Kuniskos often instructed Antikrates at night that he, the young son of Lichas, could be killed by no free man. Yes, Kuniskos had gotten that out of Neto long ago back on Helikon and he knew it to be true. Once spoken, it would give this indomitable Antikrates even more strength to make it true. Kuniskos patted Antikrates on the side of the head and went on, “None of the Lichadai has the nod of the gods like you do, Master. That is worth all that they had and more still. No free man, no helot, no slave can fell you. Not one.”
At first Kuniskos had limped into the hamlets disguised as an old Argive traveler. He walked about with a walking stick and heavy wool hood, asking for shelter and news of robbers and the safety of the roads. Sometimes he wanted a meeting of the elders, as if he were a runaway helot in his thick Doric speech. A few claimed Kuniskos was also a farmhand, stripped to the waist, with wide shoulders hoeing the olives and learning of the strongest of the helots. But once he learned the nature of the towns and farms, Kuniskos came back on a horse with a phalanx of mounted spearmen behind him. “Kuniskos eimi, akouete pantes, akouete e apothanete. I am Kuniskos. You listen up or die.” Two hundred young kryptes rode fifty steps behind him. On his ululation, they galloped to cut down any he pointed out. “Join me or die. Epaminondas and his murderers, his rapists, and his thieves will soon shear you. Your Spartans alone can save you. Join me or die-proschoreite moi e apothanete.”
As the weather grew hot in the next summer after Leuktra, Gorgos was looking for the troublemaker Erinna. He had reports of a she-man poetess who plotted with Neto-always Neto, always her-who had joined wild Nikon and the other gang of Doreios in organizing the helots in tens and twenties. Yes, he must find Nikon and this Erinna, who had borrowed his Neto and never given her back, as the two helped expand the revolt. Two hundred and more Spartans under command of Antikrates were found every month rotting in the countryside. Most were gutted in the byways by these breakaways-many with black-feathered arrows in their necks, a red letter mu for Messenia swabbed on their backs with their own blood. Whole tribes of Messenians were living free in the mountains and had since abandoned their farms. They even had a forge and bellows to make blades of black iron and bronze breastplates. Neto had taken Nikon to her temple and had his scribe Helos draw on an enormous hide map of Messenia, showing where the Spartans had forts and guards. Then she parceled out regions to Nikon’s helpers and he in turn had given them killing quotas each month. These helots rarely fought in daylight, but instead swarmed the Spartans at night, throwing pitch torches on their timber stockades and flinging arrows as they bolted out from the flames, or they hid in the forests and picked the red-capes off on the narrow paths. Or sometimes they would lie in ditches all night and cut the throats of drunken Spartans who in their wine sang their war songs as they stumbled back home from evenings with their helot women-most of them informers of Neto’s circle.
Soon the Eleans were sending daily more copper and tin ingots and iron from down on the Alpheios, as the helots spread their forges and hammered out new swords and spearheads. Finally, most of the daylight Spartan patrols stopped altogether. As summer waned they were forced to stay mostly in Gorgos’s stockade at Ithome. Antikrates had built a second outer wall, to surround the inner one, with more pointed stakes to keep the horde of throat-cutters out. But for all his warcraft, he began drinking more than commanding and had no stomach for fighting outside the phalanx in the ambushes where the helot renegades might kill their betters indiscriminately from afar with arrows, sling bullets, and javelins. Kuniskos soon ran the stockade, and the son of Lichas went back over Taygetos, ceding Messenia to Lord Kuniskos. Antikrates was hoping at the first of the year to fight as a spearman on the icy Eurotas, to cut down those Boiotians whom he had missed at Leuktra. Better all the way around this way. He would kill Melon and Epaminondas to fulfill his prophecy. The loss of Messenia-well, it would be due to Kuniskos, the old helot who would have proved unworthy as a Spartan overseer when his master had left him in charge-until Lichas and son would return to Messenia from their victory to reclaim what the treasonous helot had lost. Or so Antikrates figured as he rode home over Taygetos and left Messenia to Kuniskos.
As the last month of the year neared, just about the same time that Epaminondas was promising to tear down the Propylaia of Athens as he headed out over Kithairon, the Spartans under Kuniskos could neither leave the stockade at night nor lure any more helots inside its walls with promises of freedom. Kuniskos more often than not spent his days by the fire in drink, as his guards grew soft on the timber ramparts and fearful of the helots who no longer sent their wagons of food over Taygetos to Agesilaos. On these gray days, Gorgos prepared for the worst, and yet he often lamented to himself that life was far too short for a man of his genius, and how unfair it was that he had come into his own at the end of his sixth decade, with talents that had been unrecognized both when he served as the young lackey of Lichas and then for too many years on Helikon when he worked as a farmhand. He reflected that his life had started out well, a helot with Brasidas at ten and six. He had grown to be a man with children and freedom to his name when the great war against the Athenians had ended and been won. Then all had been lost later at the Nemea, when Malgis had caught him and made him a slave again-even as Lord Lichas before the battle at last had made him a king’s servant and with a green cape at that.
While enslaved on Helikon, Gorgos had lost all track of his wife Elaia and his son Nabis to the south. His family was banished-hungry and now dead, or so Lichas had told him. Lichas had said they all had perished when their papa Gorgos, well over forty seasons old, had not returned home to his freedman’s plot among the perioikoi near the Eurotas. Long-gone Gorgos was slandered among the half-helots as a runaway and a trembler, a dirty shield-carrier of the dirtier Boiotians. His family died in shame, or so he was told by Lichas, who often treated those he liked, and his own family as well, more harshly than he did his enemies.
Kuniskos thought, as he stretched out his long legs on his low table in his compound, that he could have created a new Messenia, had he just started at his first beard rather than in his near dotage, had he been given an indentured people at rest rather than being ordered to put down a rebellion. His dead son Nabis could have worn a red cape. He might have been a peer of Sparta, and had a hundred plethra of red grapes. Yes, if only Gorgos had not been captured at Nemea, if only the Spartans had not lied that he had not served his king. Life really was not fair when a man who was more Spartan than the Spartans had seen his genius marooned in the vineyard of Melon. These present triumphs, then, made Kuniskos even angrier. He was not so much grateful for his current renown as furious that it had come so late. He had been betrayed by his Neto, by Antikrates who had left him with the growing revolt, by his master Melon who would soon come to settle up, no doubt to unleash on him the killer Chion. Only his own genius was left.