The wheat was already drooping with the weight of the ripening grains. The olive pressing that Melon had left before the new year was long finished, the oil safe in the vats with another even heavier new crop on the trees. The sons of Lophis would meet their grandfather in the courtyard-since they wagered Melon at least for now had survived the Peloponnesos and come home safely. They would be eager to boast that Myron had laid out the new pressing room on the slope near the first threshing floor as Chion had once envisioned.
After his first night back on Helikon, Melon said little in the morning to the boys, who were accustomed to rise with the sun if they were to eat one more day. Myron, it seemed, was more himself on a level with the boys. He worked alongside them rather than, like Chion, leading the sons of Lophis to the fields. He knew far better the lore of the neighbors and was liable to go off the farm to listen and stop the rumors that had grown up with the death of Lophis and the flight of Chion.
Melon only now grasped that folk like Chion and he are the worn hobnails that finally ruin the boot and hurt the wearer from the inside. In the end they must be either pulled out or hammered down, however much they have once softened the cruel wear of the hard road for others. These two were the goads of war that are useful only to stop men like Kleonymos or Lichas when such brutes threaten to run amok and hurt the weaker sort. But in peace? They must be watched or better yet kept at a distance, until bloody Ares crashes in and the more civilized and frightened call them back to bar the gate. So Melon noticed the worried glances of his own kin at his scars and grim look that had not yet left him. On the second night back in his bed in the shed behind Damo’s tower, Melon finally pulled off his old cloak, and then saw the tiny scroll that fell to the dirt-the proof of sale of the Theoris that Gaster had quickly handed to Alkidamas on the quay below holy Delphi.
Melon got ready to put it in the flame of the lamp, but for some reason unrolled it to see how much that scoundrel Nikon had made off the exchange of Alkidamas’s ship, if there were even a bill of sale rather than a blank scroll. Yet there was writing, but it was no receipt at all.
Nikon salutes the men of Boiotia.
The secretary Helos, grammateus of the Boule writes this. You are home safe if that one-armed Gaster gives you this papyrus. Rejoice. We are free now. In a free Messene, under a free Ithome-with gratitude only to grandfather Alkidamas, and our father Epaminondas, and you, our apple, Melon, and dark-eyed Ainias and the souls of Chion and Proxenos, and wandering lame Neto, and all you others from the north. Don’t be cross with us. The polis Messene is better. This month looting stopped. The helots will soon be Messenians. We were worthy of your blood sacrifice. Free men elected me first citizen of the Messenians, archon Basileus, friend of the Boiotians, friendlier still to the men of Helikon. Know that we Messenians, as long as I am archon, are the first and last friends of the Boiotians.
Nikon, son of Nikostratos, archon of the Messenians.
And Helos wrote this too.
Melon rolled back the tiny paper, tied it carefully, and put it in his small wooden box on the three-legged table next to the bed, where he could find it in his evenings by his lamp and so reread the letter from the archon of the greatest city of Hellas-who could neither read nor write. In half a month’s time as the summer solstice came on, Melon wondered whether he had ever been south at all, so well the farm looked as the grain harvest was continuing in the lower fields and the goats were ready to eat the stubs bare. No one came to disturb him from town. None asked who was free and who not. Melon’s fame from Leuktra had passed on in his absence. That Chion was dead was lamented, and then almost immediately forgotten. The memory of Chion rested only in the hearts of a few kindred great-hearted souls, the megalopsychoi who must remain the strong links in the otherwise weak chain of civilization. All Melon could do was frown when the agora lounger and wall-borers harangued at the smithy and butcher shop: “Old Chion had some run-in, a falling out with that runaway Gorgos, his helot slave, and went down there to fetch him, I gather. Got more than he asked for, he did. Both ended up butchered, as the slaves usually are when they have no business being freed.”
To the crowd at the agora of Thespiai, Lichas and Antikrates might as well have been cold stone hoplites, nameless on the temples at Thebes. None knew that a stone lion known as Chion now guarded the Arkadian Gate at holy Messene. The farmers of the bottomland around Kopais up until the plain of Chaironeia, had they even known of tall Messene, would have only yawned at the business of folk far to the south and of no import for the Boiotians. Yet they would never again fight men from the south on the slopes of their Ptoon or Messapian. That there would never be Spartans in their fields-never Spartans in anyone’s fields in all of Hellas-they just by rote and habit assumed, as if it were their birthright and not a gift paid for with the lives of Lophis, Staphis, Proxenos, and Chion.
Melon was through with the world of petty repute, the town’s whispers of the larger coin chest in the well, and the rolling gossip of the agora; and yet in these first ten days of his return he was restless too on his mountain. Damo and Myron asked him little about the fighting to the south, as he returned to the chores of the farm. He heard even Phryne was to flee to Attika, in disgust at Epaminondas who had emptied the countryside of her customers and ruined her colony of eros, and whose army might torch her salon of gossip and treason should they catch her still in Boiotia. At that thought Melon at last hiked down to pay her a final visit. She had received word of his visit, and so his Sphex was sitting under the plane tree by the lion-head fountain in a bright white chiton, with her breasts tucked high, and her hem hiked to the upper thigh.
She had come out to watch her carts go with her load of love gear, both her girls and the rich baggage of the porneiai that headed back under the guidance of Eurybiades to Athens. In the past at Athens, when Phryne was in trouble in the courts, she simply bared her breasts and won her freedom. Now? If she had stripped naked, it would have done no good in winning a pass to stay at her palace in Thespiai, as both her breasts and her audience were not as they once had been. “You could have stayed the hero of Leuktra, my Melon,” she sighed. “I would have had all thoughts of that know-nothing virgin girl Neto out of your breast the moment my cloak dropped. Instead you were helot-crazy. Too eager to kill your fellow Hellenes. All for man-footed slaves like that Neto of yours, whom I hear didn’t come out so well after all. I could have used her, it seems, but not now, I hear at any rate, unless it is for some depraved sport among the bad ones. So you took away my clients on the long march south and soon the city here will turn against me. Yes, the army will return with no goodness in their heart for those of us who opposed bitterly your Epaminondas. They say I gave silver to Backwash to stop this madness. They claimed I offered free eros at Athens to Kallias and Iphikrates for their words and weapons to save Hellas from your bloodlust. They say I sent runners to Lichas to ready the Spartans for Epaminondas, and they say your Gorgos was in my pay.”
Melon turned away, happy that he had never mounted this woman. Do that, he thought, and he would have been thinking of his terraces and vines, and the need to get home before he was even done. Only now he knew why men called her “Toad.” Still, as he turned away, he spoke to her. “They say? No, no, so I say. I say that the Boiotians who come back will not have patience with any of you. None of you traitors they like. As for helot-crazy, I suppose I was. Yes, I found out that I was, both for the freedom of the Messenians and for the company of Neto.” He then got up and ended, “Not you, not me-not any of us have ever been helots. Have we, Phryne? Cutting down the wheat stalks, only to give flour to masters on the other side of Taygetos-as thanks each year that they might kill only a few hundred not thousands of our kin?” Now Melon turned wild and raised his hand to slap her hard if she even squeaked back a slur. “No, you go from here. Go. Leave from out Thespiai. Your lust, your sway is nothing. It leaves your customers hating you as much after their pleasure as they flatter you for it before. So, no, I have no apologies. Maybe only one: We should have battled the ice of the Eurotas and killed Agesilaos when we could have. Or stayed on Taygetos and hunted down that Antikrates. Or stayed in the high country until I carried my Neto back kicking on my shoulder.”