Sword of Apollo (49 page)

Kolax jumped down from the mainmast and fit an arrow to his bow, sending it flying in the direction of the Korinthian ships.

Chusor pulled the dead helmsman from his seat and took over the tiller handles while Nikias and the other mariners on the top deck tried to clear the debris from the fallen sail. The sound of Ji's voice carried from below deck, calling upon the men and women to row for their lives. But the sound of his voice was drowned out by the screams of the enemy warriors coming from the ships closing on them. Nikias looked back and saw armored men crowding the decks of twenty triremes that were now within bowshot range. Arrows started whizzing around him and several mariners fell.

“Get back below, stupid girl!” Chusor bellowed suddenly, for Melitta had poked her head up the ladder from the gangway. She scowled and ducked back down again.

Nikias ran to the bow and looked into the distance. They were just about to enter the gap. It was only a mile from side to side here—two spits jutting out from the north and south. In the distance, a few miles to the northeast, he could see a harbor and a fortress. That was Naupaktos. They were almost there! They passed through the gap, and then Chusor was steering them for the port. But the Korinthian fleet was right behind them.

And then the ship was rocked by a huge blow and Nikias nearly tumbled over the side. A Korinthian had rammed them from behind and the
Spear
started spinning around.

“The rudders are both wrecked!” shouted Chusor, rising from Agrios's seat. He sprinted across the deck to the bow, seizing hold of the bolt shooter that had been rigged with the tube for spraying fire. “The pump!” he shouted at Nikias.

Nikias reacted as though slapped in the face and leapt down to the hold, shouting, “Onto the battle deck! Leave the oars!” Rowers jumped from the benches, abandoning their oars and grabbing their weapons. They surged up the ladders.

Nikias went into the pump room and slipped his feet into the straps on the bellows, grabbing the rings on the beams above. He could hear the fluid gush through the tube as he moved his body up and down. A few seconds later he felt an enemy trireme scrape against the side, followed by the sound of splintering oars.

Then agonized screams cried out and Nikias knew that the deadly fire was sweeping over the enemy ships. He pumped as hard as he could. “Burn!” he cried, choking on the naptha fumes. “Burn, all of you!” he raged. It only took a few minutes for the liquid to run out, and then Nikias staggered from the chamber, coming face-to-face with the women and children who now sat huddled in the hold. The women held long knives and their eyes were wide and terrified. But he saw Melitta clutching the sword that he had given her, looking defiant and unafraid.

“I'm not going to stay down here!” she said, and ran to the opposite end and scrambled up the ladder.

He called to her but she wouldn't stop. He turned and clambered up the bow ladder, sword in hand, expecting to find the battle deck strewn with bodies and the enemy storming the ship.

But what he saw when he emerged onto the crowded deck stopped him in his tracks: enemy ships burning, enemy ships rammed by black triremes, enemy ships spinning out of control with oars in disarray, and others backing up and heading back for the gap—running like dogs with their tails between their legs. And the
Spear
was all alone, separated from this chaos, drifting peacefully toward the shore.

The black ships were Athenian. That much Nikias's confused brain could understand. But he could not figure out where they had come from. Had they appeared from the air? Was he hallucinating? He saw armored men swarming from the decks of the Athenian ships onto Korinthian vessels that had been rammed—struck through the side like hoplites with spears in their guts.

“What happened?” Nikias asked of no one in particular.

“Chusor set those Korinthians on fire before they could board us,” said Diokles, appearing at Nikias's side amongst the mariners standing shoulder to shoulder, “and then those Athenians came out of nowhere and rammed the others in the sides.”

“The Athenian triremes were hiding on either side of the gap,” said Ji, smiling widely. “Waiting like lions for the Korinthian sheep to come through. It was a trap.”

The mariners watched in awe as forty or more Korinthian ships were pressed closer and closer together in a clump of confused oars and jammed rams, hemmed in on all sides by the Athenian ships, which were moving about the water with the ease of predatory beasts, forming up a perfectly coordinated circle—a ring of death around them.

“Where's Chusor?” Nikias asked.

“Rigging a new rudder,” one of the mariners replied.

Nikias found Chusor and some mariners at the stern, working quickly to fit a spare rudder into place. When it was done, Chusor called out, “Back to the oars!” and took his place at the helmsman's seat. With this one smaller rudder he was able to guide the ship on an irregular but steady course toward Naupaktos, giving the battle a wide berth. Nikias, standing with Kolax at the bow, could see the
Briseis
in the distance, floating with its nose toward the sea battle like a hovering hawk that longed to pounce on a hare. But there was no point trying to enter the fray now. The two ships would only add to the confusion: the
Spear
could barely maneuver with its temporary rudder, and half of its oars had been smashed when the Korinthian ship had come alongside; and the
Briseis
was too small to do any good.

The battle was virtually over, anyway. Some of the Athenian triremes were breaking off from the circle, towing enemy ships behind them. Half of the Korinthian ships had fled—a muddled line stretching back through the gap and into the Gulf of Patros. But many had been boarded and taken as prizes. After a while the
Spear
caught up to the
Briseis
and Nikias looked down to see Thersites on the deck.

“Excellent day for a chariot race!” Thersites called up to them happily.

“We made it to Naupaktos!” added Argus. “And we warned the Athenian fleet that the Korinthians were coming! You've never seen triremes move that fast off the beach!”

The
Spear
limped toward the harbor of Naupaktos. A mile from the port, an Athenian trireme came up fast behind them, even though it was towing a sixty-oared Korinthian dispatch vessel, and Nikias's heart soared when he saw a familiar face standing on the trireme's deck, smiling back at him across the blue waves.

“Phoenix!” Nikias shouted.

“Nice to finally see you here, Cousin!” Phoenix called back. “Took you long enough. But you always have uncanny timing!”

 

SIXTEEN

That night, after all of the Athenian ships had returned to Naupaktos with their prizes, Phoenix came to the place where the
Spear
and the
Briseis
had been beached and found Nikias, then brought him to the house of Admiral Phormion—a place crowded with mariners and officials, all of them exultant over the stunning victory.

As Nikias entered the building a one-armed man dressed in a mariner's tunic practically knocked him over, embracing him with one strong arm and a stump.

“Nik!”

“Konon!” Nikias cried. “What are you doing here?”

Konon quickly told him about his adventures—how Phoenix had returned to the cove on Serifos and found him weeping like a child, and then a hasty description of their perilous journey north to Naupaktos. Here Konon had been reunited with his older brother, a mariner under Phormion's command. Because of his skill at writing, Konon had been made one of the admiral's scribes.

“I didn't know that you could write,” said Nikias.

“I kept all of our farm's accounts,” said Konon happily. “Now I'll be writing down the names of Korinthian prisoners for the next week! Ha, ha!”

Nikias was glad that his friend had found a place amongst these stalwart mariners. Phormion, their leader, had already proven himself—even before this victory—to be one of the canniest admirals that Athens had ever produced. At least, that's what Konon told him as he led Nikias to the admiral's office. The burly and affable Phormion promised to send four triremes to escort the
Spear
all the way across the Gulf of Korinth to the port of Kreusis, for the waters here, the admiral proclaimed, “teemed with the enemy like so many sharks.”

The openhanded admiral, red-faced and tipsy from celebratory wine, also wrote orders for the
Spear
and the
Briseis
to be given all the supplies they needed to replenish those that had been cast overboard, as well as any timber or gear needed to outfit their ships. He then scribbled a message on a piece of papyrus and sealed it with his signet ring.

“This note is for your grandfather,” he said. “We are old friends, Menesarkus and I. My grandfather and Menesarkus's father fought together at Marathon during the first Persian invasion. Did you know that, young Nikias?”

“I did,” replied Nikias. “I've heard the tale many times. My great-grandfather was one of the few Plataeans who died there. My grandfather was a small boy at the time. But he got his revenge at the Battle of Plataea ten years later.”

“We Athenians and Plataeans were the only two city-states to stand against the Persians at Marathon,” said Phormion with sincere emotion, his eyes welling up with tears. “And we drove the invaders into the sea and made it red with their blood! Your ancestor died a heroic death. You should only be so lucky.” He handed Nikias the note and added in a low voice, “But may Zeus protect you and see you returned to Plataea safely.”

The
Spear
was fitted with new rudders taken from one of the captured triremes, and oars to replace the ones that had been smashed. By morning of the next day they were ready to leave, and the convoy departed the crowded harbor, which was filled with captured triremes, and headed east along the northern shore of the gulf along with the
Briseis
. Three of the ships that Phormion had sent to protect them were the same triremes that had left Athens with them more than two months ago: the
Argo
, the
Spartan Killer
, and the
Aphrodite
.

It was only after they were well under way that Chusor took Nikias aside and told him the plan that he had been formulating—the scheme to get Nikias and his men back into Plataea past the counterwall.

“The plan is mad,” said Nikias after he had heard it. “But it's better than anything that I can think of.”

The women of the
Spear
went to work cutting and sewing the rolls of red cloth—the same stuff that Chusor had bought in Kroton—into capes in the Lakonian style. The material, Nikias discovered, had been one of the few items not cast overboard when they were being chased by the Korinthians, for it had been stowed in the little cabin and nobody had thought to look there when they were seeking things to jettison. Helena insisted on making Nikias's robe herself, while Melitta made Kolax's.

“I never thought I'd wear a cloak of
this
color,” said Kolax disparagingly after he and Nikias had tried on their capes and stood staring at themselves in the surface of a burnished shield.

“Me neither,” said Nikias. He pushed his long bangs over his brow and squinted at his reflection, shifting his jaw forward a little and making a haughty expression until he saw another man's face staring back—his cousin Arkilokus the Spartan.

They met no enemy ships and, after two days of hard rowing, entered the little cove of Kreusis at sunset. The only vessels on the beach were fishing boats, and so they brought all of the triremes and the single-decker onshore. Nikias climbed down and strode through the water to the beach, then reached down and scooped up a handful of the familiar dark gray sand—little pebbles mixed with broken shells. He had ridden here hundreds of times over the years to swim. His horse, Photine, loved to roll on the sand.

The cove was situated at the end of a valley filled with olive trees and surrounded by steep hills on either side. One had to walk eight miles through the valley to get to Plataea. There was no sign of an enemy encampment here, which surprised him. He reckoned the Spartans were using the protected cove that lay south in Megarian territory, on the other side of the mountain. This spot would be too vulnerable to raids from Naupaktos.

He walked over to a limestone tower that clung to the lower part of the northern hill. It was surrounded by walls that ran straight down into the sea where there was a small protected harbor. This was an ancient and crumbling Plataean fort that had been virtually abandoned at the start of the invasion.

“Hey!” he shouted. “Is anybody up there?”

After a long silence somebody called from the tower's uppermost window, “Who's there?” It was the voice of a very old man.

“Me. Nikias.”

“Nikias who?”

“Is this a joke?” Nikias asked. “Who's up there? Is that you, Adonis?” He had recognized the man's voice—an olive farmer who owned most of the land near this cove.

“Nikias the goat doctor from Thespis?” asked the old man.

“No, Nikias from Plataea!”

Nikias could hear Adonis muttering with some other men in the tower.

“Aristo's son?” asked another voice from the dark window. “Menesarkus's heir?”

“Yes, yes! Who else?” said Nikias impatiently.

“Well, I'll be arse plowed!” cried the second voice. “It's me! Baklydes!”

Eventually Nikias heard the tower's ground-level door creak open, and then a knotted rope was flung over the wall. Adonis—an aged but hale old man—climbed down, and with him came Baklydes. Nikias hadn't seen his old friend since he and Leo had been forced to abandon their injured companion in Megarian territory on the morning after they had set the fire on the mountain, and he embraced Baklydes in a bear hug. The other inhabitants of the fort crowded the wall above, peering down at them.