Acula Read online

  “How about…you come and get my weapons!” Father shouted, echoing the words King Leonidas had told the Persian captain at Thermopylae only months ago. The crowd seemed to gasp in unison. Father’s words seemed to enrage the Persians. One of them pointed his sword at Father from a distance, yelling aggressively in their foreign tongue. Even though the Persians had won the battle, it had been an embarrassing display for their army. The Persians waited for the order, staring up at their captain.

  “Take him by force—kill the boy!” the captain ordered furiously.

  Dust and sparks flew from the ground as Father slammed his bronze shield into the stone brick, pointing his spear at them. He roared, creating a sound I had never heard from him. It sounded primal, like a lion defending his cub from a pack of jackals. I couldn’t see much from inside the protection of his shield. I looked over at his face; he was gritting his teeth, his canines overlapping his lip as he bit it. He glanced back and forth at them savagely.

  I knew Persians would die this day.

  “Father. Your short sword, please. Let me die a Spartan’s death,” I pleaded, beholding the sheathed Xiphos on his hip. He had trained me since the age of four in combat; now fourteen, I was more capable than most grown men. I was terrified, but I wanted Father to be impressed with my courage.

  He looked off into the distance for a moment and sighed, staring back at the Persians. He said nothing, and his eyes danced back and forth like a fire whipping around in a brisk wind. For a moment, I thought he considered allowing me to fight, but something stopped him.

  I could hear the Persians getting closer; it sounded like one of them was dragging a spear or sword across the brick. It grew louder. Then, I felt a great force pushing me back as I toppled over on my backside. Father had shoved me behind the booth of the merchant he’d killed.

  I landed in a tacky puddle of blood, the sudden fall creating a splash that covered me in it. I could feel it in my hair now, the warmth touching my scalp. I turned to my left as I lay down. I was parallel to the dead merchant, staring into his eyes. I froze for a moment. His eyes were open, but lifeless and cold. I felt my skin flush as blood pounded in my ears, each pulse in rhythm with the beating of my heart.

  I rose hurriedly, kneeling as I peeked over the booth counter. Father stood low in a balanced stance facing three Persians. One swordsman each on his left and right, with a spearman at his front. They looked at one another as if to signal a plan of attack.

  “Please! Just lay down your weapons, Spartan,” a middle-aged Greek woman called out.

  “Come on!” Father yelled, ignoring her. Instead, he banged his spear against his shield in defiance. The clanking echoed off the ruins and mountains in the distance. Then, rain began to fall suddenly and heavily as thunder rumbled.

  The swordsman to Father’s left dashed in with an overhead strike, but Father countered the blow with his shield high, parrying early in his attack. This exposed the Persian’s body. Father blocked, then stabbed him immediately after. Lightning flashed just when his spear jabbed inside him.

  I could hear bones scraping as the spear penetrated his ribcage. The man tried to scream, but nothing came out of his mouth but blood. Father bashed the man’s face with his shield, knocking his lifeless body to the ground. Blood coated his shield in a streak where the man’s now broken nose had impacted. Several Greeks turned away from the carnage; some hurried out of the market, while others covered their children’s eyes.

  Father left the spear inside the Persian, spinning his body towards the other swordsman to his right. He exploded into action and unsheathed his short sword in one motion—SHHIIIIIINK—cutting the swordsman’s left leg off at the knee. It was so fast that the Persian had no time to react. Blood spewed into the air, mixing with the rain as the man fell on his back. “Ahh-hhhhhh-hhhh!” he screamed in agony, attempting to cap off the blood flow with his hands. I had watched my father train in combat, but never with such speed. Something was elevating him far beyond anything I had witnessed. For such a large man, he moved like a blur; it was frightening, even for me.

  The spearman began to back away, looking at his captain. Rain funneled down my father’s helmet, streaming off the sharp edges on his bronze cheek guards. He casually pulled his spear out of the Persian lying down on the ground, then wiped the tip against the Persian’s handsomely colored garments to clean it of blood.

  The captain pointed at the spearman aggressively, signaling him towards Father. He stepped closer, raising his wooden shield, mustering up the courage. One of the archers fired an arrow, but Father raised his shield, knocking it aside. “Coward!” he called out as he walked towards them, pointing his spear at them.

  “One man against twelve and you still need arrows?!” an old Greek man said, yelling over the wind. Spartans—and many other Greeks, for that matter—were not fond of archers. We believed that true warriors fought up close and personal.

  Suddenly, I felt a blade to my neck. “Don’t move,” someone whispered. I glanced down, observing a quiver of arrows dangling. One of the archers had snuck around my flank.

  “Spartan!” the archer called out. Father turned and sighed loudly. Maybe he saw no other option; the Persians had made their demands known, and now that they had me an inch from death, he had two choices: fight and lose me for sure, or surrender and have a chance I might live. The prideful Spartan in me hoped this might serve as my honorable death. A small but insistent voice inside muttered in favor of my survival. How would Father choose?

  Slowly, he took off his helmet, then dropped his shield. I watched it fall as if it were descending through mud, much slower than usual. I looked down at the red griffin he had painted on it. The image of Greek power and unity stained from the blood of the fallen Persians.

  “Kill the boy?” the archer asked his captain.

  “Not if you want me to make weapons like I do,” Father said, kneeling down. “He’s my apprentice. It would take me months to train another in his craft,” Father said.

  I didn’t know that much about bronze crafting, but it was quick thinking. The captain squinted his eyes and paused for several moments. “Hm. What’s the boy’s relation to you? Your son? Nephew?” the captain asked, dismounting his horse.

  “Nothing. He was a slave boy I bought…look at his hair, it’s as yellow as the sun. My hair is black,” Father replied.

  “Maybe he has the look of his mother?” the captain asked. He walked over and examined my face, placing his two fingers under my chin as he lifted up my head. Then he glared back at Father. The ten or so Persians that remained surrounded us.

  “…Do what you like with him,” Father said, speaking of me, “but if he doesn’t work with me, it will set my efforts back eight months minimum while I train another.”

  “We have bronze craftsmen already; surely he’s no better than the grown men we already have? Not eight months’ difference? No man fights like you just did unless he has good reason. I’ll ask again, is the boy your relation, or not? You lie again…I’ll kill him. It’s nothing to me; I just lost two men because of you,” the captain said.

  Father slumped his head, briefly glancing at me, his expression darkening at the knife to my throat. His look was of fear, something I had never witnessed. The corner of his lip quivered briefly as he attempted to hide it.

  “Haha! See?” one of the Persians said, pointing his sword at Father. The rest of the Persians started laughing at him.

  “He’s my son!” Father shouted over them. The Persians began to snicker under their breath. I felt the blade dig deeper into my throat. Warm blood trickled down my neck.

  “Take the boy with us, for now,” the captain ordered.

  “What?” the archer asked, pulling the blade from my neck. “We lost two men because—”

  “No. I just wanted him to admit it. We’re not going to kill the boy; he’ll be worthless as a grieving father…we have to give him something to fight for, don’t we?” the captain asked, mussing my hair in an
almost fatherly way. The gesture was rough, though, and it hurt as my head was jostled around.

  “I don’t…understand,” the archer mumbled.

  “Of course you don’t,” the captain replied. “Here’s something you’ll understand—take what we need from the market and kill everyone who remains,” the captain said, smiling.

  Those words were understood, and the Persians reacted quickly to them. People began screaming in terror. The archer made me watch as the other Greeks attempted to scramble away. Most of them were cut down from behind as they ran. Old women, children—it didn’t matter.

  I tried to look away, but the archer dug the blade into my neck. “This is our land now, boy,” he said, laughing. “You watch!”

  The market symbolized the Greek states’ unwillingness to work together. If we all united, we could have outnumbered and overpowered the Persians. Fractured as we were, though, the Persians slaughtered us like sheep cornered against a cliff. In our differences, we failed to unite against the tyrannical siege.

  Chapter 2

  The Mold

  “Acula, wake up,” Father whispered, shaking me. I squeezed the sand beneath me, letting it run between my fingers. I opened my eyes, looking up at the tent canopy above me. It had been a year since we had been captured, and even now I couldn’t believe where I was. My entire life, I had wanted to experience life outside of our village, and now I couldn’t wait to return.

  I sat up, looking at my father. He had an intense look on his face as the muscles in his square jaw were flexed. His dark eyebrows knitted together as he held his finger over his mouth. “Shh, let’s go to work. Quick, before they wake and give us something else to do.”

  I stood up, looking around me at the guards and whores in the room beside us. Naked bodies and wine jars were scattered about. “Don’t look, Acula,” Father warned, but my nostrils were already saturated by the smell of sex, wine, and death. I respected his intentions, but it was too late to preserve my innocence. It was as if he refused to believe I saw the slaughter of all those innocent Greeks back at the market that day. I had also witnessed countless sex acts without his knowledge, usually after Father drifted off to sleep. Maybe it was more comforting for Father to think of me the way I was before.

  “Yes, Father.” But I looked anyway. Some of these foreign beauties were ethereal and impressive to behold. At fifteen, it was a curious time. There was no sense of imagination about a woman’s body here; it was on full display.

  “I said, don’t look,” Father snapped around at me.

  “I didn’t— “

  WHAMP!

  Father smacked me across the face. I froze. My blond hair shifted to the other side of my head from the impact. A fat, drunk slaver woke up from the loud effect, staring at Father for a moment. “He-heeheee.” He grinned, reaching for a bottle of wine before slumping back over unconscious. I wanted to laugh, but my face was still hurting.

  “One day you’ll find a woman…and you can look at her any time you want,” Father said, stopping in his tracks, glaring up into the morning sky through a hole in the tent. I had never once seen him look at another woman. My mother had died shortly after childbirth with me. Father never talked about it. His eyes jumped back and forth, and then he turned away. “Come on.”

  We continued, stepping over a few sleeping slaves as we made our way to the casting pit. Father had a coal fire going. It was time to cast swords.

  Another drunken Persian guard on duty was sleeping right next to the fire. “And they wonder why they need so many soldiers to fight a battle,” Father joked. I smiled as Father pinched a metal flask with his iron clamps. The metal container was about twice the size of a man’s clinched fist and full of a mixture of liquid tin and copper. He moved it into the fire. I could hear it sizzling as some of it spilled over.

  “You still don’t think we could escape?” I asked.

  “No. I don’t. As lax as it appears inside some of these tents, the perimeter is swarming with alert guards. Even if we supplied every slave with weapons, they’d cut us down on horseback or with arrows,” he replied.

  “So…we wait?”

  “The allied Greek forces will make their move. Be patient, even their squabbling, the Greeks will come together. There is too much wealth in this country to allow others to take it.” he said. He moved around some of the charcoals to increase the heat. I began to zone out looking into the fire as sparks flew up. I had something on my mind.

  “Father?”

  “Yes.”

  “The clerk you killed…back at the market that day when we were captured…” I said.

  Father nodded his head slowly as if he knew the question was coming. “What of him?” he asked.

  “You killed him for selling our weapons to the Persians,” I said. He looked down at the fire, moving the bronze to just the right spot. I had helped him cast bronze hundreds of times in the past year, but today I would ask him the question.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “Well…now we’re making weapons for the Persians. Hundreds of them.” I looked away. Father stayed silent, continuing his work until the coals were hot enough. He looked around the room, and I could sense he was in deep thought. I dared not press him before he was ready to answer. Father had taught me to mind my words before speaking, and I knew he was now doing the same.

  To the left of the coal pit was a mold made of clay, a long, cylindrical object about three feet long that we poured the hot liquid blend into. The clay inside the cylinder had been formed in the shape of a sword. As the liquid cooled, it meshed with the clay, solidifying the sword’s shape.

  We stared into the fire without a word until it was time. Then Father used his iron clamps to pull the hot flask out.

  “A beautiful thing, how the right blend of copper and tin makes bronze,” he said, walking over to the clay mold. “Here, hold.” He chiseled the top off of the flask while I held the clamps. He tapped at it about four times, clank, clank, clank…clank…cheeeeeeshh…

  The guard beneath us turned over on his side, wrapping a thick cloth around his head. He mumbled a few words in his sleep. My eyes met Father’s as I assessed his reaction.

  “Hey—pay attention, don’t worry about him…pour,” he said as a few drops spilled onto the ground. I remembered Uncle Icar describing a volcano eruption he’d seen in a faraway land. I tilted the clamps, and the molten alloy reminded me of the lava my uncle described. The bronze seeped into the clay mold. “There…good,” he said.

  “I did it.”

  “Look at you. Barely any spilled that time,” he said, grinning and nodding his head in approval. He stuck his bottom lip out a little bit. “Not bad at all.”

  He then seemed to ready to answer my question.

  “Ahem…Yes, Acula, we are making weapons for the Persians,” Father said as the blade began to cool. I glared up at him, holding the clamps until the last drop emptied.

  Father leaned in close, pointing at the blade and lowering his voice. “The difference is, none of these are as strong as Spartan bronze. It looks and feels like it—I’ve created alloy that feels sturdy, has enough flex—but once it clashes against true Greek bronze…it will break,” he whispered, raising one eyebrow.

  “I didn’t notice the difference,” I examined.

  “Nor have they. The first fifty swords we made were strong—the Persians tested those—but since then, I’ve been diluting the composition slowly. Thousands of swords that are worse than what they had to begin with. If they trained more often, we might have problems, but as you can see, they have other things on their minds,” he said, smiling, glancing over at the drunken guard. He then plunged the hot clay mold into a vat of water. Steam viscerally exhaled, creating a popping sound.

  “Here, hold it,” he said as I took the clamps. We let it cool for several minutes before pulling it out of the water.

  “You see, it takes a keen eye to detect these…flaws,” he said, pulling the sword from the vat. He then laid dow
n the sword, lightly chiseling away the clay mold, exposing the finished product.

  “Looks good?” he asked.

  “To me it does,” I replied.

  “To most it does. That’s the thing, in order to build true strength, it’s a process, a precise blend. It takes dedication, stress, extreme heat, then cooling to strengthen a blade that holds up under tension…a man is much the same way.”

  “A man?”

  “Yes. As you know, bronze is the standard of strength for Spartans. A very small mixture of tin with mostly copper creates the most resilient bronze blade,” Father said, picking up a sword, closely examining its edge. He then sat down on a tree stump and sighed. “Some swords even have the appearance of true bronze, but once tested, they break, as does the weak man.”

  “Like the clerk at the market,” I replied. Father glared up at me, nodding his head in agreement.

  “He was seduced by greed at the expense of his fellow Greeks. He sold my weapons to the enemy. He broke. His composition was corrupted—too much tin in his bronze, perhaps?” Father asked. The thought his blood splattering on my face forced its way into my mind. I thought of his vacant stare, the empty eyes I had seen when I had fallen beside his corpse.

  “Perhaps,” I zoned off. I wondered if I’d ever forget the feeling of his blood on my scalp, or the gurgling sounds he had made just before his life slipped away. Now, the imagery of his death was forged with his decision, his corruption.

  “I reacted in haste killing the merchant. I wanted you to see the punishment for treason, but I also feared he might escape with the Persians approaching.”

  “Father, but he deserved punishment. It is law.”

  “Of course, but it is not my place to play executioner. He should have stood trial and punished by his peers. Not me. At the age of thirty-eight, I am molding myself for the better. My life after the wars, my life by the fire has taught me much, but I still stumble. It’s been a long, difficult cast. But like the sword, we all start with a mold; you had one, as did I. It’s given to us at birth. You see the lines in this mold?” he asked, running his fingers down the clay mold of a sword.