“Take your staff to me, sir, if you wish, but hear the message I am ordered to impart.”
Anaxibius at last lowered his lumber. In that instant Lysander snatched forth his own blade and, striking upon the colonel's undefended right, fetched him such a blow, backhand, as to cleave his neck to the bone and in fact nearly decapitate him. Anaxibius dropped like a sack from a wagon; fluid gushed as from an overturned pail. Our four gaped as Strawberry spun the fallen form facedown on the stone and, plunging again and again into its back the bared steel of a nine-foot spear, inflicted such wounds as could only be read as the blows of cowards and assassins.
Weapons filled my mates' hands; our squad had formed up, backs to each other, certain that our own murders were next, at the hands of other concealed confederates of Lysander. No sound came, however. No squads materialized from shadow. If indeed there was a camp about, no stir arose from it.
“What a waste.”
Lysander broke the silence, indicating the corpse of his countryman. He spat blood. He had bitten his lip through, accidentally, as one does frequently in such exigencies. “He was a good officer.”
“For whose murder we four will be accounted.” This from Telamon, indicating himself and our party.
“Not by name,” was our employer's cool rejoinder.
Lysander knelt, examining what had been a man and was now meat.
One came by degrees to grasp his perfidy's object. The colonel's assassination would be passed off as the work of agents of Athens.
We who had been dupes need neither be named nor apprehended; the act alone would suffice to ignite outrage at Sparta. The home government would shuck its sloth and rise, in time to snatch Tegea from the brink.
“Will you murder us now, Captain?” Telamon inquired.
Lysander rose, pressing at his cut lip. He had, by his demeanor, never entertained such a notion.
“Men as yourselves, who stand apart from the fealty of statehood, are invaluable to me.”
He nodded to his squire, who accorded us our pay.
“Then we will require more than this,” spoke Telamon.
Our patron laughed. “I'm flat.”
“We'll have the horses, then.”
Lysander approved this.
Rabbit had crossed to the portico; he motioned all clear. My own blood, which had run chill for all this interval, now refound its course and heat. “Who slaughters his own, Captain,” I heard my voice address the Spartan, “scorns God as well as man.”
Lysander's eyes met mine, as steel-black as I recalled. “Take your man's portion, Polemidas, and leave heaven to me.”
XI
I would not have been at Mantinea save for my brother. He was at Orchomenos with Alcibiades and got a message to me.
The greatest battle in history is about to be fought. I shall try to hold it for you, if you hurry.
One must understand the topography of the Peloponnese to reckon the peril to the Spartan state had she failed to carry that day. From Mantinea the Argives and allies, had they been victorious, would have swept down the plain to Tegea, then south to Asea and Orestheum, from which the entire Eurotas valley lay open to the sword. Sparta's serfs would have risen, in numbers ten times their masters'. Slaughter by hoe and mattock would have confronted the lads and women of Sparta. Joined by whatever remained of the Corps of Peers, the defenders would have resisted to the last breath, perishing in a bloodbath unprecedented.
I arrived the morning of the battle, in the train with Telamon and our Messenians, so wretched with septic fever that I must be borne on a wagon with the infants, the pregnant camp wives, and the spare spears hafts.
I had never seen so many troops, and of such quality. Once as lads, Lion and I had larked after the runners in the torch race of the Panathenaea. From the statue of Love in the Academy where the competitors light their brands, we paced with them through the Sacred Gate, across the agora, past the Altar of the Twelve Gods, lapping the Acropolis to the Heracleum, every foot of which thronged with humanity. That was nothing beside Mantinea. The entire army of Argos stood to hand, led by their elite, the Thousand, along with the corps of Mantinea, regiment after regiment, the Cleonaeans and Orneaeans, the allies and hired troops of Arcadia, with a thousand heavy infantry of Athens, dispatched in “defensive posture,” so as not to poach upon the Peace. Further, it seemed, every jack of the Argolid who could hurl a dart or sling a stone had collected, making five and six light-armed for every heavy infantryman.
We crossed with our Messenians behind the marshaling troops.
I was sick and puking like a dog. I must arm, however, or never face my mates again. I was just commencing, abetted by Eunice, when Lion reined in above. He bore a courier's pennant and trailed a second mount, a mare which, he reported, had thrown her rider.
I must mount as a dispatch runner. Such office, at Alcibiades' orders, would not be left this day to pages but only officers.
Alcibiades was on-site not as a commander (he had failed of election this term to the Board of Generals at Athens), but only as an envoy. Such distinctions were academic, of course, as any post he held became the hub and marrow simply by his occupation of it.
Here was how the battle kicked off: There had been a false start three days prior, a full-dress advance aborted by Agis a stone's toss before contact. The Spartans had withdrawn south to Tegea. No one knew what they were up to. Attempting to flood the plain, the allies heard. The month was Boedromion; there wasn't a course strong as an old man's piss in either river. A day passed; then another. The allies took fright that Agis would pull something truly harebrained.
They came down off Mount Alesion, an impregnable position, into the throat of the plain, just north of the Pelagos wood. Word came that the Spartans were advancing from the south with every spit and jigger they could carry. That was when I arrived. The allies had formed up, two miles across, barring the plain.
Now a fresh rumor started: the Spartans had turned back. There would be no battle; our side would haul out too. The regiment above which my brother and I perched had marshaled beneath pear trees, the only crop left untorched by the Spartans because they were not ripe, and the troops from boredom had begun gnawing the stony culls. These made men crap like geese. By twos and threes troops fell from formation, ostensibly to heed nature's call but in truth to get a jump on packing for decampment.
Suddenly one saw dust.
Wisps ascended from the Pelagos wood a mile away. This appeared at first as the brush-burning in fall, when the olive grovers rake their piles beneath the canopy and light them off.
Now tendrils grew to vapors, and vapors to clouds. All stir ceased within our formation. The front of dust broadened; isolated risers conjoined. The tread of thirty thousand could not raise such a storm; the enemy must be twice that. Yet one saw neither a flash off a shield nor even a scout rider cantering in the fore. Just dust, ascending in thunderheads from the canopy of oak until the wood seemed to smoke from end to end.
Lion reined beside me; we must make to the commanders to receive orders. He began directing me to the swiftest track.
Suddenly, inexplicably, our troops began to advance.
You have witnessed such movements in hosts of men. Soldiers in massed formation often cannot hear even a legitimate signal, owing to various clamors of the field. The individual finds himself stepping off in response to the motion of others, knowing no more why he follows than a sheep or a goose. At any event the corps began to move. “Get to the fore.” My brother motioned me toward the plain. “Find out what the hell's going on!”