The End of Sparta: A Novel (38 page)

At the end of the fourth day from the shadows of Akrokorinthos, Erinna and Nêto entered the walls of the new city of Mantineia, though there was as yet no gate and only a few makeshift timbers to bar the way. Nêto had steered them far from misty Skopê on their left, and whispered to Erinna to turn her head from the hill where in her visions told that one day too many good men of the north would perish in yet another battle. The towers of Lykomedes this summer were only half built and the channel of the new Ophis still dry. There was no word of Proxenos or Ainias, who had gone to Thespiai to finish the town’s walls and would not return south until the summer was spent. Still, the three were given a wide opening. None of the lords of Mantineia wished to test the fangs of the huge wolfhound on Nêto’s leash.

On their fourth day in his city, the long-toothed Lykomedes, chief archon of Mantineia, finally gave them an audience, with a booming shout, “Alkidamas warned me of you two.” They now spoke with him near the Arkadian gate in a small stoa where his archers lowered their bows, despite the growls of Kerberos. He had it in his mind to kill both women—whether out of spite as their cold stares met his probing eyes or out of worry that the Spartans might win still and blame him for intriguing with the helots—despite the money Alkidamas had sent him for their safe passage. But first Lykomedes was curious to find out whether they knew anything about the number of men that might come with Epaminondas and his winter army. Such an army might make even more dangerous his own ongoing secret talks with King Agesilaos and the Spartans, a way to earn Lykomedes some silver and an escape should the Boiotians not come southward after all. Because Mantineia was close to Sparta and far from Thebes, Lykomedes was not quite ready to join Epaminondas unless he might show up at the city with thousands at his back. And even then it seemed a wiser course only to plunder Sparta to strengthen Mantineia, but not to go farther west in some mad pursuit of the freedom of the helots. Better for both Sparta and the helots to stay weak, since Lykomedes figured that after Epaminondas was dead or exiled, he would himself have to deal with those on both sides of Taygetos. So he now spoke to the women carefully.

“Alkidamas urged me to help you. But I can see that you are queer folk, both of you. Why, look, you carry men’s weapons, and have a man-dog with you and are looking for phantoms in some mythical city of Messenê to come. Still, I give you leave of our polis to find your helots—for a day.”

Then the boar-tooth stuck his finger into Erinna’s breast. “But you are only to find the visiting helot Nikôn—then leave. Stymphalian Ainias for all his promises may not come back here to new Mantineia. I believe our builder Proxenos will abandon us before the walls are finished. Neither has returned of late. So we want no charge brought on us by the Lakedaimonians that we are stirring up their runaway helots. Find your troublemaker Nikôn before I do. Just follow your nose to that tanner. Then leave. Cleanse all the helots from the city. I do not trust your Alkidamas and all his wild talk of revolt and helots and a huge army from the north—not while my walls are half-done and our Proxenos is missing, and the Spartans on my borders are restless.”

The women nodded, smiling that the silver of Alkidamas had bought them safety, or at least time to round up the helots for the trek into Messenia. So they left Lykomedes. Nêto and Erinna covered their noses. It was the black pond, where open ditches dumped the public toilets and the butchers threw in the carcasses of their sheep and goats, among them an occasional corpse of a hanged thief. By early evening the two women had returned to the straw of the public stalls, and they talked late into the night about how to scour the city to find the Messenians. But before dawn they woke to an image at the doors. A tiny man in a rough cloak of wool riled the horses. Then he burst into the barn. Neither had time to reach for a blade. Nêto grabbed her cloak and covered up. Erinna jumped out of the straw and faced the intruder naked, ready to jump at his throat. Both then heard a husky voice in thick Doric yell “
lykos,
” and without warning Nêto answered in turn “
lykos
.”

“Calm down and get your cloak on, woman. Your Alkidamas sent me. So Nêto here knows our password “wolf.’ ” Then the shadow man hesitated and stepped into the torchlight. “We are to take you to Ithômê, Nêto. We leave this morning. Pack. We have twelve from free Messenia here. Another eight helots will join us on the trail. We march due west, with the warm sun at our back. I say I am Nikôn. But you knew that from your night dreams long ago.”

“We do know you, Nikôn—from our dreams.” Nêto nodded to Erinna. “I heard you from the hill in far-off Messenia calling me. I even hear you on your cliff in my sleep. I don’t believe you’re the killer they say you are. I learned that in my visions.”

Erinna glared at him and scoffed, once her hawk eyes saw a small band at the barn door. “This is your army of freedom, Nêto? I mean you no ill will, helot Nikôn. But I had heard your band is the fiercest of the rebels, and yet I see just a handful of men in rags and with the smell of cow hide and pig fat. And when we two women are taller than any of your army, well … well. I worry that the Spartans will not worry.” She kicked the straw and pulled her cloak over her head and finally picked up her bow.

Nikôn frowned. “No tall Spartan helmet crests here to scare you women. No tricking your eye with our false height. We’re not Spartans. But laugh at us, and then see if we can’t hit a cow’s eye at thirty steps with the javelin, or follow that throw with the knife to split the shaft. Ask Antikrates. Ask even black Kuniskos just how many hoplites of Sparta they have found rotting in the passes from Ithômê. Ask him why they all stay barricaded in Ithômê, and why he fears us.”

Erinna put down her bow. Good. This Nikôn was a bit mad himself—and armed, and might show her why his name brought terror even to the
kryptes,
the helot killers, of Kuniskos. The growing light showed that at second look these helots seemed a tough lot, with blades and worn quivers, and cornel javelins as well. Most had a savage look about them. Some of the men were pointing at the big breasts of the poet herself and beginning to smile.

Erinna laughed as she took two steps back. “We will go safer for your company—at least until we can see the peak of Ithômê.”

Nikôn turned and pointed his sword at Erinna. “Our trip is for us, woman, to decide—since we hear only a trace of bad Doric in your talk. Nêto we know of. She knew the password. But as for you, Amazon, only Alkidamas pledges his word. Where is he now? We watch—so you don’t earn silver from a Spartan
krypt,
or any other helot hunter. Don’t bristle; plenty of Messenians have done just that. Kuniskos was once a helot, we hear. We have been killing Spartans, lots of them, while you sing of our fights from a distance. Our fifty have become five hundred. And then again five thousand. Soon ten times that.”

Nikôn, as the light confirmed, was a dark sort, with an eye that gave off bad intent to anyone it caught. Still, once he started, it was hard to quiet him down. He was a runner as well as a cutthroat, who flitted about Taygetos with messages for plotters and firebrands. Nikôn went always with this short fellow Hêlos, who carried a long scroll and wrote down orders and messages, one of the few of the helots who could write the block letters and yet believed his illiterate master was far smarter than any of the bastard helot leaders who in private boasted of red-caped fathers. Nikôn wore no helot leather, no fur cap. But he had a black wool cape on his shoulders—and a looted Spartan breastplate beneath.

In silence Nikôn and his helots at last set out of the main road from Mantineia with the two women. As they neared the western gate of the city, Nêto was already staring at the cut square stones and bull-nose-edged corners of the foundations, and at a new course of rectangular stones that had been freshly laid. They were just like those at new Thespiai—and what she had seen at Plataia. So the proud aristocrat Proxenos had not heeded her warnings but had long been down in Arkadia supervising the finishing of the ramparts, even after her visions at the generals’ tent before Leuktra. The scent of the stone-man Proxenos was already spreading all over the Peloponnesos, as if he had stamped a beta for the Boiotians on every wall that rose. Without Proxenos, Nêto reminded her travelers, there would be no freedom here in the south.

In another day on the trail westward, Nikôn’s band passed through the stones of the sprawling Megalopolis farther down the Arkadian road, heading south over the low mountains to ford the Alpheios. They refreshed at Lykosoura. Then they all went up the side of Lykaion to the cave of Pan for the night. Soon Nêto could see the dark, gloomy shape of Ithômê, the mountain of myth, home to the gods of Messenia. At dusk on the fourth day from Mantineia they crossed into Messenia toward Andania, with a larger throng of armed helots of Nikôn’s band—maybe a hundred now, the first invaders of the great war to come. “Look at it, Erinna. Black Ithômê at last, home to Aristomenes of legend, the great refuge of the helots. The mountain rises as the beacon to all Messenians, of all helots for a thousand stadia in every direction.” Nêto had not noticed the bands of helot rangers who had been shadowing them from the woods.

These new companies of Messenians were wearing Spartan breastplates and carrying heavy willow hoplite shields with double grips. The helots had come to welcome the newcomers and escort them to the ruins of Thouria. They had often trailed the Spartan
kryptes
to harvest the stragglers and strip their panoplies up on the higher passes. The Eleans had sent breastplates and shields as well, so this was no
ochlos
but a well-outfitted phalanx of hoplites. Finally Erinna, as she neared the slopes, found her voice and began chanting her own new poem of her Epaminondas. She had added a new line about this second great city, holy Megalopolis that they left behind as they headed farther west still: “By the arms of Thebes, Megalopolis was girded with walls.”

Nêto asked, “Sing of Messenê, my Erinna. It is past time to look for the third, the greatest, the tallest of all the fetters of Sparta to rise.”

Erinna smiled. “Not yet; not until the city of our helots is free.”

The March Down Country

The Great Muster

With the vote to go south before the new year, and the breakup of the Theban winter assembly, Mêlon made his way through the noise and elbows to a small shrine on the Theban Kadmeia. Still in the high city he stopped by two laurel trees that grew out of a stone outcropping, a viewing place with benches and a fountain. For the first time as he gazed below he understood just how many thousands of winter fighters were camped outside the walls of Thebes. A myriad? Or were there two and more ten-thousands?

How could Menekleidas with his two-pointed shoes prance around the hall as if he could stop what already was started? As the rhetoricians had been warning that very morning, thousands below were sharpening their blades and oiling their shield blazons a stone’s throw from Iphikrates and his thugs in the assembly—and all this at the onset of winter. They looked more like mercenaries than liberationists, scarred with blade nicks, lame from spear jabs, clad in leather and bronze, eager for pay, more eager still for Spartan booty, with not a worry about their icy breath and sleeping on snow. These islanders and northerners cared little whether the Boiotarchs voted for their war, only whether Epaminondas was to be at their head with plunder promised. All had their grudges with Spartans. All could claim that a harmost or a Spartan admiral had ravaged their land or killed a cousin or friend in battle.

The law of Boiotia or the freedom of the helots meant not so much to them; the hatred and loot of Sparta everything. Mêlon saw tents and midday smoke rising all the way to Kithairon to the south and then even more camps northward up to the spurs of Parnassos and even toward the gap at Chaironeia. As he left his lookout point, the Thespian fought his way through the crowd. Then Melissos finally caught him on the back of his cloak. The boy had just tied Xiphos nearby to a plane tree. He was in high spirits due to the wild eyes of the delegates that had filed into the assembly—and what he had heard from the grove above the theater, where the poor and slaves listened in.

For all Melissos’s bad sight, the boy was counting tents below and already numbering loudly the size of the army to be. “Two myriads,” he gasped, “maybe more still if we could see all on the foothills to the south. Even our armies to the north are not this size.” Suddenly the two were called over by Pelopidas. The general had a bright green cloak on, and a heavy leather tunic beneath. He was allotting scrolls in leather pouches to a group of young ephebes. By prearranged signals, well before the actual voting, the Theban already had sent out runners throughout Boiotia. The general was ordering more messengers to the marshes to ensure that the tardy and stubborn Boiotians of Orchomenos and Helikon showed up in the morning as they had promised. The eleven districts had had less than two days to send in their allotted
lochoi
—five hundred hoplites each and as many light-armed were the orders. The tribes in all the districts were to fill their quotas by daybreak, as the army would be on the passes outward within two days.

Pelopidas turned to Mêlon. “If we can get even a half-myriad of those Boiotians who stood firm at Leuktra, we will be doing well enough. That would give us altogether on the morrow almost two ten-thousands, with these volunteers from Euboia, Thessaly, Lokris, the islands, and even the men of Phokis who are still trailing in. And, of course, there are mobs in the south that will join us. So your Thespiai will send troops this time, even if they are not like those of the Malgidai or Chiôn?”

“Yes, some Thespians may march in. I am a Thespian, and pledge I will go south with you, and then over to Messenia to find my servant girl, whether alone or once again at the van of the army of Epaminondas. The fame of Chiôn and the big talk after Leuktra count. But mostly they will be the hill folk on Helikon, those in the backcountry all the way to Parnassos. Together with all these foreigners, I reckon that we may set out from Boiotia with more than Kleombrotos had when he came up here, at least.”