For a bit longer Kuniskos, fired by wine, about every tenth day tried to go out with his horsemen for a few stadia, to at least make a show of force with his mounted spearmen. In his wake the Messenians later would see an occasional helot with throat slit and arms tied to a post along the road. The few who could read the block letters told others that the placards read-in high Hellenic, no less-“I killed a Spartan and so am dead myself-on orders of helot Kuniskos, lord of the Helots.” Tina Spartiaten apekteina, kai os apothnesko autos. Touto keluei ho helotes heloteton despotes ho Kuniskos.” Kuniskos was after the girl helot seer who was said to be promising a day of freedom for the helots-and who was arming them to fight. Kuniskos was sure that Neto led the helot ambushers from her sanctuary in the temple of Artemis; but he found few who would confirm his suspicions, and he was now as often as not befuddled with drink. So perhaps the chief troublemaker might be this Sapphic Erinna, who, his spies related, was causing rebellion in her supposed school on the high cliff. Kuniskos decided to make his own night raids to catch them both. With his last hundred horsemen, all the cavalry he had there beneath Ithome, he targeted the shrines and rural temples of Messenia and all the farmlands that belonged to the gods, sweeping down on moonless nights to plunder and burn them, and riding off with the priestesses back to his compound by dawn.
Inside the stockade, Kuniskos would have their heads shaved. Then they would be given fur caps and dressed in skins and hides, with leather ropes and long fox tails dangling from their naked waists to their bare buttocks. The guards would chain the captives to serve meals for the kryptes. Kuniskos would keep twenty or so of his “animals,” then when he tired of them, he would send the batch over Taygetos to Lichas and seek more replacements. At banquets, Kuniskos and his peers soon were throwing raisins at the helot servant girls while they danced and sang bare-breasted under coercion. Then, full of wine, Kuniskos and his thugs took whoever they pleased, the more virgins, the better. Life could be good in the twilight of Spartan Messenia.
As the new year approached, all of Messenia was in open revolt, with helots even armored and marching about equipped as hoplites with heavy armor. Theban scouts were rumored to be in the hills around Ithome. Kuniskos’s final batch of captives was small, not more than a few Messenian girls that had hid out near the Alpheios. They were all from the precincts of Artemis of the lowlands, all would-be diviners in training, they said. In their final late-night sweep, the handful of kryptes in service of Kuniskos had brought in seven temple women, to be stripped and to be asked-as they were hung by their toes from the rafters of the great hall-when and where Epaminondas would arrive, and who among them had prepared his way.
Kuniskos did what he pleased with Antikrates gone. If he were to perish in Messenia, then he would do so in a way that lived on in song-and in the terrified hearts of the Messenians. So his men whittled down his stock of prisoners. They sent most over to Taygetos to be thrown into the gorge. A few they roped to the fence post outside the stockade for the crows and buzzards that circled in wait over the house of Kuniskos. Korakon oikos, they began to call the compound of Kuniskos, “House of Crows.” The ugly ones they lopped, sticking their heads on stakes and throwing their bodies in the fire pit.
Soon there were almost no captives left inside the compound and there was no way to bring any more from the outside. Among the last haul of the prisoners from the Alpheios was a woman taller than the rest, who covered her head and kept apart. Kuniskos had told his guards to bring this one in last, and claimed she spoke a half-helot tongue, as if she had learned her speech from others beside helots. His henchman Klopis wanted her, but he drew back when Kuniskos stepped in between him and the helot. She had caught the eye of the drunken Kuniskos, who poked with his walking stick at her thick winter cloak; he wanted some sort of sport with her.
Beneath the folds and tucks of her inner chiton, the old man could see firm flesh and firmer breasts, or so he fancied in his drink. A body it seemed as perfect as he had seen and without scars of torture or the brands of slavery, much less the tears and sags of childbirth-and a priestess unspoiled for his lust. As was his custom with the women, he reminded his men that it was his right to first order anyone into his chambers before they were noosed and dangled on the trusses. There she would first talk and then endure the passion of Puppy Dog. If she gave the name of a rebel or the location of a house of resistance, she would be given back her life, but only after the fire of Kuniskos had been quenched and a hot brand had been burned into her cheek-and if her tales had proved true and had led to the killing of those she had betrayed. But now there were no more fresh captives, and this woman, as ordered, was the last to be brought to Kuniskos.
“Why have you come across the Alpheios?” Kuniskos laughed. “You seem to have the look of the huntress, with your long arms and legs. Are you a Sapphic? There are travelers, they say, from Arkadia, or is it that a few lost Boiotians came your way? Surely you can tell Grandfather Kuniskos something of their talk?” He stuck his hand into her hood and pinched lightly her covered neck. “Where is this foul Proxenos? I hear he has a plan for a new city on top of my house, right here on my mountain. Stranger, do you know a Neto? Or this Amazon Erinna whom you must have heard is in the highlands? Or maybe you’ve mixed it up with this Doreios? Or are you the woman of Nikon?”
The cloaked figure muttered only a word or two about “a horde from the north.”
“A horde, now? Of Boiotians maybe? You know the Messenian prophecy?”
“And some Arkadians. I know no more news.”
Kuniskos laughed again. “What does this horde want with this Kuniskos? To throw down Sparta and raise up Messenia?”
“Perhaps-though the god has not told me all that. They act only as fate wills. It’s too late. Neither you nor your Spartans can ward off the great reckoning.”
“Reckoning, is it? Come nearer, priestess, sit on your granddaddy’s lap. Either you be a talker of the gods’ minds, or some faker in the robes of a holy woman sent here to stir up our kind. But I say, come near, scoot over, cast off that hood. Do you remember who I am?”
The hooded girl spat back. “They know you as Kuniskos. The new killer of the helots, or so the travelers say Lichas mined you out of Taygetos, hammering you from stone to smash down your own kind. You kill the Messenians sometimes as the farmer, sometimes the mounted man, sometimes their friend and recruiter. They say you are alone and a drunkard and even your lord Antikrates has left you to swing on a Messenian gallows.”
Kuniskos liked her sauciness and even more his own playacting. In his wine-craze he was close to confessing to her his charade, but wished the drama to play out a little longer. Kuniskos tugged a bit on a thick cord that was wrapped tight around her left foot. “What a nice little bitch on a leash to visit her Kuniskos. But when Klopis brings me virgins from the helot temples, I send them back soiled and stamped-the lucky ones that do not go over Taygetos to the pits. With the seed and the brand of Kuniskos-my own kappa burned right into their cheeks and a puppy in their belly, if I’m lucky.”
He yanked on her leg chain a bit more. “They learn to serve men’s lust on the street corners. Or maybe they play flutes at the fine houses for a few coppers. For the goddess has nothing to do with them stained and polluting her sacred ground, especially if with child, the new litters of my puppies to come.” Gorgos was pulling the chain ever harder, as he went on. “So Virgin, talk-unless you wish to feel the spike of Kuniskos inside you. Then the pictures and whispers in your head will disappear for good. An ugly gamma will mark your cheek just as your own Messenian killers smear their bloody letter mus on my innocent dead. You alone earn the gamma-for the sake of the ancient days on Helikon.” With that end to his drama, Kuniskos, drunk and stumbling, with haze in his eyes and dizziness in his head, threw off the young woman’s long cloak and veil. Then he tore her chiton. But then even he, lord of the Helots, froze for a moment in his delight as the wine no longer clouded his vision.