“Then forgive my ignorance, my dear Demosthenes, but how do you propose to supply five thousand men for a patient siege on a barren island?”
Demosthenes dismissed him with a toss of his head. It was, however, the most perceptive question Cleon had asked since his arrival.
The captain of the Messenian exiles, Protesilaus, came with an answer. Dressed in a set of armor that seemed thrown together from corpses found on a dozen battlefields, he towered over little Cleon, who had a reflexive mistrust of anyone he had to look up at. What the Messenian had to say, though, delighted him.
“The Lacedaemonians need incentive to give up. Give me fifty archers and you’ll have their heads-or their surrender-by nightfall tomorrow.”
“How do you propose to accomplish this?” asked Cleon.
“We’ll circle around behind them. We can use that bunch of rocks to defend ourselves, then use the archers to make things hot for them.”
Demosthenes glanced at Leochares, whom he understood to have some experience with the Messenian. But Leochares just shrugged.
“By what path,” Demosthenes inquired, “do you think you’ll ‘circle around’?”
“There is no path,” came the easy answer. “That’s why they won’t expect it. But we can scale around on the cliffs, just below where they can see us.”
“In the dark? With equipment?”
“It can be done. We’ve done it before.”
“You’ve done it here?”
“Not here. In Aetolia, Phocis, Achaea. Worse places.”
“Perhaps. But as for my men, I won’t risk-”
“Fifty archers are too many for you to defend,” interrupted Cleon. “Can you manage with twenty-five?”
“If we must.”
“Good. Then we expect to see you behind the fort by sunup tomorrow.”
Protesilaus, exultant over his new prominence in the campaign, flew away to assemble his party. Demosthenes could hardly look at Cleon. He wanted to knock the party-favor helmet off his head, smack the ignorant smile from his lips. But instead, he had to content himself with sarcasm.
“Yes, I see now how you trust my judgment,” he said.
“I expect you want to hit me,” Cleon replied, smiling. “But what is there for us to lose? At most, we’re out a few archers and some bad-smelling pirates. Let him try.”
Demosthenes’ face cracked into a grimace.
Lost in the canyons, some of the Athenians tried to climb straight up the jagged walls. The ones that didn’t plunge to their deaths were picked off by the Aetolian slingers, who made a game of it. He could hear his men scream until they hit bottom; their bodies made a wet, popping sound as they struck, exploding like overfilled wineskins.
Cleon clapped a reassuring arm around Demosthenes. “And don’t look so sick, my friend! It is not for our sake that we take risks, but for the People. Athens demands action!”
11.
The Athenians slept huddled together on the ground. Though the air was no colder than in the stockade or on the ships, it felt more chill on the island at night, as if something in the rock sucked the heat from their bodies. That the Spartans had survived there for months, without shelter or fire, earned them more credit in Xeuthes’ eyes than anything he’d seen them do on the battlefield.
They awoke to a surprising commotion. Raising his head, Xeuthes saw a fight had broken out behind the Lacedaemonians. A raggedly dressed bunch, unmistakably Messenian, had taken up position on an outcrop at the very summit of the island. They were standing above the Spartans now, bringing clubs and swords down on them, as a platoon of shooting bowmen perched behind. Their volleys were disorganized, ugly-but none of that mattered. The Spartans huddled in the fort had no cover from them.
The Athenians cheered. Xeuthes slapped the shoulder of the man nearest to him, who slapped him back. “Those dogs have done it!” he cried. “Better pack up your things, boys! We’ve spent our last night on this dunghill!”
Antalcidas had also passed the night poorly, though not because of the cold. Something kept waking him up-something less than an overt sound, but more than a suspicion. He jerked awake at one point at a rustling he could not place. He woke again when he realized what it was: the whistle, familiar to all infantrymen, of a right arm being slipped among leather strap. It was the sound of a soldier slinging his shield across his back. Antalcidas looked around at the other Lacedaemonians. Most were asleep, and none were about to rig their shields for carrying. He made an examination of the ground between the fort and the enemy; the Athenians were quiet.
He closed his eyes. In what seemed like the next moment, an uproar broke out all around him. Men were discovering arrows stuck in their bodies. Antalcidas searched the morning sky over the Athenians-but saw no volleys in the air. He turned to the man closest to him.
“Where are they shooting from?” he demanded.
The other, who was hiding with head under his shield, replied by pointing to the high outcrop behind the fort.
The Messenians had come up near the place where the guards were watching the helots. The exiles were among them before anyone could raise an alarm-no one expected that the enemy would somehow bypass the fort. The guards were killed where they slept, before they could arm themselves. Most of the helots, equally surprised, ran down to the fort where their masters might protect them. The confusion of the moment-and the fact that the exiles spoke the same dialect as the Messenian helots-led the soldiers to mistake their servants for the enemy. Dozens were struck down by the half-asleep Spartans before Epitadas called a halt to the killing. When dawn broke, the Lacedaemonians, uncomprehending, stood among the bloody remains of their squires.
But not all of the helots died in this way. A few, though as unarmed as newborn babes, tried to attack the Messenians as they emerged. The fighting was grim, with the helots using stones and fingernails against the exiles, who wondered if it was the Spartans themselves who had discovered them. When it was over the Messenians saw that it was not the Lacedaemonians they had slaughtered, but the very helots they had come to liberate. Protesilaus, puzzled, gazed pityingly at the faces of the fallen servants-his sweet, misguided countrymen. Then he ordered the archers to begin shooting into the fort.
Antalcidas found his brother barking commands from behind a stone lintel tumbled on end. “Give me the reserves,” he told Epitadas, “and I’ll clear the Messenians for you.”
“No, not now. The Athenians might attack from below.”
“We have no cover here.”
A soldier nearby, an under-thirty, took an arrow in the leg. The boy suffered it well, making nothing but a baleful frown as the point split his tibia. Epitadas rushed to him, tearing off some of his cloak to help staunch the bleeding.
“Is this how Leonidas would have led his men?” pressed Antalcidas. “To have let them die at the hands of men with spindles?” And he used the old Dorian word for the bow, which was identical to the word for the tool helot women used to spin wool, to goad his brother.
“The gods curse you-keep your position!” Epitadas shouted back at him. Then he closed his ears to anything more Antalcidas would say.
The rest of the Lacedaemonians cast wary eyes on Antalcidas as he stalked around the fort, enraged and heedless of the arrows whistling down on him. After he did this for a time he came to where the bodies of the helots, killed in the first confused moments of the day, lay in a heap. Glancing idly at the faces there, his anger cleared long enough to remember Doulos.
He examined each body in the pile. Some were, in fact, not quite dead, but there was no chance to save them. By the time he was satisfied Doulos was not among them, the sun was well up and the Athenians below were still standing around like spectators. This, he decided, would be his only opportunity to go out and retrieve the boy. It was an act he knew was reckless, incomprehensible to his fellows. He would do it nonetheless, because that day, his last on the island, he was determined to do something that was not for Epitadas, his family, or his city.