Area 51: Nosferatu by Robert Doherty

Author:Robert Doherty
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780440237242
Publisher: Dell
Published: 2003-07-02T12:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

Greece: 335 B.C.

For Nosferatu the decision to follow the course of action proposed by Aspasia’s Shadow was not a difficult one to make. If he could somehow find more of the Gods, he might be able to get some of their blood and take it back to Nekhbet. That he was being played by Aspasia’s Shadow he had no doubt, but one could always try to change the rules of the game.

Nosferatu had traversed Africa on foot and sailed around it by boat, both astounding feats. But China was a different matter. No one in Greece had ever heard of such a place and Aspasia’s Shadow had laughed when Nosferatu had asked where the land lay. “To the east. Far to the east,” had been his answer, before letting Nosferatu know it was time for him to leave.

While no one knew where China was, everyone now knew of Macedonia and the boy-king from that province; Nosferatu had a hard time getting anyone to talk of anything else. But the more he heard, the more interested he became in Alexander, son of Philip II, king of Macedonia, and Olympias, a princess of Epirus. Besides what Aspasia’s Shadow had said, Nosferatu knew that to go east would be more than a matter of pointing his face in that direction and walking. The Persian Empire, the most recent conqueror of Egypt, lay that way and it was not fond of strangers passing through. He would need help and it made sense to seek out the most powerful ally available.

Nosferatu was impressed by what he heard. Tutored by Aristotle, who was held in great esteem among the intelligentsia in Athens, Alexander was now king of Macedonia to the north of Greece as a result of the assassination of his father the previous summer. In one short year, surrounded by enemies in his own kingdom and those surrounding him, Alexander had brutally exerted his will, executing any who stood in his way.

His power was so great that a Greek congress of states gathering at Corinth had elected him commander of their latest campaign against the Persians, during which he had attacked to the east as far as the Danube River, a fact that certainly intrigued Nosferatu. While conducting that campaign, Alexander had been brought close to disaster at home when Thebes revolted. Yet he’d returned from defeating the Persians and in one week razed the city of Thebes to the ground and sold its population into slavery, an action that caught the attention of the rest of the Greek states not yet allied with him.

The previous year Alexander had gone after the Persians once more, crossing the Hellespont, the water barrier dividing east and west Anatolia, to the east.

Alexander attacked a superior force of over 40,000 mercenaries and, according to the tales, totally defeated it while losing only 110 men.

Alexander was currently camped across the Hellespont and the rumor was that he was preparing a further expedition to the east against the Persian main army under King Darius III.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.