Again in camp Telamon awaited us. He had found Simon, alive and unwounded, tending the sick. I dropped where I stood and slept the day round. Only four remained of our sixteen marines; it took five platoons to make one new one. I passed the day beside Pandora, writing widow letters. Her foreships had rotted through; she lay careened on the site the soldiers called Dog Beach, awaiting timbers.
The camp had become one sprawling mudhole, stinking to heaven. Our tents were pitched in the swamp where Gylippus’ troops had driven us, fifty thousand kenneled in a bog narrower than the agora in Athens. Every step sank into sucking ooze. My bed was a door atop a flat of muck, which I shared with Lion and Splinter, taking turns as one does shipboard. The men called these bunks “rafts.” You had to watch your raft or someone would steal it.
Foreign sailors began slipping the cable. It was impossible to hold them; they simply waited for dark, then swam for it. Some even took their oars. Victualry ceased, and refuse removal; there were no armorers, cooks, or nurses. Line troops must be assigned details customarily performed by drudges; twice in ten days altercations flared into near mutinies. The one thing the troops had was money. But what could you buy? Not a dry patch to lay your head or a clean divot to empty your bowels upon. You could not buy water; the foe had dammed the streams that fed the camp and poisoned the solitary spring. Hundreds sickened, swelling wards already packed with the thousands of casualties of Epipolae, who worsened daily in this hellish miasma.
A phrase swept the camp: “hoisting the akation.” You know this, Jason: the foresail of a trireme, the only one borne into battle, run up at life-and-death, to flee. Not a man did not burn to hoist the akation. Epipolae had turned Demosthenes against the whole expedition. In his eyes Sicily was a quagmire; we must get our boys out now, or failing that, withdraw to a part of the island where the country could be overrun, supplies obtained, and the wounded and sick given proper care.
Now of all people Nicias acquired resolution. He refused to retreat without orders from the Assembly at Athens. One night I took supper with my cousin and the physician Pallas. This doctor’s family was the Euctemonidae of Cephisia; he was related to Nicias and had tended him here for kidney disease, which ravaged him yet. The medic had had a snootful and spilled his tale straight.
“If Nicias takes us home wanting victory, how will the demos express its gratitude? He knows, believe me. Those same officers who squall loudest now for withdrawal will, safe in Athens, turn upon him to hide their shame. Our commander will be impeached for cowardice or treason or taking bribes of the enemy; his accusers’ mouthpieces will inflame the multitude, who will howl for his head, as for Alcibiades’. Say what you will, Nicias is a man of honor. He would sooner meet death here as a soldier than be butchered at home like a dog.”
Days passed and the army did not move.
Gylippus returned from the Sicilian cities, having recruited a second army more numerous than the first. A camp of ten thousand arose on the Olympieum and another twice the size on Ortygia. The foe had lost all fear. He manned his benches in broad daylight and trolled past our palisade, daring us to launch and face him.
At last Nicias saw the wisdom of withdrawal. Word was passed; the army would be taken aboard this night. Across the camp, the mood was elation. Far from feeling shame at packing up, the men felt chastened and restored to grace. Humility and piety, however tardily rediscovered, had delivered them from the ruin heaven had prepared, witness all the turns of evil that had plagued the expedition, from the banishment of Alcibiades on. What derangement, men asked now, had made us tear him from us? Could any believe that, Alcibiades in command, our force would stand in such straits? Syracuse would have fallen two years ago. The army would be halfway up Italy’s boot; the fleet would have reduced Carthage and be rounding on Iberia. But the gods had not ordained this, such was apparent. Perhaps heaven scourged us for our pride in mounting an enterprise of such moment, or for bearing strife to a country which had borne none to us. Perhaps the immortals bore malice toward Nicias for his luck, or Alcibiades for his ambition. It was all moot now. All that mattered was we were going home.
All that mattered until the moon disappeared.
No night is so dark as that, orb-illumined, plunged into the ink of lightlessness. No place may be so black as the starless sea, nor men more prone to dread than those in peril of their lives. So evil were the omens, when at last the diviners had taken them, that the first victim and the second and third were cast aside; the seers slaughtered beast after beast seeking any that would bleed propitiously.
Thrice nine days the fleet must abide, so the portents read.
For thrice nine days no ship may sail.
XXIII
UPON THE WALL OF SHIPS
Gylippus struck on the twenty-second day. He came against the ramparts with thirty thousand and with seventy-six vessels on the fleet in the bay. The walls held; the ships didn’t.
Our squadron leaders Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos all went down. Of twelve in our reconstituted company of marines save Lion and myself, five were killed and four disabled. In all, forty ships were lost, including sixteen driven aground at the salt marsh called the Horns, where Gylippus’ men penned the crews between seawalls and slaughtered them to the last man. The captured vessels were now in service against us. Eurymedon’s Ariadne was lost off Dascon. The foe nailed the general’s corpse to the prow and paraded before our palisade, vowing to make us all envy the dead.
Here was an overthrow as monumental as the calamity on Epipolae. Men’s hearts broke. They could not believe they had been routed, again so utterly, or what was yet more patent: that worse would come, and soon.
The enemy was erecting a wall of ships across the harbor mouth. Word came that we would make a run for it, all or nothing. The upper walls of the camp were abandoned and a new crosswall thrown up, tangent to shore. Our estate had shrunk to a rectangle of mire, less than a mile at its base, penned on all landward sides. Sixty thousand, including ninety-five hundred wounded, and a hundred and ten ships packed every stinking foot. The last slaves and camp followers were kicked out, even though they, who had proved so steadfast, entreated to stay. Bread remained for five days only; it must be spared for the troops and the wounded.
No footing remained to plant the dead. Burial parties stacked the corpses in squares, layering ship’s timbers between, that faces might be visible for identification. The lanes between these barrows filled with brothers and comrades, seeking their own. Men returned from these errands struck through with such woe that they could neither sleep nor eat, and no threat or blandishment could make them obey an order. So unwholesome had the hospital site become, so grisly and dispiriting, that physicians bade their charges scatter where they would among the camp. Corpses of men slain at sea collected like booms of logs, choking the strand, while those not borne onto our palisade by tide and swell were driven there by vessels of the foe, herding them with boat hooks and boarding pikes.
We must break out or die. All who could fight were taken aboard. The date was the sixth of Boedromion, the feast of the Boedromia, when Theseus defeated the Amazons. A hundred and fifteen triremes put out; twenty-two were left dry; we had no more oars. No attempt was made to render the ships seaworthy. We would worry about that later. Nicias delivered a speech, a good one, and Demosthenes made one too. Absent was the customary shirking of battle or the prayer for late-hour reprieve. Every man stood to his place before dawn, and none wanted rousing. The troops of the army, under nine thousand, defended both extremities of the camp, one the seawall fronting Feverside, beyond whose expanse massed the Syracusan Temenites division under Hermocrates, forty thousand who had been a mob twelve months previous and were now crack troops. The west, the bluff called Bad News, was held by a palisade of rock and wood. Four thousand of ours faced twenty of the foe.
Twenty-seven thousand Athenians and allies embarked, eleven thousand fighting men, sixteen thousand at oars. The ships shoved off in darkness so profound the helmsmen
could not make out vessels starboard or port but must steer by sound, the bow officer’s tapstone and the chirp of the fog whistle. Here was an hour like no other. Each man would fight today, victory or death, to see children again, wife and country. None spoke or even sighed. That which each could do, he would or die.
The ships advanced in column to their assembly marks, then formed in line abreast, twenty-five across and four deep, with a squadron of ten in reserve. Pandora’s place was in the first rank, sixth from the left, the division under Demosthenes. The enemy’s wall of ships lay east, a mile and a half. We could not see them, even their lamps, with the dark and the mist.
The waiting began. That interminable interval as the line dressed and all vessels were brought on station. Corvettes shuttled, completing count and relaying instructions. It is always cold on the water; men’s teeth chattered in the dark. At their benches the sailors choked down a meal of bread, oil, and barley. Topside marines huddled in their cloaks, packed against the sidescreens saying nothing. For the twentieth time their orders were repeated. No grub for us; it had been forgotten.
At last, at the cloaked lantern, the line moved off. There was no sound, no orders, nothing at all save the squeal of oar looms against their pins and leathers, the choonk of their blades as they bit, and the gliss of the surface spooling past along the hull. You could hear the tap of the cadence stones, light and clear, and the unisoned expulsion of breath as the oarsmen set their blades and pulled. Pandora drove forward by surges.
The sky began to lighten. Our ships could be made out now. The spectacle they presented could not have appeared in more inglorious contrast to that golden aspect with which they had set off from home, so few seasons past and with such expectations. Paintless and unadorned, displaying ensigns only to differentiate themselves from the foe, the warships ploughed low in the water as scows, burdened above decks with such a load of men-at-arms that they looked less like warcraft than ferries. Hides and skins bedecked their carapaces, topside to deflect incendiary bolts and along the waterline to shield the hold oarsmen at their banks. Cloaked in this motley, the vessels appeared as some species of derelict, limping ragged upon the foe.
Like the others, Pandora’s masts had been unstepped and left ashore. Prow-and sternpeaks had been cut down, replaced by platforms defended by sidescreens, with drop-planks at intervals as boarding ramps. The helmsman worked behind a bunker of timber and hides. “Make her ugly!” Pandora’s captain Boros, her sixth since Athens, had urged his crew, laboring alongside them through the night. “Pandora must be a box of evil for the foe.”
Forward where her sail locker had been (my old snoozing spot), the foreships had been reinforced with timbers salvaged from our own ruined hulks. Triple-wide rams had been rigged to counter this innovation of the Corinthians. These outrigs stood vacant now, but on closing with the foe, marines would mount to each, armed with grapnels. The mass of epibatai, my squad and Lion’s, held now aft of amidships, so their weight would keep the prow high and the oxhead clear of the water’s drag. On the forepeak squatted the first of three firepots, from which darts and brands would be lit. A second stood beside me now, amidships, and a third by the steersman’s bunker aft.
From my place inboard of the outrigger I could see into the foreships. Already Pandora was taking water in such quantities that the footboards of the hold oarsmen were awash. Scupper lads bailed on the beat, slinging the bilge past their comrades’ ears out the hide-sheathed ports through which the oars projected. Above the oarsmen’s heads, new decks had been framed to support the mob of infantry, archers, and javelineers who now crouched topside, numbers retching already.
We could see the enemy now. His rampart of ships rose like a wall; the harbor had become a lake. Palisades had been erected, plaited with hides to retard incendiary missiles and notched with embrasures from which the enemy would loose his own artillery. Before this the foe had spiked the surface with spars and timbers. A gap had been left of about a furlong. Beyond this in the open sea we could see his warships, above forty, pulling hard in column. They would come to line abreast, three and four deep, to bottle any Athenian breakout. Enemy small craft by the hundred filled out the field of obstacle, while upon both quarters further squadrons launched from shore. The foe held nine-tenths of the harbor perimeter. Gylippus’ army waited at the margins of the swell. God help the ship and crew falling within their killing zone.
The line had been advancing at two-and-one, resting each bank by turns. Now, a half mile out, the boatswain piped “At the triple” and Pandora shot forward on the swell. On the forepeak Boros bellowed through his megaphone to skippers port and starboard, as each singled out the vessel he would attack. He scampered back with a little kick-step of joy. “Dolphins, lads! Racing the cutwater!” With a laugh he bolted aft to the steersman’s post. Now came the prostates, the bow officer, a midshipman named Milo who had been caught in the grass with his lover and nicknamed Rhodopygos, Rosy Cheeks. He was an anxious sort, always dreading the worst, and now crabbed forward at the crouch, bearing above his crown an oak plank heavy as himself.
“Expecting rain, junior?” Lion called.
Rhodopygos frog-hopped back and forth, peeking over the prow to assess our distance from the enemy. At his signal we would press forward in a body, to launch our own missiles, while our weight would drop the ram at the deadliest instant. That was the plan anyway. In the end as ever chaos prevailed.
Three hundred yards out, clouds of enemy small craft swarmed at us out of the vapor. Darts and firebrands began clattering on the deck. Rosy Cheeks took a spike through the foot; in an instant we were all at the outrigger, unloading everything we had. Dead ahead rose the wall of ships. We would not make it. Two of the foreline converged on us, one a triple with a forepeak of a bare-breasted female, the other a converted galley beamy as a barge. The mob on her deck must have made a hundred. Pandora swung bows-on to meet her; the trireme lanced in on us from the flank. On our prow marines were slinging pinwheels onto the triple; arcs of smoke shot across the fast-foreshortening gap. The men launched javelins from their knees, then dropped prone behind the sidescreens as the enemy’s volleys rainbowed in return. Both sides were hurling the rope-handled jars of smoking sulphur the Syracusans call “scorpions” and Athenians “hello-theres.” Already all three craft were afire.
Now came the collision. The ships crunched together, Pandora and the converted freighter. But the angle was askew, and both vessels, foreships locked, began to slew sideways along each other’s hull. Our marines flung grapnels across the interval; the foe replied with a fusillade of darts and stones. The enemy had stripped rails and drawn hides across all objects of purchase. Grapnels were bouncing like beans. What heads caught, the enemy bashed free with mawls or hacked through with axes. One luckless bastard had been hooked through the calf and now hung, pinned against the mast step, while three of our marines hauled on the line with all their strength. Moments later Two Tits punched broadside into Pandora’s belly, and, instants beyond, our own Dauntless reamed her up the ass.
The enemy bore stones, great boulders of thirty and forty pounds which he had stacked as ammunition along his prow and rails. He had his most cyclopean men forward; these now elevated their projectiles and heaved them into our sidescreens, staving them to splinters.
A titan of the foe led their wave. Six and a half feet and naked from the waist up, this ox strode onto our prow unarmed save one massive boulder, a sixty-pounder, which he wielded before him, bowling our marines from their feet. A youth named Elpenor opened the man’s forearm to the bone; the brute turned with a bellow and drove his stone, crushing the marine’s skull, then wheeled and stove another’s face. With thighs like oaks he was kicking men over the side.
This was no time for heroics. I seized two others, Meton Armbreaker and Adrastus, whom they called Towhead, and hauled them to the monster’s rear. We took him three-on-one, putting one spike through his liver and a second into his haunch. Towhead hacked through the hamst
ring with a boarding pike. The savage dropped to one knee, roaring. He never looked back to see who had unstrung him, just raised the great stone and flung it with all his strength into the bilges. It plunged through the undecked oarsmen’s compartment, shearing off a second-banker at the knee, then crashed through the keelson timbers, shivering the hull like a shot. Up boiled the sea. Pandora was sinking.
It is impossible to reconstruct in afterthought the sequence of events, the sequence of sequences, transpiring so rapidly and amid such chaos, when one’s faculties are deranged by rage and terror, fear for his men and himself. At one point a marine of the foe had me by the beard and was pounding the crown of my helmet edge-on with his shield with such fury that I felt the bone of my skull begin to rupture. I seized his testicles with all my strength and wrung free, the mass of my tangled whiskers coming off in his fist. I tumbled over the rail into the gallery of the outrigger. Lion, behind the man, decapitated him with a two-hand swipe, left-handed; helmet and skull pinwheeled onto my belly, gushing fluids, and bounded through the posts into the sea.
There is this aspect to fighting on the water: a man has no place to run. Somehow the mass of our company succeeded in capturing the galley, if such a term may be applied to the occupation of a pack of blazing tinder fast on its way to the bottom, achieving this triumph primarily because the scow was sinking from the stern and we advancing from the bow had the advantage of fighting downhill. We ploughed the enemy into the sea behind a wall of shields. An ancillary battle, grisly as the main, now commenced in the gutter between the burning hulks, as oarsmen of Pandora and Twin Tits, forced to abandon ship, grappled hand-to-hand, each seeking to drown the other. Ax and boarding pike had supplanted spear and javelin as weapons of favor. The shivered oar served as well. Marines hacked and stabbed and clubbed the foe in the water even as the decks on which they stood subsided beneath them. By this time the Athenian third and fourth waves had reached the enemy’s rampart and were attacking it in escalade, like land troops assaulting a fortress. We were taken off the freighter onto Dauntless. In moments we, too, were on the wall.