Gorgos had left her a bitter look, as he promised, with her branded scar. Neto for her part wanted no man. Kerberos would not leave her side anyway and she in turn kept him from going back to the wolves. Neto in her shame soon limped more into the deeper hills, even far above the house of Erinna and was seen with the deathless naiads of the glens, now more a phantom than a fleshy mortal. Melon had tried to track her down, but the mountain helots were ignorant of her wanderings, and he had lost his tracker Chion. Finally, he sent out messengers with word to her to come home. But no ranger could find her, not even the hounds found a scent of her Kerberos. Both vanished from the thoughts of the Messenians. Melon remembered her harsh talk to him the previous summer on Helikon and at least figured she was happier in her free Messenia than back in his Boiotia. Or so he told himself.
Finally, not just the hoplites, but their officers also, told Epaminondas to leave. They demanded of Epaminondas that they reach home before the green stalks of the wheat fields of Boiotia turned yellow and heavy. The army took inventory and prepared provisions for the march across the Isthmos. Then Alkidamas appeared again. He had gone north to Olympia, and had news as he returned southward to the new city. “I have called on you too much, Thespian. You have given too much of the earth and water of Helikon for the cause of the Messenians. I ask a final favor, a homecoming gift. I think that when you go north with the new month, we will not see each other again-at least until the trial of us all. So our tiny band of liberators should go homeward toward the gulf, ahead of the army, together as part of one final good deed, to smooth the rocks from the road before Epaminondas arrives with a bounty on his head. Let us get to Thebes first, before Epaminondas arrives, and make sure he sees flowers, not a rope, around his neck.”
So five left ahead of Epaminondas. Alkidamas led with Ephoros, the writer of history. Melissos followed at the rear. Ainias and Melon walked in between, both silent in their hatred of the Spartans who had killed Proxenos and turned Neto feral. After a two days’ walk, the five reached the coast of the gulf of Korinthos. From there they could see the wave-crested sea of Megale Hellas to the west, and the dark cliffs of Aeolis directly across the water where men of the polis seldom went. Soon on their way to the docks, they passed the first huts outside the great walled city of Patrai, city on the gulf, friend to Athens and home to the Achaians of old.
Ainias had grown tired already of the south, of his own Peloponnesos, and was ashamed of his Doric-and now even of himself as well. As promised, he would tend to the farm of Proxenos up on the Asopos River, at least for a while. The sooner he got to Plataia, and away from this southland, the better for himself and his companions condemned to see him in his madness. He would find his cure in the olives and vines of Proxenos. There he would swear off Dionysos, and bathe in the cold Asopos each morning to cleanse his stains. He would teach the sons of his friend to bend the bow and dig the vineyard. Or so he promised once he was north of the gulf and free of his homeland.
The joints of Alkidamas were stiff, and Melon himself was quite lame from his bad leg. His knee was nearly twice its normal size. His foot was blistered and torn from walking on its side. Lame and tired, they were all glad to go inside the city gate of these men from Achaia and walk down between the Long Walls to the port on the gulf rather than continue east to the Isthmos along the shore. Alkidamas laughed, “Ah yes, we take the ferry straight over to windy Naupaktos. No Gaster this time, just an honest ferryman and his barge. We stay the night over there on the high eastern road by the water. Then up a day through the olive groves of Amphissa to Delphi and we will pass along by the snake oracle of Trophonios into Boiotia, coming up on Helikon on her backside. Once across the water we are safe. Done with the deed-at least for this season.”
Melon and Ainias were mostly quiet on the broad-bottomed ferryboat over to Naupaktos. The late-spring sea of the fickle month Theilouthios was choppy. But the aged tiller was no fat one-armed running mouth, but an expert young sailor from Zakynthos with his father’s boat, who crisscrossed to the opposite side despite the white tops on the waves. Even with a strong northern headwind in their faces, they reached the northern shore by the noon, and then made the sixty stadia to Naupaktos in less than a day.
There Alkidamas rented a large common room, an andron with six wooden couches and reed mats. He had ordered food brought in to sup together a final time-olives, garlic, some dried fish, and an octopus or two, with four krateres of black wine and greens and spring horta from the well-watered slopes above Naupaktos. He had on either side of him flute girls. Two porters brought in torches and a long low table. “Well,” Alkidamas began as he leaned on his elbow, chewing a tip of raw wild asparagus, “well, well, we have a sort of symposion with girls and couches. Let the wine and eating and boasting begin. I am the symposiarchos, and preside over our talk session. Look. I have bought laurel wood for a roaring fire.” A short Akarnanian girl in a see-through cloak of light linen kept their cups full. Another with a large backside from Ithaka walked around the table with an aulos. On the prompt of Ainias, she took up a soft song of Erinna of Athens. Ainias had no smile on his face as he leaned forward. Rather than drop a raisin in his mouth he threw several across at the beard of Alkidamas.
“So we ended the Spartans,” he growled. “Don’t lie to me that we left something better. You saw the mess at Messene. Lichas was right. We miss him-and can’t bring him back to right things.” Alkidamas wiped a dribble of wine from his chin, clicked his fingers, and the Akarnanian girl-Skylaki, they called her-brought in a new calyx of red, the third of the night, and a towel for his face. “I am hog at the symposion and won’t let any of you speak, no, not just yet,” Ainias announced. “There is an army still left with Agesilaos. Even after Leuktra he is enough alive. He sits safe on his acropolis. I think we will all be back in the vale of Lakonia-and more than once.”
The other four were fidgeting. Ainias looked away from them. They were unsure how much the wine rather than Ainias was talking and looked over to see that his spear was on the floor. They signaled for the music to begin again, in soft fashion, as they heard him out, hoping the five-foot tune would calm him and that they themselves would not be persuaded by his anger. Ainias was a slave himself to Dionysos and would not calm. He kicked up his feet and jumped back up in the lamplight, spilled an entire krater of the white, and almost turned over the table itself. “Will your ox Aias pull the yoke any better, Melon, because there are no more helots? Will that big press work better without a Chion? I think not. Who challenges all this? All vanity. It was all about the vanity of Pythagoras, this notion you could play god, and make some serfs free so to make yourselves feel more something-what I don’t quite know.”
The drunken Ainias knocked over his couch and walked around the table, along the backside of the couches. Not one of the four was reclining. Melon might have agreed with some of this nonsense of Ainias. Now he kept quiet, for he had a half-thought to cross swords with Ainias, and more than a half that he would take down the Stymphalian. The piper Skylaki started on her flute and began to dance and lead Ainias back to his couch. It was the writer of historia among them, the yellow-haired malthakos Ephoros, who challenged the mercenary. How odd that the twig-armed Ephoros cared little about a spear-thrust from the drunken hoplite. He was even redder from the winter sunburn he had acquired on the trip down, but his voice came out through his nose in his affected Attic. There is courage in writers on occasion, especially if there is a story to come of it. Ephoros had learned to endure slights and an occasional slap as he questioned the helots for his great saga of their liberation to come. For all his perfumed locks, he was no coward. Ephoros had said little in fear that the veterans would scorn his white skin and soft hands-and his support for a war that he had not fought in.