not?”
Antalcidas turned away with the requisite scorn. Inwardly, he was amused by the boy’s combination of uselessness and expertise. Since the day he left the Rearing he had had trouble finding the will to put the lash to Doulos’ back. The thought of how he had tormented helots in his youth caused Antalcidas to flush with regret.
Epitadas came to him after watching the discussion about the proper way to haul a shield. “The way your slave disputes with you,” he said, “sets a bad example.”
“He’s my business,” replied Antalcidas.
“Wrong, Brother. It’s all my business now.”
The next day was overcast, with a solid dome of clouds stretching from Mount Mathion in the east to the slate gray edge of the western horizon. The respite from the sun made the twin aches of hunger and thirst seem more manageable; the prospect of rainfall filled the garrison with a subtle excitement. Meanwhile, a storm far out at sea sent high swells barreling into the island’s flank. To escape taking the waves broadside as they proceeded along the coast, the Athenians were forced to tack east and west. The pitching and rolling of their hulls was harrowing just to watch. When the Athenians tacked inshore, sentries standing downwind of them could detect the faint odor of vomit.
During daylight the Lacedaemonians did their best to keep hidden. Overt maneuvers were restricted to dawn and day’s end, when the twilight hid their movements. On the ninth day of the blockade Antalcidas made his way at dusk to check their positions at the south end of the island. There he found the guard in that area, an under-thirty named Namertes, lying on his belly as he peered over the cliff’s edge. Antalcidas crept around: the boy was looking straight down on an Athenian trireme resting in the calm water of a deep rift in the rock. Hacking up a gob of phlegm-the lack of fresh water made spitting a challenge-Namertes let the wad gather on his lower lip for a long moment, then let it drop on the deck below. It hit an Athenian bowman in the back of his neck. Reaching back to wipe it, the man gazed at the sky as if checking for rain.
Antalcidas cleared his throat. The young man leapt to attention.
“Excuse me, elder. I didn’t hear you.”
“Of course you didn’t. You were busy.”
Namertes blushed. “I was watching the enemy.”
“Speak plainly, boy! You were insulting him, though without much effect. And what if their archers reply by putting a bolt through your eye?”
The other tossed his head as if to deny he could ever fall to something as womanly as an arrow. He was a handsome lad, with a firm, straight brow over deep-set eyes. The coating of dirt on the front of his tunic made him seem more the rambunctious schoolboy than a soldier.
“I wanted to use something heavier, but I couldn’t manage it alone,” he said. He indicated a small boulder at his side. It was roughly spherical, about three feet in diameter, resting in a notch less than two yards from the edge of the precipice. Antalcidas looked from the boulder to the ship and back again. The thing probably weighed as much as five men, and if it were pushed over the side would drop something like a hundred feet to the sea. The idea intrigued him.
“Who’s your platoon leader, son?”
“Arcesus, son of Sphodrias.”
“Of Amyclae?”
“Of Limnae.”
“I see.” Antalcidas dropped his shield and spear and threw the front of his cloak over his left shoulder. “Well, what are you waiting for? Are you going to help me?”
Namertes smiled. By rocking the boulder back and forth they muscled it out of its notch, but because of its irregular shape they had to struggle to get it to roll farther. Once they forced it free, the partners had to reverse themselves to keep it from going over the side. When the rock was finally in position, Antalcidas wedged a flat stone behind it to stop it rolling backward. The trap was set now, a rude Sword of Damocles. Antalcidas peeked over the ledge at their target; the Athenian ship was backing water now, ready to resume its patrol. From the disposition of the figures on the top deck it seemed that they had neither seen nor heard the Lacedaemonians above them.
“Looks like we’ve lost our chance for now.”
“They’ll be back,” said Namertes. “I’ve been here five straight days and they come here every morning-one ship or another.”
“Then I will see you this time tomorrow.”
Antalcidas retrieved his equipment and walked away. Namertes gazed after him with admiration, but wiped it off his face when the other suddenly turned.
“Do I have to remind you to keep this between us?”
Antalcidas, whose enemies needed little encouragement to call him “Stone” to his face, stared into the younger man’s eyes.
“I’ll say nothing,” pledged Namertes.
6.
In the months since he left on campaign he hadn’t thought much about home. He might have said it was because he was engrossed in fighting the war, but that would have been fooling himself. Demosthenes preferred not to think about Athens. He was visibly pained when her memory crossed his mind. To dwell on the place was to be reminded of what she had become over the course of seven disastrous years.
He had once owned a town house pleasantly situated on the Hill of the Nymphs. A lifetime before, when the wind was right, he could sit in his parlor, sip good wine from a silver cup, and listen to the tinkling of the cymbals at the still-uncompleted Sanctuary of Hephaestus. When he couldn’t sleep, he need only look out his window and be lulled by the dimming of the cressets on the renovated Acropolis. On festival days, after a morning at the theater watching some offering from Sophocles or Aristarchus or Ion, he would round the sacred mount and stop in the marketplace to check the catch of the day. Sometimes he would pause, the fish under his arm, to laugh at a comic interview between Socrates and some self-important big dome. He was a nodding acquaintance of Pericles on his rounds of the city, though it was always sad to see the great man hounded by a train of unwashed, unemployed Furies, remonstrating with him as they hinted that a three-obol loan would fill their bellies nicely.
He would sometimes linger too long at these errands, arriving home with the fish going stiff in its sack. Ianthe would give it to him then, a bolt of black hair loosed over her eye, wagging her head as she did at his irresponsibility, to be wasting his time listening to those fools downtown. Demosthenes smiled as he did when she railed, taking her soft face in his hands to cover it with kisses, and more kisses after that, until she would look at him and ask if he’d been drinking. He would exclaim, “Only the nectar of your gaze!” The fish landed on the table, the lovers in their room. Demosthenes’ smile soured on his lips as he remembered that table where, come the plague, he was destined to sit by his dear, dead Ianthe, moving neither to eat nor wash, for all the days it took to wring out the last of his tears.
It was not the same city anymore. Thousands of the displaced had set up shanties in the narrow area between the north and south long walls to Piraeus. Their cooking fires sent up a haze of smoke that put the city under a pall thicker than usual; the enormous pits dug for their sewage overflowed with the winter rains, spreading their filth and foul odor over the roads. Other refugees found shelter where they could, in doorways and porticoes, laid up with reeking blankets in the stoas. Panhandlers waited around every corner, hands out, never sparing a harsh word for fellow citizens who hurried past, their heads buried in their cloaks. Demosthenes had once ascended the Acropolis to deposit a contract; on his way out, he saw a man show his regard for Pericles by squatting by his Maiden Temple, staining the freshly hewn marble with his shit.
Worse than this physical degradation was the steady sapping of the people’s spirit. By unspoken mutual consent, the wars of the past had always been quick affairs; even the Great Wars against the Persians had been forced to a conclusion in only a few years. Now, in the face of this endless conflict, faces everywhere were stricken, unable to believe what their eyes told them. Lively public debate had been replaced with the useless clash of irreconcilable dogmas. Make peace! Stay the course! How dull it all was! The summer invasions had slipped Athens
