The Isle of Stone

by Nicholas Nicastro

  With almost a hundred well-born Spartiates lying dead below, it was already an expensive day. At that point, with more fighting ahead, it would have been unseemly to remind Epitadas of his misjudgments. Antalcidas made nothing of it, contributing only what he could to help secure the fort. At least a defense was feasible: with no way to approach the Spartan position except from the south, they could not be enveloped. The men guarding the helots also kept watch on the steep ground leading down to the Sikia Channel. So far the Athenians had made no attempt to land there, though they could easily have swum across the channel from Koryphasion.

  Meanwhile, against widely held expectation, the helots took scant pleasure in their masters’ difficulties. There was no cheering as they watched the disaster unfold before them, no uprising when the Spartans returned exhausted and fewer. Antalcidas caught Doulos’ eye as he walked by on inspection: the latter smiled, as if glad to see his master alive. Something in Antalcidas’ face caused his good feeling to fade, however. As a rule, Antalcidas was seldom aware of what expression was on his own face.

  In a rare feat of personal discipline, Frog also kept his tongue. He would not meet Epitadas’ eyes as the latter issued his orders for the defense of the fort; he was heard to mutter as he stalked between the old stones. Yet he made no outward challenge for the leadership. It was too late for that.

  Epitadas made a final inspection of the defenses. They were safe from arrows and infantry where the walls remained intact up to three courses. Their remaining front against the enemy was short enough to place one man every few paces. If the attackers managed to drive his men off the blocks and clamber over, he kept a reserve squad of his best fighters, including Antalcidas, to deal with them.

  Then they waited. From his vantage at the very top of the island, Antalcidas could look out at the Lacedaemonians on the other side of the bay. It was impossible they would not be aware of the Athenian attack, yet the allied ships remained stuck on the beach. Why?

  As if overhearing this question, Epitadas appeared at his side. “No use looking for help over there. The Peloponnesians are too terrified to come out.”

  “Then they should let our men take the oars.”

  Epitadas laughed. “They need more reason than a few trapped Spartans for them to risk their precious ships!”

  10.

  By nightfall, the Lacedaemonians were still in possession of the heights. Demosthenes had sent his men up in continuous waves, hoping to wear out the defenders by weight of numbers. The Lacedaemonians fended them off with spears, and if those broke, with swords. Some lost their swords too, and fought with shields or stones; most had spent so much time striking at metal armor that, for hours after, their hands vibrated like struck bells.

  At sundown Demosthenes called off the assault. He had already sacrificed more than a hundred men to inflict only a few enemy casualties. He couldn’t use his archers when his infantry attacked the fort, and when they weren’t attacking, Nestor’s tough old walls gave the Lacedaemonians cover.

  Cleon, unmussed and undaunted, demanded a night attack. Demosthenes restrained the temptation to laugh in his face, calmly explaining that the Spartans were masters of night fighting. “We have the advantage,” he said, “and so we must have the strength to be patient.”

  “Then forgive my ignorance, my dear Demosthenes, but how do you propose to supply five thousand men for a patient siege on a barren island?”

  Demosthenes dismissed him with a toss of his head. It was, however, the most perceptive question Cleon had asked since his arrival.

  The captain of the Messenian exiles, Protesilaus, came with an answer. Dressed in a set of armor that seemed thrown together from corpses found on a dozen battlefields, he towered over little Cleon, who had a reflexive mistrust of anyone he had to look up at. What the Messenian had to say, though, delighted him.

  “The Lacedaemonians need incentive to give up. Give me fifty archers and you’ll have their heads—or their surrender—by nightfall tomorrow.”

  “How do you propose to accomplish this?” asked Cleon.

  “We’ll circle around behind them. We can use that bunch of rocks to defend ourselves, then use the archers to make things hot for them.”

  Demosthenes glanced at Leochares, whom he understood to have some experience with the Messenian. But Leochares just shrugged.

  “By what path,” Demosthenes inquired, “do you think you’ll ‘circle around’?”

  “There is no path,” came the easy answer. “That’s why they won’t expect it. But we can scale around on the cliffs, just below where they can see us.”

  “In the dark? With equipment?”

  “It can be done. We’ve done it before.”

  “You’ve done it here?”

  “Not here. In Aetolia, Phocis, Achaea. Worse places.”

  “Perhaps. But as for my men, I won’t risk—”

  “Fifty archers are too many for you to defend,” interrupted Cleon. “Can you manage with twenty-five?”

  “If we must.”

  “Good. Then we expect to see you behind the fort by sunup tomorrow.”

  Protesilaus, exultant over his new prominence in the campaign, flew away to assemble his party. Demosthenes could hardly look at Cleon. He wanted to knock the party-favor helmet off his head, smack the ignorant smile from his lips. But instead, he had to content himself with sarcasm.

  “Yes, I see now how you trust my judgment,” he said.

  “I expect you want to hit me,” Cleon replied, smiling. “But what is there for us to lose? At most, we’re out a few archers and some bad-smelling pirates. Let him try.”

  Demosthenes’ face cracked into a grimace.

  Lost in the canyons, some of the Athenians tried to climb straight up the jagged walls. The ones that didn’t plunge to their deaths were picked off by the Aetolian slingers, who made a game of it. He could hear his men scream until they hit bottom; their bodies made a wet, popping sound as they struck, exploding like overfilled wineskins.

  Cleon clapped a reassuring arm around Demosthenes. “And don’t look so sick, my friend! It is not for our sake that we take risks, but for the People. Athens demands action!”

  11.

  The Athenians slept huddled together on the ground. Though the air was no colder than in the stockade or on the ships, it felt more chill on the island at night, as if something in the rock sucked the heat from their bodies. That the Spartans had survived there for months, without shelter or fire, earned them more credit in Xeuthes’ eyes than anything he’d seen them do on the battlefield.

  They awoke to a surprising commotion. Raising his head, Xeuthes saw a fight had broken out behind the Lacedaemonians. A raggedly dressed bunch, unmistakably Messenian, had taken up position on an outcrop at the very summit of the island. They were standing above the Spartans now, bringing clubs and swords down on them, as a platoon of shooting bowmen perched behind. Their volleys were disorganized, ugly—but none of that mattered. The Spartans huddled in the fort had no cover from them.

  The Athenians cheered. Xeuthes slapped the shoulder of the man nearest to him, who slapped him back. “Those dogs have done it!” he cried. “Better pack up your things, boys! We’ve spent our last night on this dunghill!”

  Antalcidas had also passed the night poorly, though not because of the cold. Something kept waking him up—something less than an overt sound, but more than a suspicion. He jerked awake at one point at a rustling he could not place. He woke again when he realized what it was: the whistle, familiar to all infantrymen, of a right arm being slipped among leather strap. It was the sound of a soldier slinging his shield across his back. Antalcidas looked around at the other Lacedaemonians. Most were asleep, and none were about to rig their shields for carrying. He made an examination of the ground between the fort and the enemy; the Athenians were quiet.

  He closed his eyes. In what seemed like the next moment, an uproar broke out all around him. Men were discovering arrows stuck in their bodies. Antalci
das searched the morning sky over the Athenians—but saw no volleys in the air. He turned to the man closest to him.

  “Where are they shooting from?” he demanded.

  The other, who was hiding with head under his shield, replied by pointing to the high outcrop behind the fort.

  The Messenians had come up near the place where the guards were watching the helots. The exiles were among them before anyone could raise an alarm—no one expected that the enemy would somehow bypass the fort. The guards were killed where they slept, before they could arm themselves. Most of the helots, equally surprised, ran down to the fort where their masters might protect them. The confusion of the moment—and the fact that the exiles spoke the same dialect as the Messenian helots—led the soldiers to mistake their servants for the enemy. Dozens were struck down by the half-asleep Spartans before Epitadas called a halt to the killing. When dawn broke, the Lacedaemonians, uncomprehending, stood among the bloody remains of their squires.

  But not all of the helots died in this way. A few, though as unarmed as newborn babes, tried to attack the Messenians as they emerged. The fighting was grim, with the helots using stones and fingernails against the exiles, who wondered if it was the Spartans themselves who had discovered them. When it was over the Messenians saw that it was not the Lacedaemonians they had slaughtered, but the very helots they had come to liberate. Protesilaus, puzzled, gazed pityingly at the faces of the fallen servants—his sweet, misguided countrymen. Then he ordered the archers to begin shooting into the fort.

  Antalcidas found his brother barking commands from behind a stone lintel tumbled on end. “Give me the reserves,” he told Epitadas, “and I’ll clear the Messenians for you.”

  “No, not now. The Athenians might attack from below.”

  “We have no cover here.”

  A soldier nearby, an under-thirty, took an arrow in the leg. The boy suffered it well, making nothing but a baleful frown as the point split his tibia. Epitadas rushed to him, tearing off some of his cloak to help staunch the bleeding.

  “Is this how Leonidas would have led his men?” pressed Antalcidas. “To have let them die at the hands of men with spindles?” And he used the old Dorian word for the bow, which was identical to the word for the tool helot women used to spin wool, to goad his brother.

  “The gods curse you—keep your position!” Epitadas shouted back at him. Then he closed his ears to anything more Antalcidas would say.

  The rest of the Lacedaemonians cast wary eyes on Antalcidas as he stalked around the fort, enraged and heedless of the arrows whistling down on him. After he did this for a time he came to where the bodies of the helots, killed in the first confused moments of the day, lay in a heap. Glancing idly at the faces there, his anger cleared long enough to remember Doulos.

  He examined each body in the pile. Some were, in fact, not quite dead, but there was no chance to save them. By the time he was satisfied Doulos was not among them, the sun was well up and the Athenians below were still standing around like spectators. This, he decided, would be his only opportunity to go out and retrieve the boy. It was an act he knew was reckless, incomprehensible to his fellows. He would do it nonetheless, because that day, his last on the island, he was determined to do something that was not for Epitadas, his family, or his city.

  He walked out helmetless. The Messenians, although gripping their spears, observed him with what seemed like mild amusement. Protesilaus stood on the tallest rock, regarding Antalcidas with the kind of icy disdain that men reserved for things that were implacably polluting, like parricides or menstruating women. Antalcidas stared through the exile as if he wasn’t there.

  He came within ten feet of Protesilaus—close enough for them to smell each other’s stink, but just out of spear range. The latter was beginning to wonder if this Spartiate had lost his mind. “What do we have here, boys?” he asked. “A hero?”

  Doulos had collapsed at the foot of the outcrop. Examining him, Antalcidas found he had taken a spear thrust in the chest. By this time the effluent had turned a thick black, pulsing weakly through the clotted wound. Antalcidas waved aside the gnats that had gathered on his flesh. One of the insects flew in a nervous, tightening spiral that ended on Doulos’ closed left eye. The eyelid quivered, then opened. The helot fixed his gaze on Antalcidas—he was alive, though he showed no outward sign of recognizing his master. Antalcidas stripped off his cloak to protect him from the chill and the flies.

  A Messenian came up to deliver Protesilaus a javelin. The commander took it, but did nothing. He was too engrossed in watching the spectacle before him—a Spartan taking the weight of a wounded helot on his noble back. Imagine it! Did this servant have some damning secret to tell? Was it a trick, or a joke? Was this a loyal soldier protecting state property? He handed the javelin back—he might as well let the Lacedaemonian go. There was nowhere for any of them to hide.

  The Athenian archers kept shooting as Antalcidas reached the fort. His comrades looked at him warily; violating orders for the purposes of gaining eternal honor was one thing, but this stunt just embarrassed them all. He ignored them, placing Doulos in the lee of the tallest block he could find. Searching his body for other wounds, he discovered that Doulos had lost all the fingernails on his hands except one, which was caught by its root at a right angle from his blood-smeared thumb.

  “You seem to have lost your cloak, my lord,” Doulos suddenly said. Antalcidas looked up to find his eyes open again. As he spoke, his voice was accompanied by a hiss of air from the hole in his chest. Antalcidas grasped his hand.

  “You fool, it wasn’t your business to fight like that.”

  The helot smiled until the pain seemed to grasp him, and he frowned.

  “I’m sorry to miss your victory.”

  Antalcidas squeezed his hand.

  “You haven’t.”

  In the sight of his brother and the gods, he bent down to kiss the helot on the lips. Then the Spartans watched, gaping, as he reached for his sword; Antalcidas covered Doulos’ eyes with his hand to shield him from the sight of the blade. When he sank it through his friend’s left breast, the heart’s last beats made the hilt tremble. For all the men Antalcidas had killed, it was something he had never noticed before.

  12.

  The Athenians pressed them again as the sun climbed and the breeze faded. As if by prior arrangement, they charged into the collapsed sections of the wall, forcing the defenders to rise up and expose their backs to the archers. Demosthenes forced his men to run risks: in the places where the Athenians filled the breaches they came within bow range themselves. Their helmets, which were of the archaic, closed style, sealed off their hearing and vision but protected them from arrows better than the Spartans’. No speeches were necessary to tell them how near the end lay. They fought that day with a hunger for victory that the Lacedaemonians had seldom encountered.

  Epitadas, Antalcidas, and Frog defended their posts as if the arrows were mere raindrops. Still, the pain and bleeding of multiple wounds slowed them down, until it felt as if their arms and legs belonged to others, so sluggishly did they seem to move. Antalcidas broke his spear; he swung the buttspike like a club, spraying himself with shards of bone as he caught an Athenian full in the face. He spat the splinters at the next man, who came at him with the expression of someone urgently trying to find a seat at the theater. Antalcidas flailed with no technique, wasting precious sweat on overswings, until the force of his exertion made his desiccated tongue split like the skin of a grape.

  He fought on as the boundaries of his vision seemed to collapse to a fog-fringed point. His arms still moved as they carried him to the rear; he watched as a circle of sky blue enlarged, broken now and then by the streaks of feathered shafts. The face of his brother appeared before him. Epitadas was no longer handsome—his eyes had sunken into bony wells, his cheek torn, corpuscular flesh within. His expression seemed to ask a wordless question—are you ready to lead? Antalcidas nodded. His brother bowed his head, reveali
ng the arrow in the back of his neck, lodged in such a way that he could not even rest on his back. Antalcidas helped him to his stomach, but dared not remove the arrow.

  When he was on his feet again the news spread through the fort—“Epitadas is wounded,” “Antalcidas leads us!” Frog looked at him with ample contempt. Passed over again for command, he seemed to make no distinction between the men who obstructed him. “Yes, Antalcidas leads,” he said. “How fortunate for Damatria and her wealth!” The struggle dragged on as before, with the Lacedaemonians dying in ones and twos, and the Athenians charging in inexhaustible supply, and the end always seeming near, until some Spartiate or under-thirty would, by some miraculous exertion, push the enemy out of the fort again.

  Beset from all points, their position was ideal for martyrdom. If Antalcidas issued no orders at all, the day would end as Epitadas envisioned. When the Athenians swarmed over the top of the hill, and the Spartans across the bay saw it, they would send emissaries to acknowledge defeat and collect the bodies. The funeral rites would be on the beach; their bones, still steaming from the pyre, would be shoveled into a mound that would become their common grave. In years to come, they would erect some marker on them, some leonine cenotaph, which would become one of Messenia’s “points of interest,” a featured item in some future travelogue. Epitadas himself would get a bronze statue on the acropolis of Sparta. The old men would bring their boys to see the figure, and wonder if the living man really had such a fine, square chin. And then they would turn and go about their lives, never having heard the name “Antalcidas” because it appeared nowhere on the inscription.