Sword of Apollo (2 page)

And Nikias's grandfather loved Asterion like a favorite dog.

“We're a couple of fat geese sitting on a log,” muttered Mula.

Nikias didn't respond even though he knew the boy was right. This was not a safe place. And the bull was making a din that would wake the dead. It pumped wildly, bellowing with each thrust, as long trails of saliva dripped from its maw.

“Patience,” said Nikias. “He's almost done.”

Nikias peered north toward Thebes, but the rolling hills and trees hid the enemy's walls. He turned and looked in the opposite direction, scanning the gently sloping foothills of the Kithaeron Mountains to where his family's farm stood near an ancient olive grove surrounded by vineyards. All that he could make out was a thread-thin stream of smoke wafting from the chimney of the house. His pregnant wife, Kallisto, and their twin girls were there now, and he pictured the three of them in the kitchen—Kallisto at her loom and the girls crawling at her feet, playing with the weights tied to the ends of the dangling yarn.

The house had been burned to the ground two and a half years earlier when the Thebans launched a sneak attack on his farm as well as the citadel of Plataea—an attack in which Nikias's mother and most of his friends were slaughtered. But the Plataeans in the countryside rallied their forces and came to the aid of their brethren trapped in the city, defeating the enemy in a great battle at the gates of Plataea, where Nikias helped lead the forces to victory. Two weeks later the Plataeans went on to trounce a small army of Spartans—allies of the Thebans—who'd come to the Oxlands hard on the heels of the Theban attack. Five hundred full-blooded Spartans were captured where they'd made camp at the old Persian Fort.

Years ago, in the wars against the barbarian invaders, the Spartans had been allies of Plataea and Athens. But over the decades enmity had grown between the Athenians and Spartans—the two great powers of Greece. They were like a pair of wolves fighting over the carcass of a deer, each with sharp teeth clenched into the hide of the prize, neither one willing to unlock its bloody jaws. The Athenians were the masters of the seas and controlled the islands, keeping their army safe behind the walls of their vast citadel. But even though the Spartans lacked a powerful navy, they were a dominant force on land, and no Greek army dared to meet them in pitched battle.

But the small Spartan expeditionary force that had ventured into Plataean territory two and a half years ago had been filled with hubris. They did not expect the Plataeans to venture from their high-walled citadel and launch a bold attack on the Spartan encampment, and the enemy was surprised and overwhelmed.

Nikias had not taken part in the defeat of those Spartans, however. He'd been recovering from wounds he'd suffered at the hands of a Theban spy named Eurymakus, a man who'd captured Nikias on his way back from a foolhardy journey to Athens to hire mercenaries. A man who had tortured him to the threshold of death.…

He glanced down at his right hand—a hand with only four fingers. The littlest one, his signet ring finger, had been cut off where it had joined to the hand so that his signet and the bloody finger could be delivered to his grandfather to let him know that his heir had been taken prisoner. The skin at the nub of the severed digit was still pink and tender. He wondered if it would ever heal.

Eurymakus had broken Nikias back then—hung him by his ankles from the rafters of a dark undercroft like a piece of meat in a butcher's shop. The enemy had wrecked his body and toyed with his mind … hollowed him out like an ox horn that's been carved clean of its pith. And then the Theban had handed him over to the Spartans, who had in turn exchanged Nikias for a Spartan of royal blood. That warrior, though a few years older than Nikias, was his look-alike. And for good reason. He and Prince Arkilokus were first cousins—grandsons of Menesarkus of Plataea, who had traveled to Sparta after the Persian defeat as a guest-friend of the royal family. While there the young Plataean hero had been unwittingly selected for the Spartan “wise breeding” program—seduced by a female royal who harvested his champion's seed.…

“Young master?” asked Mula, shaking his arm. “Shouldn't we go?”

“Do you want to try and pull Asterion away from his task?”

“No, but—”

“Then shut up, little brother,” said Nikias, and slapped Mula on the back.

Mula frowned and dropped his head submissively.

Nikias's gaze traveled up the forested mountainside of the Kithaerons to the peak where the ridgeline resembled the withers of a swaybacked horse. That was where the Cave of Nymphs lay—the place where he and Kallisto had first made love. His eyes passed down to the citadel of Plataea at the foot of the mountain. The city's mighty twenty-foot-high walls, interspersed with square guard towers every hundred and fifty feet, stood like a stout armored hoplite waiting for battle.

The Thebans had not breached those walls on the night of the sneak attack. Instead the gates had been opened by one of its own citizens—the traitor Nauklydes, a Plataean magistrate who had been bought by the spy Eurymakus … bought with Persian gold. Nauklydes had forged a secret alliance with the Thebans and Spartans. But they had been defeated, and Nauklydes had been tried and convicted of treason and given the dreaded tunic of stones as his punishment—buried up to his chest in the marketplace and stoned to death by the citizens he had tried to destroy. His bones had been cast outside the boundaries of Plataea to rot in the open: a horrible desecration of a man's flesh that was certain to cause Nauklydes's shade an everlasting torment. For surely the vengeful Furies pursued his spirit now and forever in that other world.

After their defeat, the Thebans had laid low behind their walls, licking their wounds. And the Spartans, fearing reprisal against their elite warriors being held as prisoners in Plataea, had turned their wrath against Plataea's closest ally—Athens—burning homes and trampling crops in the region of Attika while half a million Athenians and their slaves dwelled in safety behind the walls of their immense citadel.

For thirty months neither Theban nor Spartan had attempted to attack Plataea again. The Plataeans in the countryside had sown and harvested, working together to build up a storehouse of supplies in the citadel. And Nikias and his grandfather, with the help of their neighbors, had rebuilt their house, but only after Nikias had recovered from Eurymakus's torture. It had taken months to regain enough strength to hold an adze to hew a beam, or to lift heavy stones to put up a wall. But the making of that house—rebuilding it from the ground up—had slowly helped him regain his soul.

The Spartan prisoners held in Plataea had been released in small groups, a few every month to stave off a full-scale Spartan invasion—to buy the city-state precious time to prepare for a siege. But now there were only a handful of the Spartans still held as prisoners inside the citadel. Time was running out for peace in the Oxlands. Everyone in Plataea knew that this lull between two violent storms was about to end.

Mula cleared his throat loudly. “I heard something.”

Nikias cocked his ear, but the noise of the bull and cow drowned out all sound. Then he felt the ground suddenly tremble beneath his feet and a rider charged up the hill, reining in his mount a few strides away, staring at Nikias and Mula and the copulating beasts with a mystified expression.

Nikias and Mula returned the stranger's astonished gaze.

“Odd place to practice animal husbandry,” the horseman announced nonchalantly, resting his javelin under the crook of one arm. His dark hair fell in ringlets to his shoulders, and the spirals of his beard and mustache cascaded down his face like the curls of an ancient kouros statue. At his hip was a long sword in a scabbard embellished with precious stones, and on his head was a golden cap. His clothes were outlandish: red silk pants and a colorful padded tunic woven with silver and gold thread worn over golden scale armor.

“Breeding on the top of a hill,” the rider continued. “And yet this ghastly place
is
called the Oxlands,” he added to himself, flexing the bejeweled fingers on his right hand. It took Nikias a few moments to realize that the man was speaking in Persian, a language that Nikias had learned in his youth from Mula's father. This strange horseman was almost two thousand miles from the capital of Artaxerxes's empire.

“I said: odd place for animals to mate,” the rider repeated, this time in heavily accented Greek. He looked back and forth at Nikias and Mula, and then rolled eyes that were painted round the edges with black lines. To Nikias he looked ridiculous—like an overdressed Persian warrior from a play he had seen years ago, or a ghost from the past.

“Imbeciles,” the Persian muttered under his breath; then, turning in his saddle, he shouted behind him in his own tongue, “I'm up here, you laggards!”

The ground thundered and six armed horsemen crested the hill, coming to a halt next to the Persian rider. Nikias planted his feet, fighting against the overpowering urge to run, for these newcomers were Median cavalrymen—skilled warriors and vassals of the Persians.

“Zeus's balls,” hissed Mula out of the corner of his mouth.

The riders, like the Persian, wore trousers and padded coats, but their outfits were plain and unembellished. They had long mustaches that trailed down past their chins, and they were armed with swords, bows, and short spears. Nikias had fought one of their kind before—a servant of the spy Eurymakus. And he had barely escaped from that duel with his life.

Nikias grabbed Mula by the arm to keep him from bolting. If the boy tried to run, the Medians would merely ride him down and slay him.

The horsemen glared at him with their killers' eyes and Nikias raised his hands in the sign of submission. Two of the Medians reached for their bows and quickly nocked arrows while the other four walked their horses slowly toward Nikias and Mula as the bull shuddered and roared one last time in triumph.

 

TWO

“Cut off his head and now it's mine, gild it with gold and fill it with wine!”

Kolax sang his favorite drinking song at the top of his voice as he raced down the rocky pine-covered slopes of the Kithaeron Mountains on his nimble-footed black steed. He was dressed in the leather trousers of a Skythian warrior, and wore the skin of a lion as a cloak—the head of the snarling beast covering his head like a hat. Unlike the Greeks, who rode bareback, he used a saddle.

As the trees thinned near the edge of the forest, Kolax could see the valley of the Oxlands stretching out below. He caught a glimpse of Nikias's farm where the foothills met the floor of the valley. The house was surrounded by vineyards—the neat rows of vines were lush with bright green leaves. These grain-eating Greeks were miserable archers and even worse horsemen, Kolax mused, but they could make a bowl of wine to please Dionysus himself. Soon Kolax would be at the farm and drinking some of that wine with his best friend, Mula. He could already taste it now! Uncut. Thick and purple. Like earth blood.

He glanced down at his drinking cup where it was attached to his belt. The gilded bowl shone in the afternoon sun as it bounced on his hip. He'd made this cup from the skull of a Dog Raider he had killed on a raid in Megaria, on the other side of the mountain. Dog Raiders were the Megarian hill marauders who wore helms covered with the hides of wild dogs, and they peeled the skin off their still-living victims to send a warning to any who would challenge them.

But Kolax wasn't afraid of Dog Raiders. Although he had just turned fourteen, there were already twenty-three notches on his bow—each one the shade of a Dog Raider he'd sent to the underworld. But his proudest kill was not a man. It was the lion that had foolishly stalked him in the forest. Stupid cat. He had killed the beast with a perfectly aimed poison-laced arrow, and then turned its hide into this wonderful cape!

“My drinking cup, my drinking cup! Raise it to the ceiling—raise it up, up, up!”

He was in a happy mood, for he had been sent by his father—the commander of the Plataean mountain fortress called the Three Heads—to deliver a message to Arkon Menesarkus at the citadel. Kolax relished the chance to be free of the confines of the small fortress that guarded the high pass and the road to Athens. By Zeus's hairy bunghole, that place was a bore! All day long standing guard duty on the top of the wall, on the lookout for Spartan invaders creeping amongst the stones and trees—invaders who never came.

Kolax slowed his horse, Pegasos, as they came to a switchback trail, then cut across it to a big field of grass and tall weeds where hundreds of goats grazed. He started galloping again, racing past a pair of startled shepherds. Two big sheepdogs took off after him, barking crazily as they gave chase. Kolax glanced over his shoulder and laughed at the dogs.

“Stupid hounds!” he shouted, and his lion's-head hood fell off to reveal his long copper-red hair flowing freely from his loosened topknot. “You'll never catch Pegasos!”

He dug his heels into his mount's sides and the sleek animal surged ahead, leaving the dogs in the dust. Kolax breathed in the warm air through his nostrils and relished the scents of grass and wild herbs. He loved the Oxlands. He wanted to stay in this place forever. It was now his home.

But his long journey from the grasslands of Skythia to this place had been a strange one. When Kolax was six years old his father went away from their homeland to Athens, enlisting as one of the Skythian guards of the citadel—fierce archers who policed Athens and guarded its walls. For Skythian bowmen were famous throughout the world for their speed and accuracy: a warrior from the grasslands could shoot an arrow for every three heartbeats. Kolax was raised by his uncle, riding and hunting on the plains of his homeland, always dreaming of one day joining his beloved papa in Athens. But then the good king of Skythia was murdered and the hated Nuri chieftain called the Snow Dog seized the Grass Throne. Kolax's tribe of Bindis were slaughtered, and he was captured by the enemy Nuri and sold into slavery. He ended up in Plataea, purchased by a curious inventor named Chusor who wanted Kolax to teach him the secret method of making the deadly Skythian poison.