Spartans at the Gates (19 page)

There was nothing more dangerous, Kolax knew, than a wounded hunting dog. This one had an arrow sticking through its hind end—straight up like a stiff tail.

Kolax pulled back on the bowstring as hard as he could, hoping to drive an arrow straight through the dead Mollossian's exposed belly and into the one hiding behind it. But the bow was not strong enough and the arrow merely went into the dead dog halfway up the flights.

“Stupid Greek bow,” he spat.

A scrabbling sound on the outside of the temple wall made Kolax jump. He turned just in time to see the head and front paws of the mottled brown Mollossian appear at the roofline. Kolax shot an arrow through the dog's muzzle, but that didn't stop it. The hound flung itself over the wall and landed on top of him, snapping its teeth, reaching for his throat, and clawing at his chest with its sharp nails.

Screaming, Kolax kicked out with both feet, gaining a split second. He grabbed an arrow from where it was stuck in the earth, and plunged it into the dog's eye—into its brain. The body jerked and slumped.

Kolax grabbed his bow, nocked an arrow, and looked out through the barricade. The wounded dog with the arrow in its rump was gone.

Stuffing his remaining arrows into the quiver as fast as he could, Kolax kicked aside the barricade and started walking cautiously. Which way should he go? He was surrounded on all sides by trees. He knew the Mollossian would be at an advantage in the woods. It could be hiding anywhere. The best thing to do was taunt it—bring the creature into the open where he could get a clean shot.

He stopped and stood in the center of the glade. He could hear something coming through the brush behind him—footsteps. He put an arrow to his string and turned.

“Zeus's eggs!” said a stunned man, staring in shock at the dead dogs everywhere. He looked at Kolax with wonder. “Who are you?”

Kolax noticed the man had a net in one hand and a cudgel in the other. Slave-hunter. He glanced behind him and saw the man's mount standing at the edge of the glade.

The slave-hunter's eyes flashed at something behind Kolax. Without hesitating the Skythian put arrow to bow, turned, and pulled the gut-string.

And the bowstring snapped.

The wounded Mollossian with the arrow in its hind end was ten paces away, running at him at full speed, blood and saliva dripping from its mouth.

Kolax drew his long dagger and fell flat on his back, holding the blade with both hands at his loins. The Mollossian leapt on him and Kolax thrust upward, gutting the dog and spraying his chest with gore.

The moment Kolax got to his feet something wrapped around his neck like a snake. He clawed at his throat and felt leather—a whip! It was cutting off his air and crushing his larynx.

“Bastard!” yelled the slave catcher, pulling tighter with his powerful arms and shouting, “There's a wild Skythian boy over here! Help! He's killed all the dogs!”

Kolax's vision started to go black at the edges. He knew he didn't have much time. Only a couple of seconds. He lifted his leg and grasped the handle of the small Theban dagger he kept strapped to his ankle, pulled it from the sheath, and jabbed backward with all the strength left in his body. The whipcord went slack and the slave-hunter fell backward.

The Skythian boy rolled over and yanked the dagger from the dead man's heart. He wiped the tears from his eyes and tried to swallow, but there was a lump in his throat that made him gag.

He heard horses galloping toward the glade and the shouts of men. He turned at a sound coming from the opposite direction and saw a lone rider burst through the thickets not twenty paces away. The horseman was a blond-bearded Athenian with a jagged scar running the length of his face. Kolax knew the man the instant he saw him—General Lukos. Iphigenia had described her tormentor's scar.

Kolax watched as the Athenian's gaze danced from the dead dogs, to the corpse of his servant, to the bloody dagger in Kolax's hand. Then Lukos's expression shifted from astonishment to outrage.

The barbarian boy stared down the Athenian and started walking slowly backward toward the dead slave-hunter's horse tethered at the edge of the glade. General Lukos raised his short spear and flung it at Kolax, but the Skythian was too quick and jumped aside. The spear stuck in the ground, vibrating like a plucked bow.

Yanking the spear from the earth, Kolax turned and flung it at the general's chest with a lightning-fast motion. But the wily Athenian pulled back on his reins, making his horse rear, and the spear struck the animal in the breast. The beast screamed and Lukos was thrown.

Kolax sprinted to the other horse, undid the tether, jumped on its back, kicked it hard, and took off. He looked back over his shoulder and saw Lukos climbing onto another mount, shouting furiously at his men to give chase.

“Follow me if you can!” Kolax cried out in Skythian. “Follow me to your deaths, you rapers-of-sheep!” He let forth a croaking war whoop and laughed with wild joy, turning his horse toward Athens, leading the slave-hunters in the opposite direction of the girl in the tree.

 

EIGHTEEN

The bay was swimming with dozens of double- and triple-decker galleys with huge eyes painted on their prows and bronze rams jutting from their cutwaters like the teeth of peculiar and deadly ocean creatures. Nikias had never seen so many of the powerful warships in one place at one time, and the sight was awe inspiring.

He'd followed the old mule driver's instructions and ridden cross-country to the port city of Piraeus, situated six miles southeast of Athens. As far as he could tell he'd left the spies who'd been chasing him in the dust. He'd abandoned the mount outside the city walls and entered on foot, making his way along the dock road to the first of the two harbors—a place swarming with shipbuilding activity. The noise of adzes and hammers, furiously shaping and fitting timbers, filled the air with a cacophonous music. The smell of brine, fir, and pine pitch filled his nostrils.

He paused to look at the hulks of at least fifty vessels, all in various phases of construction, sitting inside the open boat sheds. Some were just the beginnings of ships—the keels laid from aft to bow. And there were completed hulls that had yet to be planked, their wooden rib cages exposed to the sun. Near the water's edge, perched on log rollers, was a nearly finished triple-decker, already rigged with ropes and sails. He saw men painting the entire hull with dark pitch, staining the ship black like all the others out in the bay.

“It'll be a backbreaker for you if they take you on,” said a voice from behind.

Nikias turned and saw a cheery man of middle age with a wavy brown beard, kindly eyes, and cheeks that stuck out like apples when he smiled. Over his stout body he wore a leather apron covered with pockets out of which poked the handles of his woodworking tools.

“You'll be assigned a bench on the lowest deck,” continued the shipwright. “It's hot and it stinks down there. But you look like a strong lad. You'll work your way up fast.”

Nikias realized that the carpenter assumed he had come from the country looking for work as an oarsman. He wondered, with frustration, why it was so obvious to every Athenian that he wasn't a local. “How many ships are in the fleet now?” he asked.

The shipwright scratched his beard, calculating. “Two hundred doubles, three hundred triples, and about a hundred of the smaller vessels fit for service. Most of the doubles and triples are guarding the shipping lanes now. The ones in the bay have just come in with cargo convoys from the north—timber and grain. Others are here to get supplies and men before heading back to the blockade of Potidaea. I heard say ten triples are going out to raid the coast of Megara.”

“Good,” said Nikias, thinking of the Dog Raiders of Megara. “It will be nice for them to get a taste of their own piss.”

“The Megarians will regret their treaty with the Spartans,” said the shipwright. “We'll cut off their grain supply and they'll starve.”

“There's so many new ships being built,” observed Nikias.

“Perikles loves ships,” said the shipwright. “We'll keep building them until the treasury is bare of owls and the mines of Laurium are empty of ore. It's as good as anything to spend our silver on, at least in my opinion. I'm a boatbuilder, after all. They say the walls of Athens and the Piraeus protect Athens. But the wooden walls of the fleet are what keeps us safe from the Persians and Spartans.”

Nikias had heard his grandfather say the same thing before when defending Athenian tax increases to pay for the fleet. “Do you know where the
Sea Nymph
is stationed now?” he asked, hoping to get information about his cousin's boat.

The shipwright laughed. “You'll never get a seat on the pretty
Nymph,
my son. That's Perikles's personal dispatch ship. He bought it with his own money and picked every man on it.” He pointed at a magnificent two-hundred-foot-long ship beached on the shore. “Look at her. As pretty as any hetaera in the city.”

“That's the
Sea Nymph
?” asked Nikias.

“She came in two days ago,” said the shipwright, and went on his way with a nod.

Nikias headed down the road toward the port offices, thinking of his cousin as he walked. He hadn't seen Phoenix in almost four years—not since his older Athenian relative had come of age and shipped out as an oarsman. Nikias had met Phoenix only six or seven times over the years, and they'd never gotten on well. Phoenix, in Nikias's opinion, was a vain, loudmouthed braggart. The only thing they shared was the fact that their late mothers had been sisters. But he felt that he had to find him and tell him what had happened in Plataea. He wondered how he would locate the mariner in this port crawling with oarsmen on leave.

He passed a row of workshops filled with women working at looms. Out in front of their shops, hanging from hooks, were displayed expensive bolsters—cushions for oarsmen to put on the arse-numbing benches of the galleys. The Athenian navy, everyone knew, did not supply these necessary pads for their mariners. The slipcovers had the names of various ships woven onto them, or pictures of things from the sea—shells, dolphins, triremes, and fish. Some had images of men engaged in acrobatic sexual acts with other men, or women, or satyrs, or a combination of all three.

He saw a group of mariners bartering over the price of a cushion that bore the image of a grinning sea horse with a giant erection. The shoppers were obviously oarsmen because of their tremendously muscled shoulders and legs. He wondered if Phoenix had turned into one of these “sea-oxen,” as Chusor disdainfully called them.

He kept going up the lane until he entered the busy square in front of the naval offices. A gang of workers had dug up the ground here to replace a clay water pipe. Several children were playing about in the mud caused by the broken conduit, but Nikias didn't see a one-eyed slave boy anywhere.

One of the slaves working on the pipe—a craggy-faced lout with a jutting jaw—stopped digging and glared at Nikias with a hostile expression. Nikias didn't like the look of him and was worried the man might be one of Kleon's spies, so he moved to the edge of the square where the slave couldn't see him.

“Stop right there, lad,” said a commanding voice.

Nikias turned quickly and saw a handsome fifty-year-old man with silvery hair and a perfectly folded, expensive robe. He stood in a small wooden booth with a sign over the top that read:
COLONISTS WANTED.

“Your destiny awaits!” said the recruiter, flashing a smile and pointing at the sign.

“No, thanks,” Nikias replied. “I'm not looking to move to some rock farm on the arse-end of civilization.”

Nikias heard a snort of laughter. He glanced over to a nearby food stall where a bearlike man was chewing on a chicken leg, watching them with a bemused expression.

The recruiter said with a scolding tone, “You are terribly misinformed, my lad. The colony of Thourion has some of the richest soil in the world.” He smiled again, raising his eyebrows and leaned forward, dropping his voice to a whisper. “The local women of Italia—or the men or even boys if you prefer—are beautiful beyond compare. You can't imagine—”

“I can imagine quite well,” interrupted Nikias. He'd heard about these Athenian colonies. Squalid places where the Athenians shipped off their poorer citizens to prevent overcrowding in the capital.

“You're right to be suspicious,” said the man at the food stall. He wiped his mouth on a hunk of bread and ambled over to the recruiter's booth. “The only thing you'd have to look forward to in one of the colonies is catching some disease or getting murdered by the local barbarians.”

“Not true!” exclaimed the recruiter. “The population of Thourion is fifteen thousand strong. They're building a new assembly hall and a gymnasium. Wheat production is rising—”

“Have you ever been there?” asked the other, picking a piece of chicken from a molar.

The recruiter's smile faded and he scowled. “No, I have not. But I have heard excellent reports.”

The bearish man gave Nikias a conspiratorial grin. “That's what King Xerxes said before he invaded Greece, ha ha! And look what happened to him.” And he slapped Nikias on the back.

Nikias laughed. He liked this kind of Athenian man. Straightforward and bluff—just like a Plataean.

“You've got a friend,” said the bearish man.

Nikias felt a tug on his tunic and looked down to see a little black-haired slave boy—a one-eyed boy—staring up at him.

“Come with me,” said the boy with a croaking voice. He gave the recruiter and the other man a suspicious look before darting off.

Nikias nodded at the two Athenian men and took off after the slave boy. He was fast and Nikias had to move quickly to keep up with him. He shot in and out of a maze of alleys, courtyards, and doorways until he came to a dark stair that led down to a foul-smelling tunnel. Nikias could see sunlight and the sea at one end and reckoned this was the main sewer conduit for the Piraeus District.