Antigone's Wake Read online

  The suspense ended as the Antigone approached within sight of Tragia. Dexion’s flotilla was, as usual, bringing up the rear, although under the guidance of Poristes, his four ships had succeeded in keeping in contact with each other. The sun had already sunk into the Aegean. What was left of daylight was filtered weakly through a bruise-colored overcast that seemed to swell downward, as if the sea was trapped under a water-logged tent. Worse, the wind had risen until it blew hard from the west, whipping up eight-foot swells piled up as thick as phalanxes on the water. As the hull began to pitch Sophocles hung on by his bloodless knuckles. When the Antigone bottomed out, suspended by its bow and stern over the troughs, he could look over the port rail and watch the blades of all three oarbanks churn high and dry in the air.

  “Bury her nose in the waves!” Poristes shouted to the helmsman, who was wrestling with the steering oars. Battered and groaning, the ship turned with agonizing slowness, until her beak was pointing south of Mycale, toward the island of Lade. Peering between the peaks of water, Sophocles could see the green shadow of Tragia in the distance, and beneath that, intermittently between the swells, a vast, confused mass of wooden hulls, sprits and masts.

  He blinked, wiping the sea-spray from his eyes. He looked again — the spectacle was still there, spread now over a wide stretch of water. Columns of smoke ascended in raking fashion toward the clouds, and beneath them, tiny tongues of flame.

  “The gods have blessed us!” Poristes cried over the blast of wind. “We have met the Samians.”

  *

  The sea settled just as the Antigone came abreast of the north coast of Tragia. Dexion could now take in the scene in its entirety.

  From the northeast flew the enemy samaenas, a dozen strong and formed up in a wedge. Their profiles, like great metal-tipped plows carving the sea, were hulking and murderous; the triremes, by comparison, seemed thin, waspish. Over the unsettled water the broad-beamed Samians moved with absolute steadiness, none of their precious momentum wasted sideward. Even to an eye as inexpert as Dexion’s, their ships’ superiority in a high sea was obvious. The enemy had picked the perfect conditions for an attack.

  In their path the Athenians were strewn in various states of disarray. Some of their ships were already immobilized, oars snapped by the enemy rams, their hulls peppered by flaming arrows as the Samians passed. The triremes ahead were struggling to turn away from the attackers, but were rocking dangerously on their keels, their oars finding poor purchase in the swirling water. Further beyond, Dexion could see tiny figures — his countrymen — struggling to refloat several vessels that had already been beached for the night. If these got into the action at all, it would be too late, after the attackers had smashed the rest of the fleet.

  As he watched, a samaena crushed a stalled trireme broadside. The ram, which was sharp and long like a leather-maker’s punch, disappeared into the body of the Athenian. The sound of the collision followed later — a thunderous, fibrous crack, like the rending of a misshapen tree. This was followed by the screams, thinned by distance, of a hundred terrified oarsmen as their ship was torn in half.

  As all the world seemed to pause and watch, the Samian backed water to extricate her ram. From the vast cleft the weapon withdrew cleanly, and like a jar suddenly uncorked, the stricken Athenian disgorged its contents. The bobbing heads of live and dead oarsmen spread over the sea, surrounding the trireme as it settled to its topdeck. With most crewmen capable of no more than the most rudimentary dog-paddle — Sophocles himself could not swim at all — few of the men in the water would survive.

  Without drastic action, a similar fate awaited the rest of the Athenian fleet. When Dexion thought about it later, the gap between this realization and his next action was frighteningly short: turning to Poristes, he issued a command that surprised them both as soon as it left his mouth.

  “We must attack. Give the orders you must.”

  Poristes gave a half-step forward, cocking his surviving ear as if he had misheard.

  “Don’t make me repeat myself!” warned the poet.

  “Attack broadside to the sea? We’re as likely to wreck ourselves.”

  “So be it.”

  With an outburst of archaic mariners’ curses, Poristes turned to his bosun. The pipers quickened the cadence, and the steersman, with a dubious expression, dragged his starboard oar to bring them about, on a course to pursue the Samians. Looking astern, Dexion watched as the other three ships in his squadron followed the Antigone’s lead, forming themselves up in a staggered line off her port quarter. Offense became the Athenian character: from a place seemingly beneath the sea, hundreds of hidden oarsmen asserted their presence, chanting “ryppapai, ryppapai.” It was an enthusiasm borne of ignorance, for most of the oarsmen could not see the danger awaiting them. Yet the song thrilled Dexion as much as any ovation he had received in the theater.

  “Is it a battle, father?”

  Sophocles found Iophon standing behind him.

  “I told you to stay below.”

  “You couldn’t have been serious,” the boy calmly replied. “How am I supposed to see anything from down there?”

  “You will see what I want you to see.”

  “Then why did you bring me, if not to face war?”

  “By Zeus, obey me!” Sophocles cried.

  Iophon didn’t move.

  Though Dexion’s triremes made ugly progress — rolling on their beam-ends, sliding down the windward faces of the swells — they made an instant impression on their adversaries. The swagger abruptly went out of their maneuvers. They sped up, tightened their line; they chose not to ram an Athenian that was immobilized in their path, passing her by as her oars flailed. The vaunted samaenas, it appeared, were steady but slow.

  The poet was filled with the confidence of a predator in sight of his kill. As he clung to his shelf, riding the rocking Antigone through the troughs and up the lee side of the swells, his intense focus on the targets ahead banished all anxiety. Poristes shouted that the ship would swamp. Sophocles barely heard him, feeling instead as if some god was lifting his ship by the outriggers, yanking her onward to some predisposed glory. The sight of the four gleaming rams forming a line off his right shoulder came as a powerful thrill.

  Unnerved by the unexpected attack, the Samians paused. The light was draining from the west with an unnatural slowness, as if the day was reluctant to end. In that flat, tenacious twilight, a new factor appeared: a squadron of six triremes beating its way out from the shore, coming at the Samians from the other direction.

  With the possibility of envelopment, the Samian warships broke formation. The Athenians, having much experience in such things, spread their line to trap the stragglers. As divine Hesperus, the first star of the night, gleamed on their spray-drenched rams, they assured their first capture: a samaena, turning this way and that, slowed to a drift as her captain realized he would not escape.

  Coming closer, Dexion watched the enemy crew ship their oars. Time seemed to slow as the Samians abandoned their benches and poured out on the topdeck, each one bearing a spear or short sword.

  “They’re spoiling for a fight this time,” observed Poristes, surprised.

  “Then let them learn the consequences!” Iophon exclaimed. And he began to dance a little martial jig, cutting the air with a dagger he had secreted aboard in his tunic. His father, aghast, caught the boy’s arm and snatched the knife from his hand.

  “And who will save me from your mother if you hurt yourself?”

  The archers and marines on the oncoming triremes rose to meet the Samians. One of the hulls in Dexion’s squadron, the Doros, was the first to make contact. With a scream of abrading wood, the two vessels struck and their crews had at each other. A strange, unbidden thought occurred to Dexion: the sound of men fighting with blades was reminiscent of his father’s armory, except the beat of metal on metal in the shop was less regular in time. It was a commotion he had learned to go to sleep by as a child — a sound not unl
ike battle.

  Another trireme crashed into the Samian from the other side; the Athenians assaulted the defenders just as they had beaten back the attack from the Doros. They would have driven back the second wave, too, if a third trireme had not joined the fight, and a fourth. The Samian oarsmen were now trapped between multiple parties of invaders. Many of the latter had hoplite armor, and long infantry spears, and so could wear down the Ionians with impunity. The mass of live defenders began to dwindle.

  With the conclusion foregone, Poristes murmured something to the bosun. The Antigone slowed, keeping a distance between herself and the knot of snarled vessels.

  “Aren’t we going to fight?” demanded Iophon.

  “Poristes, get him below!”

  Two archers appeared to drag the boy below as he kicked and cursed everyone in reach. Embarrassed at the scene, Sophocles buried his head; it took several moments before he realized he was still holding Iophon’s knife. With a contemptuous flourish worthy of his acting days, he cast the dagger into the sea.

  “That boy,” said Poristes with a shake of his head, “was born to trouble his fathers.”

  *

  In its reality, the battle was a complex and terrifying spasm of chaos. The story spun around it, on the other hand, was the picture of simplicity: in a surprise attack at dusk, the Samians attempted to inflict enough damage on the Athenians to discourage an invasion, but had been repulsed. In the telling the number of enemy ships had somehow increased from a mere twelve to an armada of seventy. The Athenian fleet suffered four ships damaged and two destroyed, against one Samian ship lost to fire and one captured. Pericles’ fleet would hardly be slowed down by these losses. The rump navy of the Samians, however, was reputed to be finished as an offensive force. The talk around the Athenian camp was that the samaenas would never again venture out of port. The dispatch about the battle sent back to the Assembly was two lines long:

  Met Samian fleet near Tragia. Enemy was set to flight before nightfall.

  A trophy was erected the next day on the promontory of the island closest to the action. It was a spare, spindly thing. Constructed out of a few Samian oars recovered from the captured wreck and a few helmets, it looked like the skeleton of some horrid creature that had expired on those deserted rocks. To Sophocles, it was hard to tell if it was a monument to victory, or starvation.

  The story went that the battle had hung in the balance until Dexion saved them all with his decisive action. The intervention of his squadron from behind the Samians, though the sea was running against him, was hailed as a tactical masterstroke. As he came into the generals’ camp on Tragia, wine cups and pats on the back were proffered from every direction.

  “Quite a show you staged for us today!” declared Xenophon.

  “Your best production ever, if you ask me!” The man was positively bursting with pleasure at his own wit.

  “Get him his crown! Get him an ivy crown!” demanded Cleistophon.

  “We’ve tried! There’s not a sprig of ivy on this whole blasted rock!”

  “We should at least give him his prize goat … ”

  “It makes me sick just to watch you cross the current, Dexion,” said Lampides of Piraeus. “What possessed you to try it?”

  All went silent to wait for his answer. Under the circumstances, with the generals making such a fuss over what was nothing more than a snap decision, he was tempted to throw away his reply. But the sight of all those expectant faces, each desperate to bask in some glimmer of reflected glory, aroused the showman in him.

  “It was Dionysus, my usual patron,” he declared. “To whom else can an actor attribute his good timing?”

  Pericles, his pride contained behind pursed lips, stepped out from behind his colleagues and put his arm around the hero.

  “Our friend Dexion understands what is at stake in this war,” he said.

  After applying a kiss to Sophocles’ forehead, and giving a squeeze that rounded his shoulders, the Supreme Commander disappeared into his tent. The tribute to the victory went on through the night, with the prize for Dexion’s “drama” delivered in the form of a dozen fatted goats that feasted all the generals and their staffs. Pericles, for his part, did not come out to celebrate. It was not his practice to make a spectacle of his good fortune.

  And then there was the worrisome omen hidden inside their triumph — one that gave Sophocles brief pause, but etched deep creases up the height of Pericles’ brow. The Athenians had used stories of Samos’ poor performance in the Persian wars, and the ease of their last invasion, to convince themselves that this enemy would buckle at the first reverse. But at Tragia the Samians had taken the initiative against a numerically superior force. When they were surprised, they resisted like Greeks; when they were forced to retreat, they did it in good order. This would be no quick intervention, but a campaign full of hard fighting. Despite Pericles’ best hopes, there was no chance he would bring all the Athenians home.

  *

  He had grown to hate Antigone because she refused to let him go. All of his characters spoke to him for a time; their voices became clearer in his head as the writing progressed, rising sometimes to a shout as the festival approached. But in every case they began to quiet after the premiere, until the time came when they became mere characters on a scroll, abstractions as surely dead as the petty spirits of doorways and crossroads once feared by his grandfathers.

  But not this girl — this outlaw princess. She was not his best-drawn creation, or his favorite, but she was the most vociferous, costing him months of sleep, refusing to retire to a decorous literary grave. Lately her words seemed to come to him from the beach, where her namesake was parked. O Sophocles, your mask is slipping, she would say. O Sophocles, your little boots won’t save you from slipping up this time! The bristling desolation of Tragia seemed to amplify her voice, which always resembled that of some woman in his life. Sometimes she sounded like his wife, sometimes Photia, sometimes Aspasia; occasionally he had to ransack his memory to recall which relative or lover she conjured. On the night after the victory she was unmistakably Nais, and she kept him awake to within an hour of daylight.

  Frustrated, he rolled off the cushions and stepped over the snoring Bulos. Standing on the sand, he watched the dawn claw with rosy fingertips to rise above the mainland peaks. He strode down to the water; the hulls in his squadron were drawn up together, beam on beam, lean shadows in the gloom. To a less tortured eye they would seem indistinguishable, but Dexion could easily pick out the Antigone by her painted eyes. Instead of dish-like circles with balls set in the center, like those of some dumb beast, the flagship had almond, seductress eyes, with kohl-like rings and pupils set forward, as if permanently fixed on her next victim. They seemed to follow Dexion as he approached.

  ANTIGONE: So here is the hero, blessed of Enyalios and Eris, and the well-robed one whom his countrymen call Athena Parthenos, the well-armed maiden. Greetings and felicity to you!

  DEXION: How you disappoint your creator, princess of Thebes, who did not make cunning your sin! You know well you have no need to greet me, for you have followed me without mercy, like the Furies Tisiphone, Allecto, and Megaera, and banished from me all power of sleep. Keep your pleasantries, and permit me only the felicity of your silence!

  ANTIGONE: O gallant warrior, can it be that your mighty helm has met with Samian club? Do you account yourself dreaming even now? For it has never been in my power to cost you sleep. For that affliction, you must blame only one man: Sophocles son of Sophilos.

  DEXION: Yes, a dream this must be, because your words are a riddle I cannot solve — or that have no solution.

  ANTIGONE: Pitiable man, who is a riddle to himself!

  DEXION: Be not coy with your invocations, tormentor! Of this Athena Parthenos I care little, as I care little for gods unknown to my fathers. They burned the fat for Athena Polias, the true goddess of our city, protectress of field and hearth. To her the fighters at Marathon bent knee, not some patroness of
speculators and oarsmen!

  For her we go to war to defend the Athenians.

  ANTIGONE: Take care when you insult oarsmen, Dexion, when you address a ship! And what is this about defending the Athenians? Can it be that a figment like myself can understand what we are all doing here better than you, a general of the Athenians?

  DEXION: The nature of this latest deceit escapes me, for it is obvious that we sail to fulfill our oaths.

  ANTIGONE: What oath did you fulfill when you bent knee for the whore Aspasia, great Dexion?

  The poet was distracted by the sound of loose oars dropped in a heap on the dirt. Turning, he saw the officers of most of the ships gathering from every corner of the cove, bringing spare equipment with them. This was to be the last opportunity for the crews to trade for replacements before the run to Samos that day.

  Poristes was also there for the morning sailor’s market. He was standing over a pile of oars so ancient they must have stroked the waters off Salamis in the days of Themistocles. From the way he was staring he had clearly heard the general talking to his ship.

  “It’s not unusual to hear them speak,” Poristes said before Sophocles could deepen his shame with some feeble excuse.

  “You can know a ship for years and hear nothing. And then, just when they get a new name, you can hear them in your dreams just as if they’re whispering in your ear. It can be as simple as that — they won’t speak to you until you call them by their right name,” said the captain.

  Chapter IV

  SHIELDBREAKER

  “But disobedience is the worst of evils. This it is that ruins cities; this makes homes desolate; by this the ranks of allies are broken into headlong rout. But of the lives whose course is fair the greater part owes safety to obedience.”

  — Creon, Antigone, 1. 670-5

  *

  The island of Samos presented a undulating outline just twenty miles long and ten broad at its widest point. Verdant and highshouldered, it was famed for its fertility and its location as the Greek bridge to the East. The Strait of Mycale, which separated the island from Asia, was by ancient reckoning no more than ten stades wide.