Euripides opened his mouth but said nothing, nodding shyly instead.
Aristophanes blared on exuberantly with a glowing review of his own dramatic works, while Sophocles shifted and shuffled behind him, trying to make eye contact with his lover. But Aristophanes was set on having Euripides for himself, it seemed.
“All three love each other really,” said a light voice behind Kassandra.
Kassandra swung around. Nothing.
“Down here,” the voice continued.
Kassandra dropped her gaze to waist height. A doe-eyed girl stared up at her, biting her lip, face wrinkled with guilt and a dash of defiance.
“Phoibe?”
Phoibe threw her arms around Kassandra’s waist. “I missed you terribly,” she wailed into Kassandra’s stola. “After you left, Markos looked after me well enough, but then he found out about the eye. He convinced me to lend it to him so he could invest it, and promised to double its value.” She sighed.
“Phoibe, you didn’t . . .”
“He lost it all.”
Kassandra’s teeth ground. “Of course he did.”
“He was distraught for days on end. It was only new and more dreadful business ideas that brought him back to his usual self. He wanted to steal a herd of cattle from the estate north of Mount Ainos. It was a ludicrous plan that involved me wearing a cow suit.” She shook her head. “Anyway, it has been a year since you left, and I knew I had to come in search of you. I sneaked aboard one of the supply ships bringing timber to the Piraeus harbor. I now work for Aspasia, wife of Perikles. I am a servant, yes, but at least I don’t have to wear a cow suit. I knew you would come here eventually. Everyone does, they say. Tonight, when I saw you, I . . .” She fell silent, her eyes brimming over with tears. Kassandra held her tight, kissing the top of her head, enjoying the familiar scent of her hair, stamping down on the deeper wells of emotion that tried to rise from her heart.
“Tell me why—why did you not return to Kephallonia,” said Phoibe, “even just to let me know you were well?”
“Because the quest I set out upon has grown horns, tentacles and talons.” Kassandra sighed. “My mother lives, Phoibe.”
Phoibe’s eyes grew moonlike. “She lives? But you told me—”
Kassandra placed a finger over her lips. Phoibe was one of the few who knew everything. “I told you what I thought was true. I was wrong. She lives. Where, I don’t know. That is why I am here. Someone here tonight might know.”
“Aspasia will help you,” she said confidently, straightening up. “Everyone here knows something, but she knows nearly everything. She is as bright and shrewd as Perikles himself. Brighter, even, say some.”
“Where is she?” Kassandra asked, seeing no women present.
“Oh, she is here.” Phoibe smiled knowingly.
Thucydides and his military men called Phoibe over, waving their empty wine cups. Phoibe rolled her eyes then hurried over to tend to them.
Kassandra moved to the edge of the room, rested a shoulder on the edge of a doorway and tried to work out who to approach next. From behind the door—locked—muffled voices spoke. Her ears pricked up and every half-formed word she heard was like a shiny coin landing in her purse. Anything, she willed herself to hear, even the smallest clue.
“Wider, wider. Yes . . . yes!” A squeal of delight. A sucking noise and then a popping sound, quickly followed by a gasp of pleasure and a joint cry of delight from a group of voices. Instinctively, she jolted upright, as if the wall itself were part of this debauched tryst. The door rattled from the force of her movement.
Footsteps, then the door swung open. A golden-haired vision stood within, chiseled and young, standing proud. He was pale-skinned and blue-eyed, wearing just a leather cord around his neck and a diaphanous silk scarf around his waist. Standing proud in all senses, Kassandra realized, cocking her head to one side then looking up again. Behind him, the room glowed with the light of a few oil lamps and weltered with sweet incense smoke, steam from a sunken bath and the heat of naked bodies. Men and women writhed on the beds and couches, all across the floor, under the table. Glistening buttocks and bouncing breasts—all of varying standards, moans of pleasure and tangles of limbs.
“Ah, another participant?” the golden-haired man grinned.
“Possibly,” she said, seeing an opening.
“Alkibiades. Perikles’s nephew.” He bowed, taking and kissing her hand, his eyes drinking in her body’s every contour.
“I’m looking for a woman,” Kassandra said.
Alkibiades’s grin widened and he extended a hand, gesturing toward a voluptuous older lady who was sitting on her own by the side of a sunken bath. The woman shot Kassandra a lustful glower, running her tongue across her perfect teeth, her raven hair spilling in coils across her shoulders as she slid her legs apart.
Kassandra arched an eyebrow. “No, that’s not what I meant.”
“A man then?” he suggested, his waist scarf twitching.
“It depends on what that man can tell me.”
“I can tell you anything you’d like to hear. Come, come.” He beckoned her in.
Kassandra set down her wine and water kraters and stepped inside. “I seek a woman called—”
Alkibiades shot a hand across her front, like a barrier, halting her and swinging the door closed with a click. With his other hand, still across her front, he traced her breasts. She balled a fist, feeling a strong urge to break his jaw as she had done with the opportunistic Spartan in Stentor’s camp . . . but then she saw the glint of opportunity.
She relaxed her fist, stepped toward him and pressed her lips to his. He chuckled softly as they kissed, his lips hot and wet, his tongue venturing into her mouth. He wrapped his muscle-bound arms around her and she felt him guiding her toward a rare free couch, but she halted him with a hand on his broad chest, pulling back, knowing she had the fish on the hook. “I’m looking for a woman who fled Sparta a long, long time ago,” she said.
Alkibiades whimpered, face still contorted for more kissing, eyes still half-closed. When he realized the tryst was on hold until he answered, he shook his head as if to clear away the haze of desire. “Fled Sparta? No one flees Sparta. And alone?” He blew air through his lips. “But, let’s pretend she did. Come to Athens without a male chaperone and she’d be arrested. Thebes, Boeotia, all the rest it would be the same. If she was smart, she’d go to the one place where women can be free and independent.”
Kassandra stared at him, her hard eyes demanding the rest.
“Korinthia,” he said. “The Hetaerae of the temples are the heart of that city. Aye, they lie with men for money and gifts, but only because it is the will of the Gods. They are strong, free . . .” His eyes grew distant, his lips quirking with some debauched memory. “Imaginative.”
She clicked her fingers a few times in front of his eyes, breaking the spell.
He shook his head. “Anthousa is the one you should speak to. Korinthia is in her care as much as Athens is in Perikles’s . . .” He sighed, glancing over her shoulder at the door. “For now, anyway.”
Outside, she heard a muffled voice. Someone speaking in strained, panicked tones. Herodotos?
She stepped away from Alkibiades, deliberately brushing his groin scarf. “Thank you, Alkibiades. Perhaps when next we meet I can show you a thing or two.”
He looked her over once more with a sigh, realizing now that she would not be his conquest.
“If you see Sokrates out there, send him in, will you? I’ve had my eye on him for an age, and he keeps wriggling out of my grasp with his words—he’s like an oiled cat.”
She slipped from the orgy room and back into the andron. No Herodotos. She swung her eyes in every direction. That was when she saw him instead. He was no different from the others in his appearance: dressed well if simply in an exomis and leather sandals, mutedly
chattering with Thucydides’s companions. He wore a squared beard, his thin, greasy, dark hair swept back without a parting. She would have thought nothing of him, had she not noticed the one misted eye . . . and the markings on each wrist: jagged, pink scars—only recently healed over. Her mind flickered with images of the last gathering she had attended—a far darker affair—and the masked cur who had sliced his own skin at the snake statue to give an offering of blood.
Do not let the fangs grow dry, go on, give offering . . .
Frozen with indecision for a time, she watched him. Did he know she was here? Was he here to attack Perikles? Phoibe, what about Phoibe? Her heartbeat grew rapid, like a runaway horse. She backed away into a corner of the room, pouring herself a full cup of wine from a krater. Let them gasp at how I drink it unwatered, she scoffed inwardly. I need this. She raised the cup to her lips, when a hand caught her elbow.
“Pretend to drink, but do not,” a voice said, soft but strong. “Hermippos laced that wine with poison. Drink it and you will be unconscious within a trice. Two things will happen after that. You might never awaken—and that would probably be for the best—or you will come to in a black cave somewhere, chained, at the mercy of Hermippos and his ilk.”
Her flesh crept, but she did as the voice said, “sipping” on the wine. Hermippos’s odd-eyed glances over toward her continued like a slow, steady heartbeat. When he saw her “drink,” the dimples above his beard deepened and a look of great satisfaction spread across his face.
Kassandra stepped behind a polished, red-veined marble column, into a colonnade of shadow. There, hidden from the eyes of the room, she turned to the voice. A woman in a purple stola and a golden pectoral. She was older than Kassandra, a beauty too. She wore dark tresses of hair piled atop her head, her face powdered and painted. Although her lips were marked in ochre with a kink of a smile, Kassandra saw how they were in fact set straight, humorless. Her eyes—like dark, inky wells—searched Kassandra’s, probing deep within.
“Aspasia?” she whispered.
Aspasia nodded gently. “Phoibe told me you might need my help. Well now you have it. Hermippos is here and so you can guarantee that so too are more of them. He’ll quickly realize that his poison hasn’t worked, and whatever gambit they have as a backup plan will befall you next. You need to leave this villa, leave Athens . . . now.” Her words were soft and gentle, but at the same time hard as a smith’s chisel striking stone.
“But I came all this way to speak with these people. I seek my mother’s whereabouts, yet still I have gathered only a few loose pieces of advice: to speak with a healer in Argolis and a temple prostitute in Korinthia. Perhaps tomorrow I will leave but tonight I must speak to—” Her words tapered off as she saw—down an unlit corridor—a pair of shadows moving into place, filling that passage like sepulcher doors.
“Die tonight and your quest is over,” Aspasia hissed, grabbing her by the biceps. “Go with what you have. Find out what you can, then return here at a safer time.”
She glanced down the corridor in the other direction. There, two more shadows moved into place.
“Come with me,” Aspasia whispered, guiding her speedily into a small antechamber and closing the door. She moved over to a panel in the wall and cranked the lever beside it. The panel slid away, revealing a web-draped stone stairway that vanished down into the acropolis’s bedrock. “This passage leads to the lower city. I have a man waiting there. He will guide you safely back to the Piraeus docks.”
“But Herodotos—”
“—is already with my man.”
“And Phoibe—”
“Will be safe here,” Aspasia barked, shoving her into the tunnel. “Now get to your boat and put to sea . . . Go!”
EIGHT
The masked circle talked quietly. The lone lamp in the center cast their shadows on the chamber walls: titanic, crooked, inhuman. “Deimos has served his purpose. He is strong, yes, but he thrashes like a roped bull. Where is he now? None have seen him since he left the Cave of Gaia, when he smashed one of our number’s faces to a pulp.”
“He is far more valuable than the one he killed,” another snapped. “He will return to our heel when we call him.”
Footsteps echoed through the cave. Each of them looked up. Their masks were already locked in unsettling grins, but behind them, each of the Cultists grinned for real as the old messenger came in and slid to one knee, panting.
“It is done?” a Cultist whispered. “News from Athens. The sister has joined us . . . or she is dead?”
The messenger looked up, his wide, age-lined eyes giving away the answer. “She escaped,” the old fellow croaked. “She fled Athens on her ship. Hermippos and the other four of your number who were there to intercept her gave chase aboard two Athenian galleys but . . .” He stopped to gulp. “The sister’s galley was like a shark, smashing one boat in half and setting the second ablaze.”
The Cultist who had spoken stared at the old messenger for a time. All heads turned to the gaps in their circle. “So she has sent five of our members to Hades?” he said with an edge of respect.
The messenger nodded. “All aboard those galleys perished.”
The Cultist stepped forward, nodding and tapping a finger to the lips of his mask in thought. “You have done well, old man,” he said, cupping the messenger’s jaw in one hand. “You did as you were asked without fault. You whispered not a word of who you were working for, I trust?”
The old man nodded pridefully.
“Excellent work.”
He gently placed his other hand on the back of the old man’s head, then twisted it all the way to the right . . . then even farther. The messenger’s head locked up and he yelped. “What . . . what are you doing?” But the Cultist’s hands grew white, shaking with effort. The old messenger slapped and clawed at the masked man’s hands, but the Cultist strained and strained until, with a crack, the messenger’s head snapped around to face backward. The Cultist stepped back. The messenger’s head loosely rolled back to the front and then lolled—the neck hanging at a sickening angle and a shard of sheared vertebrae poking at the underside of the skin. The body flopped forward as the Cultist turned back to his circle.
“The sister’s capture has only been delayed. Where is she headed now?”
* * *
• • •
The Argolid hinterland shimmered in the summer heat. All Argives with their wits about them were indoors, sheltering in the shade of their homes or under trees. Some, however, could not afford to pass up this chance to be here at the broad bay, not while he was here. A man, slight and bald with a single surviving lock of brown hair curled at the front of his pate, walked among the hundreds who sat or lay: simple countryfolk, heads propped on their robes or on rocks, weeping, moaning; soldiers of Sparta and of Athens, clutching grievous wounds, heedless of the proximity of their foes; mothers cradling silent babies, praying, wailing. He hitched the folds of his purple exomis, set down his wicker basket and crouched by one youth—an apprentice carpenter, he guessed, going by the cuts and callused whorls on his hands. The youngster gazed into the sky, pale and lost, his lips moving slowly, trembling. His face was dotted with red sores.
“My mother and my dog wait on me back on the island of Kea. They said you would fix me,” the youngster whispered. “Travel to Argolis and the bay near Epidavros, they said. The great Hippokrates is there. He can heal anyone—bring the dead to life again.”
Hippokrates’s face creased in a tortured smile. The lad had all of the symptoms.
“All the way here I dreamed of only one thing. Of returning to them, of holding Mother in my arms again, of kissing my dog on the head, letting him lick my face.”
Hippokrates’s vision blurred with tears. There was no way home for this lad, not at this stage of the sickness. All that awaited him was a slow, horrific slide into the Ferryman’s clutches. “Here, lad,” he said,
stroking the boy’s hair and holding a small vial to his lips. “Here is the cure.”
The lad shook with the effort of raising his head, then drank it gladly. Hippokrates stayed there, stroking the boy’s head, whispering comforting words to him about the journey home, about his mother and his hound. Hours passed, and the henbane numbed the boy’s body, easing his suffering. But it was no cure. Eventually, the lad’s eyes—brimming with fondness—slid shut forever.
He stood, the invisible burden on his shoulders another man heavier. All around him, dozens reached out, moaning weakly for his attentions, many with the same symptoms as the boy. So few among them could be saved, he realized. But I have to try. Please, he raged inwardly, glancing up to the skies, let me find a cure. The Gods did not answer.
He turned toward a woman whose bones showed through her sagging skin, and made to move toward her, when a pair stepped across his path and halted there like gates. He knew instantly they were not patients—neither war-torn soldiers nor countryfolk riven with the strange sickness. In their eyes he saw not hope of salvation but cold malice, glinting like jewels. One, his shoulder-length hair held back from his brow by a bronze circlet, smiled—the expression massively at odds with his eyes.
“Hippokrates,” he chirped. “We were surprised when we didn’t find you at the sanctuary inland. Is that not the place where all healers should practice?”
“Healers should practice where there are sick to heal,” he replied calmly.
The pair shared a look. He knew there and then who they were, even before he saw the lone figure watching from a hillside inland. A woman, black-haired with a white streak near one temple, her expression wintry.
“Why don’t you come with us, Hippokrates,” said the second man—a fellow with a head like a misshapen turnip. The hard look that followed underlined that it was not a question.
They led him away from the bay and inland, toward the hill. The track took them through a low dell, ringed with poplars and tinged with the musty odors of ferns and fungi, frogs croaking as they went. Charged with hubris, he had dismissed Perikles’s warnings about coming back here alone. Sokrates had implored him too. Take an escort! But to bring even a knot of active Athenian hoplites into this land would have been to spread the war here to this land—Argolis, a treacherous, age-old enemy of everyone, perched on the shoulder of Spartan lands and spitting distance across the Saronic Gulf from Athens.
Assassin's Creed Odyssey (The Official Novelization) Page 13
