Neto wept. Where was Alkidamas? Why had he let Chion go on from the coast? Then she sighed that it was hard to save a man who had begun living to die, rather than dying to live. Then Neto-always the good bearer of corpses-leaned with her side on the horse to lay her arm on the wrapped Chion and secure his corpse, her Chion, bought slave of the Malgidai-free citizen of Thespiai, hero of Boiotia, and the great nemesis of the Spartans.
CHAPTER 35
There were more guards on the streets when the five reached the torches of the new city. They brought in Chion to the houses of the dead, put him on a table, and then went to sleep in the tent by the Arkadian Gate. Melon kept his distance from this Nikon, and wondered once more whether his city was the calm or nightmare of his nightly dreams on Helikon. The helot in turn was babbling about more bad helots to hang. Epaminondas turned. “Quiet, Nikon, we have a better dead man than all your men alive. We mourn Chion as he burns. At least torch those you hang. Don’t leave them for the dogs. We are better than the men of Sparta. Kill the looters if you must. Hang the traitors. Hunt down the Spartans left, though I wager there are no more than a handful alive and none on Taygetos. But do it on the vote of your demos. Burn them outside the gates and let their womenfolk collect the ashes.”
In the days after the deaths of Lichas and Gorgos up on Taygetos, Melon and Ainias said little. They kept busy on a hero shrine outside the Arkadian Gate where their hired Messenians had erected two gray limestone lions. Proud heads roared in stone over the ashes of Proxenos and Chion. Each sat on his haunches and seemed to be bellowing out to the southeast, “The end of Sparta.” Ainias took up the chisel himself, and wondered again as he cut the stone what had driven two northerners to come so far south to die for those who had never known them. When he was done, something of the faces of Proxenos and Chion stared out from the lions’ manes and whiskers. For a bit he was angry again for the end of his friend, the death of Chion and the laming of Neto, angry at the once-grand idea to free the Messenians, and so he could not keep quiet even among the helots around him. “Look at us, Melon. Making stone beasts roar like our Chion and Proxenos. Look at what they died for-a city of crooked towers, of thieves, of looters and worse. Proxenos planned their city and we cannot even give him credit, so we lie about some faker Aristomenes who envisioned it so that these child helots won’t have hurt feelings that they could not even plan their own city. Now look at them, drunk on the freedom we gave, all in need of the Spartan lash. Killing each other when they can’t find Spartans. Next they’ll turn on us, their liberators. I helped do this. No polis here at all-there never will be. Why, most city-states wouldn’t even let that thug Nikon in the city gate. Here he is an archon. I would burn him up before I would Lichas.”
Melon ignored the rantings from the dirty and unkempt Ainias. He smelled of wine and sweat and wore the blood of Proxenos on his cloak like the victor does the laurel, and went from the middle way to unhinged in a blink-and would yet return to his senses soon enough. Melon the farmer saw something quite different from Ainias. With new eyes he began to perceive a stirring amid the mess, and larger walls than either at Megalopolis or Mantineia. For the farmer who brings the wheat field out of thistle and bramble, his eye is always not on the natural chaos, but on what order can emerge from it. Amid the gallows, and the sewers, and the corpses, he saw majestic stone temples, and houses-and the skeleton of a great polis to come, one that grew flesh each day. And the clouds above it all, this day they seemed now to be as faces, yes faces of Chion and Proxenos both, as if they had become Olympians who smiled down on their subjects.
His mind took in Messenians torching the corpses of the executed and arguing to stop the killing, and young men racing in the half-built stadium, throwing the discus and hitting targets with their javelins, in preparation for the great games of the founding of holy Messene. “Freedom is not so clean. The Athenians have had their democracy maybe a hundred and a half-hundred years, they say. It still is, well, you know, chaos, Ainias; these Athenians who started wars each season and killed Sokrates and slit the throats of the Melians, and all the rest. And us? Has it even been ten years since Pelopidas and his gang dressed up as women and assassinated our oligarchs in their drinking parties? So we are to demand of these helots perfection, our beautiful virgin Demokratia, all in Parian white, without a blemish or chisel mark on her bosom?”
In their grief the two hoplites were largely left alone by Epaminondas, who had mustered the army only then to camp it three times and more, reluctant to leave Messenia and face his trial at home. The general instead walked all night, paced the ramparts of the nearly finished walls of Messene, wondering whether his victory would draw out Agesilaos-and whether he should head back east over Taygetos for the summer to attack the lame king.
Pelopidas laughed at his fantasies. “You’ll be lucky, Theban, to get this army home as it is. One hundred and twenty days and more I reckon our men have slept outside and fought the Spartan. Half are sick from the cold. The rest vomit from the bad water. They feel the foul air and the fever it brings. If we don’t leave soon before the summer, they’ll hate the helots more than the Spartans-if they avoid the fevers of these lowlands by the coast.” Pelopidas then pointed to the Boiotians in the camps below the finished ramparts. “They need do no more. You promised a march home thirty days ago. Not even Zeus with his thunder on Taygetos could get them to go back east. They will not go back into the lair of Agesilaos. No, they are tiring of founding cities for ingrates.”
“If you want your Messenians to enforce their laws and finish their walls, then it is time for us to dry up the teat and wean these infants who have grown teeth aplenty. The spring star Arktouros has long ago arisen with our month of Agrionios and winter is past. Even Epiteles knew that and took his Argives home last month-and no less on the advice of Lelex and Nikon, who want their polis to be their own. Do you like your uncle sleeping in your tower bedroom a hundred days after his promise of a short visit?”
Neto had drifted back to the empty schoolhouse of Erinna far above the city, and was said to have gone quiet in the night as the vapors of the goddess had set the other virgin priestesses afire. She could tend the outer sanctuary, and plant her garden, but was not allowed into the temple proper or precinct, not after her stay with Kuniskos. She wished to avoid Melon, ashamed that he would spurn her, for she was soiled and ugly and she walked slower than did her master. She instead talked to Erinna in her sleep, but out of make-believe since the visions of what was to come were gone. Even Doreios, who before her capture had claimed he would make her his own, let her alone now, since he saw that she drew men’s eye for her scars rather than her beauty. The more he had once talked of yoking his Neto, the less he saw of her, for her deer legs were a faint memory and her gait was not a pretty thing to watch.
Neto at last had her free Messenia, but the deaths of Chion, Proxenos, and Lophis, and the looming date of departure of the northerners, Melon especially, bore hard on her-as did the truth that her dream talk to Nikon had almost gotten them all killed on Taygetos. That lamentation turned Neto away from the world of reasoned men and for a time back to the gods of Olympos who alone, it seemed, a day or two each month spoke to her. If a year earlier she had turned all the heads in the agora at Thespiai, now few in Messenia gave her a look, and then only to gaze at her slumped walk and her scarred cheek. Her leg had healed with a bad bow and she favored it like the old women in black shawls with the hump-backs and staffs.