Goatsong by Tom Holt

Author:Tom Holt
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9789085241522
Publisher: For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Published: 1988-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

FOUR

The next day, heralds from the Syracusans came to announce a truce for collecting our dead without hindrance, according to the custom. They also thanked us for the vast amount of armour and weaponry which we had donated to the Syracusan war effort when we ran away; if we had any more, they said, they would be delighted to receive it, for although they now had more than enough for their own needs, including the construction of the appropriate trophies, they could always sell any surplus to their allies the Spartans.

I think the disaster at Epipolae must have turned Nicias’ brain for a while. For Demosthenes, who was no fool, saw that we no longer had any hope at all of capturing Syracuse, and that the best possible thing for us to do would be to go home while we still could. The Syracusans were clearly feeling quite unbearably cocky after their victory, and would probably make some attempt to fight us at sea, where we still had a theoretical superiority. But Nicias would have none of it; he said that he wasn’t going home without orders from Athens, since he would undoubtedly be tried and executed as soon as he set foot in the City and he was too old and too tired to defect to Sparta. Besides, he had reliable information from Syracuse that the oligarchic faction there (which was still quite strong) was seriously alarmed at the Democrats’ ascendancy after the victory, and would be prepared to help us in any way we wanted. How Nicias had heard this, given that it was only a matter of hours since the battle, nobody knew; but he was adamant that he wasn’t leading his army back, although Demosthenes could do what he liked. The two of them argued away for hours, with their junior colleagues Menander and Eurymedon contributing such helpful comments as ‘There are good arguments on both sides’ and ‘Don’t ask me, you deal with it’.

So we stayed where we were, and whiled away the time by collecting and burying our dead. That was a miserable business, as you can imagine, but for some reason it distressed me far less than it did my fellow soldiers. I did keep well away from the spot where Little Zeus was killed, but otherwise I just got on with the job, which was very hard work, as anyone who has done it will testify. But I do remember that instead of the rather splendid and dignified ceremony which the Athenians generally use when burying their fallen comrades, we simply dug a series of big round pits like granaries and pitched the bodies in; and that we hadn’t dug them deep enough, and that in the end we were so sick of the thing that we couldn’t be bothered to dig an extra pit to accommodate the left-over bodies, so we just crammed them in as best we could and covered them over with cairns of stones to keep the dogs off.

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