Neto looked her up and down, to make sure it wasn’t some demon. No, she was human, a hag with rump back. Kallista spoke Boiotian coast, that much was clear, and seemed a near twin to her neighbor on Helikon, Dirke-if not the shrew herself in disguise. Neto jumped down. She followed the woman’s point to the shanty shrine. There was the body of Lophis. Kallista had already washed much of the gore from him, dead a day and a half now. The Spartans Teleklos and Lykos, for all their gruff, had given her a coin to keep the Thespian whole for his kin, a better gesture, Neto thought, than what she herself would have done to the dead of Sparta. Lophis lay on the bench in front of the stone statue, the broken body that had been ridden over by the cavalry of the Spartans. Her master’s throat was cut. It was caked with dry blood as the Spartans had said. But there were enough ugly wounds below the armor line that made Lichas’s final slice no matter. These spear jabs to the lower stomach had finished Lophis anyway. Neto finally looked away. How hideous Lophis had become-stiff, swollen, and blue-black and ghastly in expression like Medusa’s face.
Was this the war she sang about-and urged others to risk their all for? All Lophis’s grand dreams had been reduced to this contorted mess of flesh, to be thrown across the back of his tired horse by a slave girl? This-not Epaminondas’s “one step more”-was the face of war. Perhaps she herself, if freed, would not vote for Epaminondas as Boiotarch, since he would only lead his people into more Leuktras south of the Isthmos. She flicked a maggot off his neck and poured some wine over his hair to flesh out more crawlers. The broad nose of the Malgidai was bent flat on his face, his strong jaw smashed and mangled apart from its joints. This certainly was not the battle that she’d seen from the camp above Leuktra, not the grand prelude to the march south to free her helots. How many Boiotians-she should ask the grand planners like Epaminondas or Alkidamas-was a new Messene on Ithome worth? Surely her One God must give her a number. A thousand? Five thousand were worth it?
Meanwhile, the dog Sturax was nowhere to be found. Yet Porpax soon smelled the hound’s death scent on the blood of Lophis. Then another odor hit the hound, and he was off toward Kithairon. Neto thought he’d be back after the smell of a dappled fawn proved false. She gave the woman of the shrine a bag of raisins and figs-and another silver Athenian owl for good measure. Then Kallista helped her douse and scrub off Lophis with oil and sprinkle him with wine, and wrap his stiff corpse in Neto’s blanket. They tied it into a bundle and then slung him gently over the back of Xiphos. The horse jumped at that, raw as he was with cuts from the battle. Neto shuddered; she had seen this picture in night visions before of her strapping a dead body on a horse in front of a shed, but was it this one now, or was there another corpse in yet another bad night in the future?
A bony hand grabbed her shoulder. “Stay here the night, pretty one? Don’t go off in the dark with killers on the road. I hear the wild man-bear is out tonight, come down from Helikon out your way to harvest some Spartans. For another three silver pieces, I can lead you to my hut up the draw over there.” But Neto pushed Kallista away, flashed her knife, and decided to wait no longer for the marauding dog Porpax to return. She turned Xiphos around and slowly led the horse by the reins, careful that the body remained balanced on his back.
On the way back, an Athenian-or at least he sounded like one in his loud Attic-ran up to her in the darkness and grabbed the tail of Xiphos. The pony kicked hard. Neto waved her blade in the air. She glanced back at the robber in the dirt, a boy, with two or maybe three more friends, out for easy steals in this blur between peace and war. During the trip back there were small parties of Spartans to watch for, trailing the army that by now was well past the Megarid. She remembered the warnings of her master, Melon, who had told her everyone has a choice in this life-a way to either live in fear or to give fear to others. So don’t be a slave to your terrors, Neto spoke to herself. Let those robbers worry what Megale Neto, the Amazon warrior, will do to them with this sharp knife, not what they might do to me. At that she pulled out her blade and pointed it ahead as she rode.
She went faster on her way north, and by midmorning Neto could see the farm’s tower in the distance on the slopes of Helikon. The Dog Star sun was warming up. She wanted to get Lophis inside the cool air of the bottom floor of the farmhouse where the water from Helikon was piped in, and she knew Melon would be waiting. Then she heard loud voices far in the distance, but thought at first it was only the Athenian robbers, accosting some fool without a horse and knife. It was nothing but sounds on the wind, as a hard breeze came up from south of the Isthmos.
She yelled out anyway in the direction of the noise: “I am Neto of Helikon. Make way-or die.”
PART TWO
Between Peace and War
CHAPTER 12
Off in the distance a world away, far to the south in Messenia, maybe a thousand stadia away from Neto on Helikon, at this very moment hawk-eyed Nikon of the helots, would-be leader of the revolt, stared out fixed on the late summer moon. His helot rangers had backed off from their leader and let him scream in his drink on his rocky perch, as he did on occasion when they walked on the high mountain trails of Ithome far above Messenia below. This Nikon was a tanner and smelled of hides and lye, and he was unlettered. Yet he knew knife work and had led the fiercest of the helot rebels. Let the Messenian leaders parley with Lichas for a quarter, a half of Messenia. But he would free it all, and kill every Spartan caught on the wrong side of Taygetos. Now he was perched on a cleft on Mt. Ithome in the land of the Messenians, and he kept repeating to the stars under the moonlight, “I am Nikon of Messenia. Make way for me-or die.”
This same night Nikon was on his second bag of sweet wine, and calling out to anyone under the same sky of Hellas. Did the men of Boiotia care that the heilotai were whipped and killed and in the best of their moments pelted with rotten fruit, poked and lashed by the drunk Spartans at dinner in the syssitia? Did they know the Spartan overlords sang of “Messene good to plow, good to plant” as if Ithome were theirs, as if helots were but ants of their soil? Nikon may have been the rabble-rouser of the helot rebels here on the upland. But the wine and the starry night on Mt. Ithome had put him into a trance, as if his saviors in Boiotia, half the length of Hellas away in the north, might hear him-but only if he called out loud enough to their shared sky. He had heard voices of prophecy, of Epaminondas and Melon, of great armies to come, and of the Messenian woman to the north, Neto of Helikon, who was promising a great reckoning this coming winter or next. Or so he told himself that there were real sounds and talk in his head, and not just gibberish brought on by two pouches of unmixed wine. He had no runners to send north for news, no money to visit the oracles at Delphi and Olympia for the gods’ plans. So the illiterate Nikon yelled to the stars in hopes that an oracle, a priestess maybe in Boiotia far to the north might hear him.
“Who said who was to be free and slave? What god did this thing? The Spartans? Is their Lichas an all-powerful Zeus Soter? Why for three hundred and fifty harvests have the Messenians been the asses of the men of Sparta, while all the rest of Hellas has been free?” But Nikon was talking only to himself. Only his henchman Helos, who knew how to write the block letters and put his master’s thoughts onto scrolls, followed him on the high path on the cliffs of Ithome. Loyal Helos had his own bladder bag, but one of icy spring water; and the good partner tried to get Nikon to drink and dilute the raging heat in his head. It was also Helos, the finest scribe in the west of the Peloponnesos, who saw that the illiterate Nikon alone of the rebel bands knew the mind of the Spartan, how to ambush him, how to goad the helots into killing their landlords.