those sheepfuckers get there?!”
We drew up in a ravine, out of our wits with terror and clutching each other like children. “Are we turned round? How did they get on that side of us?” We tried to orient ourselves by the moon, but in the defile you couldn't tell which direction its light came from. Sounds! Men advancing in a body, from where we had just come. “It's them!” Three rangers scrambled over the crest. We unloaded everything at them.
“Athenians!” they shouted in fright.
We demanded the watchword.
They had forgot. So had we.
“By Zeus, are you Athenians?!”
“Yes, yes! Stop shooting!”
They were our countrymen. In a minute their main body scrambled over the rise, about a platoon; we located their lieutenant. Lion told of the enemy we had blundered into, immediately north.
“That's west.”
“It can't be. Look at the moon.”
“It's west, I tell you!”
“Then where's the fight?”
“It's over. We've lost.”
“Never!”
We bolted, seeking the battle. More men ahead. We formed fast, fearing the enemy. “Athena Protectress,” their point pair called.
The password! We countersigned. They hurried toward us. “By the gods,” our youngest advanced with relief, “what the hell's going on?” Their point plunged a nine-footer into his guts. More fell on us from the flank. We bowled through in terror.
We could not tell if they were the enemy, discovering our watchword, or our own mistaking us for the foe. One imperative drove us: to reach our own lines. It didn't matter if we were eviscerated one moment later, we must reunite with our countrymen. We were out of our minds with this necessity.
Forms ghosted past in the darkness, fleeing and advancing in all directions. They kept silent as we, each in dread of the other. A new fear had seized me. I was terrified that I would encounter my cousin and each, taking the other for the enemy, would slay the other.
When men passed I called out, “Simon!”
“Shut up!” Lion barked.
I couldn't.
“Simon! Is that you?”
“Have you lost your mind?”
At last we got out onto the flat. A breast-bursting hump of a mile carried us to the Labdalum fort, the first one that the rangers and shock troops had taken, what seemed like a lifetime past, this night. There were mobs everywhere: dead and wounded being borne rearward; masons and carpenters just now mounting the switchbacks of Euryalus; and scores of remnants like us, bunching up in terror and disorder. Troops streamed by, fleeing. Battling each other to get down the cliff face.
“What has happened?”
“Lost! All lost!”
“Hold up!” Lion advanced into the stream. “Rally, brothers!
Summon your courage!”
The sight of our countrymen in flight filled me with such shame that fortitude, or some simulacrum, reanimated. I took my place beside Lion.
“Have you found your head, Pommo?”
“Yes.”
“You scared the wits out of me.”
Men fled past us. We caught a few, shamed as we, and formed them into a front. I recognized one, Rabbit, who had fought as a shield with Telamon. When I clutched his arm, I saw he was in tears.
“I killed a man,” he cried.
“What?”
“Our own. One of ours.”
He was unhinged and begged me to cut his throat. “God help me, I couldn't see… I thought he was theirs.”
“Forget it, it's the dark. Make your stand.”
He bared his steel and set its point beneath his jaw.
“Form up!” I shouted at him. “Rabbit! Take your place!”
He grasped the hilt with both fists and jammed the blade up into his brain.
“Rabbit!”
He dropped like a cut puppet. Men gaped in horror. We could hear the enemy's paean.
“Hold!” Lion bawled to our comrades. “Hold where you stand.”
“Why?” cried one.
They ran.
We ran too.
XXII
You have heard recounted numberless times, Jason, the chronicle of the lunar eclipse which occurred a month succeeding the calamity on Epipolae, and the terror into which it plunged the fleet and army, coming as it did in the instant their vessels made ready to embark for safety. Men have censured Nicias as commander and indicted the troops themselves for yielding to such dread, superstition-spawned, at the hour of their deliverance, when they had at last set their purpose to abandon Syracuse and sail for home.
Of those who condemn us I say only: they weren't there. They weren't there to feel the dread that breathed in that hour, when the moon hid her face and its benediction from men's sight. I consider myself a man of practical usage, yet I, too, stood stricken at my post, staring skyward in consternation. I, too, turned about, unnerved and unmanned by this prodigy of heaven.
Nine thousand had been lost since Epipolae. In the panic at the cliffs, men had leapt and fallen by hundreds. I went out that first dawn with Lion, seeking our cousin. Thousands were still missing.
Many who had made it down off the Heights had lost their way seeking camp. Now with first light the Syracusan horse were making mince of them. At the base of the cliffs, dead and dying lay strewn for acres. They were all ours. Some had tumbled in the panic as thousands bunched up at the brink and each, in terror to reach safety, had dislodged another, spilling him in turn onto those picking their way down the switchbacks below. Many in despair had leapt of their own will, stripping armor and casting themselves to fate.
At the top of the cliffs prize parties of the foe now collected.
They called down, taunting. “You are so clever, Athenians, did you think you could fly?” Take a good look, the enemy vaunted, slinging severed limbs and even heads down onto the mounds of our slain. “This is the only way you will leave Sicily!”
Again in camp Telamon awaited us. He had found Simon, alive and unwounded, tending the sick. I dropped where I stood and slept the day round. Only four remained of our sixteen marines; it took five platoons to make one new one. I passed the day beside Pandora, writing widow letters. Her foreships had rotted through; she lay careened on the site the soldiers called Dog Beach, awaiting timbers.
The camp had become one sprawling mud hole, stinking to heaven. Our tents were pitched in the swamp where Gylippus' troops had driven us, fifty thousand kenneled in a bog narrower than the agora in Athens. Every step sank into sucking ooze. My bed was a door atop a flat of muck, which I shared with Lion and Splinter, taking
