Gordon Doherty - Assassin's Creed Odyssey - The Official Novelization

“Be ready,” she berated the crew, turning toward the stern and the shore. She heard the Cyclops’s breathy rage, seeing the ropes tossed up from the shore snagging on bolts and timbers then tensing as the brute and his thugs climbed. The crew tossed hooks and poles to and fro, then rushed to the stern rail to batter at the climbing men, knocking some off like limpets. But the Cyclops was too strong. He reached the rail, slashed up and ripped open the neck of one crew member, who toppled into the shallows. He and three thugs managed to reboard. When the one-eyed giant lunged toward Kassandra, the fretting, unarmed Barnabas staggered into his path, and the Cyclops tensed his blade, ready to slice the man out of the way. Kassandra grabbed a fishing pole—affixed with a spike on the end—and launched it across the deck at the giant. The makeshift javelin hammered into the Cyclops’s chest, threw him backward and pinned him to the mast. The brute’s good eye flared in anger and disbelief, before a gout of dark blood leapt from his mouth, followed by a rattling breath. Finally, he slumped into death.

The few thugs still fighting now backed away, gawping, all confidence gone. They leapt from the boat and sped up the bay.

“The Cyclops of Kephallonia is… dead?” one crewman stammered.

“The island is free from his terror,” croaked another.

Barnabas, still soaking and somewhat bedraggled, came before Kassandra, stared at her, then fell to one knee like a dropped cloak. He gazed up at her in awe and veneration. Just then, Ikaros swooped in and landed on her shoulder. “Daughter of Ares?”

“Kassandra,” she replied, waving him up then casting an eye over the strewn bodies and the clay pot. “I had heard of some grudge between the Cyclops and the triearchos of this boat. I didn’t realize how severe it was.”

Barnabas rose with a deep sigh. “What happened with the Cyclops was a misunderstanding, shall we say. I was in Sami recently enjoying a meal in the dockside tavern there. When I say a meal, I mean a bucketful of wine. I grew rather merry and decided to tell the locals a tale of a past voyage, about a thing I saw out in the islands—while I was hideously drunk, admittedly… but I did see it: a horrifying creature, ugly beyond description. I mentioned the words ‘one-eyed monster’ and our friend back there rises, kicking over his table. He thinks I’m talking about him, you see, and chases me from the place. We were lucky to escape the Sami docks before he could catch us. But it seems he watched for my next landing, because as soon as we put into shore here, he and his men pounced.”

“Yes, the Cyclops tends… tended to take that kind of thing personally.” Kassandra half smiled.

Barnabas’s sun-darkened face slackened in relief as he beheld the Cyclops’s body and then the clay pot. “After spending most of my life at sea, it would have been absolutely shameful to drown in a pot. I owe you my life. We all do. Yet I can never repay you but with my loyalty.”

“The use of your ship for a time would be payment enough,” she said.

“A journey?” he asked. “I will take you anywhere, Misthios. To the edge of the world, if needs be.”

The Adrestia left Kleptous Bay behind and sailed around the island to the harbor of Sami. There it remained at anchor for a time while Barnabas’s men gathered provender and supplies for the journey that lay ahead, the crew trooping back and forth across the gangplank with sacks laden on their shoulders. Kassandra rested one elbow on the ship’s rail, her mind already at sea, the babble of the docks, the screeching of gulls and the clack of cups from the nearby taverns incessant around her.

Light footsteps rose behind her, rattling along the jetty. “I’m ready,” Phoibe panted. “I have packed all my things.”

Kassandra’s eyes closed tight, and she fought to douse the flickering flame within. “You’re not coming,” she said coldly.

The footsteps slowed behind her. “If you’re going, I’m going,” Phoibe said in a clipped tone.

“Where I’m headed is no place for a child,” Kassandra said, turning slowly to face her, crouching to her eye level. Now she could see the clipped tone was but a mask. Tears quivered in Phoibe’s eyes. “You must stay on this island. The Cyclops is gone now and so you and Markos will be safe.” She shot a look over Phoibe’s shoulder. Markos stood on the jetty, locked in discussions with some boss-eyed trader, trying to sell him a mangy donkey with a bald back. “A battle horse,” he crowed, “fit for a general.” He stopped for a moment, and returned Kassandra’s look, offering her a half nod in farewell. Look after her, she mouthed to him. Another hurried nod like a scolded child.

She felt something being pressed into her hand then. Phoibe’s wooden toy eagle. “Then take Chara with you,” Phoibe said. “Wherever you go, Chara will be with you, and so will I—in a way.”

Kassandra felt invisible hands squeezing her throat, and a sob pressing through the gap. But she wrapped her fingers over the toy eagle and stifled the emotion with a cold sigh. “And I have something for you,” she whispered, slipping the Cyclops’s obsidian eye into Phoibe’s palm. It had been a deft sleight of hand back at Kleptous Bay: she wondered for a moment if the poor goat had now passed the small rock she had shoved up its backside. “Keep this for yourself. Don’t let Markos know about it. If you run into trouble, sell it and use the coins wisely.” Phoibe stared at the eye, agape, then tucked it in her purse.

“Farewell, Phoibe,” Kassandra said, rising.

“You will come back, one day, won’t you?” Phoibe pleaded.

“I cannot promise you that, Phoibe, but I hope we will meet again.”

Shouts echoed across the boat as the last of the supplies was brought on board and the gangplank was readied to be drawn up. Phoibe backed away, smiling, crying. She hopped from the boat and down toward Markos. Kassandra turned away from her, clutching the toy eagle tightly.

The Adrestia pulled out to sea under oar. Barnabas strode to and fro across the deck. Unlike that day when she had saved him, he no longer resembled a drowned cat. He wore a pale blue exomis with white shoulders, his long, thick locks swept back from his face and his beard combed to forked points. He was handsome in an avuncular way, stout and strong. After a time, he called out to his men: “Ship the oars, set sail. The crew were like squirrels, speeding up the mast, tugging on ropes. With a rumble like faraway thunder, rolling closer, the cloud-white sail of the Adrestia tumbled from the spar to reveal a crimson blazon of a soaring eagle. The sail caught the stiff wind, billowing like a giant’s chest, and the boat lurched eastwards at speed, spray soaking all those aboard in moments, a trail of white foam churning in the boat’s wake.

Barnabas came to Kassandra’s side, hair rapping in the wind of the voyage. “When the Cyclops forced me underwater, I prayed to the gods. And then you came…”

Kassandra laughed drily. “You called, and I answered.”

“And you fought like an Amazon Queen, like a sister of Achilles! All while Zeus’s eagle flew around your head,” Barnabas continued. Ikaros, following in the boat’s wake, screeched in acknowledgment. Barnabas’s eyes grew glassy, sparkling with wonder. “On my travels, I’ve encountered people who claimed to have blood of the gods in their veins. But claims are cheap and easy… Deeds are the true measure of a person.”

Coyly, she glanced away and around the deck. It was bare and tidy, with a small cabin just below the scorpion-tail stern and a number of nooks and high nests that the crew seemed to favor, men sitting on the spar with their legs dangling. Some slept in the shade near the prow, using rolled-up cloaks as pillows, others sang as they scrubbed the timbers and some played games of knucklebones by the rail. Thirty men altogether, she counted.