“Misthios!” he yelled, spotting her, his face black with blood, his grin wild, eyes wide.
“Hold your ground,” she yelled up at him. “We’ll clear a path back to shore for y—”
That was when the fire parted like drapes. Behind Brasidas, a shadow walked, head dipped. For a moment, she thought it was an avatar of Ares . . . and then the figure raised its head. Deimos?
“Brasidas, behind you!” she cried, rushing forward with all her strength.
Brasidas’s wild and confident mien faded as he swung to his rear. Deimos’s spear flashed up like a lightning bolt, and Brasidas’s shield crumpled under the mighty blow. With an adroit swirl, Deimos brought the lance streaking down. Brasidas’s spear swung to block, but he was too slow. In the scudding smoke, she saw the two shapes shuddering . . . then Brasidas toppling to one side. His body rolled off downhill through a carpet of blazing heather.
Kassandra staggered to a standstill, her feet where Brasidas had stood a heartbeat ago, Deimos before her. Her brother cocked his head this way and that, like a predator eyeing strange prey. His gold-and-white armor was streaked with black smoke and running with blood and his face was demonic, uplit by the flames. His expression flashed with madness and he leapt for her.
Kassandra threw up her shield to take the blow. His sword bit deep, breaking the bronze coating and crumpling the timbers below. She tossed the ruined shield down. Deimos’s spear lashed for her again. She parried and struck back. Sparks flew as they hammered blow after blow like this until, exhausted, she caught his next strike on the tip of her Leonidas spear. The pair strained, shaking, vying for supremacy. Around them, ancient trees groaned and fell over in great whooshes of fire and smoke. When she edged his spear slightly to one side, she saw Deimos’s confident glower waver for a moment. But it was like a fuel to his madness, and with a roar, he pushed back, swatting her lance aside. She rolled clear of his follow-up swipe and stood, backing away.
“You came here to die?” Deimos spat, striding toward her, spear trained on her.
She felt her heels meet the edge of the small hill and stopped.
“Do not make it so easy for me,” he growled. “At least put up a fight.”
“I came here to bring you home.”
She saw it again: the flicker of uncertainty in his face.
“That’s right. Mother wants you to come home . . . to Sparta.”
She saw a mist pass across his eyes now, as if the words had thrown him into the distant past. But the mist faded, and his lips curled into a mockery of a smile. “You don’t understand,” he said, jabbing a finger down at the smoldering earth, sweeping his hand around the blazing cage of trees. “Battle is my trade, and the fields of war my estate. I live only to take the heads of my enemies. This is my home . . . and your grave.”
She saw his body tense, saw him lunge for her, felt her knees soften into a crouch. She leapt clear of his strike and brought the lance around, the flat whacking him on the temple. Stunned, he staggered back from her, then crumpled in a heap.
She stepped forward, sinking to one knee, cradling him. When she touched his chest, his pulse thundered under her palm. “And now, I will take you home . . . to Mo—”
Her words ended when a terrible groan sounded from above. She looked up just in time to see a huge pine, roaring in a fury of flames, swing down upon her and Deimos like an executioner’s ax.
Blackness.
SIXTEEN
The blackness lasted for an eternity. And then she awoke to the crack of a barbed whip.
“Up, bitch! If you’re fit enough to mutter in your sleep, then you’re fit enough to walk for yourself.”
Her head ached and it felt as if she had not sipped water for a year. She felt herself being pulled upright from a stretcher of some sort, but she could not bear to prize open her eyes. A thick nausea rose from her belly and she longed to lie down again, but ropes were wrenched around her wrist, then yanked taut, hauling her along in a dazed shamble. She pried open one eye now: seeing the blinding daylight of what looked like Arkadian countryside—frostbitten, the woods golden. A great serpent of Athenian soldiers marched for miles ahead, along with a wagon train and a pack of mules. It was to one of these sumpter beasts that her wrists were roped. She noticed many other Spartan prisoners tied likewise. They wore rags and thick scars and burn welts, their hair filthy and tousled.
“Aye, bitch, you lost,” cackled the toothless Athenian slave driver.
She had no sooner looked at him than he lashed his whip across her back. She heard just a ringing in her ears, felt her jaw lock open in a soundless scream, one knee touch the ground, before the slave driver grabbed her by the hair and pulled her up. “If you fall again, I’ll hack off your legs and leave you for the wolves.”
By her side, she saw one of the Tegeans walking, roped like her. “We came close to saving the trapped men,” he whispered. “Had we arrived a little sooner, we might have succeeded. But the island was a death trap that night. Those who were not captured were left to burn alive. It was a shameful defeat for Sparta, and one that will echo over all Hellas. Where men once feared to even speak of the Spartans, now they will laugh and mock them.” He let out a long, weary sigh. “The worst of it is that Sparta offered peace in return for our release.” He gestured up and down the prisoner column.
“Peace?” Kassandra whispered. “Then why do we head north, away from Sparta.”
“Because Athens rejected the proposal. They say that Kleon whipped the people up into a frenzy, convincing them that now was the time to drive home the advantage, to abandon the last vestiges of Perikles’s defensive strategy and to crush Sparta under their heel like an insect.”
She closed her eyes. The Cult had the Athenian victory they wanted. They were back in firm control of the war . . . of the world. “You and your men fought well,” she said to the Tegean. “Your efforts will never be forgotten.”
“Memories won’t feed my wife and three girls,” he said quietly.
On they went in silence. Kassandra heard the familiar cry of an eagle at times, and she knew that Ikaros was tracking her, watching over her. Stay away, old friend, she thought. It is not safe.
After a month of marching—the Athenian army and the slave train camping with impunity in Spartan-allied territory as they went—they returned to Attika, crunching over the autumnal frost to march through Athens’s land gates to a storm of petals and singing. Now she understood the sheer magnitude of the defeat at Sphakteria.
All around the streets, Spartan shields were mounted like trophies. The lost shields of the fallen and captured at Sphakteria—whisked here before the prisoners themselves. The ultimate shame for the famous warriors of the Hollow Land. There were Tegean shields up there too, and the man beside her sighed in despair as he noticed this. “Eternal infamy,” he whispered.
The whips cracked as they were led through the city streets. The decay of the plague had long since been eradicated, she realized, seeing crowds where the heaped corpses had once been. Rotting vegetables whacked down on them along with showers of spittle and torrents of jeering and cursing. As they walked through the agora, a woman ran out from her house and hurled a bucket of still-warm sewage over Kassandra and those near her.
At the agora mouth, where the Long Walls led off to the coast and Piraeus harbor, naval crewmen waited, and were given groups of Tegean prisoners. “They’ll take us to the colonies,” the Tegean said. “To work us like dogs in the hot fields, our ankles chained. Or to live in the darkest pits of the silver mines—where men go blind and most kill themselves after a few years.”
She watched as the Tegean was dragged off with fifty other prisoners and driven like a mule down toward the harbor. Slowly, the many hundreds of prisoners were taken away. The slave handlers then approached her and the small cluster of Spartans remaining. He wagged a filthy finger at her. “You . . . I have a fine fat
e in store for you. Every day will be worse than the last,” he enthused.
But a hand rested on her shoulder. “Stop: the purebred Spartiates are to be kept here as prisoners. As a guarantee against a Spartan assault on the city. They will be billeted in the wheat-grinding houses and there they will work their fingers to the nub. But this one? She comes with me.”
“Yes, General,” the slave handler agreed, backing away and bowing obsequiously.
Kassandra felt a sudden rising of hope . . . until she turned around.
Kleon grinned at her, his red locks swept back and his beard combed to a point. His face was bent with malice, and she saw a shape under his cloak. The shape of a mask. “You’re one of them?”
“The darkest of them all,” he whispered.
Two pairs of guards’ hands grabbed her by the shoulders and a sharp blade dug into the small of her back. Purposefully, they drove her away from the harbor route and toward the other side of the agora. She eyed the shadowy, sorry jail.
Where souls are sent to be forgotten, Herodotos whispered from memory.
“No,” she croaked, fighting feebly. “No!”
* * *
• • •
Months passed in that cage of stone. She could see nothing of the outside—just the moving rectangle of sunlight that hit the floor from the jail’s tiny ceiling grille and crawled across the cell at an agonizing pace. She would stare for hours through the cell’s iron-bar gate, watching the hay on the floor of the corridor. Every so often, a breeze would steal in from the exterior door, gently stirring the strands of hay on the floor. Movement. Something.
The sounds of life were an even bigger torment, the bustle of the agora fading over the winter, then rising with the heat as spring came and then summer. Sweltering days passed where she saw nothing, nobody, just the daily opening of a wooden hatch on the exterior door and the appearance of a filthy hand setting down a bowl of thin wheat porridge and a single cup of brackish water onto the floor of the corridor, close enough for her to reach from her cell gate.
Kleon had explained nothing when he had cast her in here. He did not need to. She worked it out the moment she heard the lock clicking and the chains settling into place. She was to be a reserve, no more. A replacement, should the Cult need a new champion. Yet why would the Cult need to change anything? They had the world all but in their palm. But what was left of the Cult? Was it not now just Kleon and a handful of others? She had lost count of the number of those masked bastards she and Myrrine had killed in these last years, but of the forty-two she had witnessed in the Cave of Gaia, almost all of them had been slain.
They haunted her at night, when Athens fell quiet. She dreamed of their masked faces, standing around her filthy bed of hay, staring down at her, those wicked smiles unfaltering. By day, she tried to keep her mind at bay by leaping for the ceiling grille and grabbing the iron bars, then hauling herself up then lowering down, over and over, catching glimpses of clouds rolling by high above. Her shoulders, back and arms stayed strong and thick thanks to this, but she longed to run—to speed across the countryside, feel the wind on her face, smell the scent of summer meadows . . . anything but the shit-stink of the agora in summertime.
It was like a ray of sunlight when she awoke in the middle of one night to hear a new inmate being dragged into the adjacent cell. The stone wall meant she could see nothing of him, but she drank in the sound of every word as if each syllable was a treasure.
“Tell me where you found it. Where?” one unseen guard roared, underlining his last word with what sounded like a backhand slap across the new inmate’s mouth. The sound of teeth landing and scattering across the ground was followed by a dull whimper. “I . . . I don’t know. I was shipwrecked, and so I was lost. How can I tell you if I don’t know?”
“Well we’ll beat you into a pulp every day until you remember,” cackled a second guard.
When the guards had left, she whispered to the fellow. “Who are you?”
“Please, don’t speak to me. If they hear, they will come in and beat me.”
“Why?”
“Because they enjoy it. And to wring from me a secret I cannot give to them.”
“They will not hear us speaking. At night, the guards stand nearer the tavern end of the agora.”
Silence for a time, then: “I . . . I found something they seek,” he said.
“They—you mean the Cult?”
He seemed reticent. “Yes, the masked ones,” he croaked. “The Athenian guards act under their orders.”
“Why don’t you tell them what they want to know?”
“Because if they find the carvings, then the world will burn.” He caught his last word. “I have said too much.”
He fell silent for the rest of that night. Days passed, and each one began with the inmate’s being beaten by the guards. When the guards left, she tried to comfort him with simple conversation, but he would be too busy muttering to himself, chanting over and over.
The following day, Kassandra heard the guards beating him again. “Cough up your secrets, dog,” they sneered as they broke his fingers, one by one. Kassandra hugged her knees to her chest and closed her eyes, wishing it to be over for the poor man as quickly as possible. As the guards left, one called back at him: “It’ll be your toes tomorrow.”
He whimpered quietly to himself. “Dear Photina, I pray you are well, that Demeter blesses the soils of Naxos to keep you well fed, that Ariadne blesses the grapevines . . . Dear Photina, how I miss your touch . . . Sweet Photina, it has been years since last we were together, but . . .”
Kassandra’s eyes blinked open, realization dawning. “Your wife is Photina of Naxos?” she said, thinking of Barnabas’s brief love on the island.
Silence.
“And you are Meliton, the seafarer.”
Another short silence, then: “The guards told you that, did they? Are they paying you to question me now?”
“You spoke with Herodotos once,” she continued, “told him of the time you were shipwrecked on Thera . . . of the carvings there, the lost knowledge of Pythagor—”
Shhh! he hissed. “Very well, we can talk, but promise me you will not say his name aloud—for it will be the death of us both.”
They talked that day and into the evening, Meliton recounting the story of Thera, eulogizing Herodotos and reinforcing the historian’s fears that the lost wisdom be found by the Cult. That night, when they both fell asleep, her new friend was taken from her. The guards stomped into the adjacent cell in the darkness. She heard Meliton wail, heard them thrashing him, then heard the crunch of a stamping boot breaking his skull, the wet sputter of his brains bursting across the floor and finally the hiss of his legs trailing as they dragged his smashed corpse outside.
Isolation, once again.
As the seasons wore on, through heat and cold, she began to see the masked shades again. In her dreams as before, but this time in the waking hours also. Deimos too. They would stand and stare from the edge of her vision as she repeated thousands of sit-ups, leaps, squats and balancing exercises. Every so often, she imagined that she held the Leonidas spear in her hand, and she would swish around, streaking the make-believe weapon through the imagined ghosts, scattering them. This became such a habit that she took to laughing when she saw them, shrieking with delight when she made them vanish.
One morning, she awoke to the sound of scratching. A rat, she guessed. No, it was coming from up above. She squinted at the small rectangle of light in the grid overhead, seeing a feathery mass shuffling about up there. For a moment, her heart skipped a beat. Ikaros? But with a flurry of wings and before she could be sure it was him, the bird was gone, and a small object thumped down on her forehead. She yelped, then caught the small clay disk as it bounced. Her eyes combed the surface of the disk over and over, and the words inscribed there. Be ready, it stated. She looked up at the
grid again. For what?
On rolled the endless march of time, the masked visions taunting her. One day, the vision of Deimos appeared, alone at the cell gate. She pretended not to notice him for a time, before springing up, thrusting her “lance” at his chest.
He did not vanish.
“Sister,” he said.
The word echoed through the jail like a drumbeat.
She struggled to balance, still in that mock battle pose. It was the first word she had been offered in so long. He wore his white robes, but—for once—no armor.
“I have struggled to understand what you were trying to do back in Sphakteria,” he said.
“The last thing I remember,” she replied, her own voice sounding strange after so long without speaking, “was trying to save you.”
“The last thing I remember is your spear knocking me unconscious,” he replied instantly. “It wouldn’t be the first time you have cast me away to die.”
Assassin's Creed Odyssey (The Official Novelization) Page 25
