Nicholas Nicastro - The Isle of Stone

“Are you really just seven years old?” asked Birthmark.

“Yes.”

“He’s too tall,” he said to the other boys. “Betcha his mother kept him at home an extra year, maybe even two!”

“Did not.”

“Don’t argue, Grub!” a redheaded boy ordered, holding his little fist under Antalcidas’ nose.

“Grub?”

“It’s a kind of useless worm… Grub!”

“We call all the new ones grubs,” said Birthmark. “If you’re lucky, you get a real name when you prove yourself.”

“Wake up! Scarecrow due east!” a third boy announced with hushed excitement.

All eyes looked to Birthmark, who Antalcidas realized must be the pack’s leader. The boy crouched suddenly, and was joined in the huddle by everyone else. Redhead turned back to Antalcidas.

“What are you doing, Grub? Get in here!”

The others made a space for Antalcidas to join them. Birthmark was in the middle giving orders, jabbing a finger at each boy in turn.

“Frog, Ho-hum, Cricket, and Beast take flanking position. Redhead, Rehash, and Cheese guard against the countermarch, while the rest of you circle around with me to the front…”

“Wait, what do I do again?” asked Rehash.

“I said, guard against the countermarch! New kid, you come with me too… on the double!”

As they scattered, each of the boys picked out a handful of stones from between the broken barley stalks. Antalcidas didn’t understand what they were attacking-until they all crept through the grain and fixed their target.

The “scarecrow” was a solitary helot, walking along the verge with a hoe across his shoulders, a sun hat on his head.

Birthmark led his party through the barley a short distance ahead of the helot. He paused, synchronizing his approach with the flankers and the rear guard. The helot halted too, cocking his head as if he’d heard something, bringing the hoe down in blocking position across his body. There was a pause as hunters and quarry held still; Antalcidas had stalked hares on his own, in the grove behind his house, but had never before felt his heart beat with such anticipation. And then it began: the squad closed in on three sides with rocks on high, letting loose a collective squeal that seemed more rodentlike than dangerous. But there was no avoiding the ferocity of the attack as the stones pelted the helot from all sides. His hat fluttering off his head like a wounded bird, he collapsed to the dirt with his face covered. Birthmark and his more brazen foot soldiers came in close to hurl their missiles from inches away. The helot, who seemed to have some experience with these things, convulsed on the stubble to avoid the blows.

They tortured him with every rock they could find, and when they ran out of rocks they tried sticks, pebbles, and cow chips. Climbing to his feet, the helot uncovered his face to see where he might run. That was when Birthmark served up his last surprise-a shard of granite he had held back just for that moment. It struck the helot square in the mouth. An arc of blood, like a libation uncapped, poured out of him. He escaped into the woods adjoining the next field. Frog and Beast moved to go after him, but Birthmark called them back.

The boys gathered around the splash of helot blood and broken teeth on the ground, cheering. Birthmark broke into the middle of them.

“Quiet, all of you! What do you have to celebrate? Doing your duty?”

“That’s one scarecrow who won’t raise his head for a while!” declared Frog, a seemingly neckless, dimpled lad. He picked up the stump of a broken incisor and tried to fit in into the gap in his own mouth.

“Maybe. But there are always more slaves than men like us. Remember that.”

“Look! New kid didn’t throw!”

They all looked to Antalcidas-the only one of them who still had a sizable rock in his hand. As they all scrutinized him he burned red with embarrassment. The rock dropped from his fingers.

“Well, I’d say we’ll be calling you Grub for quite a while yet,” Birthmark said.

For the next month, Antalcidas had no contact with the world of adults, but instead lived as freely as some wild thing sprung straight from the soil. No one came to feed the boys, but at the height of summer the trees and gardens and vineyards were heaped with food for the taking. After gorging themselves on fruit, they would go down to the swift Eurotas to drink, and then lie on the rocks as the rays of the summer sun filled them with warm indolence. Twilight was the time for deer and jackals to venture out, and so too for the squad to use the shadows to stalk helots. Soon enough Antalcidas was in the forefront of these attacks, coming at last to relish the look of terror on the faces of grown men as he came screaming upon them. The excitement plucked every string of muscle and tendon with the music of unabashed, consequence-free cruelty. With such power, he not only lost his fear of the dark, but came to take night and cold as his natural allies.

One by one, the amenities he had grown up with-a roof, hot food, clothes-became distant, even absurd to contemplate. The sound of human speech itself was stripped away, becoming in those days a rare thing to be indulged only for purposes of organizing war parties. In time they at last stopped calling him “Grub” and named him “Stone,” after his deadeye accuracy with a thrown rock. But Antalcidas, having learned the essential unimportance of words, no longer cared what he was called.

He stopped missing his home. After two months of sleeping under the stars, he could visualize the constellations more easily than the features of his mother’s face. Looking up from his bed of rushes, he imagined he had a new family all around him; the lines of an old poem of Alcman, still sung by the older boys, echoed in his mind: The upland gorges are sleeping, laid among peak and crag Hushed by rushing waters As the nation of beasts enwombed in the black earth Keep the silence…

His packmates all came to look alike, their faces and knees caked with the same dirt, their feet hardened by the same calluses, their eyes burning with the same appetites. Older men coveted them when they glimpsed them in the forest, like prize game. Birthmark taught the younger lads to masturbate like men, standing up as if to piss, legs together. In the end they deposited their seed all together in a communal hole in the ground. Antalcidas wrung what he could into these viscous masses, imagining perhaps that the mingling of masculine essences would give life to the soil, like the warriors of Theban Cadmus sprung from the earth out of dragon’s teeth. Women who came upon these wet spots puzzled over them; men who had gone through the Rearing understood-and smiled.

By the fall Birthmark-whose real name Antalcidas never learned-passed into the lowest of the senior age-groups. Beast took over as their leader, and boys younger than Antalcidas entered the pack after him. He bullied them in turn, calling them “Grub” just as he had been. Helping his inferiors to struggle, adapt, and finally to mature made him believe in his own wisdom. Besides learning where the best berries grew, and which leaves to chew to settle an upset stomach, and where to obtain the sharpest cutting stones, he imagined he understood at last how a boy acquired manly virtue.

But he still had a lot to learn. Just as the chill of autumn mornings bit harder, the single cloak Endius had given him had become reduced to moldy, moth-eaten uselessness. It was no longer so easy to find fruit on the trees. The olives were not ready yet, and not many grapes were left on the vines after the harvest. Beast showed them how to stave off the pangs by chewing thyme leaves. He also showed them that, in a pinch, crickets and ants were edible (the former tasted like dry sticks, the latter like almond). But it was hard to eat his fill of these. The hunger gave him a constant headache; he found himself attracted again to settled places, where he thought he might steal some bread or cheese.