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Mêlon saw again the blazon on the general’s shield propped up on a wooden stand, and could now make out that it was a crude picture of Orpheus—as if this Pythagorean would descend, like the flute player of myth, into the Hades of the Peloponnesos to bring the helots down south out of their serfdom, and thereby ensure their liberators that their souls, suddenly eternal, would be even happier in the hereafter once freed from their brief-lived bodies. Pelopidas and the rest of the Sacred Band, one hundred fifty pairs of warriors in green capes, had now ringed the camp. The uneasy crowd was mostly made up of the lesser officers of the merê from the outlying villages, the boroughs far from Thebes. Mêlon looked in vain for his son Lophis in the tent. But at least he heard horses outside, perhaps on the far hill, where the cavalry and his boy were camping. He noticed the snake eyes of Epaminondas watching to spot a shaking knee or a stained cloak of the trembling among his officers. Find that, Mêlon knew, and then get that man out, before his look swept over the entire group.
    Ainias the Stymphalian had enough of the noise and shoves and he shouted above the crowd with a mere point to Mêlon, “He’s here, here from Helikon.” Ainias was an Arkadian mercenary, born by the gloomy lake at Stymphalos, with rumors of slaughter and gore to his name from the south below the Isthmos. He had earlier left word for the command to watch for “the hoplite Mêlon of Thespiai, of prophecy fame.” It was he who had sent his newfound friend Proxenos out to the high ground to look for wagons from Helikon. At least some were relieved at Mêlon’s sudden appearance. Ainias paid heed to the seers who had promised victory should an “apple,” a mêlon , join the army, and he knew that was the only way to win back the ranks for war. Even the generals now quieted when they noted the arrival of two such killers from Thespiai for the front line, old as one seemed to be, and even though the other brute was a branded slave.
    Mêlon was pushed into the center of the crowd. Retainers stepped aside in deference to the son of Malgis. They knew he had fought at the Nemea, and the same year at Koroneia, and then later at Tegyra—and, in fact, in all the battles of the last thirty summers, after he went out with Malgis at his first battle at Haliartos and beat the Spartans back. In the three-sided open tent were another twenty officers of the provinces, crowded together in a closed circle around the general. As Chiôn strode in with Mêlon, no Boiotian wished to ask of his business. Most knew of this slave from Chios. They remembered that a few years earlier Chiôn had bashed Spartan skulls at Tegyra as he left the baggage train and joined in the pursuit. His branded face and bull’s neck won him offers of seats, even from men of Anthedon under the rich Boiotarch Ladôn. He said that he was here at Leuktra for his master. But who knew—maybe also for their own farms as well, or even to restore the name of disgraced Thespiai, since he planned to kill a Spartan king and walk over the corpses of the royal guard to get to him—Lichas’s most of all.
    This was at last his moment. Chiôn, the “Chian” who never knew the island of Chios of his birth; Chiôn the “snowy white one” who had no affinity with the whiter Thrakians; Chiôn the slave who hated the slaves he knew far more than he did any free man. Chiôn was of nothing to anyone, nor anyone to him—except in battle, where his killing of the Spartans, or so he thought, would do far more for Hellas than any philosopher Alkidamas or Platôn.
    Epaminondas moved over to a small bench, sipping some light barley and pork soup out of a black clay bowl with a long handle. He looked back over at the misanthrôpos Mêlon. He had never met the hoplite, but he sensed a kindred outsider who likewise had earned the distrust of the mob. Both perhaps would know each other by creed and need no formal