Read Online Spartans at the Gates by Noble Smith - Free Book Online

bag of gold and I’m on my way to see my papa! No rest for me!”
    After Kolax had saved him from the Dog Raiders, Nikias had given the boy half of the gold to carry, thinking it better to split the treasure between them in case they were attacked again. He was beginning to regret the decision, however. The boy might just leave him in the dust and head off to Athens on his own. Or cut his throat.
    No. That was a foolish notion. Kolax was as loyal as a dog. “I’m being mistrustful,” he thought. He touched his head with the back of his hand. His forehead burned and he sweated profusely. He realized that he had a fever.
    After another mile the road wended its way through a flatter area—there were fields on either side of the road that had been cross-furrowed to kill the weeds. In the distance, to the right, he could see a single farmer plowing with a bony ox, preparing the field for spring planting. Probably millet, Nikias considered with the eye of a farmer. That’s what he would grow in this cracked rocky ground that was so unlike the verdant Oxlands, where you could practically scatter seed in the red earth without plowing and know it would come up strong.
    The cart ruts were deeper on this part of the road than they had been closer to the mountain range. If he were to step into one of these tracks his leg would go in all the way up to his calf muscle. He wondered how many years men had moved along this road. A thousand? More? He could see a little cluster of farmhouses on top of a low hill surrounded by trees and vineyards. It looked like a happy place to live. And easily defensible from enemy attack.
    â€œBut I thought that our home was safe from attack,” he thought. “And I was wrong.”
    His mind wandered, lulled into a sort of waking sleep by his fatigue and the rhythm of the galloping horse. A vision of his mother, standing at her loom and singing, flashed before his eyes, and he felt a stabbing sensation in his gut. She was dead now, murdered by Thebans on the night of the sneak attack. After Nikias had escaped from the citadel through the secret tunnel, he had gone straight to his family’s farmhouse and had found it in smoldering ruins. The Theban called Eurymakus, who had a blood feud with Menesarkus, had tried to wipe out Nikias’s entire family.
    The next morning Nikias had come face-to-face with Eurymakus in the battle in front of the gates of Plataea, when the Theban reinforcements had clashed with the Plataean cavalry that Nikias had led from the border garrisons. But the Theban spy had fled in the confusion of the battle.…
    â€œWhere is my mother’s shade now?” Nikias thought morosely. He should have been at the farm on the night of the invasion. He would have saved her.
    She had not received a proper cremation and interment. For her body had been consumed in the inferno that had obliterated their home. Nor had she been given a funeral feast. Would her shade be angry? Confused?
    Nikias’s father, Aristo, had died on a battlefield when Nikias was six, and his grandfather had brought the corpse back home in a cart. It didn’t take much effort to recall that memory. He could see his father’s body in his mind as clearly as the day it had happened. Aristo’s long, lean body laid out like a plank, almost blue and drained of blood from a terrible spear wound to his abdomen—a wound from which no man could recover. His grandfather had found his only son on the battlefield with his face buried in the dirt, hands frozen in the act of pushing dirt to either side of his face. He had smothered himself to stop the terrible agony.
    â€œHe looked as though he were shouting to the Underworld that he was on his way,” Menesarkus had said.
    Nikias had been allowed to help wash his father’s corpse. He’d even been given the honor of placing a silver coin in his father’s hand to pay the Ferryman who would transport him