The Isle of Stone

4.

Spartan warriors were among the best amateur podiatrists in Greece. This was because, notwithstanding Napoleon’s famous dictum, an army marched on its feet, not its stomach. Lacedaemonians therefore lavished a quantity of time on their soles and toes that was second only to that spent on their hair.

In this regard the topography of Sphacteria presented special problems. The Lacedaemonians had landed on the island with the bare minimum: spears, shields, and the clothes on their backs. The expectation had been that there would be plenty of time to supply them later. But when the Athenians turned the tables, the lack of certain equipment, such as nail files, became urgent. The island bristled with bramble fields and rocks that were either cracked or sculpted into razorlike corrugations. Slashed arches and bloody heels were epidemic; the irritation of broken, overgrown nails drove the soldiers to carve away at them with their sword points, causing as much damage as they relieved. Feet everywhere were caked with suppurating cuts that never had a chance to close; by night, their toes were covered with gnats that feasted on the blood.

The Lacedaemonians signaled their predicament by flashing messages on a polished shield to their superiors on the coast. Though little was getting through the Athenian blockade, Antalcidas pressed his brother to add a request for buskins. Epitadas refused; such a request would only disgrace him in the eyes of the generals. His estimate of Spartan empathy turned out to be dismally accurate: when the first helot swimmer got through from the mainland on the eighth day, he bore nothing-no food, no spare flints for fire-making-except a coded message. These dispatches, which looked like random marks at the edge of strips of parchment, were decoded by winding them around a wooden rod of a standard size. In this case Epitadas found the marks aligned into an aphorism: “Enemy skins make good buskins.”

If it ever rained on Sphacteria, Antalcidas saw no evidence of it. Dry leaves shed like the molt of reptiles from buckthorn and cistus; the grasses growing between the eruptions of rock bristled like broom heads. The only tolerable opportunity to chew thyme leaves was just after dawn, when the proportion of dew and salt spray was on the sweeter side. There were brambles in the hollows, and arbutus on the heights, and pine trees where the soil would take them. Here and there were a few spiny, spindly oaks, but these were dwarfed by the constant wind and offered little shade. And everywhere wafted the tendrils of broken spiderwebs, finding their way inevitably into eyes and mouths and beards. The spiders themselves seemed to have decamped for better quarters.

There were 420 Lacedaemonians on the island, including more than 200 Spartiates and an equal number of Nigh-Dwellers chosen by lot from all the battalions of the army. Helot retainers came to attend the citizens. This temporary population of more than six hundred made their base at an ancient redoubt on the northern summit. The fort lay in a shambles, the outline of its square tower barely discernible, its blocks stacked nowhere higher than six courses. Once, in the time of warlords and charioteers, it must have served as old King Nestor’s outpost against pirates. Now it barely cast a useful shadow.

There was a single source of water on Sphacteria, down on the flats in the center of the island. With the intervention of the Athenian fleet, Epitadas cut the water ration by half, and then halved it again as the surface of the water receded into the depths of the well. The food situation was dire: with no grain getting through and no significant game on the island, the troops were reduced to throwing rocks at birds, or scaling down the cliffs to collect eggs. The rocky soil begrudged them only a few insects.

The extreme exposure of their position, on a sunblasted rock with no heavy timber available and little soil to dig into, took its toll. A wet wind from the sea beset them at night; Epitadas forbade the setting of campfires lest the Athenians use them to guess their numbers. The men were forced to take what shelter they could on the lee sides of boulders, under shrubs, or curled up in shallow nests with their cloaks thrown over them. The sea spray reversed years of patient work on the Spartiates’ glossy locks, with the strands becoming so caked with salt that they refused to take the comb. The proud crimson of their uniforms began to fade to mottled gray.

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.