Atlantis: Gate (35 page)

“Did you succeed in your quest?” Xerxes asked.

Pandora wearily leaned on the Naga Staff. “No.”

“Then whoever sent you will be displeased,” Xerxes said.

Pandora stiffened as a blade entered her back. She saw a figure slip away--Xerxes’s Dagger--even as she knew he had delivered a fatal blow. “You are nothing,” she said to the Persian King. “You will fail in this. The Greeks will defeat you.”

“Is that a prophecy or a wish?” Xerxes asked.

Pandora collapsed on the Middle Gate, adding her body to the multitude.

***************

The women of Sparta mourned their dead men in much the same manner in which they had sent them off to war. The sound of the mournful hymn they sang rose above the city-state and echoed into the surrounding forests and mountains.

Cyra heard the song as she sat in the shade of a tree near the parade field where Spartan boys sparred, preparing for the next battle. She got to her feet as Thetis approached. The King’s wife wore a thin strip of black cloth around her forehead to mark her “loss. To her right was Briseis.

Thetis bowed her head slightly. “Greetings, Priestess.”

“Your husband asked me to come here,” Cyra said.

“For what reason?” Thetis asked.

Cyra looked at the young girl. “To teach your daughter.”

Thetis smiled through her grief. “He asked that? A Spartan King concerned about his daughter’s future? Perhaps things can change.” She reached out and took Cyra’s hand and placed it in Briseis’s small hand. “Teach her well.”

THE PRESENT

Alluvial waters have widened the pass at Thermopylae over the centuries since the battle between Spartans and Persians. It is now over a mile wide, as represented on Pandora’s map. It was indeed an epic battle, as Xerxes turned back to Persia the following year, never completing his conquest, and the forces he left behind were routed by the Greeks. The entire history of the western world was changed as a result.

Near the mountain, where the pass was tight in days of old, etched on a monument are two lines in memory of the battle:

Go tell the Spartans, thou who passest by,

That here, obedient to their laws we lie.

The End

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