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.
He walked out helmetless. The Messenians, although gripping their spears, observed him with what seemed like mild amusement. Protesilaus stood on the tallest rock, regarding Antalcidas with the kind of icy disdain that men reserved for things that were implacably polluting, like parricides or menstruating women. Antalcidas stared through the exile as if he wasn’t there.
He came within ten feet of Protesilaus-close enough for them to smell each other’s stink, but just out of spear range. The latter was beginning to wonder if this Spartiate had lost his mind. “What do we have here, boys?” he asked. “A hero?”
Doulos had collapsed at the foot of the outcrop. Examining him, Antalcidas found he had taken a spear thrust in the chest. By this time the effluent had turned a thick black, pulsing weakly through the clotted wound. Antalcidas waved aside the gnats that had gathered on his flesh. One of the insects flew in a nervous, tightening spiral that ended on Doulos’ closed left eye. The eyelid quivered, then opened. The helot fixed his gaze on Antalcidas-he was alive, though he showed no outward sign of recognizing his master. Antalcidas stripped off his cloak to protect him from the chill and the flies.
A Messenian came up to deliver Protesilaus a javelin. The commander took it, but did nothing. He was too engrossed in watching the spectacle before him-a Spartan taking the weight of a wounded helot on his noble back. Imagine it! Did this servant have some damning secret to tell? Was it a trick, or a joke? Was this a loyal soldier protecting state property? He handed the javelin back-he might as well let the Lacedaemonian go. There was nowhere for any of them to hide.
The Athenian archers kept shooting as Antalcidas reached the fort. His comrades looked at him warily; violating orders for the purposes of gaining eternal honor was one thing, but this stunt just embarrassed them all. He ignored them, placing Doulos in the lee of the tallest block he could find. Searching his body for other wounds, he discovered that Doulos had lost all the fingernails on his hands except one, which was caught by its root at a right angle from his blood-smeared thumb.
“You seem to have lost your cloak, my lord,” Doulos suddenly said. Antalcidas looked up to find his eyes open again. As he spoke, his voice was accompanied by a hiss of air from the hole in his chest. Antalcidas grasped his hand.
“You fool, it wasn’t your business to fight like that.”
The helot smiled until the pain seemed to grasp him, and he frowned.
“I’m sorry to miss your victory.”
Antalcidas squeezed his hand.
“You haven’t.”
In the sight of his brother and the gods, he bent down to kiss the helot on the lips. Then the Spartans watched, gaping, as he reached for his sword; Antalcidas covered Doulos’ eyes with his hand to shield him from the sight of the blade. When he sank it through his friend’s left breast, the heart’s last beats made the hilt tremble. For all the men Antalcidas had killed, it was something he had never noticed before.
12.
The Athenians pressed them again as the sun climbed and the breeze faded. As if by prior arrangement, they charged into the collapsed sections of the wall, forcing the defenders to rise up and expose their backs to the
