The Isle of Stone by Nicastro Nicholas

Author:Nicastro, Nicholas [Nicastro, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781101097014
Publisher: Signet
Published: 2005-12-06T06:00:00+00:00

2.

In the opening year of the war, six campaign seasons before the siege of Sphacteria, the Dog Tail Battalion, having suffered no combat casualties, returned from the first invasion of Attica. The only deaths were by misadventure: a Nigh-Dweller was crushed under an apple tree he had cut down with too much zeal, and a low-caste Spartiate, relegated to the shame of riding with the cavalry, fell from his mount onto a fence of sharpened logs. Though King Archidamos proceeded slowly, making clear his army’s position each day, the Athenians stayed snug inside their fortifications and would not fight. As the season wore on, the king had the Lacedaemonians march under the Long Walls with their heads exposed, spears on their shoulders, shields lowered. The guards on the Athenian ramparts, selected by Pericles himself for their coolheadedness, looked down on this challenge with perfect equanimity, as if observing a migration of sea turtles. The monotony of a whole season consumed by burning fields and felling trees left the Lacedaemonians desperate to risk their lives in battle.

Antalcidas was thirty-two years old when he at last contemplated taking a wife, but he seemed younger. He was then part of a dwindling cohort of unmarried males over thirty. Zeuxippos, who was by then too frail for anything but giving advice, reminded him that his responsibility lay in taking on a young protégé of his own. As his hair grew out and the lines on his face deepened, Antalcidas became an object for furtive glances from the new propaides, who leaned to their fellows to inquire what mess he attended. But he never felt up to the task of mentoring. By his own reckoning, he had yet barely proved himself on the battlefield, while knowledge of the helot blood in his veins did nothing for his self-confidence. To be exposed for a fraud would dishonor not only himself, but anyone he took under his wing.

Something similar applied to the prospect of his marriage. Damatria did what her station demanded, sending his way the daughters of Spartiates who would think well of attaching them to the largest estate in Laconia. Ever gallant, he entertained these women, though they all left him cold.

“What was wrong with gentle Elephantis,” his mother asked him in a letter cut in wax, “that you would treat her with such little regard? I thought her teats worth the liability of her face. And think of the expense you’d save on a wet nurse . . . !”

Grinding his teeth, he rubbed out her message and sent the tablet back without inscribing a reply.

On those occasions when he was in the city he found his thoughts going back half a lifetime, to the girl in the chorus at the Harvest Festival. Sparta was not a big place—in time nearly every face became familiar in form if not by name. Yet in all those years he never saw her. Was it a peculiar kind of fate that kept them strangers? Or was she

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