The End of Sparta: A Novel (13 page)

Mêlon across the way knew that none could hear him either, given the clatter of gear and their bronze helmets, and the war cry of the Spartans. But the same advice came out nonetheless to Chiôn on his right and the quivering Staphis on the left. “Run. Keep moving. Shields out. High and out. Bunch together. No gaps. No gaps. No stops—all eyes ahead. Look at the men you kill. Steady, men, steady. Spears level. All at once. All at once, aim for their throats. Hit them as one, all together. Chiôn, my Chiôn, here they are, the eyes of these Spartan snakes. Endure it, men. Endure it, my Staphi. Staphi, Staphi stay left. Left. Left, left—drift to the good side. Always to the good side move. Hit them on their right, from the flank on their naked right. We go left
. Pros t’aristeron. Eis euônumon
.”

Still, few heard a word. There was too much iron and wood—and, for most of the terrified, the shrieks of the circling black Kêres above. Mêlon’s helmet was down. Dust was in his mouth and ears. He was dizzy and wondered why he was running. No more trot now, he was running with the bad leg—faster even to the hated left, faster than he remembered from the old battles. The rear ranks are pushing me ahead, he thought. They’re knocking me over, my own men, the fifty
aspides
from the rear. My elbows are free as we run. Good sign, good sign in these early moments. Yes, the big shove, the
ôthismos
that knocks us ahead. Do these doomed reds, these blurs up ahead, do they have any notion of these fifty shields at our backs? Poseidon’s wave is about to knock them over. Yet they walk, walk into our charge?

What would the others, these young ones—Mêlon kept thinking—these who had never stood down the Spartan, what would they do with this wave, this push of their friends’ shields breaking on their backs? They might panic. Or be knocked over before they hit the wall of the red-capes. He could hear the Boiotian paean, the war cry—
eleleleu,
eleleleu,
eleleleu
.

Chiôn alone was quiet and a step ahead, worried that his master’s slow leg meant they could not be four or five paces closer to the oncoming Spartans. The Boiotian front lines hit the enemy at a run, shuddered, recoiled, bunched back up, and then began to push, stab, and pour into any gaps where Spartans had gone down. In a few moments, it was all Mêlon could do to keep his feet, even as he was struggling to move to the left with the others on the front line and get to the flank of the Spartan right wing. His left arm was battered and stung. The hard rims of the friendly shields from the rear kept pushing on his back shoulder to force him forward. He could not hear his Chiôn yell, “Forget your hobble. No Chôlopous now, master. Let them at our backs do the work. Jab our spears into their faces.”

The Spartans were upon them all. Mêlon revived from a brief moment of darkness after the crash of the armies. Spartans everywhere—horsehair, braids, and plate bronze in a sea of red tunics and wooden shields, the lambdas on their shields eyeing him. His own to the rear kept blindly pushing him through these crimson lines. Shafts hitting at all angles, the battle now a maze of wood, round shields, and tall spears that not even the god of war could sort out. Mêlon’s long Bora struck something and shuddered, first before most others. Why not—his tip was four palm’s widths longer than most of the first line. He at least knew where they were—at the
symbolê
, at the first hit between the two armies. Then came the terrible counter-blows from Spartan spears. At first only a few spent jabs glanced off Mêlon’s breastplate. But soon his shield shuddered and cracked from hard spear thrusts. In these first moments none of the stabbers of the enemy line had hit his throat. His groin was untouched. Not so with the enemy. Thebans here on the left had struck the enemy royals at an angle, hit an entire line on their unshielded right sides as they had tried in vain to move to their right and behind the mass of Boiotians—who had won the race to the flank.

The noise reminded him of a hard spring hail on Helikon, when he worked on the olive press in the cold shed, under the din of Zeus’s storm. It was like clattering ice on the roof tiles above. Amid the clanging, Mêlon was stabbing and bashing with his shield as the Spartan resistance stiffened. Soon he was nearly crushed between the pressure of spear points ahead and his own shields behind—before breaking deeper into the Spartan mass ahead. Then as the line plowed on, Spartans inside on his flanks grabbed at him amid their ranks. “Just keep on your feet, fool,” he muttered to himself. Mêlon tried to steady himself, as the shields behind continued to send him forward, as he sought to keep his own shield high on his left to give Staphis cover, as he took safety in Chiôn’s wooden shield on his right, as he stabbed over the shield rims of the enemy, as shafts from the rear grazed his helmet, as he went ahead in unison with his own, as he stepped over spears and shields—and men—on the ground. The best hoplite was not the strongest right arm, Mêlon knew, but he who could cover his neighbor, stab, advance, keep his balance amid the flotsam at his feet, and hide in the shield cover from his right—all at once.

At Mêlon’s side, a husky Spartan broke through a small gap that just for an instant had opened between himself and Staphis. The longhaired killer—he was known in the south as Kobôn of the large hands—had plunged too deep into the Theban lines with not a Spartan shield in sight for his cover, and then fell to the stabs from the butt-ends of a half-dozen spears to his rear. “Lizard-killers”—
saurôtêres
—hoplites called these bronze squared spikes. Those with their spears still upright shredded anything that moved on the ground at their feet. This gnarly-hide Kobôn, even in the bronze of his grandfather Artemôn, was hammered apart by the feet and spikes of six men. “Keep rank, fools, keep rank, stay together,” Mêlon yelled, more to himself than down the line. He knew that if just two or three more of these red-shirts like Kobôn had made it through, the Boiotian front line would have split asunder. A phalanx was like water: It flowed through the easiest hole. A current soon became a deluge if there were quick-witted officers (and in the Spartan army there always were) to cry out, “Push”—
ôtheite, ôtheite
—when they found a channel to widen.

In the brief death lock of the two armies, three or four Boiotians toppled to the ground from the enemy spear jabs, over to his left beyond Staphis. They were hard hill men from the slopes of Messapian, and below near Oinoi and Tanagra, a few of Philliadas’s folk that seemed now to be always at the hottest spot in the fray. But they learned it was not so easy to hit these killers of the Spartan phalanx, who as one and with precision stabbed at their throats. Despite their small numbers in this pocket, many of the red-capes still penetrated three ranks in, before being swarmed by Thebans who filled these holes and put them all down. Yet for all the prebattle bluster of Lichas, for all the royal pride of Kleombrotos, the masters of war so far had been outsmarted by the plans of Ainias the tactician. The Spartans, in their arrogance, had let the smaller Boiotian force mass deeper with no idea that the shorter front had marched at an angle to their own right flank. They were dumbfounded how to get around and outflank this narrow fist of Epaminondas that slammed into them at a run. Somehow the shorter front had reached to the flank of the longer.

Soon the force of fifty shields began to grind down the enemy’s depth of twelve, as the Boiotians to the rear dug in their heels and pushed their own into the Spartan phalanx. Time, quick time was everything in this choreography of death: to break the lambda-shields before they got to the flank. Battle hinged on
kairos
, the moment, the
akmê
of position, of the first blow, of hitting hard men on their open sides. “With me, Chiôn. You, me, Staphi. Get to the king now—before they get to our rear. Plow on to the king.” Who decided who lived or died this day at Leuktra? As in getting the harvest in, not always the greater nerve and muscle, since a coward might stab on the blind side and hit the hero’s cheek. As often it was luck. The length of fate’s long thread determined who stayed on his feet and who did not. The goddess Tuchê, or at least Klôthô and her two sisters of the Moirai had as much say as man’s right arm in massed battle. If by chance he lined up across from lesser enemies—the allied Peloponnesians or freed helots—then a Boiotian farmer might live; but should he draw the lot to face the peers of Lichas, then even those of the Sacred Band could well die before such killers.

The line of killing peaked and ebbed. In this
klonos
, this frenzy of battle, those who were hit and went down at first were quickly replaced. In the world of the phalanx, the Thebans stepped forward to close and isolate these pockets of Spartan intruders and yet still keep the files and ranks tight—and the wall of shields unbroken. The Spartans were like their fathers of old in closing ranks and keeping even the most brutal of enemies from boring into their phalanx. A few Boiotians, Antikrates knew, would have their necks crushed this day by the edges of Spartan shields. Like the scaly serpent’s jaws, the rims slammed shut on any fool who stuck his helmet forward into the Spartan wall.

Antikrates, still advancing on the Spartan right after the crash, almost alone cared little that his wing behind was buckling under the Theban weight. He thought that he could give room to Kleonymos and his guardsmen to range out to kill these pigs, even as enemy hoplites from three sides started to bang their shields against his collapsing wing. We can’t kill enough of these men, Antikrates knew now, to stop the mass—even as he bashed down Eurynomos from the hills of Kithairon, and speared in the groin his brother Antalkidas who rushed in to take his fallen sibling’s place. But it was not easy to kill brothers like these, not here on their soil. They did not run, these gnarled farmers who took three or more blows before stumbling. Nonetheless, Antikrates kept telling himself, we can kill the Malgidai and still save our king. We of the line of Lichas, alone the professional killers of Hellas, can kill Epaminondas, kill their best and teach others before we die the price of fighting men like us.

Or so he thought, but for every Eurynomos and Antalkidas of the enemy who were on the ground, four Spartiates had already been ground down. And they were the best of the Spartiates: Dorrusas, nephew of Agesilaos, himself screaming as a black iron spearhead broke the barrier of his teeth; the ephor Araios buried beneath five spear stabs—under the jaw, in the armpit, below the navel, above the knee, through the groin; and now even Anaxilas, the henchman of Antikrates. Anaxilas had married his cousin Kreusa, was hamstrung and flailing like a crushed scorpion on the red ground of Leuktra, as the rustics under Philliadas from Tanagra shredded his thighs, slamming down their butt-spikes. Worse still, few Spartans stepped up from the files to plug the holes. The Boiotians were now even into the middle ranks. And the terrified Spartans were backing up, some even turning about, and fighting their way through their own hoplites to flee the crazed men of Boiotia. It was not just Antikrates who noticed the novelty of Spartan failure; the catastrophe was spreading throughout the army as the royal guard screamed orders to stay fast, commands that were never heard and were as shrill as they were brief.

At this moment beside the stream of Leuktra, for the first time in three hundred summers, the dreaded thrust of the Spartan Right ended and went for good from the memory of the Hellenes. Instead, the unaccustomed stiffening of the enemy already sent a shiver throughout the entire Spartan column. The king’s guard felt the unease in the ranks that an enemy line had not collapsed when hit hard, but had grown rather than receded with the blow. Of course, the old hands like Deinon and Kleonymos and Sphodrias, too, were spearing the Thebans as they always had. Yet why, Antikrates wondered, were even they not moving forward, not even holding their ground, but slowing being pushed backward? Antikrates through his eye-slits saw the bobbing crests about him. The horsehair plumes of his confused men began nodding in all directions. The circle of Spartans was collapsing around their king.

Far too late, Kleombrotos and Lichas ordered Sphodrias and his folk at the tip of the spears to get the men moving to the far right, to bypass this onrushing mob so much deeper than anything they had ever fought. Mêlon was now right in front of the king’s line. Yes, he was to face Lichas once more, perhaps as Malgis had. But now Mêlon took heart that once more Lichas would bear out a Spartan king on his back, perhaps this time dead rather than wounded. He pressed on; yes, this time Lichas would carry out a dead king.

Mêlon could feel that gaping holes were opening, as yet more pockets of Theban rustics surged in. Too few Spartans stepped up to plug the gaps made by such spearmen. Mêlon and Chiôn, with Staphis and Antitheos and his men to the left, were already, at this very beginning of battle, three or four ranks beyond the Spartan front line. They were almost as far into the enemy phalanx as Pelopidas and the Sacred Band fifty or so feet farther to their left on the wing. Over there out of sight, the Sacred Band had avoided the crash. Instead they had already trotted around the Spartan line, and well past the king. From the side and now from the rear, the Sacred Band began to encircle the Spartan horn. Pelopidas’s men were herding the enemy back into the spears of the advancing left under Epaminondas, Mêlon, and Chiôn. Already the Spartans were nearly surrounded, their entire right flank blocked at every side. Mêlon’s Thebans were like Helikon goat dogs, nipping the ankles of the rams, herding them together as they were forced into the pen. The Spartans were in danger not of losing, but of being destroyed to a man.

Across the way, Lichas saw the disaster. Almost alone he felt this doom of his royal right. He pointed to the king’s guard to keep to the right. “Break out of the pig jaws. Trot out. We break out of their ring, quick time, now. March on the double-step. Listen to our pipers.”

As the Spartans tried to spear a way out of the closing circle, Staphis, Chiôn, and Mêlon held firm. The three were drifting more and more to the left as planned, batting down spear thrusts, jabbing Spartans as they worked their way onward toward the royal guard itself. More Spartan bodies lay at their feet as they stepped ahead—twitching like the fishermen’s speared tunny, but trapped in their scales of armor. Staphis crushed a prone man’s throat with his hobnailed sandal. Those coming up behind with their still-raised spears finished him off, slamming their butt-spikes straight down through his eye-slits, once the Spartan’s shield was splintered and then hammered down flat. For these in the rear who would not meet the first storm of the Spartan, their grand tales back home at the pottery stalls would be of pushing their friends ahead and smashing their spear-butts, their
saurôtêres
, into hundreds of Spartans that they trampled and stepped on. Soon the Thebans, as song would have it in the years to follow, were walking over the dreaded schoolmasters of war—Spartans cast down like mere scraps of meat on the dirty floor of the raucous banquet hall.