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

Spartan trust was like a thick iron lock. Grain was the key, she realized. She rose, slipped silently from the boat and headed inland.

Up on the bluff, a circle of torches delineated the Spartan camp. Sentries stood, watchful and expressionless, the butt spikes of their spears dug into the earth so the shafts stood upright like pickets. A few Skiritae —expert javelin marksmen and outlying night watchmen, not purebred Spartans, but soldiers held in some esteem nonetheless—sat in trees and on elevated ground in the surrounding countryside. Inside the camp, Spartan soldiers sat by fires rumbling with deep laughter, slurping painfully thin black broth from their kothon mugs or whetting their spears. A few stood naked, their Helot slaves carefully oiling their gaunt bodies and strigilling them clean.

Stentor sat by the fire at the heart of the camp, tired, famished and irritable. Unable to rest, he had risen in the darkness and brought a few other insomniac warriors with him to the fire to while the hours of night away. “Sing the verses of Tyrtaios for me,” he grunted. “One of his war songs.”

The two gaunt Spartiate warriors sitting across from him coughed and shuffled, then began a dreadful rendition of a song written some three hundred years previously by Sparta’s greatest poet. Stentor’s face melted with dismay. “Make it stop, before the shade of the great man rises and rips your tongues from your mouths.”

He gazed down at the Adrestia , clinging to the shores like a limpet. The irksome misthios had been here for nearly two moons now—all throughout the stinking-hot summer. Her interference in recent battles had stolen the wind from their victories, and once with her use of the bow—such an un-Spartan weapon! One day he had walked down to the bay to watch his men training on the sand. They lined up in opposing phalanxes and marched at one another in mock battle. He had laughed gruffly and applauded as one by one the lines picked each other apart, knocking their opponents down or scoring mock kills. In the end, one soldier remained standing after an imperious display, the rest dazed and groaning. He had roared in ovation as he approached the champion… until he saw that underneath that red Spartan robe and bronze helm was no man of Lakonia. It was her. Her!

He had berated his men like a vengeful titan for letting her train with them, for giving her a Spartan spear and shield. But she merits them, sir, one soldier had countered. She has been expertly trained in the Spartan ways, by whom she will not say.

One of the men she had beaten later tried to woo her, by way of grabbing her and trying to kiss her. That one now sat in the corner of the camp, still nursing a broken jaw and bruised testicles. More strangely, in the last moon, the Skiritae had reported her odd night movements—roving far inland under darkness. What are you, Misthios? he wondered.

In any case, there were darker troubles approaching. The misthios’s claims had been accurate: Perikles of Athens was moving a strong force of hoplites south in an attempt to break the Spartan hold on this land, and so the Spartan lochos would soon be marching north to intercept them—indeed, the allies had already been summoned. He wrung his fingers through his hair: talk of Athenian heroes, of vast enemy numbers, of what many whispered was sure to be a famous Spartan defeat, gnawed at the edges of his morale, just as the hunger clawed at his empty belly.

Crunch-crunch-crunch. Footsteps, fast, coming through the tents toward him.

His head whipped up. “Guards!” he snapped.

A shadow appeared near the fire, striding purposefully toward him. He rose, going for his short sword, when the shadow halted and tossed a heavy object in his direction. The object landed near the fire and burst. Precious wheat spilled from the sack. All eyes fell upon the wheat as if it were gold. Stentor looked up as the shadow came into view. Kassandra wore the look of a huntress, her brow dipped and her eyes fixed on him.

“Misthios?” he growled.

“Hyrkanos is dead. For the last moon I have tracked him down. Tonight, I infiltrated his camp, killed him and his men. A dozen more wagons of stolen grain lie there: you and your men can eat and regain your strength—in time for the arrival of the Athenian land assault.”

He stood, elated and enraged. “So you bring us salvation again?” he seethed. “You wish to have us bow and praise you?”

“I ask for nothing other than an audience with the Wolf,” she said quietly.

Stentor’s ire faded, and a sparkling jewel of an idea began to glimmer in his mind. They needed every spear they could gather. “Very well. There is one way to secure such a meeting. When we march north to face the Athenian phalanxes”—he stabbed a finger at her—“you, Misthios, will march in my enomotia , my sworn band. I will vouch for you. You trained well on the bay. But mock fighting on the sand is no way to measure a warrior. You must prove your worth as a hoplite, as part of the wall of steel, in true battle.”

The two Spartans sitting by the fire rumbled with laughter at the idea.

Stentor willed her to crumble at the prospect of true battle. Run, Misthios, be gone!

Kassandra held his gaze. “Give me a spear and a shield, and I will fight as a Spartan should.”

Stentor’s sneer faded into a cold glower.

Dust clouds rose over the Megarid like rival serpents, drawing closer, as the two great armies marched toward battle. Barnabas had been like an old hen that morning, trying to give Kassandra extra bread and making sure she had enough water.

Now, a half morning’s march north of Pagai bay, she wondered if she would ever see him again. Inside the helm, the blood thundered through her ears, her breath crashed like waves, and the stink of sweat laced the air. The bulky shoulders of the Spartan on her left brushed against her arm with every step, the shield roped across her back chewing into her shoulders and the haft of the hoplite spear grating on her palm. She had left the Leonidas spear on the Adrestia , knowing that she could not be seen with it lest the Wolf recognize it and her. She glanced along the front of Stentor’s enomotia: thirty-two bearded men with faces set like stone. The Wolf marched with them too. The rest of the bands marched like the trailing tail of a great crimson snake. Reinforcements had been summoned from the Peloponnesian allies: Thebans, Korinthians, Megarans, Phocians, Locrians—swelling the Wolf’s force to nearly seven thousand strong. The Skiritae roved ahead like a vanguard, along with a contingent of Boeotian horsemen. The rolling countryside ahead peeled away as they marched mile after mile. Rocky hills, wooded uplands.

And then they saw the iron wall awaiting them on the great dust bowl ahead.

Steel, bronze, blue-and-white robes and banners. Athens’s brigades stretched out like the horizon itself. Nearly ten thousand, Kassandra guessed. They erupted in a din of cries and songs of derision.

Terse commands rang out along the Spartan column. The tail of the column swung forth, forming a broad front to match the Athenian line, leaving the Wolf’s Spartans on the right, the allies in the center and the Skiritae anchoring the left. The din of boots faded away, replaced by a shush of wood and metal as every man brought his shield forward to present a wall of bronze and bright-painted emblems—the Peloponnesian allies with blazons of thunderbolts, snakes and scorpions. Kassandra swung her shield from her back likewise, slipping her left forearm through the bronze porpax sleeve on the inside and grasping the leather strap at the cuff end. It felt like part of her body now.