“Send forth the Immortals!” a strange, jagged cry sounded from the Persian command. They came in their thousands, slashing and spearing the defenders down, breaking open that slender route south into the heart of Hellas. At the last, there were but a knot of the red-cloaked Spartans left. On they fought, lost in the dance of battle. I saw him then—older than she had imagined, his body laced with cuts and wet with blood, carrying the weight of a nation on his weary shoulders . . . and the unbroken spear in his hands.
“Leonidas?” I whispered.
Through the final moments of the fray, the hero-king stared through the ether and at me. Right at me. A fresh storm of arrows fell. Three struck him, yet on he fought, blocking and beating away a crowd of Immortals—his lance shattering into two halves as he did so. Another two shafts punched into his neck, pushing him onto one knee. Then a final one plunged into his breastbone. The battlefield fell silent, and King Leonidas of Sparta rolled onto his side, dead.
* * *
• • •
She blinked, the calm, deserted and rugged coastline before her free of bodies and blood, just old Herodotos smiling sadly at her.
She dropped the spear. “Why did you bring me here?”
Herodotos sighed. “Because you spoke of shame, and being unworthy of your lineage. That is not true, Kassandra. You are every bit his heir, despite what might have happened in your past.” He stooped to pick up the spear, using the leather bag again, so he would not have to touch it. He handed it back to her. “This lance and the object you saw under the Oracle’s temple . . . they were not crafted by our kind.”
“So they were made by Persians?”
Herodotos laughed quietly.
“Then by the Gods?” she said.
Herodotos’s laughter faded. “Not quite. They were fashioned by a people who came before. Before Hellas, before Persia, before the Trojan War, before the flood . . . before even time of man.”
Kassandra stared, uncomprehending.
Herodotos motioned for her to sit. He brought out a loaf of bread and broke it in two, handing her half. “I have not written of this in my histories lest men think me mad—and already some do—but I have found things, Kassandra, strange things,” he said as they ate, gazing out over the ancient pass. “One summer I came across a wandering man. A short, round little fellow by the name of Meliton, who spent his days sailing the Aegean in a tub of a boat, with no home and no destination. He told me of his adventures—some even wilder than Barnabas’s tales! I let most of the stories wash over me, but there was one that snagged my attention, for unlike all his other stories, he told this one without a glint of mischief in his eye, and with a hushed and fearful voice.”
Kassandra stopped chewing, and nodded for him to continue.
“He had been shipwrecked in his youth on the shores of Thera, that broken husk of an island, blown apart by a volcano long, long ago. Now that island is barren and bleak—naught but ash and decay. But he managed to survive there for many months eating grubs and molluscs. One night he was awoken by a strange tremor in the ground.”
“The volcano?” Kassandra whispered.
“No, the volcano is long dead like everything else on the isle. It was far stranger than that, Misthios,” Herodotos replied, his eyes growing dark. “As the ground shook, he saw a bright light, glowing in the night, somewhere up in the black heights of the island. It could not have been the fires of a volcano, for the light was pure and golden. He stumbled through the darkness toward the light. Dawn broke before he could reach the spot, and when he got there he found just a plain, black rock face. It took him a few moments to notice the markings.”
“The markings?”
“Carved into the black rock, etched expertly, were strange symbols and sequences. I asked Meliton to describe them to me as best he could, so he drew them out in the dirt.” As he spoke, Herodotos used a finger to trace out geometric shapes in the dirt where they sat. “This,” he said, tapping the dirt, “is the wisdom of Pythagoras.”
A thrill raced up Kassandra’s back.
“Aye,” Herodotos nodded, seeing that she understood the magnitude of it, “the philosopher, the political theorist, the geometrician . . . one of the most brilliant minds to have graced Hellas. He was one of the few who understood the things that came before man.”
“But they said Pythagoras’s wisdom was lost,” she said, recalling a drunken conversation about the topic in a Kephallonian tavern. “That it died with him, more than sixty years ago.”
“I too thought it was gone.” Herodotos gestured to the spear. “And this etching is a mere fragment. But do you know what it might mean if his wisdom was to be recovered in its entirety? If the people of today could obtain the knowledge to craft things such as your lance, or the artifact you saw in the Cultist cave? And what if I was to tell you that the Cult have been searching for Pythagoras’s lost writings?”
The thrill on Kassandra’s skin turned into a chill shiver. “By all the Gods, it cannot happen.”
“Leonidas said the same. He knew only pieces of it all, but enough to realize that people seeking to harness this ancient knowledge and use it like a sword had to be fought. You are of his line, Kassandra, and that is why you and your family must be saved. In this dark game that so few understand, our world itself is at risk.” He stepped away and walked slowly back toward the Adrestia, motioning for her to stay when she tried to follow. “Take some time, think over what I have said.”
She stayed there for an hour, sitting by the lion and staring down at the bay, wondering how many bones lay underneath the sands. She absently fed Ikaros crumbs of bread, eating a little herself. Thrills of unease and wonder rose within her as she tried to comprehend Herodotos’s words. But damn, Historian, your answers come in the form of a thousand questions, she thought with a tired laugh. “Time to head for Athens, for some real answers,” she sighed, rising.
Thrum . . . whack!
At once she leapt back and fell into a crouch, staring at the arrow quivering in the earth by her feet. Her eyes combed the heights behind her. Nothing. Then she saw him, staring down at her like a god from a high shelf of rock.
“Deimos?” she croaked. That strange feeling on the boat, the choppy peaks in the night. Her instincts had been right: they had been followed.
He said nothing, simply turning and walking away from the edge and from sight. She stared at the high shelf, then threw herself at the rock face. A moment later and she was halfway up the mountainside, scaling toward the shelf. She hesitated for a moment, before hauling herself up and onto her knees. Deimos was there, waiting for her, back turned. “You followed me all this way?”
“I remember you,” he said. “I was a babe, but I remember you holding me.”
That long-dead flame sparked to life in her heart, flickering within the steely cage. “And I have never forgotten what it was like to hold y—”
“My parents condemned me to be thrown from the mountain,” he cut in, dispassionately. “But it was you . . . you who pushed me and the old ephor to our deaths. I saw it. The golden artifact showed me.”
“No,” she started. “I tried to save you. You must believe me, Alexios. I had no idea you survi—”
He swung to face her, the sea wind casting his dark locks across his baleful face. “Alexios died that night. Deimos was the name given to me by my real family.”
Kassandra tilted her head back in disdain, the flickering flame in her breastbone dying. “I learned from your wretched cave symposium we’re doing the same thing. Looking for our mother.”
Deimos’s head tilted a little to one side. “If you’re looking for her, that means she abandoned you too.
“Even if we were abandoned, we survived. We can go back to the way things were. We just need to find her.”
“I don’t need her.”
“Your Cultists think differently,” K
assandra said flatly. “Myrrine’s their next target.”
He remained silent for a time. “The Cult wants us because we are special,” he rasped. “But you know that now, don’t you?” He gestured back down toward the lion.
“Then you will not join me to find her?” she said, taking a step back.
“Nor you me?” he countered.
“I will not be part of the . . . Cult,” she spat.
A tense silence passed.
“Yet you cannot run from them. You are headed for Athens,” he said at last. “Or so your route would suggest. Well the Cult is already there. When you go, tell Perikles and his elitist scum they’re next.”
He backed away into a small cave opening, vanishing into a cloud of sulfurous steam.
“Alexios?” she called after him.
“Do not follow me, Sister,” his voice rang out from in there. “Be thankful I let you live . . . for now.”
SEVEN
The air over the harbor of Piraeus was tinged with the stink of sweating sailors and dung, the aroma of baking bread and roasting bream and the heady scent of wine. So many people, Kassandra thought. Voices called out from every direction, dogs barked, gulls screamed, people bartered and chatted, soldiers in blue and white trooped to and from the serried war galleys, while wagons heaped with grain sacks swayed as they rolled down from supply cogs and onto the white-flagged wharf.
She stepped off of the Adrestia and onto the quay, her gaze drawn like one enchanted by the sight of treasure, across the many heads, to the view some two miles inland: the famous city of Athens. A sea of red-tiled roofs, from which the acropolis rose like an island of marble, topped with breathtaking temples and monuments—the like of which she had never seen before, not in Kephallonia, not on her travels and certainly not in Sparta.
The Parthenon shimmered, the silvery stonework and lustrous paintwork blinding in the sunlight. The high, bronze statue of Athena glistened like flame, her face solemn and imperious, spear held like a sentinel.
The way to the city from this harbor was an odd thing: a narrow promenade that stretched for all of those two miles, like an arm reaching out from the city proper to clutch onto and keep hold of this nearest piece of coastland and its wharf. Stonemasons and slaves swarmed like ants, settling the final blocks into place atop strange walls lining either side of the promenade, their chisels tapping in an incessant rhythm.
“Come, Misthios,” Herodotos beckoned her as he set off along this promenade.
She glanced back to see Barnabas, Reza and a few crewmen from another boat engaged in a bet of sorts—that Ikaros could not snatch a ring from the finger of the other boat’s captain. Ikaros hopped from foot to foot, as if highly motivated to win the bet for the Adrestia men.
She smiled and left them to it. They went along the road, the long walls casting them in pleasant shade. An old beggar crooned at anyone who might listen: “Have we not learned of old Troy and of the Hittites and the Assyrians? Great walls bring mighty destroyers.”
Kassandra now noticed how crude the promenade walls were—hurried and ramshackle, composed of paving stones, rubble, broken pieces of architrave and the like, contrasting starkly with the shining marble splendor and fine battlements of the city proper which awaited at the far end.
Herodotos noticed her observations. “The Long Walls, as they are called, are ugly, yet beautifully expedient,” he explained. “They keep the Spartans—so unskilled at siege—out, and allow the grain to keep flowing in from the ships and to the city. You thought Perikles shrewd? Well, he is, in that sense. Sparta cannot break Athens, nor starve her.”
“That is Perikles’s strategy?” she mused. “Where is the glory in that?”
“Glory? Ah, ever the Spartan.” He laughed.
They reached a stretch of the promenade where either edge was thickly lined with shanty villages of shacks and tents, packed with grubby-faced, staring people. Soon, they were stepping over the prone forms of sleeping men, picking their way through packed crowds of families and whole communities. “I have never seen this many people crammed inside walls before,” she muttered.
“The countryfolk,” Herodotos whispered. “It is they who struggle most to follow Perikles’s wisdom. They had to abandon their homes out in the fields and valleys and come in here to live like paupers.”
The promenade steepened as it reached Athens proper, into wards of brightly painted villas, rising around the acropolis like worshippers. There was the sprawling agora, centered around a statue of Eirene, and of Ploutos—Peace and Wealth—an unlikely dream as things stood. This market hub was thronged with stalls, cattle, hawkers selling painted ostrich eggs, spices and one even holding up a blood-wet cow’s liver as if it were a prize. Everywhere, the streets were jammed with sweating bodies, the air thick with the odor of the unwashed, and the general hubbub sounded tense, hovering on the edge of argument. She noticed the sentries atop the high, fine battlements of the city’s curtain wall: Athenian hoplites, just like those she had faced and vanquished in the Megarid. They seemed occupied, pointing and discussing goings-on out in the countryside. What lay out there that caused them such concern?
She had absently wandered off to one side of the agora. Herodotos stopped her with a firm hand. “Not that way, Misthios,” he said, looking in the direction she had been headed with a mien of disgust. She saw the sad, shadowy compound resting at the far end of the agora. From within, a forlorn moan sounded. The cry of a man starved of hope. “That is the jail. That is where men are sent to be forgotten.”
The look on his face as he eyed the place caused her to shudder. But he quickly guided her in a different direction, affecting a cheerful smile. “No, this way. Up, onto the famous Pnyx, Misthios.” Herodotos led her toward the white-marble stairs that led up to the acropolis heights. “For that is where we will find our answers.”
The steps themselves were lined with guards and people too, bickering, arguing among themselves. The squabbling became louder—like a drone of hornets—as they reached the plateau at the top. They were greeted first by the silent glare of the bronze Athena statue, Kassandra almost cricking her neck as she gazed up in wonder at the colossal monument. Next, in an open square under the half shadow of the Parthenon, the Assembly was in full sway. The whole thing seemed so un-Spartan, so alien to Kassandra: thousands of men dressed in expensive robes, many bald heads gleaming in the sun, waving their arms in the air, howling in protest at one another. No . . . at one man. One poor man standing upon a plinth.
“There is the man we seek,” said Herodotos. “Perikles, General of Athens.”
Kassandra gazed up at the man. He certainly was no king, dressed simply in a plain robe, with wings of gray hair, a neatly trimmed beard and a broad nose. Herodotos’s age, but he carried himself like one who had not let his body go to seed quite as quickly.
“How long will we carry this fraud upon our shoulders?” roared the loudest objector—a red-haired, younger man with dark eyes and a pointed beard, who strode around the plinth’s base, punching a fist into his palm with every stride, throwing an accusing finger up at Perikles every so often. “Just as in the Korkyraean standoff, Perikles again excels as the master of deliberation, of hesitation, of unsatisfactory compromise. He sees merit in injuring allies and emboldening foes.”
“And that one marching around him like a scalded pig is Kleon the demagogue. He tells the people what they want to hear, even if it is fantasy. For all the enemies Perikles has faced in battle and in debate, he has never quite come up against a foe like this.”
Kleon raged on. “He has stripped all the island cities of their fleets, extorted from them their silver, and now treats the treasury up on this mount as his own! Look at how he favors the building of the Temple of Athena Nike over the welfare of his people. Is that not the behavior of a king?” He spat the word as if it were poisonous. When the people erupted in agreement, Kleon flicked
his hands up as if to fan the flames, nodding and yelling himself.
“I want the temple works to continue to maintain morale,” Perikles replied calmly once the clamor settled. “I seek to build no king’s palace here. Did I not order the stripping of gold from the villas—mine included—and shrines to fund our fleet?”
Kleon’s answer was merely a derisive snort as he sought to change tack. “Our fleet? Our mighty fleet which drains the treasury with its pitiful efforts—no more than nibbling at the coastline of the Peloponnesians? Following your calamitous efforts in the Megarid, you avoid true, noble battle on land, while our farms and our ancestral homes are reduced to nothing. We, born of the soil, must now watch it turn to ash.”
“To ash?” Kassandra frowned. Herodotos noticed, placed a hand on her shoulder and guided her gaze around, to look out from the acropolis and over the summer haze of the Attikan countryside. There, in the buckling heat, she saw the sheer silvery mountains that dominated most of the land, but in the precious stretches of flat, arable ground, she saw terrible things. She blinked twice to be sure her eyes were not deceiving her. They were not. In place of what had once been estates and granges of wheat, orchards of lemons and olives, there were black stains of fresh ash and recently toppled marble and brick. Dotted out there were patches of red—like pools of blood. Then she saw what they truly were.
Red-cloaked Spartans, camped and blocking landward access to the city. Watching, waiting, their spears winking in the glaring sun. Conquerors of the countryside now just seeking a way to beat the walls and overrun the city. Stentor? she mouthed, wondering if he was out there, leading the siege in place of the Wolf.
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