A rack of defiles impeded our passage; light troops ranged like locusts. The field stood choked with smoke and dust. Mounting a rise, we expected to see the central corps clashing. Instead the expanse sprawled vacant, populated only by scattered wounded of Mantinea and Argos. We peered right, seeking the Spartans in flight. There was nothing.
We spun left. Already half a mile gone could be seen the rear ranks of the Corps of Peers, Agis, the Knights, and the seven regiments. They were driving the Argives as dogs drive sheep.
What struck terror was the pitiless precision of the Spartan advance. Neither ravening nor keening as other armies in the rush of triumph, but in order, pressing steadily, relentlessly forward. As stalks of grain submit to the scythe, so did the allies fall before the Spartan advance. Their center was a half mile across, victorious along its entire length.
I heard a cry at my shoulder. A rider crumpled and pitched.
Sling bullets screamed past our ears. The foe's skirmishers, no longer in companies but a disordered host, rushed at us on the hinter ground. Our pack bolted; again my mount balked. Lion wheeled to my aid. We could see the mob of men and boys dashing upon us, while their bolts and missiles tore past with the sound of rending fabric.
We got to a ditch, but mounting the far wall, my mare tumbled.
I hit teeth-first with the beast spilling atop me. My brother had breasted the bank and spurred on. From the brink the foe poured stones and darts. To my astonishment the mare returned. She was a warhorse! I clawed onto her back, which was lacerated in more places than my own. But the sheer bank undid us. Three boys had got within the ditch; they were slingers and too close to fire; instead they rushed and backed, bawling profanities as they sought to hamstring the mare with their sickles and foul her legs with the straps of their slings. Rarely have I experienced such terror, looking into those urchin eyes mad for my blood. My brother thundered from nowhere to preserve me, he and our pack from the right of the field. The mare flew from the trench. “You're supposed to ride the horse, not the other way round!” Lion roared as we fled.
The far left was where our countrymen were, and the cavalry with Alcibiades. We must reach them, if only to die at their side.
But the ground as if sown with dragon's teeth birthed yet more skirmishers. We were sitting ducks, up high. Damn me if I ever climb on a horse again! Suddenly the main Spartan corps reversed and countermarched. One of those implausible moments of war now eventuated. The foe broke off pursuit of the Argives and Orneaeans and came about to assist its own routed countrymen of the left. This preserved us, the erstwhile horse of that quarter, from the slingers who ravened upon our track. Massed Spartan armor swept past, interdicting our pursuers. The Corps of Peers are of course all heavy infantry; on horseback we were out of their reach.
Past they surged, close enough to read the details on their unit guidons and see the men's eyes within their sockets of bronze.
On the left our Athenians had been routed too; the infantry had long fled, leaving the cavalry to range the overrun ground, defending the wounded as best they could. I saw Alcibiades' horse, dead in the dirt, and farther in a ditch his helmet.
It struck with the clarity of revelation that our nation could not survive his loss. Perhaps this distress was fatigue-spawned. Surely my bowels and belly had been void for hours. Strength had fled both arms from grappling all day with this wild beast, upon whose back the pounding had sapped the last from my hams and knees.
And yet, with that lucidity that comes at the end of one's strength, this fear for our commander seemed valid utterly.
I must find him. Must preserve him. Up and down the courses I drove my rank mare, whose name I never learned and never care to, seeking Alcibiades.
I could not find him. Only in camp, when descent of night had at last adjourned the struggle, did he emerge from the field, in infantryman's armor, which he had stripped apparently from a corpse midbattle and in which he had fought all day. He did not shed it now but ranged among the troops of Argos and the allies, the shield on his shoulder dark with blood and his eyes like snuffed tapers.
In defeat one learns who are friends to him, and by whom he is accounted friend. Past midnight Alcibiades' attendant summoned my brother and me to his tent. Only those most intimate were included-his cousin Euryptolemus, Mantitheus, Antiochus the pilot, Diotimus, Adeimantus, Thrasybulus, and a dozen others.
This was the singular honor of our lives, Lion's and mine, nor did either stand uncognizant of it.
It was a most dolorous caucus. What wisdom could be culled from calamity was carved like a dry goose and shared out absent appetite.
Defeat tolled the knell for our commander's alliance. Mantinea and Elis would be compelled again into the Spartan fold, as would Patrae, whose long walls would be torn down. Orchomenos could not be held; Epidauris and Sicyon would be squeezed tighter beneath the foe's screw. The Spartans would exile or execute the last democrats and take as hostages children of all suspect families.
At Argos the democracy would fall; it would only be a matter of time before she, too, toppled into the Spartan bag.
Alcibiades did not speak all evening, permitting Euryptolemus to articulate as his surrogate, as he often did, so in tune were the cousins with each other's cast of mind. Euro urged his kinsman to depart for Athens at dawn. Word of defeat would fly home; he must stand present to endure it with honor and to shore up those who had stood at his side.
Alcibiades would not leave. He must remain to take up the dead.
“The dam is down, cousin,” he accounted. “We will not hold the flood.”
None slept that night. Retrieval parties formed up before dawn.
Mules and asses, even cavalry mounts, had been rigged with the pole sleds called “baker's boards”; wagons of the commissariat had been recruited, augmented by sledges and litters; men carried cloaks and blankets upon which a body may be borne. The Spartans sent across their priests of Apollo to sanctify the field and formalize permission to us to take up our dead. They had already reclaimed their own.
At first light the Hymn to Demeter and Kore was sung; the parties moved out by tribes. Alcibiades wore dust sandals and a white chiton without emblem of rank. He was grave but not downcast. He took up the dead in silence, working beside soldiers' squires and even slaves.
Where the Tegeans and lesser Lacedaemonians had won their victory, the bodies of the allied slain had been stripped naked.
Armor and weapons were plundered; the foe had looted even the shoes.
Where the Corps of Peers had triumphed, however, no corpses had been violated. Each lay where he had fallen, intact of shield and armor. The Spartans had granted them honor to forbear this indignity. Many wept, my brother included, to behold such greatness of heart.
Midday found Alcibiades stopping with the party in which my brother and I labored. “Is it true, Pommo, that you dashed about the field at battle's close, seeking to preserve me?” A number had told him as much; this seemed to delight him enormously. “I did not know you loved me so.”
I advanced some jest that we of the infantry needed him; he knew how to pay. He did not laugh at this poor joke; rather glanced soberly, first to my brother, then me. “Of payment I know this, my friends-how to requite those whose hearts are true.”
Earlier in the forenoon, Lion and I were told later, Alcibiades had chanced to be at the extreme right of the field, that quarter where we had been when the Mantineans routed the Spartan Sciritae. He was speaking with several Mantinean officers when a captain of Spartan cavalry rode up and reined in.