Spartans at the Gates (22 page)

“Good idea,” said the bard, keeping pace with him. “Let's earn some bread for Telemakos here. And I'll teach you how to tie that outfit you're wearing. You've got it on backward.”

 

TWO

Nikias counted ten of the henchmen surrounding him. They were murderous-looking scoundrels with scars and missing teeth. They marched him down the main street of the Piraeus, his hands bound behind his back and a rope around his neck, pulling him along like a captured slave. The bearlike man, who the other men called “Commander,” held the rope.

Nikias tried to walk as slowly as he could, buying himself some time before they arrived at the ship that would take him to Sparta. But every time he paused in his steps the commander yanked on the rope, tugging his head forward violently.

“Come on, pole-pleaser,” said the man. “You'll wish you'd taken that recruiter up on his offer to go to the colonies after the Spartans get through with you.”

The henchmen laughed. Several of them whispered things that they were going to do to Nikias once they got him alone in the hold of the ship. Things that made Nikias's skin crawl. He knew what men were capable of doing to other men. He'd witnessed the torture of a captured Theban general. The enemy had resisted beyond what Nikias thought was humanly possible before he'd given up vital information about the plans of his attacking forces. But not before he'd been ruined forever as a man.

Nikias's face tingled with a mixture of fury and terror. He felt humiliated to be paraded through the streets like a slave—people were leaning out the windows of their homes, gawking at him. But he didn't want this shameful walk to end. Once they got him on that ship, he knew that his life would be over.

His only chance was to make a break for it now, while he was still in a public place.

He remembered something his grandfather told him once: the most dangerous opponent is the one that you think is helpless.

If he could catch these men by surprise and take a few of them down, he might be able to make a break for the drydocks and then to the bay. He knew he could swim without the use of his arms. He'd done it before as a child countless times in the Korinthian Sea—a test of endurance with his friends. He could swim on his back out to a trireme and tell the sailors he was part of the Plataean emissary's entourage. They would take him on board. He would be safe.

He looked the commander's men up and down, searching to see if they carried weapons, but he didn't see any. And he was thankful that all swords, bows, and daggers were banned from inside the city walls of Athens and the Piraeus. “They'll wish they had metal in their hands in a second,” thought Nikias, steeling himself for the fight. He wasn't going to let them defile his body. And he would die before falling into the hands of the Spartans.

Up ahead he saw a line of half a dozen mule carts coming toward them, each stacked fifteen feet high with bags of grain. Nikias realized the carts would take up most of the roadway, forcing the henchmen to stand on one side of the narrow lane. This was his chance. He slowed down, baiting his captor to jerk on the rope.

“Come on!” ordered the commander as he gave a vicious tug.

Nikias pretended to stumble forward and fell face-first on the ground, landing on his chest and lifting his face to protect his teeth from the stone pavers.

The commander leaned over him and wrenched the rope. “You hold us up one more time,” he said, “and I'll kill you right here!”

Nikias looked up as the grain carts started to rattle past. The henchmen stepped aside, breaking up their tight ranks. Nikias struggled to a sitting position and refused to move as the wheels rolled by. One of the henchmen kicked him on his backside, but he glared at the commander with defiance.

The commander pulled back his fist to punch Nikias in the face and in doing so he let his hold on the neck rope go slack. Nikias moved as fast as a whip, sweeping out his legs and taking the commander's feet out from under him. The heavy man landed hard on his side. Nikias lifted his right leg and slammed his heel against the commander's throat, crushing the windpipe.

“Grab him!” shouted one of the henchmen.

Nikias did a somersault to gain some distance, then spun around on his buttocks to face the enemy, doing a move called “the crab”—the last defense of a wounded pankrator. He backed up along the ground on his haunches, kicking up with one leg and then the other, snaking between one of the slow-moving carts.

He glanced over at the commander—the man was writhing on the road, his face turning purple. Two of his men were trying to help him, but Nikias knew he would be dead in seconds.

Nikias sprang to his feet and hopped onto the back of one of the moving carts, squirming onto a grain sack. Now he was level with his attackers, and the first henchman to try and pull him off the cart got the flat of Nikias's foot to the face and his nose exploded in a spray of blood. The other henchmen backed off and shouted for the cart to stop. When the cart's driver ignored them they pulled the surprised man off his seat.

“Hey!” yelled the driver as he landed on the back of his mule.

The beast panicked and tried to flee, turning and running toward a nearby courtyard entrance. The cart came to a crashing halt as it got stuck in the doorway of the house. Nikias clambered up the precariously stacked bags of grain, climbing them like stairs until he was even with the flat rooftop of the house.

“Get the bastard!” shouted one of the henchmen. They clambered up the grain sacks after him.

Nikias whirled and caught one of the men in the chest. The man flailed backward and grabbed one of his companions as he fell. The two tumbled off the roof and landed headfirst onto the stone street below.

Nikias sprinted across the rooftop, flinging himself across the gap to another flat roof next door, then bounded down a flight of stairs that led to the street. At the bottom of the stairs was an empty sconce used to hold a pine torch. He hooked the rope that was tied around his neck onto one of the hooks of the sconce and jerked his head to the side. The rope came free, and Nikias spat the gag from his mouth. Through the doorway he could see the road that ran above the boat sheds. That's where he had to go!

Bolting from the entrance, he turned a corner and ran straight into a man blocking his path. The man landed on his buttocks, but the mariner—a living knot of coiled muscles—vaulted instantly to his feet as if shot from a bow and punched Nikias in the stomach with the force of a sledgehammer.

Nikias sank to his knees with the wind knocked out of him.

“Watch where you're going, blockhead!” roared the indignant oarsman, standing over Nikias in a threatening posture, his manly face set in a scowl.

Nikias stared up at his cousin Phoenix in amazement. He tried to say his cousin's name but the man's punch had been so powerful that Nikias could not take in enough air to make any noise other than a strangled groan.

“Leave him to us!”

The seven remaining henchmen converged on Nikias at the same time and tackled him. One of them wrapped his thick arm around Nikias's throat while the others clamped down on his arms and legs, hefting him up and hauling him away.

Nikias opened his jaws wide and locked onto the henchman's forearm that was strangling him, biting through the skin and straight into the muscle. The man shrieked and let go and Nikias screamed, “Phoenix! Phoenix!”

The henchman with the bleeding arm started pounding Nikias in the face. But Nikias kept calling his cousin's name, squirming like a mad thing to be free. He lashed out with his knees. Flung his head. Tried to bite them. Anything to keep them from taking him away from his cousin.

He heard shouting and the henchmen dropped him to the ground. The next thing he saw was Phoenix's face—the face of a hero carved in marble—leaning over him.

“Who are you?” Phoenix asked. “Do I
know
you? How did you know my name?”

“Cousin,” wheezed Nikias. “Nikias.”

“Gods!” said Phoenix as recognition slowly came to him. “Nikias? What are you doing here?”

“I need your help,” said Nikias.

“That's an understatement,” said Phoenix.

“Leave the prisoner to us!” ordered one of the henchmen angrily.

Phoenix helped Nikias to a sitting position. Nikias squinted through swollen eyes and saw a wall of oarsmen—twenty or so mariners. They were restraining the seven henchmen—pinning their arms behind their backs. The ruffians looked like puny little children compared to the hugely muscled oarsmen.

“Prisoner?” asked Phoenix, baffled. He looked at the man who had spoken—a brute with a low brow. “You! What is going on here? You're no Skythian archer,” he added with a sneer. “Where's your whip and topknot?”

The man refused to look Phoenix in the eye and no one responded. Phoenix turned to Nikias with a questioning lift of his eyebrows.

“They're Kleon's men,” said Nikias, blood pouring from his mouth. “They're taking me to a ship. To send me to Sparta.”

“The lad's crazy,” said one of the henchmen. “We're taking him to the Piraeus jail. There's a bounty on his head. He raped a girl.”

“He's lying!” spat Nikias through clenched teeth. “They're Kleon's men,” he repeated.

Phoenix slowly wiped the blood from Nikias's lips with his own tunic. Then he stood up and faced the henchmen, eyes ablaze.

“Kleon's men, eh?” Phoenix said in a voice full of menace. He spat the name out again as if it were poison on his tongue. “
Kleon's
men?”

“Leave the country lad to us!” said the henchman. “Or you'll regret it, oar-puller.”

Phoenix strode over to the man who'd just spoken and smashed him in the chin with his enormous fist. The man dropped to the ground, dead to the world. Phoenix glared at the other henchmen.

“Do you know who I am?” asked Phoenix with outrage. He raised his arms dramatically, like an actor on the stage, flexing his biceps. “I am Phoenix, captain of
Sea Nymph
! And if any of you dogs-of-Kleon—that pustule of a man who slandered our leader, Perikles—would care to say another word, I'll happily pull your tongue from your mouth with my bare hands and give you a taste of each other's arse-holes! Now, get out of my sight!”

He gestured for his men to let Kleon's thugs go. The oarsmen tossed the henchmen aside, kicking them as they skulked away.

Phoenix slipped a curved boat knife from a sheath on his hip and cut the ropes binding Nikias's hands. “Now,” he said, helping him to his feet, “let's get you cleaned up, my young cousin. It appears you've got an interesting story to tell.”

 

THREE

“Telemakos always leads me to where I'm going,” said the bard with a laugh, pointing at his raven flying above them on the tree-lined lane. “He has a way of finding us good luck.”

Kolax, who was walking next to the bard and toting the man's staff and harp, nodded in understanding. His father had always told him that ravens were enchanted with a powerful magic. It was wise for this wandering musician to put his trust in such an intelligent animal. Because instead of being a smart sort of foreigner like Kolax had first thought, the bard had turned out to be one of the biggest donkey-brains he'd ever met.

In the short amount of time it had taken them to walk down from the Akropolis to this shady road, the bard had spouted a whole cartload of foolish sheep dung. Tales of lands far to the east where men could stand on red-hot coals without feeling pain, or make their spirits fly amongst the stars merely by concentrating on a third eye in their foreheads. Or the notion that the sun was a giant ball of fire rather than the Sun god's chariot flying across the sky.
That
one was really funny.

He glanced at the bare-chested bard and wondered how someone could get so muscular merely from walking from town to town and plucking catgut strings all day. The man had the biceps of a Skythian bowman and the rippled stomach of a wrestler. He would make a fine warrior if he tossed aside his tortoiseshell harp and grasped the handle of a sword. But the crazy Greek claimed he'd renounced violence! And refused to eat animal flesh! Absurd beyond belief.

Kolax knew a good thing when it came his way, though. The bard blended into Athens like all the other odd-looking characters in the capital, and as long as he stayed by this man's side, Kolax would fit in too. He'd offered to carry the musician's staff and harp for a reason: now he could pass for his servant. General Lukos and his slave-hunters would have a difficult time spotting him in this improved disguise.

And it was a great relief to be around someone who could talk in Skythian after these long months away from home. Even if the bard did speak his tongue with an outlandish Greek accent.

“My name is Andros of Naxos,” said the bard.

“Kolax of the Bindi,” replied the boy.

“I don't suppose you can write out your name? Or anything for that matter?”

Kolax laughed. What a ridiculous question. “My father taught me the Three Skills—riding, shooting, and the counting of our gold,” he replied.

“Illiterate like most of your barbarian kin,” said Andros with a sigh. “I am writing a book and would have let you read some of it.”

“What's it about?”

“The secret to eternal happiness.”

Kolax grinned. “I know the secret to happiness already—riding better than any warrior alive, shooting three arrows in three heartbeats, and possessing a clay pot full of gold darics buried in the ground beneath the floor of a spacious round tent.”

“The secret,” said Andros, acting as though he hadn't heard anything that Kolax had just said, “is to let the world slip through your fingers like sand.”

Kolax had absolutely no idea what Andros meant by that, but he made an admiring grunting sound in the back of his throat. Hopefully that would shut the man up.