all blond hair and girlish calves and a supercilious attitude—but Damatria cultivated her strenuously since their marriage in the hopes of another chance with Antalcidas. Iris oil from Ionia was a particular favorite of the girl’s. Damatria had just received another shipment of the stuff from Caria, packed in a darling little alabaster flask, when news reached the city that joined her to Andreia in a way she had not anticipated.

  Under normal circumstances, measures were taken to assure that brothers did not serve in the same units of the Spartan army. They had lately ended up together, though, when soldiers were chosen by lot for a special garrison duty. Now it appeared that the brothers were on an island, and furthermore that their garrison would be there for some time. Damatria turned to Dorcis’ old shipping maps to check the location. Was it a big island like Zacynthus or Leukas? A mere rock like little Prote? She sent her chamberlain back to the agora for more details. He returned an hour later with bad news: the Lacedaemonians were blockaded by a large Athenian fleet, with no supplies or reinforcements getting through. The sound of the island’s name, Sphacteria, suggested to Damatria the course of a blunt knife tearing a throat.

  IV

  The Terror

  1.

  The island’s appearance varied with the hours. Late in the afternoon it was a featureless undulation, low-slung and stealthy like a surfacing submarine contoured to evade detection. With the morning light at his back, the observer faced a two-color composition of hardscrabble and scrub green that, even from far across the bay, looked pitted from numberless insults. A string of low pinnacles formed a jagged line off the south end, culminating in a flat-topped butte—Little Sphacteria—that seemed to follow its consort like a lifeboat. Both islands are great concretions of marine detritus, alternately squeezed and lifted, their bodies rent by fissures, dimpled by sinkholes, tortured by the sea.

  The land bears scars of its own violent legacy. The western reaches of Messenia were once protected by three thousand foot limestone ramparts, including Sphacteria, more ancient than the gods. The wall was wracked along the fault lines that invested it, until it was finally breached. The soft, near-shore soils were then exposed to the assault of wind and water, resulting in the largest stretch of protected anchorage in Greece.

  The surface calm still hides the conflict of titanic forces. The commerce of centuries, including Athenian triremes, Turkish galleys, and modern excursion boats, has plied these waters oblivious to the dramatic, earthquake-riven landscapes beneath. Less than a mile from Sphacteria’s west coast the sea floor plunges to seven hundred feet; a few dozen miles farther out lies an abyss deep enough that if Mount Blanc were dropped inside, its summit would be submerged a depth of one thousand feet.

  On this particular day, inside a pointed archway punched through the mass of Little Sphacteria, the rising sun revealed the gleaming r
am of a warship. A good pair of eyes might have seen the white tunics of the ship’s senior crew atop the rock, looking north at the prison they’d made for the Lacedaemonians. A few moments later another trireme of the Athenian fleet rounded the island. It was one of two vessels Demosthenes kept in constant orbit around Sphacteria, traveling in opposite directions, day and night, in all weather. The blockade had been underway for a week.

  The trireme Terror arrived with Eurymedon’s rescue force from Zacynthus and alternated on blockade duty ever since. Over the eight hours of its watch it had circled the island in a counterclockwise direction, proceeding at a steady pace that brought it around twice. By the end of the last hour the rowers were tired: the blades of their oars no longer cleared the water by much on the backstroke, and the piper was forced to slow the cadence. The men were looking forward to a meal and a rest—though with the Peloponnesians in control of both the island and the mainland coast there was not much land for them to dry their hulls. The only safe spot was Demosthenes’ little stockade on the beach near the Sikia Channel. This had grown over the week into a busy little port, with more than fifty Athenian vessels lining up offshore, waiting their turns for their crews to pull out, eat, and snatch whatever sleep they could in the sand. The prolonged monotony took its toll: there were affirming murmurs all around when Patronices, the eldest of the oarsmen at fifty years old, spat from the starboard outrigger and grumbled, “I say we’ve got ourselves under siege, not the Lacedaemonians!”

  The mood was much the same as it had been in Athens two months earlier. The year’s campaign was the seventh consecutive summer of war against the Peloponnesians. The Lacedaemonian land army had not yet arrived in Attica that summer, but inevitably would come. The enemy would then settle in for a season of economic devastation—burning houses, upending crops, razing trees. The Athenians, meanwhile, would watch ruefully from the tops of their city walls as the works of their fathers went up in flames. That all this was stipulated in Pericles’ grand strategy—that the entire population of Attica would withdraw safely behind the city walls, supplied by the navy while the invincible Spartans raged outside—did little to relieve the general dejection. Pericles had, after all, not anticipated the outbreak of plague in the second year of the war that would kill so many thousands, including himself. Now all that was left of noble Pericles was his tomb, a few pretty buildings, and his strategy.

  The crowding inside the walls, and the threat of a new outbreak of plague, made it easy to recruit crews for the triremes. What else was there to do, except to take any opportunity to work their revenge against the enemy? And so it was with the usual combination of anticipation and unease that nearly seven thousand dispossessed citizens, resident aliens, and slaves took the oars of the fleet under Eurymedon.

  The sun cleared the mass of Mount Hymettos to reveal forty ships gathered off Piraeus. As the crews and captains sat with their heads bowed, and thousands more of their relatives gathered on the shore, a herald led them in prayers to Athena-the-Guardian, Enyalios, and the other gods of the city. At a signal, libations of wine in silver cups were poured in unison from the bows of every ship, and from golden bowls by the priests on land. At last the assembled citizens, ashore and afloat, sang in praise of Poseidon as Eurymedon ordered the vanguard to pull out to the cadence of the hymn. Tears standing on their cheeks, those left behind sang out as the voices of their fathers and brothers faded on the water, the line of their sails sinking into the mists around Aegina.

  The crew of the Terror had special incentive to reach the theater of war. Their town, Acharnae, was set in the plains northwest of the Cephisus river, six miles north of Athens. Nearly every summer for seven years their land had been sacked by the enemy. Having been evacuated within the walls of Athens, the Acharnians were in excellent position to witness the plumes of smoke rise from their homes, fields, and vineyards.

  The Lacedaemonians added insult to injury by making the place their preferred spot to camp for the season. Thanks to the proximity of the forests of Mount Parnes, Acharnae was a center for the production of charcoal; the particular sweet odor of burning coal was as familiar to Acharnian children as the scent of their mothers’ hair. It was therefore with particular bitterness that the exiles smelled the fruit of their labor on the wind from the Spartan campfires. But despite the wailing of the women and the young warriors’ demands to punish the invaders right away, the Athenian generals would allow no piecemeal attack. The frustration of the Acharnians made them the most hawkish of all, opposed to any accommodation with the enemy. The playwright Aristophanes exploited their almost pathological jingoism to the hilt in his comedies. The Acharnians, in return, thought little of wits like Aristophanes.

  Fortunately for the town’s partisans, the richest man in Acharnae, Philemon, son of Hippias, saw fit to spend ten thousand drachmas to outfit a warship. The Terror’s hull was of a typical trireme design, forty yards in length and five across at her widest. One hundred seventy rowers were packed inside in stacked triplets rising from near the keel to the outriggers built atop her bulwarks. The Terror was fast because she was unstable: like her fleetmates, she was fast in calm water but so slender abeam as to be a menace to her crew in rough seas. For this reason she hardly ever sailed out of sight of land, and spent her nights beached.

  The Terror was exceptional for certain other reasons. Philemon, as the vessel’s sponsor, was nominally its captain but in practice functioned more like poorly stowed ballast. His girth made it difficult for him to move unassisted even on land; at sea, where the proper distribution of weight was particularly important, Philemon seldom dared leave the little cabin he had built for himself on the top deck. If it had not been for his fear of the plague in Athens he would never had gone to sea at all. As it was he kept to his couch, diverting himself with plates of relish he could never keep down when the ship moved. When he was glimpsed, it was to empty his bucket. When the crew heard his voice, it was to make noises of authority from behind a curtain that the crew, over time, had learned to ignore.

  As poor a sailor as Philemon was, he was an excellent delegator. His hired captain, Xeuthes, son of Cratinus, was a veteran of a hundred actions from Cyprus to Sicily. Born within spitting distance of the strand at Munychia, his first memory was the spectacle of the Athenian navy smashing the Persians at Salamis. His father, Cratinus, piloted a trireme during the battle, and kept Xeuthes at his side through many of the campaigns that followed in Ionia and among the islands. As he came of age he became the living image of his father, down to the flat nose, sunblasted skin, and salt irremediably ingrained in his beard.

  With so many ships fitting out in Athens during those years, it was difficult to find a decent helmsman. Xeuthes scored a coup, then, when he brought aboard an old comrade, Sphaerus of Anaphlystus. This character was of such indeterminate antiquity that he called Xeuthes “sonny”; he seemed to have firsthand experience of Artemisium, a battle fought fifty-five years earlier. There was some concern all around when Sphaerus had to be physically led to the helmsman’s position on deck, between the two rudders mounted on either side of the hull. They had to guide his hands to the raked tillers as if he could see nothing at all.

  The oarsmen below decks were the hardest of the hard core of Acharnian patriots. Some, such as Dicaearchus, son of Erasinus, were rich men before the Lacedaemonians sacked their estates. Others, like Cleinias, son of Menanthus, and Timon, son of nobody-knows, were dirt poor laborers from the charcoal works to whom the rowers’ salary of one drachma a day was a considerable windfall. All were landlubbers from a place as distant from the sea as any in Attica. Yet together they constituted one of the best crews in the fleet, working together so well that they once almost beat the state flagship, Salaminia, from Piraeus to Aegina. This feat was all the more remarkable because the Terror’s gang of riffraff matched the Salaminia’s crew of professionals stroke for stroke.

  On their first trip around the Peloponnese they sailed in the company of nineteen other ship
s under the admiral Phormio. This voyage was as gratifying as any campaign the Acharnians had ever seen on land or sea—with the Peloponnesian ships afraid to engage them, the entire enemy coast was open to attack. The Athenians paused where they pleased to burn towns just as the Lacedaemonians did in Attica; when they landed their ships for the night they were free to liberate all the provisions they needed from nearby farms, including cattle and pigs. To the relief of the oarsmen—and the delight of Philemon—the men of the Terror ate better and got better air and water on campaign than they ever had in overcrowded, plague-ridden, bug-infested Athens.

  The only cloud on their horizon was Xeuthes’ mania for equalizing the oar power of the ship. It was not unusual for the port or starboard side to be stronger because, by chance, one or the other team of rowers had more strength or superior technique. Yet producing balanced teams was not as easy as simply commanding the oarsmen to swap benches. There was a clear heirarchy in the positions of the rowers, with those seated atop the outriggers, the so-called “beam men,” getting the most fresh air and the best view of the action outside. Below them were those in seats mounted on the middeck (the “deck men”), and lowest of all those laboring belowdecks, or the “hold men.” The deck men could see little of the outside world and depended on the beam men for guidance, but their position was still infinitely preferable to being in the lowest rank. With their benches mounted barely above water level, the hold men worked in a sunken stall of wood and flesh. If the ship was flooded they were least likely of all to escape with their lives. On a long voyage the atmosphere could be stifling, as they pitched blindly in their warrens, the stench of bilgewater rising from below while an unrelenting flow of sweat, urine, or worse flowed down from the crewmen above. To ask the beam man Patronices to exchange seats with a hold man like Timon was, therefore, as good as to invite Patronices to riot. In the end, Xeuthes had to match the power on each beam by exchanging men of equal rank only—a puzzle that took days to sort out.