Proxenos paid him no heed. Instead he continued to limp in the direction of the Sacred Band. But now his head sagged and he felt a strange urge to fall asleep, armor and all. At some point failure became pleasure. Resistance to the creeping ice inside him meant only pain. He felt a funny kinship with thousands gone-with tens of thousands unseen-but less affinity with the hundreds he could make out at his side. Where to find his knot of strength? It had vanished out of his mouth, left him unstrung. Cold voices of the dead began to whisper in his ears. The warm talk of Neto was not among them to drive these furies out.
Proxenos, Ainias knew at last as he glanced at his friend, was doing the arithmetic of death. This starts when a man of the middle age begins to add up what he has done and what lies ahead-and sees that the climb up was far better than the trudge back down. He saw the Plataian gasping, breathing out steam that rose from his sagging helmet, and noticed there was blood at the corner of his lower lip and foam as well. For those who dare to do such summing up, even without a wound, the life force itself can sometimes vanish and leave nothing but empty flesh in its wake-a lyre fallen silent without a song or player. He wanted to throw Proxenos down and cleanse his wound, but he also wished for his friend to stand tall with his spear at the Eurotas rather than drift into sleep here on the march.
Proxenos sensed his wound was behind all this mad thinking, but its full malignancy was still not quite clear to either him or his friends. So the Plataian was unsure whether this sudden waning of his strength was not a failure of his own will. Had he any courage left, he could have been at the forefront with Epaminondas, despite the spear poke that Antikrates had given him. Chion and Melon had suffered worse wounds and yet were always at the van. Had he incurred a bad daimon? Perhaps there were Olympian gods, after all. Had his impious neglect of Zeus and Apollo on Parnassos and the earth-shaker Poseidon at the Isthmos in favor of the one deity of Pythagoras-had all that come back to haunt him in his final time of need? The gods, not Antikrates, had done all this to him?
Neto had no power against the deathless ones to change or honey-coat her pronouncement of the doom he would face after crossing the Isthmos. The Plataian, through strange voices along the river’s edge, was given a final gift of visions of things to come, majestic sights in hues of purple and soft yellow, all to the music of the pipes of Thisbe. Now pictures came to him of the finished Megalopolis, and of Epaminondas standing guard as the new gates of Messene rose, then leading the army back home in triumph across the Isthmos.
Yes, his eyes were full of color and his ears of flute music. Proxenos could hear the voices to come of the demogogues at the trial of Epaminondas back home, swaying the judges to kill the general as he sat in the dock on the Theban Kadmeia. Did Ainias not see this-their general dragged into the bema to be jeered before being hanged? Yes, there would be the bickering on their return; but then, as the envy and jealousy cooled, maybe also would come applause for the magnitude of the Theban achievement when fully grasped, no doubt only after they were all dead. He, Proxenos, the lord of a vast estate overlooking the Asopos, would have to stand in a Theban court while the rabble cobblers and tanners pelted him with fruit and jeered at his half-Attic speech and damned him for joining Epaminondas-only to be found guilty of designing the three greatest cities of Hellas and freeing the men of the Peloponnesos and making the Boiotians all safe.
Such is the way of men, Proxenos reckoned in these final moments, when given a great gift, to complain about the quality of the present or the motive of the giver or the circumstances of the largesse, all to lessen the need for gratitude and indebtedness-and fouler dependence. Proxenos in his delirium saw that there would be a need for more invasions to the south to come. Sparta was hard to break and helots were harder to free. Allies would switch and join the enemy if their deliverer became too powerful, or if he seemed too weak. He knew Lykomedes was already half with the Spartans, half with Epaminondas, unsure which side in the end would win and thus he should join. It is a human habit to relax in triumph and take the boot off the neck of the wounded foe who has not quite expired. Soon Epaminondas would have to lead out the army to finish what he could not quite this morning.
Would he, Proxenos, wish to spend the rest of his life trudging down here on the tail of Epaminondas, to end Sparta? Leave all that marching each summer to Melon and all the other zealots who had made the conversion to the cause of the helots. A Plataian, as Neto warned, had no business in the ice of Lakonia. All this was too much, this monotony, this predictability. Now no matter how Proxenos tried to keep in step with the hoplites, he could not fight off a new tightness that was rising into his chest and neck at the same rate it had crept down his thighs. Since he knew all that was ahead, why the need to put off what was foreordained?
Ainias gave up trying to stop Proxenos and so instead hit his breastplate again. “Wake, do not let the ghosts take you, man. Not now, not when we are to burn the wasps in their very nests.”
Proxenos, through his helmet that had fallen back down over his face, mumbled to Ainias, who heard him clearly-strangely so, as if the gods had stopped the river roar and muzzled the grunts of the hoplites and the clatter of their bronze, “Do you like Sophokles, Ainias?”
“This is no time for that, man. But if you must know-no. He was a pompous old man. But keep to the river, not the words of the dead poets.” Ainias thought that if he kept Proxenos talking, the Keres would stay away.
“Do you know his Aias, Ainias, his Philoktetes? I never cared to watch Oidipous or Antigone, especially to see us Boiotians on stage as eye-stabbers and woman-killers.”
“Yes, once, at the big theater in Korinthos. But Aias was a suicide. I never put much faith in his ‘Live nobly or nobly die,’ not when it was by his own hand.”
“But you do, Ainias! That is why you march with Melon and me-because so do we. All three of us are Aiases of sorts-here far from our homes, no friends of the Thebans or the Messenians, but merely for the idea of it all, the last breed of the Hellenes, with no expectation that we are to live through it. We live for a code that sets us apart, and now the toll comes due as it must. Why else would a Stymphalian, a man of Thespiai, and a Plataian all be near this accursed river in winter-for the helots?”
“It helps to hate the Spartans. Or have you forgotten that, my dear Pentheus who rages as he sees two suns and the sky in a swirl.”
Ainias stopped the mad Sophokles talk because he knew where it led-as if a Proxenos were an Aias without a future or a Philoktetes who with wound was exiled by those who needed his skill. As the two argued, the mist was lifting. Most of the army had stopped and was drawing back up on the riverbank. All were stunned at last by the sight of Sparta itself, the city that they had heard of only in widows’ tales to frighten young Boiotians to come inside from the courtyard. Not a wall to be seen, just countless hoplites on the banks opposite to provide ramparts of flesh against the invader. Some of the faces of their own hoplites at the head of the Boiotian snake were white, but not just from the cold. It was a terrible thing to look across the icy Eurotas at a long line of red-caped hoplites kneeling with spear and shield. Epaminondas saw this terror and worried it had already ruined his army this day.
So he threw off his green cape and mounted his red Boiotian pony. The general galloped up and down the column and ordered his men as he reined his mount and for a moment pranced it on two legs. “No fear. No phobos. To me. Ford into Sparta with me.” Five thousand of his hoplites thronged the banks and hit their raised shields with their spears. “Shields high, men, as we get wet. Hold them over our heads as these Spartan cowards try to hit us in the water. The water will touch our waists but not our chins. There are no stone walls over there. Cross the river here at the ford. The Eurotas is cold, but not deep. Wade it-and we are inside Sparta. She is ours for the torching. Who is afraid of a little water, a little wet?”