The sound of Lakonian reed pipes filled the air. A clamor rose of moving wood and bronze. Melon did not look back. What was left of the Spartan army would before dawn march out with torches from Boiotia. A huge fire roared, consuming what dead they had managed to carry out and what Spartan corpses they had been given by the Thebans. Melon was stumbling about. The blow by Kleonymos had done more than close his eye, and after this long day he was nearly done for. He heard a high note and feared there was a daughter of night flapping in the air-or at least a shrill Ker perched on a low limb of an oak, waiting for him to fall. But the sound was a better strain and from the living, not from Hades and not a Spartan reed, either. As it entered his ear, he recognized the familiar soft piping of a Thisbe song-the strain of safety and health that always brought him home. It was Neto’s old tune to him, the sign to come down to the house from the vineyard. He followed the sweet sound of pipe back to the wagon.
Neto and Myron met him with the ox and the wounded Chion in the cart behind. She put her reed aulos down and recoiled in fright at her master’s swollen head, now half blue and covered in blood and shiny in the torchlight. His eye was completely closed. Still, she soon had the two resting in straw. Sturdy Aias would pull all four back to Helikon. The ox was eager to reach once more the hay and quiet of the stalls even after the tall stand of green grass by the stream on the parched hills above Leuktra. There would be no shaking off this runaway Myron. He feared his master’s wrath and begged only to sleep one night in the shed of Melon and a chance to care for Chion.
As the wagon rumbled home, Neto sang softly and reflected that she, Chion, and even Myron now would be manumitted and claimed as heroes of Thespiai, who had helped break the Spartans-in Myron’s case for merely following her around the wreckage of the battlefield. This night she concluded that the Myrons of the world always survive war and peace. They are not scroll-smart and can’t recite a line of Homer. But they stay immune from the vanities of ambition, always knowing their own station in life and the narrow limits between which they must live. Earned pity is their currency. Even the hardest man would be hard put to lay a hand on Myron. His smile they said was from stupidity, but if so, it gave him more power than any shield, and came from a craftiness that even the wise could not match. Gorgos surely couldn’t. Yes, in this war to free the serfs of the Peloponnesos, a Myron would survive a Proxenos or Alkidamas-as he all along had known he easily would.
She was stitching verses as was her wont, lines about the Spartan enemies in her midst-Lichas of the one ear and Sphodrias and Kleonymos who supped together in Hades with Klearchos and all the other Spartans that her heroes this day had killed. Her master Melon, always her master Melon at the van, side-by-side with Chion, sire of Lophis, all her men of the soil. She felt an anguish over the death of Lophis, and not only because she regretted that Melon had learned of it from other lips. If Neto were to list all the ways Lophis had kept the Malgidai together, her tally, she feared, might be small. Likewise, she could not point to the tower roof or the oil press beam and say “Lophis made that.” But she knew that without him there was no young heart left on the farm, no laughing, no energy from youth, just the void of his loss, and the wounded and old, and perhaps the end of the farm as they knew it, if she could not rouse the three boys to become men by first frost.
Melon lay numb next to the bleeding Chion, who took most of the cart’s space. The slave murmured in his forced breath that his good right arm had already been pledged to avenge Lophis’s ghost. He tried to lie on his side to give his master the greater straw, mumbling in the evening, “No worry, no worry. Lichas dies next time. It is written. Gorgos with him, even if he hides in the mountains to the south. I will hunt him down-and string him up.”
Melon grumbled only, “If he fights next time like today, we’ll both be dead. I liked the wagon ride over here far better than the return.” Flat in the bloody straw, the heroes of Thespiai-the killers of Deinon, and Sphodrias and tall Kleonymos, and the king Kleombrotos as well-returned on their backs to Helikon from their day at Leuktra-and on into the myths of the Boiotians.
When Neto finally drove the wagon up to the farm, it was still half a night before dawn, although the massif of Helikon blocked all light. She hailed Damo, wife of the dead Lophis. The farm woman had seen the torches of thousands plundering in the plain below but had not known whether they were Spartans coming her way or her own men soon to be rich from the loot of the Peloponnesos. Now Damo saw the wagon’s torch moving along the winding road up the low spurs of Helikon. So she was waiting in the courtyard. The three boys helped Myron carry the two wounded hoplites onto oak benches in the stone hall. “Xiphos.” Damo looked to Neto. “The wretched horse of ours. He galloped in at dusk, and with blood on his flanks-without his bit or Lophis’s reins. Dried blood. I smelled our own. Saw the light on pyres to the south. I thought Lophis must lie on one.”
Her hair was torn, her face was gouged with grief-and her sorrow was made worse when she saw the proof in the limp arm of Chion and the swollen face of Melon-and no Lophis. No battle that had maimed the brute slave could have spared her husband. “These are the wages of your Pythagoras,” she hissed at Neto and then let out a loud uluh-uluh-uluh before returning to human speech. “Why us on Helikon, why us? Where were the blowhards of the assembly? Is there a son of Epaminondas among the dead? Is there a boy of Pelopidas without an arm? Did the big talkers like Backwash lead the charge?”
Damo finally sat down on a small bark chair, muttering to the hound Porpax on his dung heap. “Even your Sturax is gone. Everything’s gone from this farm. Just as if the Earthshaker had knocked us to the ground.”
Neto spoke quietly. “We all knew what we were doing. We should have no second thought. Today is a great moment for the Boiotians. Though a sad one for the Malgidai.”
Damo glared. “Try saying that when you’ve buried sons or a husband, but don’t you dare in your virgin purity. You, barren womb, and your childless Epaminondas get too many killed. Too many rot for your visions and high words. Leave me be-parthenos, no-child, no-husband, no-mind, busy-body. No, the nice like you get too many killed who do their bidding.”
Melon was half-awake. But when he tried to get up, he saw darkness and nearly fell over. Neto-Neto, he thought, would set things right, if Damo were to see her grief turn to madness. Then he saw no more of the torches of the courtyard. As he fell into the whirl, Melon also heard the voice of Malgis reminding him that in all great crises, but in matters of death especially, there are a few who come forward to do what no one should be asked to do: close the eyes of the dead, wash the corpses, and prepare the funeral for the departed. Then when their hard work is done in the worst moments of shock, they fade. They retreat into the shadows before the ensuing ritual and staged talk of weaker others that follow, when the public crying and group lamentation by a new, a lesser cast begins. Melon, as he went back into the dreams of sleep, knew it would be so with Neto. She alone would keep the farm in the time after Lophis’s death when he and Chion lay in the netherworld spread out in the hall of the big house. Neto, freed from the anchor of Eros, or the goads of money and of pride, would do the right, the necessary thing as she always had. So Melon fell back asleep muttering to her that the Spartans had told him that Lophis would be found on the sea road to the south.
Neto prepared to go fetch Lophis, certain that the word of Lichas, at least as her master related it, was good and that her young master’s body was safe in some lean-to shrine. She unhitched the wagon and led Aias into the shed, where she soaked his back with a wet sponge and rubbed some olive oil into his wounds. She spent what little was left of the night taking off the armor of the two men, tending to the bandages and poultices of Chion, and putting oil and honey on the face of Melon. She even readied a stew of greens, beets, and wild cucumbers for the three boys to eat in the morning when they woke.