The End of Sparta: A Novel (59 page)

As he readied to leave, Epaminondas wished to remind all of the good done, in this his first and last public address to the helots in the half-finished stadium of the Messenians. All the citizens of the new polis filed into the stade-long course at the south of the city, near the Messenian Gate. There were forty thousands on its earthen seats, and maybe as many more on the field and on the walls above. Epaminondas spoke in front of a new iron statue of himself near the entry to the stadium and an altar of thanks that the women of Messenia had raised for the Boiotians and Argives.

“A great plague has passed, men of Messenê. Those who crossed their borders to enslave others are themselves surrounded. The Spartan hunters have become the hunted. Yet I remind you only that freedom won after these hundreds of years can just as easily be lost again in one—should the nerve of your newfound democracy fail and you let your shields slack to your knees. It is the nature of all men in peace to become soft and scoff at the prior hard work of their fathers who gave them such bounty. Beware the real enemy is the smoother second thought that always mocks the rougher first. You tire of us, we of you. Such is also the way of peace. So be it. Enjoy these last days of spring. Soon when your hair is white or gone, the remembrance of these great days alone will give you comfort when all else is gone.”

This was no audience of jaded Thebans who usually hooted and pelted their speakers with fruit, but one of recently freed men who slowly grew silent in renewed appreciation of their liberator as he finished and would soon depart. Now this Epaminondas took them all back to the first days when he and Epitêles came off the mountains, and the Spartans fled in terror at the mere rumors of their descent, and the helots and their liberators were one.

“We are seeing the new age of walls under holy Ithômê, worthy of Mykenai or Troy of old when only the Cyclopes could build such stout ramparts as these before us. But men of Messenê, do not trust solely in such rock or oak. It is not towers or the new machines that cast stone from afar that keep men free. Only the right arms of those willing to meet the enemy shield to shield and spear to spear will keep the Spartans out. Now the time comes for us to return to our families in the north below Helikon and Kithairon. Farewell, men of Messenia, and do not forget what those heroes of Hellas did on your behalf to make you the best men of the Peloponnesos.”

A roar followed the general’s finish. Even the dour Pelopidas and Ainias were struck by thousands of these folk who stood on the walls and towers shouting in their trust of Epaminondas—this tiny man who in a few days after all would be put on trial for his life when he arrived back at Thebes. The great war for Messenia was at an end. The great war to live in safety as free people had begun. All that was left was the cleanup, and the muster of the Boiotians as they broke camp. For one hundred and twenty days the men of Epaminondas had worked without a break, despite the furor of Epitêles and the whines of the Sacred Band. Vineyards and orchards were to be planted inside the walls, and two thousand
plethra
of barley and wheat. Five thousand head of stock roamed in open pastures beneath the walls. The grape land was black heavy land, watered by ten great springs on the slopes of the mountain—all taken from the Spartan clan of the royal Agiads whose helots had sent its harvests for four hundred years back to the royal family of Sparta.

In thanks for the health of the
dêmos
, the Messenians had laid out a temple to Asklepios, the healing god. In front was a marble statue of Nikê, the goddess of Victory, which they had erected to honor their Nikôn, now
stratêgos
of the Messenians, with his deputy Doreios, the first archon of the people. Inside the half-built temple was a model of clay that Ainias had made from the maps of Proxenos. At last the city and this model were one. There were thirty stadia of walls, ten feet thick, fifteen high, all faced with gray limestone and filled with rubble in between. The courses ran up and nearly encircled the crest of tall Ithômê. Thirty towers—two square for every round—rose thirty feet. They had put two stories in them with embrasures below their sloped roofs and, thanks to Ainias, the new belly bows aimed out the windows. Four gates, the tallest, the Arkadian in the north, shut the city tight. They left standing in the agora the hated log house of Kuniskos, a reminder to their children not born of their past bondage and the cost to free Ithômê from the likes of Antikrates and his Gorgos. His timber stakes were red with blood and gore and Nikôn had ordered the horrid poles stay up—until the head of Kuniskos could become their last trophy and they could be burned.

The Reckoning

When Epaminondas finished his speech, he headed to his muster yard outside the city, between the walls and the hamlet of Andania, in the stony ground between the great olive groves of the city. Yet even before the crowd broke up, Nikôn at last appeared as promised. He had missed the words of Epaminondas and just come down his accustomed path from the summit on Taygetos. But this time the helot headed for the generals in a frenzy.

Nikôn pushed in among them and announced loud enough for the entire Sacred Band at their sides to hear, waving a walking crutch. “Kuniskos lives! The killer of our Erinna is alive. He’s not dead. Not yet. I saw Nêto as a
daimôn
in a dream two nights past as I slept in Artemis’s shrine and breathed her vapors. Her ghost told me of Kuniskos, just where on the vast mountain he was. Then last night up at the house of Zeus Ithomatas, I saw the hut in dreams. Just now, just this very morning on my return, one Scorpas, a half-breed uplander, came over the mountain and in through the east gate following a patrol. He said the same thing as what I had seen from the goddess. And then he handed me this crutch, Nêto’s walking stick, he says. She once lived in the jail of Kuniskos on Taygetos, crippled and leaning on a stick, or so he swears.”

Nikôn went on and retold his conversation with half-helot Scorpas. “His words, those of this trader and go-between Scorpas, went like this as I remember it: ‘Your lost helot traitor—he is up there in the high mountain glen. A mad bear hunts him or something worse. The monster can’t find Kuniskos—at least not yet. For he’s safe enough in the high house in the deep woods. Up there I saw him. He was holed up in a hut. On the crest of Taygetos, the dark mountain of death. Fifty stadia and more he was from the high road. An upland trader I know saw him two nights ago. He brings him food for gold coins. Brought back this crutch, a woman’s cane. Or so Kuniskos said it is and wanted those in Messenia to have it. Still, Kuniskos will not get far. Up high near the pass, he is cut off by the fear of the man-bear or the helot rangers amid the highest trees on Taygetos. Your Gorgos cannot get home to Sparta. Yes, I know his real name. He cannot go back to his eastern side of the mountain. He is holed up. Waiting for the bear-god to attack—or maybe to be rescued by Lichas. Or maybe in fright waiting to die.’ ”

So Nikôn finished relating the speech of Scorpas. “This time your Nikôn does not see ghosts, but has a live witness.”

Mêlon scowled. “I knew he was alive. I know the helot speaks truly, for I have had visions of a hut well before Leuktra, though where it was I did not guess. And just as my dreams of the good city of Messenê trumped those of a polis in ruins, so too I know the ghosts tell the truth of our meeting with Gorgos in a hut on high Taygetos. Chiôn told me that he has also dreamt of a mountain house in flames, with Gorgos its master.” Then he looked to Epaminondas. “I would have wished news that Chiôn and Nêto live, rather than that Gorgos is soon to die. I suppose some will follow me to find this man. I take care of my own—my way. I leave for Taygetos before dusk. Follow who wish. But none need to.”

Epaminondas stepped up to face him. “Watch out, Melôn.” He then turned and grabbed the helot. “Now wait, you Nikôn. This is just the latest of your many stories and false visions. Like those before, it too is but a phantom. It is the hatred of Gorgos that haunts you and the wish of us all that Nêto still lives and that Chiôn did not fall to the man-bear, who no doubt is some demon our grandfathers warned about. Sometimes the soul makes up pictures at night of what it wants us to believe. Or we make thoughts and then claim there are gods to be honored for giving them. Your dreams are as false as the reports of this two-shoe Scorpas. That liar whittles some wood into a cane and then calls it Nêto’s—and you give him gold for his stories? Do you want Mêlon to tramp after ghosts up on the summit, to end up like Chiôn in the highlands—dead and forgotten as he goes chasing shades and half-men monsters of myth on Taygetos? The mountain is a foul place, Nikôn. Maybe not fatal for four myriads, but lethal for four or five of you. Yes, the man-bear up there may have eaten your one-armed Chiôn, as well as the
kryptes
and soon you as well. If there was ever a Kuniskos up there, they are bones and ash now, though alive enough for fakers like your Scorpas to cheat a gold owl from you.”

“Yes,” Nikôn replied, “I hate the helot Kuniskos. And I know better than you of the man-bear. I’ve seen a lesser kind of that monster before even here on Ithômê. Unlike you, I have seen his victims swinging by their capes from the spruce limbs. Still, the voice in my dreams last night was Nêto’s, as real now as in the past. Her voice lives and she whispers that Kuniskos did not die in the flight from Ithômê. Maybe this man-bear is finally dead and the mountain passes are open, and so the ghost of Nêto tells me it is at last time to come up. This Scorpas, he is a peddler, not a spy. He is dense and has no reason to lie.”

“Oh? No reason other than to do the work of Lichas and get our best killed in an ambush on a high pass? I wouldn’t be surprised to hear your trader once led Chiôn up to his death on the mountain with the same stories. Or maybe he works for this man-bear bandit who scares those at the loom with stories that he is a Sinis or Skirôn come alive. I imagine this bear scare may be a runaway Spartan lord or a pack of renegades that prey on shepherds and the lost.”

Mêlon heard little of this good-sense warning of Epaminondas. He was too eager to clear the ledger with the killers of the dead Lophis and Proxenos and Staphis, too. Who could believe that anyone or anything could put down his Chiôn? More likely this shape-changer, if he were real, was already in the belly of Chiôn rather than the other way around. That might explain why Gorgos was suddenly free to call back in Lichas, free from the terror of the man-bear—free to carve a cane and claim it was Nêto’s and get back to what he did best, lying and plotting. If Gorgos were alive, Mêlon at least would know the fate of Nêto, whether she was killed long ago in his compound or perished in the flight from Ithômê. Without a live Gorgos, no one would ever learn her fate. He turned to Melissos. “Bring a pony and our arms and plenty of rope. I want to take our Gorgos alive. I think he lives and I want to see whether he really is, as Nikôn says, the foul Kuniskos of the helots—or, before I kill him, still part of him the loyal servant who walked with me each morning on Helikon. If he has Spartans with him, the better to kill them all.”

Suddenly Ainias, who had been listening to the back and forth, stepped up and grabbed Mêlon. “Son of Malgis. Something is not right about this Scorpas. A half-helot at best, maybe even a
perioikos
who trades with Spartans in the morning and sells his wares to helots at dusk. If Gorgos lives, why has he not sneaked back to his masters? How can he be trapped by our thin patrols on the summit? This story of Scorpas makes no sense. But all the same, I will go with you to ensure that we end up killing someone, maybe even Kuniskos or Scorpas or both.”

Melissos was already packing their gear. Ainias said that he was going back up the mountain to learn the fate of Nêto. On Taygetos he would kill some of the Spartans who had killed Proxenos. Epaminondas finished with another warning. “We will see you back here in two days—with the camp cleaned up and the army mustering. If not, I will go up the mountain and follow your trail with Pelopidas and the Band.”

So they parted. Ainias and Mêlon led toward the peaks of high cloudy Taygetos. Melissos behind followed, leading a small pony. All set out armed with spears and swords. Nikôn brought up the rear. They soon met Scorpas waiting for them on the trail ahead. Mêlon kept still and limped ahead as they went up the path to the low hills. Nikôn had unleashed Kerberos, now without his mistress Nêto. He growled more than ever, since the hound had picked up a wolf scent, one that brought back some memory of the lost Sturax; and he heard too many say “Nêto.” The dog did not like the smell of this Scorpas and twice nipped the stranger’s calf. He already had the smell of the dog-kicker Gorgos in his nostrils.

None knew much about these wilds, only that most of the snow was melted and the even spring high country was now passable. Twice they saw bones tied with red cloth, hanging from pine limbs over the trail—crow and buzzard meat, maybe a month old, maybe two,
kryptes
, or what was left of them, killed by whom and left as trophies for what? Scorpas had already seen bones like these and was terrified that there would be more ahead. Now he begged them to keep off to the side of the main trail that went into the high forest. The five headed for the crest of the lower peak of Taygetos, but it was soon dark and they were glad to find the huts of the woodcutters for the night at the timber’s edge.

Little was said, though they noticed fresh coals in the hearth and half-eaten deer bones by the door. If they found their old Gorgos, he would not be alone. The small party was happier for that chance of revenge nonetheless, since men had been here in the past ten days. At first light they went up another small creek bed, amid stands of spruce and fir on the banks and a few upland poplars. It rained until midday. Ainias took charge on the route, and was content enough to keep the small band hidden and dry beneath the evergreens. Again they walked in gullies near the trail above to keep away from the sight of the man-bear. But Ainias thought it queer that this hillman Scorpas could discover a mountain hut, even with patches of snow on the ground hiding the trail and with a fresh scent of men, months after the flight of the Spartans. In fact, little was known of this mysterious trader Scorpas, before never named, never seen. Much less did Ainias believe that Gorgos, the flatlander, who had hated the high farm on Helikon, would hide in the up-country. Worse still, for most of the day Ainias saw few signs of goats and so turned back often to Scorpas to question the way and complain there were no longer traces of flocks or shepherds in the shadowy vale.