chapter 4: aspis
If unmasking the traitor-king of Sparta is a game, then the pieces are made of knowledge and discretion.
Kassandra has already forfeited the first round. As Brasidas suspected, her behavior at the palace forums is more than frustration at a mismanaged war effort; it's an interrogation. She's been testing the diarchs' reflexes, searching for clues in the way they bring up their shields to deflect her daggers.
So far, the trade has been uneven. She's exposed her intentions but gained no knowledge in return, and every new challenge only improves the traitor-king's acting.
But now they have an edge: as cautious as their quarry might be with a hunter who stalks him in the open, he still believes Brasidas to be passive and oblivious - a petteia stone to be moved and sacrificed for the greatest gain.
And a stone is not expected to fight back.
"Wait, wait," Kassandra says, laughter in her voice as she catches his wild hands in a woefully misguided attempt to calm him down. "We must be defensive. Find the gaps in his armor, and strike only when it's safe."
Such a wondrous thing they hold between them, this secret. It would be so easy to wash away in its tide. "Remember what we stand to lose, Brasidas."
She's right. Despite the traitor-king's litany of advantages - reach, resources, and a vast network of agents yet hidden from them - his greatest power is that he holds all of Sparta hostage.
It's not enough to expose him. They must catch his body as it falls and lay it gently in the dust, or the city will fall with him.
Brasidas's spies report that Athenian triremes are being loaded for battle. In less than a month, a hundred ships swollen with wine, weapons, and hoplites will arrive at the port-town of Methone, on the southern tip of Peloponnese, to challenge Sparta's borders.
As agreed, the news goes to Kassandra before it goes anywhere else.
She sprawls in the lamplight and studies the vellum map strung across the wall of Brasidas's apartment, flower-dyed into neat red and blue blotches. They've stuck bits of clay on it to mark Sparta's camps and commanders - clustered on the mainland, pointed towards Athens in a tight semicircle.
"A poisoned battle," she says, chewing her lip. "The generals are months away, holding the front in Attika. They'll never arrive in time."
She turns to him, bronze skin half-lit, with oil-fire dancing in her eyes. The thrill of a scheme discovered - the first step towards fighting back. "I think Sparta is meant to lose Methone."
Out of this hypothesis, a plan forms.
Even if the traitor-king wants Methone ceded to Athens, it's too important a foothold in the peninsula for the other king to let it go quietly. With the generals away, Brasidas - unlaureled, but trusted and popular - is well within his rights to claim commandership of the defense force.
Kassandra will feign disinterest and take a mercenary contract in Argolis. She'll dawdle while supplying, just long enough for the kings to hear of her plans. The spies will stick to her like stinging nettles when she leaves the city, and as soon as she can catch and kill them, she will turn around and ride south.
There, with Brasidas the fresh lure and Kassandra the hook buried within, they will wait for the traitor-king to make a mistake.
At first light, Brasidas petitions the kings for the relief of Methone.
Voice booming, face schooled into a soldier's mask, he asks to lead a hundred hoplites to the south, with helots to carry their provisions and a detachment of mounted skiritai to scout their path. Sparta's navy is no match for Athenian oarsmen with their precise rowing and ramming, so Brasidas will challenge them on the shore.
The performance is watertight, he knows it is, but still his heart beats fast and wild against his windpipe. He watches the kings, looking for the first faltered smile, the first stammer or hand raised in protest: which one will refuse? Which one will be the first to suggest, with a heavy heart, that Methone cannot be saved?
Archidamos and Pausanias both approve his proposal instantly.
Off balance, Brasidas barks his gratitude and dips into a stiff bow, barely holding onto his helmet. He feels every bit like the part he's playing. The traitor-king has obviously seen this coming: seen, sidestepped, and made a plan.
Fine. He and Kassandra have made their own.
Brasidas's lean army makes the journey in four days - the red of their cloaks a raw gash in the hills, in the cooling winter air. The earth rattles with their steps, heavy with weapons and armor, synchronized by the dry, bending tones of the outi players and their war songs.
Despite his counterfeit bravery at the palace, he feels a grinding unease.
They planned to meet once before departing, he and Kassandra, but with his proposal so hastily accepted, there was no time. He has no idea where she is - if she's riding towards or away from him, or whether she managed to leave the city at all. And to make matters worse, his own inexperience haunts him like a badly knit scar; he's never commanded this many men, and every time he rides out to check their marching order, the scale of it spins his head with vertigo.
A hundred crimson cloaks. A hundred brittle breastplates holding the lives of his brothers. And countless more will be lost if his phalanxes fall: the helots, the skiritai , the physicians, the fishers and farmers of Messenia who are counting on him to rebuff Athens -
A long, shaky breath - private, with his back to his men. Nothing for it. Whether or not Kassandra comes, Brasidas has a duty to survive, and to win.
A week passes on the shore, then two. The army camps, forages, eats, and trains: running in place, keeping itself hammered and sharp for a lightning-strike of combat. Brasidas exchanges letters with the ephors in Sparta and the generals in Attika, body humming alternately with nerves and thrill and longing. Armed with spyglasses and nautical charts, his runner-agents ride up and down the coast in a tight relay and describe to him the Athenian fleet's agonizing progress around the peninsula.
Then, at the end of the third week, he sees her.
It's barely a blink of movement, red and bronze through the long leaves of an olive grove, but the sense of knowing is unmistakable. He recognizes the way she moves, the way she would move if she wanted to be discreet - showing herself long enough for him to notice her, brief enough for him to doubt he's seen anything at all.
That night, he lights an oil-lamp to cast his shadow against the canvas wall of his tent, and pretends to write a letter.
"Brasidas."
The sound of his name, hissed softly through a blanket of night waves and seabirds, melts the tension from his shoulders. Three weeks apart has been harder than he would like.
"It's good to see you, Kassandra," he murmurs, and corrects himself with a chuckle: "Hear you, at least."
"I sound better than I look," she says, as if such a thing could be true. "I've been riding for two days."
"Did something happen?"
"There was trouble leaving the city. The kings tried to keep me."
Brasidas can't help a short, harsh swell of laughter. "What? After months trying to get you out of Sparta, now they want you to stay?"
She scoffs quietly, which makes him smile. If he concentrates, he can almost see the outline of her half-crouch against the tent wall, and the pads of her fingers where she's resting her hand on the fabric.
"How far are they?" she whispers. "The Athenians."
"Another week, my reports say. They left Piraeus behind schedule, and the winds have been unfavorable."
A relieved sigh: "Good, that's good - we have time. If the traitor-king moves against you, it will be late, at the last moment possible, so that…"
So that your death will have the greatest impact. The sentence doesn't need finishing.
"Never mind that," Kassandra says softly. "Be with your men. Go, before someone catches you here smiling at your inkwell."
"Wait - " He feels a sudden looming emptiness, indulges the childish impulse to keep her here even though each moment is another chance for their plan to come to ruin. "Wait. Where will you be?"
"Near."
Then she's gone, and the tent is cold again.
He doesn't see her for days, and as the battle approaches and his men begin to slam their shields and bray for Athenian blood, he wonders if there is any threat at all.
Has she been spotted? It's possible - despite her care in staying hidden, and his (admirable, he thinks) refusal to let his eyes wander openly in search of her, they have no way of knowing what the agents of the traitor-king have or have not seen. Or perhaps the trap has been detected some other way: even if Kassandra has laid a hundred false trails to the north, there are many ways to find out that she is not doing mercenary work in Argolis.
Maybe, he thinks abruptly, there was never any agent. Maybe the traitor-king is simply waiting for him to fall in battle. Another dead son, stretchered on the shield that failed to save him while his mother thanks the gods for the honor he's brought her.
The night before the Athenians make their landing, Kassandra catches a black-cloaked spy coiled in the crossbeam of Brasidas's tent.
The whole thing only takes a few heartbeats. She throws the woman down from the rafters to the war table, interrupting his meeting in the most appalling way - leaping down after her, pinning her, slitting her from groin to sternum and spilling the pink ropes of her intestines across the sheepskin map.
The men bellow in shock and knock over their stools in frenzied disgust. Blood and bowels wash Brasidas's wooden pawns to the ground. The ivory-hilted kopis that would have opened his throat clatters at his feet.
Kassandra is the only stillness in the chaos she's caused, in the raw quicklime explosion of shouts and swears and weapons drawn in panic. With a shudder that seems to take her from neck to spine to the balls of her feet, she settles back on her haunches, straddling the twitching hips of his almost-murderer. Hands on her thighs, eyes half-lidded with an emotion Brasidas wishes he understood, she tilts her head back and breathes as if the world has been lifted from her chest.
At last, having calmed the captains and instructed the helots to save as much of the map as they can, Brasidas leaves the war tent.
He half expected Kassandra to be gone again, but she's standing a little ways off with her back turned, instantly recognizable by her braid and her cuirass and the impossible geometry of her bare shoulders. He follows her gaze out to sea, where half a dozen dim orange lights quaver gently on the horizon.
The fleet is here. With a deep lurch, Brasidas remembers that in less than ten hours, he is expected to lead a hundred soldiers to victory or death.
Kassandra turns around as he approaches. She hasn't gotten a chance to wash, and there's a thick, eerie red slash across her nose and mouth where the assassin spat blood in her face.
He's imagined this reunion for the last month - planned out what he would say, how he would laugh and embrace her and celebrate the end of their long separation, the success of their gambit - but in the moment, he finds that all he can do is take her proffered forearm and hold it tightly as the words fail to come.
How many times has she done this, he wonders? Stood quietly between him and an unmarked grave, looked placidly at him moments after, and said nothing?
When Kassandra finally speaks, her voice is rough and cracked with disuse, and the most wonderful thing he's ever heard.
"I won't field tomorrow."
Brasidas feels his eyebrows go up in surprise. Too late to feign indifference. It's never occurred to him that Kassandra might not want to take part in the fight for Methone.
"Why?" he asks - but as the word comes out, he thinks he might know. Kassandra has already won her battle: one of baited hooks, of black-clad women and their poisoned daggers. This - a matter of nations, of simple glory and a soldier's duty to his people - is his.
But Kassandra has a different answer:
"Because I will dilute your glory."
She says it plainly: not a boast but a fact, carefully considered. He doesn't understand, and it must show on his face, because she sighs and continues: "In Sparta, they are beginning to talk. They are looking at me a different way, calling me things I am not. Titan, demigod - "
It's true, he realizes. A fresh memory comes into his head: fearful whispers exchanged in low tones among his own captains, just moments ago as he left his war tent painted with her destruction.
"They're cheap words," she says softly, "They cost nothing to say, but they have an echo. If I am with you on the beach, those words will eclipse the truth."
"And what is the truth?"
"That you will win."
Hearing it raises gooseflesh on his neck. Such a simple thing, but her tone is steady and warm, with a calm finality that makes it sound like it's already happened. A swell of affection - real, terrifying - threatens to swallow him.
"What Brasidas of Sparta does for Methone tomorrow, he does by his own valor," she says. "And his victory will have its own echo."
Arranged on white sand like a line of bronze shells glinting in dawnlight, Brasidas and his hoplites stand face-to-face with what any other army would call death.
They are outnumbered, as he knew they would be - three Athenians at least for every Spartan. More wait just asea, stamping their spears on the hollow decks of their triremes.
No one rides out. No emissaries seeking settlement; no war party requesting a peaceful surrender. Perhaps they think a force this small is not worth the horses.
Standing alone before his army, Brasidas sets his feet apart and draws himself up to full height. He slams the haft of his spear into the thick plate of shale underfoot on the rocky shore, chosen to resonate, and bellows:
"LEAVE."
Even in the cushion of thick sea air and crashing surf, his voice carries. A cluster of seabirds chitters in their departure. The Athenians shift in their neat lines - silent, unreadable.
And then they charge.
The approach is artless, but their formation is tight in the ways that matter. At Brasidas's shout, a volley of javelins glances noisily off the Athenian shield wall. They brace against the impact, off balance for a heart-stopping moment.
He watches them: how they react, how they recover. They lift up, in rolling waves like a great metal centipede, and advance.
Again, he says.
Behind their lizardskin of locked shields, the helots shuffle more javelins to the front. A second volley, and a third, and then the men ladder together to prepare for the push -
There: a falter. A lurching blue-and-white ripple where the phalanx wavers, tries to surge forward when their wall is tested. These are the weak ones, the excitable ones, and they are on the left.
Brasidas divides his column in two with a sharp gesture of his spear and thunders elpis, a word that in their battle-code means "false retreat." The left flank of his army recedes as a morning tide being sucked from the shore, and half of the Athenian phalanx follows, as if pulled by an invisible string, whooping in triumph and battle-lust -
Such arrogance, Brasidas thinks with pride, to believe you have made Sparta retreat!
The Athenian trierarch is screaming, shredding his voice in warning as he tries to control his men, but it's too late. His formation is stretching and dissolving. His soldiers are panicking, scrambling to fill the space left by their charging comrades. The blue and pink of armor and flesh shows through a yawning gap in the mosaic of their shields.
Brasidas brings the left flank back around, forms his men into a wickedly sharp pick, and chisels through the hole.
It is known throughout Hellas that once a Spartan phalanx has broken your line, you are done. The best you can do - infiltrated, gnawed through by hoplites feasting inside you like piranhas, eating your guts with spear and sword - is drop your shield so you can run faster.
The beach is choked with Athenian bodies. They are buckling like a rotting scaffold - not just the foremost phalanx but the one behind it, and the half-column behind that, as they see the bronze and bones and feeding frenzy of crimson capes on bloody flesh. They are in disarray. Screaming above the swell of the surf, they cast aside their weapons and throw themselves back into the sea towards their boats where Spartan spearmen chase them down and crush their skulls into the tide.
When the morning has passed, Brasidas stands on red sand with his shield on his back and his helmet tucked neatly under one arm. The winter sun and chilly ocean wind are a pleasant companion as he watches the queasy bob of the triremes - looking appalled, somehow, as if the vessels themselves are numb with shock at their sudden emptiness.
Methone is defended. Sparta has suffered no casualties.
The Athenians leave their dead, turn around, and go home.
A/N: future updates for this will be on AO3 only: /works/16587014/chapters/38871440