The End of Sparta: A Novel (8 page)

Proxenos left the center and walked amid the crowd, to and fro, patting the heads and backs of the Boiotian commanders. “The spirits of these maids of Boiotia, once molested here at Leuktra by men from Sparta ten generations ago, have guided us here for revenge against their attackers from the Peloponnesos. Their ghosts hover over us tonight. Their shades shriek for our vengeance against the Spartans. Smoke of the offerings drifts in black patterns into the wind. The seers tell us the livers of their victims lack their full lobes as the gods demand vengeance. The insides of the animals are night-black with a foul stench. A few goats are without any organs at all. Some lungs stink and shrivel in the air when touched by flames.”

Proxenos raised his hands to the top of the tent, and went on. “That is only the beginning; ribbons blow off our officers’ spears and then land on the tombs of the dead to warn of more to come. The snake god at Trophonios warns the Spartans of their death. The stone statue of Athena bent over and picked up the shield sculpted at her feet.” The crowd was rapt at the rich man’s words that offered far better promises of victory than all the complex sand drawings of Ainias and big talk of Epaminondas put together.

This Proxenos was as handsome as the foreigner Ainias was ugly—and one of their own Boiotian aristocrats for relish. Who cared for the
logos
of Epaminondas? Who needed Ainias’s
technê
? Listen to the prophecy of their own Mêlon, a Boiotian. There were gods on Olympos. They listened not to the numbers of Pythagoras—but spoke through the omens that Proxenos, another man of Boiotia, related. “Hear me out. All the prophets sing of our Mêlon the Thespian. This man the oracle of Pasiphai from far-off Thalamai warned. He is the lame one—come here tonight from his high farm on Helikon. He is the one the king was warned about. This I can prove. I have talked to the priestess of Apollo on Ptôon. She too has heard the gods’ voices: “
Should Mêlon live till tomorrow and see the face of a Spartan king, then the sons of Leônidas, they will be no more.
”

Proxenos grew even quieter in speech. “Some of you have heard the rumors about the Thespian Nêto, near Askra. She’s the virgin helot, the slave on Mêlon’s farm. She has sworn that the priestess of Trophonios, the snake-goddess of Lebadeia, promised us victory—if only the son of Malgis would fight. Ah, she is here with us now.”

Then on cue a blood-curdling shriek filled the tent.
“Alalalê
.
Alalalalalêêê …”
The war cry of Helikon. Tall and thin, Nêto stood on a chair above the hoplites. She had sneaked off from the farm, once Mêlon had left with Chiôn and Gorgos, and had spent yet another day at Thebes with Proxenos studying the omens. Now with her hair in waves and her eyes rolling, she posed like those wild gorgons in stone, carved high on the big temples, with mouth and teeth wide open. Back on Mêlon’s farm, Nêto had learned to sound her war cry in Boiotian, when guiding the oak plow that Chiôn drew—always in fear that the snorting, sweating slave would break her plowshare on the half-hidden boulders ahead. She had been born a helot but had been bought here in the north by Mêlon. He claimed her seller had told him that the little girl was daughter of a disgraced priestess of Pasiphai to the south. Now she was the oracle of the Thespians in the woods of Helikon. She acted no more like Mêlon’s slave than did Gorgos or Chiôn.

Then this wild Kalypso went on again, louder in man speech, winking at her master as she began. “Here is Mêlon. Among you Mêlon, son of Malgis. Don’t you see? Mêlon. Listen to our one God. Mêlon of Thespiai is chosen. Yes, yes he is the one they fear to the south. Mêlon will kill a Spartan king. Why? Why? He is the
mêlon
of course, the “apple” the seers say will end the Spartans.”

Now she was quite out of her steamy breath. Shaking, swaying, almost tipping off the chair, near collapse, she offered gibberish all mixed up in clumsy hexameters. One hand went up and flailed the air. The other was stabbing the breeze with her reed pipe. The hoplites had never seen anything quite like this. The sudden shouts, followed by her eerie calm voice, kept them still. All this ranting in cadence came from what looked like a slave and a woman. In Boiotian with some Messenian strains—delivered with a high pitch that cut the ears. She appeared as odd as her verse. Nêto was as tall as most men, cloaked in the rough wool of a man. Her nose was a bit long. Her lips were too wide. Her ears were big enough that her long hair could never quite cover them. Yet she was pretty, perhaps even goddess-like—or so she seemed to the eyes of her master Mêlon, who let her roam all over Boiotia.

They could see all that right now, so at least she was humankind. Nêto’s face balanced out well enough, as if its parts could not do without each other. Her legs were long. She often ran up to the dam above the farm of Mêlon, with the fawns and does. “Deer Legs,” Chiôn called her. Yes, Nêto of the fast legs that outpaced the stags on Helikon. Some of the Thebans murmured that she was a wood nymph or worse than a naiad. But who could get her off that high chair? She must have jumped up with those panther thighs to get there. Without much prompting, Nêto threw off her cloak and hood. As if possessed by the Pythia’s vapors, she slowly sang out a few more phrases as she pointed to Mêlon. “Him. Him. The Spartans must kill or lose tomorrow morn. Keep him safe. Do that and the king will die. The Thebans are mightier in war.”

Even the glum ones such as Philliadas were stunned silent once they heard that the violated virgin ghosts of Leuktra were to be in the skies floating above them in battle, tearing at the red-capes. They would keep away the winged demons of death from the Thebans. These were the Kêres, the blood-sucking goddesses who appeared, at one time or another, at all the battles of the Hellenes, drawn from afar by the shouts of battle and the smell of gore—with their craws full of man-flesh and sharp claws plucking up any who were tottering—assured that the life-threads of these victims were already spun by Klôthô, measured by deathless Lachêsis, and then cut by their partner Atropos, and that all three of the divine Moirai had nodded to their flying henchwomen that the doomed could now be stripped, their carcasses feasted upon, their souls whisked off to Hades.

In battle, the untouched hoplites saw none of the Kêres of this netherworld. Only the blood-spattered and dying were given the sudden vision of these feathered vultures, who grew fat from the carnage. When sated, the women of the night landed in weariness among the flies and dung to walk off their meal, and vomit and crap out tooth and bone, and then fly up for more. They flapped off cackling and farted out the fumes of human blood. Yes, on oaks around the battlefield the Kêres perched and fouled the ground with their red pus dung. They stank, as they always dove back, eye-level over the battlefield, with their pale breasts, bloody tunics, and long white fangs—eyeing any falling hoplites that could be grabbed and torn apart before the souls went down into Hades. The foolish among the dying saw their female full-white breasts and long red nipples, and paused—only to find fangs in their necks and talons under their arms as they were snatched up. All these would fly above the battle tomorrow—and yet the hoplites were encouraged that perhaps the good ghosts of the virgins of Leuktra might keep the black daughters of night away from them.

Nêto quickly covered up and looked around for Mêlon. Then she jumped down and took her place with the servant girls who scurried about the tent to clean up the mess of eating and loud men. Finally she went over to Proxenos, and amid the commanders, Nêto whispered despite the din of the tent. “I had a shudder. The Olympians speak through me, even if I damn them and instead worship Pythagoras. Yes, you and I claim we understood these signs, but not all of them. If there is truth to the prophecy of the
mêlon
—there is also truth to another warning that Proxenos, son of Proxenos, lord of Plataia, shall not cross south of the Isthmos.”

He laughed. But she only grabbed harder on the arm of the Plataian. “The gods on Olympos hate our arrogant Pythagoras, who has stopped so many of their sacrifices and the burnt meats men offer up to their greedy tastes. I hear these old ones, petty, spiteful, and full of envy, at night. Yet they do not always lie to me, especially when I sleep. They hate him and his
logos.
” She was weeping in this, the moment of her joy that the army was about to fight and would win, she knew—and then would go south and free her Messenian kin after all, even if thousands of helots down south as yet knew nothing of Thebes, of Pythagoras, or the idea of democracy.

But then Nêto frowned and grabbed the cloak of Proxenos. “Listen, again. Do not go south after our victory tomorrow. We will win. But you lose if you do not stay north of the Isthmos. You are no Mêlon, who even in his age is stronger than you, and is the god-loved. Nor are you an Ainias who can oversee your walls to the south. There are no black clouds above that man, either, and yet he cannot keep you safe. I see only corpses of enemies at his feet, never his own. He will die with a white beard and a walking stick at his own choosing.”

Proxenos the architect laughed, this time even louder. He was young and tanned more than he needed to be from his days fixing the walls of Plataia. Birth and money, and his white teeth and black beard, gave him a certain arrogance that comes when a man feels bigger and stronger and richer than those around him. He had been born into wealth and bred to think less of slower wits. Women, he knew, he could always persuade. Nêto would be no different: No doubt she was entranced by his vigor, looks, and silver, and now worried that she might lose the chance to enjoy them all the more when the war ended.

Proxenos had met this Nêto the previous year at the shrine of Eurynomê on the Asopos River below his red grape vineyards. A chance occurrence, he had thought, to see a naiad alone in the wilds of Boiotia. But now he was not so sure of that long-ago accident, as Nêto had come often for most of the past spring. She had taught him of Pythagoras, and soon no longer was he the bored aristocrat lamenting that the capitals of his atrium were Doric rather than new Ionic. Instead the new Proxenos became a devotee of her Pythagoras when she told him that his genius could raise walls of new cities to the south taller than those of Troy—his work for thousands rather than for a few aristocrats who wanted a new portico on their mansions. He could draw the plans in the north, and let others follow them to the south.

Now, in reply to her warning, Proxenos’s soft words flew out as pained concession, or more condescension from lord to master. “Nêto, Nêto, my Nêto. We go to all the trouble to consult these fat priests. If that is not enough, we give heavy silver to the virgins of the temple to tell us of their signs and visions. And now you tell me to go home to the Asopos? Some day, if the One God wills, we will march into shadowy Messenia and at last live up to our divine
logos
that says no one is born a slave—and just as we start, you tell me all that reason, that faith in numbers is but a lie?”

Nêto grabbed the arm of Proxenos. “But my Proxenos, reason or not, don’t press too hard the dying gods who like to give short lives to those too certain of themselves. Run from Nemesis.” She was almost ranting again. “Because we ignore some of the omens does not mean we are smarter than the old gods—or the duller mortals who believe in them, much less that they no longer exist and cannot hear us right now. They grew old, yes, but they were here before the wisdom of Pythagoras dethroned them. That is why the reason of our god Pythagoras may explain what exactly saves our souls and what not, maybe nine tenths of what we do each day, but not always the last tenth part of our lives. Only faith and belief do that. The other voices tell me. I warn you, if you cross the Isthmos this year or next, it will go badly for you, Proxenos—as badly here as it will be square and good for your soul with the One God later on. The others, they can or cannot come back. Their fates are their own. But not so Proxenos, son of Proxenos, of youth, and riches and bottomland on the Asopos, who has the most to lose of us all. Epaminondas can win here and in the south without you. You were to build the ramparts, and you have drawn up such plans, but you were not to cross spears—or so said Pasiphai to me.”

Proxenos felt a sharp pain across his flank. It burned right below his navel on the lower left, as if cut by iron. She had the powers of a witch. But the aristocrat and the rationalist forced a second laugh. “Why ruin tonight with words of gloom and darkness? If you believe in our One God, if you really do, then you know nothing bad ever happens to the good man who lives his life according to reason. Did you not see, woman, that I was dead when I was idling on my farm, wondering whether I had the good number five thousand forty or the bad number five thousand forty-one of olive trees after all? I am not here to save Epaminondas. I am here to be saved by him, just like you persuaded me once.”

Nêto turned and headed out of the tent before Chiôn and Mêlon could scold her for having snuck to the battlefield.

Helikon

Hold up, man.” Chiôn and Mêlon yelled to the approaching riders. The two Thespian hoplites had beaten the throng out of the assembly. Now both were looking for a place to sleep near the tent of Epaminondas. They had decided to let Gorgos stay back by himself at the wagon up on the hill. As they spread out their gear, four horsemen galloped up—Thespians like themselves. “Lophis is here.” Chiôn immediately yelled to his master.

Lophis pulled his reins and tossed his head up. “We rode out yesterday and camped on the water by White Creek across from the Spartans last night.” He teased his father, “I figured you three had gone back in your old men’s wagon to Helikon to hunker down in the farm tower and wait all this out.” He had his helmet off. Lophis liked riding bareheaded around the camp. His hair was braided Spartan-like for show. He was taller than his father, thinner as well, with fairer skin.

The hoplite grabbed the saddle cinch of his horse, Xiphos, as his son slid off to greet Chiôn. “Hoa, you! Well, here we all are in the Thebans’ cauldron, it seems.” Chiôn nodded and looked to see if the hooves were cracked. Mêlon did not wait for the slave’s answer but walked around Xiphos, his eye checking the leather flank guards that Nêto had stitched, worried that his son could afford no lapse if he were to survive the charge into the Spartans. “Your lance, son, does it go well with Xiphos?”