The Isle of Stone

by Nicholas Nicastro

  Antalcidas’s thoughts were far from these privations as he stood his watch. For what was the Rearing, after all, but to prepare him for just this situation? As he faced west, he concentrated instead on the golden lay of Andreia’s glory around the horizon of their bedclothes. Rising up next to her, he regarded the pool of sweat in the cleft of her neck, and as he tasted it, the scent of iris oil on her skin. From that close her laughter was an indistinct piping from far away. When he opened his eyes he realized that the pipes were coming from a trireme on patrol below him, and the taste of salt on his tongue from the trail of perspiration over his parted lips. The monotony of the siege had left him more than typically ruminative for a Spartiate.

  Most of the others assigned to the island were from age-classes much younger than his thirty-eight years. He knew many of them only by sight. The presence of Frog, clopping around the stones with a ridiculous pair of incised greaves, his beard neatly combed down to conceal his grotesque necklessness, came as an unwelcome surprise. Antalcidas, being constantly aware of the delicacy of his position, couldn’t afford to betray his real opinion of his former packmate; instead, he stood on a bluff over the bay and shared with him what in Sparta they called “intelligence,” but other Greeks called “gossip.” He learned that Beast and Redhead were with King Agis in Attica, hacking down orchards. Cheese had helped to found the garrison city of Heraclea-in-Trachis, to assure Peloponnesian control of the pass at Thermopylae. Rehash fell near Naupactus in the battle with Phormio’s fleet, while Gylippus, whom Antalcidas had once defeated at the Plane Stand, had distinguished himself on Zacynthus.

  “And where have you been?” asked Frog, apparently unable to resist letting the superiority of his mess membership show on his face.

  “The Isthmus. The Megarid. Attica once, under Archidamus. And you?”

  “The Argolid and Lesbos. Tell me, Stone, what do you think of serving under a younger man?”

  This was not an innocent question. Looking around, he noted that Frog asked it with no one else in earshot.

  “It is not for me to have an opinion.”

  “It is good that Epitadas invokes Enyalios,” said the other, “though I wonder if it is adequate for the occasion.”

  Frog removed his cap, fiddled with the material, and set it back on his swelled head. His opinion of serving under Antalcidas’ brother was clear enough: as his senior by one year, and one of the Spit Companions, he believed he deserved the command more than Epitadas. He continued, “Of course it is not your brother’s fault we are trapped here. I have no use for rumors like that. But this matter of the invocation . . . it is most serious to get such things right.”

  At dawn on the third day of the siege Epitadas convened an assembly of all the Lacedaemonians on the island. The Athenians were bold when wet, he told them, but would never challenge the Lacedaemonians to a contest of virtue on land. Their best chance to prevail, then, was to outlast the enemy:

  “Look around you!” he commanded. “Every inch of the coast, except for that little stretch near Koryphasion, is under our control. The Athenians can barely take their ships out of the water! They cannot resupply themselves from Messenia, which we own, so they must bring everything they need by sea. When foul weather comes they will have to withdraw—they cannot avoid it.”

  He paused to let this point sink in.

  “I keep hearing talk of trying to escape by swimming to the bay. Let no one deny it—you have made it obvious! But these waters are not the Eurotas; the currents are swift. The shortest swim is across the channel at the north end, where the Athenians would await you on the beaches. To the south it is at least a mile to land. The enemy navy is keeping its closest watch on just that narrowest stretch, and while you might dog paddle with the best of the hounds, I have not heard yet of a man who could outswim a ship!

  “The Athenians want us to panic. All we must do, though, is control this island until the fall storms come. That will be a matter of a few weeks . . . maybe less. Do you doubt that we can win a contest of endurance with the Athenians? Who is more prepared to live off the land than we are? It is our key advantage, that we are Lacedaemonians—the only advantage that we need, granted us in the wisdom of our elders. Go now! Stand your watches with every confidence that time is on our side! Let us prevail by being ourselves.”

  Epitadas gave daily speeches to fortify morale, but in Antalcidas’ view all that was unnecessary. As the sun climbed up to banish the ground mist from their sleeping holes, the young citizens around him looked to their commander with an innocence that verged on the bovine. The notion that their elders had not anticipated everything was inconceivable to them. All except for Frog, that is—he did not rise to stand his post but stayed behind with a troubled look on his face. Antalcidas paused to hear what he had to say.

  “Is something on your mind, elder?” Epitadas asked. He instilled the word “elder” with a certain mocking overemphasis.

  “We’ll need to do more than ‘be ourselves’ if they come after us with archers.”

  “They won’t. They have few places to land, and they don’t know our numbers. If we show ourselves all over the island, they’ll think we have thousands.”

  “I understand that. But in case of something unexpected, would it not make sense to prepare some cover? Trenches on the fortress hill?”

  Ill at ease, Epitadas shifted his eyes to Antalcidas. Frog was also nervous: some of the younger troops were lingering to hear the exchange, and it was not thought honorable to question the commander’s thinking so publicly.

  “The soil is too thin for trenches,” Antalcidas ventured.

  “Yes, it is thin,” agreed Epitadas. “And would we have Spartans cower in holes because of a few Athenians with bows? Your concern is worthwhile, elder, but it is a danger we need not face if we keep watch on the landing places.”

  Under the combined scrutiny of the two brothers and the gathering audience, Frog beat a tactical retreat. “Yes, of course! How wise. Mere worries should not distract us from a forward strategy.”

  With that, he turned and descended the hill with his greaves clanking. Epitadas stared after him, then cast an appreciative eye on Antalcidas. The latter held his gaze for a moment, then departed for his post on the west cliffs of the island. There would be time yet to grant that Frog had a point.

  5.

  The attendants of the Spartiates lacked the status of soldiers but bore some of the same responsibilities. After sleeping in cold, craggy holes beside their masters, they stood watches on windswept rocks. Their standard ration was one half a soldier’s dole, which corresponded to expending half their effort to find berries and insects for the Equals. Although all helots were, by law, considered as much enemies of the Spartan state as the Athenians, their loyalty was expected. To discourage any possibility of revolt, their social intercourse was regulated, with congregations of more than two helots in any one place forbidden on pain of flogging.

  Doulos had come to Antalcidas with no training as a shieldbearer. His tender hands and feet testified to a relatively soft existence on kitchen duty or prone on his master’s bed—Antalcidas had never asked which. He was ignorant of how to handle the panoply. Antalcidas had to show him how to use the cords pegged to the reverse of the shield to sling it across his back. Doulos responded by clapping his hands in childish delight and exclaiming, “At last I appreciate the scenes on certain red-figure wares! Especially kraters and cups by masters like Psiax, Makron, Euphronios. Recall Menelaus and Hector fighting over the fallen body of Euphorbos—Achilles and Ajax taking their ease over the gaming table, the shields slung over their shoulders! The leave-taking of armed Memnon. Yes, thank you for teaching me this, my lord!”

  “I showed you to save your strength on the march, you fool.”

  “Oh that—well of course. But a cramped arm is worth learning something about the noble arts of war, is it not?”

  Antalcidas turned away with the requisite scorn. Inwardly, he was amused by the boy’s com
bination of uselessness and expertise. Since the day he left the Rearing he had had trouble finding the will to put the lash to Doulos’ back. The thought of how he had tormented helots in his youth caused Antalcidas to flush with regret.

  Epitadas came to him after watching the discussion about the proper way to haul a shield. “The way your slave disputes with you,” he said, “sets a bad example.”

  “He’s my business,” replied Antalcidas.

  “Wrong, Brother. It’s all my business now.”

  The next day was overcast, with a solid dome of clouds stretching from Mount Mathion in the east to the slate gray edge of the western horizon. The respite from the sun made the twin aches of hunger and thirst seem more manageable; the prospect of rainfall filled the garrison with a subtle excitement. Meanwhile, a storm far out at sea sent high swells barreling into the island’s flank. To escape taking the waves broadside as they proceeded along the coast, the Athenians were forced to tack east and west. The pitching and rolling of their hulls was harrowing just to watch. When the Athenians tacked inshore, sentries standing downwind of them could detect the faint odor of vomit.

  During daylight the Lacedaemonians did their best to keep hidden. Overt maneuvers were restricted to dawn and day’s end, when the twilight hid their movements. On the ninth day of the blockade Antalcidas made his way at dusk to check their positions at the south end of the island. There he found the guard in that area, an under-thirty named Namertes, lying on his belly as he peered over the cliff’s edge. Antalcidas crept around: the boy was looking straight down on an Athenian trireme resting in the calm water of a deep rift in the rock. Hacking up a gob of phlegm—the lack of fresh water made spitting a challenge—Namertes let the wad gather on his lower lip for a long moment, then let it drop on the deck below. It hit an Athenian bowman in the back of his neck. Reaching back to wipe it, the man gazed at the sky as if checking for rain.

  Antalcidas cleared his throat. The young man leapt to attention.

  “Excuse me, elder. I didn’t hear you.”

  “Of course you didn’t. You were busy.”

  Namertes blushed. “I was watching the enemy.”

  “Speak plainly, boy! You were insulting him, though without much effect. And what if their archers reply by putting a bolt through your eye?”

  The other tossed his head as if to deny he could ever fall to something as womanly as an arrow. He was a handsome lad, with a firm, straight brow over deep-set eyes. The coating of dirt on the front of his tunic made him seem more the rambunctious schoolboy than a soldier.

  “I wanted to use something heavier, but I couldn’t manage it alone,” he said. He indicated a small boulder at his side. It was roughly spherical, about three feet in diameter, resting in a notch less than two yards from the edge of the precipice. Antalcidas looked from the boulder to the ship and back again. The thing probably weighed as much as five men, and if it were pushed over the side would drop something like a hundred feet to the sea. The idea intrigued him.

  “Who’s your platoon leader, son?”

  “Arcesus, son of Sphodrias.”

  “Of Amyclae?”

  “Of Limnae.”

  “I see.” Antalcidas dropped his shield and spear and threw the front of his cloak over his left shoulder. “Well, what are you waiting for? Are you going to help me?”

  Namertes smiled. By rocking the boulder back and forth they muscled it out of its notch, but because of its irregular shape they had to struggle to get it to roll farther. Once they forced it free, the partners had to reverse themselves to keep it from going over the side. When the rock was finally in position, Antalcidas wedged a flat stone behind it to stop it rolling backward. The trap was set now, a rude Sword of Damocles. Antalcidas peeked over the ledge at their target; the Athenian ship was backing water now, ready to resume its patrol. From the disposition of the figures on the top deck it seemed that they had neither seen nor heard the Lacedaemonians above them.

  “Looks like we’ve lost our chance for now.”

  “They’ll be back,” said Namertes. “I’ve been here five straight days and they come here every morning—one ship or another.”

  “Then I will see you this time tomorrow.”

  Antalcidas retrieved his equipment and walked away. Namertes gazed after him with admiration, but wiped it off his face when the other suddenly turned.

  “Do I have to remind you to keep this between us?”

  Antalcidas, whose enemies needed little encouragement to call him “Stone” to his face, stared into the younger man’s eyes.

  “I’ll say nothing,” pledged Namertes.

  6.

  In the months since he left on campaign he hadn’t thought much about home. He might have said it was because he was engrossed in fighting the war, but that would have been fooling himself. Demosthenes preferred not to think about Athens. He was visibly pained when her memory crossed his mind. To dwell on the place was to be reminded of what she had become over the course of seven disastrous years.

  He had once owned a town house pleasantly situated on the Hill of the Nymphs. A lifetime before, when the wind was right, he could sit in his parlor, sip good wine from a silver cup, and listen to the tinkling of the cymbals at the still-uncompleted Sanctuary of Hephaestus. When he couldn’t sleep, he need only look out his window and be lulled by the dimming of the cressets on the renovated Acropolis. On festival days, after a morning at the theater watching some offering from Sophocles or Aristarchus or Ion, he would round the sacred mount and stop in the marketplace to check the catch of the day. Sometimes he would pause, the fish under his arm, to laugh at a comic interview between Socrates and some self-important big dome. He was a nodding acquaintance of Pericles on his rounds of the city, though it was always sad to see the great man hounded by a train of unwashed, unemployed Furies, remonstrating with him as they hinted that a three-obol loan would fill their bellies nicely.

  He would sometimes linger too long at these errands, arriving home with the fish going stiff in its sack. Ianthe would give it to him then, a bolt of black hair loosed over her eye, wagging her head as she did at his irresponsibility, to be wasting his time listening to those fools downtown. Demosthenes smiled as he did when she railed, taking her soft face in his hands to cover it with kisses, and more kisses after that, until she would look at him and ask if he’d been drinking. He would exclaim, “Only the nectar of your gaze!” The fish landed on the table, the lovers in their room. Demosthenes’ smile soured on his lips as he remembered that table where, come the plague, he was destined to sit by his dear, dead Ianthe, moving neither to eat nor wash, for all the days it took to wring out the last of his tears.

  It was not the same city anymore. Thousands of the displaced had set up shanties in the narrow area between the north and south long walls to Piraeus. Their cooking fires sent up a haze of smoke that put the city under a pall thicker than usual; the enormous pits dug for their sewage overflowed with the winter rains, spreading their filth and foul odor over the roads. Other refugees found shelter where they could, in doorways and porticoes, laid up with reeking blankets in the stoas. Panhandlers waited around every corner, hands out, never sparing a harsh word for fellow citizens who hurried past, their heads buried in their cloaks. Demosthenes had once ascended the Acropolis to deposit a contract; on his way out, he saw a man show his regard for Pericles by squatting by his Maiden Temple, staining the freshly hewn marble with his shit.

  Worse than this physical degradation was the steady sapping of the people’s spirit. By unspoken mutual consent, the wars of the past had always been quick affairs; even the Great Wars against the Persians had been forced to a conclusion in only a few years. Now, in the face of this endless conflict, faces everywhere were stricken, unable to believe what their eyes told them. Lively public debate had been replaced with the useless clash of irreconcilable dogmas. Make peace! Stay the course! How dull it all was! The summer invasions had slipped Athens from her moorings, cutting her off from
the country around her, making the city seem no more than a vessel adrift, shorn of its oarbanks. To think that the rich used to scorn the simple Attic wines, the plain homegrown olives or figs that were now such sentimental luxuries! Under the circumstances, even the gods suffered: the loss of pilgrims from half of Greece made for empty seats in the theater during the Festival of Dionysus. Like many others, he could hardly remember how the Eleusinian Mysteries were conducted in peacetime, before the Lacedaemonians cut the way to the sanctuary. Instead, celebrants had to content themselves with an austere procession by sea, without the joy of the traditional roadside offerings and choruses. The unceasing obsession with security obliged the bodies of loved ones who died in summer—like his beloved Ianthe—to wander like shades in Hades. Instead of going to their rest, they were temporarily buried inside the walls, then exhumed and moved, half-corrupted, to the outside graveyards after the invaders were gone.

  Despite himself, Demosthenes sat in his little command tent on the beach at Pylos and brooded over these things. He was encouraged now only by the possibility that the Lacedaemonians would understand that they must make terms to save their men on Sphacteria. He had seen some reason lately to believe they would send emissaries. First, although it was an exhausting task, the blockade was working—little more than the occasional swimmer was reaching the island. Quite a few of those had been picked up, lugging behind them such meager supplies as poppy seeds fixed in blocks of solid honey, or sacks of un-shelled nuts. Others were found facedown in the bay, drowned. His spies in Messenia told him that the Peloponnesians on the mainland would not even launch their ships. This had forced the Spartans to offer freedom to any helot who reached the island with a boat; some of these might even have slipped through the screen at night or in foul weather. A few fishing boats were seen wrecked on the shore after thunderstorms. But these never seemed numerous enough to amount to a serious problem.