“I swear I uttered not a word of a lie. Please do not take her from me!”
The cry sailed across the bay, the voice ragged and desperate.
She fell to her haunches and shielded her eyes from the sun. At first, she saw just white, foaming breakers, wheeling seabirds, and a few wild goats chomping on marram grass. It was only on a second sweep that she spotted the trireme lodged on the shoreline, farther up the bay, the stern in the sand and the fore bobbing in the water. It was smaller than the Athenian war galleys and Elpenor’s gorgon-head boat, but it looked slender and well crafted, painted black near the keel and red around the rails. The stern rose into a curving scorpion tail and the rostrum sported a glinting bronze ram, eyes painted on either side.
“The Adrestia is everything to me,” the voice wailed.
“Adrestia,” Kassandra whispered. The Goddess of Retribution… and the name of this ship? Shivers streaked down her back as she cycled the name over and over in her head. The Adrestia, the Adrestia, she mouthed, clicking her fingers, unable to recall why the name seemed familiar.
There was movement too, all over the decks. Tiny shapes of men. Bandits, tying kneeling crewmen, beating those who tried to rise. There was one older man, bent double thanks to the giant holding his head over a large clay pot. The pinned fellow writhed and struggled in vain. She heard the gurgling, forlorn cry again. “Gods, spare me, spare my ship!”
The cry ended in a frantic gurgle as the giant plunged the wretch’s head into the pot, water and foam spewing up from the edges. Now her vision grew eagle-sharp, and she saw the giant for who he was, and realized where she had heard of the Adrestia before. Markos’s words echoed in her mind:
The Adrestia is one of the last galleys left on the island. The Cyclops is on the hunt, and that ship is his prey.
THREE
Barnabas cried out in vain, bubbles roaring past his ears as his breath escaped, the dull moan of his underwater pleas sounding strange and otherworldly. His hands, bound behind his back, were hot with blood where the ropes had chewed into the skin. The water surged up his nose and flooded his mouth, pushing into his throat like a serpent. This was the worst part: when the air was gone from his lungs, when his body screamed for him to suck in a fresh breath, while the Cyclops’s viselike, meaty hand held him here, denying him. Flashes of white were followed by black splodges like squid ink, growing, spreading, joining, stealing away his vision. This was it, he realized. This time, the Cyclops would not bring him up for air. Charon the Ferryman would have him. Inside, he wept, and from the pits of memory, his well-lived life played out in flashes, like a sputtering torch. He saw the sandy island on which he had been marooned as a young sailor—saw the swell of the ocean that morning when he had been dying of thirst… saw the glistening, gargantuan thing that had arisen from the waves. Sun madness, his rescuers had claimed, dismissing his tale.
Suddenly, it all changed. The water roared and then fell away as the meaty hand wrenched his head up. His soaked tresses of long hazel, white-shot hair and beard swinging like octopus arms, spraying water in every direction. The crystal clarity of the air seemed deafening, and his head ached at the brightness of the sunlight. Blinking, retching and gasping for air, he stared up at the giant holding him, the lone eye staring down at him in return.
“Your loose lips are turning a little blue, Barnabas,” the Cyclops rumbled with laughter.
“What I said,” Barnabas coughed, “was meant as no affront to you. I swear to the Gods.”
“Too much talk of Gods,” the Cyclops sneered, his grip on the back of Barnabas’s head tightening again. “Time for you to go meet one of them, old man. Hades awaits you!”
“No—” Barnabas’s half plea ended with a splash and a mouthful of water. Back into the briny abyss, the darkening vision, the burning lungs. This time he saw his first mission as a triearchos, when he had led his crew to an island in search of an ancient treasure. They had found nothing but a labyrinth of caves. They wandered for days in those dark, underground passages, lost. They found no treasure. But Barnabas had seen something, one night, while all the others slept. It was a… creature. Well, it was a shadow at least: of a huge beast, broad of shoulder, with horns, watching them as they slumbered. As soon as he had seen it, it vanished. The mists of his dreams? That’s what his men had said when he tried to tell them about it, but later he had found the faint tracks and the markings of cloven hooves. He sucked in a lungful of water, felt his body slacken as the life seeped from him. The struggle was almost over. Then…
“What’s wrong, you old bastard?” the Cyclops hissed as he ripped Barnabas back from the pot again. “Are your Gods silent? Or did they tell you to go away?”
The bandits watching the tied crew exploded in laughter. “Finish it!” one cheered.
Barnabas felt the Cyclops’s hand tighten on the back of his head again. He did not bother to suck in a breath, knowing it would only make his end more lasting and painful. “Why did you not come to my aid?” he whispered skyward. The next thing he saw was the water in the pot rushing up toward him…
“Let him go,” a voice struck from across the bay.
The Cyclops’s hand froze. Barnabas stared at the pot water, his nose a finger’s-width from the surface. With his head locked like that, he rolled his eyes to the side. What he saw sent a shiver of awe through him. She walked across the bay with a swagger, tall, lithe and strong, wearing a hunter’s bow, an ax and a strange half lance. Her chiseled features seemed to be set hard, her eyes shaded under a baleful brow; and on her shoulder sat the most wondrous sight. An eagle. A bird of the gods. Tears gathered in Barnabas’s eyes. Who was this daughter of Ares?
“I will not ask you again, Cyclops,” she boomed, loose sand swirling around her like a mist.
The one-eyed giant shook with rage, then a low growl spilled from his lips, before he tossed Barnabas aside like a used rag.
The Cyclops of Kephallonia stared down at her from the boat’s stern, his long-ago mutilated face and the pitted hole that once housed his right eye pinched in a look of permanent anger. His oak-like limbs were tensed, glistening with sweat, his torso bulging beneath his bronze-studded leather thorax.
“Misthios,” he drawled, his scooped-up tail of black hair whipping in the wind like a living flame as Kassandra came to a halt twenty paces from the boat. “Misthios!” he shouted again in disbelief.
Kassandra shuffled to stand, feet apart, shoulders square, Ikaros bracing on her shoulder. Radiate power, Nikolaos growled in her mind. What she hoped the Cyclops and his men could not see was that her hands shook like the plucked strings of a lyre. But she had to face him—after years of avoiding this brute and his thugs, she had to face him, to end his stranglehold over her, Phoibe and Markos… over all Kephallonia. And to get that damned boat.
“What are you doing here?” the Cyclops boomed. “I asked my men to bring you to me in ropes.”
“They are dead. I came alone, to face you… Cyclops.”
The Cyclops bashed a fist upon the rail there. “Do not call me that,” he roared, then waved four of his men toward her. They vaulted over the rail and landed on the shore, spreading out to either side of her.