No sooner had Erinna pointed out the shadow than the wolf circled at the edge of their camp. Suddenly the wild thing broke out of the dark, changed course, and ran, heading right toward their fire with teeth bared. Neto froze. She could not lift her knife in time. But then as the animal neared, she pointed to Erinna, “Put down the bow. Stop. Stop!”-just as the large dirty hound charged her at full run and jumped up to her bosom and knocked her flat.
“Porpax, Porpax. No wolf. No wolf. My Porpax, Porpax of Helikon.” Neto wrestled with her dog with the bared fangs. Neto laughed. “Living in the high caves on rabbits? Or on worse up on Kithairon? But you’re home with me, your Neto-and ready for our long march.” The dog was growling but at least put his head down, as Erinna kept her bow taut.
“He may well have been your dog. But who knows what sort of flesh this Kerberos has tasted? He’s changed to man-shape and back many times, I wager. We could cook a meal from the ticks and fleas on his raggedy fur. Neto, Neto-let this hound rejoin his new kind. He’s gone over to the other side, either a wolf or worse. Or let me put an arrow through his head and kill off the demons in his black heart.”
“Oh, no, he is my Porpax all right,” Neto laughed. “We will find no better guard than his long fangs.” She patted the monstrous hound. “You’ll see. He can smell Lichas ten stadia away and has Gorgos in his nose already.” The aged hound had hard sinews and plenty of scars on his legs and back-and a taste of the wild that put him on the edge between feral and tame. His wandering on Kithairon had suited him since he left Neto that night when she bore home Lophis. A year on the mountain had taken three off his frame. In his growling after the loss of Sturax, he killed a wolf, a young one with sharper fangs but half a head smaller. Then the farm dog took over the wolf brood that feasted on the goats of the highland shepherds. With his age and a near year in the pack, Porpax had lost his paunch and the jowls beneath his fangs.
Still, Porpax was not quite gone over to the way of the wolf. And in the morning this unlikely three-aged hound, helot virgin, and Amazon poetess-trotted along between the gulf and the Aegean. Erinna had planned to meet a few girls from Sikyon. Her friends were to hike them through the harbors of Lechaion on their right and Kenchreai to the left, all the way to sanctuary at Nemea. There the two would head due south to Argos-the same trail that Ainias and Proxenos would follow in the winter to come with their red stakes. As they all headed toward Akrokorinthos, Neto was spinning long tales to the mute hound. She went on about how often he must have tried to leave his wolves to reach Helikon, about how Zeus had once turned King Lykaion into a wolf and the guard dog Kerberos in Hades, and how Charon on the Styx would meet them all with his wolf ears.
Erinna put all her silliness to verse-“Netikon and her talking dog”-in her low singing. Then Neto announced, “Our dog is reborn and I name him Kerberos. Yes, he is guard dog of the underworld now. Our Porpax has become Kerberos of the three heads. If Gorgos can become Kuniskos, why cannot my Porpax be renamed Kerberos? When the two meet-and I am told at night in visions that they will-may the best dog win.”
Soon the two women and the new Kerberos met the friends of Erinna. Three of them approached in cloaks, carrying two more cloaks for Neto and Erinna, the women now all dressed out in deep green hoods, in the garb of pilgrims of the goddess Hera. The throng told strangers and the toll-men of Korinthos on the Nemea road that they were escorting the granddaughter of Chrysies, a new priestess for Hera at the sanctuary of the Argives near the sea. Most let the women be, once they saw Kerberos and feared the wrath of the goddess should her servants be touched. At the sanctuary of Zeus, the three guides left Neto and Erinna at the guesthouse in Nemea, with a map of the road carved into an ostrakon, leading south into the valley of the Argives and then west over Mt. Parthenion to the three poleis and the valley of Mantineia.
Neto reminded the innkeeper to be on watch for Proxenos the Plataian and a Stymphalian in the late autumn who would warn them all of a vast army to follow before the new year. The two set out southward over the pass into the Argolis, keeping the Heraion on their left and the aspis of the Argives on the right. They passed into the long walls and then beyond to the pyramid at Kenchreai, where they slept. “Keep away from Lerna and the Hydra,” the Argive guards at the garrison laughed. “The air is bad over there on the swamps and their monsters bring fever to all who get near.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” Erinna countered. “We believe in no tall stories of Herakles and his hydras and whatnot. We know that the sickness comes from bad air that hangs over the stagnant water there, not the bite of monsters in the night. Anyway we have no wish to head to the sea but instead to the high peaks of Parthenion, even with Pan and his Satyrs. The mountain protects virgins and there is no sickness on its heights. Even the hoofed god up there will leave us be. Once we reach the summit, then even we can’t get lost since Tripolis and the valley of the Mantineians soon will be in sight below.”
At the end of the fourth day from the shadows of Akrokorinthos, Erinna and Neto entered the walls of the new city of Mantineia, though there was as yet no gate and only a few makeshift timbers to bar the way. Neto had steered them far from misty Skope on their left, and whispered to Erinna to turn her head from the hill where in her visions told that one day too many good men of the north would perish in yet another battle. The towers of Lykomedes this summer were only half built and the channel of the new Ophis still dry. There was no word of Proxenos or Ainias, who had gone to Thespiai to finish the town’s walls and would not return south until the summer was spent. Still, the three were given a wide opening. None of the lords of Mantineia wished to test the fangs of the huge wolfhound on Neto’s leash.
On their fourth day in his city, the long-toothed Lykomedes, chief archon of Mantineia, finally gave them an audience, with a booming shout, “Alkidamas warned me of you two.” They now spoke with him near the Arkadian gate in a small stoa where his archers lowered their bows, despite the growls of Kerberos. He had it in his mind to kill both women-whether out of spite as their cold stares met his probing eyes or out of worry that the Spartans might win still and blame him for intriguing with the helots-despite the money Alkidamas had sent him for their safe passage. But first Lykomedes was curious to find out whether they knew anything about the number of men that might come with Epaminondas and his winter army. Such an army might make even more dangerous his own ongoing secret talks with King Agesilaos and the Spartans, a way to earn Lykomedes some silver and an escape should the Boiotians not come southward after all. Because Mantineia was close to Sparta and far from Thebes, Lykomedes was not quite ready to join Epaminondas unless he might show up at the city with thousands at his back. And even then it seemed a wiser course only to plunder Sparta to strengthen Mantineia, but not to go farther west in some mad pursuit of the freedom of the helots. Better for both Sparta and the helots to stay weak, since Lykomedes figured that after Epaminondas was dead or exiled, he would himself have to deal with those on both sides of Taygetos. So he now spoke to the women carefully.
“Alkidamas urged me to help you. But I can see that you are queer folk, both of you. Why, look, you carry men’s weapons, and have a man-dog with you and are looking for phantoms in some mythical city of Messene to come. Still, I give you leave of our polis to find your helots-for a day.”
Then the boar-tooth stuck his finger into Erinna’s breast. “But you are only to find the visiting helot Nikon-then leave. Stymphalian Ainias for all his promises may not come back here to new Mantineia. I believe our builder Proxenos will abandon us before the walls are finished. Neither has returned of late. So we want no charge brought on us by the Lakedaimonians that we are stirring up their runaway helots. Find your troublemaker Nikon before I do. Just follow your nose to that tanner. Then leave. Cleanse all the helots from the city. I do not trust your Alkidamas and all his wild talk of revolt and helots and a huge army from the north-not while my walls are half-done and our Proxenos is missing, and the Spartans on my borders are restless.”