The End of Sparta: A Novel (40 page)

Chiôn looked troubled. So Mêlon warned him a last time. “Chiôn. This is not your fight. Your one arm, wife, your son to come, and the farm, too—all that means you stay on Helikon. You give the money to Alkidamas at the port, and then go home. That is enough. I’ll race the old man by land to Messenia, and see if I can beat his ship to deal with Gorgos wherever and whatever he is. That way one of us at least will get to Messenia, by land or sea.”

Chiôn paused. “Maybe. But I fear I can do far better in hunting Nêto down than you, Master. Besides, I’ve only seen the Spartans twice. At Tegyra and Leuktra. Not in their home. I can even up with Lichas for my arm. I’ll make him bow to Lophis in Hades—or worse still. No one knows Gorgos better than his fellow farm slave. I can figure out where he is before either you or Alkidamas. And we hear still of the boast of that Antikrates. We missed him at Leuktra. The tongues of your Olympians say he will do harm to our Epaminondas. So I will give the money to Alkidamas and come back and march with you to the Isthmos.”

“No. No. All in good time, Chiôn. I let Nêto go off, and it is my debt to bring her back safely. I have waited far too long this autumn in my anger at her leaving. These other debts are on my ledger as well, along with seeking Nemesis for Lophis and Malgis. The reckoning is soon. Lichas, or so my
daimôn
tells me, is not long for this earth. Not with all of Boiotia heading south in the morning. But remember the words of Nêto,” Mêlon ended with a laugh. “You are not to see the sea. So again head home, and keep our farm safe. Take our Xiphos here. You need him on the farm, and you can save me from having a Plataian ride him back over there. Either Alkidamas or I will find Nêto.”

Chiôn frowned at that. “How silly. Proxenos was not to cross the Isthmos, and yet he is now a hero down there in the south. I will swim in the sea anyway if I give the silver to Alkidamas at Aigosthena late this night. But, yes, I go to the sea and then home to Helikon.” With that he nodded, took the reins of their Xiphos, and led the horse away. Then he was gone as abruptly as he had appeared. Mêlon almost thought he saw Myron, or some brute, in torchlight waiting for his friend on a crest not far from camp.

As Chiôn headed toward Helikon, he seemed to see visions again in the starry night, as if, amid the stars and moon, there were bright outlines of a timber stockade. Then he paused and the trance was clearer and right before his eyes. Inside this fort he saw through the lamplight the head of Nêto shaved—was it on a pole? Nêto was either dead or close to it. Gorgos was near or at the center of this crime, though he seemed to go by different names and had altered his look, or so they said of the helot lord with the shaved head and fine cloaks. So Nêto spoke all this to him for a moment from across the Isthmos far to the south. His dreams had stayed with him in the waking hours, and now were even stronger enough to stop him in mid-stride. Myron shook him and the visions ended as the two picked up their pace.

After Chiôn left, Mêlon and Melissos slept for only half the night, and then arose well before sunrise. Mêlon was eager to press ahead to find Nêto, but he was still not sure whether this Nikôn was a scoundrel who had heard Nêto’s master had coin, or was an agent of Alkidamas, or was a lover of Nêto. In any case, for now all Mêlon could do was send Chiôn with his money for Alkidamas at Aigosthena. He would march with the army into the Peloponnesos, and then hope by burning Lakonia that the helots on the other side of Taygetos would rise up and so free Nêto wherever she was—though he thought he would slip away at some point and arrive at Messenia before the army.

Others this morning were stirring even before Mêlon and Melissos. Soon they were waiting impatiently at the head of the column, nervous to move out. There was a growing noise of horse and leather and wood and bronze, with plenty of clatter and cursing in almost every dialect of the Hellenes. Everywhere arose the din of the heavy tread of thousands of feet milling about as they readied to march out. “Look back toward Thebes,” Melissos yelled. “The torches, a myriad of them. Even more, below.” Then they heard the voice of Epaminondas. “March out!”

With that the mob at the back of the hoplites let out, “On to Sparta. To Sparta.” Then a roar of just “Sparta, Sparta …” The columns at the van moved out toward the mountain passes, in the gloom as the winter sun was behind the mountains. In quiet the army knew it was late in the year for war, on this the shortest day of the year—the great brooding solstice when all shuddered that the colder times were ahead. This northern horde was perhaps three or four times larger than the one mustered at Leuktra. All Hellas north of the Isthmos seemed to be on the move, either to fight or follow the throng peddling food and drink and women. Even more would join up in the south. Northerners had never marched in mass before, much less had they joined with islanders and the men of the Euboia to the west, soon to be alongside hoplites mustering at Elis, Argos, and Arkadia to the south. In the early darkness most appeared strange folk. Some had open-faced
piloi
without nose guards in the new style. Others wore cheap armor on their chests from the foundries of Euboia that were scarcely tempered or hammered. Most had painted the club of Thebes over their shield blazons—as if for the next few days they were Epaminondas’s own Boiotians. A few had the heavy sheet-bronze breastplates of their grandfathers, but far more wore glued fabric with small metal plates. Freedmen and the poor had neither the
thôrax
nor even greaves. Many, Mêlon noticed, were the hide men from the mountains on the north shore of the gulf. These carried small Thrakian leather crescent-shaped shields and long javelins or bows across their shoulders—the tribes of Aitolians, Akarnanians, and Ambrakions for whom ambush and outlawry in the hills alone won honor. Thessalonians and Lokrians rode on past atop shaggy ponies, with long fur capes and quivers and javelins strapped to their saddles. The looters of Delphi, the Phokians, came with good bronze armor—no doubt lifted at night from the votive racks in the temples.

“No worry, Master, about how they look. The uglier the better, yes?” Melissos stammered. He went on. “As for us, up in the north, we pay any who will fight. And Master, when they fall, we burn their corpses, without charge for the timber to their families, as promised. That’s enough. These are men who have strong right arms; why worry why they fight? For now, aren’t they on our side?” He went on with an eye on Mêlon to see whether his new master was ready with a slap to quiet down. “Who cares any more whether spearmen own land or meet your census? Our poor men from the hills, why, they can kill a lord with his five hundred
plethra
of wheat land just as easily as they can a snake. Watch when this army pours into Lakonia. One of our landless robbers from Ambrakia will jump on the back of a Spartan ephor. Cut his throat without any music or two-step or any of those other things the Spartans drill at. These are the wages of
dêmokratia
of your new Hellas, a real equality—in killing. Why dye your cape scarlet when it keeps you no warmer?”

Mêlon laughed at his new talkbox servant. For a blurry-eyed boy he knew too much about the darker nature of men—and how much better it is to use than be disappointed by it. Yes, this Melissos was hardly the gangly servant that he had dismissed in his mind just three days earlier. He had grown up royal in the rough north, it seemed. There the Makedonians grunted rather than spoke the Hellenic tongue. They poked or killed anything that they wished to in their wine halls after battle. They fought for women, or gold, or land, not for ideas, and much less for helots. So how odd, Mêlon mused: These northerners like Melissos and his brood flocked to civilization to enjoy the finer life that the law and justice would bring, even though, like the flat worm in the gut, they would eat enough holes to starve and kill their life-giving host. Odder still, the more the Hellenes adorned their cities in marble and wore gold clasps and purple cloaks, the more they lost their stomach to get into the muck and fight those like Melissos who thrived here in the mess and would storm their gates. No wonder Epaminondas dressed in rags and drank gruel and had no children—no concerns for the safety of kin that so blinds men, no worry whether he would tire of ice baths in the river. To keep his soft Hellas free, Epaminondas would shun its softness. When a man gives up gold and land and family, he’s halfway living in the other world anyway. But then so were men like Proxenos, and Ainias—and Mêlon himself. Was not that why they followed Epaminondas in the first place? Mêlon thought of all that—and how this Melissos might be a good servant to have in the days ahead.

The sun rose just as they trudged up the mountain, and they soon passed through the forests of spruce and pine of Kithairon and the high plains among the woods. The army was already moving at a brisk walk, along the road that would lead them out of Boiotia through the mountains down into the Megarid and onto the Isthmos. Without the usual August heat, a winter march was far easier on the men—at least if the weather held and the ground stayed firm. Mêlon and Melissos were at the van during the ascent to Kithairon’s summit. So they fell in with Pelopidas and Epaminondas at the head. Both at intervals already were sending out runners ahead to watch for Athenian archers and horse who might try to waylay and whittle down the army in hopes that the war between Thebes and Sparta might be more evenly matched and more lethal for both. Some had already spotted the red stakes—the ones that Proxenos and Ainias had set out a few days earlier to mark the way where the Megarian tribes of the mountains had supplied food. The idea of the Boiotarchs was to skirt the Athenian border. The army would take the mountain fork and avoid the Eleusis road. That way they could get to the Megarid along the Oinoi path between the watchtowers to the plain across Salamis, with the summit of Mt. Pateras on their right. They could sleep up on the pass on this first night and be tented around Megara and its market on the afternoon of the second day.

At noon on the third day from Thebes, the army would cross the Isthmos—Korinthians and Athenian guards not withstanding. Then by noon on the fourth or fifth, Epaminondas would market outside the
aspis
of Argos. In two more days from there they would be coming down from the hills of Parthenion and spreading over Tripolis. On the seventh or maybe the eighth morning, when they joined the Argives, fifty thousand of them would be camped at new Mantineia. Or so was the plan that Epaminondas and Alkidamas had worked out when they sent Proxenos and Ainias ahead.

Lykomedes had promised good stocks in his new city, and they had pledges of twenty thousand to join them from Elis and Arkadia, all to meet at Mantineia. Ainias and Proxenos along the way had bought in advance a thousand goats, five hundred cattle, and two thousand sheep to be picked up by the army as it moved, some of them paid in Elean silver in advance to the Megarians and Nemeans. The two already had purchased five hundred
medimnoi
of barley and five hundred of wheat in measures of a hundred stored in dry cisterns every other day past the Isthmos. Ainias had posted a warning to the plainsmen of the Megarid and those beyond the Isthmos that Epaminondas would take what he had paid for, should the towns not produce what was bought, especially since Ainias had agreed to the high winter prices and put down two talents for the grain stores.

Before the high noon of this first day of the march, the generals parleyed over the food and route—snow in the shady ravines, with some ice in the low spots under gray skies. Even with the sun out, the morning was windy and cold, and the oncoming low clouds from the north made Mêlon worry that this huge muster was star-crossed or cursed by barren winter. He had marched for thirty years but never in winter, and never under s
tratêgoi
with less than a month left on their tenure. Yet his farming sense told him the wind would let up and they would see the sun before they crossed the Isthmos. Epaminondas noticed the Thespian’s silence. “Worried about becoming an outlaw, son of Malgis—a hungry
phugas
or an
adikôn
even? Don’t. Don’t give in to your fears. The army will march at the pace of your limp. If we don’t make it by the new season but decide there are other things to clean up in the Peloponnesos, well then I will gladly stand trial, not the men who follow. But I doubt the talkers in the agora wish to execute ten thousand of their own Boiotians in armor for the crime of humiliating Agesilaos.”

Suddenly, at the summit, the sky in the distance became blue and clear, and the storm clouds blew on by out to the Aegean. Looking back they had a clear view of the horde following them. Epaminondas resumed his own talk. “Take in all these men tramping in the cold of winter. Think of it all, Mêlon.” Even on this eve of winter the land looked lush with month-old green barley and some sprouting wheat stands. It all prompted a gasp from Epaminondas as they headed into a dark bend in the pines. “Farmland like no other, ours is. No wonder Kleombrotos tried to take all he could of it from us. I would too, if I were from parched Lakonia.”

Without warning Mêlon grabbed his arm as they marched, worried that his general did not know war for all of his years of bleeding in it. “Did he really only want that, my general? Doesn’t the king have green land enough from the water that runs down from the ridges of Taygetos? Or do you think Spartans starve and are without the twenty thousand
plethra
of bottomland in Lakonia and Messenia?” The farmer, who knew something about land and the fight over it, wanted to let these generals know what they were about to march into. “Is this what we are marching about? Who will own the great plain of Boiotia? Is that all you think wars are about? Taking what you are in need of from someone else? This greed, real or imagined—this
pleonexia
?” Suddenly Mêlon felt a
daimôn
had infused his thoughts. He could not stop. His tongue ran on. He even forgot where his feet took him over the pass. Now his stiff leg eased, and the words poured out. It was as if for those last ten years of thought in his vineyard alone, he could claim his due to speak with a hundred captains about him as recompense.