Deimos. The invincible dread.
“What are we to do?” Clearidas pressed. “We have little grain left, and Kleon knows this.”
“What can we do?” Brasidas replied. “On one of the rare occasions when the Athenians dare to face us in the field, we have not the means to meet them. I value every Helot in my ranks as much as any one of the Spartiates… but they will be massacred if we face those Athenian elites on the plain in pitched battle. Our only option is to wait, and to pray that the Goddess Tyche will shine favor upon us.”
Clearidas left him and went off to address and encourage the men. Brasidas stared at the huge army outside the city, and felt the strangest, most un-Spartan of emotions.
Fear.
The sun burned on the back of Kleon’s neck, and the saddle had turned his buttocks numb. But it would not do for him to dismount and be on the ground at the same level as the wretches around him—at the same level as Deimos. He eyed the champion, standing nearby on the hill’s brow. I do not need you, dog, he mused. All the way here on the galleys, the soldiers had cheered Deimos’s every appearance from the cabin. At Eion harbor, they had sung songs of his heroics at Sphakteria. Yet most shrank as he passed them. Fear and respect, that glorious blend, Kleon seethed, the hand beneath his cloak clutching in futility at thin air, forming into a fist and shaking. Well, when battle comes, perhaps you will find the greatest honor, Deimos—he smiled, the clutching hand settling around the upper limb of his bow—to fight as a hero… and to die in the fray.
Just then, an explosion of laughter rolled across the hilltop. Behind his foremost, serried ranks, the allied hoplites from Korkyra had set down their spears and shields and were drinking water and sharing bread. One among them pranced in circles around another. “Look at me! Look at me!” the prancing one chirped. More laughter. Hot fingers of disgrace crawled up Kleon’s neck. The play… the damned play! Rumors of the goings-on back in Athens had reached them that morning in Eion. He had heard whispers, seen men’s laughter-red faces quickly turn away from his. One messenger confirmed it: in his absence, Perikles’s orphaned rats had crawled from their holes and spread a plague of lies about him to the people. Well, he seethed, I will send word to my powerful friends back there, and they will… The train of thought halted when he thought of the last Cult gathering. He and one other masked figure. The rest? All dead. When I return, I will have the rats hung from the city walls by their ankles. The crows will peck out their eyes.
The reenactors were in full sway now. His chest stung with anger, but now was not the place to deal with them, in full view of the rest of the army. They would respect punishment, yes, but not the horrible death he had in store for the offenders. He thought of his dogs back in Eion, and glanced south to that small harbor. Those hounds would feast upon these actors’ open bodies, while they still breathed.
“General?” asked one of the Athenian taxiarchs, snapping Kleon from his dark thoughts. “What say you? Do we assault the city walls?”
Kleon eyed Amphipolis, and the lonely figure of Brasidas watching him up on the city walls. Some of his officers had claimed the Athenian hoplites were growing restless, and whispering that after so many years of bombast against Perikles’s conservative strategy, now the great Kleon was afraid to attack what was no more than a shower of Helots. A hot spike of pride shot through him, and he made to grab his sword, imagining hoisting it aloft and booming out the order for the advance—a heroic moment that would be talked about forever, trampling the irksome gossip of the play…
“Because I’m not so sure we should,” the taxiarchos added. “See the trees beyond the city—there could be horsemen in there. Remember the carnage the Theban riders wreaked at Boeotia? If such a force was to fall upon us here then…”
Kleon felt his guts twist and turn, and a loud gurgle of distress rumbled from his abdomen. He heard little more of the taxiarchos’s advice. “Send scouts to reconnoiter the woods. Establish a watch up here. The army will return to Eion.”
Grumbles and gasps of frustration rose from the Athenian ranks. Kleon’s neck burned with indignation. “We will return tomorrow,” he howled. “By then the Spartans will have had another day of dwindling bread and growing dread. Tomorrow, we will parade their heads on our spears. Tomorrow… for victory!”
The speech stirred a few cheers, but the barked orders of the many officers quickly drowned it out, as they shouted for their regiments to turn and descend the hill’s southern slope. A thunder of boots rose from the hilltop as the Athenian army shuffled around, turning away from the city of Amphipolis, kicking up a thick plume of dust. Kleon saw the Korkyraean allies forming the left wing of the pivoting force. In theory they were supposed to be leading the march back to Eion. Yet they were slow and shambling, out of line—some still snatching up their helms and spears, putting corks back in their drinking skins. His fury rose like a burst of molten bronze.
“Move!” he roared, heeling his horse over toward them, drawing a wooden baton to whack the slowest of them on the back of the head.
Brasidas felt the hot wind fall still at that moment. “They withdraw?” he whispered to himself. Through the dust-obscured sunlight he saw the shambolic maneuver. Memories of childhood in the Agoge exploded across his mind: of the tacticians teaching him and the other boys how to identify a weak spot in an enemy force. Backs and flanks, the hoary old expert had implored them, arranging lines of polished pebbles on the dirt floor to demonstrate. His neck lengthened and a shiver scampered up from the base of his spine and across his scalp.
“Spartans,” he boomed down to his hundred and fifty. “Be ready.”
They stiffened, holding their spears aloft. “Aroo!”
“The shame of Sphakteria has burned in my heart for too long. Is it not the same for you?” he roared as he sped down the battlement steps to come before them. They thundered in agreement, beating their spears on their shields.
He turned to the mass of Helots, led by Clearidas. “And you, brave warriors, throw off your dogskin caps, take up your spears and prepare to stride with us… into eternity!”
The Adrestia sliced into the sands of the bay by the mouth of the River Strymon, halting with a violent judder. Kassandra leapt down into the coarse sands. Silence reigned. Until she heard a distant sound, carried on the hot breeze: a low groan of timbers. Gates swinging open, and the colossal roar of men. She looked up the long, low ridge—a grassy wall blocking her from the source of the sound. She sped up the slope, slipping in the scree, skin slick with sweat. Ikaros circled and shrieked madly, already high up there and seeing it all. When she came to the ridge’s brow, she staggered to a halt, struck by a hot blast of wind and frozen by the sight ahead.
A round hill dominated the flatland. Down the southern slopes, the Athenian army washed in a perilously loose formation. Streaking around the hill’s faraway eastern side was a tiny knot of red-cloaked Spartans, and she knew at once who led them. Yet the small Spartan force was dwarfed by the Athenian army.
What are you doing, Brasidas? she mouthed. You know you cannot win this fight.
But when those 150 smashed into the unprepared Athenian left, they gouged deep and without mercy. With a thunder of shields and clatter of spears, a din of screams and a crackle of breaking bodies, Brasidas’s Spartans laid waste to the Athenian left, pinning the center too. It was like that vision at the Hot Gates: Brasidas leapt and spun among the enemy, he and his comrades cutting them down in scores, but she knew he could not win due to sheer lack of numbers. When the Athenian trumpets blew, she saw Kleon’s right swing in to support the stunned left, and felt a great sadness rise within her, knowing this was it for Brasidas.