The End of Sparta: A Novel (61 page)

Then Kuniskos seemed hurt and wounded and so sat sunken back into his leather-woven chair. Then his voice lowered and he was almost once more what they remembered of the broken-down Gorgos nearing his seventh ten-years on Helikon. He pointed his fork at his friends and softly, slowly told them the way of their world to come. So there would be peace and a quiet descent with him as their prisoner back to Messenia after all. “The great game is over. My Spartans are broken, a race humbled by lesser folk by far. My helot people are free, as I suppose they should be. You have forgotten. I, whom you slur as Kuniskos, I too am a Messenian, born one, bred one, and so should be happy at their freedom. Even here I pick up things from my messenger, my dear Scorpidion. Yes, I heard that your Chiôn could not stop his killing on Helikon. Who else could have hung up Medios or drowned Thrattos, my friends and neighbors. So he died an outlaw now, a killer of the old and weak? Or was it all on your prompt, Master, who wishes me to face the law of bloodletting? Who is the killer and who in contrast pulls wounded boys out of battle at great risk to himself? And my, my, how everyone seems to have passed on.”

This fluent Kuniskos was for a blink confusing his old friends with his long new way of talking as Lord Kuniskos. “Are you four alone? Just four? No more? So few to come so far? Three with good legs in your new band, and two sadly now with not? I thought I spied five of you as you came down the path. Or were there shadows in the woods? Were there not five or perhaps six of you? So many to fetch—or is it to kill—your Gorgikon. No Alkidamas here? I hear he is never far from you all but always safely distant when iron is drawn. Of course, Epaminondas stays warm back in my fort, too wise to tramp up here in the spring rain. And where is my Scorpas, always the loyal messenger to the end?”

Mêlon kept his spear pointed at his helot. “Ready your things. We have a night of walking down the mountain still. Epaminondas wants you to face the
diskastêria
of the Messenians. Down the mountain I will settle up with you for Nêto and Lophis, if the court of the Messenians leaves me a few scraps.”

“Calm, calm down, Master, my master. Nêto no doubt will tell you soon enough that she lives due to me. I kept her safe in my fort. I tried to save Lophis, at Leuktra, though he was near dead when I picked him up from the gore of battle. How could I return to the Boiotians when your Chiôn swore he would kill me after the battle? I had no choice but to cross the battlefield, since for all my babble I loved your Lophis and you too in my way. I yelled in vain to my Lichas to let him live. I, no one else, dressed out his body. I, Gorgos, left my own good money on the road south for the priestess Kallista at Kreusis to keep him safe from the birds and dogs. I was the good servant, and you are angry only because I the lowly now am free. May Zeus bless Lichas who alone let me live free, the true, the only liberator among you.”

Mêlon stopped for a moment, and thought he heard traces of the old Gorgos in the talk of Lord Kuniskos. Indeed the helot was slumped even further in his chair, and seemed wrinkled as he always had been. Yes, he was almost the helot of Helikon once more—tired, old, flabby even. He had a tear in his right eye and slobber at the side of his mouth. Maybe he had tried to save Lophis after all?

The myth floated away in a blink with a shout of “Liar!” Nêto shrieked again, “Liar!” She may not have looked any more like the helot maiden of Helikon, but her voice was the same and she dragged her foot and closed on Kuniskos. “Liar. Dogfaced liar. You killed Lophis as if with your own hand. I know your hands that snuffed the life out of Erinna in the house of Antikrates. You can tell the jurymen all that—even more when we get down the mountain, about the dead Messenians hung up on trees, and their women sent to the Kaiadas after your play. You will drink the hemlock poison or they will throw you into the pit alive, as you did to hundreds of our own—or you will hang for the buzzards. We will stone your poisoned corpse, then hang it from the new north gate before throwing it as
bora
to the dogs and crows.”

Kuniskos now stared her down. “Jurymen? Trial? Aren’t you talking of your own day in court to come in Thebes, you renegades who are this year outlaws, the real lawbreakers of Boiotia?” Kuniskos shouted and all the pretense of the old good Gorgos vanished now for good. “Such hypocrites you are. You slave-owning liberators of helots.” Kuniskos could not stop. The spell was broken once his tears had not swayed any of his guests. “How do your helot folk govern themselves or keep the Spartans out without hiring Epaminondas each season? When you are through with your fun under Ithômê and all go home, who will clean up this mess, govern these wild tribes? Who gives you the power to free anyone, you who owned me, the better man, the helot who wants freedom from the likes of you and your kind? Do you plan to move down here to watch them, as if parents who must change the soiled clothes of their half-grown children?”

Nêto cut him off. “Liar, liar you are, old man. Liar on our Helikon. Traitor of your own kind, sell-out to the killers of Agesilaos.” Then she stepped up and slapped the palm of Kuniskos, thinking how these hands had squeezed Erinna and tightened the bonds on her neck. The other four went silent as they watched instead the right arm of Kuniskos, who was now up and out of his chair. As Mêlon knew from the weak lamplight, the long narrow cottage was far larger than it seemed to the eye when outside. Maybe twenty or thirty paces to the rear, eyed again the second door of his dreams—now noticed in the dark shadows as well by the sharp eye of Ainias, who usually scanned all rooms on entry as if he were on a crest over the battlefield.

Suddenly three tall shapes appeared there at the back of this single room. They swung the rear door wide open. At the same time, before Melissos could yell out, a spear tip pushed him back off the front threshold as another two men and a woman came in from the front door. Mêlon’s band had Gorgos in front of them and Spartans on both their right and left, altogether seven to their five.

Melissos grabbed the hand of Mêlon. “The cave, master, the cave, they came out of the cave.” The rescuers were trapped. Both doorways were barred by tall men in armor—Spartans who were veterans of the
kryptes
, and raven-haired Elektra herself, who stood blocking the light without entering all the way into the hut.

“Meet, Master Mêlon, my Spartan friends.” Kuniskos laughed and waved with each hand to the six Spartans at the two entries. “And you, my Lakonian friends, this is my master of the long whip, lame Mêlon. He is the killer of our king Kleombrotos. Over there is his new lackey Ainias, another rat in our trap who smelled some sweet cheese up here on Taygetos. They claim this mercenary thought up the ruse of attacking you from the left at Leuktra. That other wild boy from the far north does not matter. Forget the skinny helot—the one they call Nikôn. He will run when the blood flows, like all helots. Nêto over there who barked this winter under my table for a bone, whether rabbit or mine, why she prides herself the mouthpiece of the helots—yes, that brand-face in rags that stands there across the table. I doubt this time she will find a way out of my hands as before.”

The Spartans ignored the big talk of their Kuniskos and watched instead the hands of Ainias and Mêlon. There was not much room to move. Mêlon clinched his spear. Ainias backed against the wall. All five bunched up. The two hoplites shielded Melissos and Nikôn behind them, who had only their blades. Nêto in the middle of the tiny phalanx picked up the walking stick of Kuniskos. Ainias also drew his cleaver, and quickly handed his spear to Mêlon, who had Bora in his other hand. Like the Stymphalian, Mêlon had dropped his shield outside on the path before the threshold—not because either one trusted Kuniskos, but thinking they would have no room in the hut for the wide swings of the willow shield that had brought so many low at Leuktra. There was a pause before the fighting. A gruff, harsh voice of a man in the shadows took over and stepped into the lamplight of the hut, speaking more like an Athenian than an ephor of Sparta. It was Lichas himself.

“Old Chôlopous. So we meet again, the half-dead Mêlon, son of the long-dead Malgis. You are the father of the dead boy at Leuktra? All has turned out as promised. Or do you remember me? We first met on your farm when you had your first set of teeth, when you ran under your arbors before I could cut off your tiny head—and at Koroneia, and yet once more at the fight at the Nemea. On that night at Leuktra, and then on your recent visit to burn my farm at Sparta. My, my, my friend, how we’ve grown old together.”

This tall but stooped Spartan stepped even farther forward near Kuniskos while the others stayed put by the doors. Lichas was ageless like his Kuniskos, and likewise he felt no burdens of age or time. In similar fashion, Lichas felt freed by his long years and the end of Messenia and the idea he could do at last whatever he wished—which for Lichas always meant to kill without penalty whoever he wanted. Lichas continued. “I speak for a bit before you bleed. I wanted Pelopidas and Epaminondas to visit our hut and maybe Alkidamas as well, so with a clean cut today we could finish this Messenian mess once and for all and get our boys back down over there where they belong. Only the hungriest rats scampered up here, I see. Even the best trapper must put up with the rodents who clutter his nets. I brought today my son Antikrates, who killed so many of yours at Leuktra. More of our friends are here as well. You say you will take our helot back down the mountain? Oh no, no. Not this time, Master Mêlon. You will go down no mountain—not even a hill, not even dead. Where is your proud Epaminondas or Pelopidas—or even one of those brutes from the islands here to rescue you? We had soup here for both. Your islander, we hear, has gone feral. He flees the blood guilt on your Helikon. If he comes up here—and he won’t because he’s dead—by now he would have met our man-bear who bites the throat of all lone wanderers on Taygetos.”

Then his wife Elektra stepped to his side, proud with her long hair, some tresses braided and some dangling out the sides of her helmet. She boasted, “Too much talk, my Lichas. Kill them before that branded helot over there puts a chant or spell on us. Let me cut her tongue out before this Nêto bewitches us all. Or let my boy Thibrachos have a taste of her first.”

The Spartan had drawn his sword, a shiny
xiphos
with both edges gleaming in the candlelight. Elektra had a black
pelekus
, a battle-ax given to her by the king himself, and she swung if far better than did her son Thibrachos. The outnumbered band crouched and made ready for the rush, Mêlon and Ainias still covering the flanks, Nikôn and Melissos between them three steps back with drawn long knives—and Nêto in reserve with an oak staff. She put both hands on the shaft and looked for an opening. The five had backed flush against the wall, as the Spartans by the two doors covered the escapes. They could at least take down Gorgos, and maybe even Elektra before their deaths. These were armored men, Sparta’s best; and Mêlon’s side was without bronze—and with boy and a lame woman.

“Come over here, Mêlon. I want you to join your father and son, so you can all boast in Hades that Lichas sent you there.” Lichas talked more than a Spartan should, talked more than he ever had, as he shifted his weight from foot to foot to find the right moment to stab. “If you throw down your weapons, I promise a good enough burial. Antikrates over there, my best son, took out that fool of yours who built walls. What was his name, boy? Yes, yes, the soft Plataian rich man Proxenos? The grand thinker whose belly you cut open when that mob of northerners stormed our tower.”

There was to be no parley with Lichas. He meant to cut them all down and wanted them to know it before they fell. No quarter. Elektra started her ululation. Still Mêlon called out, “If you have an ax, swing, Spartan woman, don’t talk.”

Lichas had a final word. “You have it wrong, all of you. God has made every man a slave. Only a man, if he’s worth anything, makes himself free.” Lichas wanted to get closer, to cut with the sword and taste the blood flying in the air as it dotted his face. Kuniskos pulled from the rafters a cleaver and backed aside to let his friend charge through. The blade had been hidden above the table right near his head. He had taken the idea of hiding it from the dead Erinna. He had hoped to place it at the throat of Nêto and drag her outside for some final sport—or to strangle her slowly and give her his death whisper.

At the back of the cottage, facing his father on the far side, Antikrates pointed his spear with the underhand grip. He and his two henchmen had been hiding in the cave when Mêlon arrived and had quietly sneaked out to block the rear door once the visitors were inside. Lichas, Elektra, and his retainer had come around through the forest path to plug the main entrance.

“That damn Scorpas and his phantom goat-man—and without a helot patrol to be found,” Nikôn cried. “We are surrounded, with nowhere to go.” Then Melissos pointed toward Lichas. “Spartans fight in the sun. Let us out. Duel in the open air. Kill or die face-to-face like men should.” Melissos could have run, having no part in war against the tall Spartans. But no words of retreat or surrender came out. Instead, he decided to stand his ground, blade in hand, here with Mêlon, Ainias, Nêto, and Nikôn—and for something more than the love of gore or a Spartan scalp.

The Old Breed

No way out, Melissos knew. Still, if the henchmen of Lichas thought to kill a royal of Makedon, a son no less of Amyntas, then they would at least learn it was no easy thing. Mêlon covered Melissos to keep the youth safe until the last. The five Spartan men wore full armor. The near-naked Kuniskos was more than a match for the staff of slow-foot Nêto. Elektra would have to fight him for her head, or, better yet, let her Thibrachos have first claim on her.

Lichas paused at the Makedonian boy’s plea and scoffed, “Leave, foreigner. You are nothing to me. We kill the rest as they are, and burn them up. You go down the mountain and tell all of the funeral smoke you saw.” Melissos stayed quiet and right by his master Mêlon, no longer the hostage but the loyal man of the Malgidai, as much a Boiotian as any in Thebes.