“So the elders will treat with the Athenians for their release?”
“We have treated with them. There was a truce, but it has failed.”
“But won’t they try again?”
“The Athenians are infatuated with glory. The Gerousia can offer nothing more. We anticipate an attack soon.” He was blunt, but when he saw the effect of his words, he added, “You should prepare yourself.”
He watched her absorb this with the courage appropriate to a Spartan wife. Inwardly, he mused over the ancient predicament of woman, prone on the ground with breasts teeming, body replete with the seed of beautiful men fated to die. He reached out to tousle the hair of little Melitta, bright and careless. Yet how soon would she, too, suffer the perennial sorrow of her sex? The thought gave him sentimental pleasure, like the memory of some long-done hurt. He moved to leave.
“My husband-” she said, halting. He paused, looking at her. “Can you get a message to him for me?”
Zeuxippos believed such a thing to be impossible. But what harm would it do to indulge her?
“I can try, though I promise nothing.”
“Tell him-he has a son.”
The old man smiled. It is somewhat premature, he thought, but it was a good message. He then bid her good-bye with a touch of his staff to his brow.
On his way back, Zeuxippos sighted the lady Damatria coming the other direction with a harvest basket on her arm. Curious, he paused to watch her make her way down to the farmhouse. Andreia, struggling on the balls of her feet, rose to greet her. The younger woman said something to Damatria, who stared back, regarding. Andreia fell into the other’s arms, holding her so tightly that only their clothes distinguished daughter from elder. Zeuxippos sighed and thought how pretty, how reassuring, this sisterhood of shared grief. Among the Lacedaemonians, men were at war, boys growing, women weeping. May all be forever as it was!
As they embraced, the women thought of what each faced losing on the island. Damatria believed she could be forgiven for thinking of Epitadas, just as the other must worry for her beloved Antalcidas. Yet as Andreia wrung out tears on her shoulder, Damatria felt a certain awe in the trust she had earned. She had never favored women very much in her life, after all. There were few things in this world, she believed, that were more ignoble than woman. Yet now she found herself embracing another of her kind, close enough now to smell the dampness on her face, and feel both her trembling and the capsule of her womb, hard as a full wine sack, pressed against the pit of her abdomen.
Melitta, feeling left out, grasped the thighs of her mother and grandmother. Had he seen it, Zeuxippos would have approved the girl’s early taste of the portion of mortal females. But he was already gone, down the path to mess with the Spit Companions.
IX
The Starlings
1.
They heard the flock before they saw it. The sound was like that of a second sea on the landward side-a rhythmic rising and falling of sibilant waves washing the island. When Antalcidas poked his head from beneath his cloak he saw a flickering cloud conceal the dawn. As the starlings came nearer, he made out their individual forms in the mass. Each was a black, pointed, busy thing, fluttering in synchronized fashion with the whole. Of their number he could not guess; the Lacedaemonians, who had little use for figures above ten thousand, could only look at the immensity and think, “Many birds.”
The fire had burned for three days, scorching the island from end to end. The Spartans had lost no one to the flames, yet stood bereft of cover, pregnable, on a smoking spit of ash. The provisions they had hoarded from the truce were ruined, as were whatever shields, cloaks, and spears were left in the fire’s path. As if smelling their vulnerability, the enemy ships made ever tighter circles around the island. Every man, from the youngest under-thirty to Epitadas himself, understood that the Athenians could now gauge their exact numbers from the heights of old Pylos. An attack would come soon.
But the misfortune of the Lacedaemonians presented an opportunity for the birds. Approaching in their hundreds of thousands, the starlings broke into two cohorts-one making for the vertical cliffs on the lee shore, the other directly for the Spartan camp. Along the cliffs, they intruded into the nesting holes of the swallows and doves, stabbing at whatever moved inside. The mothers fled by thousands into the air, flying over the bay and wheeling around to protest their nestlings’ slaughter. But they were still outnumbered by the frantic invaders, who flew in patterns alternating between chaos and unity, tips of beaks wet with blood, feathers gleaming an iridescent purple-black like the carapaces of beetles.
“This kind of bird,” observed Doulos, “is rare so far south, over water.”
“A foul portent,” said Frog.
“Foul for the Athenians.”
The starlings at the top of the island came to feast on the seeds that littered the ground after fire. The flock descended in a broad wedge, crowding onto the ashes. The birds in the vanguard pecked as others flew over them from the back, rushing for the uneaten seeds a few inches ahead. In this way the mass resembled a liquid wave that rolled forward but never broke. Now and again they would come upon some insect or lizard baked in its tracks, and a knot of inky opponents would gather around the carcass, picking it apart as the great black wave rolled on, leaving them behind until the contestants had split their prize.
The Lacedaemonians said nothing as the birds worked their way down the slope. The visitors took wing at last as they reached a line of sterile boulders, forming themselves into a pliant cloud that seemed to flash white and black as the birds, in choral unison, alternately exposed dark backs and pale bellies. Rising, they merged with the other cohort ascending from the cliff. The reunited host formed itself into a twisting tower, then a sphere, then a flattened disk as it flitted in indecision. By whatever reason moved them, the birds finally went south. A moment later they were over the Athenian base on Little Sphacteria. A pair of birds dove toward it, trailed by a game few, but when the majority refused to follow, the deviators reversed course and rejoined the mass. The flock was far over the water, halfway toward a double-humped mountain on the shore, when Antalcidas lost sight of it.
2.
“Epitadas, I would speak with you,” said Frog as he planted his defiant squatness athwart the path. Epitadas, bending to the inevitable, turned an impassive face on the other; Frog had been insisting on yet another public confrontation since they had driven the enemy from the island, but had been frustrated so far. At least this time he chose a place away from the other men.
“I am concerned about the tactics we used against the Athenians from the ship,” he stated.
Epitadas replied, “Do you mean the tactics we used with such success?”
“If we must call it that. I call it a foretaste of disaster. The threat of their archers-you have not solved it.”
“I recall that they had archers last time.”
“They came with only a handful. But ask your brother, who killed more than his share: did the arrows slow him down? Ask him.”
Antalcidas stood nearby, blowing into his clenched hands. The days dawned colder now. He had been listening to the exchange between Epitadas and Frog, but chose this time to play the stolid Equal who responded to questions only when directly asked.
“Brother, were you bothered in the least by their arrows?”
“No.”
“He’s lying,” asserted Frog. “I saw him shifting his feet to avoid them. And did he not have an arrow stuck in his helmet?”