Arrow through the Axes by Patrick Bowman

Author:Patrick Bowman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781553803256
Publisher: Ronsdale Press

CHAPTER EIGHT

Marked for Execution

THE GUARDS DRAGGED me downstairs and threw me into a dungeon. Their torches gave me a brief glimpse of the filthy cell, its edges sprinkled with mouldering straw, before the heavy door slammed shut.

I lay there most of the night, listening to rustling and squeaking all around me in the blackness. Twice, something scampered over my leg, and once, I leapt up as I felt an experimental nibble at an exposed bit of skin.

I had lain awake like this once before, on the night the Greeks took Troy, as I hid in a filthy culvert under the road. That time, I hadn’t known what was coming. This time, there was no doubt. I wasn’t sure which was worse.

After drifting in and out of sleep a dozen times, I was awakened by a noise. The dungeon door was pushed open, and two guards came in. They tied a sack over my head and dragged me out. I was led through some corridors and shoved down onto a chair. My hands were whipped around and tied expertly behind me.

“Stay,” said one. A door closed behind them.

And then, nothing. This was it. I made quiet apologies to my sister, Melantha, who I would never rescue from slavery. And to Helen, whose situation I had made even worse. And to Lopex, Pharos, Deklah, and all the Greeks who had perished in the shipwreck. Would it be beheading, I wondered, a quick stab with a sword, or would they cut my throat as I’d seen the Greek warriors do? They said that some Greeks killed their victims by pulling them into the air with a rope around their neck. I hoped that wasn’t what they did here. It sounded slow.

A door opened. Footsteps walked across a stone floor and stopped nearby. There was the scrape of a chair being pulled up and a moment later, a voice.

“You’re the messenger from Mycenae.”

There wasn’t much to say to that.

“The king wants you executed.” A man’s voice, not young. “For making eyes at his wife, I presume.”

Did the voice sound familiar? Impossible. This was some sort of trick.

Then the voice said something that startled me. “Have you found your sister Melantha yet?”

I twitched. “What?” I said, confused. And then came a sudden rush of recognition as I placed his voice, the last one I would have imagined finding here. “Kassander?”

The bag was tugged off my head. Before me, visible in the light of a torch on the wall, stood a completely bald man with a closely-trimmed beard, wearing a simple white chiton tied at the waist with a blue rope, leaning on a cane. He looked very different from the fellow-slave I’d travelled with nearly two years ago, and I felt a sudden doubt. But then I saw his eyes, and my doubt was gone.

Kassander reached behind me with a knife and cut the hide rope binding me to the chair. I stood up. “There,” he said. “Now we’re even.”

“Kassander!” I exclaimed, giving him a hug.

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