The women nodded, smiling that the silver of Alkidamas had bought them safety, or at least time to round up the helots for the trek into Messenia. So they left Lykomedes. Neto and Erinna covered their noses. It was the black pond, where open ditches dumped the public toilets and the butchers threw in the carcasses of their sheep and goats, among them an occasional corpse of a hanged thief. By early evening the two women had returned to the straw of the public stalls, and they talked late into the night about how to scour the city to find the Messenians. But before dawn they woke to an image at the doors. A tiny man in a rough cloak of wool riled the horses. Then he burst into the barn. Neither had time to reach for a blade. Neto grabbed her cloak and covered up. Erinna jumped out of the straw and faced the intruder naked, ready to jump at his throat. Both then heard a husky voice in thick Doric yell “lykos,” and without warning Neto answered in turn “lykos.”
“Calm down and get your cloak on, woman. Your Alkidamas sent me. So Neto here knows our password “wolf.’ ” Then the shadow man hesitated and stepped into the torchlight. “We are to take you to Ithome, Neto. We leave this morning. Pack. We have twelve from free Messenia here. Another eight helots will join us on the trail. We march due west, with the warm sun at our back. I say I am Nikon. But you knew that from your night dreams long ago.”
“We do know you, Nikon-from our dreams.” Neto nodded to Erinna. “I heard you from the hill in far-off Messenia calling me. I even hear you on your cliff in my sleep. I don’t believe you’re the killer they say you are. I learned that in my visions.”
Erinna glared at him and scoffed, once her hawk eyes saw a small band at the barn door. “This is your army of freedom, Neto? I mean you no ill will, helot Nikon. But I had heard your band is the fiercest of the rebels, and yet I see just a handful of men in rags and with the smell of cow hide and pig fat. And when we two women are taller than any of your army, well … well. I worry that the Spartans will not worry.” She kicked the straw and pulled her cloak over her head and finally picked up her bow.
Nikon frowned. “No tall Spartan helmet crests here to scare you women. No tricking your eye with our false height. We’re not Spartans. But laugh at us, and then see if we can’t hit a cow’s eye at thirty steps with the javelin, or follow that throw with the knife to split the shaft. Ask Antikrates. Ask even black Kuniskos just how many hoplites of Sparta they have found rotting in the passes from Ithome. Ask him why they all stay barricaded in Ithome, and why he fears us.”
Erinna put down her bow. Good. This Nikon was a bit mad himself-and armed, and might show her why his name brought terror even to the kryptes, the helot killers, of Kuniskos. The growing light showed that at second look these helots seemed a tough lot, with blades and worn quivers, and cornel javelins as well. Most had a savage look about them. Some of the men were pointing at the big breasts of the poet herself and beginning to smile.
Erinna laughed as she took two steps back. “We will go safer for your company-at least until we can see the peak of Ithome.”
Nikon turned and pointed his sword at Erinna. “Our trip is for us, woman, to decide-since we hear only a trace of bad Doric in your talk. Neto we know of. She knew the password. But as for you, Amazon, only Alkidamas pledges his word. Where is he now? We watch-so you don’t earn silver from a Spartan krypt, or any other helot hunter. Don’t bristle; plenty of Messenians have done just that. Kuniskos was once a helot, we hear. We have been killing Spartans, lots of them, while you sing of our fights from a distance. Our fifty have become five hundred. And then again five thousand. Soon ten times that.”
Nikon, as the light confirmed, was a dark sort, with an eye that gave off bad intent to anyone it caught. Still, once he started, it was hard to quiet him down. He was a runner as well as a cutthroat, who flitted about Taygetos with messages for plotters and firebrands. Nikon went always with this short fellow Helos, who carried a long scroll and wrote down orders and messages, one of the few of the helots who could write the block letters and yet believed his illiterate master was far smarter than any of the bastard helot leaders who in private boasted of red-caped fathers. Nikon wore no helot leather, no fur cap. But he had a black wool cape on his shoulders-and a looted Spartan breastplate beneath.
In silence Nikon and his helots at last set out of the main road from Mantineia with the two women. As they neared the western gate of the city, Neto was already staring at the cut square stones and bull-nose-edged corners of the foundations, and at a new course of rectangular stones that had been freshly laid. They were just like those at new Thespiai-and what she had seen at Plataia. So the proud aristocrat Proxenos had not heeded her warnings but had long been down in Arkadia supervising the finishing of the ramparts, even after her visions at the generals’ tent before Leuktra. The scent of the stone-man Proxenos was already spreading all over the Peloponnesos, as if he had stamped a beta for the Boiotians on every wall that rose. Without Proxenos, Neto reminded her travelers, there would be no freedom here in the south.
In another day on the trail westward, Nikon’s band passed through the stones of the sprawling Megalopolis farther down the Arkadian road, heading south over the low mountains to ford the Alpheios. They refreshed at Lykosoura. Then they all went up the side of Lykaion to the cave of Pan for the night. Soon Neto could see the dark, gloomy shape of Ithome, the mountain of myth, home to the gods of Messenia. At dusk on the fourth day from Mantineia they crossed into Messenia toward Andania, with a larger throng of armed helots of Nikon’s band-maybe a hundred now, the first invaders of the great war to come. “Look at it, Erinna. Black Ithome at last, home to Aristomenes of legend, the great refuge of the helots. The mountain rises as the beacon to all Messenians, of all helots for a thousand stadia in every direction.” Neto had not noticed the bands of helot rangers who had been shadowing them from the woods.
These new companies of Messenians were wearing Spartan breastplates and carrying heavy willow hoplite shields with double grips. The helots had come to welcome the newcomers and escort them to the ruins of Thouria. They had often trailed the Spartan kryptes to harvest the stragglers and strip their panoplies up on the higher passes. The Eleans had sent breastplates and shields as well, so this was no ochlos but a well-outfitted phalanx of hoplites. Finally Erinna, as she neared the slopes, found her voice and began chanting her own new poem of her Epaminondas. She had added a new line about this second great city, holy Megalopolis that they left behind as they headed farther west stilclass="underline" “By the arms of Thebes, Megalopolis was girded with walls.”
Neto asked, “Sing of Messene, my Erinna. It is past time to look for the third, the greatest, the tallest of all the fetters of Sparta to rise.”
Erinna smiled. “Not yet; not until the city of our helots is free.”
PART THREE
The March Down Country
CHAPTER 22
With the vote to go south before the new year, and the breakup of the Theban winter assembly, Melon made his way through the noise and elbows to a small shrine on the Theban Kadmeia. Still in the high city he stopped by two laurel trees that grew out of a stone outcropping, a viewing place with benches and a fountain. For the first time as he gazed below he understood just how many thousands of winter fighters were camped outside the walls of Thebes. A myriad? Or were there two and more ten-thousands?