Light footsteps rose behind her, rattling along the jetty. “I’m ready,” Phoibe panted. “I have packed all my things.”
Kassandra’s eyes closed tight, and she fought to douse the flickering flame within. “You’re not coming,” she said coldly.
The footsteps slowed behind her. “If you’re going, I’m going,” Phoibe said in a clipped tone.
“Where I’m headed is no place for a child,” Kassandra said, turning slowly to face her, crouching to her eye level. Now she could see the clipped tone was but a mask. Tears quivered in Phoibe’s eyes. “You must stay on this island. The Cyclops is gone now and so you and Markos will be safe.” She shot a look over Phoibe’s shoulder. Markos stood on the jetty, locked in discussions with some boss-eyed trader, trying to sell him a mangy donkey with a bald back. “A battle horse,” he crowed, “fit for a general.” He stopped for a moment, and returned Kassandra’s look, offering her a half nod in farewell. Look after her, she mouthed to him. Another hurried nod like a scolded child.
She felt something being pressed into her hand then. Phoibe’s wooden toy eagle. “Then take Chara with you,” Phoibe said. “Wherever you go, Chara will be with you, and so will I—in a way.”
Kassandra felt invisible hands squeezing her throat, and a sob pressing through the gap. But she wrapped her fingers over the toy eagle and stifled the emotion with a cold sigh. “And I have something for you,” she whispered, slipping the Cyclops’s obsidian eye into Phoibe’s palm. It had been a deft sleight of hand back at Kleptous Bay: she wondered for a moment if the poor goat had now passed the small rock she had shoved up its backside. “Keep this for yourself. Don’t let Markos know about it. If you run into trouble, sell it and use the coins wisely.” Phoibe stared at the eye, agape, then tucked it in her purse.
“Farewell, Phoibe,” Kassandra said, rising.
“You will come back, one day, won’t you?” Phoibe pleaded.
“I cannot promise you that, Phoibe, but I hope we will meet again.”
Shouts echoed across the boat as the last of the supplies was brought on board and the gangplank was readied to be drawn up. Phoibe backed away, smiling, crying. She hopped from the boat and down toward Markos. Kassandra turned away from her, clutching the toy eagle tightly.
The Adrestia pulled out to sea under oar. Barnabas strode to and fro across the deck. Unlike that day when she had saved him, he no longer resembled a drowned cat. He wore a pale blue exomis with white shoulders, his long, thick locks swept back from his face and his beard combed to forked points. He was handsome in an avuncular way, stout and strong. After a time, he called out to his men: “Ship the oars, set sail. The crew were like squirrels, speeding up the mast, tugging on ropes. With a rumble like faraway thunder, rolling closer, the cloud-white sail of the Adrestia tumbled from the spar to reveal a crimson blazon of a soaring eagle. The sail caught the stiff wind, billowing like a giant’s chest, and the boat lurched eastwards at speed, spray soaking all those aboard in moments, a trail of white foam churning in the boat’s wake.
Barnabas came to Kassandra’s side, hair rapping in the wind of the voyage. “When the Cyclops forced me underwater, I prayed to the gods. And then you came…”
Kassandra laughed drily. “You called, and I answered.”
“And you fought like an Amazon Queen, like a sister of Achilles! All while Zeus’s eagle flew around your head,” Barnabas continued. Ikaros, following in the boat’s wake, screeched in acknowledgment. Barnabas’s eyes grew glassy, sparkling with wonder. “On my travels, I’ve encountered people who claimed to have blood of the gods in their veins. But claims are cheap and easy… Deeds are the true measure of a person.”
Coyly, she glanced away and around the deck. It was bare and tidy, with a small cabin just below the scorpion-tail stern and a number of nooks and high nests that the crew seemed to favor, men sitting on the spar with their legs dangling. Some slept in the shade near the prow, using rolled-up cloaks as pillows, others sang as they scrubbed the timbers and some played games of knucklebones by the rail. Thirty men altogether, she counted.
“Each of them is a brother to me,” he said, noticing her gaze. “And you can rely on them utterly. But I must ask: why, of all places I could take you… why the Megarid?” He gazed off to where the ship was headed: the wide waters of the Gulf of Korinthia.
“At the Megaran port of Pagai lies a great prize.”
“And the heart of the war, Misthios,” Barnabas countered. “The Megaran lands crawl with Spartan phalanxes, and the waters are ringed with Athenian galleys. The latter will pose no problem, for although the Adrestia is small and aged, she is fast and swift to turn… and she sports a sharp beak. But even then, we will make shore at a time when rumors thicken of Perikles leading an Athenian land army into the Megarid to face and destroy the Spartan regiments. What prize could possibly be worth setting foot on such a war-torn land?”
“The head of a Spartan general,” she replied.
The crewmen nearby gasped.
“I have been hired to kill the one they call the Wolf,” she said, her confidence growing as the trireme sliced across deeper waters.
Barnabas blew air through his lips and laughed without humor, as one might when surveying a sheer-sided cliff smeared with oil that they have been asked to climb. “The Wolf? You have taken on a tall task, Misthios. They say Nikolaos of Sparta has shoulders of iron, sleeps with his spear in hand and one eye open. And his bodyguards are like demons too…”
Kassandra heard Barnabas’s words fade into a deafening ring. She heard herself mutter: “What did you say?” and saw the looks of confusion on the captain’s face and on the faces of the crew nearby who came to her aid when her legs weakened. She shook them off, grabbing the ship’s rail and leaning over to stare down into the water.
The Wolf is Nikolaos of Sparta? I have been sent to kill my father?
As he watched the Adrestia drift out to sea, spearing toward the Korinthian Gulf under power of sail, Elpenor stroked the strange mask in his hands, chuckling quietly to himself. He saw the small figure of Kassandra at the stern. Proud, brave, mighty, at first. Then he almost felt the crushing blow as it was delivered, seeing her fall to one knee, waving the men away.
“She knows…” he purred. “It has begun.”
FOUR
“Hoist the sail!” Barnabas yelled. As the great blazon of the eagle was tucked away, twenty men settled on the padded-leather benches running either side of the ship, each taking up a fir-pole oar, lifting it and threading it through a leather loop and thole pin. With a rhythmic splash, the oars met the waves.
The Megarid was in sight. The journey was all but over.
Kassandra, perched at the prow, stared at the forest of Athenian galleys ahead. Flapping striped sails, fir masts and pitch-painted hulls. Every one of the mighty vessels was packed with glinting hoplites, archers, slingers, peltasts. Some were even laden with Thessalian steeds, their heads covered with bags to stop them becoming panicked at the sight of the ocean. A floating army stood between the Adrestia and the hazy Megaran hinterland beyond and the port of Pagai itself.
“I have to face him,” she whispered to herself. It was a mantra that had echoed in her thoughts for the past two days of the voyage as she came to terms with the Wolf’s true identity. “But there is no way through that blockade.”