But as Epaminondas charged back and forth along the high banks of the river, the lame Spartan king yonder across the water was also visible to the Thebans through the whirling mists. Agesilaos limped along the Eurotas, always shadowing Epaminondas, pointing this way and that with his spear, sending companies of spearmen anywhere he saw a possible ford. What a small man he was, Melon saw-half the size of the Agiad king Kleombrotos at Leuktra. Smaller even than short Epaminondas. Were these Eurypontid kings dwarves? The king limped far worse than Melon did himself. So this lame-foot man was all that kept Epaminondas from storming Sparta? Not quite all-for there was something else on the far bank, a figure standing next to Agesilaos. Melon, who was at the side of Proxenos, yelled out to his aide Melissos, “There, look. There, boy, there is the killer, Lichas. Look at that foul spearman. Bare-headed, with his white braids. No helmet.”
The bleary eyes of Melissos thought he saw nothing other than the fuzzy shapes across the water. But he sensed the furor in Melon, who faced Epaminondas and called out again, “He’s there, our Lichas, near the king Agesilaos. He is the one who dares us.”
Then the king was gone, as quickly as he had appeared, into the hedges across the river. In his place ran his granddaughter, hair in the winter wind, with a black sword in her right hand. Now there was no mistaking her. She darted across the line of crouching Spartan spearmen, her klopis hitting their wooden shafts as she reminded them, “Your king and my Lichas are with you. Stand fast and spear the pigs from the north. Leave Epaminondas to me.” Her voice easily carried across the water.
Melissos cried out to his master, “I can hear them, Thespian, I can hear your Lichas and the king in their fury on the other side, and his demon bitch, all cursing our Epaminondas. Can they see us as well? Why not cross and kill them? I can help, I can do that.” But Melon grabbed the Makedonian by the neck and drew him back from the water where the arrows were beginning to hit near their shins. The last bridge had been destroyed by the king, enraged that a Theban had shut his men inside his city when they were used to marching a thousand stadia abroad into the lands of others. Still, this Melissos was proving to be as brave as any in the phalanx.
Agesilaos came back out of the bushes and bellowed to the Thebans when he caught sight of the mounted Epaminondas. A wind came up and all the Thebans could hear his slurs from across the river. “O wild man” the king pointed at Epaminondas, shaking his spear, “you will not cross this ford, fool, you cannot without a bridge. Never touch the polis of Leonidas. You can’t cross, not now, not ever. We are the better men. Our Elektra is a man, and you are women.” For once the aged royal spoke true, as the army froze at the water’s edge, stopped there by the fog and sleet and ice combined with arrows and javelins hurled from the Spartan side.
Melon spoke to the boy Melissos, as if he were a general like Epaminondas, as they both watched the throng across the wide cold river. “This morning is not our day. It is not fated, Melissos. I see that now. We are not to kill Agesilaos and Lichas today. Too high the water, too cold, too many Spartans on the banks.” Even if they got across the current, the Thebans would be inside the hornets’ nest. To fight in the streets of Sparta was a battle few welcomed. No wonder the Arkadians, the Eleans, the Northerners, even the Argives wanted no part of this. It would mean being pelted by roof-tiles and hit by the pots tossed down by frenzied women, as the Boiotians got caught in winding and dead-end streets and trapped in courtyards. Lampito, younger sister of Lichas, along with Elektra, his wife, had organized the women into lochoi, ten to a roof, sixty houses among them each. The Boiotians remembered the stories of their grandfathers. They had told of the Thebans who had once stormed into the streets of nearby Plataia. Few had made it out alive as the women and boys of the town had buried them with hard clay from the rooftops.
Until the sun broke through the heavy fog around noon, each time Pelopidas and the Sacred Band reached a new sandbar of the river, hundreds across the water ran up to the banks. The Spartans knelt down with spears on their shields to meet them, then lowered their heads as their archers and javelin throwers at the rear targeted the throng of Thebans with a volley of missiles. The Spartans had mocked that arrows were the work of women. But now they flung anything they could to stop Epaminondas at the Eurotas.
A few of the foolish among the Boiotians who had reached halfway into the current were already floating downstream, with javelins stuck in their necks and thighs. In vain, Epaminondas had ignored the advice of the veteran Ainias and Pelopidas, and of Melon as well. They had all warned him to avoid the city. Instead, why not burn the dockyards at Gytheion to the south? For this day leave Agesilaos alone. Once more, let Lichas be. Melon was at the general’s side, trying to grab his reins and get Epaminondas off his red horse. He tried to talk over the shouting of battle. “Mad Theban. Don’t ruin our army in the water when twenty myriads await us in Messenia. Join the Arkadians as they burn the countryside. This Lichas, he baits us. He’s your nemesis. Wants us to climb out soaked on his side. Don’t. Stay here. Burn and loot and overturn their farms. The Eurotas will be our warden and bars.” Melon had remembered Malgis’s stories of the Athenian slaughter at the River Assinaros in Sikily, and he began to see that even Lykomedes and his looters had the better advice this morning. So he kept on with his early-morning warning to the mounted Epaminondas to avoid the water. “They will slaughter us. As if we were the Athenians in Sikily. Water is their helper. Back off, Theban. Today is not our day. Not this day.”
Ainias saw in the lifting fog that his friend Proxenos had drifted off and was standing on the bank-deliberately in range of the Spartan archers. The Stymphalian damned himself again that he had allowed his friend to arm that morning when Proxenos should have stayed inside the warm tents of Pelopidas and finally had his wound cleaned and oiled.
Proxenos was the first to plunge in the icy waters and the last to lumber out as the rising waist-high current barred the way. Did he wish to be hit or to drown? Now on this last attempt, the Plataian had to be pulled out. He fell down, shivering on the bank, but had at least shown the Boiotians how a Plataian braves the missiles of the Spartans and cares little for the cold of the Eurotas. Ainias at last could treat his friend, still breathing on the bank, nearly blue in his wet armor, muttering of his visions of white women with barbed wings and bloody fangs. His eyes closed. With a whisper he touched Ainias’s hand. “No man a slave. None really are. Where is my Neto?”
“Eyes open, man, before you freeze.” Ainias pulled Proxenos up at the arm. He ordered the hoplites to bring oil and woolen cloaks. Melissos ran up with his pack, a blanket, and a flask. He had seen Proxenos stagger into the Eurotas, shield high, and wanted rare men like this to live; he tore open his pack and tossed oil, honey, and cloth to Ainias.
The river, Proxenos knew, was no longer fast and cold, but strangely warm and slow. He wanted to crawl back into it. He still heard his friends jabbering; too loud, harsh, and grating, they were like the harsh crows fighting each other to pick apart the rotting sucker-fish on the quay. Were they Keres now? So he looked instead across the river, and now found the floating shades far more to his liking with their soothing calls to ford the warm river. There were heroes, not Keres, across the Eurotas. Scarlet and purple, these images sang from across the water, “Come across, Proxenos, son of Proxenos, hero of Plataia, guest-friend of Sparta. The water is warm here, my son, where you belong.”