Tides of War (30 page)

Of those who condemn us I say only: they weren’t there. They weren’t there to feel the dread that breathed in that hour, when the moon hid her face and its benediction from men’s sight. I consider myself a man of practical usage, yet I, too, stood stricken at my post, staring skyward in consternation. I, too, turned about, unnerved and unmanned by this prodigy of heaven.

Nine thousand had been lost since Epipolae. In the panic at the cliffs, men had leapt and fallen by hundreds. I went out that first dawn with Lion, seeking our cousin. Thousands were still missing. Many who had made it down off the Heights had lost their way seeking camp. Now with first light the Syracusan horse were making mince of them. At the base of the cliffs, dead and dying lay strewn for acres. They were all ours. Some had tumbled in the panic as thousands bunched up at the brink and each, in terror to reach safety, had dislodged another, spilling him in turn onto those picking their way down the switchbacks below. Many in despair had leapt of their own will, stripping armor and casting themselves to fate.

At the top of the cliffs prize parties of the foe now collected. They called down, taunting. “You are so clever, Athenians, did you think you could fly?” Take a good look, the enemy vaunted, slinging severed limbs
and even heads down onto the mounds of our slain. “This is the only way you will leave Sicily!”

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.

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.”