Sunset of the Gods

by Steve White

  She stepped forward eagerly, showing no signs of having shared Landry’s observations. It was during this part of the training that she seemed to truly come alive, and this, too, disturbed Jason, for reasons he could not put his finger on.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Orientation often involved an actual jaunt to the target area, for purposes of familiarization. In this case, Rutherford deemed it unnecessary and possibly counterproductive, given almost twenty-nine hundred years’ worth of changes. And in Landry’s case—and, to a lesser extent, in Jason’s—modern Greece was old hat anyway. Instead, he took them on virtual tours, enhanced by modern scholarship’s best guesses as to what the landscape in question had looked like. Jason knew from experience that those guesses were sometimes surprisingly good . . . and sometimes not. He dared hope that the former was the case for the city of Athens, which had been the subject of centuries of dedicated and painstaking archaeological work.

  They were also drilled in the historical background of the period—or at least Jason, Chantal, and Mondrago were. Given his academic credentials, Landry was an integral part of the instructional staff, and quickly came to dominate it. For this, Jason eventually came to be grateful. Landry, a product of the same sort of social background as Rutherford, could be something of an irritating know-it-all at times. But he was a true teacher, not to be confused with an educational bureaucrat who held that title. In his introduction, he managed to clarify the labyrinthine complexities of fifth century b.c. geopolitics.

  “To put it in the simplest possible terms—”

  (“Please do,” Mondrago was heard to mutter.)

  “—the Greek, and specifically Ionian, colonies on the Asiatic shore of the Aegean were loosely dominated by the kingdom of Lydia in the mid-sixth century b.c.” Landry manipulated a remote, and a cursor ran over the area in question—the western fringe of what would much later become Turkey—on the map-display that covered the rear wall of the briefing room. “Then the Persians, under their first Great King Cyrus, conquered Lydia, including the Ionians. In order to keep the Ionian city-states under control, the Persians established tyrannies in them.”

  “They must have loved that,” Modrago grimaced.

  “Actually, that word doesn’t have the blood-stained connotations it later acquired in English. A Classical Greek ‘tyrant’ was simply a man who ruled a city from outside the normal constitutional framework, with the support of one of the popular factions. The closest later-day parallel would be a North American big-city ‘boss’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, although the position of Greek tyrant had more formal recognition than that.”

  “So he was well advised to take good care of his constituency,” Jason opined.

  “Precisely. But the tame tyrants of Ionia tended to lose sight of that because their other constituency—the one they had to keep happy—was the Great King of Persia.”

  “Why?” asked Chantal. “If their own people were behind them, couldn’t they defy him?”

  Landry gave her a look of rather supercilious annoyance, as though he considered the question naïve. Instead of answering it directly, he held up the remote and expanded the map to the east and south. And expanded it. And expanded it, until the peninsula of Greece and the entire Aegean basin had shrunk to kind of an afterthought at the upper left corner.

  “The Persian Empire,” he explained with almost patronizing care, “was the world’s sole superpower. It had conquered the entire Near East and Egypt, as well as parts of Central Asia and the Indus Valley over here to the right of the map, in western India. It is believed to have had a population of at least sixteen million people, while Greece and the Aegean islands had, at most, two and a half million. Furthermore, it was not the result of gradual expansion over a span of centuries. Cyrus didn’t begin his career of conquest until around 550 b.c. This unprecedented empire had burst on the world in a mere sixty years.”

  Mondrago studied the map intently. “How could the Persians possibly hold an empire that size together, at that technological level? I mean, infantry marching on foot. . . .”

  “Yes. The Greeks were incredulous when they learned that the Persian capital of Susa was three months’ march eastward from the Aegean shore. They would have been even more incredulous if they had known that the empire extended another three months’ march beyond that.”

  “Then how—?”

  “The Persians were the first empire-builders in history to recognize that communication was the key to control. They used a combination of fire beacons, mounted couriers using a system of highways with posting stations, and other techniques, including aural relay in mountainous regions.”

  “‘Aural relay’?” queried Mondrago.

  “Yes. They had men trained in breath control who could literally shout to each other across valleys and ravines where the acoustics were good, with lots of echoes, thus transmitting messages almost instantaneously across the right kind of terrain. By using all these various means the Great King was able to get information from the frontiers and send orders back in mere days, which seemed supernatural to the Greeks.”

  “I’m beginning to understand why the Ionian tyrants had to kowtow to him,” Mondrago said seriously. “The capo di tutti capi.”

  “Yes. But by so kowtowing they were swimming against the tide of the Greeks’ inveterate xenophobia, and thereby running the risk of alienating their own people. So their rule was always teetering on a knife-edge, and they were ready to jump either way: gain still greater favor with their master; or, failing that, go into rebellion out of sheer desperation.

  “In 500 b.c. Histaeus, the tyrant of Miletus, the largest and richest of the Ionian cities, tried the first option. He himself was living at the Persian court in a kind of gilded hostage situation—they gave him the title ‘Royal Table-Companion’—but through his nephew Aristagoras, who was standing in for him at Miletus, he offered to expedite a conquest of the Aegean island of Naxos, where he had contacts among the disgruntled aristocracy. As it turned out, Aristagoras made a total botch of the expedition. Rather than sit with folded hands and await the usual fate of Persian puppets who failed, Aristagoras reversed himself: he declared himself a convert to democracy of the kind Athens had had for the past eight years. He also called on the other Ionian cities to establish democracies and join Miletus in rebellion.”

  “The expression ‘big brass ones’ comes to mind,” commented Jason.

  “Indeed. The rebellion spread like wildfire through Ionia and beyond, and Aristagoras persuaded the Athenians to come to the aid of the new democracies. In 498 b.c. they sent an expeditionary force which marched inland and burned Sardis, the seat of Artaphernes, the local Persian satrap, or governor.” Landry caused the cursor to flash on Sardis.

  “Mission accomplished,” Mondrago remarked drily.

  “Not quite. The town was burned but the citadel held out and the Greeks were forced to retreat to the coast. On the way, they were cut to pieces by the Persian cavalry.”

  Mondrago looked perplexed. “I’ve studied the ancient Greek style of warfare, and I’ve always gotten the impression that the Persians had no answer to the hoplite, or heavy infantryman. That seems to be the pattern all the way up to Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Persian Empire.”

  “One gets that impression because, as you’ve pointed out, the Greeks won in the end,” Landry explained with a chuckle. “It’s always the ultimate winner’s successes that are remembered. It comes as a shocking surprise to most people that George Washington was soundly trounced whenever he came up against professional British troops in the kind of open-field set-piece battle they were organized and trained to fight. However, your point is well taken as applied to the phalanx of hoplites. When it could be brought to bear under the right conditions—head-to-head combat on a narrow front—it was indeed unstoppable by anything except another phalanx. But it was a rigid, inflexible formation, and the hoplites who comprised it, loaded down with fifty to seventy po
unds of armor and weapons, were incapable of rapid maneuvering.”

  Landry manipulated his controls again. An image appeared on the screen, superimposed on the map. It showed a man who seemed to have stepped out of a Grecian vase-painting. He were greaves on his lower legs, a cuirass with curving metal shoulder-plates, and a face-enclosing helmet with an impressive-looking but (to Jason’s eye) impractical-seeming horsehair crest. He carried a large round shield and a spear a couple of feet longer than he was. At his side hung a leaf-shaped sword. The image represented modern scholarship’s best reconstruction, which had turned out to be very much like those vase paintings after all.

  “When hoplites armed and equipped like this couldn’t form up, as in the retreat from Sardis, the Persian cavalry could ride circles around them and shoot them to pieces with arrows. In 479 b.c., that Persian cavalry nearly won the Battle of Plataea, before the Spartan phalanx could be effectively brought to bear. But the Persian style of warfare was, at bottom, a raiding style. The Greeks finally won by forcing decisive battles. Alexander became ‘the Great’ because he could catch his enemies between a phalanx and the heavy shock cavalry his father Phillip had invented—the most effective heavy shock cavalry the world would see before the advent of the stirrup. But the point is, we’re going to be seeing the first of those decisive hoplite battles.” Landry’s eyes glowed with anticipation, then he shook himself and returned to his subject.

  “At any rate, after the debacle of the retreat from Sardis, Athens withdrew into isolationism, leaving its Ionian allies to be brutally subjugated, a process that was completed by 494 b.c. with the destruction of Miletus. After which the Great King Darius decided it was time to punish those Greeks across the Aegean who had aided the rebels. In 491 b.c. his emissaries toured Greece demanding ‘earth and water’—the tokens of submission. Athens and Sparta violated the diplomatic niceties by killing the emissaries, in the case of the Spartans by throwing them down a well, at whose bottom they were told they could find what they sought.” Mondrago smothered a guffaw. Landry shot him a primly disapproving look before resuming.

  “This was very bold, you see; the Persians had already established a satrapy in Thrace, to the north of the Aegean, and had an army there. But their accompanying fleet was wrecked by a storm, which made invasion from the north impractical. Instead, a new fleet was prepared—six hundred ships, including some specialized for transporting cavalry horses. It carried an army we believe numbered as many as 35,000 infantry and 1,000 cavalry—the Greeks later claimed it was hundreds of thousands, but they always believed in making a good story even better. It also carried Hippias, the last tyrant of Athens, who had been working for the Persians since being deposed in 510 b.c. He was now over eighty years old, but still hoped to be restored to power. Instead of working its way north, the fleet island-hopped directly across the Aegean and took the city of Eretria on the island of Euboea, an Ionian ally, with the help of fifth columnists. They then burned it and enslaved the population . . . which was also meant to be the fate of Athens.”

  “Which brings us to your mission,” said Rutherford, who had entered the room unnoticed. “You omitted one thing, Bryan: in 492 B.C King Alexander I of Macedon, who was reliable only as a weathervane, made his kingdom a Persian client-state. This is convenient for us, for your cover story is that you are Macedonians who opposed submission to Persia and are in exile as a consequence. This should assure you of a friendly reception in Athens—particularly from the man we intend for you to contact. But for now, I believe it is too late in the day to begin your detailed briefing on the Marathon campaign itself—which, at any rate, should be left to the end, so as to be as fresh as possible in your minds. Also, we have other matters to take up tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Their orientation involved a great many mundane things, such as their wardrobe.

  The fabrics had to be authentic, of course—mostly wool, but also flax and the coarse animal-hair cloth called sakkos. But the Authority’s specialists had a lot of practice at producing such things. The basic male garment—there was no such thing as underwear—was the tunic known as the chiton, fastened at both shoulders and tied at the waist with a girdle. Over this was worn the himation, a large rectangular woolen cloak draped around the left shoulder and back around under the right arm and across the front. Anything even remotely resembling trousers was regarded as hilariously effeminate, which was one reason why the Athenians had underestimated the Persians before their disastrous expedition in support of the Ionian rebels. By 490 b.c., of course, the trouser-wearers from the East were no longer quite so funny. The chlamys, or cold-weather cloak, shouldn’t come into the picture in the time of year they were planning to spend in ancient Greece. As travelers from afar, they would be able to justify wearing sturdy boots rather than the more typical light sandals, and also the broad-brimmed felt hat, or petasos.

  Chantal would wear an ankle-length linen tunic, held up by pins at the shoulders and at other points to form loose sleeves. Over this she would be expected to drape the himation, preferably wrapped around her head—or, alternatively, a head-scarf. Classical Athens was not all that unlike fundamentalist Islam where the status of women was concerned. At least she should be able to get away with light sandals rather than bare feet. Her hair was long enough to be pulled back with ribbons into the orthodox ponytail or bun.

  The men would naturally not be lugging around the hoplite panoply. As Landry explained, even hoplites only burdened themselves with that load of armor and weapons a few minutes before taking their places in the phalanx for battle. And at any rate, Jason didn’t expect to be doing that sort of fighting; still less did Mondrago, given his assumed social class, and least of all did Landry. There were no such things as professional soldiers in fifth century b.c. Greece, aside from the Spartans, who were considered freakish for the degree to which they specialized in war. Athenian hoplites were simply the male members of the property-owning classes of citizens, who could afford (and were expected) to equip themselves with the panoply. They were liable for military service from eighteen to sixty, and given Greece’s chronic internecine wars they were likely to spend the majority of their summers that way. In between, training was minimal. In phalanx warfare, what counted was the steadfastness that held the shield-wall unbroken even in the shattering clash of spears. Those men weren’t flashy martial artists, but theirs had been the collective courage in whose shelter Western civilization had survived infancy.

  However, the team’s supposed homeland of Macedon was a backwater which had retained the simple monarchy of the Bronze Age while the other Greek states had been evolving into civic societies. In fact, Macedon probably came closer in some ways to what Jason remembered from the seventeenth century b.c. Jason would pose as a minor nobleman, Mondrago as a disaffected former member of the “King’s Companions,” a Macedonian holdover of the Bronze Age war-band. As such it would be normal for them to carry swords. Rutherford let them choose their blades off the rack.

  One day Jason was in the station’s gym, putting himself through some exercises with the double-edged, slightly leaf-shaped cut-and-thrust sword he had chosen—the most typical Greek pattern of the period—when Mondrago walked in from the adjacent courtyard, wiping his brow. The Corsican was holding a very simple sling: a small leather pouch with two strings attached, one of which was looped over a finger and the other gripped by the thumb. The user then swung the sling around the head and sent the stone or lead bullet on its way, propelled by centrifugal force. Jason had never used one, although he knew it was the favorite missile weapon of the Classical Greeks, who had never made any secret of their disdain for archery.

  “Can you really get any accuracy with that?” Jason asked.

  “You’d be amazed, sir,” Mondrago said, with a jauntiness bordering on insouciance. “It takes a lot of practice, but I’ve been getting some. I asked the shop to make me some in-period lead bullets. They swear these are very authentic.” He took one from his po
uch. It was oval, an inch long, and bore on its side the Greek words for “Take that!”

  “I’ll take their word for it,” Jason laughed. “By the way, did you ever pick out your sword?”

  “Yes, sir.” Mondrago went to the sword rack and took down a weapon quite different from Jason’s: a single-edged Spanish sword, or falcata, forward-curved for maximum efficiency at chopping, although it had an acute point for thrusting—a vicious-looking weapon somewhat resembling the kukri, or Gurkha knife, but longer and with a finger-guard. Like Jason’s more conventional weapon it was iron—strictly speaking, extremely low-carbon steel—and made to authentic specifications, although very well made within those limits.

  “I know it’s a slightly eccentric choice where we’re going,” said Mondrago, as though anticipating an objection. “But it’s pretty common there. I’ve seen it in Greek vase paintings. And I kind of like it.” He gave Jason an appraising look and lifted one expressive eyebrow. “Would you like to see a demonstration, sir?”

  “Sure.” They went to another rack and took down the small round wooden shields carried by Classical Greek light troops, not the heavy, awkward things carried by hoplites in phalanxes. Then they went through a couple of passes. Mondrago was good, Jason had to admit, and the falcata was like an extension of his sinewy arm. Jason found himself on the defensive, barely able to interpose the shield between himself and Mondrago’s chopping strokes, until he got into the rhythm of the thing and began to use his superior size and weight to push aggressively, forcing his way in to closer quarters.

  Mondrago backed off and indicated the shield. “Even these light versions kind of slow you up. Want to try it without them, sir?”