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

“Priests? Given what this woman had been through, I doubt she and they would have got along.”

“Ah,” Sokrates whispered, “but there is another in those parts. My friend, Hippokrates—a physician—practices there. He is no priest, and he has a memory for details, faces. He once nearly had Thrasymachos in tears, so easily could he debunk the man’s arguments with his lightning recollections. He more than any other will recall those who passed north from Sparta. Especially a woman—traveling on her own?”

Kassandra nodded quietly. “Then I will seek out Hippokrates,” she said, thankful but dismayed too at the vagueness of the lead. Sokrates made his excuses, citing the need to use the latrines… only to head over toward the relaxed-again Thrasymachos and begin torturing him with his questions once more.

Alone again, Kassandra edged through the crowds. Hawk-face was now drenched in his own vomit, two others were drinking straight from amphorae and another was arguing with a wall. She stopped near the trio Sokrates had pointed out earlier: Euripides and Sophocles the poets and lovers, and Aristophanes, the comic wit, standing like an ax between these two sheepish types, his gums flapping and nearby listeners roaring with laughter.

“You must have seen me doing my impression of Kleon? I call it, ‘The Orange Ape.’ Tell me, what did you think?”

Those nearby brayed and cackled in praise as Aristophanes hopped from foot to foot, grunting and swinging his arms. Then all fell silent and looked to Euripides, who had not given his verdict. Instead, he looked at his sandaled feet.

Aristophanes clapped a firm hand on Euripides’s shoulder. “Good men lead quiet lives, as old Euripides likes to say, don’t you, Euripides?”

Euripides opened his mouth but said nothing, nodding shyly instead.

Aristophanes blared on exuberantly with a glowing review of his own dramatic works, while Sophocles shifted and shuffled behind him, trying to make eye contact with his lover. But Aristophanes was set on having Euripides for himself, it seemed.

“All three love each other really,” said a light voice behind Kassandra.

Kassandra swung around. Nothing.

“Down here,” the voice continued.

Kassandra dropped her gaze to waist height. A doe-eyed girl stared up at her, biting her lip, face wrinkled with guilt and a dash of defiance.

“Phoibe?”

Phoibe threw her arms around Kassandra’s waist. “I missed you terribly,” she wailed into Kassandra’s stola. “After you left, Markos looked after me well enough, but then he found out about the eye. He convinced me to lend it to him so he could invest it, and promised to double its value.” She sighed.

“Phoibe, you didn’t…”

“He lost it all.”

Kassandra’s teeth ground. “Of course he did.”

“He was distraught for days on end. It was only new and more dreadful business ideas that brought him back to his usual self. He wanted to steal a herd of cattle from the estate north of Mount Ainos. It was a ludicrous plan that involved me wearing a cow suit.” She shook her head. “Anyway, it has been a year since you left, and I knew I had to come in search of you. I sneaked aboard one of the supply ships bringing timber to the Piraeus harbor. I now work for Aspasia, wife of Perikles. I am a servant, yes, but at least I don’t have to wear a cow suit. I knew you would come here eventually. Everyone does, they say. Tonight, when I saw you, I…” She fell silent, her eyes brimming over with tears. Kassandra held her tight, kissing the top of her head, enjoying the familiar scent of her hair, stamping down on the deeper wells of emotion that tried to rise from her heart.

“Tell me why—why did you not return to Kephallonia,” said Phoibe, “even just to let me know you were well?”

“Because the quest I set out upon has grown horns, tentacles and talons.” Kassandra sighed. “My mother lives, Phoibe.”

Phoibe’s eyes grew moonlike. “She lives? But you told me—”

Kassandra placed a finger over her lips. Phoibe was one of the few who knew everything. “I told you what I thought was true. I was wrong. She lives. Where, I don’t know. That is why I am here. Someone here tonight might know.”

“Aspasia will help you,” she said confidently, straightening up. “Everyone here knows something, but she knows nearly everything. She is as bright and shrewd as Perikles himself. Brighter, even, say some.”

“Where is she?” Kassandra asked, seeing no women present.

“Oh, she is here.” Phoibe smiled knowingly.

Thucydides and his military men called Phoibe over, waving their empty wine cups. Phoibe rolled her eyes then hurried over to tend to them.

Kassandra moved to the edge of the room, rested a shoulder on the edge of a doorway and tried to work out who to approach next. From behind the door—locked—muffled voices spoke. Her ears pricked up and every half-formed word she heard was like a shiny coin landing in her purse. Anything, she willed herself to hear, even the smallest clue.

“Wider, wider. Yes… yes !” A squeal of delight. A sucking noise and then a popping sound, quickly followed by a gasp of pleasure and a joint cry of delight from a group of voices. Instinctively, she jolted upright, as if the wall itself were part of this debauched tryst. The door rattled from the force of her movement.

Footsteps, then the door swung open. A golden-haired vision stood within, chiseled and young, standing proud. He was pale-skinned and blue-eyed, wearing just a leather cord around his neck and a diaphanous silk scarf around his waist. Standing proud in all senses, Kassandra realized, cocking her head to one side then looking up again. Behind him, the room glowed with the light of a few oil lamps and weltered with sweet incense smoke, steam from a sunken bath and the heat of naked bodies. Men and women writhed on the beds and couches, all across the floor, under the table. Glistening buttocks and bouncing breasts—all of varying standards, moans of pleasure and tangles of limbs.

“Ah, another participant?” the golden-haired man grinned.

“Possibly,” she said, seeing an opening.

“Alkibiades. Perikles’s nephew.” He bowed, taking and kissing her hand, his eyes drinking in her body’s every contour.

“I’m looking for a woman,” Kassandra said.

Alkibiades’s grin widened and he extended a hand, gesturing toward a voluptuous older lady who was sitting on her own by the side of a sunken bath. The woman shot Kassandra a lustful glower, running her tongue across her perfect teeth, her raven hair spilling in coils across her shoulders as she slid her legs apart.

Kassandra arched an eyebrow. “No, that’s not what I meant.”

“A man then?” he suggested, his waist scarf twitching.

“It depends on what that man can tell me.”

“I can tell you anything you’d like to hear. Come, come.” He beckoned her in.

Kassandra set down her wine and water kraters and stepped inside. “I seek a woman called—”

Alkibiades shot a hand across her front, like a barrier, halting her and swinging the door closed with a click. With his other hand, still across her front, he traced her breasts. She balled a fist, feeling a strong urge to break his jaw as she had done with the opportunistic Spartan in Stentor’s camp… but then she saw the glint of opportunity.

She relaxed her fist, stepped toward him and pressed her lips to his. He chuckled softly as they kissed, his lips hot and wet, his tongue venturing into her mouth. He wrapped his muscle-bound arms around her and she felt him guiding her toward a rare free couch, but she halted him with a hand on his broad chest, pulling back, knowing she had the fish on the hook. “I’m looking for a woman who fled Sparta a long, long time ago,” she said.