The End of Sparta: A Novel (48 page)

The two hoplites were soon standing at the rear of the column. They had kept falling farther behind the Thebans as the phalanx was nearing the banks of the Eurotas. Ainias tapped his silent friend with a light blow to his helmet to see whether he flinched from his stupor, and took off his pack. He wanted to force him down and probe his cut, but Proxenos was still standing and slapped away his hand. Ainias now sensed his friend was waning, and that he could do little to cure either his body or his soul, and perhaps should play this final act out until the end of the drama. Nonetheless, he wanted Proxenos of Plataia to show the army that he was a hoplite of the first rank who took his wounds in front and fell in the first rank. “Wake up, man. Even lame Mêlon has passed us up and waits at the fore with Epaminondas. Pelopidas needs our counsel at the spear tip. He has no spirit to fight ice and Spartans together. Hey, Proxenos.
Hypnos
has you again, man. Your eyes—they’re rolling, ever since that farm. Shake it off, this black bile. Spit out the lotus-eater in you. Come back from the other shore.”

Proxenos paid him no heed. Instead he continued to limp in the direction of the Sacred Band. But now his head sagged and he felt a strange urge to fall asleep, armor and all. At some point failure became pleasure. Resistance to the creeping ice inside him meant only pain. He felt a funny kinship with thousands gone—with tens of thousands unseen—but less affinity with the hundreds he could make out at his side. Where to find his knot of strength? It had vanished out of his mouth, left him unstrung. Cold voices of the dead began to whisper in his ears. The warm talk of Nêto was not among them to drive these furies out.

Proxenos, Ainias knew at last as he glanced at his friend, was doing the arithmetic of death. This starts when a man of the middle age begins to add up what he has done and what lies ahead—and sees that the climb up was far better than the trudge back down. He saw the Plataian gasping, breathing out steam that rose from his sagging helmet, and noticed there was blood at the corner of his lower lip and foam as well. For those who dare to do such summing up, even without a wound, the life force itself can sometimes vanish and leave nothing but empty flesh in its wake—a lyre fallen silent without a song or player. He wanted to throw Proxenos down and cleanse his wound, but he also wished for his friend to stand tall with his spear at the Eurotas rather than drift into sleep here on the march.

Proxenos sensed his wound was behind all this mad thinking, but its full malignancy was still not quite clear to either him or his friends. So the Plataian was unsure whether this sudden waning of his strength was not a failure of his own will. Had he any courage left, he could have been at the forefront with Epaminondas, despite the spear poke that Antikrates had given him. Chiôn and Mêlon had suffered worse wounds and yet were always at the van. Had he incurred a bad
daimôn
? Perhaps there were Olympian gods, after all. Had his impious neglect of Zeus and Apollo on Parnassos and the earth-shaker Poseidon at the Isthmos in favor of the one deity of Pythagoras—had all that come back to haunt him in his final time of need? The gods, not Antikrates, had done all this to him?

Nêto had no power against the deathless ones to change or honey-coat her pronouncement of the doom he would face after crossing the Isthmos. The Plataian, through strange voices along the river’s edge, was given a final gift of visions of things to come, majestic sights in hues of purple and soft yellow, all to the music of the pipes of Thisbê. Now pictures came to him of the finished Megalopolis, and of Epaminondas standing guard as the new gates of Messenê rose, then leading the army back home in triumph across the Isthmos.

Yes, his eyes were full of color and his ears of flute music. Proxenos could hear the voices to come of the demogogues at the trial of Epaminondas back home, swaying the judges to kill the general as he sat in the dock on the Theban Kadmeia. Did Ainias not see this—their general dragged into the
bêma
to be jeered before being hanged? Yes, there would be the bickering on their return; but then, as the envy and jealousy cooled, maybe also would come applause for the magnitude of the Theban achievement when fully grasped, no doubt only after they were all dead. He, Proxenos, the lord of a vast estate overlooking the Asopos, would have to stand in a Theban court while the rabble cobblers and tanners pelted him with fruit and jeered at his half-Attic speech and damned him for joining Epaminondas—only to be found guilty of designing the three greatest cities of Hellas and freeing the men of the Peloponnesos and making the Boiotians all safe.

Such is the way of men, Proxenos reckoned in these final moments, when given a great gift, to complain about the quality of the present or the motive of the giver or the circumstances of the largesse, all to lessen the need for gratitude and indebtedness—and fouler dependence. Proxenos in his delirium saw that there would be a need for more invasions to the south to come. Sparta was hard to break and helots were harder to free. Allies would switch and join the enemy if their deliverer became too powerful, or if he seemed too weak. He knew Lykomedes was already half with the Spartans, half with Epaminondas, unsure which side in the end would win and thus he should join. It is a human habit to relax in triumph and take the boot off the neck of the wounded foe who has not quite expired. Soon Epaminondas would have to lead out the army to finish what he could not quite this morning.

Would he, Proxenos, wish to spend the rest of his life trudging down here on the tail of Epaminondas, to end Sparta? Leave all that marching each summer to Mêlon and all the other zealots who had made the conversion to the cause of the helots. A Plataian, as Nêto warned, had no business in the ice of Lakonia. All this was too much, this monotony, this predictability. Now no matter how Proxenos tried to keep in step with the hoplites, he could not fight off a new tightness that was rising into his chest and neck at the same rate it had crept down his thighs. Since he knew all that was ahead, why the need to put off what was foreordained?

Ainias gave up trying to stop Proxenos and so instead hit his breastplate again. “Wake, do not let the ghosts take you, man. Not now, not when we are to burn the wasps in their very nests.”

Proxenos, through his helmet that had fallen back down over his face, mumbled to Ainias, who heard him clearly—strangely so, as if the gods had stopped the river roar and muzzled the grunts of the hoplites and the clatter of their bronze, “Do you like Sophokles, Ainias?”

“This is no time for that, man. But if you must know—no. He was a pompous old man. But keep to the river, not the words of the dead poets.” Ainias thought that if he kept Proxenos talking, the Kêres would stay away.

“Do you know his
Aias
, Ainias, his
Philoktêtes
? I never cared to watch
Oidipous
or
Antigonê
, especially to see us Boiotians on stage as eye-stabbers and woman-killers.”

“Yes, once, at the big theater in Korinthos. But Aias was a suicide. I never put much faith in his ‘Live nobly or nobly die,’ not when it was by his own hand.”

“But you do, Ainias! That is why you march with Mêlon and me—because so do we. All three of us are Aiases of sorts—here far from our homes, no friends of the Thebans or the Messenians, but merely for the idea of it all, the last breed of the Hellenes, with no expectation that we are to live through it. We live for a code that sets us apart, and now the toll comes due as it must. Why else would a Stymphalian, a man of Thespiai, and a Plataian all be near this accursed river in winter—for the helots?”

“It helps to hate the Spartans. Or have you forgotten that, my dear Pentheus who rages as he sees two suns and the sky in a swirl.”

Ainias stopped the mad Sophokles talk because he knew where it led—as if a Proxenos were an Aias without a future or a Philoktêtês who with wound was exiled by those who needed his skill. As the two argued, the mist was lifting. Most of the army had stopped and was drawing back up on the riverbank. All were stunned at last by the sight of Sparta itself, the city that they had heard of only in widows’ tales to frighten young Boiotians to come inside from the courtyard. Not a wall to be seen, just countless hoplites on the banks opposite to provide ramparts of flesh against the invader. Some of the faces of their own hoplites at the head of the Boiotian snake were white, but not just from the cold. It was a terrible thing to look across the icy Eurotas at a long line of red-caped hoplites kneeling with spear and shield. Epaminondas saw this terror and worried it had already ruined his army this day.

So he threw off his green cape and mounted his red Boiotian pony. The general galloped up and down the column and ordered his men as he reined his mount and for a moment pranced it on two legs. “No fear. No
phobos
. To me. Ford into Sparta with me.” Five thousand of his hoplites thronged the banks and hit their raised shields with their spears. “Shields high, men, as we get wet. Hold them over our heads as these Spartan cowards try to hit us in the water. The water will touch our waists but not our chins. There are no stone walls over there. Cross the river here at the ford. The Eurotas is cold, but not deep. Wade it—and we are inside Sparta. She is ours for the torching. Who is afraid of a little water, a little wet?”

But as Epaminondas charged back and forth along the high banks of the river, the lame Spartan king yonder across the water was also visible to the Thebans through the whirling mists. Agesilaos limped along the Eurotas, always shadowing Epaminondas, pointing this way and that with his spear, sending companies of spearmen anywhere he saw a possible ford. What a small man he was, Mêlon saw—half the size of the Agiad king Kleombrotos at Leuktra. Smaller even than short Epaminondas. Were these Eurypontid kings dwarves? The king limped far worse than Mêlon did himself. So this lame-foot man was all that kept Epaminondas from storming Sparta? Not quite all—for there was something else on the far bank, a figure standing next to Agesilaos. Mêlon, who was at the side of Proxenos, yelled out to his aide Melissos, “There, look. There, boy, there is the killer, Lichas. Look at that foul spearman. Bareheaded, with his white braids. No helmet.”

The bleary eyes of Melissos thought he saw nothing other than the fuzzy shapes across the water. But he sensed the furor in Mêlon, who faced Epaminondas and called out again, “He’s there, our Lichas, near the king Agesilaos. He is the one who dares us.”

Then the king was gone, as quickly as he had appeared, into the hedges across the river. In his place ran his granddaughter, hair in the winter wind, with a black sword in her right hand. Now there was no mistaking her. She darted across the line of crouching Spartan spearmen, her
klôpis
hitting their wooden shafts as she reminded them, “Your king and my Lichas are with you. Stand fast and spear the pigs from the north. Leave Epaminondas to me.” Her voice easily carried across the water.

Melissos cried out to his master, “I can hear them, Thespian, I can hear your Lichas and the king in their fury on the other side, and his demon bitch, all cursing our Epaminondas. Can they see us as well? Why not cross and kill them? I can help, I can do that.” But Mêlon grabbed the Makedonian by the neck and drew him back from the water where the arrows were beginning to hit near their shins. The last bridge had been destroyed by the king, enraged that a Theban had shut his men inside his city when they were used to marching a thousand stadia abroad into the lands of others. Still, this Melissos was proving to be as brave as any in the phalanx.

Agesilaos came back out of the bushes and bellowed to the Thebans when he caught sight of the mounted Epaminondas. A wind came up and all the Thebans could hear his slurs from across the river. “O wild man” the king pointed at Epaminondas, shaking his spear, “you will not cross this ford, fool, you cannot without a bridge. Never touch the polis of Leônidas. You can’t cross, not now, not ever. We are the better men. Our Elektra is a man, and you are women.” For once the aged royal spoke true, as the army froze at the water’s edge, stopped there by the fog and sleet and ice combined with arrows and javelins hurled from the Spartan side.

Mêlon spoke to the boy Melissos, as if he were a general like Epaminondas, as they both watched the throng across the wide cold river. “This morning is not our day. It is not fated, Melissos. I see that now. We are not to kill Agesilaos and Lichas today. Too high the water, too cold, too many Spartans on the banks.” Even if they got across the current, the Thebans would be inside the hornets’ nest. To fight in the streets of Sparta was a battle few welcomed. No wonder the Arkadians, the Eleans, the Northerners, even the Argives wanted no part of this. It would mean being pelted by roof-tiles and hit by the pots tossed down by frenzied women, as the Boiotians got caught in winding and dead-end streets and trapped in courtyards. Lampito, younger sister of Lichas, along with Elektra, his wife, had organized the women into
lochoi
, ten to a roof, sixty houses among them each. The Boiotians remembered the stories of their grandfathers. They had told of the Thebans who had once stormed into the streets of nearby Plataia. Few had made it out alive as the women and boys of the town had buried them with hard clay from the rooftops.

Until the sun broke through the heavy fog around noon, each time Pelopidas and the Sacred Band reached a new sandbar of the river, hundreds across the water ran up to the banks. The Spartans knelt down with spears on their shields to meet them, then lowered their heads as their archers and javelin throwers at the rear targeted the throng of Thebans with a volley of missiles. The Spartans had mocked that arrows were the work of women. But now they flung anything they could to stop Epaminondas at the Eurotas.

A few of the foolish among the Boiotians who had reached halfway into the current were already floating downstream, with javelins stuck in their necks and thighs. In vain, Epaminondas had ignored the advice of the veteran Ainias and Pelopidas, and of Mêlon as well. They had all warned him to avoid the city. Instead, why not burn the dockyards at Gytheion to the south? For this day leave Agesilaos alone. Once more, let Lichas be. Mêlon was at the general’s side, trying to grab his reins and get Epaminondas off his red horse. He tried to talk over the shouting of battle. “Mad Theban. Don’t ruin our army in the water when twenty myriads await us in Messenia. Join the Arkadians as they burn the countryside. This Lichas, he baits us. He’s your nemesis. Wants us to climb out soaked on his side. Don’t. Stay here. Burn and loot and overturn their farms. The Eurotas will be our warden and bars.” Mêlon had remembered Malgis’s stories of the Athenian slaughter at the River Assinaros in Sikily, and he began to see that even Lykomedes and his looters had the better advice this morning. So he kept on with his early-morning warning to the mounted Epaminondas to avoid the water. “They will slaughter us. As if we were the Athenians in Sikily. Water is their helper. Back off, Theban. Today is not our day. Not this day.”