The Isle of Stone

by Nicholas Nicastro

  He sent for Leochares. The officer, who never seemed to stray far from his tent flap, arrived as Demosthenes reread the letter, and stood so quietly that the general was startled to look up and find him already there.

  “You called for me, sir?”

  Demosthenes looked into those gray eyes, so pale that they seemed to repel all light. How, he wondered, can a man stay so blanched after weeks of waiting on a beach?

  “The truce is off,” he said. “Prepare your men.”

  Leochares’ face twisted into an unfamiliar configuration—a smile. For the first time since news of his brothers’ deaths, his chance had come to kill Lacedaemonians. Demosthenes, perceiving this sudden enthusiasm, raised a finger in warning.

  “You know your orders. Accomplish your goals, and take no unnecessary chances. Control the Messenians!”

  The smile faded from Leochares’ lips, but not from his eyes.

  4.

  Using an old trick, the party kept to the stony patches of the trail to avoid raising dust. Leochares went in front, furrows of worry besetting his brow as he tried all at once to take in the view both near and far; behind him, a trio of Athenian peltasts—light infantry—marched with their helmets off and the bronze parts of their shield faces covered with burlap. Farther back a dozen Messenian exiles, likewise draped so their equipment would not glint in the sun, proceeded upcountry in reverent silence. For most of them, it was the first time they had walked free in the land of their ancestors.

  The night before, the trireme dropped them off behind the Lacedaemonian lines. The vessel had gone on an overcast night without lanterns or pipes, feeling its way up the coast to a landing place scouted the day before. The steersman, whom Leochares had known only from his muffled curses, was obliged to pick his way north, guided by nothing but the sound of the waves on the beach and the black profiles of the rocks against the somewhat lighter gray of the water. At the worst moment the forward oars to starboard crashed against something submerged—probably more rocks—and there was yelling as the boatswain ordered the blades raised. For several anxious moments the vessel floated free, every soul on it frozen in silence, as they waited for the enemy lookouts to raise the alarm. But they heard nothing.

  They went ashore a few miles behind the enemy positions north of old Pylos. About the location of the helot village that had sent supplies to the Athenians, Leochares could only guess: the boys who had first visited the stockade had never specified it, and in fact had forbidden the invaders from incriminating the villagers by contacting them. With the end of the truce all bets were off, however. To make mischief in Lacedaemon’s own backyard was an opportunity both rare and irresistible, now that Messenian exiles from Naupactus had arrived.

  The exiles were the descendants of the Messenian rebels who had, in the days of Cimon, held out against the Spartan army on Mount Ithome. Lately they had become little more than semi-civilized freebooters. They came by their own initiative in a ship of thirty oars, sporting shields, spears and cuirasses stripped from victims all around the Corinthian gulf. Their most valuable contribution lay not in their arms, however, but in their mouths: unlike the Athenians, they stood a chance of convincing the local helots to revolt. No self-respecting Messenian, after all, would believe promises made in the mincing dialect of Attic dandies. The exiles could speak to them in their native, barnyard Dorian. If they did manage to spark an uprising, and the unrest spread as it once had after the Great Earthquake, the Lacedaemonians would be so beset they would have to make peace on Athens’ terms.

  The party struck east through a scrubland of pine dwarfed by the breeze from the sea. As the water receded behind them, Leochares led them down to a stream bottom wet by a winding trickle and lined by oleanders. It was a fair guess that the helots sited their village near this rivulet; they would proceed along its bed until they found signs of a settlement. They had been walking a long time, though, when Leochares began to wonder just how far the Messenian boys could have lugged those sacks of meal and skins of wine.

  Doubling back, he searched for the village, risking detection by sticking his head up over the crest of the slope. They had backtracked almost to their landing place when he was rewarded at last by a cluster of thatched roofs. The helots had placed their houses within a grove of broad cypress to moderate wind and sun. Coming closer, Leochares made out stockpens and wagons parked at the margins of the settlement, and crops marching in neat rows toward the eastern highlands.

  He turned to the leader of the Messenian exiles, a rawboned giant with the charmingly Homeric name of Protesilaus. “We’ve found them. It’s up to you, now.”

  The other never took his eyes off the line of roofs ahead. “I think not,” was all he said.

  Leochares snorted at this rustic bloody-mindedness. Perhaps the only charming thing about Protesilaus was his name. But as he came closer to the village he understood the Messenian’s caution. Though the houses were intact, none of them showed smoke for cooking or cleaning. The black-faced sheep, which he thought would be driven up to pasture at that time of day, seemed to doze in their folds. And it seemed inconceivable that the Lacedaemonians would leave the place unguarded with the enemy so close by.

  He had almost reached the rail of the enclosure when he saw that the sheep were not asleep, and did not have black faces. With muzzles pressed against the earth, their wool was stained by puddles of their own congealed blood.

  “Take guarding positions!” commanded Leochares.

  They entered the village in a defensive circle, with shields up and visors down. In this way, with their noses assaulted by the stench of slaughtered livestock, they inspected the settlement, peering into every house and granary. The place was emptied of people in a manner that hinted at some sudden evacuation. There were water jugs set next to half-filled cauldrons, abandoned in midpouring, and half-clad spindles left in stoolside baskets, and axes stuck midway through logs. A clay figure of a warrior lay in the dust of one threshold, as if it had been dropped by a child roughly snatched away.

  “Stand down,” Leochares said at last, and pointed at one of the other Messenians whose name he had never learned. “You there—get up on that hill and keep watch.”

  Closer examination did nothing to lift the mystery. They found no bodies and no sign of a struggle. None of the houses were damaged by fire. The people had gone in a hurry, but someone had taken the time to cut the throats of the larger animals. He looked to Protesilaus, who remained silent but offered a rueful expression.

  “All right, then,” Leochares addressed him. “Do you know what happened here?”

  “What happened,” the Messenian replied with weariness, “is what always happens, and what you Athenians should have expected. The Spartans have cleared the villages.”

  “Cleared them all? Can they do that?” asked one of the peltasts.

  Protesilaus gazed pityingly at the man. He opened his mouth to say something, but closed it again, as if judging himself too perturbed to speak.

  Leochares led a more thorough examination of the village to see if any of the helots had hidden away or been forgotten. They found not a living soul in the whole place, and indeed discovered that every possible source of food, down to the last piglet, had been destroyed. He was at a loss to decide where to go next when the lookout cried that he had seen something.

  There was a large area of trampled grain a short distance to the east. When the lookout reported it, Leochares thought at first that someone must have camped there. But on investigation they found not a camp but a zone of disturbed soil with a mound in the center. It seemed that something had been buried underneath.

  It took only a few minutes digging with knives and swords to find the first helot body. Brushing away the soil, Leochares was looking into a rot-blackened face, the maggots congregated around the soft tissues of the eye. The body was of a beardless young male. Fighting the sickening effect of the stench, the Messenians pushed this first corpse aside and dug deeper through dirt thick
with the effluvia of the dead. The exiles were hip deep in their countrymen and standing on more when they pushed their spear butts down through the stinking mass.

  “It’s bodies all the way down,” said Leochares.

  “There’s a story the Messenians remember in times like this,” Protesilaus began, unprompted. “It was in my grandfather’s time, in a town just a few miles east of here. The great revolt had already swept through most of the country, but in this one place the helots had stayed on the land. The Spartiates came one day with a proposal: if the fittest of the men agreed to serve garrison duty along the Arcadian borders, the state would emancipate them and their families. With the prospect of seeing their sons free, and the pledge that they would not be forced to fight their countrymen, 211 of the strongest, brightest, most hopeful Messenians of the town agreed to serve terms of seven years.

  “The Lacedaemonians welcomed the helots into the army like long-lost brothers. All 211 were given crimson cloaks and shields, and led on a procession to make soldiers’ dedications at the local shrines. After this they were feasted in the town crossroads in full view of their families. The wives wept to see their husbands treated like men at last, instead of like animals. The sons of the elect went about boasting that their fathers were warriors in the Spartan army. The next day they were formed into platoons and paraded out of town. They said they were going to receive their training in Laconia. The echo of their voices singing the marching song, ‘Castor’s Air,’ was heard in the village for a long time after they were gone.

  “Not one of those 211 Messenians was ever seen again. Some say all were killed in the mountains and tossed into a chasm; others that they were locked in a pen and starved to death. What is very clear is this: the Lacedaemonians feared these men, and lured them out with challenges only the strongest would accept. And when they had taken an oath before the gods to serve their former masters loyally, these Spartans, these honorable and pious Spartans, had them killed in secret. Not a pinch of ash or a fragment of bone was left for their families to honor.”

  The Messenian turned to the peltast he had meant to speak to before. “You ask, can they do that? The Lacedaemonians have nothing if not long memories. If Fortune is with us, they have only evacuated—not killed—the women and children. But they’ll slaughter more than sheep to prevent another revolt.”

  Since a pyre would give away their presence, Leochares forbade the exiles to give the victims the proper rites. There were too many bodies, in any case, to do anything more than cover them up and consign them to Hades. That night, the party went upstream as far as they dared, mounting hills and climbing trees as occasion demanded, looking for any sign of human habitation. Over the entire expanse from the Messenian highlands to the sea, not a single torch was burning except in the billets of the Lacedaemonians—no hearths in the towns, no lamps in the farmhouses, not the campfire of a solitary shepherd. When they had gone their farthest east, Leochares thought he saw a knot of lights twinkling in the foothills; in the moments when the night air settled, the luminous mass sorted into a cluster of points too haphazard to be a military camp. Had the surviving helots all been banished to that place, as far as possible from the corrupting influence of the Athenians?

  The party had started on its way back when one of the pickets heard a noise to the south. He ordered all the exiles and peltasts to ground, signaling they should do nothing but hug the earth. More sounds: the snap of a fennel stalk, an exhalation that might have been the wind—or an outburst of whispered commands.

  Nobody trained for night fighting like the Spartans; rivals all over Greece had learned to concede the dark to them. The suspicion that they were being stalked robbed the Messenians of all confidence. They jabbered at each other, rattling their panoplies in their alarm. Even with the burlap covers, the din of their shields against the rocks became truly alarming. Leochares turned back at them.

  “Shut your traps you dogs! If you make me give away my position again—”

  He meant to leave the threat unspecified, but the exiles only laughed.

  “And you’ll do what?” said a voice behind him.

  Leochares responded in as deliberate a tone he could manage at a whisper: “I’ll hobble you and leave you here.”

  The party retreated to the sea by the light of a low crescent moon that cast faint raking shadows on the ground. The sight of their own tramping silhouettes had the effect of accelerating their pace, until they were careening at a run, stumbling over rocks and their own feet. As the sound of the water rose to meet them Leochares thought he heard the thud of bare knees against stone. Someone cursed in what seemed like a Dorian drawl.

  “They’re behind us!” a peltast cried, practically running up his commander’s back in his haste to escape.

  Leochares thought of pausing to make sure one of his Messenians had not fallen, but was distracted by the sight of the warship riding offshore. Leochares gave the recognition signal, three cracks of his spear shaft against his shield, and listened for the response. He heard the voice of the boatswain ring out in much-welcome Attic, and the rip of oar blades in the water as the ship pressed inshore. His men couldn’t wait: slinging their shields across their backs and dropping their spears, they hit the water en masse, reaching for the ship’s stem, for oar shafts, for anything they could lay their hands on.

  Then came the moment when Leochares, alone, watched from the beach as a knot of exiles accumulated on the ship’s ram—a ball of panicked men clinging there like bees swarming on a tree—and the captain hissed for them to take turns lest they upset the ship on her keel. It was a moment in which he thought he glimpsed the end of a war that was for so long unimaginable. Athens would be defeated.

  It was near dawn when they approached the stockade on the Sikia Channel. With distance from shadowy threats the men regained their composure; the captain had them divided in two groups now, squatting in balanced numbers along each rail. Casually, almost in boredom, Leochares counted the exiles and peltasts—and then, his alarm rising, counted them again.

  “We left with sixteen, didn’t we?” he asked Protesilaus.

  “Fifteen plus yourself,” came the answer, and after his eyes danced over the heads strung out behind him, the Messenian added, “Fourteen now. We’ve left someone behind, I think!”

  5.

  The Acharnians of the Terror took the oars the next day for their eighteenth circuit of Sphacteria—the most of any ship in the fleet. There were almost fifty other vessels at Demosthenes’ disposal, but after two months it was clear which crews were good at blockading and which not so good. On none of its previous trips had the Terror run aground, gotten rocks dropped on it, or lost rowers to oar shafts snapped back by submerged obstacles. Sphaerus, the steersman, had neither orbited the island in wide, lazy circles, nor taken undue chances coming in close. The captain, Xeuthes, had not sought undue shore privileges, but had beached his vessel only as much as necessary.

  Yet the effort was taking its toll on Philemon’s investment. The limited laying-up time had saturated the hull’s wood, causing leaks. What supplies they had shipped for repairs were long since gone, forcing the carpenters to beg for replacement blades, unsplit oar sleeves, and intact sheets from the rest of the fleet. “Don’t look, but here come the Acharnians again!” the other captains would complain; though the quality of their patriotism was well-known, the fact earned them no sympathy from their fleetmates. All of them would ultimately confront a long voyage home, very likely out of fair-sailing season, when—if ever—the accursed siege ended.

  Xeuthes was therefore in a foul mood as he watched the familiar serrations of the island slip by. He was tired of these waters and these rocks. He was tired of being tired. He had never lost a vessel in his time, but might yet see one rotted out from beneath him. And it was all on account of a pack of stubborn Lacedaemonians who refused to accept they were beaten! In his gloom he could imagine his enemies starving themselves, eating dirt, consuming their dead companions—going
to any extreme to outlast the summer, to see the Athenians scattered by the autumn storms. He envisioned them as grinning, cock-sure skeletons, taunting him from the beach as the Terror, down to one bank of patched oars, waddled away on its waterlogged strakes.

  Lately he was consumed by another peeve: with time ashore rationed among all the ships, he had been forced to take far too many meals afloat. No one was meant to eat on the water, he decided; there was a reason the gods had given mortals legs instead of flukes. Nor were men made to spend all their days packed like sprats in a jar, struggling to breathe in sweltering middecks or stockades strewn with filth. He summoned Stilbiades.

  “By the gods,” Xeuthes declared to the bosun, “we will eat our next meal on dry land!”

  “Sir?”

  “Stop the ship. Tell Sphaerus to find us a decent place to go ashore.”

  Stilbiades sucked in a breath like a drowning man breaking the surface at last. “But isn’t that against orders? The Spartans—”

  “Use your eyes, man! If we come ashore on this low section, we can see them coming from a long way off. I suspect they have no archers.”

  “I suspect you’re right,” the other replied, his wind-chapped face cracking into a grin. In fact, he longed for the Lacedaemonians to attack. Anything to force the issue at last.

  The men of the Terror went to the island in relays. They had very little food with them—just a few sacks of half-rotten onions and whatever remained of the rationed flour. Yet these seemed like a kingly repast to those privileged to recline ashore, free to stretch every limb beside a fine, fragrant, sleep-inducing pinewood campfire. Patronices, the beam man, lay dozing, his head cradled on a rock that, by the peace that shone from his face, might as well have been a silken pillow.

  “I wouldn’t get too comfortable,” Timon advised. “The longhairs will spot our smoke sooner or later.”

  “Let them come! They’ll learn a lesson they’ll never forget, coming between a sailor and his rest—”