The End of Sparta: A Novel (20 page)

“I said hear your Lichas. You won a battle. A big one. But not this war. A bigger war—
megas kindunos
. That you will have in days. Then my men from the coast get here with our other king’s son. Or now we march out home. Then go home. Or will we stay here? And kill you all?”

Whether he smiled or grimaced, few could tell. So far his talk was nonsense. “We go in the night. It is written by the gods that Sparta survives Leuktra. You do the second thinking; Lichas does the first killing of the enemies of Hellas. No, you won’t kill me, the last true Hellene. You’d miss, need me too much. Kill me? Then you would kill Sparta. Then who would protect you weaker ones from the wild men from the north and east?”

Pelopidas came up and raised his spear, but he was checked by the hand of Epaminondas. Still, Pelopidas thought it better to kill this man now. Ainias nodded to him and grasped his hilt. Never again would such men as their own be together to get this close to the Spartan. If it was not done now, both sensed that this man would bring them and their own catastrophe upon catastrophe in the year ahead. But it was the softer Proxenos who already had his spear out. He was lowering it in the shadows for a groin stab, for a foul black mood had come over him as Lichas and his brood neared. He was a man of vast lands and black soil and halls with marble columns, while these lords of Sparta lived in hovels and knew not a plum from an apricot. Proxenos did not believe Nêto’s prophecies about a bad end across the Isthmos, but he did sense that one day he would march safer in the Peloponnesos without the evil of Lichas and his tribe.

Epaminondas stepped even closer, to within five palms’ width of the Spartan’s face. “You claim to be Lichas? You carried the dead king out. I apologize—for not killing you myself. But we had others of the royal blood today to deal with first. You yourself have lived too long, old man.”

Lichas blustered at that. “None of us ever explain what we do. We do all for Hellas—make her free. I keep the good on top to take care of the weak like you on the bottom. You only talk of making the bad equal to the good so that we all end up bad. Yes, what you cannot be, you would tear down. But we are the Hellenes, you its polis destroyers. Sparta is Hellas, Hellas Sparta, nothing more, nothing less.” Lichas spat out some of the dried goat meat he was gumming on. Then he continued, looking at Mêlon. “Is it to be more war? Or do my Spartans march out under truce? No difference to me. I killed ten of you today, and got back Spartan armor from the babe in diapers who thought he could wear it.” Then he laughed at all that and stepped a pace closer.

Mêlon hobbled up closer to the side of Ainias. In his own wounds, old and new, he looked as torn as Lichas himself; a knot on the side of his temple was as large as the egg of a hawk. Its blue sheen better reflected the torchlight. From the eyebrow to his jaw the side of his head was black with swabs of dirt and dried blood. Some cuts were wet and seeping, around the massive bruise to his face. His arms were bloody and his skin beneath his shoulders everywhere was torn like latticework. Every man, however small his stature and reasonable his nature, has his limits. Mêlon cared little whether he lived or slept for good, as he eyed the man who had killed his son. He had just woken from his trip to Hades, and did not find the change so much of a relief, this living without a son on his Helikon. Suddenly the fear of Lichas left him, and he quit scanning his enemy in worry about how to kill him. He knew he would kill the Spartan, and it mattered little whether it was here or next year in the south. Going to the house of the dead was a small coin to hand over—and would save the lives of others later on. This Lichas talked grandly of killing, but he had not killed either Mêlon or Chiôn. They had in turn sent most of his own to Hades.

Lichas first grunted as Mêlon came into his torchlight. “Hold up. I thought I killed you, yes, peasant boy of Helikon? So remind me. Did I hit you today? I am sure I killed you, cripple-leg. Is not this Mêlon, son of Malgis of the old women’s tales? I remember you, Thespian. You’re not the
mêlon
to fall, but the sheep to be slaughtered. I know our tongue and your
mêlon—mâlon
to me—means sheep, not apple. So bray for us.”

Mêlon laughed. Any small fear of the Spartan had vanished. Only hatred for the killer of his son remained. “Not yet, Lichas. You are old, only good for carrying away dead kings, not for protecting live ones. We meet again, not for the last time yet. The voices of Nêto’s seers ring in my head as well. This time you gave me an ear. Now give me back my helot Gorgos and my son he carried in.”

“Your Gorgos? You mean my Kuniskos? Our long-lost puppy? That creaky helot would not fetch more than an Athenian drachma or two on the auction block in Delos.” Unlike the other Spartans, Lichas had been a harmost and had traveled all over the Aegean. If he wished, he could talk more like an Athenian than any Boiotian. “But Gorgos was—is—mine again. I missed his service these long years. I needed my puppy’s little teeth. He could have had better things to do for me than prune vines for you and drink in his stupor. He wagged his way back home to me. Of his own will. Like any good little dog that has lost his master and, when at last he picks up the scent, comes yelping back to his kennel, with a crushed hare in his mouth, a gift for good will.”

Lichas went on. “The body that Gorgos lugged into our camp just now I keep safe in good faith—or what is left of him. Ah. I see now, he is your son. I thought until now it was you I had killed, you who had taken to riding horses with your bad leg that I gave you at Koroneia. I see that I have these years killed both the father and son of yours, Mêlon.” Lichas smiled as he saw the Boiotians edging toward him. “Men like us sire plenty of boys to fight and die—at least if they are to be good men at all. I have another son you saw today,
megas
Antikrates. He killed Boiotians, better even than Kleonymos. Neither of you can escape, not from him. My big son, this one, is a sort even we fear at Sparta. You’re already dead—so’s your general and that branded slave we cut down this day.” Lichas stayed fixed on Mêlon. “But, Mêlon, why was your young upstart on a black pony with armor not earned or worn well? One thing for your son to wear Lysander’s plate, another to fight like a Spartan—a lesson your dead father learned at Koroneia.”

Mêlon replied, “Lysander was a thief himself. Like all you Spartans who make nothing, but steal all from others. You neither farm nor build yourselves. You live in a city of wood, not stone. You have no money, no iron, nothing except what you steal. You are the true polis destroyers. Without your helots, you can’t tell an oar from a winnowing fan. If we bind you, Lichas, perhaps your folk will hand over my Lophis in exchange.”

Epaminondas now stepped up. “Go, Lichas, before Mêlon puts a spear in your face. It is written that with you goes the last Spartan who will ever walk under arms in Boiotia,” He saw the logic of letting the enemy regroup his army for the long march to come. “It is better this way, Lichas, to settle it down south in your courtyard anyway. Some day when there is new snow on Parnon and Taygetos, look for me when you least expect a winter horde from the north. On the banks of your Eurotas, we will meet you when its waters roar in winter.”

With that the parley broke up and the two sides went back to their lines. Left unsaid was that the Spartans before light would be given passage to the mountains, and that the body of Lophis would be returned. As the two Spartans lumbered away to their awaiting guard, Mêlon kept silent, knowing now that his Lophis would not rot among dogs and birds, and that Lichas would not live long in the south.

The trailing Lykos turned around before the shadows swallowed him and faced the Boiotian. Lichas had already disappeared into the night. “Bother us no more, cripple of Helikon. Your time is past, Chôlopous. The dreams of Pasiphai warned us that you would kill our king. So our king you have killed—the worse one. But we have another. The gods tell us that by tonight you have no more power over us.” Then Lykos, a peer of royal blood, gripped his sharp sword with his left and lowered his spear with his right, and backed off a few feet as he ended his lecture. For all his bristling, he was a Spartan man of his word, who did not break oaths or lie. “Gorgos leaves your son—or what is left of him—at the coast road tomorrow before night, with a hag at the seaside shrine. Lichas keeps his armor. It belonged to our big man Lysander. You keep the mess that was once your son. Lichas knocked him off his black horse. He was thinking it was you. Be proud, for he was a hard kill like your father, or so Lichas said. Four or five stabs and his eyes would not stay closed. And proud he was this day that he was the first of the Boiotians to die. He spat that in our faces when Gorgos laid him down. Lichas cut his throat to ease the pain of his spear wounds. Gorgos then turned to go home to Helikon, but we convinced him that he wanted to stay with us. And then he nodded he did.”

With that Mêlon fell silent as the five walked back to the phalanx of Thebans. Pelopidas in his melancholy quickly sent all the Boiotians on home who were sated with plundered armor and the coin pouches of the dead. Mêlon turned darkly to Epaminondas. “Not quite over. You and I will see this Lichas again, and it will not be in Boiotia.”

Ripples of Leuktra

Epaminondas fell in with Pelopidas and the Sacred Band as they trotted off in silence under the moonlight on the road back to Thebes. It was full night and Mêlon was alone. Proxenos and Ainias went south in the darkness in the opposite direction toward Plataia, promising to visit Helikon within the year. Proxenos had sent word to his wife, Aretê, that both had survived the melee and would be home on the Asopos before the sun came up over Kithairon. Neither wanted any plunder and never liked the look of an army as it breaks apart. Both, as the new partners they had become, were plotting the rebuilding of Mantineia to the south and the greater citadel of the Arkadians at Megalopolis, the new democratic fetters that would hem Sparta for good inside the Peloponnesos.

The sound of Lakonian reed pipes filled the air. A clamor rose of moving wood and bronze. Mêlon did not look back. What was left of the Spartan army would before dawn march out with torches from Boiotia. A huge fire roared, consuming what dead they had managed to carry out and what Spartan corpses they had been given by the Thebans. Mêlon was stumbling about. The blow by Kleonymos had done more than close his eye, and after this long day he was nearly done for. He heard a high note and feared there was a daughter of night flapping in the air—or at least a shrill Kêr perched on a low limb of an oak, waiting for him to fall. But the sound was a better strain and from the living, not from Hades and not a Spartan reed, either. As it entered his ear, he recognized the familiar soft piping of a Thisbê song—the strain of safety and health that always brought him home. It was Nêto’s old tune to him, the sign to come down to the house from the vineyard. He followed the sweet sound of pipe back to the wagon.

Nêto and Myron met him with the ox and the wounded Chiôn in the cart behind. She put her reed
aulos
down and recoiled in fright at her master’s swollen head, now half blue and covered in blood and shiny in the torchlight. His eye was completely closed. Still, she soon had the two resting in straw. Sturdy Aias would pull all four back to Helikon. The ox was eager to reach once more the hay and quiet of the stalls even after the tall stand of green grass by the stream on the parched hills above Leuktra. There would be no shaking off this runaway Myron. He feared his master’s wrath and begged only to sleep one night in the shed of Mêlon and a chance to care for Chiôn.

As the wagon rumbled home, Nêto sang softly and reflected that she, Chiôn, and even Myron now would be manumitted and claimed as heroes of Thespiai, who had helped break the Spartans—in Myron’s case for merely following her around the wreckage of the battlefield. This night she concluded that the Myrons of the world always survive war and peace. They are not scroll-smart and can’t recite a line of Homer. But they stay immune from the vanities of ambition, always knowing their own station in life and the narrow limits between which they must live. Earned pity is their currency. Even the hardest man would be hard put to lay a hand on Myron. His smile they said was from stupidity, but if so, it gave him more power than any shield, and came from a craftiness that even the wise could not match. Gorgos surely couldn’t. Yes, in this war to free the serfs of the Peloponnesos, a Myron would survive a Proxenos or Alkidamas—as he all along had known he easily would.

She was stitching verses as was her wont, lines about the Spartan enemies in her midst—Lichas of the one ear and Sphodrias and Kleonymos who supped together in Hades with Klearchos and all the other Spartans that her heroes this day had killed. Her master Mêlon, always her master Mêlon at the van, side-by-side with Chiôn, sire of Lophis, all her men of the soil. She felt an anguish over the death of Lophis, and not only because she regretted that Mêlon had learned of it from other lips. If Nêto were to list all the ways Lophis had kept the Malgidai together, her tally, she feared, might be small. Likewise, she could not point to the tower roof or the oil press beam and say “Lophis made that.” But she knew that without him there was no young heart left on the farm, no laughing, no energy from youth, just the void of his loss, and the wounded and old, and perhaps the end of the farm as they knew it, if she could not rouse the three boys to become men by first frost.

Mêlon lay numb next to the bleeding Chiôn, who took most of the cart’s space. The slave murmured in his forced breath that his good right arm had already been pledged to avenge Lophis’s ghost. He tried to lie on his side to give his master the greater straw, mumbling in the evening, “No worry, no worry. Lichas dies next time. It is written. Gorgos with him, even if he hides in the mountains to the south. I will hunt him down—and string him up.”

Mêlon grumbled only, “If he fights next time like today, we’ll both be dead. I liked the wagon ride over here far better than the return.” Flat in the bloody straw, the heroes of Thespiai—the killers of Deinon, and Sphodrias and tall Kleonymos, and the king Kleombrotos as well—returned on their backs to Helikon from their day at Leuktra—and on into the myths of the Boiotians.