“The assembly gathers tomorrow,” said Sokrates, coming over to Kassandra’s side. “This play will show the people Kleon’s cynical ways, and that he is no champion or hero. His reputation will be left hanging in ribbons.”
She noticed his sideways gaze resting on her.
He arched one eyebrow and smiled. “I can see words burning behind your lips. Say what you feel.”
“Destroying his reputation alone is not enough,” she mused. “We cannot merely wound him, for he has the means to wreak a terrible revenge. We must destroy him utterly.”
“Exactly,” Sokrates said, his smile fading.
“Then my part in this affair will be on the stage of battle,” she said, standing straight, looking to Barnabas.
“The Adrestia is ever ready. We await your command, as always, Misthios.” Barnabas half bowed fondly.
SEVENTEEN
A hot wind furrowed Brasidas’s hair as he rested one foot on Amphipolis’s sun-bleached southern parapet, staring across the parched grass outside. The River Strymon forked around the city’s northern walls, and a hill lay an arrow shot to the south. The morning before, the hill had been a pleasant, quiet hill and no more. Then Kleon’s boats had arrived at Eion harbor, a small Athenian-held dock where the Strymon spilled into the Aegean. Now, the hill was capped in the silver, white and blue of first-class Athenian hoplites. Thousands and thousands of them. Ironclad riders and a sea of allies too. They sang bold songs, mocking the Spartans’ defeat at Sphakteria. The chorus was unending, humiliating.
“There are too many of them,” said Clearidas, his deputy.
Brasidas saw from the corner of his eye the jumble of men down inside Amphipolis’s walls: the army he had been granted to take and hold this vital northern city. The one hundred and fifty Spartiates stood like statues near the gatehouse below. But the rest? The Helots had served him well in this northern campaign—standing their ground and attacking bravely, but never against a foe such as this. They wore their dogskin caps in place of helms, and shabby brown capes instead of Spartan red. He glanced to the north, across the River Strymon, seeing nothing but a warping band of heat. The Thrakians lay somewhere out there. Woe betide Hellas should the red-haired bastard on that hill win this land and throw open the doors to them. But the darkest danger stood with Kleon on the hill. The beast who had almost killed him at Sphakteria.
Deimos. The invincible dread.
“What are we to do?” Clearidas pressed. “We have little grain left, and Kleon knows this.”
“What can we do?” Brasidas replied. “On one of the rare occasions when the Athenians dare to face us in the field, we have not the means to meet them. I value every Helot in my ranks as much as any one of the Spartiates . . . but they will be massacred if we face those Athenian elites on the plain in pitched battle. Our only option is to wait, and to pray that the Goddess Tyche will shine favor upon us.”
Clearidas left him and went off to address and encourage the men. Brasidas stared at the huge army outside the city, and felt the strangest, most un-Spartan of emotions.
Fear.
* * *
• • •
The sun burned on the back of Kleon’s neck, and the saddle had turned his buttocks numb. But it would not do for him to dismount and be on the ground at the same level as the wretches around him—at the same level as Deimos. He eyed the champion, standing nearby on the hill’s brow. I do not need you, dog, he mused. All the way here on the galleys, the soldiers had cheered Deimos’s every appearance from the cabin. At Eion harbor, they had sung songs of his heroics at Sphakteria. Yet most shrank as he passed them. Fear and respect, that glorious blend, Kleon seethed, the hand beneath his cloak clutching in futility at thin air, forming into a fist and shaking. Well, when battle comes, perhaps you will find the greatest honor, Deimos—he smiled, the clutching hand settling around the upper limb of his bow—to fight as a hero . . . and to die in the fray.
Just then, an explosion of laughter rolled across the hilltop. Behind his foremost, serried ranks, the allied hoplites from Korkyra had set down their spears and shields and were drinking water and sharing bread. One among them pranced in circles around another. “Look at me! Look at me!” the prancing one chirped. More laughter. Hot fingers of disgrace crawled up Kleon’s neck. The play . . . the damned play! Rumors of the goings-on back in Athens had reached them that morning in Eion. He had heard whispers, seen men’s laughter-red faces quickly turn away from his. One messenger confirmed it: in his absence, Perikles’s orphaned rats had crawled from their holes and spread a plague of lies about him to the people. Well, he seethed, I will send word to my powerful friends back there, and they will . . . The train of thought halted when he thought of the last Cult gathering. He and one other masked figure. The rest? All dead. When I return, I will have the rats hung from the city walls by their ankles. The crows will peck out their eyes.
The reenactors were in full sway now. His chest stung with anger, but now was not the place to deal with them, in full view of the rest of the army. They would respect punishment, yes, but not the horrible death he had in store for the offenders. He thought of his dogs back in Eion, and glanced south to that small harbor. Those hounds would feast upon these actors’ open bodies, while they still breathed.
“General?” asked one of the Athenian taxiarchs, snapping Kleon from his dark thoughts. “What say you? Do we assault the city walls?”
Kleon eyed Amphipolis, and the lonely figure of Brasidas watching him up on the city walls. Some of his officers had claimed the Athenian hoplites were growing restless, and whispering that after so many years of bombast against Perikles’s conservative strategy, now the great Kleon was afraid to attack what was no more than a shower of Helots. A hot spike of pride shot through him, and he made to grab his sword, imagining hoisting it aloft and booming out the order for the advance—a heroic moment that would be talked about forever, trampling the irksome gossip of the play . . .
“Because I’m not so sure we should,” the taxiarchos added. “See the trees beyond the city—there could be horsemen in there. Remember the carnage the Theban riders wreaked at Boeotia? If such a force was to fall upon us here then . . .”
Kleon felt his guts twist and turn, and a loud gurgle of distress rumbled from his abdomen. He heard little more of the taxiarchos’s advice. “Send scouts to reconnoiter the woods. Establish a watch up here. The army will return to Eion.”
Grumbles and gasps of frustration rose from the Athenian ranks. Kleon’s neck burned with indignation. “We will return tomorrow,” he howled. “By then the Spartans will have had another day of dwindling bread and growing dread. Tomorrow, we will parade their heads on our spears. Tomorrow . . . for victory!”
The speech stirred a few cheers, but the barked orders of the many officers quickly drowned it out, as they shouted for their regiments to turn and descend the hill’s southern slope. A thunder of boots rose from the hilltop as the Athenian army shuffled around, turning away from the city of Amphipolis, kicking up a thick plume of dust. Kleon saw the Korkyraean allies forming the left wing of the pivoting force. In theory they were supposed to be leading the march back to Eion. Yet they were slow and shambling, out of line—some still snatching up their helms and spears, putting corks back in their drinking skins. His fury rose like a burst of molten bronze.
“Move!” he roared, heeling his horse over toward them, drawing a wooden baton to whack the slowest of them on the back of the head.
* * *
• • •
Brasidas felt the hot wind fall still at that moment. “They withdraw?” he whispered to himself. Through the dust-obscured sunlight he saw the shambolic maneuver. Memories of childhood in the Agoge exploded across his mind: of the tacticians teaching him and the other boys how to identify a weak spot in an enemy force. Backs and flanks, the hoary old expert had implored them, arranging lines of polished pebbles on the dir
t floor to demonstrate. His neck lengthened and a shiver scampered up from the base of his spine and across his scalp.
“Spartans,” he boomed down to his hundred and fifty. “Be ready.”
They stiffened, holding their spears aloft. “Aroo!”
“The shame of Sphakteria has burned in my heart for too long. Is it not the same for you?” he roared as he sped down the battlement steps to come before them. They thundered in agreement, beating their spears on their shields.
He turned to the mass of Helots, led by Clearidas. “And you, brave warriors, throw off your dogskin caps, take up your spears and prepare to stride with us . . . into eternity!”
* * *
• • •
The Adrestia sliced into the sands of the bay by the mouth of the River Strymon, halting with a violent judder. Kassandra leapt down into the coarse sands. Silence reigned. Until she heard a distant sound, carried on the hot breeze: a low groan of timbers. Gates swinging open, and the colossal roar of men. She looked up the long, low ridge—a grassy wall blocking her from the source of the sound. She sped up the slope, slipping in the scree, skin slick with sweat. Ikaros circled and shrieked madly, already high up there and seeing it all. When she came to the ridge’s brow, she staggered to a halt, struck by a hot blast of wind and frozen by the sight ahead.
A round hill dominated the flatland. Down the southern slopes, the Athenian army washed in a perilously loose formation. Streaking around the hill’s faraway eastern side was a tiny knot of red-cloaked Spartans, and she knew at once who led them. Yet the small Spartan force was dwarfed by the Athenian army.
What are you doing, Brasidas? she mouthed. You know you cannot win this fight.
But when those 150 smashed into the unprepared Athenian left, they gouged deep and without mercy. With a thunder of shields and clatter of spears, a din of screams and a crackle of breaking bodies, Brasidas’s Spartans laid waste to the Athenian left, pinning the center too. It was like that vision at the Hot Gates: Brasidas leapt and spun among the enemy, he and his comrades cutting them down in scores, but she knew he could not win due to sheer lack of numbers. When the Athenian trumpets blew, she saw Kleon’s right swing in to support the stunned left, and felt a great sadness rise within her, knowing this was it for Brasidas.
But then new Spartan pipes blared from the slopes of the hill’s obscured western side. From the haze, a great wave of armed Helots spilled into view. Kassandra shivered at the Helot war cry as they sped around the hillside and into the unprotected backs of the Athenian mass.
The hillside became a riot of flashing silver and geysers of crimson. Kassandra saw Brasidas now deep in the fray, the best Athenian hoplites crowding around him, Kleon himself yelling and cajoling them, demanding Brasidas’s head. The vision of the Hot Gates pulsed in her mind, the fall of the Spartan hero. No, not this time.
She lunged down the ridge, leaping over a brook and speeding to the edge of the fray. She ducked an Athenian spear, sliding through the blood-wet earth and leaping up, shoving a Korkyraean who tried to attack her aside. There was no enemy on the field today but Kleon.
A gawping head bounced across her path, and a shower of hot blood and innards slapped on her back as she ran. At last she came to the heart of the fray. Athenian champions hacked at Brasidas. She grabbed one foe by the shoulder, twisting him to face her then ramming the Leonidas spear up and under his ribs. A second lashed his spear across her belly, slitting the skin and coating her thighs in blood. She dodged his second strike then sliced off his hand. Now Brasidas pounced upon the momentary upturn in fortune to headbutt a third Athenian champion, then rip a fourth from face to groin. Swaying, shaking, face striped with blood, eyes and teeth white in a manic battle grin, he raised his spear to salute Kassandra. “I knew I had not seen the last of you! And your timing is perf—”
He spasmed, and then the tip of a lance burst through his chest with a gout of red.
“No!” Kassandra cried, reaching out.
The spear rose, taking Brasidas up with it like a fisherman’s catch. The general twitched, vomiting blood. Deimos raised the spear like a banner of triumph, his muscles bulging with the effort, before he cast Brasidas down.
Deimos stared at her. “So Kleon could not organize your execution?” he spat. “Perhaps he should have left it to me after all.” With that, he flew for Kassandra, drawing his sword and swishing it for her neck. She backstepped and threw up her half lance to cage the blow. Pressed together, the two blades shook madly—just like at Sphakteria—and both roared with effort, the battle raging on around them. “This is it, Sister,” Deimos rasped, his sword gradually edging her weapon toward her own neck. “One of us must die.”
She felt a shudder of strength and forced her spear back against his blade. Like an arm-wrestler turning a contest, she grew as he shrank, his blade beginning to slide, her spear tip now edging toward his neck. Deimos’s confidence began to crumble. She saw his eyes widen. Here she was again: on the precipice, with the chance to save her brother or let him die. And then he convulsed suddenly with a harrowing scream.
He fell. Kassandra backed away, staring at her lance. Had she done this? No, her blade had not touched him and had no fresh blood upon it. How then? Who? Then she saw the arrow jutting from Deimos’s back, saw him slump to his knees and slide to one side. The battle swallowed up his body in a frenzy of struggling men, thrashing limbs and whirling spears. Her eyes traced the path the arrow had taken—to a small wart of rock behind Deimos. Up there stood Kleon, his bowstring still vibrating, his face lengthening as if in disbelief. His lips flickered up into a crazed and fleeting grin of triumph, and then he hurriedly nocked a fresh arrow. But before he could even draw, Kassandra lurched toward him.
“Shit!” he squealed, fumbling the arrow, his arms becoming entangled in the bow.
As she speared for his chest, he threw himself to one side, tossing the bow down, then plunging into a reckless sprint through the battle. She raced in pursuit, fighting off a maw of gnashing spears just to cut through the chaos and keep sight of Kleon. Arrows whizzed and bullet-stones from slingshots spat overhead as she leapt over the groaning wounded, splashed through puddles of blood, vomit and loosed bowels.
Only when she reached the edges of the fray did the battle begin to thin. Eventually, the din of war was but a buzz behind her. All that mattered was the sprinting, flailing bastard ahead. He stumbled and rolled, his blue cloak rapping and snapping in his wake. She ran like a deer, feeling her soles scrape on bare earth and then wet sand. The crash of waves surrounded her as she chased Kleon onto the beach. Clumps of wet sand flicked up in his wake, then plumes of foam as he thrashed out into the shallows. He waded out until water rose to his chest, then halted, gasping, panting, head flicking back to her and then to the sea. His face was white as the moon. “I . . . I can’t swim,” he warbled.
Silently, Kassandra waded out to him. He raised his sword. She grabbed his wrist and twisted it until he dropped the weapon, then seized him by the collar of his robe, dragging him back to the ankle-deep shallows. There, she cast him to his knees. He began to wail and plead. She heard not a word of it. Planting a hand on the back of his head, she pushed him down, prone, driving his face into the sand. His arms and legs thrashed and muffled screams shook the sand. At last, he fell still.
She fell back to sitting, her breath coming in great rasps. The last and most dangerous member of the Cult was dead. Behind her, she heard the moan of Spartan pipes, the solemn cry of victory. “Aroo!” they cried, spears raised, forming a circle around the body of their adored leader. Brasidas was dead, but against all the odds, Amphipolis was saved, the north too.
From within Kleon’s robes, something floated out into the waves. A mask, she realized, notched on the brow from the strike of a sword. Ikaros came and settled on her shoulder as she watched it drift along the shoreline. The eagle shrieked at the shrinking piece of flotsam.
EIGHTEEN
They said that Brasidas died with the song of Spartan triumph in his ears. They said that he died with a wistful smile. Few had really seen his terrible end on the tip of Deimos’s spear. As the Adrestia peeled away from the bay of Amphipolis, Kassandra gazed over the hinterland, shining red in the dying sun, pocked with funeral pyres and trophy mounds. The hill upon which the fray had turned was clear of bodies now, but the dead would never be forgotten. More, in Brasidas, Sparta had a new hero. Already they talked of his polyglot army as “The Brasideans.” Even now those Spartans and the Helots were camped together—for once classless and brotherly in victory.
Despite the victory, the voyage south was a somber one, with Barnabas and his crew subdued, spending the nights quietly drinking and chatting about their adventures with Kassandra. They stopped at Athens, where a new general had been elected. Nicias, championed by Sokrates and the set who had held on to Perikles’s principles in the darkest days of Kleon’s rule, had even opened talks with Sparta. A peace treaty was in the offing, some said—a fifty-year oath of harmony. It seemed fitting, Kassandra thought. Both Sparta and Athens had been ravaged by this war. Neither side had gained anything but an army of widows and orphans. She spent a moon in Athens, sitting by the graves of Phoibe and Perikles in silence before she set sail again, for home.
They reached Sparta in early August. Barnabas walked alongside her horse as she ambled north from Trinisa port and into the Hollow Land on a bright, late-summer morning. So much time had passed since the disaster at Sphakteria, since she had last seen Mother. It felt like that moment approaching Naxos, years ago. Did Mother even know she was still alive? Was she still well? Her heart thumped as they entered the Spartan villages. Helots stopped what they were doing and stood, staring at her.
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