“Is there something else?” Archidamos spat.
“My family was betrayed,” she said. A gasp arose from the Gerousia. “Sparta was betrayed. We’ve come to expose the traitor.”
Archidamos stared at her for a time. “Oh really? And who is this traitor? What is their crime?” He roared with laughter, rocking back on his throne to conjure more hilarity from the Gerousia too.
“On the island of Paros, I found evidence that one of Sparta’s two kings is allied not to the state, nor the Gods . . . but to the Cult of Kosmos. He goes by the name of the Red-eyed Lion.” She heard the hall fall silent, so still that even a feather falling to the floor would have been like the beat of a war drum.
Archidamos’s eyelids slid down a fraction, his gaze growing hooded. “That is a dark accusation, shamed descendant of Leonidas,” he growled. “You had best have proof of this, if you wish to keep your head.”
She threw him the scroll taken from the Cultists on Paros. Archidamos’s face paled, and his bloodshot eyes reddened further. “The markings of the Cult indeed. Still, this proves nothing.”
“Alone, it is worthless,” agreed Myrrine, stepping forward to her daughter’s side. “But then I traveled to Arkadia. There, I had another traitor confirm that there is a Cultist on the Spartan throne, and obtained another scroll with the same lion-head seal.” She held up the Arkadian document and shook it.
Archidamos trembled with ire. “Are you blind?” He held up his meaty hand, the hawk seal ring catching the light, then gesturing at Pausanias’s hand too and the crescent-moon seal. “There is no ‘Red-eyed Lion’ on these thrones!” he hissed, raising a finger for the Hippeis guards, who positioned their spears behind the two, ready to run them through, waiting on Archidamos’s finger to fall. “I should have done this the moment you first walked in here.”
“Wait! Wait!” Kassandra cried, throwing the Arkadian script at Archidamos. “Look at this second script.”
He caught it, hesitating on the brink of giving the order . . . then unrolling it.
“See the strange blotch upon it in the shape of a hand?” said Kassandra. “In Boeotia I was aided by a Helot who spilled the wine that stained that hide, whose hand made that mark . . .”
Archidamos’s bloodshot eyes rolled down to the dark stain on the document. The remaining color in his face vanished.
“. . . when it was being written by King Pausanias.”
All eyes swung to the younger king.
“Show me your secondary seals,” Archidamos said in a low drone.
“What is this nonsense?” Pausanias laughed. “Have them killed and be done with it.”
Archidamos glowered at his co-monarch, then lurched from his throne and grabbed him by the collar, lifting him to his feet like a toy. He grabbed the small silver chain around Pausanias’s neck and snapped it, dragging it from under the folds of the younger king’s robe and holding it up.
Every soul in the Kings’ Hall stared, aghast, at the lion-head signet ring dangling on the chain.
“You?” Archidamos growled.
“It was always him, my king,” Kassandra said calmly. “Hiding behind the guise of reason. Masked in daylight just as he is in the dark halls where he and his ilk meet.”
With a scrape of benches and feet, every single one of the Gerousia rose. Silently and solemnly, they shuffled in toward the two kings. Archidamos set Pausanias down. The younger king turned to the elders, then he backed against the ephors, who blocked any exit that way.
“You do not understand. She lies!” he said, turning to see the circle of vengeful faces around him.
“The evidence does not lie,” said one old man softly, drawing a cudgel from his belt.
“The state and the Gods demand that the Kings of Sparta must not be harmed,” Pausanias yelled, panting as the circle around him grew smaller.
“Oh, the Gods will understand,” said one of the ephors, stretching a thin cord between his hands.
Archidamos, at the circle’s rear, twisted to the trio of Kassandra, Myrrine and Brasidas. “Leave us. The matters of the past are now settled. The traitor will be a problem no longer.”
Kassandra felt a cold shudder of pity for Pausanias—despite everything—as they walked from the hall. As they stepped outside, they heard the most blood-chilling scream from within, before the Hippeis slammed the doors shut with a sepulchral boom.
Nearly all this time, she had been so sure Archidamos was the one. Pausanias’s un-Spartan eagerness to help them should really have been a warning, she realized. From the mist of memory, she recalled Sokrates’s wry line.
Things are rarely as they seem, Kassandra.
FIFTEEN
Kassandra hung over the bow of the Adrestia, watching the swell and the dolphins leaping alongside in the sparkling waters of the Aegean and Ikaros speeding along in time with the boat. Her mind combed over the autumn, winter and spring gone since Sparta had been rid of its poisonous king.
The autumnal and snowbound months had been spent exercising with Testikles in the gymnasium, running lap after lap of the track in driving blizzards. Barnabas and Reza helped where they could too, building a steep snow mound for him to race up and down. Yet one day they could not find him. Only when they heard a muffled, drunken song from within the mound did they realize where he was. They dug away the snow at one side to find him in a snow cave of sorts—really just a hole he had burrowed into. He was pickled to the point of oblivion, hugging a wineskin as if it were a baby.
“To teach young Spartans never to drink neat wine, they force Helots to get this drunk and make fools of themselves,” Kassandra explained to Barnabas as they dragged the champion by his ankles out into the silent snowfall. “Clearly, Testikles missed that lesson.”
Once Testikles had sobered up, Reza offered himself up as a sparring partner for pankration. Testikles showed flashes of brilliance, leaping, kicking, grappling and throwing the helmsman to the ground. Reza stood again, dazed, and the pair fell into a boxer’s pose, fists raised and ready. Herodotos, watching from the sidelines, chanted eagerly:
With impatient fury, in he goes,
Foot to foot, at his foes.
This is a Spartan’s noblest praise,
And to immortal glory he will be raised.
Testikles’s head swung to him, his crown of matted hair shuddering. “Hmm?”
“It’s a poem,” Herodotos replied with a sigh. “A famous Spartan poem.”
Reza’s fist whirled around and cracked the distracted Testikles’s jaw. He fell like a stone, then awoke, demanding neat wine to nurse his aching head. All groaned.
The freezing evenings were spent in the estate’s hearth room, Mother and Kassandra talking of the past, and of the strange lull in the war. No news of fresh battles. No word of Deimos. Perhaps it was thanks to the coming summer’s Olympics, and the truce that all in Hellas were sworn to obey while the games took place. It felt to Kassandra like that moment on the mountain, just before Alexios fell. A strange, pregnant bubble of respite . . . but one she knew could not last.
When the spring came, news broke that a large band of Helots had slain their masters and fled from Spartan lands, heading west. A messenger brought word that they had sought refuge on the island of Sphakteria, just off the coast. Worse, they had stolen arms and provisions. The runaway slaves’ boldness was a dangerous affront to the Spartan state; like a thread being pulled from the hem of a tunic, it had to be stopped lest the entire garment unravel. In an angry gathering, the ephors declared that a whole lochos would be dispatched under the command of Brasidas—fast becoming a hero of Sparta—to track down and capture the runaways.
While the Spartan regiments marched off to deal with this, the Adrestia set sail, almost unnoticed, carrying Testikles around the Peloponnese toward Elis, for the Olympic gathering. Herodotos chronicled every step of the champion’s voyage, while Barnabas was like a
boy, brimming with excitement for the many events the great Testikles was sure to win. In the end, the only trophy he secured was the unofficial title of “Greatest Idiot in all Hellas.” It happened just a day’s sail away from the games, when the drunken athlete had woken with a burning need to be oiled before they landed. Reza and Barnabas had suddenly found pressing tasks to attend to high up on the ship’s mast, while Herodotos had vanished into the cabin, locking himself in there. So Testikles had turned to Kassandra, a lopsided grin cracking across his face. “You will oil me?”
“Oil yourself.”
“But there are certain regions I cannot reach,” The other half of the grin rose. “Come on!” He laughed, spreading his arms wide . . . then lurching at Kassandra.
She deftly stepped out of his way, never expecting for one moment that it could go so badly wrong. The fool tripped on a coil of rope and pitched overboard. A mighty splash and a plume of water brought everyone to the boat’s edge.
Barnabas grabbed the coil of rope, ready to throw it down to the champion.
“Testikles?” he called in the boat’s wake.
Nothing.
“Testikles?” he cried again, looking ahead.
Nothing.
Then, the tip of a black fin broke the surface adjacent to the ship’s edge, before submerging again. All stared, aghast, as the water quietly blossomed red. A few air bubbles rose, then Testikles’s filthy loincloth floated to the surface.
Barnabas, heartbroken for his hero, fell to his knees, hands outstretched to the waves. “Testikleees!” he cried out in a hoarse and never-ending wail.
After that, the summer games had been a blur: days of explaining to the officials that Sparta would have no entrant, before their sneering and gleeful attitude goaded Kassandra into competing in Testikles’s place. At pankration, she bettered every man she faced and took the olive-leaf crown. At running, she was swift as a deer, losing out only by a whisker to Alkibiades—who seemed all too eager to celebrate with her in his usual way. At the discus, she threw well, beating the previous Spartan record, only losing out to an islander with the shoulders of a bear.
“Ha . . . ha!” Martial yelps drew her from her reminiscence of all that had happened and back to the present.
She turned from the boat’s rail to see Barnabas reenacting the pankration victory, swinging punches at thin air. Herodotos stood atop a pile of grain sacks, narrating excitedly. “And then she grabbed him by the waist. Threw him down.” Barnabas acted out every step and Ikaros screeched from the ship’s spar like an excited spectator.
Kassandra had given the captain her olive crown, and he had worn it day and night since they left Elis. She wondered if any in Sparta would appreciate it as much as him. Sparta. For once she thought of her homeland without the spikes of hatred. She gazed ahead along the coastline, seeing the port of Trinisa roll into view. Skiffs and rafts dotted the calm waters near this good stretch of Sparta’s coastline, men diving from the small vessels and surfacing with armfuls of porphyria shells, their bodies stained with the crustaceans’ famous purple dye. She set her eyes on the land and felt her heart ache for Mother, for home.
When she saw Myrrine on the jetty, her spirits surged. But when they drew close enough to see the look on her face, she felt the strange bubble of elation burst like a thrown amphora.
“What is wrong?” she said, stumbling from the boat and onto the pier. All around the pair, soldiers shouted urgently, angry, troubled.
Myrrine took some time to collect herself and stave off the tears gathering in her eyes. “Brasidas and his men arrived at Sphakteria and found that the armed Helots were not the greatest threat. Athenian regiments were already there.”
“A trap?”
“It seems so. But Brasidas sprung the gambit before it could snap shut. All through the summer, he and his men have battled to hold on to the island: ships groaning and circling to block the narrow bays, skirmishes on the island and on the coast of Pylos, fraught truces and talks which dissolved—every time—into angry exchanges and then battle again. The island runs red with blood. Brasidas is trapped there, but with his purebred regiment, he will not easily be beaten. Yet word has spread that Kleon has sent Athenian reinforcements to crush the Spartan brigade and secure the island. Kassandra . . .”
Kassandra saw something in her mother’s eyes and knew what she was about to say. “Deimos sails with the reinforcements.”
Myrrine nodded and buried her head in Kassandra’s chest. They held each other like that for a time, the sun setting, the peace over. She heard the soldiers’ frantic calls now. They were sending out the dye skiffs to find and summon the few galleys of the scant Spartan navy back to this dock. The ephors had refused to send another precious lochos in support of Brasidas, lest their homeland be left scantily protected. A band of Tegean allies was being summoned instead. One thousand men who might save the Spartan regiment trapped on the island.
Myrrine drew her head up and shook Kassandra. “I know what you’re thinking. I know there is no stopping you. If Deimos sails in support of Athens, then the Cult wants Athens to win, to slaughter the Spartans on Sphakteria. We cannot let it happen. Go, do as you must. I ask you only this: bring my boy back to me.”
* * *
• • •
Duplicitous warfare was not the Spartan way. Nor was it the way of any soldier in Hellas. But the great war had twisted the ancient rules of engagement. No longer did phalanx line up against phalanx in an honorable slash of steel. This was a new age of devious sieges—tunnels under city walls and countermines to ruin those tunnels and suffocate the diggers—of mighty contraptions like the great flamethrower, of deception, of lies, of desperation. Oaths lost their meaning and became tools of duplicity. All Hellas became a writhing bed of red-eyed beasts. And so it was on the isle of Sphakteria.
Stiff bodies of Spartan, Helot and Athenian lay twisted and unburied on the soil. The men of Brasidas’s Spartan lochos were like lions, whittled down day by day but never beaten, while Athenian galleys rocked up to the shores every moon, packed with fresh troops. Only in the last days of summer—when Brasidas and his men had been pushed into the island’s narrow northern peninsula—did the first relief boats from Sparta arrive. Ten triremes, brimming with Tegeans. The Adrestia sailed at their head.
It was night when they came, a sultry and stinking wind coming from the direction of the island. Kassandra crouched on the prow, Ikaros on her shoulder, both scouring the thickly wooded isle and the odd glow along its long spine. “Why does the island shine? There is no village there—just an old Spartan fort.”
Barnabas’s face lengthened. “Alas, Misthios, I fear the Athenians have learned much from their defeat at Boeotia.”
Kassandra blinked to moisten her dry eyes and saw it now: the glow was in fact an angry blaze. The pine and olive woods crackled and thundered with orange flame. The closer they drew, the more she saw: fire arrows streaked through the night sky like phoenix feathers. The missiles whistled and hissed, endless, countless, shooting from the isle’s northern shores and raining down on the small area inland—already ablaze. There were flame pipes too, breathing great clouds of orange.
“It is like the Gates of Hades,” Barnabas whispered.
She heard the distant and forlorn wail of the Spartan pipes, and recognized the tune—a call for a last stand, just as she had heard in that vision at the Hot Gates.
“We must be swift,” Kassandra urged the crew.
“We can’t approach directly,” Barnabas said. “The shores are awash with Kleon’s men. But we can draw close. Hold tight, Misthios.”
As he stalked away, Kassandra grappled a rope and braced. The Adrestia cut close to the island’s waist then sped north, parallel to the shoreline—dangerously close to the shallows, but using the overhanging cliffs as a screen from the Athenian-held coastal areas. The galley sped through a natural arch of rock and the
n the bluffs peeled away to reveal the Athenian efforts on one bay: a few hundred archers and a phalanx of some five hundred hoplites were stationed here. Only a fraction of the Athenian force was spread around the northern shores.
The Adrestia crunched onto the shingle bay just as the Athenians beached there noticed her presence, the other nine galleys coming to land alongside. “Take the shore!” Kassandra howled, leaping down onto the bay.
The Athenian taxiarchos jolted, seeing the landing enemy. He bawled at his men, who turned their blazing arrows around and upon the relief flotilla. A storm of blazing shafts spat forth. Kassandra threw up her shield as she moved, the Tegeans clattering into place beside her. They were brave and loyal, she knew, but there was something missing—they were no Spartiates. The aura of invincibility she had felt when she had fought alongside Stentor’s men was absent. It was down to her to inspire them.
The arrows whacked and spat down all around them. Tegeans slid away, shaking and clutching at the throat-piercing missiles. One ran, ablaze like a human torch, back into the shallows. The one beside her took a shaft in the eye and dropped like a sack of wet sand.
“Level spears!” she thundered, an arrow zinging from her helm. “Walk, in time.”
She felt the Tegeans draw courage from her steady, strong orders. They marched with her in a rapid lockstep. The Athenians stood their ground for a time. Then she saw one backstep. A moment later, the archers began to melt into the trees, knowing they could not hope to face Kassandra and the newly landed hoplites. Now just the five hundred Athenian spearmen faced the Tegean thousand. “Advance!” the taxiarchos bawled.
They closed the distance in moments, and the two forces met with a clatter of spears and shields, joining the chaos of screaming from inland and all along the shore. Kassandra prodded her spear into the shoulder of one man, driving him to his knees, pulling the lance clear then using it to shove another’s shield away. “Finish him!” she screamed at the Tegean by her side, who duly thrust his lance into the Athenian hoplite’s belly. The enemy fell in droves, and Kassandra felt their corpses grind under her feet as she led the push, driving them back into the woods. After a time, the Athenians broke out in a panic, more than half of them dead, the remnant fleeing. It was like great doors opening before her—or the Gates of Hades—as the way into the burning woods presented itself. She cried at her Tegeans, urging them uphill through tangled undergrowth and pitted ground. She saw silhouettes leaping and spinning through the trees in that fiery chaos, sparks blowing like rain. Spartans fought like wolves, some with their hair burned away, others with seared skin. One man fought with half his face a mess of blisters and weeping fire wounds. The Athenians who had pushed inland surrounded them like jackals—the numbers impossible. But when Kassandra saw Brasidas, just uphill, she knew she could not give up. The Spartan general spun on his heel to run an Athenian champion through, then he took the head of another with a deft flick of his spear, before ramming the lance hard into the belly of a third.
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