“So you are a misthios. And you think that we need help? Did you not just witness what happened to these Athenian fools? Is Megara not still in Spartan hands?”
“For now,” she replied. “Though I have heard that Perikles of Athens plans to mount a major land offensive on these parts.”
Stentor’s top lip arched at one end.
“I am sure you will win most battles,” she replied before he could curse her, “but could you not use a mercenary for certain things? I ask only for a place in your camp and safe harbor for the men of my boat while I am here.”
Stentor snorted in dry amusement. “You want to serve us? Do you really think I would let a hired blade anywhere near my father?” He shot a look up at the Wolf as he said this.
“You are the Wolf’s… son?” Kassandra said, her voice breaking up.
“He adopted me not long after both of his children died,” Stentor explained. “He mentored me and trained me. It is thanks to him that I am a lochagos, leader of this regiment. He is everything to me, and he is everything I want to be. I would follow him to the gates of the underworld.”
“I ask only the chance to do the same,” she said.
He looked at her askance, eyeing her from head to toe like a merchant evaluating a nag, before chopping one hand into the palm of the other, decision made. “No. No misthios will enter our camp or set foot near the Wolf,” he insisted. “Enough of your kind lurk inland as it is, working for the Athenians…” His nose wrinkled. “Hyrkanos and his hired rogues have been smashing up our supply wagons, denying our men their bread. Others seek my father’s head and the purse it will bring. Too many thorns in the Wolf’s paw already. No more. For all I know you could be one of them—here to kill my father.” He stared hard at her for a time. “So go, sleep on your boat and be grateful that I let you keep your head, stranger.”
A gentle clank of spears being leveled behind her told her it was time to leave. She half bowed and backed away, toward the fragile sanctuary of the Adrestia.
Having eaten a meal of salted, roasted sardines and bread, washed down with well-watered wine, Kassandra lay down to sleep near the boat’s prow. An eerie silence descended over the bay. She could not find rest, despite her aching muscles and foggy mind, and so she sat up on the rail, hugging her knees to her chest, Ikaros preening himself beside her in the light of a sickle moon that illuminated the waters. She watched the ring of torchlight out on the Athenian galleys, and the glow of orange up on the bluff, where the Spartans were camped. Here in this netherworld of the beach, she was surrounded by a deckful of snoring sailors, and the still, stinking corpses of the Athenian dead a stone’s throw along the sands. They had been stripped of their armor but left unburied.
Her heart froze when she heard a lapping of oars out on the water. A night attack? But she saw just a small rowboat coming toward the shore from the blockade, and watched keenly as two unarmored Athenians disembarked and headed up toward the Spartan camp. Brave men, dead men, surely, she thought. But they returned a short while later, and then a larger team of unarmed Athenians rowed ashore to join them and helped dig graves in the sand and bury their dead, granted amnesty to do so by their fiercest enemies.
Kassandra stared up at the Spartan camp. The Wolf was at the bluff’s edge again, looking down upon the burials, framed by the inky sky and a silvery sand of stars. You no doubt congratulate yourself for showing such a crumb of honor, she mouthed hatefully. Yet where was your honor that night on the mountain?
For the next moon, the Adrestia remained beached near Pagai, and Kassandra set about winning the Spartans’ trust. By day, she shadowed the ranks as they marched to and fro, defending the few good bays and docking sites whenever the Athenians tried to land or driving off the infantry assaults from the north. Twice, she helped turn the fray. First, by perching on a rock near the shore and sending blazing arrows over the heads of the waiting, battle-ready Spartans and into the sails of the approaching Athenian triremes, the vessels going up in flames before they even reached the shore. Stentor had glowered at her like a vulture robbed of his corpse. Then, a few days later, she had entered the edge of battle again, springing from the woods to defeat an Athenian champion. Stentor had rewarded her with a tirade and a quarter-drawn blade. “Stay away from my soldiers. Stay away from my father,” he had spat. But she could see the black rings under his eyes and the flagging steps of the Spartan soldiers. Despite their pride and reputation for laughing in the face of hunger, the missing supply wagons meant many had not eaten solids for nearly half a moon.
Spartan trust was like a thick iron lock. Grain was the key, she realized. She rose, slipped silently from the boat and headed inland.
Up on the bluff, a circle of torches delineated the Spartan camp. Sentries stood, watchful and expressionless, the butt spikes of their spears dug into the earth so the shafts stood upright like pickets. A few Skiritae—expert javelin marksmen and outlying night watchmen, not purebred Spartans, but soldiers held in some esteem nonetheless—sat in trees and on elevated ground in the surrounding countryside. Inside the camp, Spartan soldiers sat by fires rumbling with deep laughter, slurping painfully thin black broth from their kothon mugs or whetting their spears. A few stood naked, their Helot slaves carefully oiling their gaunt bodies and strigilling them clean.
Stentor sat by the fire at the heart of the camp, tired, famished and irritable. Unable to rest, he had risen in the darkness and brought a few other insomniac warriors with him to the fire to while the hours of night away. “Sing the verses of Tyrtaios for me,” he grunted. “One of his war songs.”
The two gaunt Spartiate warriors sitting across from him coughed and shuffled, then began a dreadful rendition of a song written some three hundred years previously by Sparta’s greatest poet. Stentor’s face melted with dismay. “Make it stop, before the shade of the great man rises and rips your tongues from your mouths.”
He gazed down at the Adrestia, clinging to the shores like a limpet. The irksome misthios had been here for nearly two moons now—all throughout the stinking-hot summer. Her interference in recent battles had stolen the wind from their victories, and once with her use of the bow—such an un-Spartan weapon! One day he had walked down to the bay to watch his men training on the sand. They lined up in opposing phalanxes and marched at one another in mock battle. He had laughed gruffly and applauded as one by one the lines picked each other apart, knocking their opponents down or scoring mock kills. In the end, one soldier remained standing after an imperious display, the rest dazed and groaning. He had roared in ovation as he approached the champion… until he saw that underneath that red Spartan robe and bronze helm was no man of Lakonia. It was her. Her!
He had berated his men like a vengeful titan for letting her train with them, for giving her a Spartan spear and shield. But she merits them, sir, one soldier had countered. She has been expertly trained in the Spartan ways, by whom she will not say.
One of the men she had beaten later tried to woo her, by way of grabbing her and trying to kiss her. That one now sat in the corner of the camp, still nursing a broken jaw and bruised testicles. More strangely, in the last moon, the Skiritae had reported her odd night movements—roving far inland under darkness. What are you, Misthios? he wondered.
In any case, there were darker troubles approaching. The misthios’s claims had been accurate: Perikles of Athens was moving a strong force of hoplites south in an attempt to break the Spartan hold on this land, and so the Spartan lochos would soon be marching north to intercept them—indeed, the allies had already been summoned. He wrung his fingers through his hair: talk of Athenian heroes, of vast enemy numbers, of what many whispered was sure to be a famous Spartan defeat, gnawed at the edges of his morale, just as the hunger clawed at his empty belly.