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

Kassandra stood with Myrrine at the boat’s rear, under the shade of the scorpion tail. She felt her mother’s tension. “Silanos is dead; the Parian blockade will crumble. More, Aspasia is wise and strong. She will tend to the Naxians faithfully.”

Myrrine nodded slowly in a way that suggested she didn’t really want to be reminded about the matter. Aspasia—a refugee fleeing Kleon’s Athens—had volunteered to take her place as Archon, overseer of Naxos. “I will always fret over the Naxians, Kassandra, but it’s not them I think of now: it’s what lies ahead.” She scoured the growing, dark outline of land: the first of the three rocky fingers that jutted from the Lakonian coastline. “The maps say that we look upon Lakonia. But my heart sees a land of ghosts.”

Kassandra felt a stark shiver rise from her toes to her scalp. It brought her thoughts to the one matter she and Mother had not yet broached: Nikolaos’s revelation.

“Before we land, there is something I must know,” she said.

Myrrine stiffened.

“Who am I? The man I thought was my father was but a guardian.”

Myrrine’s bottom lip quivered. She tried to speak, then broke down in sobs.

Kassandra caught her, held her tight and kissed her head. “The question has been asked, but you need not answer me now. You can tell me when the time is right.”

Myrrine nodded, locked in Kassandra’s embrace.

Footsteps interrupted the moment.

“The coastline is well watched,” said Barnabas, stalking around the ship’s edge for the best vantage point. “See the turrets and beacon fires on the hills? We dare not try to put in near any of them: if they do not rain fire missiles upon us, then the red cloaks will soon descend upon us just like they did to those Athenians at the Megarid.”

“You are telling me we cannot land?” Kassandra asked.

Barnabas winked. “There is nothing the Adrestia cannot do.”

Later that day, they rounded the second of the three jagged capes. A gale picked up, whistling and choppy, conjuring the sea into a restless, roiling cauldron. Herodotos spent the afternoon at the rail, retching, uttering oaths for mercy in between each purge. They came to a stretch of black cliffs, shining wet and sheer, the sky above bruised and swollen. The coastal tides crashed in upon the rocks with a terrible din, sending foaming jets of spray high into the air. There were no Spartan watchtowers here. Understandable, given that no boat could hope to land in these parts. Yet here, Barnabas gave the order to turn in for the “shore.”

“You have brought us to the darkest part of the darkest kingdom to land?” Kassandra cried over the howling winds.

Barnabas, hauling on ropes as his men worked the oars and Reza guided the steering paddles, laughed. “You wait—you will see.”

The Adrestia rolled in toward the black wall. Herodotos wailed in a rather high-pitched fashion, Kassandra and Myrrine both backed away up the deck, fearing that they were to be shredded against the bluffs… Until the wall of black seemed to slide apart.

Suddenly, the screaming gale fell away. The boat’s flapping, loose ropes fell limp and the lurching vessel settled into a calm drift. Now she saw it: the illusory cleft in the black wall, barely wider than the ship. It led into an oval inlet about an arrow shot wide, ringed by the black heights.

“Few know about this cove,” Barnabas said, his eyes growing distant, his voice falling into an echoing whisper. He looked up at the wide oculus of angry sky above, raised his hands and moved them slowly apart, his face etched with a look of wonder. “I like to call it the eye of the Gods .”

Kassandra, Myrrine and Herodotos gazed around the place.

Reza casually ambled past, coiling up a loose rope. “I call it Kronos’s arsehole.”

Deflated, Barnabas called out to his crew to prepare to dock. They disembarked onto a long strip of black rock that served as a natural wharf. As darkness fell, they made a fire under the shelter of an overhang, while the gale raged high above and the sea slapped and gurgled at the cove entrance.

Kassandra chewed on a chunk of bread, dunking it in a pot of Naxian honey every so often. Barnabas and Herodotos were locked in debate, parts of which she overheard.

“It is a fake!” Herodotos scoffed.

Barnabas, affronted, gasped. “It is not ! Look!” He held up the medallion to the firelight, unhooking it from his neck and shoving it under Herodotos’s nose. “A real piece of Pythagoras’s wisdom!”

Kassandra listened keenly now, recalling her chat with Herodotos by the lion statue at Thermopylae, and the talk of the dead legend and his lost knowledge.

“You acquired it on Naxos?” Herodotos quizzed.

“Aye.”

“How much did the peddler charge you for it? What price do they ask for naïveté these days?”

Barnabas leaned back, grumbling a low oath. “I did not buy it,” he said. “Photina gave it to me.”

“Ah, your Naxian mistress.” Herodotos chuckled.

“Aye. It was a sign of our brief love. It used to belong to her husband, Meliton, before he went missing.”

Kassandra’s ears pricked up, the name triggering more memories of the chat at Thermopylae: One summer I came across a wandering man. A short, round little fellow by the name of Meliton who spent his days sailing the Aegean in a tub of a boat… He had been shipwrecked in his youth on the black shores of Thera…

Herodotos sat up straight, frowning, now snatching the piece and scrutinizing it carefully.

Kassandra caught a glimpse of the medallion now: it was a shard of black rock, etched with a strange symbol. Herodotos’s eyes rolled up from studying the piece to meet hers. She read a thousand questions in his gaze and a thousand more rose in her thoughts.

“How long are we to stay here?” one crewman asked her, breaking the moment.

Kassandra turned to the man and tried as best she could to recall the lay of the land between here and her old home. As a child she had traveled from Sparta to the coast once with Nikolaos to learn to swim in the rough seas. It had seemed like a colossal journey then although it probably only took a day or so.

“We’ll set off tomorrow. I will go alone with my mother.”

Herodotos, Barnabas and the rest of the crew looked up, troubled.

“At least allow some of us to come with you as an escort,” pleaded Barnabas.

“No, it must be Mother and me. Nobody else. We may be gone for some time.”

They had become used to that tone of hers and knew there was no point in persisting.

“Then we must conceal the boat while you are gone,” Barnabas conceded, looking up. “As well hidden as this cove is, the Spartans send land patrols along these cliffs from time to time. If they glance down here and see a boat, they’ll slaughter us.”

“How do you hide a galley, exactly?” Herodotos chuckled.

Barnabas flicked his eyebrows up twice, then nodded to Reza. The helmsman and two others rose and set to work. They lowered the mast, strapped down all the loose fixtures. Next, one man positioned an iron piling against the hull and Reza took up a great hammer and swung it down upon the piling’s end. A mighty crunch of timber echoed throughout the cove. As the noise faded, a rushing, gurgling sound rose in its place.

“Gods!” Herodotos gasped, the bread falling from his mouth as he watched the Adrestia slip calmly under the surface, all but the rail submerged. The two with Reza took turns diving into the cove waters with ropes. Gradually, the galley sank entirely from view into the inky waters.

“They tie rocks to the hull, to take the galley firmly to the bed of the cove. Her timbers will be preserved down there. None will see her from above. And as long as we stay from sight, none will know we are here. When we need her again we can cut the ropes. Once we remove the weights, the ship will float to the surface, then we can bucket-bail and repair the hole.”