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.”
The rough, hard figures of his friends standing above him were of a tired world, one he was leaving behind. Across the Eurotas, there he saw the outline of his long-dead father Proxenos, friend of Sparta, in his armor at Kunaxa, waving for him to join him. Across the water there were not Agesilaos and Lichas, and Elektra with her bare breasts, but there now appeared in the mist Spartans enough, or at least a red-caped mob of shades milling around the angry spear-pierced King Kleombrotos. The ghosts were torn with the terrible wounds from the blows of Melon and Chion at Leuktra. Even Kleonymos and his companions who drifted to the banks and rattled their spears at him could do him no real harm-or so the voices in his head assured him.
The shade of Sphodrias was shaking his fist at Proxenos. The dead Deinon was screeching as well. There was Klearchos drifting up, who at Leuktra had at least taken down Staphis before being brained by Chion. Then Proxenos saw in the distance the ghost of a smiling warrior. He spoke the Thespian brand of Boiotian, and sang to him in the formal tongue, “I am Malgis, O Proxenos, son of Proxenos, friend of your father. Join us over here, O weary man. Come for the laurels you deserve. You served my son so well and brought the Boiotians out of their infamy-enough for any, all that. Join us, bask in the rising of your three cities; we can see them all from here. My grandson Lophis is here with me-and is a hero of the Boiotians, greater than Pagondas, greater than Ismenias, greater than any since Oidipous. Our farms are fine. Your work is finished. Now it is our time to rest. There is no more strife on this side of the river, on our sweeter side. Pay no attention to these red-caped men. These Spartans will float apart for you when you cross Styx. None of us endures the burdens and pains of the flesh here in Elysion. Over here there is order and law, just like among the good men of Plataia. There is no rabble and shoving and jeering along the upper banks of the Acheron, here in the green meadows with the nobles of Elysion.”
Proxenos forgot the melancholy and felt warm with recognition of years well lived. How fortunate he was to be cresting before his wave broke and turned to tiny eddies and stagnant backwash of old age. He could feel for a while longer two men bent over him and saw the faces of Melon and Ainias barking and shaking him, as the Makedonian Melissos spread the blanket over his midriff. It was a gift to go in his glory as Proxenos of the dark hair and with beard black and thick, and full in his armor, the greatest builder in Hellas in its greatest age of stone. No more worries about hunting down Lichas or the traitor Gorgos or fears of the turncoat Lykomedes. As in sickness, the approach of death severs one from the world of cares, or the people that scurry about without a hint that they too live on mortgaged time, with bodies no more than Korinthian glass, a small break away from a mess of shards. Even for the healthy and young, death is not always unwelcome. No, Proxenos would exit the stage before the crowd tired of his voice.
And so he did.
In a blink the man of stone, the aristocrat from Plataia, Proxenos son of Proxenos went cold-only to skim over the black waters and reach a far different shore where weight and worry were only faint burdens of the memory.
“Wake man, wake, wake!” Ainias shook his friend, who was cold. “More oil, Melissos, more oil.” He turned in disgust to Pelopidas, who had also reached him with a dozen of the Band. “He has left us, he left us. He simply gave up when we, when I, needed him most. He went into the river and caught a chill. His unknowing Arete, even now a thousand stadia to the north in Plataia, sings of his safe return as she coddles his sons with stories of his high ramparts-and of his fame to come.”
But Pelopidas was the cooler head and paid the grief-stricken Stymphalian no matter. Instead he had the breastplate of Proxenos taken off, and was wrapping him in a cloak. Melon scolded Ainias, “That was not his way. His ticket on Charon’s ferry was not of his own buying.” Then Melon took over from Pelopidas and gently probed that slash below the dead man’s navel. Two palms in width it had grown in the last day, right across the gut where the breastplate ended, the naked zone of flesh above his leather skirt. The jagged tear was now black and yet oozing foul pus, yellow and black. “This is no bile, but old rot. His gut is seeping through as well. How he walked these last days, only Zeus knows. I reckon the wound rotted him from within. He has had his finger on it to keep the mess inside since Antikrates cut his insides nearly in two.”
Ainias wept, in loss and in embarrassment of his momentary anger at the departure of his friend-and the greater anger that he had not thrown his friend down and treated his wound before they had set out that morning.
Melon ignored him, “So ends Proxenos. This is a man who achieved rather than suffered death.”
Ainias interrupted the silence as he stared down at the white face of what once was Proxenos and his black beard already spotted with ice. “The stones of the free cities of the Peloponnesos are his markers. He lies here dead cold for the helots. Pray to the One God that they were worth it. Dead for the damned helots.”
“No,” Melon answered, “for his pleasure. It was his pleasure to come south. That is enough for me. You can figure out the rest.”
Meanwhile, Epaminondas had drawn the column back from the river. The army began its retreat to camp, cold and tired and disheartened that they would never cross the Eurotas. While the four had worked to keep Proxenos warm and breathing, the last fording had failed. Epaminondas was waving all back as arrows whizzed by his head. This was the first time Epaminondas had tripped-and yet it would be his last mistake. King Agesilaos had been right after all: No man of Boiotia would ever bring fire to the very heart of a defeated Sparta. The women were braver on the banks, and hurling insults at the Thebans, baring their icy breasts in mockery and throwing rocks into the river in disdain. In front of them always was shrill Elektra, like Medea of old, holding up one bare shriveled
