Sunset of the Gods (10 page)

So the Great King had adopted a new strategy—an unsettlingly original one.

“When the newly assembled Persian fleet of six hundred ships departed from Cilicia earlier this year,” said Themistocles, speaking more to himself than to them, “nobody was too alarmed at first. Surely, everyone thought, it must be headed north, to follow the coast around the Aegean. That was the way it had always been done. But then, once past the ruins of Miletus and through the strait between Mount Mycale and the island of Samos, it turned
westward
, straight out across the open sea from island to island! First they obliterated Naxos and enslaved the population. Then they stopped at Delos, the sacred birthplace of Apollo and Artemis, and their commanders Artaphernes and Datis—he’s the real commander; Artaphernes is just a blue-blooded Persian figurehead that they had to have because Datis is a Mede—put on a hypocritical display of respect for Apollo. This, after the Persians had burned Apollo’s oracle at Didyma and plundered his bronze statue! Maybe some Greeks will actually be stupid enough to be taken in by it.”

Carrot and stick
, thought Jason.

“Do you know what that smooth-tongued snake Datis had the nerve to tell them on Delos?” Jason could have sworn Themistocles’ indignant tone held just a touch of professional envy. “He actually claimed with a straight face that the Ionian rebels hadn’t been worshiping the
true
Apollo at Didyma, but rather a kind of imposter: one of the
daiva
, the Persian demons or false gods or whatever. What a gigantic load of goat shit!”

Themistocles, Jason reflected, was even more right than he knew. As Landry had explained during their orientation, Datis’ propaganda line was nonsense in terms of Zoroastrian dualistic theology. Just as Ahura Mazda, the supreme god of truth and light, had his counterpart in Ahriman, god of lies and darkness, so his six emanations, the
amesha spenta
or “beneficent immortals,” had dark shadows in the form of the
daiva.
A Zoroastrian priest would have gagged on the idea of Apollo—one of the
daiva
himself, according to them—having such a shadow. But the Greeks of Delos hadn’t been up to speed on such subtleties, and with the Persian army occupying their island they hadn’t been disposed to dispute the point.

“I understand the Persians have Hippias with them,” said Landry.

Themistocles gave him a sharp look. “You really are
very
well informed, Lydos.”

Jason shot Landry a warning glance, for once again he was displaying an implausible level of knowledge. “We heard people in the streets saying so,” he explained quickly.

“Well, it’s true. The last tyrant of Athens, chased out twenty years ago, has been a faithful toady of the Great King ever since. And now the doddering old bastard has convinced himself that if he betrays Athens to them the Persians will restore him as tyrant. Ha! He’s a fool as well as a traitor. They’ll just use him as a source of information.”

“And,” Jason suggested, “maybe for any contacts he still has within the city.” The term
fifth column
would of course mean nothing to Themistocles.

“Yes.” Themistocles grew very grim. “And even if there aren’t really any of his fellow traitors within the walls, the suspicion that there
may
be some aristocratic faction ready to open the gates from the inside poisons our air.” He shook his head. “Ah, well, it’s just one more reason why we’re lucky to have Miltiades. I only hope that he was right in talking the Assembly into trying and executing the Persian ambassadors that came last year demanding earth and water.” He was clearly worried that Athens, at Miltiades’ urging, had forfeited the moral high ground.

“If possible,” Landry said diffidently, “we’d like to meet him, having heard so much about him.”

“Hmm. Yes, I think that could be arranged. I’ll see what I can do. But for now, you’re welcome to stay here tonight.”

As they got up, murmuring their thanks, Jason spoke up, hoping his interest sounded only casual. “Oh, by the way, we’ve heard certain odd rumors on our journey. Have there been any incidents of . . . well, of people claiming to have seen manifestations of the gods?”

Themistocles gave him a look which he could not interpret. It was never easy to know just how literally the people of pre-scientific societies really took their gods. One of the few things of which the Classical Greeks were intolerant was atheism . . . strictly speaking,
asebia
, or failure to worship the gods. It was the crime for which Socrates would be sentenced to drink hemlock eight decades from now. But what was the real gravamen of the offense: impiety, or a dereliction of civic duty? Jason knew he had to tread very warily.

“No, not that I’ve heard of,” said Themistocles after a pause. “Why do you ask?”

“Oh, only curious,” said Jason hastily. They made their exit as soon as was gracefully possible.

CHAPTER EIGHT

This was not their Acropolis.

The serene perfection of the Parthenon, the inspired eccentricity of the Erechtheum, and all the rest lay half a century and more in the future, when Pericles would loot the treasury of the League of Delos—Athens’s subordinate “allies”—to build them, replacing the temples the Persians had burned in 480 b.c. Now, ten years before that, even those earlier temples were for the most part nonexistent.

Seven centuries earlier, the five-hundred-foot-high crag had been the citadel of a semi-barbaric Bronze Age king like those of Jason’s recent acquaintance. That age-old megaron had long since vanished, for starting three generations ago, the Eupatrid clans had cluttered the summit with private building projects, competing with each other in the efflorescence of gaudily painted statuary, culminating with the large, flamboyant “Bluebeard Temple” reared by the supremely rarefied Eupatrid family of the Alcmaeonids for its own glorification and the overshadowing of its rivals, the Boutads (who hadn’t become “authentic” yet). But even such monuments to aristocratic self-importance had not robbed these precincts of their sacredness, for here was the olive tree, believed to be immortal, that Athena herself had granted to the city, besting Poseidon in the matter of gifts and winning the Athenians’ special worship. (Jason wondered if some Teloi power-struggle lay behind the legend). And the old, shabby temple of Athena Polias held an archaic olive-wood statue of the goddess believed to be a self-portrait, fallen from the sky.

Jason and his companions shouldn’t have been seeing any of this, as the crest of the Acropolis was supposedly barred to all but native-born Athenians. But it was becoming more and more apparent that a lot of exclusionary legislation was honored more in the breach than in the observance, in this state without a nit-picking bureaucracy. And besides, they were friends of Themistocles. So Landry had gotten his wish and they now walked among all the schlock that would eventually be swept away by Persian fire or Athenian urban renewal or both. Jason dutifully recorded it all through his implant simply by looking at it, knowing how interested Rutherford would be.

As far as he was concerned, the most edifying thing about the Acropolis at this stage of its history was the view from it. To the west was Mount Aigaleos, scene of the unexplained sighting that still rankled in Jason’s mind. To the south was the bay of Phalerum, Athens’s port whose inadequacy was such an insistent bee in Themistocles’s entirely metaphorical bonnet. To the northeast was the marble-quarry-scarred Mount Pentelikon, beyond which lay the beach and horse-breeding plains of Marathon. Two roads led there, one to the north and one to the south of the mountain—roads which were going to acquire a vital strategic significance in the next few weeks.

Closer than any of these things—almost directly below to the southeast, in fact, within the city itself—was what looked like an unfinished construction site. Which, in fact, was precisely what it was: the longest-unfinished construction site in history.

When Pisistratus had taken power as tyrant in 560 b.c., all the competitive building on the Acropolis had come to an end;
grands projets
were only to be for the glorification of the tyranny. And his sons and successors, Hippias and Hipparchus, had had a perfect opportunity, given that the Athenians had been so remiss as to neglect to raise a temple to Zeus, the king of the gods. In a precinct traditionally sacred to Zeus, they had begun work on a temple of truly Pharaonic grandiosity. It had been uncompleted in 510 b.c. when the tyranny had been overthrown and Hippias sent into exile. Afterwards, the new democracy had neither finished it nor torn it down. Instead, they had simply left it standing, half-finished, as a mute testament to the tyrants’ megalomaniacal folly. And so it would stand until the second century a.d., when the Roman Emperor Hadrian would deign to complete it.

Jason, who had known Zeus personally, tried to imagine just how that second, generation Teloi would have taken all this.

He touched Landry’s shoulder. “Let’s go, Bryan. It’s time to meet Miltiades down in the Agora.” The historian reluctantly complied.

The four of them turned away, toward the gates, past the immense bronze four-horse chariot placed by the democracy in this one-time aristocratic showcase as a monument to its victories over those who had tried to strangle it in its cradle. They proceeded on down the great ramp and through the crumbling old wall that still marked the outline of the Bronze Age lower town. There they turned right and followed the Panathenaic Way, past the temple enclosure of the Eleusinium on their right, from which the procession to Eleusis for the Mysteries would depart in October. After the next intersection, on the left, was the fountain-house where the women of Athens came in the morning to collect water—one of the tyrants’ more useful projects. Then, beyond that, the Agora opened out to their left.

It had been called the Square of Pisistratus, after the tyrant who had cleared it. Like the fountain-house, and unlike the temple of Zeus, this was something the democracy could use. In fact, it had needed such a gathering-place for its public business. So the detritus of the tyranny had been cleared away and replaced by public buildings like the Bouleuterion where the
boule
that prepared the agenda for the popular assembly met, and the circular Tholos where its members ate at public expense. Emphasizing the political change was the bronze statue of two men, heroically nude, with drawn swords—Aristogiton and Harmodius, “the tyrannicides,” who had killed Hippias’s brother and co-tyrant Hipparchus, and died for it.

As they passed that statue, in the center of the Agora, Landry provided an amused elucidation. “They were homosexual lovers. Hipparchus took a shine to Harmodius and tried to use his political power to have his way with him. Eventually he pushed the two of them just a little too far. They decided their only way out was to murder him.”

“And for this they put up a statue of you in this city?” Mondrago wondered.

“Well, the new democracy needed all the heroes it could get,” Landry explained. Jason, who had visited the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, recalled the word
spin.

They continued on, through the noisy merchants’ stalls. The shady plane trees that featured in so many artists’ impressions of the Agora still lay in the future, waiting to be planted after the Persians’ retreat in 480 b.c. Jason would have welcomed them, on this sunny late-July afternoon. He paused for an instant under a merchant’s striped awning and looked at the crowd. There was a subtle difference from what one would expect in such a marketplace—an unmistakable undercurrent of tension. This was, unmistakably, a city under threat.

One head stood above the general run. The man’s exceptional height was the first thing that attracted Jason’s attention. What held his eyes was that, unlike most of the people who made up the Agora’s sweaty, dusty, entirely ordinary bustle, this man looked the way Classical Greeks were supposed to look, complete with the straight, high-bridged nose and regular features. The longer Jason looked, though, there was something about him that wasn’t specifically Greek at all, but was ethnically unidentifiable. Unlike most mature men in this setting, he had no beard, and in fact looked like he had very little facial hair to grow.

Jason took all this in as the man passed them in the opposite direction, headed toward the Panathenaic Way. He thought the man’s eyes—large, golden-brown—met his own for a fraction of a second, but he couldn’t be sure. Then he felt a tug on the shoulder of his
chiton.

“Jason,” said Chantal, in as close to a whisper as she could come and still make herself heard. “That tall man who just passed us—I saw something under his
himation.
I just got a quick glimpse . . . but it was something that didn’t belong in this time.”

“Huh?” Jason stared at her. “What was it?”

“I don’t know. I probably wouldn’t have been able to identify it even if I’d seen it for longer than a fraction of a second. But it was some kind of . . . device. And it had an unmistakable high-technology look.”

“Chantal, this is impossible! We’re the only time travellers in the here and now—and even if we weren’t, nobody is ever allowed to bring advanced equipment. And while that man may look a little out of the ordinary, there’s no possibility that he’s a Teloi. You must have imagined something.”

Chantal took on a look of quiet stubbornness. “You once told me that I’m very observant. You might as well take advantage of that quality.” A trace of bitterness entered her voice. “It’s the only thing about me that’s been any use so far.”

Jason chewed his lower lip and looked behind them. The man’s wavy dark-gold head could still be seen above the generality. He reached a decision and turned to Mondrago.

“Alexandre, follow that man. Don’t reveal yourself, and don’t take any action. Just find out where he’s going, then come back and report. We’ll be over there near the Tholos.”

“Right.” Mondrago set out, blending into the throng. The rest of them continued toward the Kolonus Agoraeus, the low hill bordering the Agora on the west, with a small temple of Hephaestus at its top and the civic buildings grouped at its foot. To their left was the Heliaia, or law court: simply a walled enclosure where the enormous juries of Athens—typically five hundred and one members—could gather. Just to the left of the Tholos, a street struck off to the southwest, passing another walled quadrangle: the Strategion, headquarters of the Athenian army.