But then new Spartan pipes blared from the slopes of the hill’s obscured western side. From the haze, a great wave of armed Helots spilled into view. Kassandra shivered at the Helot war cry as they sped around the hillside and into the unprotected backs of the Athenian mass.
The hillside became a riot of flashing silver and geysers of crimson. Kassandra saw Brasidas now deep in the fray, the best Athenian hoplites crowding around him, Kleon himself yelling and cajoling them, demanding Brasidas’s head. The vision of the Hot Gates pulsed in her mind, the fall of the Spartan hero. No, not this time.
She lunged down the ridge, leaping over a brook and speeding to the edge of the fray. She ducked an Athenian spear, sliding through the blood-wet earth and leaping up, shoving a Korkyraean who tried to attack her aside. There was no enemy on the field today but Kleon.
A gawping head bounced across her path, and a shower of hot blood and innards slapped on her back as she ran. At last she came to the heart of the fray. Athenian champions hacked at Brasidas. She grabbed one foe by the shoulder, twisting him to face her then ramming the Leonidas spear up and under his ribs. A second lashed his spear across her belly, slitting the skin and coating her thighs in blood. She dodged his second strike then sliced off his hand. Now Brasidas pounced upon the momentary upturn in fortune to headbutt a third Athenian champion, then rip a fourth from face to groin. Swaying, shaking, face striped with blood, eyes and teeth white in a manic battle grin, he raised his spear to salute Kassandra. “I knew I had not seen the last of you! And your timing is perf—”
He spasmed, and then the tip of a lance burst through his chest with a gout of red.
“No!” Kassandra cried, reaching out.
The spear rose, taking Brasidas up with it like a fisherman’s catch. The general twitched, vomiting blood. Deimos raised the spear like a banner of triumph, his muscles bulging with the effort, before he cast Brasidas down.
Deimos stared at her. “So Kleon could not organize your execution?” he spat. “Perhaps he should have left it to me after all.” With that, he flew for Kassandra, drawing his sword and swishing it for her neck. She backstepped and threw up her half lance to cage the blow. Pressed together, the two blades shook madly—just like at Sphakteria—and both roared with effort, the battle raging on around them. “This is it, Sister,” Deimos rasped, his sword gradually edging her weapon toward her own neck. “One of us must die.”
She felt a shudder of strength and forced her spear back against his blade. Like an arm-wrestler turning a contest, she grew as he shrank, his blade beginning to slide, her spear tip now edging toward his neck. Deimos’s confidence began to crumble. She saw his eyes widen. Here she was again: on the precipice, with the chance to save her brother or let him die. And then he convulsed suddenly with a harrowing scream.
He fell. Kassandra backed away, staring at her lance. Had she done this? No, her blade had not touched him and had no fresh blood upon it. How then? Who? Then she saw the arrow jutting from Deimos’s back, saw him slump to his knees and slide to one side. The battle swallowed up his body in a frenzy of struggling men, thrashing limbs and whirling spears. Her eyes traced the path the arrow had taken—to a small wart of rock behind Deimos. Up there stood Kleon, his bowstring still vibrating, his face lengthening as if in disbelief. His lips flickered up into a crazed and fleeting grin of triumph, and then he hurriedly nocked a fresh arrow. But before he could even draw, Kassandra lurched toward him.
“Shit!” he squealed, fumbling the arrow, his arms becoming entangled in the bow.
As she speared for his chest, he threw himself to one side, tossing the bow down, then plunging into a reckless sprint through the battle. She raced in pursuit, fighting off a maw of gnashing spears just to cut through the chaos and keep sight of Kleon. Arrows whizzed and bullet-stones from slingshots spat overhead as she leapt over the groaning wounded, splashed through puddles of blood, vomit and loosed bowels.
Only when she reached the edges of the fray did the battle begin to thin. Eventually, the din of war was but a buzz behind her. All that mattered was the sprinting, flailing bastard ahead. He stumbled and rolled, his blue cloak rapping and snapping in his wake. She ran like a deer, feeling her soles scrape on bare earth and then wet sand. The crash of waves surrounded her as she chased Kleon onto the beach. Clumps of wet sand flicked up in his wake, then plumes of foam as he thrashed out into the shallows. He waded out until water rose to his chest, then halted, gasping, panting, head flicking back to her and then to the sea. His face was white as the moon. “I… I can’t swim,” he warbled.
Silently, Kassandra waded out to him. He raised his sword. She grabbed his wrist and twisted it until he dropped the weapon, then seized him by the collar of his robe, dragging him back to the ankle-deep shallows. There, she cast him to his knees. He began to wail and plead. She heard not a word of it. Planting a hand on the back of his head, she pushed him down, prone, driving his face into the sand. His arms and legs thrashed and muffled screams shook the sand. At last, he fell still.
She fell back to sitting, her breath coming in great rasps. The last and most dangerous member of the Cult was dead. Behind her, she heard the moan of Spartan pipes, the solemn cry of victory. “Aroo!” they cried, spears raised, forming a circle around the body of their adored leader. Brasidas was dead, but against all the odds, Amphipolis was saved, the north too.
From within Kleon’s robes, something floated out into the waves. A mask, she realized, notched on the brow from the strike of a sword. Ikaros came and settled on her shoulder as she watched it drift along the shoreline. The eagle shrieked at the shrinking piece of flotsam.
“Aye,” Kassandra said, stroking his feathers, “it is over.”
EIGHTEEN
They said that Brasidas died with the song of Spartan triumph in his ears. They said that he died with a wistful smile. Few had really seen his terrible end on the tip of Deimos’s spear. As the Adrestia peeled away from the bay of Amphipolis, Kassandra gazed over the hinterland, shining red in the dying sun, pocked with funeral pyres and trophy mounds. The hill upon which the fray had turned was clear of bodies now, but the dead would never be forgotten. More, in Brasidas, Sparta had a new hero. Already they talked of his polyglot army as “The Brasideans.” Even now those Spartans and the Helots were camped together—for once classless and brotherly in victory.
Despite the victory, the voyage south was a somber one, with Barnabas and his crew subdued, spending the nights quietly drinking and chatting about their adventures with Kassandra. They stopped at Athens, where a new general had been elected. Nicias, championed by Sokrates and the set who had held on to Perikles’s principles in the darkest days of Kleon’s rule, had even opened talks with Sparta. A peace treaty was in the offing, some said—a fifty-year oath of harmony. It seemed fitting, Kassandra thought. Both Sparta and Athens had been ravaged by this war. Neither side had gained anything but an army of widows and orphans. She spent a moon in Athens, sitting by the graves of Phoibe and Perikles in silence before she set sail again, for home.