The Isle of Stone

1.

The Athenians kept up their double patrols around the island during the period of the truce. By this time, forty days into the siege, the constant sound of the pipes playing the cadence for the oarsmen had worked its way into the blood of the Spartans. It became the unconscious rhythm in their breathing and walking. They heard the sound in their dreams, and after the deliveries of food resumed-when they felt the need to squat again-they moved their bowels in time to it.

With the peace, Epitadas excused the Spartiates from guard duty. The under-thirties continued to stand their posts, while the helots were put to work looking for a new source of sweet water. The first problem-where to dig-was solved by a helot farmer with some experience as a dowser. Instead of a divining rod, he used a round pebble dropped in the back of a shield. He spent a morning pacing, plow-ox style, up and down the center of the island, as he propelled the pebble around the shield’s cave with gentle swirling movements. When the pebble at last lodged in the center, the helot declared that water lay beneath his feet. He was standing virtually at the top of the island’s highest peak, near the remains of Nestor’s fort.

“How far down?” Epitadas asked as he eyed the beaten soil.

“That, only the gods know.”

A gang of twenty helots were assigned to the digging, with Doulos taking it upon himself to lead them. As none of the Spartiates would risk blunting a sword among the rocks, the workers went at it with spear butts and bare hands. Pebbles and soil were hauled away in rucksacks and dumped on the cesspit. The Lacedaemonians, meanwhile, indulged their birthright to sit around and watch the helots work, all the while believing that they could do a superior job if their station didn’t preclude soiling their hands with anything but blood.

By the terms of the truce, the Peloponnesians were allowed to dispatch one unarmed vessel to the island each day. An Athenian warship could accompany it, but could carry no archers and had to remain offshore while the food and water were off-loaded on the little beach on the southeast quarter of the island. The Lacedaemonians could not come down to claim the supplies until the sailors who delivered them had returned to their ship. This no-contact condition had been hatched by Demosthenes, who realized that the Lacedaemonians might try to escape by secretly switching places with the supply crew. In truth, the notion that they would save their skins by impersonating seamen was so distasteful to the Spartiates that it was never entertained.

The menu was designed to discourage hoarding; the grain, usually barley, was sifted in advance so it spoiled if not used right away. Each Lacedaemonian also received a single piece of goat or lamb, which was delivered just at the edge of turning foul. The Athenians, anticipating that the enemy might try to use their rations of wine to preserve the meat, had their jars severely watered down. Despite these measures Epitadas ordered his men to put aside half their rations. To eat cankered, maggot-ridden meat and fungal grain every other day was a small price to pay to stretch their resources.

To aid preservation, one of the helots, a cook, suggested they obtain salt by evaporating seawater in the soldiers’ upturned shields. Epitadas and Frog, in a rare show of concord, agreed that using a hundred Lacedaemonian shields as salt pans had a vague unseemliness. Still, they did nothing to prevent it. It took days to collect enough salt to be useful.

After a full day of digging, Doulos’ team penetrated Sphacteria’s tough hide to a depth of three feet. Antalcidas squatted at the edge of the pit to watch the work: he saw that the shaft was oblong and irregular, having been dug around immovable boulders. The soil looked different the deeper they went, appearing darker, richer, like the loam of a proper garden.

“The dirt may appear that way,” said Doulos, scooping up a handful, “but it is an illusion due to the moisture in it. Look here as it is exposed…”

True enough, the little pile gave off a curl of steam as it lay in the sun. In a few moments it dried to the color of straw, as powdery and lifeless as the contents of a funeral jar.

“Does that mean water is close?” asked Antalcidas.

“It may.”

Soon they began to find things made by human hands: bronze dressing pins, broken and corroded; shattered terra-cotta roof tiles; tiny clay figures of women, rudely wrought, with profiles that resembled the letters? and?. When the dirt was rubbed off, the figures showed fine incised ponytails, breasts, priestly sashes. As the workmen handed them over, Doulos laid them on the ground with a care that promised he would rebury them all in due course. This reverence did not satisfy Frog.

“This mucking around is going to offend somebody,” he warned.

“Our ancestors are pleased to sacrifice in their children’s emergency,” replied Epitadas.

“The ancestors of helots?”

“The makers of these things,” Doulos interjected, “were born the brothers and sons of old King Nestor, in the time when Messenians and Lacedaemonians joined as partners to topple the city of Troy.”

“Who asked you, you little shit?” cried Frog. “Stone, you’d better shut your shieldbearer’s mouth or he’ll end up buried in that hole!”

Antalcidas smiled. “What he will say, I can no more predict than what comes out of you.”

Frog waved him off and clambered down the slope. Antalcidas, meanwhile, caught a gratified gleam in Epitadas’ eye as he turned away. It was the first hint of good humor he had seen on his brother in many weeks.

The next morning Antalcidas perched on an oblique ledge on the east side of the island. Sphacteria’s bay side, being more sheltered from the sea wind, supported a variety of weeds common in the mountains of Laconia: grayish asphodel in tiny phalanxes, bristling acanthus, a patch or two of wild garlic at his elbow. Looking at the bay, he was surprised at the water’s changeability-at the way it reflected the mood of the sky, at how he could anticipate a shift in the wind by watching the pattern of ripples in the distance. Like most natives of landlocked Sparta, he was naive to the attractions of the sea. When the breeze was in his face he could hear seals barking on the little island in the center of the bay. Dolphins paced the Athenian triremes as they made their rounds, breaching just ahead of the metal rams as if fascinated by their gleam.

He was startled to perceive Doulos crouching beside him.

“What is it?”

“We’ve found something you should see,” said the helot in a soft voice.

“Water?”

“Come and look.”

The helot work crew was above ground when Antalcidas arrived. All of them-and the few Spartiates who had bothered to come-stood around in pensive silence, looking down at something in the pit. Not a few seemed genuinely disturbed, as if some dire portent had manifested.

Antalcidas pushed his way to the front, grumbling at Doulos and his taste for trivialities. “What is it you’ve found now? More hairpins and tiny princesses…?”

His voice trailed off as he looked over the edge.