Spartans at the Gates

by Noble Smith

  As they got closer to the open gates they could see a group of traveling merchants who’d been stripped of their robes and tunics. The naked men had their backs to the wall and watched angrily while guards pulled their wares out of a cart and tossed them haphazardly into the dirt, searching for weapons.

  “I won’t let them strip me,” said Zana through clenched teeth.

  “I said not to worry,” repeated Chusor.

  “They can strip me if they like,” said Barka.

  When they got within twenty paces of the entrance a young guard approached and held up his hand for them to stop. Zana gripped Chusor’s arm, digging her fingernails into his flesh. The smith made a growl deep in his throat and yanked his arm away from her.

  “Hello, Chusor,” said the guard. “You can enter but these others must be checked.”

  Chusor was about to protest when the captain of the Guard—one of Chusor’s neighbors—strode over and pushed the young warrior aside.

  “I’ll handle this,” said the captain, his eyes riveted on Barka.

  “Hello, Damon,” said Chusor, and gestured toward Zana. “This is my cousin, come from Athens with her two slaves.”

  Damon flicked his eyes over Ji and Zana, then returned to staring at Barka. The eunuch batted his eyes and turned away shyly.

  “They’ll be staying at the smithy?” asked Damon hopefully.

  Chusor said, “Of course.”

  Damon ordered Ji to set down his burden and untie it. Then the guard made a cursory inspection of the contents, picking through the clothes, cooking pots, and dried food. When he was done he gave Chusor a friendly smile and a nod. “Go on in.” A moment later he called out, “I’ll be coming soon for that sword of mine—the one with the horse head pommel.” He flicked a lascivious glance at Barka.

  “I’ll have it in two days,” Chusor replied over his shoulder.

  After they’d walked through the gateway tunnel and emerged into the agora Barka said, “That man Damon felt my arse as I walked past.”

  “Damon has the sort of wife,” warned Chusor, “with very sharp fingernails.”

  Barka sniffed.

  “This city is not what I expected,” said Zana, looking around at the stately temples and public buildings—many of them made of the local black marble. “It’s beauteous.”

  “It would look better without all this rabble,” said Barka, turning up his nose at the makeshift homes of the refugees scattered across the open space. “Can we please get off this filthy street? I want to see Diokles.”

  Chusor pushed open the front door to the smithy and stepped inside. “Leo? Are you here?”

  “Coming!” shouted Leo. He appeared from the back of the shop moments later cleaning his hands on a rag. His face lit up with surprise when he saw Zana, Barka, and Ji standing in the front room. “Who’s this?” he asked with a pleasant smile.

  “My cousin Zana,” said Chusor. “From Athens.”

  “I didn’t know you had a cousin,” said Leo. “Pleased to meet you, Zana. My name is Leo.”

  Zana nodded slightly and cast her haughty gaze around the messy workshop.

  “Chusor didn’t tell me you were coming,” said Leo apologetically, reading the expression on her face. “I would have cleaned up if I’d known ladies would be coming.”

  Chusor pointed at Ji, who was wiping the sweat from his face with a dirty sleeve. “This is her servant Ji. And this other one here is Barka.”

  “Where’s Diokles hiding?” asked Barka.

  “He hasn’t come out of the storage room,” said Leo. “He’s been in there for days now. I’m worried he’s going to die in there. Do you know him?”

  “Lead me to him,” commanded Barka.

  Leo gave Chusor a questioning look but the smith nodded and said, “Take Barka to him.”

  Leo led Barka down the hall. Ji asked Chusor where Zana would be sleeping and the smith told him to take her things upstairs—to the master bedchamber. Ji lumbered up the stairs with his heavy burden.

  “Must that ugly Greek boy live here?” Zana asked when they were alone.

  “He’s my assistant,” said Chusor. “The lad is indispensable. I could give a fig if he had the face of a baboon’s arse.” He set Jezebel on the table and the pigeon immediately strutted about, inspecting every item with her sidelong glance.

  Zana took off her cloak, folded it neatly, and put it on the table. Then she tied her hair into a knot at the back of her head and set to work cleaning up.

  “You don’t have to do that,” said Chusor.

  “Who else will do it?” asked Zana. “I am not so proud as you think.”

  “I could bring a woman in to clean.”

  “No.”

  He could tell by the sullen look on Zana’s face not to argue with her. She had always run a neat ship and would not abide filth or clutter of any kind, even on a galley full of criminals and miscreants. He realized that he had never seen Zana doing anything domestic before. He wondered what her life had been like as a youngster—in the palace of her youth, before her father, a local ruler, had offended the Persian king and was strangled with a silken cord. Could she cook? Did she know how to weave? It was obvious she was ill-suited to life in a city, or a poky little home and workshop like this one. A woman of her grandeur needed the vast sea as a backdrop, and a trireme’s open top deck to prowl.

  “Stop watching me and do something,” she snapped and took a pile of dirty plates into the kitchen.

  Chusor went into the smithy and started going through the various items he needed to work on. He hefted a wooden torso used to display breastplates into a corner, then rummaged through the pile of swords until he found Damon’s weapon with the horse head pommel. He reckoned the man—a notorious lover of eunuchs—would come sniffing around sooner rather than later. But it was good to have a man like Damon in Barka’s pocket. A captain of the Guard could be a useful ally.

  He stubbed his toe on a heap of scrap iron lying on the floor and cursed every god’s name he could think of. He sat in a chair staring at the nail of his big toe, which had been bent backward. Blood oozed out.

  His eyes glazed over. There was just too much to do. How would he ever get it done? Especially with Diokles cowering in the storeroom like a scared cat. He ran a hand over his bald pate and sighed.

  And then he heard a familiar voice calling out joyfully, “You brought my little Lylit!” Diokles came running into the smithy with a laughing Barka clinging to his back.

  “Diokles!” shouted Chusor, amazed at the sight.

  Diokles spun around in a circle, beaming like a child. “You brought the sweet girl,” he said, “my little goddess—my Lylit.”

  Leo appeared in the room and he was laughing, too, pleased that his friend had emerged into the sunlight.

  “How did you do it, Barka?” asked Chusor.

  Barka merely shrugged his slender shoulders and gave Chusor a complacent grin.

  “Lylit told me how I would die!” said Diokles, exuberant.

  “Who is ‘Lylit’?” asked Leo.

  “It’s a Phoenician word for goddess,” said Chusor. “Diokles’s nickname for Barka.”

  “Lylit, use the inner eye and tell me I will die in the great Eyam,” continued Diokles, using the Helot word for the sea. “That means the Spartan masters will never catch me. I will drown instead! I am invincible in this place!” Diokles set Barka down and took the eunuch’s hand. “Come, Lylit,” he said. “I will show you the citadel.” And he led Barka out of the house.

  “You could knock me over with an acorn,” said Leo. “Well, I’m glad he’s out of there. But do you think Diokles really believes that nonsense?”

  “Oh, he believes,” said Chusor. “He saw too many of Barka’s predictions come true for him not to believe.”

  “Then this Barka—she’s really an oracle?” asked Leo.

  “He,” said Chusor. “Barka is a eunuch.”

  Leo looked stunned for a moment, then scratched his chin and
said, “Oh, of course. I knew all along.”

  “But he likes to be called she,” said Chusor. “So if you want to be in his good graces, do as such.”

  “Does Diokles know he’s a … she’s a … he was a…?” Leo gave up and picked his ear with his littlest finger.

  “A physiological conundrum?” offered Chusor.

  Leo nodded his head.

  “I think I explained it to him once,” said Chusor. “But he is convinced Barka is female. Regardless of the fact that he’s got a cock between his legs.”

  Leo scratched his head pensively, then went back to his work.

  Chusor became aware of a noise in the courtyard. A loud scraping of metal on rock. “What have those two little rat-brained fools gotten into now?” he raged, and launched himself from his chair.

  The boys—Ajax and Teleos—were each digging furiously in the dirt floor of the courtyard. They had already made waist-deep holes and showed no signs of flagging. Chusor saw Ji standing off to the side, arms crossed on his chest, watching them with a stern countenance.

  “What is going on?” Chusor asked Ji.

  “These boys,” said Ji. “Their chi—their spirit—is not in balance. Probably because of their father’s death. They mourn him in the curious way of children. With violence and chaos. I gave them a task that pits one against the other. Their energy is now directed toward something useful.”

  “Useful?” asked Chusor. “You call that useful? They’re digging two useless holes in my courtyard.”

  “Look again,” said Ji. “You see two holes. I see two diggers.”

  Ji stared into Chusor’s eyes and raised his eyebrows as if to say, “Do you understand now?”

  Chusor turned and looked at the boys, who were frantically shoveling, focused for the first time since they had been living under his roof. If Chusor and the others were going to find the treasure buried under Plataea, they would need to mine the collapsed system of secret tunnels.

  “Keep them at it until they’re tapped out,” said Chusor, then headed back into the smithy to light the forge fire.

  SIXTEEN

  Menesarkus waited at the front entrance to his private house in the citadel of Plataea, leaning on his staff and chewing his lip anxiously, when a small troop of guards arrived bearing the Spartan prisoner, Arkilokus, on a palanquin.

  Arkilokus—a tall, broad-shouldered man in his early thirties with blue eyes and sandy-colored hair—lay still, eyeing Menesarkus as the guards carried him into the entrance hall. Menesarkus’s wife and granddaughter, who were standing off to the side, let out shocked gasps the moment they saw the prisoner. At first glance they’d both thought that Nikias had been brought home, such was the strong resemblance between him and the Spartan.

  “Upstairs,” Menesarkus said to the guards. “Lay him on the bed in the first room and then take up position outside the entrance to this house. No one is to come in without my leave.” The guards nodded, then headed up the stairs with their burden.

  “Who is that man?” asked Eudoxia in a whisper. Menesarkus’s silver-haired wife held a hand to her mouth, as though she’d seen a shade.

  Menesarkus took her hand, covering it with his scarred fingers. “Eudoxia,” he said with a sigh, “I must tell you something that will shock you. But there is nothing for it but the blunt truth. That is a Spartan prisoner. He was thrown from a horse outside the city walls. He has lain in the city jail, in secret, until now. And he is my … my grandson.”

  “Grandfather!” said Phile with a startled laugh. “What a strange thing to say. My brother Nikias is your only grandson.” But she gripped her grandmother’s arm and her eyes traveled up the stairs to the second floor where the guards had just disappeared, the sound of their feet treading on the wooden floor above.

  Eudoxia looked up into Menesarkus’s eyes with a horrified expression.

  “After the Persian Wars,” continued Menesarkus, staring back into Eudoxia’s eyes, “when I was invited to Sparta to participate in the funeral games for Leonidas, one of the dual kings sent his daughter to my bed. This was after I had defeated Drako in their pankration championship. You’ve heard of the Spartan ‘wise-breeding.’ Well, I was chosen to strengthen their bloodline. That young man is the heir to one of the Spartan dual thrones.”

  Eudoxia had lived through the Persian invasions, the deaths of two of her children, and the many vicissitudes of life. She stared into space for a moment, blinked, then nodded her head, standing up a little straighter, her face hardening.

  “Weren’t you and Grandmother already married when you visited Sparta?” asked Phile, seeing the stony look on her grandmother’s face.

  Menesarkus rolled his eyes—a vexed expression that very few people had ever seen on the old pankrator’s face other than his granddaughter. “Don’t you have something to do, girl?” he asked impatiently. “Leave your grandmother and me to ourselves.”

  Phile scowled and looked to her grandmother for support, but Eudoxia said softly, “Go to the kitchen and see to the afternoon meal.”

  Without another word Phile nodded and moved swiftly from the room.

  “That child will be the death of me,” said Menesarkus under his breath.

  “If Phile had been born a boy,” said Eudoxia archly, “she would be Nikias’s twin, and you would love her much more than you do.” She pulled her hand from Menesarkus’s grasp. “How do you know this Spartan is your grandson?” she asked in a forced voice.

  “He’s the one who found me in the wreckage of the farmhouse,” said Menesarkus. He thought back to that terrible night a week ago when the Theban raiders had attacked their home in the country and burned it to the ground. The women had escaped to the ground from the rooftop. But Menesarkus had been trapped up there, and had only survived by climbing into the chimney, where he’d become stuck like a stopper in a bottle but protected from the flames.

  “Arkilokus came to the farm with a Spartan scouting party,” he explained. “He brought me to the Spartan camp. That night Arkilokus came to the tent where I was being held prisoner and told me that I was his grandfather. He’s always known that he was my grandson.”

  “Plataeans are better at keeping secrets than Spartans, it seems,” said Eudoxia in a scathing tone. “Well, what do you want us to do with him, husband? And have you heard any news of Nikias?”

  Menesarkus shifted his weight, moving his staff to his other hand. The fierceness burning in Eudoxia’s eyes prevented him from evading her questions.

  “Nikias is in Athens,” said Menesarkus. “Chusor the smith told me. He’s run away on some foolhardy quest.”

  Eudoxia looked at Menesarkus and pursed her lips for a moment before saying, “Why did you bring this Spartan to our house? A house where your brother and his family were butchered by the Thebans in their beds. Thebans who do the bidding of the Spartans.”

  “Arkilokus is valuable to us,” said Menesarkus. “The Spartans will pay a warrior’s weight in silver to get back one of their captured hoplites. Who knows what a prospective heir to a Spartan throne is worth? He may be a bargaining piece. But if he is crippled he is worthless. The Spartans throw their deformed babies off of cliffs. And a warrior paralyzed in battle is awarded a knife to the heart. I need you to nurse this man back to health. Between me and Nikias you’ve healed more injuries than any doctor in the citadel.”

  “What makes you think his spine isn’t severed?” asked Eudoxia.

  “He feels tingling,” said Menesarkus. “He can move his toes and fingers. But the prison is no place to recover. I found Arkilokus stewing in his own shit today. He needs careful looking after and you are the only one to whom I can entrust this important task.”

  “I will care for him on one condition,” said Eudoxia.

  “Name your terms,” replied Menesarkus, full of relief.

  “You allow us to care for Kallisto here as well. Let us bring her here from Chusor’s smithy and give her the protection she deserves. There are men in the city who wou
ld kill her for being the daughter of Helladios.”

  Menesarkus felt a surge of anger. “The daughter of a betrayer,” he said. “The daughter of a man who allied himself with Nauklydes the traitor—a man who tried to sell Plataea to the enemy and opened the gates to this citadel.”

  “Kallisto had nothing to do with that,” said Eudoxia. “And you know this is true. Her father nearly beat her to death when he found out that she and Nikias had made love. Kallisto’s father was going to sell her as a sex slave to the Makedonian, but she escaped and came to our farm and helped to defend it from the enemy—”

  “You don’t have to tell me the tale,” growled Menesarkus. “I was there.”

  “And then she was nearly killed at the Battle of Oeroe,” continued Eudoxia, as if Menesarkus had never spoken. “But most of all you should protect her and let us care for her under our roof because your grandson and heir loves her and would marry her if only you would let him.”

  “Which I cannot,” said Menesarkus. “The blood of Helladios runs in her veins. I will not let Nikias breed scions of a traitor.”

  “Would you rather have him bed a Spartan wench?” asked Eudoxia hotly, and her eyes flashed to the top of the stairs where the guards, having delivered their prisoner, now stood staring down into the entrance hall with embarrassed looks.

  Menesarkus gestured impatiently for the men to descend the stairs. He waited until they exited the house. “Now, what is your decision about Kallisto?” Eudoxia asked.

  Menesarkus took in a deep breath and puffed out his cheeks, letting out a long slow exhalation. He thought, “What harm could be done bringing the girl here?” She had fought valiantly. But she was tainted by Helladios’s crime, and that stain would never be washed clean. “Yes, yes,” he said at last. “Bring her here. But she is not to be under the false impression that she is Nikias’s betrothed. They will never marry.”

  Eudoxia sniffed and pulled on her plait of long hair. Menesarkus knew from long experience that she did not agree with what he had just said, but that she had given up for the time being. She turned and started walking up the stairs.