Sword of Apollo (22 page)

Andros made to go but Fork-Beard grabbed him by the arm and glared at him with a look of frustrated wonder. “What you tell me is hard cock to swallow.”

“Take cock in mouth and swallow, then,” replied Andros under his breath. “For swallow you must. I am expected back at King Arkidamos's camp. If you try to thwart me or take my slave from me, you'll all be slaughtered. This olive tree that you're burning happens to be sacred, by the way. One of the Megarian priests in the king's entourage told me this whole grove is blessed.” But Fork-Beard did not release his grip on Andros's arm.

The Dog Raiders within earshot grumbled angrily, but they quickly kicked the burning branches away from the tree. A sacred olive was never to be violated. Kolax remained kneeling, his heart pounding in his ears. Just then a trumpet sounded nearby. A body of Spartan warriors, on their way back from the fortress of the Three Heads, was coming toward the Dog Raider camp. Fork-Beard shot a hunted look toward the Spartans.

“Take your hand off me,” Andros said in a low voice, “or I'll cut it from your arm.”

The moment the Dog Raider let go, Andros grabbed Kolax by the neck, pulled him to his feet, and led him to his horse. He mounted and Kolax leapt up behind him, hugging his back. The Dog Raiders parted as Andros and his men galloped away from the Dog Raider camp.

“I told you that I would repay my life debt to you someday,” Andros said. “Did I not?”

“Debt paid,” replied Kolax with a sigh. He looked back over his shoulder and made an obscene gesture at the confounded marauders standing in front of the smoking olive tree. Soon the Dog Raiders disappeared behind the cloud of dust thrown up by the Korinthian horses. “Where are we going?” asked Kolax. “We're heading south.”

“To Korinth,” came the terse reply. “And don't try to escape from us, young Skythian. You're
my
prisoner now.”

 

SIX

“Zeus help us,” said Phile, her teeth chattering. “It must have snowed a foot up in the mountains last night.”

Nikias rolled over in the cart where he lay next to his sleeping daughters and sat up with a start. How long had he been asleep? He looked around with blurry and itching eyes, the reek of campfires thick in the air. He remembered where they were—an abandoned village ten miles north of Athens. He looked around at the thousand or so Plataeans rising from their makeshift beds and tending to their bodily needs. The dawn was curiously quiet, however, for the number of people and animals crammed so close together. Everyone seemed to be in shock—numbed by the strange journey they had been on since abandoning Plataea and the Oxlands.

The last day came back to Nikias in a crazy rush—the battle with the Spartans and his cousin Arkilokus at the old tower, the frantic journey from there on the road to Athens, Nikias's desperate ruse to trick the Spartan king, and the snub at the gates of the citadel. His teeth were still gritty from the charcoal he had swallowed, and his legs ached from so much riding. For, after being denied entrance to Athens, Nikias had headed north toward Mount Parnes leading a fraction of the Plataeans who had fled the Oxlands.

The other seventeen thousand Plataeans had elected to make camp in the cemetery outside the walls of Athens. They were either too exhausted or too terrified of the unknown to continue. Sarpedon had told Nikias that the Athenians must eventually let them into the citadel. But Nikias had argued that until Kleon deigned to open the gates to the refugees, they would be vulnerable to attack from Megarian and Spartan raiders. And even if the Plataeans were allowed inside Athens, they would then be risking infection. Sarpedon said that Nikias was right, but he wasn't going to force his people to keep moving. They would take their chances there. But he appointed Nikias the leader of the group that wanted to go to the mountains north of Athens, and sent him on his way with his blessing, giving him a small contingent of cavalry—twenty riders.

“How many more miles until we get to the mountains?” asked Phile.

“Ten or so,” said Nikias, getting down from the cart and relieving himself. “There's thick forest cover there. Many places to hide. And there are Athenian watchtowers every few miles. We can make our camp near one of these. The Spartans won't go that far north. They have no reason to.” He had been in the Parnes range after the Athenian ship he was on was attacked near Marathon; he escaped and ended up in a cove near the eastern foothills of the mountains. He walked over the range to the city-state of Tanagra, aided along the way by some Athenians in one of the guard towers that lined the road to their northern allies. It was a heavily wooded and sometimes treacherous range with isolated yet defensible positions—the perfect place for a bunch of Plataean vagabonds to hide out until the war was over. A war, Nikias reckoned, that could not last more than a few years.

“What will we do for food?” asked Phile.

“We brought enough grain to last several months,” said Nikias. “And we can all hunt.” He peered toward the rising mound of Mount Parnes, covered with trees and dusted with snow along the summit from a freakish late-season storm that had blown in during the night. Even though Nikias was still furious that his people had not been allowed entrance into Athens, he was also relieved. Fear of the Spartans had driven them blindly toward the citadel. And even after learning that Perikles and thousands of others were dead, it at first seemed better to risk disease than to face Spartan iron. But he quickly realized that going to the mountains was a much better option.

“We must get out of here,” he had said to anyone who would listen. “This is a sign from Apollo. The Parnes range will be our fortress.” Some listened to him, but most turned away in morbid silence.

“I am happy to hunt,” said Phile proudly, interrupting his thoughts. “Artemis came to me in a dream and told me that I would provide for my family with my bow.”

“You'll have to,” said Nikias.

The girls started to stir and Phile tended to them. Nikias watched as his sister spoke to the girls with loving words and gently roused them from sleep, kissing them on their cheeks. She was a warrior
and
a surrogate mother … a strange duality that was encompassed in the goddess Athena—a duality that Nikias reckoned most men could never truly comprehend.

He looked around for Saeed. The Persian and his horse were gone, and Nikias was seized by a sudden fear that Saeed had ridden back to the Oxlands to find his son, Mula. Would his grandfather's faithful slave have deserted them?

“Have you seen Saeed?” he asked Phile.

“He was gone when I awoke,” she replied.

Nikias caught sight of Ajax and Teleos exiting derelict house bearing long planks. “What are you doing?” he called to them.

“Scavenging,” Teleos called back.

“We tore up these floorboards,” said Ajax. “To make a shelter.”

Nikias looked around and realized that other Plataeans were doing the same—taking every piece of wood that they could from the homes in the abandoned village and loading them on their wagons. When Ajax and Teleos got to the cart with their burdens Nikias said, “Good work. Get as much as you can. We're moving out soon.”

He found his mare, Photine, eating grass with the cavalry horses. For once she let him take her reins without shying away. He mounted and rode around the outskirts of the camp, then found hoofprints leading north and followed them for a ways. Soon he saw a rider coming toward him and knew it was Saeed.

“Where did you go?” Nikias asked as he rode up.

“Scouting,” replied Saeed.

“Find anything?”

“Follow me,” he said, and turned his horse in the direction from which he had come.

Nikias rode beside him for half a mile. They went around a bend in the road and came suddenly upon a tall square guard tower. This one was nearly identical to the tower near the Three Heads, but unlike that crumbling fortification this one was perfectly intact and well maintained. But it didn't seem to be occupied. No soldiers could be seen on the battlements. But there was a strange-looking mound piled at the base of the wall. And something big dangling from one of the upper openings.

“What—” he began to say, then stopped himself. He realized what he was looking at on the ground: a pile of corpses left to rot in the sun. As they got closer he counted at least seven bodies. They were sprawled in strange attitudes, arms and legs in disarray, some of them upside down. “What happened?” he asked.

“The sickness,” said Saeed. “The men must have died one by one. The living dropped the dead from the upper stories to clear the putrid corpses from the death chamber. There is the last man in the tower,” he observed, pointing at the dead body hanging from the third-level opening, as if he had pushed one of his brothers from the room with his last bit of strength and then expired. The sound of buzzing flies was like the drone of bees.

“There should have been at least twenty men in this tower,” observed Nikias.

“The ones who did not become ill most likely fled back to Athens,” said Saeed.

“How do you know?”

“I inspected the tower. The door on the other side is wide-open. And there are tracks heading from there south. They left in great haste.”

“Gods,” said Nikias with abhorrence. This sickness was so powerful. How did the men in the tower catch it, being so isolated from Athens? Had a messenger from Athens come and unwittingly infected them? Or was the illness borne upon the very winds? The thought made him shudder. “We'll take our people far around this place.”

“Going to the mountains was a good idea,” said Saeed. “Athens will soon be a city of shades.”

It took another day to make it to the higher hills, and then they camped for the night. Nikias went around relentlessly, checking on people, looking for signs of illness, but nobody showed any symptoms.

The next day they took a steep and bumpy roadway leading up, and were soon amongst a dense forest of pine and fir. They met no one on the road, nor did they see any signs of wildlife. Not even rabbits. But the rattling of woodpeckers filled the forest, echoing like the sound of taut drums. Ajax, Teleos, and Nestor the dog slipped off into the woods and came back triumphantly bearing two plump grouse, and that night they feasted around their little campfire on the first meat they'd had since leaving Plataea. The refugees slept on the steep hillside, spread out along the stony road.

“Are we going all the way to the top?” asked Phile. “There's so much snow.”

“The snow will melt,” said Nikias. “And we're not going to the summit of Mount Parnes itself,” he added, pointing to the snowy summit rising to the northwest. “We'll stay in the foothills.”

When they got to the rocky and treeless top of one of the lower mountains the snow had indeed started to melt, but that did not stop the people from taking pleasure in the few inches of snow that remained. Teleos and Ajax organized the older children into a phalanx of snowball fighters and made an assault on Nikias and the cavalry. Nikias and the other men leapt from their horses and joined in the fun, scooping up snow and flinging balls, happy to forget the evils of the last several days. Nikias was in such a good mood, he didn't even mind when Teleos hit him smack in the face with an ice ball, but he chased the boy and shoved a handful of snow down his loincloth in retribution.

Later, when they crested the hill, the Plataeans saw an awesome sight: the humps of mountains stretching north into the distance, tree covered and silent, empty of human habitation … a haven built by the gods.

It took Nikias and Saeed a while to find the ancient pathway that connected all of the mountain forts. A few hundred feet from the crest of the hill the snow disappeared and the pathway, which had been hidden on the top of the mountain, reappeared as though by magic. They followed it for another two miles until they came to the first Athenian mountain fortress—a squat square building, twenty feet high with battlements, standing on a flat piece of ground. This place, like the tower in the foothills, appeared to be deserted, but there were no corpses lying about. Evidently the guards had forsaken the stronghold before anyone had taken ill.

The place was surrounded by a wall. Nikias, Saeed, and three other men clambered over it and dropped down into a large courtyard with a well. It was a big space that could hold all of the Plataeans if absolutely necessary. They investigated the tower but found nobody inside. It had been completely abandoned—save the storeroom, which held several hundred bags of wheat and over twenty amphoras full of wine, and a few others with honey.

“Treasure,” said Saeed.

Nikias nodded. “We'll keep this place safe until the Athenians return,” he said with a wry smile. “And we'll build our camp around the walls. Plenty of firewood at hand, and we can all crowd into the tower behind the walls in case of attack.”

They spent the next few days breaking down the carts and using them and the wood taken from the Athenian village to build shelters on the outside of the wall. There were many stones at hand and they were able to use these to start constructing another wall around their habitations. There was a palpable air of cooperation and goodwill amongst the Plataeans. They were so relieved to be away from the Spartans and the pestilence in Athens that there was no complaining—only hard work and good cheer. Hunting parties made up of the best archers, including Phile and many other women, went on expeditions in the woods, and started providing meat on the very first day of their arrival at the fort. Phile killed a great buck, and Nikias praised her for her skill. After a week they had built a Plataea in miniature—at least, that was how Nikias referred to it. Everyone knew their place in the order of things, and nobody lacked for food or clothing because all was shared.

“This is how it must have been in the olden days when our people first came to the Oxlands and started the habitations of Plataea,” Nikias observed to his sister while they stood at the forest's edge, watching everyone hard at work around the fort. They had gone for a walk with the girls and Nestor, but the dog had disappeared, no doubt hunting on the trail of some animal. Nestor had filled out over the last couple of days and no longer looked like a walking skeleton.