The End of Sparta: A Novel (49 page)

Ainias saw in the lifting fog that his friend Proxenos had drifted off and was standing on the bank—deliberately in range of the Spartan archers. The Stymphalian damned himself again that he had allowed his friend to arm that morning when Proxenos should have stayed inside the warm tents of Pelopidas and finally had his wound cleaned and oiled.

Proxenos was the first to plunge in the icy waters and the last to lumber out as the rising waist-high current barred the way. Did he wish to be hit or to drown? Now on this last attempt, the Plataian had to be pulled out. He fell down, shivering on the bank, but had at least shown the Boiotians how a Plataian braves the missiles of the Spartans and cares little for the cold of the Eurotas. Ainias at last could treat his friend, still breathing on the bank, nearly blue in his wet armor, muttering of his visions of white women with barbed wings and bloody fangs. His eyes closed. With a whisper he touched Ainias’s hand. “No man a slave. None really are. Where is my Nêto?”

“Eyes open, man, before you freeze.” Ainias pulled Proxenos up at the arm. He ordered the hoplites to bring oil and woolen cloaks. Melissos ran up with his pack, a blanket, and a flask. He had seen Proxenos stagger into the Eurotas, shield high, and wanted rare men like this to live; he tore open his pack and tossed oil, honey, and cloth to Ainias.

The river, Proxenos knew, was no longer fast and cold, but strangely warm and slow. He wanted to crawl back into it. He still heard his friends jabbering; too loud, harsh, and grating, they were like the harsh crows fighting each other to pick apart the rotting sucker-fish on the quay. Were they Kêres now? So he looked instead across the river, and now found the floating shades far more to his liking with their soothing calls to ford the warm river. There were heroes, not Kêres, across the Eurotas. Scarlet and purple, these images sang from across the water, “Come across, Proxenos, son of Proxenos, hero of Plataia, guest-friend of Sparta. The water is warm here, my son, where you belong.”

The rough, hard figures of his friends standing above him were of a tired world, one he was leaving behind. Across the Eurotas, there he saw the outline of his long-dead father Proxenos, friend of Sparta, in his armor at Kunaxa, waving for him to join him. Across the water there were not Agesilaos and Lichas, and Elektra with her bare breasts, but there now appeared in the mist Spartans enough, or at least a red-caped mob of shades milling around the angry spear-pierced King Kleombrotos. The ghosts were torn with the terrible wounds from the blows of Mêlon and Chiôn at Leuktra. Even Kleonymos and his companions who drifted to the banks and rattled their spears at him could do him no real harm—or so the voices in his head assured him.

The shade of Sphodrias was shaking his fist at Proxenos. The dead Deinon was screeching as well. There was Klearchos drifting up, who at Leuktra had at least taken down Staphis before being brained by Chiôn. Then Proxenos saw in the distance the ghost of a smiling warrior. He spoke the Thespian brand of Boiotian, and sang to him in the formal tongue, “I am Malgis, O Proxenos, son of Proxenos, friend of your father. Join us over here, O weary man. Come for the laurels you deserve. You served my son so well and brought the Boiotians out of their infamy—enough for any, all that. Join us, bask in the rising of your three cities; we can see them all from here. My grandson Lophis is here with me—and is a hero of the Boiotians, greater than Pagondas, greater than Ismenias, greater than any since Oidipous. Our farms are fine. Your work is finished. Now it is our time to rest. There is no more strife on this side of the river, on our sweeter side. Pay no attention to these red-caped men. These Spartans will float apart for you when you cross Styx. None of us endures the burdens and pains of the flesh here in Elysion. Over here there is order and law, just like among the good men of Plataia. There is no rabble and shoving and jeering along the upper banks of the Acheron, here in the green meadows with the nobles of Elysion.”

Proxenos forgot the melancholy and felt warm with recognition of years well lived. How fortunate he was to be cresting before his wave broke and turned to tiny eddies and stagnant backwash of old age. He could feel for a while longer two men bent over him and saw the faces of Mêlon and Ainias barking and shaking him, as the Makedonian Melissos spread the blanket over his midriff. It was a gift to go in his glory as Proxenos of the dark hair and with beard black and thick, and full in his armor, the greatest builder in Hellas in its greatest age of stone. No more worries about hunting down Lichas or the traitor Gorgos or fears of the turncoat Lykomedes. As in sickness, the approach of death severs one from the world of cares, or the people that scurry about without a hint that they too live on mortgaged time, with bodies no more than Korinthian glass, a small break away from a mess of shards. Even for the healthy and young, death is not always unwelcome. No, Proxenos would exit the stage before the crowd tired of his voice.

And so he did.

In a blink the man of stone, the aristocrat from Plataia, Proxenos son of Proxenos went cold—only to skim over the black waters and reach a far different shore where weight and worry were only faint burdens of the memory.

“Wake man, wake, wake!” Ainias shook his friend, who was cold. “More oil, Melissos, more oil.” He turned in disgust to Pelopidas, who had also reached him with a dozen of the Band. “He has left us, he left us. He simply gave up when we, when I, needed him most. He went into the river and caught a chill. His unknowing Aretê, even now a thousand stadia to the north in Plataia, sings of his safe return as she coddles his sons with stories of his high ramparts—and of his fame to come.”

But Pelopidas was the cooler head and paid the grief-stricken Stymphalian no matter. Instead he had the breastplate of Proxenos taken off, and was wrapping him in a cloak. Mêlon scolded Ainias, “That was not his way. His ticket on Charôn’s ferry was not of his own buying.” Then Mêlon took over from Pelopidas and gently probed that slash below the dead man’s navel. Two palms in width it had grown in the last day, right across the gut where the breastplate ended, the naked zone of flesh above his leather skirt. The jagged tear was now black and yet oozing foul pus, yellow and black. “This is no bile, but old rot. His gut is seeping through as well. How he walked these last days, only Zeus knows. I reckon the wound rotted him from within. He has had his finger on it to keep the mess inside since Antikrates cut his insides nearly in two.”

Ainias wept, in loss and in embarrassment of his momentary anger at the departure of his friend—and the greater anger that he had not thrown his friend down and treated his wound before they had set out that morning.

Mêlon ignored him, “So ends Proxenos. This is a man who achieved rather than suffered death.”

Ainias interrupted the silence as he stared down at the white face of what once was Proxenos and his black beard already spotted with ice. “The stones of the free cities of the Peloponnesos are his markers. He lies here dead cold for the helots. Pray to the One God that they were worth it. Dead for the damned helots.”

“No,” Mêlon answered, “for his pleasure. It was his pleasure to come south. That is enough for me. You can figure out the rest.”

Meanwhile, Epaminondas had drawn the column back from the river. The army began its retreat to camp, cold and tired and disheartened that they would never cross the Eurotas. While the four had worked to keep Proxenos warm and breathing, the last fording had failed. Epaminondas was waving all back as arrows whizzed by his head. This was the first time Epaminondas had tripped—and yet it would be his last mistake. King Agesilaos had been right after all: No man of Boiotia would ever bring fire to the very heart of a defeated Sparta. The women were braver on the banks, and hurling insults at the Thebans, baring their icy breasts in mockery and throwing rocks into the river in disdain. In front of them always was shrill Elektra, like Medea of old, holding up one bare shriveled breast, waving her left hand above her head, spitting and ululating all the while. “You all need this teat like the babes you are!” she cried.

Nêto also had been right in her visions when she had long ago warned that none born in the countryside of Thebes would kill Lichas or his son Antikrates. Dozens were wounded and sixty Theban hoplites dead for this failed mad gambit to defy the prophecy. Proxenos was borne on a bier back to camp, with Pelopidas and Melissos carrying the front corners of his litter. Mêlon and Ainias did the same at the rear.

Yet none saw behind them the new Proxenos swimming across the eddies of the hot Eurotas. He waved to them all as they turned out of sight on the main road and headed to the camp north of town. He ascended the bank opposite. The Spartan shades, as promised, did the Plataian no harm. So the Olympian gods with their heaven and Hades were real after all? Now too late the Pythagorean Proxenos must concede that—even as he flitted as an empty ghost among the heroes of old who drifted about just as Homer had sung? Proxenos looked in vain for his Nêto for help, as if he felt she too were somewhere near or maybe already across the Styx at this very moment. Instead here were the Elysion fields of deep green and the marble homes of the hemi-gods.

So all the fables of the ignorant were true. Where would his soul end up in such a place as an unbeliever in Olympos, as an apostate follower of Pythagoras—down lower next to Sisyphos or Tantalos or in the depths of Tartaros? But then came noise and light. In another eye blink all these fantasies of his first twenty years of life disappeared. The false shades of Kleombrotos and Kleonymos dissipated. Proxenos felt himself in a vortex. He was whirling upward toward a bright sun. There was certainly no Zeus here.

Heat, heat of all things amid the ice, came over him, and in an instant Proxenos was given knowledge of how the plan of it all worked: that the good man alone finds peace and that the end of all things was, as his One God of Pythagoras had promised, not Hades at all, but a return to his very beginning. So Epaminondas had saved him, after all, as he knew he might. He was not in Persia like his father with Xenophon, on the royal wage, drenching his spear arm in blood for Spartans and for gold and land as well. He was not scheming to keep his olives free from the tramp of armies, but down here on the Eurotas for nothing other than his pleasure and the visions of Epaminondas for something called Hellas. For all that his soul had been made deathless a year earlier, and now he would learn that, as he would come no more again to the physical world, even as the crow or dog, but had won the battle for his soul in his brief life as the
aristos
of Plataia. The last thing he remembered as Proxenos of old was the soft murmur of Pythagoras’s warning, “When you are traveling abroad, look not back at your own borders.” Proxenos searched no longer for Ainias and his funeral march. Not now as he reached the light and became something better than he had been.

Ainias shuddered and almost dropped the corner of the bier. His breath stopped when a warm—hot even—draft from the south swept across his ice-bitten neck. Then he caught himself and whispered, “So it is. So as our holy one promised, my Proxenos.”

But at that moment far away on the other side of snowy Taygetos, Nêto shuddered as if an icy breeze had reached her.

She wept. “Our Proxenos crossed the Isthmos, but not the Eurotas.”

Lord Kuniskos of the Helots

Gorgos had not done too badly for himself this past year in the valley between the mountains of Taygetos and Parnon, back home near his gloomy Eurotas. There, as a young man and a freed helot, more than fifty summers earlier, he had once mustered in with the Spartan general Brasidas to join the long marches against the Athenians. He remembered the farmhouses of the Spartan clans of his childhood. Lichas even had given him back his name “Puppy Dog”—Kuniskos. The helot came faster at the sound of it.

Lichas feared that his Sparta suffered the curse of
oliganthrôpeia
, an insidious depopulation that was the wage of sending boys into the
agôgê
, separated from women until they were thirty, and deploying the army out on patrol for months at a time—his red-capes training and fighting when they should be sowing the seeds of the Spartan state. That the peers were defined by pure Spartan blood from both parents only made the hoplites shrink farther, as those of mixed and foreign blood began to act as if they were Spartiates themselves. The army had been large at Leuktra, but only because those left at home to defend Sparta itself were now few. So here in a shrinking Sparta a talented freedman like Gorgos found opportunity to reclaim his lost status, not just because he was gifted in the arts of guile and double-cross, but also because there were now few Spartiates in a state desperate for men of his caliber.

At Leuktra Gorgos had not really meant to take the wounded Lophis to Lichas at all—at least not at first. Or so he swore to himself and to others later. Instead, he had wanted to risk his bones to carry the broken body of the son of his master from the fray—back up, as promised, to Nêto and their wagon on the hill above the battle. Yet when he found himself near the red-capes and saw Lichas trapped amid a sea of dead hoplites, his Spartan blood warmed and drew him to the
lochos
of the old guard. Just as it had fifty seasons earlier and more when he had stormed Amphipolis with Brasidas. Most leave a losing cause; Gorgos had just joined one.

After Leuktra, and a third of the way home, the Megarians, as a sign of goodwill, had offered the royal wagon some honey to pack the dead Kleombrotos for the way across the Isthmos and then over the Argive passes back home. Gorgos poured it into the cask and smeared his king, just in the manner he had seen it done as a youth. It was Kuniskos alone who drove the fallen royal home. Kuniskos tended with wool, oil, and honey to the torn ear and bloody thigh of the lame Lichas, as he took back his proper place once again in the service of the high Lakedaimonians. It was as if for the past twenty years and more he had lived in a bad trance, trapped on Mêlon’s Helikon with rustics, when he should have been serving his betters in Lakonia. As the army made its way back, Lichas in his wounds bellowed from his wagon for help. “Where is my Kuniskos? Kuniskos, how many stadia have we to home?”