The hound Sturax that followed Gorgos was nowhere to be found. But some of the Thespian slaves who had tagged after Neto from the assembly to the battlefield had trickled back. They were fighting over the wagon, pilfering food and the good red wine of the farm in between knife jabs from Neto.
Pelopidas ran up. He had made sure the Spartans stayed on their side of the barrier, and that none of his own men tried to storm their ground until Epaminondas arrived. “This killer Lichas is over there.” Pelopidas pointed to two Spartan hoplites with torches and a raised spear. Both were now walking down from the camp and across the broad trench on a wobbly tree limb. “For a moment I saw his bald head.”
Epaminondas then gave orders. “Ainias and Proxenos and you, Melon, you who killed Kleombrotos, will all come with Pelopidas and me. We speak for Thebes and the Boiotian towns around it. Keep your chin straps on, hands on your spears. Lichas should know that a man like Ainias from the Peloponnesos is with us as well. I would have liked to have Chion, if he could walk, with us as well. So that these Spartans can look upon the slave that took down their best and sent Kleonymos into Hades.”
The five set out with torches about halfway between the two bands. Melon noticed in the glare that Ainias and Proxenos were even taller than Pelopidas. He in turn towered over Epaminondas. Yet the general was broader than any of the three and gave the look of one the Spartans would be most wise to avoid in battle. His arms were in constant motion, pointing, slapping Pelopidas on the back, waving others to follow-still dripping blood from a bandaged deep cut along the back of one arm.
A fierce-looking Spartan hoplite now came into view. His shield blazon was torn off, there was a crack in the concave willow planks. His right arm was also streaked with blood. Half his head was already shaven in mourning for the Spartan loss or in shame over defeat. “I am Teleklos. Royal blood. Regent now. I say Lichas talks for Sparta. You listen.”
Another man with him stepped up. He was a red-haired pale sort, Lykos, a Eurypontid bastard youth, who was the “eye” of the surviving King Agesilaos and an ephor who reined in Lichas when he could. They planted a torch pole in front of them. For a moment the Boiotians let out a gasp. The Empousa, the bogeyman of their baby stories, was a few cubits away as this last Spartan hoplite finally came out of the shadows. His finger was already pointing in their faces. He blurted out before he even reached them-and sounded as if he had sand in his throat. “Cow-lovers and eel-catchers. Who claims to be good enough to speak to Lichas? Speak. Where are their hoplites? Not these beggars, these vendors in rags? Where is this faker, the general of this ochlos?” Lichas appeared as large as he had earlier when Melon had faced him in the melee. Yet the darkness, flame, and shadows made him more foul-looking still.
So he was older, after all, than Melon, as old maybe as Gorgos. Lichas was like the Satyrs or foul father Selinos he had seen on the pots from Athens: high pock-marked forehead, snub broad nose and jutting jaw, completely bald on top, with two white horse tails braided that grew from around his ears and hung halfway down his chest and lay on the breastplate-his son’s bronze. The Spartan, then, had stripped the armor of Malgis from his son, and so was most likely his killer. Almost immediately Melon froze and looked down, careful not to betray his hatred. He then looked up carefully to see what sort of man he would have to kill and how.
In his shock, Melon noticed too that the Spartan’s forearms, encased in leather and rivets, were larger than those of any on his own side, as stout as Chion’s, or perhaps even more so. Lophis had had no chance against a spear jabbed by those. Lichas had done his own part to make what little nature had given him even worse, looking more like some ossified carcass that Melon had kicked up on the high cow pastures of bare Mt. Mesapion. One long scar ran from the bridge of his nose down his cheek across the jaw. Below his cratered forehead were plenty of holes and the marks of stitches and once-seared flesh.
If he had any teeth, they were invisible, or maybe black as his tongue itself. Then Melon caught another glimpse of the elaborate bronze under his dirty cloak-the aegis of Athena that Melon had kept in the tower of Malgis. This Lichas was by far the best man Sparta had on the battlefield that had escaped the death spears of both Chion and Melon. If Leuktra had been their best day-indeed, had gone beyond what either could ever again match-and this foul man had survived, surely no one in Boiotia could stop him.
Epaminondas glared at Melon, grabbed his shoulder, and took a step closer. Then the Stymphalian took hold of Melon’s other arm. They all saw that the stub of what was left of Lichas’s ear was oozing blood. A ball of wool had been stuck in the hole, and honey had been smeared on the side of his head. Lichas had another bad wound in his thigh, with a rope tied above it and a bloody cloth over it. He had walked up leaning on his spear-defiant, as if he were hale and forty, commanding at Koroneia perhaps, with ten thousand unbeaten Spartans or more at his back. Another four or five younger Spartans suddenly came out of the darkness to join Teleklos and Lykos. But on the sway of Lichas’s back hand they stopped at the edge of the shadows with spears and torches, and let their master speak.
“I said hear your Lichas. You won a battle. A big one. But not this war. A bigger war-megas kindunos. That you will have in days. Then my men from the coast get here with our other king’s son. Or now we march out home. Then go home. Or will we stay here? And kill you all?”
Whether he smiled or grimaced, few could tell. So far his talk was nonsense. “We go in the night. It is written by the gods that Sparta survives Leuktra. You do the second thinking; Lichas does the first killing of the enemies of Hellas. No, you won’t kill me, the last true Hellene. You’d miss, need me too much. Kill me? Then you would kill Sparta. Then who would protect you weaker ones from the wild men from the north and east?”
Pelopidas came up and raised his spear, but he was checked by the hand of Epaminondas. Still, Pelopidas thought it better to kill this man now. Ainias nodded to him and grasped his hilt. Never again would such men as their own be together to get this close to the Spartan. If it was not done now, both sensed that this man would bring them and their own catastrophe upon catastrophe in the year ahead. But it was the softer Proxenos who already had his spear out. He was lowering it in the shadows for a groin stab, for a foul black mood had come over him as Lichas and his brood neared. He was a man of vast lands and black soil and halls with marble columns, while these lords of Sparta lived in hovels and knew not a plum from an apricot. Proxenos did not believe Neto’s prophecies about a bad end across the Isthmos, but he did sense that one day he would march safer in the Peloponnesos without the evil of Lichas and his tribe.
Epaminondas stepped even closer, to within five palms’ width of the Spartan’s face. “You claim to be Lichas? You carried the dead king out. I apologize-for not killing you myself. But we had others of the royal blood today to deal with first. You yourself have lived too long, old man.”
Lichas blustered at that. “None of us ever explain what we do. We do all for Hellas-make her free. I keep the good on top to take care of the weak like you on the bottom. You only talk of making the bad equal to the good so that we all end up bad. Yes, what you cannot be, you would tear down. But we are the Hellenes, you its polis destroyers. Sparta is Hellas, Hellas Sparta, nothing more, nothing less.” Lichas spat out some of the dried goat meat he was gumming on. Then he continued, looking at Melon. “Is it to be more war? Or do my Spartans march out under truce? No difference to me. I killed ten of you today, and got back Spartan armor from the babe in diapers who thought he could wear it.” Then he laughed at all that and stepped a pace closer.