Sunset of the Gods (11 page)

Landry was staring raptly at a small building—a workshop of some kind, it seemed—tucked into an angle of a low wall across the street from the Tholos, near a stone that marked the boundary of the Agora. “What is it?” Jason asked him.

Landry seemed to come out of a trance. “Oh . . . sorry. But that building there . . . I don’t know who’s occupying it now, but a couple of generations from now it will be the house and shop of Simon the shoemaker.” Seeing that this meant nothing to Jason, he elaborated. “It’s the place Socrates will use for discussions with his pupils—like Plato and Xenophon.”

“Oh,” was all Jason said. Inwardly, he was experiencing an increasingly frequent tingle: a sense of just exactly where he was, and what it meant . . . and what would have been lost had the men of Athens not stood firm at Marathon.

Up the street from the Strategion came a group of men, as Jason had been told to expect around this time of day: the
strategoi
, the annually elected generals of the ten tribes, who advised the War-Archon. Jason recognized the latter from descriptions he’d heard. Callimachus was older than most of the
strategoi
, a dignified, strongly built gentleman, bald and with a neat gray beard, wearing a worried expression that looked to be chronic. Themistocles walked behind him.

At Callimachus’ side, and talking to him with quiet intensity, was one of the few
strategoi
of his own age. This was a man of middle size, lean and wiry, obviously very well preserved for his age, which Jason knew to be about sixty. He still had all his hair, and it was still mostly a very dark auburn, darker than the still visible reddish shade of his graying beard.

The group began to break up, with Callimachus shuffling off as though stooped under the burden of his responsibilities. Jason wondered if he remembered how to smile. Themistocles led the man who had been expostulating to Callimachus to meet them.

“These are the nobles from Macedon I mentioned, Miltiades.” He performed introductions, then excused himself. Jason explained that “Alexander” was currently indisposed.

“I would be, too, if I shared the name of that lickspittle king!” Miltiades gave a patently bogus glare, then laughed. He showed no sign of being scandalized at the presence of a woman in the group, which Jason had hoped would be the case given his background in the wild and wooly frontier of Thrace, where he had married Hegesipyle, the daughter of the Thracian King Olorus. He asked them a series of rapid-fire questions concerning the current state of affairs in those parts, which they were able to answer as they had answered Themistocles.

“We hope we have been of assistance to you,
strategos
,” Jason said afterwards. “And we are grateful to you for taking the time to talk to us. We know how much you have had to concern you, ever since . . . well, the news from Naxos and Delos.”

“Yes,” said Miltiades grimly. He swept his hand in a gesture that took in the Agora crowd. “Can’t you feel the suspense as we wait to hear where Datis and his fleet will strike next? And just think: the whole thing could have been avoided if only the Ionians had listened to me twenty-three years ago!”

“You mean,” Landry queried, “the matter of the Great King’s bridge of boats across the Danube?”

“Yes! Darius, puffed up from his conquests in India, had led his great cumbersome army into Scythia. Of course he couldn’t catch the Scythian horsemen, who harried him so mercilessly he was lucky to escape.” (
Ancestors of the Cossacks
, thought Jason, remembering what he knew of Darius’s invasion of the Ukraine in 513 b.c.) “He’d ordered his subject Greek tyrants—including me—to build that bridge, and await his return before the horrible winter of that land set in. I proposed to the others that we destroy the bridge and leave him stranded north of the river, to either freeze or be feathered with Scythian arrows. We would have been free! But that crawling toad Histaeus, tyrant of Miletus, persuaded the others that my plan was too bold, too risky. So the bridge remained, and the tyrants welcomed back their master.”

“Including you,” Landry ventured.

“Of course. Do you take me for a fool? Yes, I groveled with the best of them. But later I joined the rebellion Histaeus instigated through his nephew Aristagoras.” Miltiades’s scowl lightened as though at a pleasant recollection. “The only good outcome was what happened to Histaeus after the rebellion had been crushed. He had the effrontery to demand that the Persian satrap send him to Susa to appeal to his old friend the Great King! The satrap complied—by sending his head there, pickled and packed in salt.”

“There was one other good outcome,” Landry demurred. “You yourself escaped.”

“Yes—twice. First from the Persians, and then from the Athenian Assembly after arriving here! This, even though after capturing the islands of Lemnos and Imbros from the Persians I gave them to Athens! I have Themistocles to thank for my acquittal. I’ll never forget that, even though he and I don’t agree on everything.”

“Like the fact that you persuaded the Assembly to execute the Persian emissaries who came demanding submission last year,” Chantal suggested diffidently. “He mentioned that he had reservations about that.” Even Miltiades looked slightly taken aback at a woman speaking up unbidden, but after a slight pause he continued.

“A lot of people discovered that they have reservations, after the fact. They said the person of an ambassador is sacred, and that we’d brought down the disfavor of the gods on ourselves.” Miltiades’s scowl was back at full intensity. “They just don’t understand. In a city like this, so traditionally riven by the feuds of aristocratic cliques, so uncertain of its new democracy that hasn’t had time to acquire habitual loyalties. . . .” Miltiades seemed to have difficulty putting it into words. In this land with so few rivers worthy of the name, there was no metaphor of burning bridges. “We needed to make our rejection irrevocable, by taking a dramatic step that left us with no alternative but to resist. Besides which, as a practical matter, it aligned us unbreakably with Sparta, which had killed the emissaries without even the formality of a trial.”

Jason was silent, remembering the twentieth-century debate over the pros and cons of the Allies’ “unconditional surrender” policy in World War II—a debate which hadn’t entirely died down among historians even in the twenty-fourth century. Miltiades had argued the Athenians into something like a mirror image of that: unconditional defiance.

“Can Sparta truly be relied on?” asked Landry, probing again for an historical insight.

“If Cleomenes were still alive, I’d be sure of it,” said Miltiades, referring to one of the Spartan kings, of whom there were always two. “Yes, I know, he was an enemy of the democracy in its earlier days—tried to force us to take Hippias back as tyrant! But . . . well. . . .” Fifth-century b.c. Ionic Greek also didn’t have anything about politics making strange bedfellows. “Lately, he was as staunch an enemy of Persia as any. And four years ago he did us all a favor by crushing Argos, which was threatening to stab us all in the back by joining the Persians at the Battle of Sepeia.” Miltiades chuckled. “He attacked them by surprise on the third night of a seven-day truce. When someone asked him about it, he said he’d sworn to the truce for seven days but hadn’t said anything about nights! And then when the Argive survivors retreated into the sacred grove of Argos, he ordered his helots to pile brush around the grove and burn it.”

“How horrible!” exclaimed Chantal.

“Exactly. Burning a sacred grove was just one more affront to the gods, added to the Spartans’ throwing the Persian emissaries down a well. And of course the gods wouldn’t be fooled by that trick of having the helots light the fire; they knew who gave the order.” Clearly, Miltiades was more concerned with the trees than with the Argives. “But that was Cleomenes for you. An unscrupulous conniver, to be sure, but
our
unscrupulous conniver. However, he finally outsmarted himself. He bribed the Oracle of Delphi to pronounce his co-king Demaratus illegitimate, so he could bring in that pliable little rat-fucker Leotychides in Demaratus’ place. When the story came out, Cleomenes was killed—pay no attention to that goat shit about suicide. Too bad. But his successor, who’d married his daughter Gorgo, may have promise. Young fellow named Leonidas.”

Leonidas
, thought Jason, and the familiar tingle took him once again.
Leonidas, who ten years from now will lead three hundred Spartans to Thermopylae, where they will leave their bones under a tomb inscribed with “Stranger, go tell the Spartans that we keep the ground they bade us hold,” and sear into the very soul of Western civilization a standard against which every subsequent generation of Western men must measure themselves.

“And now you must excuse me,” said Miltiades. “I have people to talk to, people to persuade of what we must do when—not if—the Persians come. And the debate has already begun in the Assembly.” Landry restrained himself with an effort as they said their farewells. He would, Jason suspected, have sold his soul for the opportunity to observe the Assembly, but they all knew it was out of the question for resident foreigners like themselves.

As Miltiades receded into the Agora crowd, Mondrago reappeared. “I followed that man as ordered, sir,” he reported crisply. “He went back in the direction of the Acropolis, and through the gate in that old wall at the base—but not up the ramp to the summit. Instead, he turned left when nobody was looking and skirted the side of the hill—pretty rough footing, I can tell you. He scrambled partway up the side, past some really old-looking shrines or whatever.”

“The sides of the hill,” Landry interjected, “especially the northern side, were riddled with tiny shrines, some of them of Bronze Age vintage, in Classical times. In fact, come to think of it, there was a shrine to Pan in a grotto there. Although,” he continued, sounding puzzled, “it’s always been believed that that shrine was established
after
the Battle of Marathon.”

“Well,” Mondrago resumed, clearly uninterested, “he vanished into one of those shrines. I expected him to reappear soon—it seemed barely large enough for him to take a leak in! But he never came back out. I thought I ought to get back here and report.”

“You did right.” Jason turned to Landry and Chantal. “You two get back to our rented house. Alexandre and I are going to look into this.”

CHAPTER NINE

It was late afternoon
when Jason and Modrago passed through the gate at the base of the Acropolis ramp, and there was almost no one about. So they turned unnoticed to the left and began to scramble along the steep, craggy northern side of the Acropolis.

Looming above them to the right were the walls that surrounded the summit. Below to the left spread the sea of small, tile-roofed buildings and winding alleys that was Athens. They had eyes for neither, for it was all they could do to keep their footing on the crumbling ancient pathways that clung to the almost cliff-like face.

Here and there, they passed the mouths of shallow caves holding the worn-down remnants of shrines carved into the hill in ages past, often holding barely recognizable statues which must surely predate written history.

Jason knew full well that humans were quite capable of imagining gods for themselves without the help of the Teloi—the entire religious history of humanity outside the Indo-European zone bore witness to that. So he didn’t know how many of these Bronze Age sculptures represented the alien “gods” and how many reflected images that had arisen from the subsoil of the human population’s own psyche. All he knew was that these shrines, sacred to the forgotten deities of a forgotten people, belonged to a different world from the bustling city below or the self-conscious monuments above. Child of a raw new world, he had always found Old Earth’s accumulated layers of ancientness oppressive—almost sinister. Now he had passed into a realm of ancientness beyond ancientness, and the tininess of his own lifespan shook him.

“This is the one,” he heard Mondrago say.

It was much like the others, little more than a rough indentation in the hillside. Inside and to the left was one of the crude sculptures, in a roughly hewn-out niche with an opening to the sky. It got no direct sunlight, here on the north side of the Acropolis, but there was enough illumination to make out the statue’s outlines. With a little imagination, it was possible to see a goat-legged man.

“He’s gone,” said Mondrago.

“Gone from
where
?” Jason demanded irritably, waving his hand at the little cavern, which hardly deserved the name; it was barely deep enough for a man to stand up inside. “Are you sure this is the right shrine?”

“Of course I’m sure!”

“But he could barely have squeezed in here, much less remained for a long time.”

“I tell you, this is where I left him!” Mondrago angrily slammed the rocky rear wall of the cavern with his fist for emphasis.

With a very faint humming sound, a segment of the rough stone surface, seemingly indistinguishable from the rest, slowly swung inward as though on hinges.

For a moment the two men simply stared at each other, speechless in the face of the impossibly out-of-place.

“I must have hit exactly the right spot,” Mondrago finally said, in an uncharacteristically small voice.

Jason shook his head slowly. No one in the twenty-fourth century had any inkling of anything like this under the Acropolis. “This has to be the work of the Teloi.”

“Why? Chantal said she saw high-tech equipment on a
human
.”

“I know what Chantal said. But she had to be mistaken. The Authority doesn’t allow it.
Ever
.”

Mondrago’s brown face screwed itself into a look of intense concentration. “Look, ours is the only expedition that’s ever been sent to this era, right? So if there
are
other time travelers around here, they must have come from
our
future.”

Jason shook his head. “The Authority has a fixed policy against sending multiple expeditions to the same time and place, where they could run into each other. God knows what paradoxes
that
could lead to!”