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

“Chrysis?”

“You know her?” Hippokrates asked warily.

Kassandra’s top lip twitched as she remembered the Cave of Gaia and the praying masked one. “I know she must die. Where did she flee to?”

Hippokrates held up both hands as if to calm a runaway horse. “I will tell you, but first we should talk. Come.”

They returned to the bay and walked for a time among the injured and sick, Kassandra bathing and bandaging soldiers’ torn legs and shoulders while Hippokrates dealt with the less obvious ailments. She tended to a girl of Phoibe’s age who had an infected wound on her leg from an animal bite. She tied off the bandage then squeezed the girl’s arm and pinched her cheek. The girl giggled. Kassandra smiled briefly, but then thought of Phoibe on her own in Athens, felt a spike of concern and a spark of flame in her heart. Wiping away the smile and caging those emotions—weaknesses that could be the death of her on this quest—she turned to the next patient: a gaunt, groaning man, riddled with sores and drained of strength. There was no wound to clean, no snapped bone to splint. She held his hand for a time, listening to his weak words as he told her about his life as a fletcher. After a time he fell into a light sleep.

“There is something strange arising in Hellas,” Hippokrates said quietly as he stroked the man’s forehead.

“The Cult,” Kassandra agreed.

Hippokrates laughed dryly. “Something else. This sickness. I have not seen its like before. It seems to have arisen in cramped places—settlements with too many bodies inside. And from there it has been carried to the ports, even across the open countryside.”

“If there is a cure, you will find it,” she said firmly.

“For I am the great Hippokrates.” He sighed.

They took a break in the late-afternoon light, sitting on a knoll overlooking the stricken—strewn on the beach like washed-up fish. The sea wind stroked their skin as Hippokrates tore a loaf of bread in half, offering her one part along with a cut of fatty mutton and a boiled egg. She ate quickly, realizing how she had neglected such basic needs during the flight from Athens—eating just scraps here and there. She tossed some mutton to Ikaros. They ate an apple each then washed the meal down with a skinful of cool brook water. Hippokrates flicked a finger toward the small shape anchored up the coast.

“Ah, I see your boat now. And my friend, Herodotos, is aboard?”

“Much to his dismay.” She nodded. “My captain, Barnabas, is somewhat excitable around him. He begged me to come ashore but I couldn’t risk bringing him. I wasn’t sure what I might find here.”

“You didn’t come here to kill Chrysis, did you?” he said, his eyes searching hers.

“No, but I will kill her,” she said. “I came to ask you something. I’m looking for someone.”

Hippokrates’s lips lifted at one end. “I remember your mother,” he said.

A thrill raced across Kassandra’s skin. “How… how did you know?”

He held up his apple core. “The apple does not fall far from the tree. I saw her in you the moment you emerged from those trees.”

“So she did pass through here?”

Hippokrates’s gaze fell to his feet. “I was so young then—I didn’t know how to help. I turned her away. But her look of determination remained—burned into my mind. It has never left me and it never will. Myrrine was fire in the shape of a woman!”

“Do you know where she went?”

Another sigh. “I do not. But there is a man who might.” He flicked a finger over his shoulder, inland. “The Sanctuary of Asklepios—where I used to practice—is not what it used to be. Their standards and mine have… diverged, shall we say. They seem to think the sick can be cured simply by sitting in their temples and libraries; good for the soul, perhaps, but not so useful when your arm is hanging off.” He shook his head as if to ward off a building diatribe. “Go there. Speak to Dolops the priest—he lives by the library. Tell him I sent you. He and his forefathers have kept a record of every soul who has passed through these lands. Myrrine was here, and so her name will be among them—her name, her ailments, where she went next…”

As he described where she would find him, Kassandra felt the flickering flame within, the mere thought of Mother bringing it to life. She caged it, clasping a hand to Hippokrates’s shoulder and standing. “Thank you.”

“Go in good health, Kassandra,” he called after her as she headed inland. “And be wary. The light is fading and—”

“And the countryside of Argolis is not a safe place to wander,” she finished for him.

“Quite. But there’s something else I didn’t tell you. This Dolops… he is Chrysis’s son.”

Night fell as she forged through the woods to the song of chattering crickets, hooting owls and a lone wolf howling somewhere beyond. She spotted the spoor of a lion too, and heard the deep, throaty call of the beast, somewhere nearby in the trees. Taking care to stay downwind of the calls, she picked her way on until she saw an end to the woods, ahead.

She parted a wall of ferns to peer across the grounds of the great, weathered sanctuary: even clothed in night’s shroud, the landscape was wondrous. Three low mountains stood like sentinels around the area, one bearing the majestic Temple of Apollo, another the birthplace of the legendary Asklepios himself. In the clearing between the mountains, houses of marble were dotted, linked by broad avenues and fine, peaceful gardens. There was a long, majestic portico, within which hunched old priests shuffled; a gymnasium, a small temple, a library, and the abaton hall itself—where the sick lay—uplit by gently crackling torches; a theater cut into the hillside and a smattering of simple priestly residences. A low orphic chant came and went in the night air, sailing from within one temple.

She quietly stepped out into the clearing and made for the priest’s home near the library building. Dolops nearly fell from his chair when she entered. She had half expected him to yell, but he did not make a sound. Instead, he stared at her, his face gray and drawn, his wispy hair unkempt. Glancing around his room, she noticed strange writings on the walls, brushed on crudely, the same words over and over: Why, Mother, why? Let them live! But no sign of Chrysis?

Still feeling a creeping sense of unease, she sat opposite him and explained why she had come, who had sent her. His alarm faded a little, especially when he heard Hippokrates’s name.

“I’m looking for any clue at all about a woman named Myrrine, please,” she repeated.

His throat bulged as if he were swallowing a plum stone. But after a time he rose, took up a torch and beckoned her, ever silent, into the night. They came to the open ward near the portico. Here, stone tablets were piled high or serried in ranks like hoplites. She frowned, horror-stricken, when he gestured to one. What was this, a tombstone? But he handed her his torch and gestured for her to crouch. She fell to her haunches and passed the torch across the face of the stone. Not a tomb slab, but a record of a patient—just as Hippokrates had claimed. She scanned the inscribed words.

Diodoris came here in the spring with only one eye. In the night, as he slept in the abaton, the Gods came to him, applied ointment to his empty socket and thus he awoke in the morning with two hale eyes!

She arched one eyebrow, just managing to halt a laugh of disbelief. The next stone read:

Alas! Thyson of Hermione was blind in both eyes… until the temple hound licked his organs and he rejoiced, blessed with sight again.

“Organs?” Kassandra mused over which organs these might be.