“Come over here, Melon. I want you to join your father and son, so you can all boast in Hades that Lichas sent you there.” Lichas talked more than a Spartan should, talked more than he ever had, as he shifted his weight from foot to foot to find the right moment to stab. “If you throw down your weapons, I promise a good enough burial. Antikrates over there, my best son, took out that fool of yours who built walls. What was his name, boy? Yes, yes, the soft Plataian rich man Proxenos? The grand thinker whose belly you cut open when that mob of northerners stormed our tower.”
There was to be no parley with Lichas. He meant to cut them all down and wanted them to know it before they fell. No quarter. Elektra started her ululation. Still Melon called out, “If you have an ax, swing, Spartan woman, don’t talk.”
Lichas had a final word. “You have it wrong, all of you. God has made every man a slave. Only a man, if he’s worth anything, makes himself free.” Lichas wanted to get closer, to cut with the sword and taste the blood flying in the air as it dotted his face. Kuniskos pulled from the rafters a cleaver and backed aside to let his friend charge through. The blade had been hidden above the table right near his head. He had taken the idea of hiding it from the dead Erinna. He had hoped to place it at the throat of Neto and drag her outside for some final sport-or to strangle her slowly and give her his death whisper.
At the back of the cottage, facing his father on the far side, Antikrates pointed his spear with the underhand grip. He and his two henchmen had been hiding in the cave when Melon arrived and had quietly sneaked out to block the rear door once the visitors were inside. Lichas, Elektra, and his retainer had come around through the forest path to plug the main entrance.
“That damn Scorpas and his phantom goat-man-and without a helot patrol to be found,” Nikon cried. “We are surrounded, with nowhere to go.” Then Melissos pointed toward Lichas. “Spartans fight in the sun. Let us out. Duel in the open air. Kill or die face-to-face like men should.” Melissos could have run, having no part in war against the tall Spartans. But no words of retreat or surrender came out. Instead, he decided to stand his ground, blade in hand, here with Melon, Ainias, Neto, and Nikon-and for something more than the love of gore or a Spartan scalp.
CHAPTER 34
No way out, Melissos knew. Still, if the henchmen of Lichas thought to kill a royal of Makedon, a son no less of Amyntas, then they would at least learn it was no easy thing. Melon covered Melissos to keep the youth safe until the last. The five Spartan men wore full armor. The near-naked Kuniskos was more than a match for the staff of slow-foot Neto. Elektra would have to fight him for her head, or, better yet, let her Thibrachos have first claim on her.
Lichas paused at the Makedonian boy’s plea and scoffed, “Leave, foreigner. You are nothing to me. We kill the rest as they are, and burn them up. You go down the mountain and tell all of the funeral smoke you saw.” Melissos stayed quiet and right by his master Melon, no longer the hostage but the loyal man of the Malgidai, as much a Boiotian as any in Thebes.
The long talk ended and finally Lichas raised his slashing blade of black iron, to cut down this Makedonian upstart first. “You, you …” Then came a loud crash, as if the rafters had been ripped off the house. Lichas was cut off before “humeis” fully left his lips. The Spartan tottered, blood spurted out his nose. Then only for a moment he let out a wild shriek as he vomited more blood. His helmet flew off his head as he fell face first to the stone floor, with a long spear stuck firm into the base of his skull, cast from twenty paces outside the door. Just like that, Lichas, of forty years in the first rank, killer of a hundred and more-he just fell over, a man, not a god, after all.
The spear throw had come from outside the threshold. Was Ares or Apollo in his armor roaming Taygetos? No mortal with mere blood in his veins could fell such a peer with a single throw, surely not tall Lichas, whom the prophets said was sacrosanct and immune from the blades of free men. There he lay in a growing pool of red, on the ground gurgling and twitching about, a spear point gone almost out through his mouth. A moment later his killer was at the threshold and leapt over the fallen Lichas. The Spartans were frozen in place, stunned as the stranger burst upon them. Then he stabbed the retainer of Lichas, tall Lakrates. That Spartan too toppled over. The sword stroke hit well above the shoulders and came out through the upper throat. Was the house under attack by Pelopidas and the Sacred Band?
No. A sole figure had come through the front doorway and stood over the two bodies. He was deliberate in his sword and spear work, and now almost motionless as he looked about. A wild dog barked behind him. The stranger still paused and then finally stomped on the corpses and let out a piercing war cry as he at last turned toward Elektra. He picked her up by the back of the neck with his good right arm, and then swung her head against the hut wall-three, four, and five times before she quit her pleas. “Lichas! Help, Lichas. My Lichas!” So ended the granddaughter of Agesilaos. She had come to kill the leashed Neto and earn five hundred silver owls from the strongbox of Phryne-and yet never got in a single swing of her grandfather’s black ax. Chion of Taygetos finally stopped slamming Elektra into the mud brick, as he looked up at the three Spartans at the other end of the cabin turning to flee. Should he first deal with Kuniskos, and then go after the other assassins? He yelled to Nikon to the side as he threw down the pulp of Elektra and carefully stepped ahead. “Kill Gorgos. Kill him now-and I’ll get the others.” As he stopped, Chion punched Gorgos in the gut and sent him stumbling backward.
So broke in Chion of the good right arm, long thought dead here in the south in the tumult of liberation, always on the scent of his Neto whom at last he found to be alive in the remote hut of Gorgos. He for weeks had followed Gorgos’s trail on Taygetos, waiting for this moment to finish what he had promised. Now Chion lumbered on through the room, half-crouching to avoid jabs to come if the three Spartans ahead should choose to turn back and fight. The wolf-dog followed to guard his Neto. Melon immediately turned to take on the Spartans at the rear door and kept himself between their spears and Neto.
Behind Chion in the din, Kuniskos stood up again, still off balance from the blow to his midriff. “Get the slave one-arm. Where is my Lichas? Lichas. Lichas. Lich-.” He too was cut off. Nikon and Melissos in near unison slammed their blades-wide choppers that were hard to poke with, but made a larger hole if they got through flesh-into Kuniskos’s lower gut. The man had been made dizzy by Chion’s blow, and his head was still crackling with fire, when he had turned to his left to warn the Spartans on the other side and fell to the floor cursing them. Nikon was then atop the dying helot even as he tumbled to the dirt. He plunged his knife five more times into the back of Gorgos to keep him silent. At the same time Neto, weak, lame, and dizzy still, took up her stick with both hands and clubbed the bald head. Melissos jumped on him as well. He had no beard, but he had once learned in Makedon to kill with a careful jab to the big neck vein, and his thin arm was as strong as any ephebe’s in Boiotia.