Pelopidas and the Sacred Band?
No. A sole figure had come through the front doorway and stood over the two bodies. He was deliberate in his sword and spear work, and now almost motionless as he looked about. A wild dog barked behind him. The stranger still paused and then finally stomped on the corpses and let out a piercing war cry as he at last turned toward Elektra. He picked her up by the back of the neck with his good right arm, and then swung her head against the hut wall-three, four, and five times before she quit her pleas. “Lichas! Help, Lichas. My Lichas!” So ended the granddaughter of Agesilaos. She had come to kill the leashed Neto and earn five hundred silver owls from the strongbox of Phryne-and yet never got in a single swing of her grandfather’s black ax. Chion of Taygetos finally stopped slamming Elektra into the mud brick, as he looked up at the three Spartans at the other end of the cabin turning to flee. Should he first deal with Kuniskos, and then go after the other assassins? He yelled to Nikon to the side as he threw down the pulp of Elektra and carefully stepped ahead. “Kill Gorgos. Kill him now-and I’ll get the others.” As he stopped, Chion punched Gorgos in the gut and sent him stumbling backward.
So broke in Chion of the good right arm, long thought dead here in the south in the tumult of liberation, always on the scent of his Neto whom at last he found to be alive in the remote hut of Gorgos. He for weeks had followed Gorgos’s trail on Taygetos, waiting for this moment to finish what he had promised. Now Chion lumbered on through the room, half-crouching to avoid jabs to come if the three Spartans ahead should choose to turn back and fight. The wolf-dog followed to guard his Neto. Melon immediately turned to take on the Spartans at the rear door and kept himself between their spears and Neto.
Behind Chion in the din, Kuniskos stood up again, still off balance from the blow to his midriff. “Get the slave one-arm. Where is my Lichas? Lichas. Lichas. Lich-.” He too was cut off. Nikon and Melissos in near unison slammed their blades-wide choppers that were hard to poke with, but made a larger hole if they got through flesh-into Kuniskos’s lower gut. The man had been made dizzy by Chion’s blow, and his head was still crackling with fire, when he had turned to his left to warn the Spartans on the other side and fell to the floor cursing them. Nikon was then atop the dying helot even as he tumbled to the dirt. He plunged his knife five more times into the back of Gorgos to keep him silent. At the same time Neto, weak, lame, and dizzy still, took up her stick with both hands and clubbed the bald head. Melissos jumped on him as well. He had no beard, but he had once learned in Makedon to kill with a careful jab to the big neck vein, and his thin arm was as strong as any ephebe’s in Boiotia.
In a wild frenzy, her stick now broken, Neto kept thrashing with her nails and fists at the backside of the dying Kuniskos. She was tearing his two braids right off the sides of his head. “Helot to helot, old man,” she kept repeating as Nikon rolled her off. “Helot to helot. For Erinna and all the rest. For Erinna. For Erinna. For Chion. For Lophis. For our Proxenos.”
Here ended the helot Kuniskos, once the terror of the Messenians, who had taken off so many heads and was about to lose his own. He was once the good servant of the Malgidai, but now pierced by Neto, the freed woman of Helikon, and by Nikon and Melissos, he bled out his life force on the floor of a dirty hut where the goats and cows of Taygetos sought shelter. Neto had known, even with rope and chain these many months, that he was to die by the hand of a Messenian, but the goddess had told her only that-not that Nikon or she herself would strike. Gorgos had wanted his way one last time with Neto, but she got hers with him instead.
Kerberos, splattered in the gore of Lichas, took over and tore at the neck of the Kuniskos whose scent Keberos he now remembered from Helikon, along with the kicks he had endured. The wolf-dog locked onto him hard and bit so hard on his neck that the hound ripped off the head of Kuniskos from his body. Neto stumbled up and let out a shriek-or was it laughter? “Pull it off for your dead Sturax. Look. The head cutter has his own cut by a dog, by a dog like him.” She let out her war cry and like a Bacchant grabbed the head of Gorgos and threw it over at the battered corpse of Elektra.
Amid the killing of the four Spartans, Ainias and Melon had turned to stab their way through the back entrance. They were eager to catch the three remaining Spartans who had backed out into the open pen and were turning to run through the stockade. Chion now was heading to the rear of the hut to join his friends for the final fight, but Melon first hit the backpedaling Spartan, a stab below his war belt into the groin. He was a youth of twenty seasons or so on his first patrol-Thibrachos by name, son of Elektra herself from her first marriage to the brother of Lichas.
This fool Thibrachos for a moment had turned back around to fight after all, once he saw the brains of his mother splattered over the flat stones of the opposite wall. He had his eye on the slashing sword of the approaching Chion in the distance and never saw in the shadows Melon’s jab with Bora that went in above hip and brought out the black blood from his insides, along with his guts as well. Though the thrust was underhand, Melon sent the sharp iron right under the bronze, three palms deep into the Spartan’s midriff. Thibrachos died too, not more than twenty paces from Kuniskos-the fifth of the ambushers to fall before any had a chance to strike back.
As Thibrachos crumpled, the last two Spartans had tried to turn and flee out to the courtyard beyond. Ainias was quick with his blade and stabbed the second Spartan from the side. The doomed hoplite had tripped over his cloak and for a moment only flashed his unarmored flank. That was enough for Ainias, who sent the iron right into his armpit, and the sword tip up toward the heart, lifting him off the ground. This second Spartan was a better man than young Thibrachos and was known as the chopper Klopis, son of Deinon, and the enforcer to Lord Kuniskos in Messenia. As he fell back from the spear-thrust of Ainias, Melon came up behind and jabbed his spear butt through the back of his neck, and the Spartan hit the floor.
Chion for a second time halted in slow walk toward the back door, as his friends finished with his last two targets. Now in greater fury still, whether at his friends or enemies, the freedman suddenly headed through the back courtyard as he caught sight of Antikrates, the last Spartan alive. But Antikrates was a wiser sort than the two firebrands at his side. He had spied his planned way of escape the moment his father had fallen. Antikrates knew the perfidy of Gorgos-who had tolerated no rival to his return to Messenia-and so long ago had planned an exit should Kuniskos and his Klopis try to kill him as well in their bloodlust. Antikrates had thirty paces at least on Chion, heading through the pen to the mouth of the cave and safety. A wiser Chion of two good arms and of earlier times in the high vineyard of Helikon would have stopped, and with raised shield defended himself from a spear toss.
But like all of the old breed in the hut, friend and enemy alike, Chion held life less dear here at the final reckoning-and more so for Chion with the loss of an arm, the deaths of Proxenos and Lophis, and the maiming of Neto. Without breastplate and shield, Chion reckoned that he could catch the better-armored Spartan before he cleared the fences and was into the mountain. Why not? His legs and chest were tired but still stronger than most others’. And this Antikrates looked fat from his year after Leuktra, no longer the same man who had saved his father and the body of their king. Chion went right on past Ainias and Melon, who were finishing their iron work with the two henchmen of Antikrates. He began to trot with his sword in his good right arm stuck out in front of him for the final jab. Chion quickened his pace, and indeed closed much of the distance, but the running Antikrates was too far ahead, the mouth of the cave far too close.
Even Kerberos could not reach the Spartan. Just then at the entrance to the mountain Antikrates himself had a wild idea. This Chion was one-armed and slower than he thought-and no doubt spent. So the son of Lichas turned and for a moment saw that he would be safer, now and in years to come, to attack his nemesis than to keep fleeing into the cave. Antikrates raised his spear and cast at the onrushing Thespian. This was not a light willow javelin, but a heavy cornel for stabbing with its broad iron head, like the spear Chion had just flung into Lichas. It took a man of Antikrates’s size to hurl the long shaft with any power. Still, his pursuer was an easy target, large and without armor, coming on without balance. Chion had no left arm for a shield-nor even a spear any longer to bat away the thrust. It was back inside the hut, buried deep into the head of Lichas.
Chion was using only the sword, an old blade that Melon had given him on Helikon that he had torn back out from the dead Lakrates. Chion saw the spear and swung at the incoming tip. Too late. Antikrates’s throw hit him under the chin. The iron went deep right through Chion’s neck above the left collarbone, not far from his old wound at Leuktra. The tip broke through on the other side, as the weight of the shaft itself brought Chion to a stumble.
Antikrates stopped for an instant and announced to the sky that he had killed Chion, the bane of the Spartans. Kerberos froze and then turned back to shield his downed master. With a wild yell of triumph at his felling of Chion, the better man, Antikrates ran through the cave on his way to Sparta and fame. He reckoned up his kill, bellowing
