Kirrha’s dock was a riot of stenches and garish colors. Not a single patch of harbor water could be seen, thanks to the hundreds of bobbing rafts, skiffs and small private boats crammed there. Sailors scampered around the decks and scurried up the masts of one boat, tied at a private mooring, tying up its hideous, gorgon-head sail. Pilgrims swarmed over gangways and onto the wharfside, jabbering and singing, looking around in wonder. Merchants yapped and bleated, offering their “sacred” statuettes and trinkets to the passersby. Local children leapt from raft to raft, peddling cool drinks to the thirsty visitors. Smoke columns rose and bells clanged constantly as the crowds waded through the packed streets and onto the pilgrim’s path.
Cutting through the swarms from the private mooring, like a boat moving upstream, was a gold-draped litter.
Elpenor was a cruel man—the kind of man who enjoyed watching his friends fail. He weighed the sack of coins resting beside him in his litter. Perhaps he would divert these funds to his growing fishing business. “I could buy three new boats for my fleet,” he purred, “or . . . I could pay the toothless crooks at the harbor to scuttle twelve of Drakon’s ships.”
Drakon had been his best friend since childhood, and his wife and daughters even called Elpenor “uncle.” In the early days, Drakon’s family were poor—almost beggars—and Elpenor had enjoyed giving the family a few coins from his business earnings. The enjoyment came not from helping them, but from the feeling of control. Without his small donations, they might not eat. It thrilled him at the time. But Drakon had been overly loud about his gradual change of fortunes: finding a seabream-nesting area out at sea, and using his pathetic little skiff to bring in bounteous catches for months on end. On and on Drakon had bleated about his new boat, then his burgeoning fleet and the wealth he had acquired through it, and no longer did he need Elpenor’s charity. “Decision made.” Elpenor grinned with a venomous twitch. “I hope you are a good swimmer, Drakon.”
His nostrils flared in disgust as a waft of onions and unwashed nether regions rose from the bare-chested pilgrims standing outside the tavern, braying crudely at their own gutter humor. Get into the hills, pay your dues and begone, he cursed them all. He clapped his hands once to quicken his carriers. “Move. I want to be in my villa before noon, before the stink becomes intolerable.”
They cut through a maze of tight lanes and at last came to the edge of town, passing through the iron gates of his estate. The litter was set down, and Elpenor rose, hearing the gentle gurgle of the fountain, smelling the sweet chamomile of his gardens. Stepping inside, he slipped off his expensive leather slippers and enjoyed the feel of the cool white-marble floors on the soles of his feet. He heard the two litter slaves shuffling away and turned to one of them, clicking his fingers. “You, pour some sweet oils into the bathing pool”—his gaze grew carnal—“and wait on me in there. You had better please me this time. I don’t want to have to hurt you again.”
The slave stared into space, nodded once, and did as he was told.
Elpenor stepped into his office, well-appointed with busts and plush seats, a hearth on one side and a colonnade on the other, open to the gardens to allow the blissful song of nature to spill inside. Moving over to the black-and-burned-orange krater on the table, he poured himself a cup of wine and chilled water. It slightly disappointed him that the krater was not empty, for it robbed him of a reason to whip the girl whose duty it was to keep his home stocked with fine drinks and foods. “Now, to the business of the day,” he mused to himself, sipping the cool liquid with a contented sigh. He swung on his heel toward the polished-ash-wood bureau where his tokens and tablets waited. But he took just one stride toward it and froze.
A Spartan officer’s helm sat upon the desk, staring back at him, the transverse crimson crest spread like a peacock’s tail. One-half of the helm was gleaming bronze, the other half encrusted in dried blood.
“First, you will pay me,” a voice spoke from the shadows behind the colonnade.
He sucked in a breath, seeing her now. She paced into view, her face dark. She seemed different from that moment on Kephallonia last spring. Leaner, taller, more confident in her stride.
“And then you will tell me why,” she continued in a breathy drawl.
“Why?” Elpenor said.
“Don’t play games with me. You knew when you sent me on that mission. You knew you had sent me to take my father’s head.”
Elpenor beheld her with hooded eyes and a creeping smile. “If you had known, Misthios, would you have taken the contract?” he said, sliding open a drawer under the table and lifting a small sack of coins, never taking his gaze from her. He plunked the coins down on the bureau dismissively.
“I believe some evils are best left undisturbed,” she replied, stalking wide toward the bureau as if wary of a trap.
“Yet once a hornet’s nest has been shaken, the swarm must be faced,” Elpenor said in a conspiratorial whisper. “He wasn’t your real father, was he?”
Kassandra’s lips twitched, betraying a bestial grimace. “You will tell me everything, you snake. Why did you send me to kill him?”
Elpenor shrugged, sinking back onto a cushioned bench with an affected sigh, sipping his wine, stroking a standing marble statue of Ares by the bench’s end, the war god clutching a bronze spear. “The Wolf was a brilliant general. He would have unpicked Athens’s strategies and defenses before long . . . and there’s no profit in a quick war, is there?”
“How did you know about his past and mine?” Kassandra hissed, taking the coin purse and stepping toward him.
“I love theater. A great general throws his own children from a cliff on the say-so of the Oracle . . . it is a tragedy for all the ages.” He chuckled.
“You find amusement in the strangest of places,” she said. “Perhaps you will laugh one last time when I sink my spear into your chest?”
“Now, now, Misthios, let me explain.” Elpenor lifted his cup to drink again. His eyes obscured momentarily, he glanced to the colonnade. His eyes met those of a guard, and the guard quickly saw what was going on. Excellent, he thought as the leather-clad brute crept in from the gardens, coming for Kassandra unseen like a leopard stalking a gazelle. “The Wolf told you about your birth father and your mother, I presume?”
She nodded once, staring down her nose at him as she drew close.
“Then it is simple,” he said. “They will be your next two targets.”
She recoiled. “What did you say?”
“You heard me, Misthios. You have proven yourself a parent slayer already. Why the misgivings now?”
“I thought you a soulless cur at first, now I know that you are far worse,” she croaked. “Why, why would I do what you ask?”
“Then the answer is no?” Elpenor said, leaning forward on the bench, eyes wide as if awaiting a revelation.
“Never,” she said through gritted teeth.
“Such a shame, you could have been of use to me,” Elpenor said, then nodded once to the creeping guard behind her.
In a single movement, Kassandra bent around from the hips, drawing, nocking and loosing her bow. The arrow took the guard in the eye just as he lurched in an attempt to run her through. The man flailed and crashed headlong into the unlit hearth, where he lay, feet twitching.
Elpenor snatched the bronze spear from the marble hands of Ares, swishing it around toward her. He heard a clean chopping noise and saw both his hands and the spear spin through the air, Kassandra’s half spear flashing in a shaft of sunlight. He stared at the perfectly hewn stumps below both wrists: white bone, marrow, blood . . . then lots and lots of blood. He fell to his knees, wailing. “What have you done?”
She clamped a hand over his mouth and pressed him back against the bench. “You will bleed to death in moments. I can save you, but I want answers.”
Elpenor felt fiery agony in his forearms at first, then the hot we
tness of the soaking blood. Then . . . a growing coldness. He nodded weakly; she slid her hand from his lips. “You are a fool, Kassandra. You only left Kephallonia alive because of me. The Cult wanted you dead. I said you would be more use alive.”
Kassandra’s face grew pinched and hateful. “The Cult . . . who?”
Elpenor sensed a final victory in the onset of death. He would be her master, at the last, ridiculing her with his dying breath. “Go, as the Wolf once did . . . and ask the Oracle,” he cackled, before he slipped into a cold black infinity.
* * *
• • •
Kassandra stumbled back from his graying corpse, numb. Absently, she snatched a few more coin purses from a drawer in his desk, then opened a wooden chest to find a silk robe that would no doubt fetch a good price and a wicked-looking but probably valuable theater mask, taking both. As she crouched to make her escape before any more guards arrived, she saw the slave kneeling by the indoor pool, white with fear, staring at her, having seen it all. She tossed him one of the coin purses. “Go,” she said, “far from this place.”
She heard the slave and the few other poor wretches of the household scampering away toward the docks. She, however, turned inland, toward the rising mountains and the streaming crowds of pilgrims flooding up into those heights. Soon, her thighs ached as she climbed with them, her head bowed, neck scorched by the sun, mind heavy with mysteries. All throughout the past winter, spent hiding out in the islands with Barnabas and his crew, she had rehearsed her confrontation with Elpenor. Now it was over, and she had nothing but a pair of coin sacks and a few fine garments—worthless compared to the answers she needed.
She glanced over her shoulder in the direction of the cur’s villa, behind and far below. Kirrha town was now but a shimmer of activity—the warren of streets and alleys like a tessellated promenade, hugging the green waters of the Korinthian Gulf. Up here the heat was dry and choking, the dust sticking to the back of the throat and stinging the eyes. She felt like a fool: climbing toward Delphi and the Temple of Apollo and its damned Oracle as if she would truly find any answers there. But there was no other way. The Wolf had not told her of her true father or her mother’s whereabouts, and so now it came down to Elpenor’s dying jest and the famously abstruse words of the seeress.
Ikaros shrieked, banking and soaring up above. Kassandra squinted upward. He wheeled and sped across the pale rock and greenery ahead. A wreath of cloud obscured the higher parts, and the heat began to mix with a freshness. Here, a high green valley yawned, the sides veined with streamlets and dotted with pine and cypress trees.
On a plateau overlooking the valley floor, the Temple of Apollo was perched, like an eagle in its eyrie. The home of the Oracle. Silvery Doric columns supported a red-tiled roof, and starlings swooped to and from their nests in the brightly painted architraves. This, some claimed, was the center of the world, the neutral heart of all Hellas. The sanctuary of the Gods where Spartan and Athenian alike were but men.
The great train of pilgrims wound all the way up around smaller temples and shrines, snaking toward the grand entrance. Peddlers lapped against the sides of the pilgrim train like waves on a causeway, holding up ivory plaques and beaded necklaces.
When the hawkers crowded around her, she ignored them all, instead staring up at the ancient temple, thinking of what had happened on Mount Taygetos all those years ago. All at your behest, she mouthed sourly, thinking of the Oracle upon whose poisoned words it had been carried out. You will give me answers today, seeress, or I will sheathe my spear in your heart.
Her growing ire faded when she bumped into the man before her.
“Apologies,” she muttered, realizing the queue had come to a halt. She looked up the three-times-snaking path onto the plateau. A painful hour passed, with just a few shuffles forward.
Those queueing near her were full of grumbles and conspiracy. “This place has changed,” one moaned. “They say some are being turned away with no explanation,” complained another. “Guards everywhere too. Something’s going on,” cursed a third.
Just then, she heard a colorful and familiar voice, up on the plateau and nearer the front of the queue. She tilted her head back to look up. “Tell them, tell them!” Barnabas chirped. The captain had come up here while she had headed to Elpenor’s, and it seemed he had found a friend—someone his own age in an ankle-length exomis, with a tangle of brown hair held back from his weathered face by a blue band. He seemed aghast at Barnabas’s prompts. “Will you keep your voice down,” the man groaned.
“But you’ve traveled even farther and wider than I,” Barnabas persisted. “All across Ionia. You’ve even seen a phoenix, aye?”
“No,” the other fellow said, waving his hands to disappoint those in the queue who were listening in. “It was merely a seagull with its tail feathers ablaze.”
Barnabas’s face fell, and he climbed upon a stone bench to address the queue, jabbing a thumb into his own chest. “Well I saw a phoenix once. I swear I did. From a burning city she rose, swept high overhead and—”
“Shat on your head?” One strapping, horn-voiced pilgrim laughed. “What next: were you chased by the Sphinx? Or perhaps wooed by an overamorous Minotaur?”
Barnabas’s eyes widened and he clicked his fingers, pointing at the man in excitement. “The Minotaur, yes! There was a set of caves where I was looking for treasure—”
But his hurried explanations were drowned out as the mocking man put his fingers to his head like horns and ran in circles around the bench, making “mooing” noises. Laughter exploded all around. Barnabas’s face turned a shade of puce. His new friend tugged him down from the bench to spare him any further embarrassment.
Kassandra pushed up through the snaking queue, ignoring the curses and yelps as she went, coming to Barnabas. He was only a few dozen spaces from the entrance of the great temple.
“Misthios.” He bowed to her, a few tresses of his sweat-slicked hair stuck to his still-red face. “I thought you were going to see someone?”
“I went. I saw him.”
“But I didn’t expect to see you until I got back to the ship. When I asked if you wanted to come to the Oracle with me, you told me to travel a short distance and make love to myself . . . or words to that effect.”
“Things changed. I must speak to the Oracle,” she said, holding one arm level as Ikaros glided down to land on her bracer.
“Then you can join me in my place in the queue, of course,” Barnabas said, shifting to one side to let her in, “assuming my friend allows it too?”
The other man waved a hand, beckoning her in with minimal fuss.
“Kassandra, Herodotos,” Barnabas introduced them. When Herodotos stared at Kassandra, Barnabas tried to clarify. “You know, the misthios I was telling you about?”
“I see,” Herodotos said, his tone guarded.
“While I’m a traveler, Herodotos is a historian,” Barnabas explained. “What a life he has lived: led the revolt against the Tyrant of Halicarnassus, then sailed to almost every corner of the world before making his home in Athens. Somehow, he finds the time to write his adventures down—each titled with the names of the nine Muses, no less.”
“You did not tell me she was a Spartan,” said Herodotos.
Kassandra arched an eyebrow.
“Oh I can tell.” Herodotos half smiled. “The proud stance and the arrogant, iron stare.”
As he examined her, Kassandra could not help but notice his eyes widening, the pupils shrinking, as he caught sight of the half-spear, partly hidden under the fold of her cloak. His face paled like a man who has just seen his own shade. She pulled her garment around to hide it. “I am a child of nowhere,” she said, clamming up.
“We are all born somewhere, my lady,” he said, his face lengthening to exaggerate the lines of age. “And do not assume that I am biased against the Spartans. There is much to a
dmire . . . and loathe in the ways of the proud warrior race of Lakonia and in the Athenians. The thing that troubles me most readily is that their differences have broiled into war. For all the glory of the days when both sides stood together, fought and won against the innumerable Persians, it has come to this.” He eyed the shady portico of the temple and the towering doorway: two guards stood watch before it, armored in black-leather vests, black-painted shields and matching helms. “At least here we have a haven of neutrality,” he said.
Kassandra’s eyes narrowed. For all the world it had sounded like a question.
Just then, Reza the helmsman shouted up from the valley floor. “Triearchos,” he called, waving his hands. “Trouble at the Kirrha harbor—they’re looking for a toll for our mooring. We need you back there.”
Barnabas sighed. “After a whole day of queuing? Really?” He slumped and sighed again. Kassandra gave him a handful of drachmae from Elpenor’s sack of coins. “Most generous, Misthios.” He tipped his head in appreciation. “I will see you back on board,” he said, trudging back down the queue. Kassandra set Ikaros off in flight with him.
With Kassandra left alone with Herodotos, the queue shuffled forward. “Kings travel to these parts to consult the Oracle. She can start wars or end them,” the old historian mused. “What do you seek today?” he asked.
“Resolution,” she replied, placing a hand on her chest.
He smiled sadly, nodding. “Me, I seek . . . the truth. Though I fear I will not want it when I possess it.”
“Next,” one of the guards snapped.
Herodotos half bowed. “I feel that you should go before me, my lady.”
She tilted her head a little to one side in acknowledgment, noticing how he glanced once more at the fold of her clothes covering the Leonidas spear, and stepped forward. The eyes of the two black-shelled guards slid around, following her stride. She entered the shady interior to find the air thick with a cloying sweetness. From low, wide copper sconces mounted on tripods, ribbons of myrrh and frankincense smoke rose like ghosts.
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