“We’ve found something you should see,” said the helot in a soft voice.
“Water?”
“Come and look.”
The helot work crew was above ground when Antalcidas arrived. All of them-and the few Spartiates who had bothered to come-stood around in pensive silence, looking down at something in the pit. Not a few seemed genuinely disturbed, as if some dire portent had manifested.
Antalcidas pushed his way to the front, grumbling at Doulos and his taste for trivialities. “What is it you’ve found now? More hairpins and tiny princesses…?”
His voice trailed off as he looked over the edge.
2.
They had unearthed a skull. Still only half-exposed, it was of titanic proportions, stretching as far from chin to crown as a man could reach with outstretched arms. Unlike any other skull Antalcidas had seen, it lacked forward- facing holes for the nose, but instead had two widely spaced, downward-facing nostrils at its base. What was most remarkable, though, was the creature’s single, cavernous eyehole, set right in the center of its flat face.
“By the gods…” he muttered.
“Other giants have been discovered this way,” explained Doulos. “There was the sea monster that washed up at Sounion in the time of Solon, and the griffin dug up near the mines at Laurion, and Pelops’ shoulder from the Trojan straits. But this is the first cyclops.”
“No, Cleomenes once spoke of giant’s bones he had seen in a dried-up riverbed in Achaea,” said Epitadas.
“A cyclops was once born to a sheep on a farm in Amyclae, though it didn’t live long,” ventured Frog. “Its remains are in the sanctuary there.”
Doulos shook his head. “I think we should make a distinction between those creatures who are meant to be titans, and those who only resemble them by some accident.”
Though Doulos had contradicted Frog, the latter was too distracted by the spectacle below to object. In this the Spartiates and the helots were united, for they were confronted here by a vestige of a superior world, peopled by gods and giants, that had passed away long before the age of ordinary men.
More remains turned up. There were upper arm bones the length of men’s legs, and ribs like the beams of roofs, and a line of vertebrae that, when fitted together, described the line of the cyclops’ great, humped back. To Doulos, the latrinelike odor of the soil that entombed the titan suggested that he must have perished feet-down in some dismal pit. Pieces of chopped vegetation, like the stems of hard reeds, were scattered through the viscid mass. The titan’s weapons-a pair of great, curved horns, possibly from some long-vanished line of colossal stags- were embedded in the mud nearby.
A further discovery suggested that the cyclops had died in battle. The tar-colored pelvis, wide enough for an armored man to wriggle through, was misshapen but intact; buried in its winglike extremity Doulos found a small, fine, flared point hewn from flawless, cream-colored flint. The point still had a bud of mastic stuck to its flat end, and to the mastic, the blackened stub of a wooden arrow shaft.
Frog extracted the point and held it up for the Lacedaemonians to see. Examining it solely as a piece of craft, Antalcidas recognized good work: the knapping scars were precise, symmetrical parabolas, all confidently struck; the surface of the flint still held a sheen that made it seem permanently wet. Yet what the find portended was troubling. The Lacedaemonians passed the arrowhead around, admiring the shining thing as they turned it over in their chapped hands, yet their faces showed no pleasure at all. For them, as for all Greeks, nothing appeared just by accident.
Frog said what the rest were thinking. “So we are not the first to fight on this island. And it seems that the bow decided the issue last time.”
“Maybe for this one it did,” replied Epitadas. “How can you be sure his comrades didn’t win the battle?”
“Because the body was left to rot.”
“Perhaps,” said Doulos. “But can we presume on how his kind treated their dead? Some people bury their dead in pits, with their weapons. The Scythians, for example.”
“Listen to him! When have you ever laid eyes on a Scythian grave, you dog?”
“Better to be a dog than a neckless serpent,” Antalcidas interjected.
“So you take a helot’s part against an Equal…?” bristled Frog, his hand resting on the hilt of his sword.
“Calm yourselves, now,” said Epitadas. “We can all agree that these are the remains of some ancient giant- there is no doubt of that. But what its fate means for us is not as clear. I say, then, that we not assume the worst.”
“And how do we know that, elder? Stuck here like pets of the Athenians-with not a single goat or sheep- nothing to offer the gods except milled flour and bugs! How do you say we ascertain their will?”
“Maybe Frog will offer himself on our behalf,” said Antalcidas.
There were subdued chuckles from somewhere deep in the crowd.
Frog drew himself up to his unimposing fullness of height. “How easy it is to joke when you hide behind your younger brother, Stone! But mark my words: we will all pay a price for ignoring this sign.”
It took the rest of that day and part of the next to finish extracting the giant’s bones. As the sun set on the second day Doulos was seen dragging the remains around the heights of Sphacteria, arranging them in their living order. All together they constituted a skeleton four times larger than a man’s. That such a creature could be brought down by arrows seemed incredible. Then again, such people as the Indians and the Carthaginians were reputed to hunt wild elephants with spear and bow. Antalcidas tried to imagine the scene-the cyclops wading across the narrow channel to the north end of the island, the sea only wetting him to its knees, its great, solitary eye sweeping the heights as it brandished those enormous ivory scimitars. Maddened by blood fever, the giant tops the crest in pursuit-and meets a hail of missiles from its painted, feathered prey. Dauntless, it rushes forward until, like Polyphemus in the caves of Acis, it is rendered helpless by a bolt to the eye…
Epitadas indulged Doulos’ curiosity for a while, but soon ordered him to get on with digging the well. For the moment the Athenians were still allowing food and water to get through. The air around the deliveries, though, had lately chilled: the warships were pressing within bow shot of the beach, and the enemy hoplites were more than watchful. Their purpose, it appeared, was to count the number of jars put ashore, in order to estimate the number of Lacedaemonians on the island. The truce was not made to last.
3.
A letter from Nicias reached Demosthenes. Withdrawing at once to his tent, the general broke the seal and scanned the lines, his expression darkening with each word: To Demosthenes, son of Alcisthenes, deme Colonus Agoraeus, General-select?geides, etc. etc., from his friend Nicias, son of Niceratus. The peace negotiations are over. The proposals of the Lacedaemonian envoys were not only rejected, but they were denied fair consideration by certain wrong-headed people. The emissaries themselves were most poorly treated. As they were escorted to the gates our mutual acquaintance-you know who-had them taken through one of the affected quarters of the city. While the plague itself has subsided for the present, the Spartans were given a good look at the looted houses. Meanwhile, they were jeered by the masses of exiled souls who have been forced by crowding to follow in death’s wake-
So the fools meant to ruin him. For if there was anything that could end a career faster than losing a battle outright, it was squandering the promise of an easy victory. Nicias was an honorable fellow, Demosthenes thought, but he had no head for Assembly politics; of course “certain wrong-headed people” had opposed the peace! If Demosthenes took the island, Cleon would share the glory of advocating the decisive stroke. If, on the other hand, the siege failed, Demosthenes would be finished and Cleon would still benefit, having forced a rival into retirement. It was rather a beautiful piece of gamesmanship, in fact; he would almost have believed that Cleon had a future as
