The End of Sparta: A Novel (18 page)

“Wake up, Thespian, you cannot cross over. Not yet.”

It was the Stymphalian Ainias, the planner of Leuktra, who had sat down next to the son of Malgis. Throughout the entire battle the Arkadian had never been more than two files away in battle, always with Proxenos at his side batting away any thrusts aimed at Mêlon. Now from his wine sack Ainias poured some water into his bloody helmet. Then he beat away the flies that had covered Mêlon’s head and cleaned the wound.

The Wages of Battle

Mêlon’s head cleared a bit and the Thisbean music in it abruptly stopped—no more cedar scent in the air, no pond, no Nêto, no Chiôn, no family at work on the slopes of Helikon. The sun of the long day was speeding westward on its home leg toward the mountains. He blurted out to anyone nearby, “Good men. That is all that matters. We had them. Hoplites like Lophis, Chiôn, and Ainias and Epaminondas can do anything—good men, far better than anyone in the king’s army. Good men, that’s all that counts.”

Now Mêlon went on with his ramble, “I paid Lichas back in kind. I think you will find something of his ear, and maybe of the king’s spear as well.” Mêlon vaguely sensed that Ainias was treating his wounds. For an eye blink, he thought it was Lichas back to finish him off—since this Ainias spoke Doric and was a rough-looking sort, a frightful thing to see as well on the battlefield, nearly as ugly a hoplite as Lichas himself. “Thespian. Your spear fell from the dead Kleombrotos, but only after your sword went into his head bone. Few hit a Spartan king. None twice. That spear—it will hang in the temple of Herakles at Thebes. Or perhaps the
ekklêsia
will vote to send it to Proxenos’s new Boiotian altar at Delphi.”

Ainias was looking more carefully over Mêlon’s head wound, wondering whether the larger tear across his brow should be seared or stitched. “You are the only Boiotian who has ever drawn blood from Lichas. The prophetesses from the south say he is the favorite of their gods. These seers boast that even in his seventh decade that bald head cannot be killed by any Theban—or even perhaps any free man of Hellas. It is not easy to stand up to Spartan men in battle when they believe that the gods favor only the strong, and live and talk inside their chests.”

A growing circle of hoplites neared the dazed and bleeding Mêlon, wishing to walk over the very soil where he had just spilled the blood of the king Kleombrotos. The Thespian’s arms and neck were laced with gashes and scrapes. Ainias, who knew well the nature of mending torn skin and stopping oozing blood, put a cream of honey and animal fat in the deeper gashes. He rubbed olive oil on the bleeding shallow cuts, and wrapped them in linen to keep away the flies and gnats. He counted out loud eleven spear slices. Mêlon’s armor showed another batch of new dents. The blow from Kleonymos to Mêlon’s head had closed an eye. Half his face was unrecognizable. Where, he wondered, was his son?

Mêlon squinted back and at last weakly muttered, “Where is Lophis?” “Where is my Bora? At least go find the spear head at the
trophê
where the Spartans turned. The king’s guard of young Spartans nearly gored me. We fought from the left, Stymphalian. Just as you said. But their spears over that way were longer and sharper. Lichas was the better man. I know that now. He has a son as well—who is bigger yet. Antikrates is better still. And where is Lophis, where is our Chiôn to deal with these enemies.”

“Wait until we know more. We are sure only that your sword first went into the mouth of Kleombrotos. The king is chewing on it in Hades. His henchman Lichas can thank you for another cut. It made him look even more the dogface than he was. Though he won’t miss an ear since they say Lichas listens to none anyway. You and Chiôn have sent the royal house of Sparta across the Styx. Think of it—the king dead, and with a sword no less, a sword wielded by a farmer on Helikon.
Machairion
I should call you. But here is what is left of your Bora. We keep it and make a new shaft this spring.”

Ainias held up the huge iron tip with a broken shaft about an arm’s length left. A Tanagran had just found it near Chiôn. Mêlon was coming back for longer moments to his senses, “Where is my Lophis? Is he already at the gulf? Where Chiôn?” But there was no Chiôn to answer him. Mêlon finally began to fathom that his slave had toppled. “Chiôn? Did Lophis bring out his body?”

“Proxenos was near you all the time. That’s his nature. The hard stone in a crisis. He was there right behind you. To steady you; so much for your Nêto’s warnings to him that he too would go down.” Ainias had spied a crowd around Chiôn with shouts that he lived. He also had forgotten that Nêto had warned Proxenos not of Leuktra, but of crossing the Isthmos in its aftermath. “It was Proxenos who saved your brute. Chiôn is warm, but whether he will live, I’m not sure. Your son was with the horse, and our riders routed them easily. No doubt he is far off, in the shadows of Kithairon riding down those who bolted.” Mêlon nodded at news of his son and that Chiôn breathed, thinking that he must have been asleep as Ainias had searched the pile of the dead. He hadn’t really thought that any Spartan could kill Chiôn.

Mêlon was confused as Ainias finished, “Lichas’s spear cut into Chiôn well enough. But his bronze plate warded most of that hard blow away from his heart. The Plataian is sewing on him now, at least the smaller tear he cannot burn. They say he can patch flesh as well as build stones. Though I have healed more than he and I’ll go back there to check on the wound to make sure he has put in enough honey and wool. I don’t like thread. The hot poker is the only way to close a real tear. I brought my doctor box. I’ll need to take the bronze prong and scissors and cut away the bad skin, and pull out the splinters before we melt the wound closed. I may want to bleed him—and purge him too while I’m at it. Or maybe a leech or worm to eat away the rot to come.”

By now, as Mêlon alternately slept and awoke, it was almost dark and the torches were lit. Epaminondas had himself reformed a tiny phalanx a few hundred yards ahead and his men right in the dark were squared off against Lichas and the Spartan survivors on a nearby hill. But Mêlon’s head seemed caved in. The pounding of the waves roared in his ear. Bodies—he could see them in the twilight—were dragged and piled in heaps. The battlefield was becoming an agora as thousands of Boiotians crisscrossed the carnage. Who was that strange man in the long cloak over there? he thought. He stares here too long. An aged white-haired fellow crossed by, with a lanky, bleary-eyed attendant carrying off a corpse, a mess of a hoplite of forty or so from Thebes. There was a severed arm tied flat to his chest with twine, at least something like that under the flies. Are they afraid the dogs will get it? That must be the work of that Kleonymos, or maybe Antikrates, or so Mêlon thought.

Ainias’s voice now kept Mêlon awake, as he muttered of this trio off in the distance, “There goes dead young Kalliphon, the orator and son of Alkidamas, the greatest speaker of the Hellenes, and the godhead behind the freedom of Messenia, tutor to Epaminondas himself. They all had no business out here. The man was no fighter. You can see from the sad look of the father and their thin slave from the north. That son Kalliphon’s first day in bronze was his last. His father and that sorry shield-carrier of his, they must burn him as they can. Though one is wrinkled and stiff and that other servant of his, a northerner with a half-Hellene tongue, thin and green.”

Was this Alkidamas again? Why did he hear always of the mythical Alkidamas somewhere? Mêlon heard a familiar voice at his back, “You breathe still, my master. But you look dead to me.”

Nêto.

The Messenian girl put a cloak over the cold Mêlon. Now she poured him more warm water from her own pouch and swatted away the blue-black flies. But hadn’t he left her with Proxenos, just last dusk before the battle, with orders to start for home on the morning of the battle? He knew that he was not on the wrong side of the Styx. Or maybe this was Helikon, and he was working in the hot vineyard as his Nêto brought them his afternoon water from the spring above.

But none of this was so. Nêto cried out again, “Lophis is gone. Gone across—do you know?”

Let her babble. His son was safe and on Xiphos. The bright crackling torchlights were leaving Mêlon’s head. The failed agents of death winged away for good now, still screeching as they quit their hovering above. Mêlon fully reentered the world of the living. Or at least he thought he had. But his hearing and sight for a time were no more than half of what they had been, and he was swarmed by these strange shapes and sounds.

More than a thousand enemy dead were piled in heaps on the ground. Four hundred, it would turn out later, were elite Spartan
Homoioi.
Thousands of Boiotians were walking the fields, more curious to see what Spartan hoplites looked like, when safe and dead, than just eager for booty. Mêlon remembered the Theban cries during battle, “A dead army. A dead poliso.”—
Apethane to strateuma, hê polis apethanen
. Now he saw that it was no lie. In the torchlight, he made better sense of the mob about him. Some mounted longhairs scoured the battlefield for stragglers. Farmers tended the wounded. Their women were breaking out packs of rations and shooing off a new mob of looters and sightseers who were swarming over even the Boiotian corpses. Yet another heap of helmets, breastplates, shields, greaves, and spears was growing not far away beneath an old oak tree. Near it arose an even larger heap of capes, sandals, and cloaks. Silver coins were piled in the hollow shields.

Most of the dead Boiotians were being carried home by their folk. Pelopidas had posted guards over these piles of loot. Eurybiades the booty-seller and a small army of helpers were already buying plundered armor—paying for it with the very coins his slaves had scavenged from the battlefield. A dead Spartan stared at Mêlon not more than five cubits distant. He was naked, just stripped, and already stiffening. His legs were covered with flies and worse. A spear had gone up under the jaw. Or at least something like that had crushed in half the man’s face. “Cover him,” Mêlon yelled. He had no desire to see any more of the dead. The mangling of the face gave the corpse an eerie frozen look about him, almost a grotesque smile. One hand was extended in the dirt with all of its fingers cut off, except the index, which was pointing right at Mêlon. For a moment he thought the dead man was whispering that he had killed Lophis. But then Mêlon shook himself out of another trance, just as two slaves ran up, grabbed the nude body by the heels, and dragged it over to a long line of Spartan corpses.

Soon most of the plunder would be sold off by the states to pay for an annual festival to the victory goddess Nikê—and for a
trophê
of their victory at the spot where Kleombrotos had fallen and the enemy had at last turned. Mêlon was finally clear enough to understand that Nêto had, as ordered the previous night, hiked back up to the camp with Proxenos and joined Gorgos. But then somehow she had not gone home to the farm in the morning. Everything after that was a blur.

On her way down the hill, only with luck had she fought off the Boiotians who wanted her wagon for their own wounded. She finished her story to Mêlon with news that they had seen Lophis in the first charge fall—and then nothing more. She was uncomfortable with the crowd that had drawn around Mêlon. They pointed to him as a hemi-god and murmured, “He, that one, killed the king. There he is, the lame Thespian of the prophecy. Right there, the killer of Kleombrotos. The gods do not lie about the
mêlon
.” Yet even amid the mob, Nêto thought it better that her master hear the end of his son.

She threw back her hood and stumbled on, “I saw Lophis from the hill yonder. He charged at the first trumpet blast, out too far from the rest. A Spartan knocked him off. I saw that much, and then dust rose and there was nothing more. Then Gorgos, our Gorgos ran off below into the field. He said he would fetch him. But no, it seems? He too vanished into the dust and never came back—dead or captured by our enemies or perhaps even turn traitor, I don’t know. It was chaos by then.”

She was weeping and then clear for moments, as she tried to tell her master that either his son was dead or his slave Gorgos was a traitor or martyr—or neither. “More of Lophis I heard than saw, since when I hit the flatland just now, I grabbed two bloody horsemen, wounded men from Orchomenos, one a with broken spear stuck in his mount. They told me that our Lophis had been knocked off with a huge spear, a lance larger than any on the battlefield. Lichas had targeted Lophis, the riders said. In the melee Lichas went after him. They heard Lichas yell: ‘Fetch the armor, Spartans, drag the kill with us. Bring home the armor of Lysander.’ So they told me before they too were beaten back. Right then I went farther with the wagon to pick up Lophis. Instead I found myself here with you and Chiôn. Master, I was swarmed by a mob. They tried to tear me off the wagon. I sliced a few arms and hands to keep Aias free. My new friend, this slave Myron, saved me from the mob. But no Lophis. He’s dead, I fear. But I tried to find him. I tried.”

Mêlon knew no slave named Myron. But the more he told Nêto that Lophis lived, that the Boiotian horse had broken the Spartan cavalry, that Gorgos would carry him out alive as he had once brought the wounded Malgis from Koroneia, the more he suspected that his son was dead—too far ahead of the horsemen, the strange role of Gorgos and his current absence, the glitter of the armor of Lysander, and Lichas, always Lichas. Too many of Nêto’s details proved too true. He sat back down and kept mute. Lichas was alive. Lophis was dead. So the good die and the bad live on.

“I just saw Chiôn!” It was Proxenos who had walked up. As always the architect kept his head while others lost theirs. “First, listen. Chiôn talks. He lies back in the camp of Epaminondas. His left arm will never lift a shield—at least if that wound heals like others I have treated. Nêto, go to Aias. Drive your wagon a bit closer. We will put these two in and then you can get them back up to the farm.”