Alcmaeon sends Meratides up the second pitch and then Xelos, presumably so that they can ensure that I’ve set the rope properly before he risks himself. Our commander arrives on the shelf next, sparing me barely a glance before going into a huddle with his two comrades. Then it’s Kossos, who pointedly scorns my offered hand to climb the final overhang, and finally Diomedes. We’re all worn out, our shoulders and arms aching, but there’s no time for further rest. We leave the ropes in place despite the risk they might be spotted – we may well need them again on the way down – and work our way up the last short stretch to the top as quietly as we can.
Just below the lip of the cliff we hear boots crunching on stone and armour creaking as a patrol clambers past. We freeze, scarcely daring to breathe.
Then they’re gone, and we creep up the last few yards, wriggle our way through spiny scrub and into a stand of pines. The way ahead lies through a tangle of forest, but we soon reach the trail Doripanes said we’d find, snaking along a cliff-bound ridge that leads steeply up the mountain. Through the treetops we catch glimpses of the night sky, cold and starkly beautiful, the stars arrayed like glittering dust.
We go as quickly as we can, but we’re barely halfway to the Springs of Cithairon when the first glimmer of dawn finds us, tired despite our divine gifts. The mountainside ahead, clothed in dense forest, is already gathering tendrils of early morning mist, and so far I haven’t seen any signs of life. But I’ve heard slight noises that have set my nerves on edge. Wild animals, perhaps… or the patrols Doripanes mentioned? But we’re forced to risk that route by the terrain; elsewhere there are not only cliffs but exposed scree slopes where we are far more likely to be detected.
We’ve only just joined the main path, tucked under the crest of another ridge, and with the sun yet to rise, when I find tracks in a damp patch of ground, along with recent dung, the surface of the droppings starting to crust but the interior still moist and fragrant.
All nobles hunt, but most let lesser men do the tracking. I’ve always found the tracker’s art fascinating, though. ‘What have you found?’ Alcmaeon asks disdainfully, while his comrades snigger about ‘shit-sniffers’.
‘The nature of the dung and the number and nature of the prints suggest that two people rode towards the Springs a day ago, mounted on mules and accompanied by booted men.’
‘Tiresias and who else? Manto?’ Diomedes growls. ‘I can’t wait to catch them there and kill them both.’ The handsome young champion has been quiet, but he’s clearly hungry for a fight. He was hurled from the ladders twice during the first assaults and was lucky not to break his back, so he’s desperate to prove himself.
Bria agrees with Diomedes: ‘If we can seize those two when they’re alone, it would be perfect.’
‘They aren’t alone,’ I tell them. ‘There are the prints of at least twenty men here.’
‘Twenty?’ Alcmaeon exclaims. ‘How were we not warned of this?’ He glares at me as though I’m personally responsible for this yawning gap in Doripanes’s information.
I do my best to hide my own dismay. This has all the makings of another disaster. Should we turn back now, or continue on and make what we can of it?
‘They won’t be so many for long,’ the cocky Meratides drawls, patting his bow.
Alcmaeon scowls, calculating the odds silently. From what I’ve seen so far, he’s the most capable of the Epigoni, and he’s clearly the most ambitious. He wants a throne, he’s impatient and there are people in his way. That’s a very bad combination, not only for his enemies but for those he sees as rungs on his personal ladder.
Me, for example.
‘We move on,’ Alcmaeon decides. He fixes me with a stare. ‘It seems you can scout, Ithacan, so you can go ahead. We’ll follow half a mile behind.’
At least Alcmaeon is showing signs of caution, but half a mile is a long way back – if anything happens to me, I can’t call on any support. I share a look with Bria, before casting my eyes over the rest of the group. If Alcmaeon’s men decide she and I are superfluous, where does Diomedes stand? His father was a champion of Athena, but Tydeus broke with her at the crucial moment. And Diomedes has been under an almost impossible emotional strain over the last weeks. None of this gives me comfort.
But Alcmaeon is the leader of our little band and I have been given my orders. I set off just as the sun edges over the horizon, making my way along the trail carefully, the Great Bow strung and in my hand and a quiver of arrows over my shoulder, xiphos and dagger loosened in their scabbards. Soon I’m climbing into swirling mist, stirred by an eddying wind.
Now we’re on the main route to the Springs, it’s ambush I fear most. Doripanes’s warning about patrols is foremost in my mind – and with twenty men at his disposal, Tiresias will have made sure to guard himself well. I reason that the best chance of not getting an arrow in the back is to avoid being on the path, so I take to the margins, skirting the path a little way within the wooded slopes, gliding through and over the moss-covered boulders scattered among the pines. Last year I learnt much of tracking and ambush from an expert, and I’ve been practising since.
There are basic and not-so-basic rules: you move unpredictably, and you never expose yourself unless you have to. If you must cross any open space, first map out the places you can make for if someone appears. Watch the way the birds and animals are behaving, and when there are none about, be warned. Most of all, think not only like a hunter but like the hunted. That promontory above – would you lie there, watching? Or is it too obvious a lookout? This clearing – where would I position myself to command it? That gully – where would I hide? The wind – how can I use it to mislead pursuit? The narrows ahead – how might I trap someone there? And how could I be trapped?
My luck being what it is, there is an assassin and he’s thinking these same things. Which is why he’s on a steep downslope below the track, where I’d never have thought to hide. But some instinct has me half glancing his way. I catch the blur of his movements in my peripheral vision and drop…
An arrow buzzes past the back of my neck and slams into a tree trunk behind me. I come up again and launch myself at the boulder I’ve already picked out as my best cover. Three heartbeats it takes me to get there, and that’s barely enough time – I feel the wind of a second arrow shriek by, glancing off my hardened leather quiver and snapping on a rock.
He – or she – is damned good.
I nock an arrow and size up the situation. The assassin chose to hide below the trail, relying on surprise to compensate for sacrificing the advantages of height. But the slope they’re on steepens alarmingly, strewn with rubble all the way down to a narrow defile hundreds of feet below. It’s one heck of a gamble for one archer to take – forsaking the high ground and relying on a single kill shot…
…but it’s not such a gamble for two archers.
I glance behind me, glimpse a silhouette half out of cover above me, and hurl myself aside. An instant later an arrow rips past my torso, tearing cloth and scouring my belly as I turn side-on and fire back. The shape above me gives a high-pitched cry – whether in annoyance or pain I can’t tell – and lurches behind a tree.
First blood, I hope; then I touch a hand to my belly and it comes away smeared in scarlet. Very well, second blood.
I must have presented a glimpse of my back as I fired, but I find fresh cover, just before another arrow from below rakes past the top of my leather helmet. I check my belly again, but though the skin’s broken and it stings, it’s just a cut – I can ignore it.
By now I’ve seen just enough of both of them to work out who I’m dealing with: the two Theban theioi who helped beat the shit out of me back on Delos – close-cropped hair and tattoos, leather garb and nasty grins. They came at me front and back when I was captured on the beach, too – I guess that’s how they operate…
Working swiftly, I nock an arrow, kindle magic fire on the arrowhead and send the burning shaft into the lower branches of the stunted pine
tree where the woman archer is concealed. There’ll be smoke, but I’m confident the mist should hide it from any watchers elsewhere on the mountain. I hear a startled curse and wait, gathering my strength again after the effort the fire-conjuring exacts.
Inside a few heartbeats the tree is well ablaze and she has to move, bursting from cover with an arrow still in her left shoulder, moving low to the ground to get out of sight again. I send another shaft arcing after her, even as I hear a crunch on the path just yards behind me, on the other side of the boulder I’m sheltering behind. I don’t even follow my arrow’s flight but cast the Great Bow aside and pull out my xiphos. Then I go round the boulder on the blind side at full speed.
The burly male scout is in the middle of the path, blade in hand, but he’s facing side-on, expecting me to appear from the other side of the big rock. He recovers swiftly though, throwing up a parry then hammering his blade at me. For a few heartbeats all I can do is give ground against his frenzied assault, with no chance to counter. But then I manage a riposte, he’s forced to either walk onto my thrust or pause, and we disengage momentarily.
His rage is palpable, and I realize why: his female comrade hasn’t reappeared.
‘Two shafts, one in the shoulder and the other in the lower back,’ I pant, goading him. Angry men fight ferociously, but badly. ‘I think she’s a goner.’
‘Shut your gob,’ he snarls, snorting like a beast.
‘Lower gut, from behind, it’ll be septic by nightfall.’
‘Shut it!’
‘But if it’s lodged in her spine, she’s likely paralysed—’
‘Shut up!’ he screams, launching himself at me.
Parry, duck and slash. His blade goes wild but he twists, so my counterblow doesn’t take his chest but slashes open his forearm. Then he hits me like a charging boar and we go down in a cloud of dust, slamming into the dry earth and tangling as our swords fly and we go for daggers. He’s bigger than me and a torrent of hatred is spewing from him as he tries to find my throat with his left hand and position his dagger, but we’ve got each other by the wrist. His forehead hammers down but I twist, take it on the cheek with a crunch, and it’s still almost enough to stun, but I slam my knee upwards into the space between his legs, his face bulges and his left hand, bloody from the earlier wound, slips on my wrist and loses grip.
I ram my freed dagger into his side, through the leather, in and out the same hole thrice in succession as he gurgles and grunts, thrashing in my grip, trying to head-butt, to bite, his sweat and breath filling my senses, and then the stink of his blood and piss engulfs us as he expires on top of me.
I shove him off and scramble back into cover, but no one shoots. I recover my bow, scanning the spot where I saw the woman vanish; then, taking a different route, I slip through the trees away from the path and circle above behind the burning tree, which I quell with a silent spell. I creep closer, using another boulder as a screen, and peer over the top.
She’s lying in the dust, propped on her side, a broken arrow jutting from her left shoulder and a second shaft protruding from her lower back, just as I guessed. She’s pale as a spectre, sucking on a water flask and starring wide-eyed at nothing. She’s lost her bow and the dagger in her hand is held weakly.
I’d not be human if I didn’t feel pity. But they were going to kill me, and if she’s as badly off as she seems, there might not be much I can do anyway – even though she’s a theia, stronger than ordinary people.
I rise, deliberately making a sound. She throws me a panicked, stricken look.
‘Is he…?’ she croaks.
‘Dead,’ I tell her, still wary. Daggers can be thrown.
Instead she gives a low wail, and before I can prevent her, she rams the short blade up under her own chin, thrashes momentarily then sags, open-eyed and empty.
I swallow, gag and back away a few steps.
It’s a few moments before I can bring myself to go to her and rummage through her belt pouch, but there’s nothing that tells me even her name. She has a pendant of Artemis the Huntress around her throat, and a few obols in a small backpack. I take both, and the best of her arrows. Then I return to her partner in crime – apart from an Apollo emblem on his leather breastplate, he’s similarly anonymous. I wouldn’t even know what to mark their graves with, and I’ve no time to bury them anyway.
Artemis and Athena are virgin goddesses of Achaea. They should be working together, but instead we’re enemies. That’s what saddens me most.
I mutter a swift prayer, hoping my skirmish with the scouts and the smoke from the fire have gone unnoticed in the mist, and that Tiresias is still oblivious to our approach.
* * *
I continue up the ridge as cautiously as before but find no further killers on the trail. Although thick clouds are still tumbling over the ridge, there are now occasional breaks, with glimpses of clear sky above. I arrive at a secondary trail with tracks in soft mud that tell me Tiresias, Manto and their remaining guards have come this way. Soon I reach a point where I can spy out our destination.
I’m huddled low on a hillock overlooking two pools. Through gaps in the cloud, I glimpse part of the upper, the more important and spiritually significant pool. I see no one, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there, out of sight.
The lower pool is fed by a noisy cataract from the upper one, and there are four men beside it, minding two mules. The side trail I’ve ascended runs down from my vantage through patchy scrub and scattered trees to the lower pool. Another path, clearly man-made, weaves through boulders on the far side of the lower pool and up the near-vertical slope beside the cataract towards the upper pool, which comes in and out of view as the clouds swirl. I glimpse a tower to the right, overlooking the path to the upper pool, and beyond it, the tiled roof of a building.
These are the Springs of Cithairon, the haunting place of Tiresias’s mother, the nymph Chariclo, but there’s no sign of anything strange – as yet. I steal away unseen, returning to the main trail to await Alcmaeon and his party. They appear not long after. I step out in front of them casually, giving them a bit of distance so they don’t get too big a surprise: you don’t lightly startle a theios.
‘Welcome,’ I say drily.
They all go still, then Bria puts on a swagger and ambles up. ‘Just the two theioi back there?’
‘Just the two,’ I reassure her. ‘No one escaped to raise the alarm.’
‘But Tiresias will be expecting their return at some stage,’ Diomedes points out. He peers ahead, into the mist. ‘Is this the place?’
‘It’s not far away.’ I turn to Alcmaeon, who’s with his trio of theioi, and describe the layout as clearly as I can. It doesn’t seem to lift me in their esteem – some people you just can’t please. ‘Tiresias and the others of his party,’ I conclude, ‘are probably inside the building, or beside the upper pool. The path from the lower pool is the only way in or out, as far as I can see.’
Alcmaeon puffs out his cheeks, weighing things up: the enemy are two down, but we’re still seven against as many as twenty, including two sorcerers. It’s lousy odds even for theioi, especially if there are other theioi among them. And frankly, I’d still be worried if it was only Tiresias and Manto we faced.
‘Can we take down the four guards at the pool before they raise the alarm?’ Alcmaeon asks, glancing at my bow, and then at his own archer, Meratides.
‘Sure we can, if the Ithacan can shoot straight,’ the Argive bowman drawls.
Unwisely, I bite. ‘I wager I can shoot straighter than you.’
‘Can you just? I’ll take that wager – though I always find living targets the trickiest, don’t you?’
‘A target’s a target.’
‘I think we both know that’s not true.’ He smirks, meeting my eye – my disgust at the massacre near Corinth has got me pegged as squeamish, and in the sense that shooting an unsuspecting man down from the safety of distance and concealment is barely different from murder, he might be ri
ght. ‘An obol a head, Ithacan? Or two?’ he suggests archly. ‘What’s a life worth to you?’
I’m regretting this already. ‘For glory,’ I tell him sharply, and turn away to check the stringing of my bow.
The Great Bow isn’t terribly distinctive, but it has certain unique markings that Meratides notices, now the sun is well up and there’s plenty of light. ‘Hey, isn’t that the Bow of Eurytus?’ he asks, suddenly very attentive.
I curse under my breath; I don’t like people knowing that I hold a prized weapon like this. But Meratides doesn’t look like he’s guessing. ‘It is,’ I reply nonchalantly.
He frowns, then holds out his hand. ‘May I?’
I also don’t like handing it over, but he’s ostensibly an ally. I pass it to him coolly, while everyone watches. Meratides makes a play of handling it, testing the resistance in its draw, then he spins and suddenly feigns a shot at me, moving so fast I could almost swear he’s nocked an arrow. I flinch and he laughs.
‘Almost a waste, this beauty, in the hands of an untested youth.’
‘I’m twenty-one, and I’m not untested,’ I tell him, holding out my hand.
He pauses, rubbing his stubbly chin. ‘Let’s make the wager for this bow, eh?’ he suggests.
‘I don’t think so,’ I tell him. ‘It was given to me, and now it’s mine.’
‘That right? I thought it belonged to old Eurytus? Bears his name after all…’ He glances at Kossos before proffering the bow back with a cold smirk. ‘But I guess even a Great Bow is of no use to a dead man.’
Who’s he talking about? Eurytus? Or me? I grab the bow from him, resisting the urge to wipe his handprints off.
Alcmaeon commands us to find vantages opposite each other. Meratides claims the easier job, setting himself up below the hillock from where I first espied the Springs. Which means I will need to creep down the trail from the hillock, keeping low to avoid being seen, then find a way through steep forest below the lower pool, negotiating what will probably be a waterfall and whatever else I might find there. Alcmaeon says he’ll give me enough time to get into position, and await a signal he’ll give – something unmistakable, apparently.
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