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sacred covenant meant that no matter how bitterly he and Timocrates fought they would stand shoulder to shoulder against a common enemy, unite against a common threat, and lay down their lives if the need arose. Memnon sighed, leaned down, and kissed her hair. In a soft voice, he said, “Remember me with kindness, if not love.”
    The sound of her sobbing followed him into the street.

     
    T HE WALLED VILLA OF T IMOCRATES LAY ON THE NORTHERN SLOPES OF THE acropolis, overlooking the least of Rhodes-town’s four harbors. The path Memnon chose carried him through neighborhoods where the violence had come and gone. Shops and homes gutted by the mob were defiled again as scavengers of every stripe picked through the smoldering ruin, oblivious to the survivors who crept from hiding to survey the devastation. Bonfires spewed a pall of smoke into the air, a shroud that could not be seen in the darkness, only felt; the flames added an unclean orange glow to the oppressive atmosphere.
    Memnon jogged along. With each step, the impression of the mob being led—focused, rather—strengthened in his mind. The destruction was not wholesale, as one would have expected from a rampaging horde; nor did it radiate out from its flashpoint in concentric waves, as though following the whims of capricious looters. No, this mob kept an even course, unwavering, flowing down the street as water through a sluice. At one point, where the avenue narrowed into a natural bottleneck, the democrats had thrown up a barricade of wagons and carts to dam this rage-swollen river of humanity. It proved too flimsy.
    Memnon slowed. Amid the detritus of the splintered barricade, a score of bodies peppered the ground, some slashed and trampled, others pierced by arrow and spear. A man with the dark copper complexion of a sailor sat against the wall of a building, holding glistening loops of intestine in his hands. He looked at Memnon, confusion plain in his glassy eyes, and opened his mouth to speak. Blood gushed down his chin. Memnon turned away, a cold knot forming in his belly as he grew cognizant of the sounds rising around him. Whimpers of fear and pain mixed with keening wails; stammered prayers were lost amid pleas for succor. The stench of blood and bowel tainted the heavy air.
    “It’s not for the squeamish,” he heard his brother’s voice resonate in his skull. Years ago, he had asked Mentor what his first battle was like, how it differed from the poesy of Homer. The elder son of Timocrates answered him with unaccustomed gravity. “Forget fancy tactics and
paeans
to the gods. To kill a man, you must face him eye to eye and plant your spear in his guts before he does the same to you. When the blade goes in, you’ll see his eyes change—anger, fear, pain, grief—a whole range of emotions that would do Euripides proud. You’ll hear him scream, an animal sound like nothing you’ve ever heard, and you’ll feel hot blood spurt out over your hands. Then, as the stink hits you, you realize the worst of it.”
What could be worse than that?
Memnon muttered, his face pale. Mentor draped his arm around his young brother’s shoulder and gave him a gruff hug. “What’s worse is realizing it could have been you.”
    “What would you do tonight, brother?” Memnon said aloud. He crossed through the breach in the barricade. More bodies lay on the other side, victims of a barrage of rocks and hunting arrows, though only one caught his eye. Memnon stopped. In the lee of an overturned produce cart, a white-haired old man lay supine, his face a mask of blood from where a lead sling bullet had sheared through his forehead. For the span of a heartbeat, the icy talons of Deimos clawed at Memnon’s lungs, freezing the very breath in his chest.
Is that you, Father?
Shaken, he stumbled to his knees. With a strip of cloth torn from the old man’s robe, Memnon wiped away the blood obscuring the corpse’s visage, peered closer, and gave an explosive sigh of relief.