A rough bleating sounded behind her, and the next step of the plan was born. She turned to the goat cropping on grass behind her. “Perhaps I should stow the eye for safekeeping?” she suggested, motioning toward the goat’s rear, lifting its tail.
The Cyclops froze, aghast. “You would not dare!”
Kassandra smiled by way of reply, popping the eye in her mouth to moisten it, then shoving it deep into the goat’s anus. The goat’s head rose with a startled bleat, confused, before she slapped its rump, causing it to bolt between two of the Cyclops’s men, off up the bay and over the horizon.
The Cyclops howled. “Catch the damned goat, get my eye,” he screamed. Three set off after the creature.
Three fewer bastards to deal with, she thought.
The Cyclops and the remaining seven now crouched like hunting cats, facing Kassandra. “A bag of silver to the one who rips open her throat,” he drawled.
She took the guard ax stolen from the Cyclops’s den in one hand and the Leonidas spear in the other, watching, waiting for the first to move. The meanest-looking of the thugs, bald with heavy gold earrings and a leather kilt, wriggled a little. When he lurched forward, she threw up spear and ax in an X to block, but the blow sent her staggering back toward those behind. She pivoted midstride to meet the expected attack from that direction, only to see the streaking shadow of Ikaros, swooping down to claw at the eyes of the brute behind her, saving her from his wicked-looking sickle. She swung to face her next attacker, parrying then chopping the ax into his shoulder, cleaving deep and bringing a gout of black blood. The foe fell away and she saw the next coming for her. She bent her body around his sword thrust and jabbed the Leonidas spear into his face. He fell with an animal moan, his head ruptured like a melon. Two more lunged at her now. One scored her breastbone with a swipe of his spear, and the other nearly crushed her head with a heavy iron mace. Too many . . . and the Cyclops himself was weighing up his moment to strike the killing blow. A Spartan must have the eyes of a hunter, see everything, not just that which lies before them, Nikolaos berated her. From the edges of her vision, she saw something on the Adrestia’s decks: the ship’s spar and the rope holding it in place—one end knotted by the rail. As the two oncoming thugs screamed, she ducked, avoiding their twin strikes, and tugged the ax from the cloven chest of the first she had killed. Rising, she hurled the ax toward the ship. She did not wait to see if her aim had been good, turning to block another attack. The next thing she heard was the thunk of the ax biting through rope and into timber, the groan of wood, the roar of the Cyclops charging at her, his heavy blade tensed and ready to slice across her belly. Then the shadow of something passed overhead. The spar—freed—pivoted around on the mast, the rope flailing past overhead. Kassandra leapt up to grab the brine-wet rope and clung on for dear life, just as the Cyclops’s blade cut through the space she had been occupying. The rope dragged her through the air, and she kicked out at the Cyclops, smashing his nose in with her heel, then swept around like a stone in a sling, shooting free of the ring of thugs and toward the ship. She let go of the rope and slammed against the vessel’s rail then levered herself onto the deck. She ran to Barnabas and sliced through his bonds, then those of the nearest crewmen. They leapt up, panicked.
“Be ready,” she berated the crew, turning toward the stern and the shore. She heard the Cyclops’s breathy rage, seeing the ropes tossed up from the shore snagging on bolts and timbers then tensing as the brute and his thugs climbed. The crew tossed hooks and poles to and fro, then rushed to the stern rail to batter at the climbing men, knocking some off like limpets. But the Cyclops was too strong. He reached the rail, slashed up and ripped open the neck of one crew member, who toppled into the shallows. He and three thugs managed to reboard. When the one-eyed giant lunged toward Kassandra, the fretting, unarmed Barnabas staggered into his path, and the Cyclops tensed his blade, ready to slice the man out of the way. Kassandra grabbed a fishing pole—affixed with a spike on the end—and launched it across the deck at the giant. The makeshift javelin hammered into the Cyclops’s chest, threw him backward and pinned him to the mast. The brute’s good eye flared in anger and disbelief, before a gout of dark blood leapt from his mouth, followed by a rattling breath. Finally, he slumped into death.
The few thugs still fighting now backed away, gawping, all confidence gone. They leapt from the boat and sped up the bay.
“The Cyclops of Kephallonia is . . . dead?” one crewman stammered.
“The island is free from his terror,” croaked another.
Barnabas, still soaking and somewhat bedraggled, came before Kassandra, stared at her, then fell to one knee like a dropped cloak. He gazed up at her in awe and veneration. Just then, Ikaros swooped in and landed on her shoulder. “Daughter of Ares?”
“Kassandra,” she replied, waving him up then casting an eye over the strewn bodies and the clay pot. “I had heard of some grudge between the Cyclops and the triearchos of this boat. I didn’t realize how severe it was.”
Barnabas rose with a deep sigh. “What happened with the Cyclops was a misunderstanding, shall we say. I was in Sami recently enjoying a meal in the dockside tavern there. When I say a meal, I mean a bucketful of wine. I grew rather merry and decided to tell the locals a tale of a past voyage, about a thing I saw out in the islands—while I was hideously drunk, admittedly . . . but I did see it: a horrifying creature, ugly beyond description. I mentioned the words ‘one-eyed monster’ and our friend back there rises, kicking over his table. He thinks I’m talking about him, you see, and chases me from the place. We were lucky to escape the Sami docks before he could catch us. But it seems he watched for my next landing, because as soon as we put into shore here, he and his men pounced.”
“Yes, the Cyclops tends . . . tended to take that kind of thing personally.” Kassandra half smiled.
Barnabas’s sun-darkened face slackened in relief as he beheld the Cyclops’s body and then the clay pot. “After spending most of my life at sea, it would have been absolutely shameful to drown in a pot. I owe you my life. We all do. Yet I can never repay you but with my loyalty.”
“The use of your ship for a time would be payment enough,” she said.
“A journey?” he asked. “I will take you anywhere, Misthios. To the edge of the world, if needs be.”
* * *
• • •
The Adrestia left Kleptous Bay behind and sailed around the island to the harbor of Sami. There it remained at anchor for a time while Barnabas’s men gathered provender and supplies for the journey that lay ahead, the crew trooping back and forth across the gangplank with sacks laden on their shoulders. Kassandra rested one elbow on the ship’s rail, her mind already at sea, the babble of the docks, the screeching of gulls and the clack of cups from the nearby taverns incessant around her.
Light footsteps rose behind her, rattling along the jetty. “I’m ready,” Phoibe panted. “I have packed all my things.”
Kassandra’s eyes closed tight, and she fought to douse the flickering flame within. “You’re not coming,” she said coldly.
The footsteps slowed behind her. “If you’re going, I’m going,” Phoibe said in a clipped tone.
“Where I’m headed is no place for a child,” Kassandra said, turning slowly to face her, crouching to her eye level. Now she could see the clipped tone was but a mask. Tears quivered in Phoibe’s eyes. “You must stay on this island. The Cyclops is gone now and so you and Markos will be safe.” She shot a look over Phoibe’s shoulder. Markos stood on the jetty, locked in discussions with some boss-eyed trader, trying to sell him a mangy donkey with a bald back. “A battle horse,” he crowed, “fit for a general.” He stopped for a moment, and returned Kassandra’s look, offering her a half nod in farewell. Look after her, she mouthed to him. Another hurried nod like a scolded child.
She felt something being pressed into her hand then. Phoibe’s wooden toy eagle.
“Then take Chara with you,” Phoibe said. “Wherever you go, Chara will be with you, and so will I—in a way.”
Kassandra felt invisible hands squeezing her throat, and a sob pressing through the gap. But she wrapped her fingers over the toy eagle and stifled the emotion with a cold sigh. “And I have something for you,” she whispered, slipping the Cyclops’s obsidian eye into Phoibe’s palm. It had been a deft sleight of hand back at Kleptous Bay: she wondered for a moment if the poor goat had now passed the small rock she had shoved up its backside. “Keep this for yourself. Don’t let Markos know about it. If you run into trouble, sell it and use the coins wisely.” Phoibe stared at the eye, agape, then tucked it in her purse.
“Farewell, Phoibe,” Kassandra said, rising.
“You will come back, one day, won’t you?” Phoibe pleaded.
“I cannot promise you that, Phoibe, but I hope we will meet again.”
Shouts echoed across the boat as the last of the supplies was brought on board and the gangplank was readied to be drawn up. Phoibe backed away, smiling, crying. She hopped from the boat and down toward Markos. Kassandra turned away from her, clutching the toy eagle tightly.
The Adrestia pulled out to sea under oar. Barnabas strode to and fro across the deck. Unlike that day when she had saved him, he no longer resembled a drowned cat. He wore a pale blue exomis with white shoulders, his long, thick locks swept back from his face and his beard combed to forked points. He was handsome in an avuncular way, stout and strong. After a time, he called out to his men: “Ship the oars, set sail. The crew were like squirrels, speeding up the mast, tugging on ropes. With a rumble like faraway thunder, rolling closer, the cloud-white sail of the Adrestia tumbled from the spar to reveal a crimson blazon of a soaring eagle. The sail caught the stiff wind, billowing like a giant’s chest, and the boat lurched eastwards at speed, spray soaking all those aboard in moments, a trail of white foam churning in the boat’s wake.
Barnabas came to Kassandra’s side, hair rapping in the wind of the voyage. “When the Cyclops forced me underwater, I prayed to the gods. And then you came . . .”
Kassandra laughed drily. “You called, and I answered.”
“And you fought like an Amazon Queen, like a sister of Achilles! All while Zeus’s eagle flew around your head,” Barnabas continued. Ikaros, following in the boat’s wake, screeched in acknowledgment. Barnabas’s eyes grew glassy, sparkling with wonder. “On my travels, I’ve encountered people who claimed to have blood of the gods in their veins. But claims are cheap and easy . . . Deeds are the true measure of a person.”
Coyly, she glanced away and around the deck. It was bare and tidy, with a small cabin just below the scorpion-tail stern and a number of nooks and high nests that the crew seemed to favor, men sitting on the spar with their legs dangling. Some slept in the shade near the prow, using rolled-up cloaks as pillows, others sang as they scrubbed the timbers and some played games of knucklebones by the rail. Thirty men altogether, she counted.
“Each of them is a brother to me,” he said, noticing her gaze. “And you can rely on them utterly. But I must ask: why, of all places I could take you . . . why the Megarid?” He gazed off to where the ship was headed: the wide waters of the Gulf of Korinthia.
“At the Megaran port of Pagai lies a great prize.”
“And the heart of the war, Misthios,” Barnabas countered. “The Megaran lands crawl with Spartan phalanxes, and the waters are ringed with Athenian galleys. The latter will pose no problem, for although the Adrestia is small and aged, she is fast and swift to turn . . . and she sports a sharp beak. But even then, we will make shore at a time when rumors thicken of Perikles leading an Athenian land army into the Megarid to face and destroy the Spartan regiments. What prize could possibly be worth setting foot on such a war-torn land?”
“The head of a Spartan general,” she replied.
The crewmen nearby gasped.
“I have been hired to kill the one they call the Wolf,” she said, her confidence growing as the trireme sliced across deeper waters.
Barnabas blew air through his lips and laughed without humor, as one might when surveying a sheer-sided cliff smeared with oil that they have been asked to climb. “The Wolf? You have taken on a tall task, Misthios. They say Nikolaos of Sparta has shoulders of iron, sleeps with his spear in hand and one eye open. And his bodyguards are like demons too . . .”
Kassandra heard Barnabas’s words fade into a deafening ring. She heard herself mutter: “What did you say?” and saw the looks of confusion on the captain’s face and on the faces of the crew nearby who came to her aid when her legs weakened. She shook them off, grabbing the ship’s rail and leaning over to stare down into the water.
The Wolf is Nikolaos of Sparta? I have been sent to kill my father?
* * *
• • •
As he watched the Adrestia drift out to sea, spearing toward the Korinthian Gulf under power of sail, Elpenor stroked the strange mask in his hands, chuckling quietly to himself. He saw the small figure of Kassandra at the stern. Proud, brave, mighty, at first. Then he almost felt the crushing blow as it was delivered, seeing her fall to one knee, waving the men away.
“She knows . . .” he purred. “It has begun.”
FOUR
“Hoist the sail!” Barnabas yelled. As the great blazon of the eagle was tucked away, twenty men settled on the padded-leather benches running either side of the ship, each taking up a fir-pole oar, lifting it and threading it through a leather loop and thole pin. With a rhythmic splash, the oars met the waves.
The Megarid was in sight. The journey was all but over.
Kassandra, perched at the prow, stared at the forest of Athenian galleys ahead. Flapping striped sails, fir masts and pitch-painted hulls. Every one of the mighty vessels was packed with glinting hoplites, archers, slingers, peltasts. Some were even laden with Thessalian steeds, their heads covered with bags to stop them becoming panicked at the sight of the ocean. A floating army stood between the Adrestia and the hazy Megaran hinterland beyond and the port of Pagai itself.
“I have to face him,” she whispered to herself. It was a mantra that had echoed in her thoughts for the past two days of the voyage as she came to terms with the Wolf’s true identity. “But there is no way through that blockade.”
The ships were serried in banks, four or five deep. She saw the knots of white-tuniced peltasts aboard the two nearest triremes turn from the blockaded land to behold the tiny vessel speeding toward their flotilla like a mouse charging a pride of lions. They shouted and pointed, their commander barking at them to lift their javelins and take aim. Kassandra looked back at Barnabas and his men, ready to tell them to turn around, that it had been a mistake. Maybe they could swing north or south and land on either side of the Korinthian Gulf. From there it might only take them a month or so to pick their way overland to Pagai and—
“Kybernetes,” Barnabas roared before she could say a word. “Turn . . . turn . . . turn!”
Under the shadow of the galley’s scorpion tail, the coal-skinned helmsman named Reza grabbed onto the twin steering oars, his mighty shoulders shaking with effort, leaning left to edge the boat to the right. He roared with the strain, until two crewmen rushed to add their weight to the mix.
With a hiss of churning water, the galley tilted sharply to the right, slicing through the waves. Kassandra grabbed hold of the rail for balance. A sheet of water leapt over her, soaking the deck too, and she saw the loosed javelins of the Athenian peltasts sail harmlessly into the churn of the Adrestia’s wake. The galley rolled level once more and Kassandra gawped at the lone Athenian trireme ahead, side on to the Adrestia’s prow. Barnabas had spotted it through all the other boats: a weak spot in the blockade.
“Aaand: O-opop-O-opop-O-opop . . .” the keleustes chanted faster and faster, passionately punching a fist into his palm as he strode along the spine of the deck.
Every repetition of the sound saw the oarsmen draw back, brought the Adrestia up to ever-more-incredible speeds . . . the bronze beak speeding toward the flank of the lone Athenian galley. Kassandra’s eyes widened, and the Athenians’ faces dropped. “Brace!” Barnabas roared.
The world exploded in a roar of crumpling timbers. Kassandra felt her shoulders nearly leap from their sockets as the Adrestia lurched, and the sky darkened for a moment with clouds of kindling. Through a chorus of screams the Adrestia cut, the two halves of the broken Athenian galley swinging open like doors, the great mast falling, the crew clinging to timber poles for dear life. The commotion fell away as rapidly as it had risen.
Kassandra gazed back at the chaos of foaming waters and groaning wreckage, sure the rest of the Athenian fleet would fall upon them.
“They won’t follow,” Barnabas said. “They won’t risk getting too close to the shore to catch one small boat.”
The shore, she thought, looking toward the shingle bay and bluffs of Pagai. A flurry of icy thorns pricked her heart as she realized there was no excuse now. She was here . . . and so was he. She scoured the coastline, heart thumping. Nothing.
The ship drew in to a deserted stretch of shore, sliding onto the shingle. Kassandra leapt down onto the bay, staring along the deserted hinterland. Where are you, Wolf?
A desperate gasp nearby sent a jolt of fright through her. An Athenian warrior, from the ship they had halved, scrambled through the shallows and onto the shore, panting, spitting, his blue-and-white exomis sopping wet. All along the coast she saw more—hundreds of them, swimming in from the wreckage. Some used their shields as floats, and most were armed too. Those on the other boats out in the blockade raised a distant cheer. For a moment, it seemed that the Athenians had an unlikely foothold on the bay.
Until, from the pine woods, a crimson pack poured forth.
Assassin's Creed Odyssey (The Official Novelization) Page 5