“The Spartans found a way inside the walls?” Herodotos croaked.
“No,” Kassandra realized, seeing the sores on some of the dead. “Much worse. It is the sickness. Hippokrates foresaw this.”
They edged carefully along the way, wary of every outstretched, rotting arm or leg.
“A sickness, aye, that makes sense,” said Herodotos sadly. “The Spartans could not break down Perikles’s mighty walls. But this pestilence rose within. Too many people crammed in such a small space for so long. The Spartans are gone, but the true enemy now runs riot in the streets.”
They came to the city proper and found more grim corpse heaps in each corner of the agora. Men and women shuffled past with cloths on their faces, bringing fresh dead to add to the piles. The reek here was overpowering, and now Kassandra had to draw her cloak around to cover her nose and mouth, Herodotos doing likewise.
A hunched woman dropped the body of a young girl on the pile then staggered away, sobbing.
Phoibe! Kassandra gasped inwardly, momentarily mistaking the corpse’s face for that of her dear friend.
“How many?” Herodotos croaked to the hunched lady, gesturing to the piles.
“Nearly one in every three now rests upon these towers of bones,” she said. “I am the last of my family… and I feel the fever rising within me. I have asked my neighbor to place me on the heaps when my time comes, but then he too is weak and wracked with delirium. Our armies are crippled by this sickness, and now even the mercenaries and allies are refusing to come here for muster. This plague spares no one.” She sighed.
A troop of citizen hoplites hurried past nearby, cutting across the market square.
“Trouble?” Kassandra asked the woman.
“Always. Kleon seeks to use this plague like a lever, to make the acropolis hill his own. While his people die around him, he gathers militia and buys the loyalty of citizen soldiers.”
The mention of the acropolis brought the eyes of Kassandra and Herodotos to the Pnyx hill, silhouetted by a sad gray finger of light that barely penetrated the fog. The mighty Parthenon and the towering bronze statue of Athena were counterbalanced by the jagged, unfinished walls of the Temple of Athena Nike. Worse, they saw clouds of flies and vultures up there too, hovering in the air above more corpse heaps. They wished the woman well then climbed the rock-cut stairs to the acropolis plateau and approached Perikles’s villa.
“No guards?” Kassandra mused.
“Apart from the few at the harbor and a handful patrolling the city walls, I have seen no armed men at all,” Herodotos agreed.
Still no Phoibe, Kassandra fretted.
They slipped from the drifting fog and inside the villa. All was so different from that night of the symposium. The place was devoid of life, the air thick with the cloying scent of sweet wax, melting on burners to hide the odor of death. Their footsteps echoed as they passed through the andron, then climbed to the second floor. At last, they heard a whisper of life—but a weak and fading one. It was coming from a bedchamber.
“The walls should have been our… salvation,” the weak voice whispered.
Kassandra beheld the one who had spoken: an emaciated sack of bones lying on the bed. Mist rolled in from the balcony’s open shutters, and in the pale light she saw he had a puff of thin, patchy hair and a bedraggled beard. She wondered why Sokrates sat with this stranger, and why Aspasia was sitting with this diseased man, stroking his head lovingly.
Realization fell like a butcher’s ax.
“Perikles?” Kassandra uttered.
Aspasia jolted. Sokrates yelped. Perikles’s eyes—bulging from his haggard face—rolled to meet hers and Herodotos’s. “Ah… Misthios, Herodotos,” he croaked. “I regret that you have to see me this way. It is an embarrassment that I have been… stricken with the malaise. The people… elected me as a general to lead them. My manifesto was clear: to tell people plainly what needed to be done for the good of them all, to love my homeland and to remain incorruptible. I did these things, but the advocates for peace grew to detest me. Kleon and his war party loathe me too. And here I lie… broken and useless.” His body convulsed with a violent coughing fit. Aspasia held a rag to his lips. When she brought it away, it was stained red. “The truth lies out in the streets in grim piles: Athena has abandoned Athens and me. I have failed.”
“That’s not true, old friend,” Sokrates said calmly. “If a man grows ill with his efforts to save something he loves, is it failure, or testament to the strength of his love?”
“When this wretched plague claims me, I will miss our chats,” Perikles said, patting Sokrates on the hand.
Aspasia rose and made to leave the room. As she went, she made eye contact with Kassandra. Reading the signal, Kassandra followed her. Outside in the corridor, they were alone.
“Tell me Phoibe has not been stricken with the sickness,” Kassandra blurted out.
Aspasia placed a calming hand on her shoulder. “Phoibe is well. She is playing in the villa grounds.”
Kassandra felt a great whoosh of relief pour through her, like a cooling wind. “Good,” she said, adopting the calm, aloof demeanor of a misthios once more.
“Did you find Hippokrates?” Aspasia said.
She nodded.
“Did he speak of a cure for this malaise?”
Kassandra’s nonresponse was answer enough. She expected to see tears in Aspasia’s eyes, but she remained impassive, staring. Some people cage grief in the strangest of ways, Kassandra thought.
“What of your mother? Did you find her?”
The question surprised Kassandra, who had been unsure whether raising the matter of her own personal problems would be appreciated, given the circumstances. But the distraction was probably a welcome one, she realized.
“No. My journey to Argolis yielded nothing but a fight with a bitch of a Cultist. Korinthia too—but at least there I did find a solid clue. It seems that my mother sailed from there in a boat called the Siren Song—a ship painted in flames. She went out into the Cyclades.”
Aspasia’s eyes narrowed. “The Cyclades? A ship can sail around that archipelago for years on end and still find new islands.”
“Aye, and that is why I came back to you as you asked me to. I thought you might be able to help guide me?”
Aspasia’s head shook slowly. “I am afraid I cannot. But there is a woman who lives on the Pnyx slopes who once sailed those parts. Xenia is her name. She may know the ship of which you speak. I will talk to her.”
Kassandra nodded in thanks. For all Perikles’s fame, it was clear that Aspasia was as wise and shrewd as he. Perhaps even wiser? she mused.
Soft footsteps sounded as a slave approached bearing a basin of steaming water and a pile of cloths, quarter-bowing to Aspasia then entering the bedchamber. Herodotos and Sokrates made quick excuses and left.
“Bath time?” Kassandra guessed.
“Aye. I will help bathe him. It is one of the few things I can do for him. You should rest. Most of our workers have perished and so the villa is tired and untended, but treat it as your own. Help yourself to wine or bread from the pantry. I will have a proper meal prepared for tonight. You will eat with us, yes?”
Kassandra nodded. Aspasia entered the bedchamber and closed the door with a click, leaving Kassandra to trudge around the villa in a daze. She found a bare room on the upper floor and slumped on a cushioned bench in there, letting her head loll. Some time passed as she thought of all that had happened in these last two years. And then she heard the sweetest sound of laughter from somewhere outside. She ran to the bedchamber’s balcony and peered out into the fog, her eyes combing the untended gardens below. Through a spiral of hedgerows Phoibe ran.