The End of Sparta: A Novel (66 page)

At the docks, Alkidamas first saw a fat man grab the silver from his steward—and with his one hand, no less—even as he called back from across the boarding plank. “Old man. I thought you’d be dead now, you, my partner, and your Spartan-killers.” It was Gastêr. Gastêr who never aged, and never worried, and cared not a whit whether you were Athenian or spoke Doric, won or sat out the great war, if only you had four-piece silver owls from Athens in your palm. Yes, Gastêr was here, the anti-Epaminondas. “I’m afraid I sold our
Theôris
to the Messenians, Alkidamas. Or at least sort of. Why, that cutthroat Nikôn and his council, they gave me this merchant boat instead. I got marble and ferrying business with it to boot. Not a bad trade. Some shiny coins came with the ship swap. Those helots of yours learned to row and stayed with me on this boat too, better sailors than they proved wise men. So we meet again. I took the risk. You don’t want a cut out of my
Eleutheria
, though the
rhêtôrs
might argue it came from your money to begin with. I have proof of sale. Here, take it.”

Alkidamas took the rumpled tiny papyrus and gave it to Mêlon without thinking to throw it away. “Fine, fat man. No need of proof. You beat those Korinthians out to the gulf, and we all got to Messenê as bargained for. As for your trade for the
Theôris
—well, there’s money to be made even in Messenia, it seems. Take it as the spoils of war.”

“I already have,” announced Gastêr as he waved for their passenger to board his deck. Alkidamas then escorted the Makedonian to the quay and laughed. “You remind me of clever Kuniskos, Melissos, if you don’t mind me saying. Now that you’re both gone, as it were. Like him, you were not like you seemed—with your rickety thin bones and bad eyes. Or maybe you’re a Gastêr, as smart as you are ugly, who can tiptoe on a rolling deck with one arm and a pot belly. Yet I think you see better than the rest of us who don’t squint so. Tell the kings of Makedon that Alkidamas took good care of you, as you did him.”

The four gave their ward a final good-bye. Melissos walked on board, just as Ainias called out across the gangway. He had thought he disliked this half-Hellene and had not believed in his eye blurs or even his stutter, but instead had studied his airs and darting eyes. Now he was not so sure, and he wanted others to see the boy’s true insides here at the end, since they were more good than bad. Indeed, Ainias would not slit the Makedonian’s gullet, even if the voices in his head warned him that thousands of Hellenes not born would live if only this buzzing bee from the north were swatted right here before he ever began.

Ainias grabbed his sword. “Not so fast up on your hind legs, our little Makedonian upstart. One last order. It won’t require you to carry our shields any longer. Just tell me a final thing, down-beard northerner. What exactly did you learn from your year with our Alkidamas, and with us as well?” A wind came up, so Ainias yelled out even louder to the departing ship. “So hostage boy, give me something that I can tell our general on his return. You claim to be half-blind, but like no-eyes Oidipous you see more than the seeing can.”

Melissos sensed that Ainias meant him more good than bad. On the final walk along the gulf he had been going over just such questions and how to answer them when his father King Amyntas at home pressed him for wisdom—and for the walls and passes and armies of the Hellenes they would soon conquer in the south. He was safe, and even Ainias would not kill him now. The boy thought that he wanted to say that they were all second-thoughters like Mêlon, who would hesitate to strike the first, or maybe even the second, blow—dreamers who thought we had souls and so died for something other than loot and fame; makers of grand walls and bronze armor, but without the sense to put them to proper use. But that was not at all what came out from the departing Melissos, not at all.

Melissos turned to Ainias and spoke no longer in the role of hostage servant of Alkidamas and Mêlon, but as the future king of a warrior tribe who was coming of age. Melissos stared at the Arkadian. “I figured out many things, Taktikos, as you will soon fancy yourself as you write down your exploits for the rest of us. Of your democracy, it is not so silly as I thought—even if the dirtiest and loudest like Backwash shout down their betters. There are, I learned, lords like poor Nikôn and Nêto and cowards like well-born Antikrates. How would we know that if birth trumped merit? Any of those who whined in the hall of the Thebans we would have strung up, and yet they fight for something far better than my father’s wage, though he would have kicked them into the barns for their braying.”

They laughed at that boy’s high talk. Then even Ainias stopped, for he saw that this new Melissos was no fool, and was no longer what he had been before the great march. He went on with the airs of the Makedonian prince that he was again: “Was there some gold or a secret shipment of slaves in the bargain for you? I think not, though I was once convinced that there must be cartloads. Instead, I think here of Proxenos and your Chiôn and lame-footed Nêto and all the wild men like Nikôn and the rest who rot, who taught me, their slave, that I was as good as they with no idea that I was supposed to have been born far better than them all. I too in Lakonia and in the hut on Taygetos would have died for the dream of all them, and for crippled Nêto and my crippled master Mêlon, who taught me that I was the real cripple, after all.”

The four were struck dumb as Melissos went on. “I will also tell my father that we too will fight deep in the phalanx like you smarter Thebans. Very soon we will carry spears longer even than yours,
sarissas
we know them as. We will kill from five ranks in, not your three. We are tough, foul folk as you know, who worry only about killing in the north—not dying. Yes, I fear my Makedonians will be far better killers than you in your phalanxes. All that is written as the sun will set tonight in the west.”

Now Melissos was shouting as the wind came up. Then, as the
Eleutheria
left the pier and floated out from its mooring, Melissos ended. “A last warning, my friends: I fear you have no more Chiôns that I can see. No more giants of the soil to come, men like Mêlon and Ainias. When I come back down here as king, as I must, I will honor you all even as I must end you all.”

Then even as his voice was carried off by the wind, the youth yelled to the clouds a last time. “Oh, and you will know me next time I come back, but not I fear by your dear Melissos the Honeybee. For you see, I was and am Philippos, the lover of horses of the royal House of Pella. Yes, I am the son of Amyntas and the royal Eurydikê, the future King Philippos of all of Makedon and all of Hellas to come and Persia perhaps as well—I who carried your baggage and would do it if I could ten times and more again.”

The Restoration

With that the teary-eyed boy was gone, although none on the pier could quite fathom the last boasts of Melissos that were lost on the gusts—something about a Philippos and kings and Persia but just a few words without sense. Mêlon would remember only that the last time they saw Melissos he was waving, the one arm of Gastêr still around his shoulder. Gastêr, no doubt, had not liked the end of his speech, but at least he was buoyed by the boy’s spirit and saw money ahead for both. As for this Melissos-Philippos, he really was seen again in the south and in about thirty seasons thence, when the grandsons of Mêlon and the men of Thespiai would fall before his phalanx of
sarissas
and Philippos’s eighteen-year-old son to be born, Alexandros,
ho Megas Alexandros
. The dream of Epaminondas would end in the narrow valley of Chaironeia, not more than a day’s walk from where they all stood, where a balding Philippos would build a great lion monument to the Thebans he had killed. There would lie the better men of the polis, the sort that decades earlier in Boiotia the hostage prince wished to become—and might have become, had he only stayed longer as Melissos at the side of Mêlon and Epaminondas.

Ainias and Ephoros were happy enough to see the odd northern boy leave, and on the ship of Gastêr, no less—though he had been handy on the road and had carried far more than they had thought he would from the look of his small arms. Mêlon told them, “He proved at the end as good as any of us, a mirror as he hinted that we too went from bad to good once we set foot at holy Leuktra and then crossed the Isthmos. The next big war, mark my words, will come from his Makedonians and by land from the north. I miss him already—though I should not, since we may have trained a cub that will return a lion. Still, with Nêto gone, and Lophis and Chiôn dead, there is not much left. And without the Spartans I wonder whether our children can stop anyone as the old ones once routed Xerxes and his Medes.”

Alkidamas turned to them and looked over at Mêlon. “Are we ready for our climb up to the sanctuary? Don’t worry about our Melissos or whatever his name was or shall be. I too believe that he may not quite be a killer, although he proved to be a killer enough still. We did our best to tame him so he wouldn’t learn just our warcraft but also the rule of law, our
nomoi
, as well and the voice of Pythagoras, which I think I heard in him beneath his strange speech. What he does with that knowledge rests on his soul, not ours. The One God sorts it all out in the end. Enough; each man fights the battles of his own day. Ours are mostly over, and his will begin soon.” The four laughed at that and spent their second day out from Naupaktos ascending through the valley of the orchards to Parnassos. They walked in shade up the hills amid the olive groves of the men of Amphissa, who waved at them from the tall pruning ladders as word had gone ahead that the slayers of the Spartans this day were climbing to Delphi.

At last they rested beneath the shiny Phaidriades cliffs, not far from the ravine at the spring of Kastalia, happy to spend their last night together in the nearby tavern beneath the upper sanctuary of Apollo. In the morning the four headed down the Boiotian road with an escort of Phokians who were eager to hear of the victories in the south as the wage of their escort—and who pressed them for news of booty and more to be had. Rumors had already reached them that the army of Epaminondas would come up from the Isthmos in a new moon with wagons of Spartan plunder and gold from the Messenians. Ephoros and Alkidamas were to go on to Athens. Ainias would accompany the two as far as the shadows of Kithairon and take the fork off to Plataia and the farm of Proxenos. So Mêlon would be the first to part in the evening at Helikon, whose looming silhouette brooded on their right. Finally at dusk the four came to the crossroad that led on to Askra and Thespiai. The wheat of the upper fields was about milk ripe, not quite in full ear—just as Epaminondas had promised the previous winter when he assured the men they would be home from Ithômê for high harvest in Boiotia. The other three said little at their parting, for Ainias wished to see Aretê of the yellow hair, the widow of Proxenos, by nightfall. He had at last bathed as promised in the icy Mornos above Naupaktos, and then shaved at the inn below Parnassos. Each in Boiotia and beyond would now talk up the virtues of Epaminondas and ready the countryside for his return.

Ainias knew that he always would be a mere day’s walk from the farm of Malgis and that he and Mêlon were yoked as the twin oxen team who, for all their grunts, would still once more, side-by-side, willingly pull the hard plow of Epaminondas. Ephoros and Alkidamas were anxious as well to get to Thebes by dark. Ephoros had to meet two Athenian scribes and was ready to dictate from his dirty scrolls all that he could remember and all that Alkidamas could relate of the great march to the south. He was soiled with mud on his chiton and his cloak was thick with burrs. The writer wanted a long bath to wash and pleat his hair and get the road stink off before he took a carriage over Kithairon to his salon at Athens, the lone brave voice to take on Platôn and his friends on behalf of Epaminondas. The great adventure that had begun so long ago with a marching into the spears of Kleombrotos at Leuktra ended quietly in the spring sunshine a few stadia away. Alkidamas told the Thespian, “I wish you would come to Athens to hear my speech on the liberation of the Messenians. I could use a strong arm since I have no friends at Athens and I hear a number of enemies would like this head off its shoulders. Their democracy is much more of a free-for-all than anything at our Thebes.”

“No, not Athens,” Mêlon laughed, “I would rather go back to Sparta than that. So good-bye to you three and farewell. I will see you at our trial. Don’t listen to the signs of your doom this year, Alkidama. I wager you will die in your sleep in your eighth decade.” Mêlon slowly made his way up the winding road to the flanks of Helikon. He was alone, just as he had begun on that cold day five months earlier when he had made the long detour to the monument of Epaminondas on his way to the great debate at Thebes. And Nêto? He had left her somewhere at Ithômê, lost in the forests above the schoolhouse of Erinna. He should have stayed, even if he had sensed that she could see him through the glens and glades and would not come out and not come home.

He recoiled at the thought of the disorder of the farm. Would it be worse than the mess that he left when he had loitered in town with Phrynê? Of course, it must. After his half-year of neglect, there would be chaos—the weeds choking the fields, mud clogging the great drain. Perhaps the stones of Chiôn’s walls fallen to the ground. The worst of it? There would not be even a one-armed Chiôn to make right what would take other lesser men years to finish. The three boys of his dead Lophis had only the half-wit Myron to guide them. Damô was twice-widowed now with a young son. She would be locked in the tower as before, now with two husbands to mourn—and, with her young Chiônikos, now four children to raise. The tower’s roof probably leaked and its whiteness had probably long since peeled off. In her frenzy, Damô would blurt out the cold voice of reason: Why die for helots far to the south? Still, Mêlon remembered that there was at least no more Dirkê. No more Thrattos or Medios, or Hippias or maybe others like Hipponichos, who had coveted the farm of the Malgidai or even plotted it harm. The final rage from the outlaw Chiôn had settled those accounts. He had played Zeus on Olympos—as Mêlon had feared both Chiôn and Gorgos might have if they had been freed—meting out final justice to any of those he thought had lived far too long.