Free Spartans at the Gates by Noble Smith

fear on their faces. He held up his left hand in a sign of peace and slowly sank to his knees, dropping his chin to his chest.
    â€œMothers,” he said in a croaking voice. “I need water. Please. I can pay.” He tried to grasp the leather pouch at his belt, then swayed. He heard one of the women scream as everything turned to blackness before his eyes.

 
    SIX
    â€œAs wily as Odysseus,” grumbled Chusor as he climbed the steep goat path that wended its way up the Kithaeron Mountains.
    He still reeled from his meeting with the Arkon. He’d known Menesarkus for only two years, but he’d seen enough of the man in action to realize that he was a strategist without compare. Their conversation of an hour ago reinforced this notion beyond a doubt.
    â€œHow could he have known my greatest desire?” Chusor asked the stones, the trees, and the birds of the hillside. “How did the Arkon know the one thing that would keep me here in this doomed city? Risking my neck against a Spartan siege?”
    If Chusor helped defend Plataea, then he would be granted Plataean citizenship. But only after the Spartans had departed the Oxlands. That was the preposterous stipulation that Menesarkus had presented to him.
    It was a ludicrous arrangement … so why had Chusor said yes without hesitation?
    He paused and wiped the sweat from his brow, staring down at the citadel five hundred feet below the trail. His gaze wandered from the jumble of hovels in the agora to the overcrowded marketplace, and then to the gates on the eastern wall. One of the great portals had been opened to allow people to exit the citadel, and men and women were heading into the countryside, looking around fearfully for Spartans as they went. Nobody knew how much longer the Spartans would let Plataeans move about unmolested.
    Chusor peered to the northeast—two miles from the citadel of Plataea—to where the massive earthen-walled structure of the Persian Fort loomed. This fortification was big enough to hold four citadels of Plataea within its twenty-foot-high bastions. It had been constructed almost fifty years ago by King Xerxes’s army of half a million warriors and slaves. It was a marvel of engineering and industriousness, for it had been erected in less than a week. But the place had become a killing ground when the Greek allies had broken through the Persian and Theban shield walls, trapping the invaders inside their own fortress: a battle in which Menesarkus, only sixteen years old at the time, had won renown by slaying the Persian general Mardonius.
    The Persian Fort became a tourist destination after that, visited for decades by warriors from all over Greece. Nikias told him that he and his friends used to play inside the fort when they were children, searching in the tall grass for treasures: bronze arrowheads and spear points, pieces of armor, and even Persian gold and rings. For the Persian nobles had gone to battle vainly arrayed in all their wealth—riches that had been divided up between the Greek allies after the Persians were wiped out. The Plataeans had used their share of the gold to make Plataea’s walls higher and stronger, and to construct public buildings and temples, turning their city into one of the strongest and most beautiful in Greece.
    Two weeks ago, after the Theban reinforcements had been defeated in front of the gates of the citadel, the Spartans had arrived in the Oxlands—too late to help their Theban allies. The Spartans had taken over the Persian Fort as their base of operations, swarming into the place like a flock of predatory birds into abandoned nesting grounds. And now they were waiting silently … waiting for the Plataeans to join them in their war against the Athenians, or suffer the torments of a siege.
    From the center of the Persian Fort a gray haze rose toward the blue sky—smoke from hundreds of campfires. And on the parapets of the walls, moving