Gorgos thought he could almost see that death walk of his noble red-caped killers. Oh how he wished he were with them and not here with the soon to be losers at his side. Sparta was always short of men, and here he was untapped, unused, a Boiotian slave no less. The helot even began tapping his foot, even in the back of Melon’s wagon, alongside the dozing master. Who cared, since they would all die anyway in a few hours. Boiotians always fall when they meet the better men of Sparta. So it did not matter that an old helot in Boiotia sang the songs of the enemy or woke up his sleeping master.
Then a hard slap. Gorgos almost fell off to the road. The song ended. The other slave, the driver Chion-“Snowy” most thought chion meant-had let loose of the reins, turned, and given Gorgos his backhand. He slapped Gorgos for no more than his bad verses, or so it at least seemed. Chion stayed silent, even as he stood tall again, always a head higher than any around him, now driving amid the rising dust. He was the young one, Gorgos the far older slave. In his years of his pout and isolation, their master Melon had let both of his two farm slaves run almost wild. They managed the vineyards on Mt. Helikon more than did their master. Now with this new notion of Epaminondas and talk of freeing of the helot serfs to the south, not much longer could a liberator own other Hellenes anyway.
Melon himself woke yet again to the sound of the slapping of Gorgos. In the back of the wagon, he had fought with his own visions. Maybe he should have long ago killed these two slaves, inasmuch as both were smarter and stronger-and far angrier-than their master, just as he thought he was to all others on Helikon. If Chion and Gorgos survived the battle, if they were freed, even in his dotage Gorgos would kill too many of the good, as if he were some whip of the Spartans; and Chion would kill too many of the bad, as if he thought he had the rights of some fury god. It was a dangerous thing to free slaves with good minds and longer memories. Who could guarantee that they would kill each other and so cancel themselves out, before the corpses of the guilty and innocent alike piled up?
War, Melon at least knew, is the great torch that brings such heat and light to everything and everyone. Nothing can hide from the god Polemos, not even the clever mind of Gorgos who now sang like a traitor. But then he saw Chion smiling; did the Spartans have any idea of how many of the red capes that one would kill? Melon went on and imagined that, like some high mountain bear, his Chion might take down all these southerners, drag them to the nearest oak, hang them up by their heels with their red tunics, and let the dogs and birds do the rest. Or so he remembered Chion mumbling, that and more stilclass="underline" that spearing was too good for them. Chion talked more like that because he was now close to the moment of battle, to being freed at last to make all things right, as he promised, for his master, for his slave Neto, for the good son of Melon, Lophis, for freeing slaves of the artificial laws of the polis that said some are free, others not.
The cart stopped. Gorgos unhitched a sweaty Aias. He roped and hobbled the ox to the tongue. The helot gave enough slack so that the beast could drink from the creek water. Cagey Gorgos had guided Chion well here. He laughed out loud, as he thought how clever he was to have known the spot in advance-maybe as a back escape path down the hill should the slave Chion turn feral and try to kill him right here? Or was it a way to get out the backside, should the Boiotians lose-or even win? About four stadia away on an opposite gentle rise, the three could make out through the haze where King Kleombrotos and his horde of Spartans had settled down for the night. The ditch and brush ramparts of the invading Spartans were already finished-and all done in just the two days since the king’s arrival in Boiotia. The outline of shadowy Mt. Kithairon loomed to the enemy’s rear.
Melon knew how to compute numbers. He had long ago measured borders when the farm squabbles broke out on the upper plots on Helikon. Now he saw there was a far larger army of invaders than there was in the new Boiotian tent town of Epaminondas below them. What had his son Lophis talked him into-and into what had Epaminondas talked the Boiotians? The old man turned to Chion. “I gauge at least ten thousand of them, maybe twelve or even fifteen thousand more Spartans over there, who need killing. Three to two, against Epaminondas, maybe closer to two to one. For all his fine talk of freeing the unfree, that is all that is left. Either they keep ravaging Boiotia or we stop them. You stop them only by knocking down the royal Spartan bunch on the right wing where they need killing the most. Only the spear arm stops them. Nothing else. They won’t parley, won’t surrender, won’t stop-until killed. No need to count them. They aren’t going anywhere. Why should they when they outnumber us?”
Chion paid him no heed. Melon could smell the campfires of the Spartans as they roasted their sacrificial goats for their early meal. He kept talking to himself. For stadia well beyond their ditch and camp wall, early evening fires were flickering everywhere on the hills opposite, on the other side of the gully in the growing twilight. The whole world tonight seemed Spartan. How were they to beat men like that, said to be better and known to be more numerous? King Kleombrotos, Melon said to himself, if he wins, he will be supping inside the seven gates of Thebes. By tomorrow at dusk we will all speak Doric on our way down into Hades as well.
The two slaves still ignored their babbling master and kept unpiling their gear.
CHAPTER 2
Across the way, the Spartans were working, not thinking-stacking brush as a wall on their backside. They had the dry streambed and now a ditch as rampart at their front. Unlike the Boiotian camps, there was order here in their huge circle-a taxis, a plan of marching hoplites in drill and to pipe music. On this night before the battle, the stewards on cue brought kettles of black barley soup and spits of roasted goat. Over there, Gorgos knew, stalked bald Lichas, son of Lichas, the best of the old Spartan breed. Lichas had fought the Athenians forty summers earlier. He knew enough of Epaminondas that if the fool had his way in making everyone equal who were not, then there would be no place for the better ones like Lichas himself in the new softer Hellas. Only Lichas and a few of his Spartan henchmen stood in the way between the old and better ways of the Hellenes and this polis-wrecker Epaminondas.
Now in confidence Lichas went from campfire to campfire rousing his men on. “Comb your hair who have it, men. Shave your upper lips clean. Look like the better men you are when we face these pigs. We are no different from the tall men who once broke the Persians at Plataia. Why, we could still sail into Athens, as our grandfathers did, and tear down its walls. So chant your Tyrtaios. Tomorrow, right at mealtime we eat on their acropolis, atop their Kadmeia. The Boiotian pigs? Why, they will soon sup in Hades. Listen to your king. Our Kleombrotos, king of Sparta, speaks at torchlight.”
His hulking son Antikrates followed. He was a giant of a man outfitted like a battling Ajax or Achilles depicted on the red clay pots from Athens. The panoply was all Spartan style, but heavier and thicker and better than most armor of the peers, his scarlet cloak a deeper hue and with a silver trim. Few others could carry the weight of such bronze. His willow shield was ten palms wide, as round as the best turned cartwheel, hewn from the copses on the low slopes of Taygetos. Bull leather padded the inside, and on the outside was hammered a tin lambda for Lakedaimon, the home of Sparta. His thick left forearm alone could hold it chest high. Two dented bronze greaves covered his shins with an olive oil sheen-and each with two intertwined serpent bosses, no less, hissing and biting as they wound around each other down to his feet. More oily leather sheets were stitched to the greaves’s insides. Antikrates wore the old-style chest plate, all cast and hammered bronze, with silver clasps joining the back sheet to the front. Small finger-length silver running stags with six-pointed horns were hammered about, all with eyes of gold, of intricate design, patches that covered the holes and cracks from twenty spear thrusts from Arkadians, Athenians, and Boiotians, fool hoplites all who died thinking they could reach the flesh of Antikrates through the bronze scales of his armor.