He let out an eerie high-pitched laugh, even as more Spartans drifted back from their campfires to hear him. The growing throng was calling out Lichas as loudly as they had been quiet listening to their stuttering king. The more he swaggered and talked, the more the men in their long capes cheered Lichas. Behind such a Spartan, they felt safe. They could boast they were no worse men than those Spartans of old who had followed King Leonidas against the Persians. If there were dike still in the vale of Lakonia, any justice at all, this man Lichas, without birthright of a king, long ago rightly would have been their king. Or so they mumbled in admiration at the four tall men on the wagon.
Let the Boiotians talk of the faker god Pythagoras, who preached that all men were equal to the worm or sparrow. Let them shout for Epaminondas and the new fantasy cities to rise in the Peloponnesos. Let them do all that and more. The Spartans had Lichas, Lichas of the old gods and the ways of the south, and that would be proved more than enough tomorrow.
But even now Lichas was not quite done. He then roused them with a final taunt, as he seemed to know all the Theban generals and why they had begged Melon to come down from Helikon. “So who of us kills the counterfeit Epaminondas? Who then kills the other general Pelopidas and with them their Theban plague of demokratia? Who sends this Thespian would-be savior, the broken-down farmer Melon who, the hag priestesses say, will kill us all, if he dares to show up-the so-called apple of women’s fables that kills our king. Who sends him to the houses of the dead?”
“Who? Who?”
“Ego Lichas. Ego. Not your Kleonymos. No, not my Antikrates. Not even sneaky Sphodrias here. No, I say it will be your Lichas. I am your Leonidas at Thermopylai reborn. The gods say no free man born of a free woman can kill me. Not tomorrow, not ever. You bet on others. I wager on Lichas-on myself. Sparta is as it was always before. We take the power we need and let others worry whether it’s fair. For all we care, these pigs are no better than Persians, and they will die as badly as well.” Then Lichas lumbered down. The other three followed him with a shout. The leaders of the lochoi rushed up to the wagon, pushing and shoving the crowd ahead to touch the old man. They wanted their Lichas as king-Lichas their man of hard oak, by his speech and zeal capturing the hearts of thousands that the green-stick king Kleombrotos had lost despite his birth.
As Lichas finished, back across the plain in the Thespian camp high across the creek bed, Melon and his slave Chion were almost finished digging their armor from the wagon, cursing at the frayed straps and patched clasps since they had not put the full bronze of Malgis on in more than seven summers-since the last spear crossing near Tegyra beneath Mt. Ptoon. Finally at late dusk the two began to make their way slowly toward Epaminondas. His tent was in the gully below.
Gorgos was left back alone with the ox. The helot slave was sitting on the ground against a wagon wheel, happy enough to be alive with Chion gone. In vain, he once more strained for even more Doric sounds from his godly poet Tyrtaios, as those sweet melodies wafted in from the Spartan campfires across the gully. The music of old brought dreams of his son Nabis, the beardless boy he had left as an orphan long ago in smoky Lakonia, when Malgis had captured him up here in pig land.
Gorgos had been more than a helot in the south. He had risen to leader of the helots in Messenia, renamed by his masters Kuniskos, or so he claimed to the slaves on Melon’s farm. In his youth he was freed by the house of Lichas for his battle courage and had once become known even as Lord Kuniskos-Lichas’s fixer, the eyes and ears of the Spartan ephor and hero. Gorgos now dreamed that after the victory of Lichas at Leuktra perhaps he would return to Lakonia and be known this time as Kuniskos the Terrible-no longer Gorgos the snake man. Once the two, side-by-side, had spear-charged the Thebans at the great battle at the Nemea River-only to have Gorgos fall stunned, brought down and dragged out by Malgis the Thespian, bound with a rope on his way to servitude on Helikon, land of the pigs. Gone forever from his beloved master Lichas. Now he was old and had ended up as no more than Gorgos the dung spreader, who for twenty and three winters had emptied the slop jars in the vineyard of Malgis.
With Chion gone, Gorgos was soon napping at the wagon amid the flies of Aias. As he dozed, he chuckled out loud, as he went deeply back into the old dreams of his highland hideout, on his beloved mountain of Spartan Taygetos, far to the south in the Peloponnesos, where he was once more Kuniskos meting out justice for his lost son Nabis. Now he was cooking in his own hut, and laughing in his slumber that Neto, and Chion, and Melon had just walked into his house, his own house, where his dinner, quite a meal, was ready for them all. There on Taygetos, the slaves were masters, and masters were slaves-though not in the way that his fellow dreamer Melon had thought.
CHAPTER 3
Melon was trying to pick up the soft sounds from the playing of Kopaic reeds as he and Chion neared the main tents of the Theban generals of Leuktra. The two were let inside by a few leather-clad sentries with felt caps, stoking the evening fires of Epaminondas.
At last here was the great Epaminondas. Their general, who would lead all the Boiotians tomorrow, did not look like much. Was this short fellow really the god who claimed he could chase a myriad of Spartans back home and turn Hellas into a single polis?
Epaminondas seemed to Melon dark and wiry, with shoulders almost too broad for his small frame. His beard was flecked with gray. Most of the head was without hair. But it was hard to tell since his scalp was leathery and dark from the wind and sun. Eyes, nose, mouth-they were all dark too, and blended in with beard and crusty face. He was neither old nor young, neither fair nor entirely foul-just burned and wrinkled. He was covered in something that looked more like hide or bark than real skin. No wonder, Melon thought, folk like this talk of freedom, and deathless souls and all the other code of the wild Pythagoras. Most ugly sorts on the wrong side of four decades usually do babble of god and the good they will do as their end nears-like the great rationalist Perikles himself, who wore an amulet around his neck and invited in the witches to chant in hopes that they might abate the boils and fevers from the great plague that ate his body away each hour.
The gear of this Iron Gut-sideroun splangchon, his hoplites called Epaminondas-was cheap bronze, as dull as the panoply of Antikrates shone in the campfires across the way. The breastplate was cracked and dented. Cheap bronze patches were badly hammered on everywhere. Epaminondas wore no greaves. But he should have. His lower legs were scarred from ugly wounds. A tattered green cloak blew up over his shoulders. Melon’s eye fixed on his bare right spear arm. It was nearly as wide as Chion’s. A long scar went from his shoulder to his elbow. A worse oule had reached his neck, right above the edge of his breastplate.
Melon looked for a general’s horsehair crest, a leader’s scarlet cloak, surely a gold sash of the usual Theban strategos. There was none-just an old round-topped Boiotian helmet and a cracked wooden shield without worn blazon. All those cuts and scars and he had still ended up a bald man with no money about to die fighting the Spartans. He was no peacock general. Or maybe one so marked by Ares that he more often suffered than gave blows in the mix-up. Whatever he believed in, he had believed in for a long time-and had fought for it, too. The nondescript, the poor and needy looking, these are far more dangerous revolutionaries than those with gold clasps and purple cloaks. Melon knew that, but he also sighed to Chion at his side, “Poor ugly Theban. He’s a walking wound. They must call him ho traumatias. And he is to lead us tomorrow?”