Sunset of the Gods - By Steve White Page 0,58
deep breath. “Remember when we were at the Athenian Assembly? This is sort of the opposite side of the coin from that. Once again, I don’t deny that there are risks involved. But if the opportunity presents itself, I plan to try again to offer Pan our help in exchange for his cooperation.”
Mondrago looked disgusted.
Pheidippedes half-ran and half-staggered into the camp the following night. He had paused only briefly at Athens to impart the news he now brought to the army. In the immemorial way of armies everywhere, Rumor Central promptly conveyed that news to everyone.
“Carneia!” old Callicles snorted, with his patented eloquent spit. “The Spartans are celebrating Carneia, their holy festival—quite a big festival, I’ve heard—and they can’t march until the moon is full!”
Mondrago shared his feelings. “Greatest warriors in history!” he muttered to Jason in an English aside. “More like the greatest party animals!”
“Mark my words,” Callicles continued, “if that bastard Cleomenes was still running things in Sparta, he wouldn’t let any stupid ‘period of peace’ stop him. But now he’s dead, and the Spartans are shitting in their chitons with fear that they may have offended the gods by throwing those Persian emissaries down that well, not to mention burning that sacred grove at Argos. So they’re being very careful to observe their religious holidays—and never mind that we Athenians get butt-fucked by the Persians while they’re doing it!”
A pair of men passed within earshot, heading toward the tents of the Aiantis tribe. One of them paused. In the light of the campfires, Jason saw he appeared to be in his mid-thirties, beginning to go prematurely bald. “But,” he called out to Callicles, “if they set out at the full moon and march as fast as Pheippides says they promise to, shouldn’t they be here in a week? Surely we can hold the Persians at bay that long.”
Jason expected a scornful reply accompanied by another expressive spit. But Callicles’s “Maybe you’re right” was no worse than grudging. He sounded as though he knew the man, at least by reputation.
“Come on!” the man’s companion called. “We’re already late.”
“Coming, Cynegeirus.” The man waved to them and hurried on.
“Who was that?” asked Jason.
“Fellow named Aeschylus, from Eleusis,” said Callicles. “Writes plays.”
Jason stared at the retreating back of the man who was to become Greece’s greatest dramatist—but whose epitaph would say nothing about that, only that he had fought at Marathon. And the familiar tingle took him.
“You’ve heard of this guy?” Mondrago asked him.
Jason nodded. “In our era he’s going to be known as the Father of Tragedy.”
“He seemed pretty cheerful to me.”
“He may not be quite as much so after what is going to happen to the man with him—his brother Cynegeirus.” Jason shook himself, recalling what Landry had told him. In the final phase of the battle, on the beach, Aeschylus would watch as Cynegeirus had a hand chopped off as he tried to grab the stem of an escaping Persian ship, a wound from which he would subsequently die. “I’ve got to go. The generals must be meeting now to decide where we go from here, and I want to get that meeting on my recorder—there have always been a lot of unanswered questions about it.”
“They’re going to just let anybody listen in?” Mondrago sounded scandalized by such sloppy security.
“Maybe not. But I’ll never know if I don’t try.” And Jason slipped away through the camp.
Security almost lived down to Mondrago’s expectations—indeed, it was a barely understood concept in this place and time. In the heat of the August night, Callimachus and the ten strategoi were meeting under an open tent. Herodotus had claimed that command of the army had been rotated among those ten tribal generals, one on each day, and that as the day of battle had approached the others had handed command over to Miltiades on their allotted days. Mondrago had scoffed at that, declaring roundly that no army could or would have tried to function under such a nonsensical system. He had turned out to be right. Their initial impression—that Callimachus the war archon was in actual as well as honorary command, assisted by Miltiades as primus inter pares among the strategoi—had proven to be correct. Mondrago, whose sole intellectual interest was military history, had mentioned the names “Hindenburg” and “Ludendorff.”
Jason had a great deal of experience at making himself inconspicuous. He now brought all the subtle techniques he had learned to bear as he moved among the campfires and approached the open tent.