Frog’s detested voice suddenly called out again.
“By the gods, Antalcidas, must all the Spartans die for your vanity?”
Then Frog did the inconceivable: breaking cover before the arrows flew, he waved his arms and shouted, “The Lacedaemonians will bear their shields!” The words pierced Antalcidas deeper than any arrow. Yet he did nothing at first, preferring to believe that he had misheard. There was also the possibility, as sweet as the memory of Andreia’s face, that the Athenians would do them all the favor of shooting Frog down.
There was no snap of the bowstrings. Instead, the other Spartiates around Frog gave up too, and more around the fort, until the post dissolved in confusion, with some of the men wandering around the ruins and asking, “Have we surrendered?” and others not waiting for confirmation, but throwing up their hands unsolicited. Before long most of the garrison had stood up, exposed in a way that made the Athenians stare up at them, openmouthed.
From their position on the left, Xeuthes and Cleinias looked at each other, captain and oarsman united in mutual amazement. Neither had to ask if the other had seen the Lacedaemonians behave in such disorder, so ordinarily, in a set-piece battle. Was it not common knowledge that Spartans never raise their hands in surrender?
Antalcidas burst from his hiding place, spear leveled at no one in particular. “Don’t listen to that man!” he cried. “All of you put your hands down! I’ll kill the next man who disgraces us…!”
But Frog had already let the Athenian hoplites inside the fort. There was a sharp struggle, metal crunching against metal, as Antalcidas and a handful of other diehards clashed with them. As the sound reached Cleon, he became alarmed, thinking perhaps that the enemy had drawn the Athenians into a trap. Demosthenes, on the other hand, was serene-his troops were now pouring into the fort, and most of the Spartans had already thrown their spears to the ground. The end was foregone.
It was the sixteenth day since Cleon made his promise to the Assembly. If he got word north to Elis by the next evening, he could have runners deliver the news to the archons before his twenty days were up.
The solution presented itself. Of course he would not do anything as crude as display the heads of fallen Spartiates. Instead, he would take the platform with a round object wrapped in burlap. He would defy expectation by refusing the wreath, and refusing it again, until the cumulative buzz over what he carried hit a fever peak, and he tore the burlap cover away. The captured Lacedaemonian shield would blaze in the rising sun, shining as a Spartan shield ought, the great crimson lambda splashed like blood against the polished metal. He would hold it over his head for all the time it took for the waves of acclaim to roll through the Assembly, and wash over him as they chanted his name-“Cleon, CLEON, CLEON…” Victory would then wing her way down from the clouds, bearing a crown of olive leaves for setting upon his head. Nike had the face of the little brunette chippy from the Chersonese who served the relish at his drinking parties; her feathers were dark too, like raven’s wings, and her chiton thinner, almost like a whisper, pressed down so flat by the wind that it cratered within that little dimple at her midriff. The goddess would give him that same little fetching smile the slave gave him when she finished blowing on his stubby flute…
His assurance restored, he turned to Demosthenes.
“As I told you, dear Demosthenes,” he said, “the Lacedaemonians have seen it our way.”
16.
The 292 Lacedaemonian survivors, including 120 Spartiates, marched down the hill between the divided halves of Demosthenes’ army. Epitadas, who had been unconscious through the final assault, was carried to the shore on a litter rigged out of two spears and some sailcloth. Antalcidas went by his side, not looking at the Athenians around him. Since he had been the recalcitrant face of the Lacedaemonians earlier that day, the Athenians focused their scorn on him, staring with smug grins, whistling and hissing at him as they would to some down-at-heels tart in the street. In their shame, the Spartans marched with their shields reversed, crimson lambdas hidden.
Frog, who went behind, was still not satisfied with his day’s work. It struck him as unfair that Antalcidas would receive all the notoriety for leading the Spartans; the decision to surrender, after all, was his. His only gratification came late in the day, when he was about to join Altalcidas and Epitadas in the hold of the fleet’s fastest ship, the Terror. Just before he ducked into his new prison, Patronices, the deck man, shouted out an impertinent question to him.
“Capitulators! Shall we suppose your dead comrades are the real Spartans?”
Frog stopped, and with barely a moment to consider an answer, replied, “Athenian arrows would be wiser than the Athenians, if they could choose to fall on good men instead of cowards.”
Frog and six others were shackled to separate posts in the bowels of the ship. The holds of Athenian triremes were not capacious, with the most clearance available atop the keel, between the rows of the bottommost oarsmen. If there was a place on a ship more disagreeable than the seats of the hold men, it was where the Lacedaemonians were imprisoned: a mere crawl space, with no more than three feet of headroom, among stinking blocks of cobble ballast and the unkempt feet of sixty exhausted, sweating men. Nor were their miseries private ones, with those in the lowest stratum of Athenian society able to peep down between the thwarts at the conceited Spartans, free to try out all the insults their frustration had inspired over seven years of war.
The hold rode well below the waterline, so Antalcidas could see nothing of the outside world but the glow of reflected daylight from between the oarsmen’s seats. A scratching sound along the keel told him when the ship reached ground at Koryphasion. The Athenian oarsmen, who never seemed to shut their mouths, complained about the miserable meal they were about to eat, as they disembarked by sections.
From his vantage in the semidarkness, Antalcidas watched as an Athenian doctor came down the ladder. When they learned that the original commander of the Spartans was not dead but only wounded, the Athenians spared no effort in making certain their adversary reached Athens alive. Cleon’s personal doctor had extracted the arrow and cleaned the wound before they left the island. When he came down to inspect Epitadas’ dressings, Antalcidas addressed him, saying, “You would be better off letting him die, friend.”
Scratching his bearded neck, the doctor spared him barely a glance before vanishing up the ladder. His charge, apparently, did not include tending the wounds of the other Lacedaemonians.
The Athenians seemed to be in a hurry. After only a few hours the hull was refloated and the oarsmen, only half-rested, filed back to their seats. There was much noise on the deck as the masts were stepped and sails bent on them. Soon they set off again; the ship adopted a rocking motion that suggested they had entered open water. It was then that Stilbiades, the bosun, served the prisoners their first meal in days: a husk of bread and one half-blackened onion for each man, and a sip of water from a common canteen. As Frog’s lips touched the water before Antalcidas’, the latter refused to touch it, though he was cotton-mouthed with thirst.
Frog produced a bitter smile. “So I see we should add spitefulness to Stone’s list of faults.”
Antalcidas ignored him. He had nothing to offer tremblers but his scorn.
Epitadas roused sometime during the first day at sea. He tested his shackles, then took a long look at his new surroundings.
“Is this Hades?” he asked.
“Not yet, Brother.”
He stared in Antalcidas’ direction, his expression blank, as if he could not recognize the figure sitting there. “You sound like my brother,” he said. “But that can’t be true. Antalcidas affirmed his loyalty to his family upon his honor as a Spartiate, and so must be among the virtuous dead in battle, not chained like a dog.”