Sunset of the Gods by Steve White Page B

the few strategoi of his own age. This was a man of middle size, lean and wiry, obviously very well preserved for his age, which Jason knew to be about sixty. He still had all his hair, and it was still mostly a very dark auburn, darker than the still visible reddish shade of his graying beard.
    The group began to break up, with Callimachus shuffling off as though stooped under the burden of his responsibilities. Jason wondered if he remembered how to smile. Themistocles led the man who had been expostulating to Callimachus to meet them.
    “These are the nobles from Macedon I mentioned, Miltiades.” He performed introductions, then excused himself. Jason explained that “Alexander” was currently indisposed.
    “I would be, too, if I shared the name of that lickspittle king!” Miltiades gave a patently bogus glare, then laughed. He showed no sign of being scandalized at the presence of a woman in the group, which Jason had hoped would be the case given his background in the wild and wooly frontier of Thrace, where he had married Hegesipyle, the daughter of the Thracian King Olorus. He asked them a series of rapid-fire questions concerning the current state of affairs in those parts, which they were able to answer as they had answered Themistocles.
    “We hope we have been of assistance to you, strategos ,” Jason said afterwards. “And we are grateful to you for taking the time to talk to us. We know how much you have had to concern you, ever since . . . well, the news from Naxos and Delos.”
    “Yes,” said Miltiades grimly. He swept his hand in a gesture that took in the Agora crowd. “Can’t you feel the suspense as we wait to hear where Datis and his fleet will strike next? And just think: the whole thing could have been avoided if only the Ionians had listened to me twenty-three years ago!”
    “You mean,” Landry queried, “the matter of the Great King’s bridge of boats across the Danube?”
    “Yes! Darius, puffed up from his conquests in India, had led his great cumbersome army into Scythia. Of course he couldn’t catch the Scythian horsemen, who harried him so mercilessly he was lucky to escape.” ( Ancestors of the Cossacks , thought Jason, remembering what he knew of Darius’s invasion of the Ukraine in 513 b.c.) “He’d ordered his subject Greek tyrants—including me—to build that bridge, and await his return before the horrible winter of that land set in. I proposed to the others that we destroy the bridge and leave him stranded north of the river, to either freeze or be feathered with Scythian arrows. We would have been free! But that crawling toad Histaeus, tyrant of Miletus, persuaded the others that my plan was too bold, too risky. So the bridge remained, and the tyrants welcomed back their master.”
    “Including you,” Landry ventured.
    “Of course. Do you take me for a fool? Yes, I groveled with the best of them. But later I joined the rebellion Histaeus instigated through his nephew Aristagoras.” Miltiades’s scowl lightened as though at a pleasant recollection. “The only good outcome was what happened to Histaeus after the rebellion had been crushed. He had the effrontery to demand that the Persian satrap send him to Susa to appeal to his old friend the Great King! The satrap complied—by sending his head there, pickled and packed in salt.”
    “There was one other good outcome,” Landry demurred. “You yourself escaped.”
    “Yes—twice. First from the Persians, and then from the Athenian Assembly after arriving here! This, even though after capturing the islands of Lemnos and Imbros from the Persians I gave them to Athens! I have Themistocles to thank for my acquittal. I’ll never forget that, even though he and I don’t agree on everything.”
    “Like the fact that you persuaded the Assembly to execute the Persian emissaries who came demanding submission last year,” Chantal suggested diffidently. “He mentioned that he had reservations about that.” Even