Sword of Apollo (34 page)

He looked around in a frenzy. He saw mariners leaping from the
Spear
while men on the upper deck hurled objects into the sea: pieces of wood, boxes, extra spars and beams—anything for the people in the water to cling to.

Nikias saw a young woman's face fifty feet away—she went under. He hugged the little girl to him and kicked over to the drowning woman.

“Helena!” he cried.

He grabbed the woman around the waist and held her tight, swimming on his back with the girl clutched to one side and the woman to the other. The woman turned her wild eyes to him and he realized that she wasn't Helena.

“My baby!” the woman howled, clawing at his face to let her free. “Where's my baby!”

“Stop!” shouted Nikias. “You'll kill us all!”

But she would not listen. She scratched his cheek, drawing blood, and he took in a great gulp of water when a wave hit him in the side of the face. He let the woman go, otherwise she would have pulled him under, and she took one last look at him with her crazed eyes before disappearing under the sea.

Nikias held the little girl's head above the water and swam with one arm, trying to move in the direction of the
Spear
. In the troughs of the waves he could see mariners and other women and children who had been cast from the Korinthian ship.

“Come together!” shouted one of the marauder crew members. He was holding on to a spar with one hand and a half-drowned woman with the other. “Come together!” he repeated, his deep voice rising above the waves.

Nikias grabbed onto the spar and placed the little girl's hands on it. “Hold on!” he commanded. “Don't let go!” Then he swam off to help a mariner who was pulling two grown women through the water toward the spar.

Time lost all meaning. The world became nothing more than tossing waves and a thunderous sky and shivering bodies clinging to the spar. Nikias searched the water relentlessly, leaving the spar to seek out survivors, sometimes returning with a woman or a child who had somehow stayed alive on the rough waves. But many of the women and children could not swim, and so the sea was littered with the dead. The last one he found alive was a black-haired boy, stuck to an amphora like a limpet. The amphora's mouth was still sealed with its wax plug, otherwise the jar would have sunk like a stone.

By the time Nikias had utterly exhausted himself, there were twenty or so woman and children clinging to the spar and five or six mariners. As the waves rose and dipped, Nikias caught sight of other clusters of survivors, but sometimes, after a big wave came, they would vanish, pulled down to Poseidon's realm.

In the distance he saw a fire burning on the water. Whether it was the
Spear
or the Korinthian trireme, he could not tell. The lips of the people around him were turning blue. They wouldn't last for much longer in this frigid water. This sea was colder than the hands of Thanatos, the god of death.

No one spoke. No one had the energy. And what was there to say?

Erratic images flitted through Nikias's tired brain. He saw Kallisto and his daughters playing in the yard of the farm. He saw Helena dressed in her goatherd's clothes. He remembered the strange vision of the boar shitting gold darics and then turning into Eurymakus the Theban. And the eclipse. And the dead fox in the field that his grandfather had found. And the snake that swallowed the baby owl. And so many other mysterious signs. He wondered what it all meant. Any of it. Were they messages from the gods or just happenings? What did life mean?

A saying kept rolling over and over in his mind: “If only humans could be a scourge to the gods like they are to us.” Who had said that? Where had he heard that before?

Somebody uttered a sigh next to him. He turned and saw the boy he'd found clinging to the amphora close his eyes then slip under the water as though he were falling into a soft bed. But Nikias grabbed him by the tunic and hauled him to the surface. “Wake up!” he yelled, and the boy's lids fluttered open.

Up and down on the sea they went—a sea that had turned as dark as the sky above. Nikias had faced death before, but it had never been so tedious. He realized how parched his mouth felt. How he couldn't feel his feet anymore. It seemed as if he had always been clinging to this spar—and would cling to it forever.

In a mist of rain he saw the
Spear
coming toward them, appearing out of nowhere as if in a dream. Its sails were down and only half the oars were at work, stirring the sea feebly. The old marauder with the deep voice—the one who had first called the others over to the spar—cried out, “Look!” and let forth a wild laugh.

The ship was real. And Chusor was at the prow, scanning the water like a hawk. When he saw them he pointed and shouted, “There!”

The
Spear
fought against a powerful wind, but the survivors clinging to the spar were moving with the current, and soon they bumped against the prow. Mariners reached down and hauled them on board. Nikias was the last one to leave the sea. They had to carry him to the gangway, for his legs would not move and his teeth chattered so hard they sounded like bone dice in a clay cup. He sat huddled with the others in the narrow hold, staring into space. Lightning flashed directly overhead, and a hard rain came, beating on the cloth covers that had been put up to keep the rain out of the open gangway. He drifted in and out of consciousness.

Then he saw two strong legs standing in front of him.

“You are the luckiest bastard I have ever known,” said a raspy voice.

Nikias looked up. There stood Chusor, covered in blood, a wicked slash across his left pectoral, another across the right side of his cheek from eye to earlobe. One of his arms was badly burned and the skin was blistered and blackened. But he was smiling out of the side of his mouth.

“Wha—what happened?” Nikias stammered.

“We won,” said Chusor, his voice obviously hoarse from screaming orders—from screaming in battle. “We burned the Korinthian hoplites and archers off their battle deck, then stormed the ship in the flames. We found more women and children in their hold. Our men fought like animals. It was a thing to see. The Plataeans and Athenians gave no quarter. Many died. Once we had killed all of the enemy—down to the last man—we left their ship to burn. We've been searching the sea for hours since then. Two men died at the oars from exhaustion. But the others wouldn't give up. You seem to be the last of the survivors,” he added. “A third of our rowers are either dead in battle or drowned searching for their kin. We saved a hundred or so of the women and children. Now the storm is on us. And it might kill us all anyway.”

Nikias closed his eyes and felt the huge up-and-down lift of a swell. He tried to speak, but his emotions had robbed him of his voice. “And Helena?” he finally forced himself to ask, fearing the answer.

When he opened his eyes Chusor was gone, but Helena was kneeling before him. Her face was bloodied and bruised. But she was alive and her eyes were filled with an inextinguishable light. He laughed with joy—a choking laugh that quickly turned into a sob. He tried to lift his arms to hold her but they were so heavy and numb, he could not make them work. He slumped into her and she embraced him.

“Chusor told me that you leapt into the sea for me,” she said, her voice full of awe, full of love.

 

P
ART
III

“The Athenians paid no heed to the Syrakusans because their island lay so far across the wine-dark sea. But those descendants of Korinthian colonists grew in strength, like a fell beast that is left alone in the mountains—a beast that eventually preys upon all that come near its lair.”

—P
APYRUS
FRAGMENT
FROM
THE
“L
OST
H
ISTORY
”
OF
THE
P
ELOPONNESIAN
W
AR
BY
THE
“E
XILED
S
CRIBE
”

 

ONE

Kolax's new master, Andros the Korinthian, had given him free rein to wander anywhere in the citadel of Syrakuse, just so long as he came back to the house where they were staying before nightfall. Then, during the evening meal, Andros would pester him with all kinds of annoying questions, asking him about the most seemingly insignificant details of the things that he had seen and overheard in the agora, or by the sacred fountain of Arethusa, or at the wharves of Ortygia—the little isle connected by a narrow stone bridge to the main island of Sicily and the place called the New City.

Kolax had decided to play along with Andros, biding his time and humoring the man until they went back to Greece and he could make his escape from the devious spy. It wasn't that he didn't like the man. He had many good qualities for a Korinthian: he was kind and knew how to make a good joke, he spoke fluent Skythian, he let Kolax drink as much uncut wine as he wanted and gave him silver coins to spend as he pleased, and he'd never once tried to rape his arse. And besides all that, Andros had saved him from those cistern-arsed Dog Raiders who were going to skin and roast him alive.

But Kolax felt as though he were repaying his life debt to Andros by being slowly bored to death. First he'd been forced to ride all the way from the Dog Raider camp in Megaria to Korinth clinging to Andros's back like a toddler. Then, before Kolax had had time to even take a crap or plan his escape back to Plataea, they boarded a trireme that took them on the spectacularly dull journey across the Gulf of Korinth, stopping each night at Korinthian forts and shabby little villages all along the way, then continued on across the mind-numbingly tedious sea to the island of Sicily—a trip that took fourteen days or more, for Kolax lost count in his apathy. They were over four hundred sea miles from Athens, whatever that meant. Kolax knew that it was a long, long way.

Along the journey Andros had forced Kolax to start wearing stupid Greek clothes, and made him do lessons every day, like sea navigation, and reading, and numbers, and even practicing Kolax's pronunciation of Greek words until he thought his lips might fall off.

“You're a quick learner, Kolax,” Andros said to him once in Skythian. “But you need to learn patience. The secret to life is ataraxia—and that means equanimity. You must be evenly balanced like this ship, or else you will flip over and spill your cargo.”

Kolax laughed at this bit of advice. He repeated the words that he had told Andros when they'd first met in Athens years ago: “My papa taught me the Three Skills of the Skythians—riding, shooting, and the counting of our gold … and that is all a man really needs to know.”

Kolax had told Andros everything about his own history: how he had been captured by an enemy tribe and sold into slavery. How he had been purchased by Chusor the smith and helped the Plataeans defeat the Thebans on the night of the sneak attack. And how he had gone to Athens with Nikias, hoping to find his father, who had enlisted with the Athenians when Kolax was a small boy. That was where Kolax had first met Andros.

It was a strange tale, and one that Andros said was worthy of a book.

Now, walking across the busy bridge that led from the isle citadel of Ortygia to the mainland district for the twentieth time in as many days, Kolax wondered, for the thousandth time, if his papa and the other Skythians were still alive. Andros had told him that the fortress of the Three Heads had been seized by the Spartans, but no Skythians had been captured there. Had his people abandoned the stronghold and gone to Plataea? Or were they hiding somewhere in the Kithaeron Mountains? Kolax had heard there was a famous soothsayer living here in Syrakuse. Perhaps the soothsayer could tell him if his father was still alive.

The soothsayer lived with the man everyone called the Tyrant—a powerful oligarch named General Pantares who controlled Syrakuse and made war on other city-states with a ruthless fervor. Pantares was the man whom Andros had come on this long journey to see, but the spy had been kept waiting for weeks, and Kolax was amused to see Andros's precious ataraxia—his equanimity—slowly erode, to be replaced by a seething petulance. Kolax had discovered that Andros was a man of high standing … a dangerous man, to be treated with respect and fear. But Pantares ruled Syrakuse like one of the tyrants of old, obsessed with making his city-state the strongest in the land, and guided by a belief that Apollo—whose sacred shrine was said to stand on the exact spot where that god's mother had given birth to his twin sister, Artemis—watched over Pantares above all other Greeks.

Kolax had been to the temple of Apollo on Ortygia several times since they had been on the island. And he thought it looked just like every other temple he had ever seen in Greece: columns, carvings, droning priests, a statue … boring as shit.

Kolax crossed the bridge and stopped by a shield maker's storefront, staring at himself in the burnished surface of an unpainted shield, shaking his head with disgust at the lanky lad staring back at him. He felt so silly with his cropped hair—which Andros had forced him to dye black as soon as they arrived in Syrakuse—and this ridiculous short tunic and frilly sandals. At least Andros had given him a knife to wear on his belt, otherwise he would have felt utterly enfeebled. If his cousin Griffix could see him now, he would laugh his head off.

“—stuff the Spartans! They can't tell us what to do. And neither can the bloody Korinthians. Syrakuse rules Syrakuse as we have for centuries—”

“The Tyrant rules Syrakuse, you mean—”

“Pantares is a strong leader for dangerous times. He doesn't have to buy my vote. Our city-state may have been founded by the Korinthians, but that doesn't mean we have to bend over and grab our heels for them every time they…”

Kolax listened with half an ear to the two men in the shield shop speaking with heated voices. Everywhere in the city men were talking about the Spartans and Korinthians and whether or not to side with them in the war with the Athenians. Most of the citizens of Syrakuse, Kolax knew from his conversations with Andros, were more interested in trading and making money than waging war. And they had their own enemies to deal with—rebellious city-states on the island of Sicily and Karthaginian pirates on the seas, not to mention the warlike Tyrsenians, who inhabited a place called Italia to the north. Nobody in Syrakuse wanted to send ships across the sea to fight against Athens. It seemed like a preposterous notion to the islanders to go all that way for a war. Disaster was the only thing that could come of an expedition so far from home.