The Isle of Stone

3.

It was the Terror’s turn on roving blockade the next day. After a four hour rest and a breakfast of tired, cankered onions, the crew was prepared to go out for a clockwise round. As they set oars to water, Xeuthes was surprised to hear Demosthenes request permission to come aboard.

“Thank you, Captain…” the general said as he wove a zigzag course on the unstable deck. Xeuthes extended a hand to steady him.

“If you’ll take my seat at the center, General, I think you’ll be more comfortable.”

“Of course,” replied Demosthenes, who made his career campaigning overseas but resented every minute he was forced to spend afloat. He looked at Sphaerus, the old pilot, and inclined his head at him, but got no response as the old man stared ahead.

Xeuthes settled in a crouching position at the ladderway just above Stilbiades. For the next four hours, as the piper sounded a cruising cadence and the swallows bowed and flitted in the cliffs, he had an opportunity to inspect the general as the general inspected the island.

Demosthenes spared few words as they circled that blasted shore. Instead, his sharp-beaked, birdlike features seemed to respond to every cut and thrust of Sphacteria’s profile. What he would never say, but what Xeuthes might have suspected, is that the disaster at Aetolia had taught the general how topography itself could be turned against him. Here, the island was a prison for the Lacedaemonians, but it was also a kind of fortress protecting them.

He scowled at the island’s highest ground to the north-a gray eminence of bare, deeply incised stone, as high as the crag of old Pylos across the strait. The enemy, however numerous they were, would adopt that mount as their defensive strong-hold. As the ship proceeded, there seemed precious few safe places to land troops: the shoreline was either too steep, or full of rocks worn by the swirling water into a riot of bowls, arches, ruts, and crags. The water seemed to leap out of the bay to lash the stone, traceries of silver-white filling the runnels in the backwash. Near the southeast flank the ground set down into a low, pebbly strand before sweeping up toward the flat-topped southern headland. That spot seemed a serviceable landing place, but as the island’s only real beach it would undoubtedly be guarded, and require his men to clamber over the scree to reach the interior.

The Terror threaded through the strait between the big island and Little Sphacteria. The general perked up as a towering cleft appeared in the island’s mass. It was not deep enough to count as a cavern, but it cut some distance inward, and the higher reaches of the cleft rose near to ground level above.

Demosthenes turned to Xeuthes for the first time in an hour. “If there’s a way to reach the surface through there, we could land without being seen.”

“The crews lie in that hollow to rest or make repairs,” said Xeuthes. “I’ve looked at the roof of it myself-there doesn’t seem to be any way up.”

“Take me closer.”

They were now pushing up the seaward side of the island. Prospects for a landing seemed even worse there, with swells from the Ionian Sea rolling in broadside against the rocks. The trireme rocked sickeningly from beam to beam, the leather oar sleeves of the lowest bank disappearing under the surface with each pitch. Xeuthes thought nothing of it, but Demosthenes had not been on open water since he first arrived at Pylos.

“If you focus your eyes on the horizon, sir, or on the island.”

“Yes, Captain, I know…”

His voice trailed off as he saw something appear on the heights. Following his gaze, Xeuthes saw what he did: a solitary figure standing above them, silhouetted against the ascending sun. He was carrying a spear and a shield, the insignia and the color of his cloak concealed in shadow. The face of the Lacedaemonian lookout was too far away to see, but Xeuthes could feel him staring down on the Terror, impassive, as stolidly immobile as a natural feature of the landscape.

“We see them like that sometimes,” said Xeuthes. “They come out to eye us, those fearless Spartans-but never within bow range.”

Demosthenes kept his eyes on the Lacedaemonian until he was hidden behind the brow of rising ground to the north.

“If you might, I’d like you to drop me off at the stockade before you make your second round.”