Spartans at the Gates (33 page)

Once the Athenian dispatch ship had been captured, all of its surviving oarsmen would be taken to Syrakuse and sold—they would spend the rest of their lives cutting marble in the dreaded Prison Pits or chained to an oar bench in a slave ship. And the boat itself would be added to the growing Korinthian fleet. Perikles would never know what had happened to his galley. It would become yet another Delian League vessel that had vanished without a trace.…

“We'll have a quick journey home to Korinth,” said the old man. “The wind is in our favor.”

Andros smiled, ignoring the pain on his back where the Skythian whip had ripped his flesh. Closing his tired eyes, he let the sun warm his swollen face.

“The
gods
are in our favor,” he said.

 

P
ART
III

The Persian gods were strange to us. But that did not make them any less formidable.

—
P
APYRUS FRAGMENT FROM THE
“L
OST
H
ISTORY
”
OF THE
P
ELOPONNESIAN
W
AR BY THE
“E
XILED
S
CRIBE
”

 

ONE

On the day before his impending execution by suicide, Eurymakus the Theban sat alone in his library, composing a letter in coded glyphs, starting the missive over several times because his writing was shaky and illegible. But it wasn't fear of his coming death that caused such an unsteady hand. The problem was that his writing hand was no longer attached to his arm—he had amputated it at the elbow on the field of battle in front of Plataea, and now he was forced to use his left hand to hold the stylus. He felt like a child learning to write all over again.

The coded words in Persian script resembled the tracks of bird feet made in sand. It was based on the ancient wedge writing he had seen on old clay tablets on his first trip to Persia when he was a young man. He had found one of these tablets for sale in the market of Persepolis. The tablet fit into its own baked clay envelope. And even though he hadn't been able to read the writing at the time, he had bought the old thing and kept it as a souvenir of Persia. It sat on his desk now—a weight to hold down sheets of papyrus.

Later, after he learned to read the ancient Persian script, he discovered that the clay tablet and its envelope were nothing more than a mundane record of grain shipments, written by some lowly clerk. The letter he wrote now was of a far different kind. He read over what he had inscribed:

“Greetings, my most beloved and honored King Artaxerxes, son of Xerxes, lord of Persia and blessed of the true god Ahura Mazda. I, Eurymakus, magistrate of Thebes and your loyal vassal, offer news that will sadden your heart. By the time you receive this letter I will be dead. The sneak attack on the city-state of Plataea—that city of demons, your father's bane, where he suffered his greatest defeat against the depraved Athenians and Spartans and their allies—has utterly failed. And this loyal servant has been blamed for the disaster.

There was a gentle knock on the door and a slave, his eyes red from weeping, poked in his head. “There is a doctor, sent by the council, to see you, master.”

Eurymakus put down his stylus and touched his upper lip where the Skythian boy had bit it off during the fight at Menesarkus's farmhouse. The missing flesh had left Eurymakus with a perpetual sneer on his otherwise handsome face.

“Send him in,” he said to the slave. He tried not to move his mouth when he spoke, for the pain was severe.

“Dr. Pisenor,” said the slave, and then disappeared.

The doctor, as thin as a reed, white-haired, and decrepit, shuffled into the library and stood before Eurymakus's desk. “Every slave in your house is in tears,” said Pisenor with an impressed tone, stroking his beard with a hand shaking from palsy. “They must love their master.”

“They don't cry for me,” said Eurymakus. “They are all to be sent to the quarries after I'm dead. My wives and children too. Or hadn't you heard?”

“I—I was away for the trial,” said Pisenor, embarrassed. “I just returned from the coast. I was taking the sea air. I have a small house near Anthedon. It was my mother's uncle's house and he died childless, leaving it to me and…” He trailed off, having caught the withering look on Eurymakus's face. “My apologies, Eurymakus,” he continued. “I blather on. Your punishment is harsh.
Too
harsh, in my opinion.”

Eurymakus put down his stylus and placed a hand on the stump of his right arm. It ached fiercely. But none of it mattered anymore. None of the physical pain or mutilation of his body meant anything. Soon he would be dead, and his spirit would be reunited with his perfect and unchangeable form in the Other Realm.

Now he just wanted it all to be over. He had failed to kill Menesarkus and his scion, the citadel of Plataea was still standing, and Eurymakus was an outcast from the city in which he was born. After he had escaped the massacre at the gates of the citadel, he had fled back to the Spartan camp at the Persian Fort. He had hoped to rest there until he could take passage to Persia—the place he had gone to study in his youth and where he'd been recruited by the Persian king's high whisperer: a man who had trained him and sent him back to Greece as a spy to help bring about Artaxerxes's reconquest of Greece.

But the Spartan general Drako, who hated Eurymakus, had handed him over to the Thebans, knowing full well that they would turn the spy into a scapegoat for the disastrous outcome of the attack on Plataea. Somebody had to be punished. Who better than the man who had planned the whole thing?

“What do you want?” asked Eurymakus.

“Tomorrow at dawn,” said Pisenor, “I will mix the hemlock and watch over you while the poison takes effect. I am here to instruct you on the procedure.”

Eurymakus lowered his head and rubbed his eyes. He knew all about poisons and their effects. He didn't need to be told by some senile old man what would happen. First his toes would become numb and cold, and then the numbness would pass up his legs, to the testicles, then the torso, and finally to his heart. And then his heart would stop beating and his soul would abandon this wretched husk for another … a perfect celestial body.

He brought his right hand to his mouth to kiss his signet ring—the ring with the name of his guardian angel inscribed on the stone. But when he looked down he saw only the stump. The hand and ring had been gone for ten days now. Many times over the last several days his mind had tricked him this way, as though his brain were mocking his soul.

The doctor cleared his throat and said, “I assure you it is painless, Eurymakus. Shall I explain exactly what happens—”

“Pain?” shouted Eurymakus, his face contorted in wrath. “You think I am afraid of pain? You idiot! Pain is meaningless to me. Humiliation, however, is worse than any pain this world could inflict upon me.”

“I didn't—”

“Shut up, old fool!” sneered Eurymakus. “Why do you think they sent you to me? A palsied old shit-for-brains who has just returned from a vacation at the sea! It's ludicrous. At least they could have given me the honor of having my head severed from my body by the public executioner. No! A jury convicts me of treason against my own city, when the truth is that my plan was ruined by the incompetence of the generals leading the expedition and the cowardliness of the men under their command. But they punish
me
by sending my entire household into slavery, and they make me live with the wretches for days, listening to their howls and sobs, in an attempt to degrade my spirit even more. And now they send you, Pisenor—a doddering herb-grinder—to be my executioner. It's galling. It's mortifying.” He stopped and wiped the spittle from his mouth, twitching with fury, glaring at the old man.

Pisenor had watched in silence as Eurymakus vented his spleen. “So you don't want the hemlock tutorial, then?” he said at last.

Eurymakus reached for the clay tablet on his desk, intending to throw it at the doctor's head, and realized with dismay that he was trying to clutch the object with his missing hand. He gasped and turned away from Pisenor, hiding his face. “Get out,” he hissed. “Get out.”

Pisenor left him alone, and Eurymakus picked up the clay tablet with his left hand and hurled it against the wall, where it shattered.

He stumbled back to his chair and sat, staring at the clay lamp on the desk with its unlit charred wick floating in the dark oil. He thought of his imminent death and funeral pyre with misery.

The slave poked his head in the door again. “Master,” he whispered. “Nihani begs to see you.”

Eurymakus sighed and shook his head. Nihani, his Persian wife, was his favorite of all his consorts. She had been a gift from King Artaxerxes: a temple prostitute skilled in the arts of love-play. She had known how to please him from the moment of their first night together.

He hadn't been able to face her since coming back from the disaster at Plataea. He didn't want her to see his mutilated mouth, his missing right arm. He had been filled with a shame so profound after the loss to the Plataeans that he felt as though his spirit had already left his body. There was nothing left but a hollowed-out gourd.

“Master?” pressed the slave.

“No,” said Eurymakus. “I don't want her to … I don't want to see her.”

“She said she would kill herself if you didn't let her come to you.”

Eurymakus considered this for a moment. Nihani was perfectly capable of committing self-violence. She was a bold, strong-willed woman, unlike his other docile and lazy wives, who were good for nothing but breeding pudgy little brats. Nihani had yet to give him a child. He didn't care, though. He loved her more than any of them put together. But after his execution she would be sent away to the quarries with the rest. It was such a waste. Like casting aside the most splendid jewel into a heap of dung.

“Bring her,” he said, half-miserable, half-relieved.

He rested his face on his remaining hand with his eyes half-closed. His heart started beating wildly as he waited for Nihani to enter. What would she say to him? Would she chastise him for his failures? Berate him for the dismal future that now lay before her? He feared her reprimands more than the poisoned cup. By the time the door opened he was shaking from nerves and felt like he would be sick. He kept his eyes hidden by his hand as she approached the table. He couldn't look at her. She stopped on the other side of the table, standing in silence.

“My husband,” she said at last in a stern voice, speaking in Persian. “Why do you cry like a little girl?”

“I can't look upon you,” he replied with a quaking voice in the same language. “I have lost you. And I have lost my honor. I am ugly.”

“You haven't lost me, or your honor,” said Nihani. “And you are still as beautiful as an angel.”

She placed something on the desk. He spread his fingers apart so he could peer at the thing: a knife handle sticking from an onyx box; the weapon and box were fitted so precisely together that it appeared the blade had been driven into the stone.

“My assassin's dagger!” thought Eurymakus.

The sheath was filled with the deadliest poison known to Persian whisperers: “Dragon Blood” it was called. The slightest scratch from the tainted blade caused an excruciating and nearly instant death. He had learned to make the concoction in Persia, mixing the powerful venom of saw-scaled vipers along with the juices of wolfsbane, oleander, and hemlock, and then brewing this noxious potion for several months in a sheep's bladder. He had brought the vipers with him to Thebes from Persia, and he'd bred the snakes for years in the undercroft beneath his slaves' quarters. He grew all of the poisonous plants in the courtyard of his house—his garden of death.

The dagger and its slightly rounded stone sheath were rotating slowly on the tabletop where Nihani had set it spinning like the iron pointer on a lodestone.

Why had she brought this tool of death to him?

“You wish that I should kill us both now?” he asked.

The sound of Nihani's harsh laugh caused him to jerk his hand away from his face and stare at her for the first time since she had entered the room. He was taken aback by what he saw now, for Nihani resembled a young man: she wore one of his tunics and his leather riding boots, standing with her hands on her narrow hips, shaking her head with a scornful expression on her handsome face. She had cut off all of her long curls so that her hair was as short as a man's, which made her more ravishing than ever in Eurymakus's eyes.

“Die together?” she sneered. “That's the last thing I would want.”

“Then why have you come?” he asked. “Why did you cut your hair?”

“I have come to plan our escape,” she said. “And I cut my hair and burned it, in the manner of these Thebans when they come of age and offer their hair to their war god. I am ready to join you in your battle against the demons.”

Eurymakus looked at her in disbelief. “Where will we go?” he asked. “I am nothing. I am ruined. My own people have sentenced me to death. The Spartans spurn me.”

Nihani tilted back her head and looked down her nose at him with her black eyes. “Where is my husband?” she asked, her thick dark eyebrows arching. “Where is he hiding?”

Eurymakus recoiled. “Your husband is here,” he said, pointing to his heart. “This ruined body is not me.”

“I wasn't talking about your body,” she spat. “You look the same to me as when you set out from Thebes to kill the Plataeans who murdered your brother. What care I if you are missing an arm? What care I if your face were
covered
with scars? You have the wounds of a hero.” She put her palms on the table, leaning close to his face. “I want my husband to come back. The
spirit
of my husband. What I see in your eyes is a cunt staring back at me!” And she repeated the word in Greek, spitting on the table.