The End of Sparta (31 page)

Mêlon grabbed his forearm as Chiôn continued. “I needed a thousand good silver pieces, Master. I only skimmed the top of the iron boxes, and didn’t touch the gold below. So I told this Nikôn the ransom money would follow in five days. I will take it myself to free our Nêto to keep her alive. I promised Nikôn the helot that. We gave pledges. I sent word to Alkidamas, who is on the side of Kithairon by the sea waiting for a ship. But Nikôn took off back southward out to the harbor town Kirrha on the gulf like he was running the race in armor at Olympia. Here is the letter that Damô read better than I. I memorized what she said was scratched on the bark:

Erinna tês Ithômês tô Mêloni. O Mêlon Malgidos. Pempe nun chrêmata pros tên Erinnan en tê gê tê tôn Messêniôn. Autên apoagorazein dei tina Nêtona apo tôn Spartiatôn. Pempete auta meta toude Nikonos, andros men agathou, agrammatou de.

“Erinna of Ithômê to Mêlon, son of Malgis: Send money to Erinna in the land of the Messenians. She must buy back Nêto from the Spartans. Send it with this here Nikôn, a good man, but an illiterate.”

Chiôn remembered more or less the way Damô had read it, but half the words on the bark were unclear to him. So he handed it over to Mêlon and kept talking. “What do these scratches mean? That stringy helot Nikôn went to his knees in begging, an odd thing for a tanner by his smell who says he will set all of Messenia on fire. So our Damô had me pull up the coin box. I had no wish to trust this helot, even if Nêto had long said that she spoke to him while asleep. But Nikôn told Damô well enough what our Nêto looks like. So he does not lie, at least not completely. But who is this Erinna? When I asked Nikon, he said, ‘Ask Alkidamas.’ ”

Mêlon at least knew as much as Chiôn. “I am sworn to march with Epaminondas, but it is southward all the same, and I will be over Taygetos perhaps before any of you. I see that you know that Alkidamas is not here. He left the assembly for the bay at Aigosthena and has some grand plan to sail into the port of Messenia with helot rowers, no less, that he rounded up at Athens. He was supposed to send me word when he was to leave and where we were to meet in the south. Maybe he had wind of your Nikôn last night. But I see you planned to row with him all along or at least the two of you cobbled together some sort of plan on your chance meeting when I had set out with Xiphos to Thebes. Chiôn, you did well enough. Don’t worry about the silver. But now there is no need to go yourself. We can send the pay-off with Alkidamas, who as it works out is going south anyway, even if you were his agent after all. I see that now. Trust this Erinna. I’ve heard from Alkidamas at Thebes she is with Nêto. Stay on the farm. I am marching at sunrise. As I said, I hope to beat all of you to Messenia and still keep my vow to march with Epaminondas into the vale of Lakonia. I may get there first anyway.”

“If Gorgos is this Kuniskos,” Mêlon went on, “then he will not kill her, at least not yet. He knows us, that we will send ransom money. You or I will even up with him. The man Alkidamas, I saw just these last two days in the assembly at Thebes. He is on his way. He must know this Nikôn and is close with Nêto and what she was up to. She never said anything much of her plans to me before she left.” Mêlon finished slowly. “So take the money from the farm to him at the port. Do it this day. Then it will go by sea to Ithômê, while I try to get south first. Yes, go to the port and find your Alkidamas.”

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 spear-men 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.