Download 2. Agis The king was coming. One of Sparta`s two

2. Agis
The king was coming. One of Sparta's two kings, anyway. Agis the Second was better of them,
most would say, for his not having spent two decades in exile and disgrace like his counterpart. Agis
was due at Athens's harbor town of Pireaus by midday, and Styphon stood on the beach at the head of
ten Equals tasked with escorting him the five miles to the conquered city where he was to meet with its
conqueror, Brasidas.
On schedule, or near enough, the royal ship Archegetas appeared. No special decoration made
the trireme royal; the quality of its construction and identity of its trierarch were enough. New and
better vessels existed now, thanks to the witch Eris, vessels equipped with complex rigging and
triangular sails that allowed them to tack against the wind. The ones used a month ago to seize Athens
with a surprise seaborne assault, had been converted triremes. Now, the new ships were being built to
purpose.
In shipcraft, as in all things, some inevitably would reject the new and cling to the old ways.
Styphon was uncertain where he fell. Perhaps somewhere in between blind adherence to tradition and
blind longing for the new. Fortunately, one of his middle rank was rarely called upon to make such
decisions, but only follow those who did.
When Archegetas's crew had eased her into the dock and moored the ship, Agis and his
entourage disembarked and strode the planks down onto the beach where Styphon waited.
“Lord king.” Styphon and the men behind him all fell briefly to one knee and then rose.
Spartans were no Persians who bowed and scraped the earth before royalty. True, Agis was a blood
descendant of Herakles, and thus of Zeus, but he was still yet a man.
Agis was handsome and just under thirty, with bright, honest eyes and dark locks that tumbled
over both shoulders. As an heir apparent, Agis had been spared the harsh training regimen prescribed
to all other Spartiate boys from the age of seven, and thus were his limbs leaner than the ideal, his skin
thinner and lacking in scars, yet none could accuse of him of putting on aristocratic airs. He wore a
plain wool chiton bound by a leather belt, and the crimson cloak on his shoulders bore the white salt
streaks of a sea voyage. His sole adornment, the only declaration of his royal birth, was a ring of plain
iron set on a finger of his left hand.
The king smiled, acknowledged and dismissed the bows with a wave of his hand, which he then
extended to clasp Styphon's. “What is your name, soldier?” he asked.
Styphon's heart froze. Since his shameful surrender at Sphakteria two years prior, his name had
been a curse in Sparta, its taste often foul even to his own lips. But he spoke it anyway, without
hesitation. “Styphon, sire.”
The king's smile vanished. His open eyes hardened, and shrugging his cloak off his right
shoulder, he drew his short sword. Styphon held his ground, unflinching even as the blade's point came
to rest in the hollow of his neck.
“I've heard you called a trembler,” Agis said. “Are you?”
“That's not for me to judge, sire.”
“But it is.” Agis poked him with the blade. “If you were raised well, then you are your own
harshest critic. So tell me, Styphon, why did you bring shame upon yourself by surrendering so many
Equals under your command to irons?”
Despite his best efforts, Styphon let his own black eyes fall from the king's penetrating, regal
stare as he replied: “I believed it best for Sparta, sire.”
“You mean you deemed the outcome of the war more important than that of a single battle, is
that right?” the king offered. “And also more important than your own honor?”
“Yes, sire.” Styphon began to sense that this was not a true interrogation at all, but something
else. A performance?
“What right-minded Spartan could argue that the opposite was true?” This question was
rhetorical, but the next—directed not at Styphon but the Equal to his right—was not. “What is this
place where we stand, soldier?”
“Piraeus, sire,” the Equal answered eagerly.
“And where are your unit's barracks?”
“Athens, sire.”
“Athens, hmm?” Agis raised a brow theatrically. “Then I dare say we must have won the war,
did we not?”
“Yes, sire,” the man replied. This answer was less enthusiastic, as the Equal perhaps realized he
was being patronized.
“And I hear that the man who led the force which broke down Athens' gates was this very man
whom some have called a trembler, this Styphon.” The king removed his sword from Styphon's neck,
but kept it aloft and shook it while he raised his head to address all present. “Let any Equal who would
question Styphon's honor be prepared to back up his words with hard evidence, or else face this blade!”
Styphon's face flushed, but not with pride. It was without question an honor for any man to
have a king of Sparta proclaim his worth, but it was also much better that a disgraced man earn back
his countrymen's respect by his own deeds, not be given it by decree. But Agis' words were spoken
and could not be unsaid. How they fell upon the ears and hearts of the six Spartiates behind him, and
those of the six times six whom those men would tell of this moment, and so on until all the army
knew, was for the gods to decide.
Right now, the six gave no indication of their reactions, and even Styphon had no time to devise
his own before Agis sheathed his sword and took long strides up the beach, forcing the escort detail to
hurry after him. The king's small entourage followed, too: five bodyguards, and walking in an empty
space all his own, a small man in a black robe who was well known to any who knew Agis. The little
man's brown head was shaved bald and his delicate features refused to give away his age. The tall staff
he carried, topped with a fist-sized, opal-eyed bronze figure of a bull's head, flicked sand with each
step. His name was Phaistos, but most men called him simply the Minoan, and he was said to have
been found alone as an infant in the foothills of Kythera, the last son of a civilization long dead. The
Minoan was a seer and diviner, and Agis, like the king's father before him, never went abroad without
this black shadow a few steps behind.
The combined party made its way from the harbor to the nearby shrine of Poseidon so Agis
could pour an offering of wine, after which they passed through the still-splintered gate which until
recently had barred the way inland to Athens. The soon to be razed Long Walls, which had sheltered a
generation of Athenians from their enemies, rose up twenty feet on either side of them.
Agis eyed with curiosity the Athenians who passed on their daily business to and from the
harbor. The few looks which came back were fleeting; most wanted nothing to do with him or any
Spartan.
“Has there been any sign of resistance to our rule?” the king asked Styphon.
“I would not wish to contradict the polemarch, sire.”
Agis looked crosswise at his escort. “Brasidas will tell me what he tells me. Right now I am
asking you.”
Styphon remained quiet, considering his reply.
“I can surmise the answer by the way you and your men watch the crowd,” Agis remarked. “So
you may as well tell me, phylarch.”
“It's enomotarch now, sire,” Styphon corrected him.
“Congratulations,” the king said. “Last I checked, my rank was still somewhat higher.” Putting
aside for now the matter of resistance, he laughed. “An unenviable position, to be torn between
superiors. Do you bow to seniority or follow the chain of command? It's a choice that the Lawgiver in
his wisdom left for each Equal to decide for himself, when and if the moment comes.” He flashed
Styphon a smile. “Very well,” he conceded, “I'll hear the answer from Brasidas. You might tell me one
other thing, though.”
The king's heavy pause hinted to Styphon that the question to come would be even thornier than
the last.
“The witch, Eris,” Agis began. Her very name was a thorn in Styphon's ear. “What became of
her?”
Styphon despaired to speak of the she-daemon. In their first encounter, he had watched Eris
slaughter a dozen veteran Spartiates as if they were children wielding birch whips. Even now he
wondered if Eris wouldn't swoop down from the Long Walls and take his head if he misspoke, but the
asker was Agis, and he dared not try the king's patience or spoil his evident good will, mixed blessing
that it was.
“She was felled by Athenian spindles at Eleusis,” Styphon reported. “After slaying her rival,
who fought for Athens.”
“So I was told. But what became of her corpse?”
“It lies in Apollo's sanctuary, a cave on the north face of the acropolis.”
“Curious,” the king said with obvious interest. “Why has it not been buried? Or burned?”
With only slight hesitation that he hoped was not detectable, Styphon lied, or at least withheld
the truth from his king. He had to, for Brasidas had sworn him, and a very few others, to secrecy on the
matter of his witch's apparent ability to shrug off death.
He thus answered with a refrain which almost qualified as a Spartan nursery rhyme: “It is not
my place to question my superior's will.”
Agis accepted the deflection. “It matters not. It was merely curiosity.” His words lacked the
ring of truth and clashed with his dark tone of moments ago. “It is not in every war that we get a
goddess fighting on our side. Or whatever she was.”
They walked the rest of the way to Athens in relative silence. When they reached the broken
gates which had hung open since their breaching forty days ago, the gazes of Agis and his royal guards
were on the crowded city beyond, particularly the white crags of its temple-crowned acropolis. They
were laying eyes on these homes and holy places of their intractable foe for the first time, and they
could hardly help but be struck with either awe at its grandeur or disgust at its prodigality. Maybe a
mixture of both.
The king, for his part, took on a philosophical air. He lamented idly, “Perhaps it would be best
not to tear down the walls which shield such beauty.”
They continued on past the fire-blackened hillside which had been the seat of Athens's toppled
democracy. It was near there that bald Phaistos the Minoan, with a rapid thump-thump of his bull staff,
caught his master up and asked, “My lord king, might I go make sacrifice at that shrine of which we
earlier spoke?”
“Hmm? Yes, by all means,” Agis answered him distractedly. “Take my guards with you. I'm
well protected, it would seem, against this Athenian resistance which may or may not exist.” He shot a
sly smile at Styphon, and then his gaze flicked to a wall nearby where two Helots had just begun to
paint over graffiti of a giant capital letter Omega.
Flashing his own toothy smile, the Minoan seer bowed his hairless head, waved his staff at Agis'
five spear-wielding bodyguards and scurried off ahead of them, virtually swimming in his black robes.
***
Brasidas had made his office in the red-roofed Tholos, the administrative headquarters wherein
Athens kept its civic hearth. Standing to either side of the cylindrical building's stone steps were larger
than life-sized marble figures of the goddesses Hestia and Peace. Styphon paused beneath the latter
and yielded so that Agis might mount the stairs first.
But Agis, whose eyes had not stopped taking in the sights and passersby the whole of the trek,
likewise halted. He drew Styphon aside and leaned in close.
“There is a special task with which I would charge you once this meeting is done,” he
whispered.
“But name it, sire.”
“These Athenian women interest me,” he began, leaving Styphon with little doubt as to where
he was headed. “Find one—no, two—and bring them to me tonight, dressed in fine clothes and jewelry
as is their custom, hair piled in curls.” He raised a cautioning palm and added, “Not virgins, and not by
force, mind you. Find some wives or widows who will come willingly, in order to secure their property
against seizure or win their families favor in the new order.”
Styphon was careful to remain stone-faced, as though the perverse request were perfectly
natural. When the king was done, he whispered back, “That may prove difficult, sire. Athenians keep
their citizen women locked away. Particularly now.”
Agis turned away, dismissive of the excuse. “I have faith in you, Styphon,” he said, and
clapped him on a thickly muscled arm before mounting the steps.
Styphon and the escort detail followed in his wake to the open double doors of the Tholos and
inside to the round central chamber. Athenians, like most men outside Sparta, were overly fond of
embellishing their halls of government. Here in the Tholos that tendency was illustrated, almost
literally, in the murals of great Athenian triumphs from the mists of time, or ones they claimed credit
for: over the Amazons, over the Centaurs, over the Persians. At the center of the tiled floor stood the
perpetually burning civic hearth from whose embers all hearth fires in the city were lit. The priestesses
who tended the flame, one of whom was stoking it now and glanced up blankly at them as they entered,
had not flagged in their duties during the city's transition to new leadership.
Lining the Tholos' rounded walls were couches where the elected public officials of Athens'
defunct democracy had taken their meals when on duty. Currently occupying one was a group of
Athenians whom Brasidas had appointed as minor bureaucrats in the transitional government. The
arrival of a party of Equals silenced their hushed conversation, and they offered respectful nods. Had
Agis worn anything about his person to indicate his kingship, they might have raced over and competed
with another to lick his cloak clean of salt. Instead, he was just another Spartiate, an object of fear.
Brasidas had made his office in a sub-chamber which once had served some or other official of
the abolished democracy. Before they reached it, the polemarch appeared in its open doorway, sank to
one knee as he must before his king, and then came forward, smiling, extending his arms for an
embrace. Agis accepted the greeting and, at least for those few moments, they appeared as Lykourgos
intended, as brothers, instead of what they truly were: a young king who'd not yet managed to inscribe
his name alongside those of his esteemed predecessors in the annals of history, and the older man of
lower birth whose name already was spoken by the Elders of Sparta with great pride.
Their rivalry had come to a head some months ago when the Elders had voted to put Brasidas in
command of the invasion of Attica rather than Agis, who in line with tradition had led it the three years
prior. Some number of the Elders on the council would have seen tradition upheld, but enough were
either afraid of Brasidas and his witch-goddess or enamored of their promises to strip Athens, by means
of technology, of her twin advantages: control of the seas and her Long Walls.
Not even Agis could argue that Brasidas and his false goddess had failed to deliver on those
promises.
Right now, as they broke off their embrace, whatever tension there was between them remained
hidden.
“The sea god treated you well, sire?” Brasidas asked cordially.
“The god, yes, and your man here, too,” Agis answered.
Once more Styphon wished the king would hold his tongue, however good his intentions.
Indeed, Brasidas used an instant when Agis's eyes were not on him to cast Styphon a glance which held
the promise of questions to come.
Spartans were not ones for small talk. These were two of the most powerful men in Sparta, and
thus in Greece and perhaps the world, and there remained unfinished business in their city's recent
victory: resistance in Athens and, of course, the thousand or so holdouts still under siege at Dekelea.
The door shut behind them so they might discuss such matters, while Styphon's mind set to work on a
problem of his own: how in the name of Apollon's asshole was he to find a pair of Athenian wives
willing to whore themselves?