Spartans at the Gates

by Noble Smith

  “My husband,” she said at last in a stern voice, speaking in Persian. “Why do you cry like a little girl?”

  “I can’t look upon you,” he replied with a quaking voice in the same language. “I have lost you. And I have lost my honor. I am ugly.”

  “You haven’t lost me, or your honor,” said Nihani. “And you are still as beautiful as an angel.”

  She placed something on the desk. He spread his fingers apart so he could peer at the thing: a knife handle sticking from an onyx box; the weapon and box were fitted so precisely together that it appeared the blade had been driven into the stone.

  “My assassin’s dagger!” thought Eurymakus.

  The sheath was filled with the deadliest poison known to Persian whisperers: “Dragon Blood” it was called. The slightest scratch from the tainted blade caused an excruciating and nearly instant death. He had learned to make the concoction in Persia, mixing the powerful venom of saw-scaled vipers along with the juices of wolfsbane, oleander, and hemlock, and then brewing this noxious potion for several months in a sheep’s bladder. He had brought the vipers with him to Thebes from Persia, and he’d bred the snakes for years in the undercroft beneath his slaves’ quarters. He grew all of the poisonous plants in the courtyard of his house—his garden of death.

  The dagger and its slightly rounded stone sheath were rotating slowly on the tabletop where Nihani had set it spinning like the iron pointer on a lodestone.

  Why had she brought this tool of death to him?

  “You wish that I should kill us both now?” he asked.

  The sound of Nihani’s harsh laugh caused him to jerk his hand away from his face and stare at her for the first time since she had entered the room. He was taken aback by what he saw now, for Nihani resembled a young man: she wore one of his tunics and his leather riding boots, standing with her hands on her narrow hips, shaking her head with a scornful expression on her handsome face. She had cut off all of her long curls so that her hair was as short as a man’s, which made her more ravishing than ever in Eurymakus’s eyes.

  “Die together?” she sneered. “That’s the last thing I would want.”

  “Then why have you come?” he asked. “Why did you cut your hair?”

  “I have come to plan our escape,” she said. “And I cut my hair and burned it, in the manner of these Thebans when they come of age and offer their hair to their war god. I am ready to join you in your battle against the demons.”

  Eurymakus looked at her in disbelief. “Where will we go?” he asked. “I am nothing. I am ruined. My own people have sentenced me to death. The Spartans spurn me.”

  Nihani tilted back her head and looked down her nose at him with her black eyes. “Where is my husband?” she asked, her thick dark eyebrows arching. “Where is he hiding?”

  Eurymakus recoiled. “Your husband is here,” he said, pointing to his heart. “This ruined body is not me.”

  “I wasn’t talking about your body,” she spat. “You look the same to me as when you set out from Thebes to kill the Plataeans who murdered your brother. What care I if you are missing an arm? What care I if your face were covered with scars? You have the wounds of a hero.” She put her palms on the table, leaning close to his face. “I want my husband to come back. The spirit of my husband. What I see in your eyes is a cunt staring back at me!” And she repeated the word in Greek, spitting on the table.

  Eurymakus stood up, mouth agape. “What do you say to me? How dare you!”

  Nihani strode to the other side of the table and lifted up the front of his robe, peering at his loins with disdain. “I expected to see the petals of a woman’s lips down there. But your manhood remains, however shriveled it may be.” She grabbed his balls in one hand, squeezing them hard. Then she lifted up her tunic to reveal the carved phallus that she always wore during their lovemaking. “Bend over,” she commanded.

  When Eurymakus hesitated, Nihani grabbed his long hair at the nape of his neck and shoved him toward the desk.

  “Bend over, I say!”

  He let himself be pushed down until his stomach was flat on the tabletop, and then he stretched out his arm and stump. Nihani lifted up his robes, baring his naked buttocks and legs. She picked up the oil lamp that sat on the table and poured its contents onto his backside. He felt the cool oil dripping down his inner thighs and legs as her fingers worked the lubrication into his crease. He waited with anticipation, and gasped with pleasure when she slowly entered him.

  “Ah,” she said, reaching around and stroking his growing erection. “There’s still blood running through those veins.”

  “Tell me what to do,” said Eurymakus, grabbing the edge of the table with his remaining hand as she slammed against him. “T-tell me.”

  She pushed all the way inside him and leaned over his back, whispering in his ear. “The men who guard the front door to this house take their pleasure with me every night. All three of them at the same time. When they are all inside me, heedless and witless, you will slay them with the poisoned dagger.” She started pumping again, slapping his buttocks with one hand. “Do you understand?”

  “Unnnhh,” he gasped. “But the guards—”

  “The guards are beasts,” she replied. “I have brought them under my control like dogs.”

  He stared at the dagger on the table. It would be easy to kill three unarmed men. He could already see their corpses writhing in agony on the floor. “But where will we go?” he asked. “The city confiscated all of my wealth.”

  “I have darics,” she said. “They were hidden in a secret compartment in my dowry chest that I brought from Persia. Enough to get us back to Persepolis. I have already purchased horses. They’re at a stable near the gates. We will ride down the eastern road through the night. You told me once you have allies in other city-states. Once we get away from Thebes, we can plan how to get to the coast and hire a ship.”

  Eurymakus nodded his head. It was a good plan. She had learned much from him. His life in Thebes was over. But that did not mean he should give up his duties to the one true god. Why should he throw his life away because an assembly of incompetent men had cast their votes against him? Eurymakus had not been born to serve as a scapegoat!

  “You are a good wife,” he said.

  “I am your secret husband now,” said Nihani. “Nihani was your wife.” She thrust her hips, stroking him with her hand at the same time. “Tell me I am your husband.”

  “Yes—my husband!” cried out Eurymakus. He imagined Menesarkus’s heir. He saw the young pankrator in his mind’s eye, on his knees, groveling and submissive, bleeding from many wounds, raped and defiled.

  In no time at all Eurymakus bucked and shuddered violently, crying out in ecstasy, “My husband!”

  TWO

  Chusor led a sleepy, and therefore sulky, Barka through the Sarkophagi—the cemetery that stood outside the western wall of the citadel of Plataea. The eunuch, as Chusor was well aware, liked to sleep in very late. But he’d roused Barka from bed a few hours before sunrise and had asked him, with all of the politeness he could muster, to follow him to the graves.

  “I always knew you were going to be the death of me,” Barka joked as he stared at the cemetery.

  Like the streets of Plataea the Sarkophagi was laid out on an orderly grid. Family tombs were constructed of black marble and made to resemble miniature versions of houses. The little pathways of the cemetery were lined with tall cypress trees and low-growing juniper. A few crocuses had started to poke through the ground, and the vines of the everlasting flowers—snaking around the monuments—were beginning to sprout their tiny gray leaves.

  Chusor thought back to yesterday in front of the walls: the terrible omen of Nikias’s riderless and bloodied horse returning to Plataea alone. Was the lad dead? He clung to the hope that his friend still lived. But his stomach felt heavy and sick, as though it were filled with ore slag.

  “A pretty little city for shades,” commented Barka, the irritation in his v
oice contradicting his words. He wore a woman’s dress, veil, and straw sun hat—all of which he’d purchased in the marketplace of Plataea—and now resembled a female Oxlander. “These Plataeans know how to make domiciles for their dead,” continued the eunuch.

  Chusor paused to look back at the high wall of the citadel. Every ten feet along the battlements stood a watchman with a spear. He saw a figure waving at them and frowned.

  “Who is that?” he wondered aloud.

  Barka sighed. “It’s the man from the gates. The one who was tasting me with his eyes that first day we entered the citadel. Damon.”

  Damon gave a lingering look at Barka before continuing on his inspection of the battlements.

  “At least he’s not too hairy,” said Barka. “I can’t abide the hairy ones. Like smelly monkeys. And he gives me pretty things like this bracelet.” He held up his wrist to show a cheap bauble.

  “You don’t have to pleasure the man,” said Chusor.

  “My dear Chusor,” said the eunuch, “you know as well as I that having a man like Damon, captain of the Guards, wrapped around my pinkie is a boon to our endeavors.”

  Chusor rubbed a hand over his scalp. Barka was right. The more their group was integrated into Plataean society, the less suspicion would arise toward their activities. He gestured for Barka to keep following and they walked in silence until they came to the outlying section of the Sarkophagi. Here there were tombs in the ancient style—elongated rectangles with lids, carved from limestone and granite. These cracked and crumbling memorials had been worn away over the years by wind and rain and were a stark contrast to the well-kept marble grave markers of recent centuries.

  “How old are these?” asked Barka, running his fingers over the rough edge of a gravestone.

  “Five hundred years, perhaps,” said Chusor. “Maybe longer. They were built by the race of men who lived in this valley long before the Greek-speaking Plataeans arrived. The citadel here was built on top of the ruins of their city. They spoke a language akin to Phoenician, but their writing is mostly indecipherable, at least to me. The legends say that these people—whom the locals call the “Ox Turners”—had a vast treasure in gold which they buried under their city. But they were wiped out by the invasions of the Sea People. A Greek tyrant discovered the buried hoard, but then he was slain by a democratic hero named Androkles. And the secret of its location died with him.”

  “Ah!” exclaimed Barka. “The statue in the agora of that delicious youth.”

  “That is the hero Androkles,” said Chusor. “Slayer of the Last Tyrant.”

  “And how did you come to know all of this?” asked Barka.

  “The architect Hippodamos of Miletus told my former master Phidias,” said Chusor. “I overheard them speaking one night while they drank. Hippodamos was the man the Plataeans brought to improve their city after the victory against the Persians. They paid for this construction program with the gold they’d gleaned from the bodies of the dead princes in King Xerxes’s army. The Persian nobles went to war covered in gold, the fools, and their corpses made the Plataeans wealthy beyond compare.”

  “And where is this Persian gold kept?” asked Barka. “Perhaps we should just steal it.”

  Chusor waved a hand at the citadel. “They spent every granule of gold on the city itself. No expense was spared. Hippodamos—the greatest architect in Greece—was kept busy for ten years expanding these walls, building temples and public spaces. During his work he discovered a network of tunnels under the citadel.”

  “And?”

  “They led nowhere. They were all dead ends. And so he gave up looking for the hoard of the Ox Turners. When I moved here with Diokles I began my quest. But after two years of searching I hadn’t even found a single tunnel entrance. Until the night of the Theban sneak attack, that is.”

  He recounted that fateful night when he and a handful of warriors tried to figure out a way for Nikias to escape from Plataea and warn the men outside the walls that the Thebans had taken the citadel. The invaders had controlled the gates that night—the only exit in and out of the city—as well as the battlements. Breaking out had seemed impossible until the oldest man in Plataea, the priest of the Temple of Zeus, had shown them the entrance to the secret tunnel hidden under the temple altar. Nikias had crawled through this shaft, making his way under the city walls and emerging outside.

  “The shaft led to a tomb,” said Chusor.

  “Where?” asked Barka.

  Chusor pointed to a granite box—about the size of a table—that was missing its top. The smith jumped inside and squatted in front of the opening to a narrow shaft that ran back in the direction of the western wall, less than twenty paces from the tomb.

  “This is the tunnel Nikias used to escape,” said Chusor. He peered into the gloom of the shaft and breathed in the dank odor of the underground passage. A shudder passed through him. He hated any cramped space and had a terror of being trapped underground.

  “And what makes you believe this tunnel has anything to do with the treasure of the Ox Turners?” asked Barka.

  Chusor clambered out of the tomb and stood over a broken stone slab where it lay on the ground next to the tomb. The face of the slab was covered with inscribed letters. “When Nikias came out of the tomb he had to push off this lid to get out, flipping it over so the side facing down was revealed. It’s cracked in several pieces, as you can see, but I put them back together.” He passed his hand over some letters etched into the stone. “Unlike the outside of the tomb, this underside of the lid was never exposed to the elements, and it looks like the day it was carved.”

  “Those are ancient Phoenician words,” said Barka.

  “Of course,” said Chusor. “I knew that when I first saw them because there are no vowels. But I can only pick out a few of the words. There”—pointing to the center of the slab—“are the words ‘trove gold’ and the numbers are recognizable, but as a whole they’re meaningless.”

  Chusor watched as the eunuch knelt down and ran his hands over the letters and numbers, this way and that, up and down, even in circles.

  “I don’t need your seer-sight now,” snapped Chusor, thinking Barka was going into one of his trances. “I need your knowledge of Phoenician. You were educated in the library of Karthago. You must have seen any number of ancient Phoenician texts and—”

  “Shut up!” said Barka. “I’m trying to think.”

  If any other man had told Chusor to “shut up” he would have twisted his neck and popped off his head. But Barka was different. He was so much like a woman in both aspect and demeanor that Chusor was always thrown off guard whenever they interacted. Especially when he snapped at him like an angry female.

  Barka stared at the sky, tracing a finger up and down his neck. He shuddered, then walked quickly away.

  “Wait,” said Chusor, running after him. “Tell me what you discovered about the words on the slab.”

  “Take me to the highest place in the citadel,” said Barka. “I need to see something.”

  * * *

  The Eagle’s Turret was the tallest point in the citadel—a tower on the southeastern section of wall, directly behind the smithy building. The guards on the walkway below the tower were used to seeing Chusor up there and let him and his pretty veiled companion gain access to the stairs leading to the top.

  “The view of the citadel is on the other side,” said Chusor as Barka went and stood at the low wall on the top of the turret facing the Plataean valley.

  “I don’t want to look at the city,” said Barka. “I want to look at the countryside.”

  “What do you see?” asked the smith.

  “There,” said Barka, pointing in the distance.

  “What?” asked Chusor.

  “A plowman and an ox,” said Barka.

  Chusor cursed under his breath. “This is not the time for games, Barka.” He glanced at the farmer and wondered what sort of optimistic fool would be plowing a field in front of a city that
was about to be besieged.

  “You didn’t understand most of the words on the slab,” explained Barka, “because they’re written in an old dialect of Phoenician, which I can read. And the order of the letters is confounding, unless you know the secret of the way they were transcribed.”

  Chusor gave Barka his full attention. “And what is the secret?”

  Barka said, “You told me the ancient inhabitants of this place were called the ‘Ox Turners.’ But the name has nothing to do with their occupation, though I’m sure they worked these fields just like the Plataeans. What the name refers to is the way a plowman, once he has reached the end of his furrow, turns his ox and plow, and walks back across the field, only to turn around and go back the other way.”

  Chusor stared into the distance and watched as the plowman got to the end of his rectangle of earth and made a tight turn.

  “You see?” asked Barka, smiling. “The language is read from left to right. But the line below is scanned from right to left, then left to right, then right to left, and so on. That is called the turning of the ox.”

  “Ah,” said Chusor. “I did not know that.”

  “And thus you were scanning the words in the wrong direction,” said Barka smugly. “You need to start from the bottom and work your way to the top.”

  The smith tugged on his goatee with excitement. It was so simple! “So could you read it?” he asked.

  “Oh yes,” said Barka. “And you were right. They’re instructions on how to find the ‘treasure trove.’ You must start with the ‘navel of the city,’ as they called it. Everything is paced out from there to an arm’s length with the use of a special rock for directions—magnetite I think it is called in the Greek.”

  “A compass,” said Chusor. Then he started laughing. “Zeus’s Thumb,” he said. “The ‘navel of the city’ is Zeus’s Thumb.”

  “Whatever are you babbling about?” asked Barka.

  He pointed down into the city. “In the oldest part of the citadel is an ancient stone. Some kind of marker worn by centuries of rain. The people call it Zeus’s Thumb because it looks like a great finger jutting from the ground. That is where we start.”