The Isle of Stone

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, revealing 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.

The Spartan mind did not flirt with regrets. It would have been easy for him to blame Epitadas and his flawed strategy. (The Athenians shifted to press en masse against Frog’s men, trying to overwhelm them there. The defenders shifted with them, and the tactic failed.) Doubts notwithstanding, Antalcidas had made a thousand choices since the beginning-choices of when to fight and when not, when to speak or stay silent, that had made him complicit in everything that followed. (Frog took an arrow in the calf. He tore it out and jabbed the bloody point into an Athenian’s neck.) These things he had done would make incomprehensible any change he might imagine now, pragmatic and sensible though it might be. True, there was many a Greek who would understand if he defied Epitadas now. Those Greeks were not Lacedaemonians, however, steeped in a tradition of loyalty that transcended reasonableness. To rule men and to be ruled: these were the things that were in the bones of every Spartan, well-born or half-helot. (An enemy peltast, bearing a wicker shield, pushed through the line.)

Before he was conscious of willing it, Antalcidas confronted the intruder. “You’re a brave man to come here with a shield made of sticks!” he told the Athenian. Timon, looking at this spattered, wild-eyed Spartan bristling with arrows, took fright and ran. Antalcidas brought him down with a slashing attack to the tendons in his leg. He then slaughtered Timon as he would an animal, making a small slit in his throat to let his blood pour on the ground. “For the glory of the goddess, an offering,” he said to the dying oarsman. “And for Doulos.”

And then, with the sounding of horns, the Athenians pulled back. After a few more arrows fell, the archers behind them also stopped shooting. The cooing of the wild pigeons in the cliffs rose again over the abrupt silence. Suddenly bereft of opponents, the Lacedaemonians stood around, bewildered; by all honest account the day was nearly lost for them, yet the enemy had flinched. “Spartans, we’ve broken their nerve!” proclaimed Frog, waving his sword above his head. His companions cheered, but Antalcidas didn’t believe it. Such a miracle could only be the work of Artemis Herself.

A more worldly explanation soon presented itself. A voice from behind the Athenian lines asked for a meeting between the captains of the two sides. It took a while for Antalcidas to register that they were calling for him, not Epitadas. As he went, Frog called out to him, saying, “Serve your men well by what you do, Antalcidas!”