by Noble Smith
“How much gold are we talking about?” asked Menesarkus.
“Fifty darics or more.”
Menesarkus let forth a scoff that could have been taken as a sign of either amazement or exasperation.
“And you gave it all to my grandson?” he asked. “This fortune in gold? Enough gold, I might add,” he said, slapping down the stylus and peering at Chusor, “to build a very fine little temple to the goddess of fucking Mirth!” He raised his hand and slammed a fist onto the table with such force that the ink pot jumped and spilled ink across the parchment like a spray of dark blood. “Because this adventure of his is a pathetic joke. He’ll be lucky if he makes it to Athens alive, and even luckier if he comes home with his balls intact, let alone with a band of cutthroats from the port of Athens!”
“I wanted to assist him,” said Chusor, abashed. “He was going to Athens no matter what I said to him. I reckoned the gold could be put to good use. When your grandson sets his mind to something, he cannot be diverted from it.”
Menesarkus ground his teeth together, staring back at Chusor under heavy lids.
The door opened and the servant peeked in his head, saying, “Arkon, you’re needed for a moment.”
Menesarkus got up, scowling, and limped toward the door on his bad right knee. “Stay here,” he said to Chusor, and shut the door behind him.
Chusor swiped at his forehead, wiping away the stinging sweat that dripped into his eyes. He could hear the sound of activity in the offices on the other side of the door: the chattering voices and scribes hard at work. His gaze wandered to a big vase sitting on a table behind Menesarkus’s desk. It was painted in the old style, from perhaps a hundred years before, when artists colored the bodies of men with black paint. The vase bore the image of a preposterously muscular man, the hero Herakles, lifting a much larger opponent—the Libyan giant Antaios, son of Mother Earth—and squeezing him in a bear hug. The artist had captured the action of this moment vividly. Antaios had thrown back his head and howled in pain and surprise, his toes straining to reach the earth. Chusor could almost hear Antaios gasp as Herakles crushed his ribs, driving the bones into his organs.
Chusor had seen Menesarkus beat a man in a pankration bout in just such a manner. By squeezing the air from his lungs until he’d passed out.
The door opened again and the Arkon came back in holding a jug of wine in one hand and two drinking cups in the other. “Leave me,” he said to the servant, who was trying, ever so gently, to pry the jug from his hands. “I can do it myself! Now leave us.”
The servant bowed, scurried out, and shut the door behind him. Menesarkus hobbled back to his desk, placed the jug and cups down with a sigh, then poured the wine. He handed Chusor a cup, then took a long draft from his own, wiping his mouth on his forearm, then nodding his head as though responding to an unspoken question.
“No, I can’t blame him for having my blood,” he said at last, though more as if speaking to himself than for Chusor’s benefit. “I would have done the same at his age.” He stared at Chusor and gestured at him with his cup. “You are an interesting man, Chusor,” he said. “I didn’t trust you when you first came to Plataea. Not because you’re half Aethiope. But because you seemed to be too clever a fellow to merely be a vagabond. I reckoned you must be either a spy or a criminal on the run. I encouraged the old Arkon to have you watched closely and he agreed. Every aspect of your life was scrutinized that first year you were here. But after you became friends with my grandson, and I saw what a good influence you had on him, my feelings about you started to change. Nikias talks about you constantly, you know? You’re one of his heroes. And when I saw what you have made with your hands, well, I was convinced you were some kind of genius. The beautiful armor and helms”—here he gestured toward the armor on the rack behind him—“and your inventions! Nobody has ever seen the like, I’ll wager, not even in Athens. You have a gift that few men ever hope to have.”
Chusor didn’t know what to think. His head was spinning. The revelation that he’d been spied upon didn’t surprise him. He’d known he was being watched back then. But to have Menesarkus, the great general of Plataea, offer him praise in such a manner—it disconcerted him.
“Many thanks,” said Chusor softly.
Menesarkus stroked his beard and said, “When the Athenian whisperer Timarkos told me you’d killed one of Kleon’s men in Athens … well … everything finally made sense. You came to my city to hide.”
At the mention of Timarkos’s name Chusor’s heart sank. He knew Timarkos well from his days in Athens. He was one of the most dangerous spies who inhabited the viper pit of that vast citadel. And the skinny, goat-bearded whisperer had been partially responsible for Chusor losing the woman he loved.
“I do not deny that I killed a man,” said Chusor at last. “But I did it in self-defense. I had to flee Athens because I would not have been given a fair trial. And Timarkos, who helped orchestrate my downfall, is a liar and not to be trusted.”
“He said the same of you,” replied Menesarkus. “On several occasions. He even suggested I have your throat slit.”
The casual way in which Menesarkus had said this last sentence was chilling.
“But Timarkos does not concern me now,” continued Menesarkus, peering directly in Chusor’s eyes. “He has proved to be most unreliable. Now you, on the other hand, have proved your worth countless times over the last two weeks. Without your help this city might have fallen to its most hated and ancient enemy. This invention of yours, this sticking fire that you used against the Thebans … I think it is the key to defending Plataea from a Spartan siege.”
Chusor thought back to the night of the sneak attack. The small army of Theban invaders, an advance force that had been let into the citadel by Nauklydes, had trapped the stunned Plataeans in their own city. The Thebans had built a wooden barricade in front of the gates using carts and timbers while mounted archers had patrolled the high walls. Anyone who had tried to get to the gates—the only entrance out of the citadel—was shot down by the archers on the walls. Nikias had been chosen to attempt a daring escape through an ancient and crumbling tunnel that led under the citadel. He was sent to round up all the warriors in the countryside as well as warn the border cavalry garrisons what had happened and bring them all back to Plataea.
But the men in the citadel had not known if Nikias would succeed. They knew they had to attack the barricade. If the Theban reinforcements arrived at dawn, they were all dead men, and every woman and child in Plataea would be turned into a Theban slave. Fortunately for the Plataeans, Chusor had been taught the secret of the sticking fire. Using clay vases as containers for this powerful weapon, they attacked the barricade, hurling the “pandoras,” as he called them, using two-man slings. The makeshift fortification turned into an inferno. Many of the Theban invaders were burned alive.…
“You have been doing an excellent job as Master of the Walls,” said Menesarkus abruptly, pulling Chusor from his thoughts. “You did a remarkable job repairing the gates after the Thebans destroyed them. There is no doubt in my mind that we need you. And so I have asked you here today to make you a proposition.”
This time it was Chusor’s turn to be flummoxed. “A proposition?” he asked with a catch in his throat. He tugged on his braided beard and stared into Menesarkus’s eyes.
“You were born a slave,” said Menesarkus.
“Yes,” said Chusor, blood rushing to his cheeks. “But my master gave me my freedom.”
“Freedom, yes, but not citizenship. The most you can ever hope to be in any city in Greece is a metic. A foreign worker isn’t much better than a slave. You’re like a confused shade that finds itself lost in that netherworld between life and death.”
Chusor had never heard his own situation put so bluntly before. Menesarkus was right, of course. And it made him sick at heart. “Such is my fate,” he said, staring gloomily at the vase behind Menesarkus.
Menesarkus followed his gaze to the jar. �
��Herakles could not beat Antaios by throwing him to the ground,” he explained, gesturing at the painted image, “because it was the earth that gave Antaios his strength. So Herakles had to change tactics and trust in the gods. The solution was simple, really.”
“All he had to do was lift Antaios off the ground,” said Chusor.
“And then Herakles could squeeze the life out of him,” put in Menesarkus with a wicked gleam in his eye. “These Spartans … all we have to do is get them off their feet, and then we can crush them.”
“Why am I here, Arkon?” asked Chusor. “What is your proposition?”
“Haven’t you figured it out?” asked Menesarkus with a sly smile. “I am offering you citizenship as a Plataean.”
Chusor stood up as though he’d been stung by a wasp. Wine sloshed from his cup, splattering the stones. This was an offer of a treasure more valuable to him than a mountain of gold. Citizenship! To no longer live as a paltry freed slave, or a lowly metic, but rather a full-fledged citizen of a city-state that was in league with the great Athenian Empire. A gift once given that could never be taken away and would serve as a passport anywhere in the empire, even were Plataea to fall.
“Do you toy with me?” he asked.
“I would never toy with such a man as you,” said Menesarkus. “But this gift I offer you comes at a very high price.”
FIVE
Nikias and Kolax had been riding hard for many miles with a strong wind at their backs. It felt like the hand of a friendly god pushing them toward Athens.
The fog had burned away completely to reveal the rocky and barren terrain of this region: Attika. Hardscrabble hills and parched fields waiting to be plowed and sown; many hues of brown under a bright blue and cloudless sky. The landscape reminded Nikias of a desiccated old man. It was as though the fog, like a white death shroud, had been pulled away to reveal a dried-up old corpse.
Nikias glanced at the barbarian boy riding a few strides ahead—always a few strides ahead in an impatient manner that irked the Plataean. The Skythian kept looking back at him and frowning as if to say, “Can’t you go any faster?”
The truth was that Nikias could not. But he didn’t want to admit this to Kolax. His recent injuries were preventing him from keeping up with the boy. His right shoulder, injured in the fall from Photine, felt as though it had been branded with an iron. And the place where he’d been kicked in the chest by the black gelding hurt more now than it had an hour ago. It throbbed with every hoofbeat, radiating a dull ache through his torso and into his spine. He longed to come to a stop and lie down under the shade of a tree.
He could sense his horse was at the end of her limits too. He was on one of the Dog Raiders’ mounts—a lithe gray mare that had been the only animal to escape injury from his Sargatian lasso in the chaos of the fight. She was fast, but a little too small for Nikias’s heavy build. And she was getting tired. He would have to stop soon to let her drink and nose around for some food.
“How much farther to Athens?” asked Kolax.
The barbarian boy had asked this question so many times that Nikias had lost count. Kolax was anxious to be reunited with his father—an archer in the employ of the Athenian police force. But the truth was that Nikias didn’t know the answer. He was in a daze.
“Have to stop soon,” he said. “Need to rest.”
“Rest?” scoffed Kolax. “I’ve got a bag of gold and I’m on my way to see my papa! No rest for me!”
After Kolax had saved him from the Dog Raiders, Nikias had given the boy half of the gold to carry, thinking it better to split the treasure between them in case they were attacked again. He was beginning to regret the decision, however. The boy might just leave him in the dust and head off to Athens on his own. Or cut his throat.
No. That was a foolish notion. Kolax was as loyal as a dog. “I’m being mistrustful,” he thought. He touched his head with the back of his hand. His forehead burned and he sweated profusely. He realized that he had a fever.
After another mile the road wended its way through a flatter area—there were fields on either side of the road that had been cross-furrowed to kill the weeds. In the distance, to the right, he could see a single farmer plowing with a bony ox, preparing the field for spring planting. Probably millet, Nikias considered with the eye of a farmer. That’s what he would grow in this cracked rocky ground that was so unlike the verdant Oxlands, where you could practically scatter seed in the red earth without plowing and know it would come up strong.
The cart ruts were deeper on this part of the road than they had been closer to the mountain range. If he were to step into one of these tracks his leg would go in all the way up to his calf muscle. He wondered how many years men had moved along this road. A thousand? More? He could see a little cluster of farmhouses on top of a low hill surrounded by trees and vineyards. It looked like a happy place to live. And easily defensible from enemy attack.
“But I thought that our home was safe from attack,” he thought. “And I was wrong.”
His mind wandered, lulled into a sort of waking sleep by his fatigue and the rhythm of the galloping horse. A vision of his mother, standing at her loom and singing, flashed before his eyes, and he felt a stabbing sensation in his gut. She was dead now, murdered by Thebans on the night of the sneak attack. After Nikias had escaped from the citadel through the secret tunnel, he had gone straight to his family’s farmhouse and had found it in smoldering ruins. The Theban called Eurymakus, who had a blood feud with Menesarkus, had tried to wipe out Nikias’s entire family.
The next morning Nikias had come face-to-face with Eurymakus in the battle in front of the gates of Plataea, when the Theban reinforcements had clashed with the Plataean cavalry that Nikias had led from the border garrisons. But the Theban spy had fled in the confusion of the battle.…
“Where is my mother’s shade now?” Nikias thought morosely. He should have been at the farm on the night of the invasion. He would have saved her.
She had not received a proper cremation and interment. For her body had been consumed in the inferno that had obliterated their home. Nor had she been given a funeral feast. Would her shade be angry? Confused?
Nikias’s father, Aristo, had died on a battlefield when Nikias was six, and his grandfather had brought the corpse back home in a cart. It didn’t take much effort to recall that memory. He could see his father’s body in his mind as clearly as the day it had happened. Aristo’s long, lean body laid out like a plank, almost blue and drained of blood from a terrible spear wound to his abdomen—a wound from which no man could recover. His grandfather had found his only son on the battlefield with his face buried in the dirt, hands frozen in the act of pushing dirt to either side of his face. He had smothered himself to stop the terrible agony.
“He looked as though he were shouting to the Underworld that he was on his way,” Menesarkus had said.
Nikias had been allowed to help wash his father’s corpse. He’d even been given the honor of placing a silver coin in his father’s hand to pay the Ferryman who would transport him across the river Styx. After that his father had been wrapped in his best robe, and then burned on a bier. The ashes and bits of bones were collected and stored in a funeral jar painted with Aristo’s image: a beautiful man with long limbs holding a tortoiseshell harp and staring into space with sad eyes. He had been a poet and a runner, one of the fastest in the Oxlands. “Not meant for the battlefield,” his grandfather had said several times over the years. Not with disgust or anger. Just regret. But Nikias had always bristled at this description of his father. Who was meant for the battlefield? It seemed, in Nikias’s opinion, that whether or not you survived was based almost solely on pure luck.
His grandfather had an answer for that too. “Some men are born lucky, others seize luck by the balls and take it. Others can’t buy luck even if they have a cartload of gold.”
Nikias had kept his father’s funeral jar and tortoiseshell harp in his bedroom. Both had been destroyed in the fi
re. His mother’s remains were mingled in the cinders of the abandoned farmhouse as well. There was nothing left of her body. No hand in which to place a silver Plataean coin for the journey to the Underworld.
“The Athenians put the Ferryman’s coin in the mouths of the dead,” he mumbled aloud. Nikias also knew that the poor kept money in their mouths when they went to market.
His mother had told him this when he was a child. She’d come from Athens. She’d been poor, but so very beguiling. His parents’ marriage had been arranged, but Aristo had fallen in love with her the moment he’d seen his bride. At least that’s what his mother had told him.
He hoped his mother had found her way to the Underworld. Perhaps the Ferryman would give her passage for free, enraptured by her beauty. And then she would search the Land of the Dead, drawn by the sound of her husband’s playing and singing. Would his parents still love one another if they were reunited? Could the dead hold each other? Make love as shades? How terrible to be nothing more solid than a fog. A mere vapor craving life.…
The sound of laughter startled him from his grim reverie. He glanced to the left of the road and saw a small olive grove. Some boys were beating the trees with long sticks to shake out the last of the harvest. A pair of toddlers, barely able to walk, were picking up the fallen olives and gleefully tossing them into a basket.
“Stop,” said Nikias, pulling back on the reins and coming to a halt. Kolax stopped, too, trotting back to him.
“What is it?” asked Kolax.
“There’s a road marker,” Nikias said, sliding off his horse’s back. When his feet hit the ground his brain exploded in a blinding flash of pain. Bending over, he took several ragged breaths to compose himself, and then clutched the horse’s reins, walking the animal over to a statue by the road: a stone head with long curling beard and hair stuck onto a rectangular column. A phallus protruded from the center of the block of marble, pointing the way to Athens like a fat finger.