Sword of Apollo (17 page)

Arkilokus stood mutely on the promontory, staring morosely into the haze, thinking about poor Hippios and waiting for the Dog Raiders to return with their report. He had killed many men in his life, but none that he had loved. What a terrible twist to befall the beautiful and strong young warrior. He imagined the hateful old hags—the Fates—cackling with glee as they guided Hippios's feet to that Skythian trap. The moment he had seen the eclipse he'd known that it would bring about some personal disaster. With every passing minute his heart became more inflamed with anger. An hour went by, but the Dog Raiders did not come back.

“They must have bolted for home,” said the Megarian commander as he strode toward him.

“The scum!” said Arkilokus, and cursed.

“They were angered that they were not given the fort,” said the Megarian, and went into a coughing fit.

“They'll regret their actions,” said Arkilokus, rubbing the nub of his amputated digit with the fingers of his other hand.

The time for standing and waiting was over. He didn't care how long it would take him to find the Plataeans. He would chase them to the Dipylon Gates on foot if he had to. How far could his men run in full armor? Arkilokus had entered the armored footrace several times, but that distance was only half a mile. Without armor he'd run fifty miles or more at one stretch. His Spartiates, who'd been raised in herds from childhood, had each run a hundred miles without stopping on many occasions.

He mustered the men—both Spartan and Megarian—and ordered them to remove their armor. “Sword and sandals!” he shouted, stripping off his own equipment. Soon the air was filled with the din of clinking bronze.

They marched down to the road, then lined up in phalanxes. Then Arkilokus went out front and started running. He did not feel stiff or awkward. His feet felt as though they had grown wings. He reckoned they had gone four miles when he caught sight of many carts and wagons blocking the road, as if their owners had abandoned them in great haste and fled. The wind had shifted and the smoke was starting to clear. He could see five hundred feet in every direction now.

Suddenly a white horse leapt from a thick olive grove and reared in front of him. A skinny dog bounded after it and, catching sight of Arkilokus, started barking fiercely.

Arkilokus recognized the rider at once.

“Nikias!” he screamed. “Nikias!”

Nikias glared back at him with a look of surprise mingled with fury, then kicked the horse and rode toward a crumbling tower an arrow shot away, followed by the dog.

“Run!” Arkilokus cried to his men. “Follow the rider!”

He sprinted. Sword in hand. Screaming. Flying across the rocky landscape with his Spartiates behind him. The Megarians followed, screaming with bloodlust as they charged.

Nikias was just up ahead. He reined in his horse in front of a line of standing figures and dismounted, then slapped the horse on the flank and the animal bolted, running toward the tower. Nikias stood with his sword raised, smiling fiercely.

Arkilokus realized that all of the people standing behind his Plataean cousin were women. Thousands of women lined up like warriors in a phalanx! Where were the men? He almost regretted the slaughter that was about to take place. He glanced up at the tower and saw someone standing on top of the broken crown—a man with a horn held to his lips.

And then Nikias dropped his sword in a sweeping motion and cried out “Now!” and the women in the front of the line pulled back their robes and knelt in unison—a graceful, dance-like motion. They each held something in their outstretched hands. Staffs? Spindles? Arkilokus blinked and the next instant something struck him in the thigh. His leg buckled and he fell flat on his face. The air buzzed as if a thousand insects had all taken flight. Men fell all around him. The ones who did not fall stopped dead and crouched low, instinctively covering their chests and stomachs with their arms, for none of them had shields or armor.

The man in the tower blasted the horn.

Out of the haze from the left and the right sides came the thumping of more bowstrings and the screams of arrows. Spartan and Megarian warriors dropped like wheat mowed down by a scythe. The horn sounded again and a thousand more arrows flew from the bows of the women. A Spartan fell dead at Arkilokus's feet with two arrows in his face—one through each eye!

And then the terrible horn sounded thrice in a row. The noise was followed by a thundering din that shook the earth—the unmistakable sound of horses. Cavalry charging from behind. Now they were under attack from all sides!

Chaos followed. And a whirl of blood and screams and death. Bodies crashing into each other. Heads and arms flying. At one point Arkilokus saw Nikias running at him, but then the Plataean was cut off by a wall of Spartiates who sacrificed themselves to save their prince. Arkilokus did not know how he came to be standing on the road with less than a hundred of his warriors. Had an hour passed? A day? Or had it been mere seconds? Most of the men who'd dragged him from the field were wounded. One was missing a hand, the other an arm.

“Prince Arkilokus, can you run?” asked one of them—a warrior whose chin had been sliced clean off his face.

Arkilokus nodded with a sharp jerk. They formed up a retreating mass with him in the center, heading back up the road toward the Three Heads. The surviving Megarians—a thousand or so—were retreating west, chased by a mass of Plataean horsemen, three hundred or more strong, who speared them in the backs as they ran toward the olive grove, hemmed in by the line of carts blocking the road to the south.

Arkilokus had never seen such a rout. The world did not seem real. It was like living in a nightmare. “Keep moving,” said the voice in his head.

“The Megarians are drawing the enemy riders away from us,” said one of his men.

“Keep moving!” Arkilokus shouted. He ran fast despite the pain in his leg. He saw Nikias's face in his mind's eye, smiling smugly. The Plataean had lured them into that killing ground. His people had blocked off the road with the carts to funnel the Spartans and Megarians toward the tower where thousands of archers—mostly women—had been waiting. And the Plataean cavalry had been hiding in the olive grove on the other side of the roadway the whole time, ready to crush Arkilokus and his army from behind.

“You underestimated him,” said a mocking voice in Arkilokus's head. “You should have heeded the warning of the eclipse.”

They'd run at least a mile when a pack of horsemen charged out of nowhere, shooting as they rode. Spartans screamed and dropped to the ground, writhing in throes of anguish.

“Skythians!” yelled Arkilokus.

He looked up. The smoke had cleared enough to reveal the fortress of the Three Heads on the hill. Now he had his answer to what had happened to the Skythians. They had not run away. They had only been hiding in the foothills nearby … waiting like wolves.

One of Arkilokus's men put a horn to his lips and gave a great blast. Then an arrow sliced through his cheeks—through one side and out the other—silencing the horn.

The barbarians whittled them down, riding round the pack of warriors, always shooting from a distance, taunting them, pointing to the fresh Dog Raider heads they wore tied around their waists.

By the time Arkilokus and his men made it to the slope below the fortress, there were only ten or so of his warriors left alive. All seemed lost. The Skythians were closing in for the final kill. But then a host of Megarian archers sprinted down the road, shouting as they came, and loosed a hail of arrows at the Skythians to drive them away. But the barbarians were already galloping down the southern road, jeering and whooping as they went.

“We heard the horn!” said one of the Megarians, stooping by Arkilokus's side. “What happened?”

Arkilokus lay down on the road, gasping for air. He couldn't talk. He couldn't catch his breath. He looked at the arrow in his right leg, then realized that he had another shaft stuck through the biceps of his left arm. Thank the gods it wasn't a Skythian arrow, or he would already be dead. He touched his face—it was slippery with blood and sweat. There was a gash on his forehead. A deep one. He rolled over and vomited.

“What happened?” a Megarian archer asked again.

“Ni … Ni,” wheezed Arkilokus after he'd stopped heaving. “Nikias…” was all that he could force himself to say.

 

P
ART
II

“… and then the sickness came to Athens and covered the citadel like the poisoned cloak that the mad sorceress Medea used to slay Glauke—the second bride of Jason. And men who'd lost their entire families stood on the temple steps and cursed the gods, while other deranged citizens proclaimed that the Olympians and their scions had never existed at all, but were nothing more than fables.”

—P
APYRUS
FRAGMENT
FROM
THE
“L
OST
H
ISTORY
”
OF
THE
P
ELOPONNESIAN
W
AR
BY
THE
“E
XILED
S
CRIBE
”

 

ONE

The
Spear of Thetis
cut through choppy blue and white-capped waves with its shining copper ram at the prow, cruising toward the walled harbor entrance of the port of Piraeus a mile away. Every man was at the trireme's benches, and the one hundred and seventy oars dug into the water, then swept back in unison like the limbs of a strange and many-legged water insect. The two captured merchant vessels followed in the
Spear
's wake.

Chusor stood on the top deck next to Agrios the helmsman on his throne-like seat, gazing at the familiar sight of the sturdy walls and towers of the great Athenian port. The entrance to the first harbor was a narrow gap in a seawall guarded by two stout towers on either side. If there were a threat of invasion by sea, a giant chain could be linked between these two towers, and triremes would be anchored to this chain, creating an impenetrable floating wall. But no enemy had attempted to enter the harbor since the days of the Persian Wars.

Chusor liked it up here on the open deck with Agrios as his only companion, where the constant annoying drone of the oar drums was drowned out by the wind. Agrios hardly ever spoke, which suited Chusor. He could lose himself in his thoughts while he gazed at the sea. His mind drifted back to his brief visit with his daughter, Melitta, on Serifos. She was a tough girl who liked to wear a boy's tunic and keep her hair short. The rough island life suited her.

In Athens she had lived in the household of her elder half sister who had been a hetaera—a high-class prostitute. But Melitta didn't miss anything about the urbane life in the citadel. She craved adventure more than anything, and he knew that she had inherited that quality from him. Despite dressing and acting like a boy, there was no denying her extreme beauty. The islanders said that she favored him in her looks, but they had never known her mother—the hetaera Sophia … the most beautiful woman Chusor had ever known. And he saw Sophia's eyes staring back at him whenever he looked at his daughter.

The voyage from Serifos had passed without incident. The sea had been the calmest in recent memory, but as soon as they had caught sight of the island of Salamis the wind started to blow hard from the northwest, and the three ships began to buck on the waves. Chusor could see a thick haze of smoke obscuring the mountains in the direction of the Oxlands beyond. And there were numerous trails of dark smoke emanating from the city of Piraeus and even more from Athens, like thin tufts of black goat hair pulled from a spindle.

They approached the walled isthmus of Piraeus, cruising past the tomb of Themistokles, which stood on a rocky point outside the bastions. Themistokles—the great admiral who had defeated the Persian navy at Salamis in the last war—had died far from home after being ostracized by his own people. But then he had been honored by the Athenians after his death.

“A hero one day, a goat the next,” muttered Agrios.

“That must be a big forest fire,” said Chusor, pointing his chin toward the mountains to the northwest. They were in a wide channel now, heading toward the harbor of Kantharos. To get to this harbor the
Spear
and the two grain ships would have to pass between a narrow gap in a breakwater. The breakwater itself was capped by walls that connected to the bastions of Piraeus on the right, and the walls of the outer city to the left side of the channel. On either side of the entrance were sturdy guard towers.

“A big fire,” repeated Agrios. “But what are those strange dark streams of smoke coming from Piraeus and Athens?”

“Odd,” said Chusor. He squinted into the wind.

“Odd indeed,” said Agrios under his breath.

“What's this?” asked Chusor abruptly.

A small sailing vessel, no more than thirty feet long, shot from the narrow gap in the breakwater, its sails bellying on the strong wind. It headed straight toward the
Spear
and then turned suddenly and awkwardly, nearly capsizing as it hit the choppy sea outside the protection of the harbor. Screams emanated from the boat and Chusor caught a glimpse of many people crammed inside the open hold—women and children and even some animals and many belongings stuffed into sacks.

“Lubbers,” said Agrios with disdain.

The sailboat's crew worked frantically to get the ship in order, pulling on the rigging and fixing a boom that had come undone from the mainsail, which had deflated like an empty sheep's bladder. The sail caught the wind again, puffed out, and the vessel jumped forward like a kicked horse just as the galley came parallel to it. A man at the tiller of the sailboat cupped his hand to his mouth and shouted something at the
Spear
as they went by, but Chusor could barely hear him over the wind.