The sun had almost finished its course by the time the boys caught sight of the forbidden island. It was a monumental pyramid rising out of the sea, with three long sharp rocky pinnacles reaching to the heavens. Silhouetted against the setting sun, they resembled gigantic spires.
Both boys stared in awe. They’d reached it. Poseidon’s Trident.
“Do you think it’s true?” asked Agathos. “Will Poseidon really hear us?”
“I hope so.” Xanthos lowered the sail, took the oars, and rowed toward a breach in the rocks, which concealed a small inlet.
“But where’s his ear? I don’t see any cave. How do we talk to him?”
The cave, they’d been told, was somewhere on the north side of Poseidon’s Trident, and reached only by boat. It was a good thing, too, since setting foot on the sacred island was forbidden. “We’ll have to look in the morning. It’s too dark now.”
When they reached the shallows, Xanthos dragged at the stone-filled net attached to a rope and pitched it over the side to anchor the small vessel near the shore. They ate their supper of olives and cheese, drank from a flagon of water, then settled down for the night, allowing the gentle water to sway them to sleep.
Xanthos awoke to a sudden tilt of their boat and a vise-like grip on his shoulder. A fierce, bronzed face stared directly into his eyes. Before he had time to realize what was happening, two men were hauling him and his brother out of the little boat and into the shallow water. Agathos dug in his heels, his screams piercing as he cried, “No! No! No!”
“By all the gods,” came a voice from somewhere on the beach, “silence that shrieking harpy.”
One of the men raised his hand to strike the small child. Xanthos darted forward, tried to stop him, and was struck instead. “He’s afraid,” Xanthos said, ignoring the pain in his jaw. “It’s forbidden to set foot on the island.”
“Is it?” The burly man picked up Agathos and tossed him onto the gravel in front of the tallest and fiercest of the group.
He looked down at the boy, his dark eyes narrowing. “You’re very small for such a loud harpy.”
Agathos stilled, his eyes widening as the bare-chested man took a step forward, the morning sun hitting the tattoo of an angry boar’s head on his shoulder and the deep scar on his forehead. Someone had branded him with the letter D, signifying that he was, at least at one time, a slave. “What’re you staring at?” the tattooed man said. His heavily accented Greek frightened the boys even more knowing he must be from the island of Samos.
Agathos looked down, edging his way toward Xanthos, who recognized the lot for what they were. Pirates. Their father—before he was lost at sea—had warned Xanthos about the men who sailed the Aegean in a red ship, plundering and enslaving all they came across. “Please. If you let us go, we won’t tell a soul we saw you here.”
“To be sure,” one of the men said, grabbing Xanthos by the scruff of his neck. “Pactyes will want to see the fish we’ve caught before we put them on a spit and roast them.”
With a roar of laughter, the pirates frog-marched the boys across the beach to a serpentine path that wound its way up to the top of the island and the pinnacles of rock, to Poseidon’s Trident.
They reached the peak and stumbled out onto a plateau. The boys looked down to the east side of the island where the Samian corsairs’ ship lay at anchor, its scarlet sails furled. The evil eye on its boar’s head prow stared out as a warning to others. Xanthos, seeing the rows of oars lining both sides of the red ship, all manned by slaves, reached for his brother’s trembling hand. Even he was not big or strong enough to survive that fate.
&n
bsp; He turned his gaze from the red ship to the center of the plateau, where several men—some of them clearly Lydian foreigners—were looking down into a dark cavity at the base of the centermost pinnacle rock of Poseidon’s Trident. One, wearing a purple tunic of shimmering silk that barely concealed his protruding chest and belly, seemed to be directing two Samians using a wooden hoist and pulley to lower an amphora into a cavern. He looked squarely at them. “What have we here, Drakon?”
The man with the boar’s head tattoo said, “Lampros tells me they were sleeping in a boat in the small cove.”
The exquisitely dressed foreigner approached, looking them over, then focused on Xanthos. “What are you doing on this island?”
Xanthos, who’d never seen anyone wearing silken trousers, wondered if the man was sent there by the gods to punish them for trespassing on sacred land.
“Speak up!” the tattooed man ordered. “The honorable Pactyes asked what you are doing here.”
“Fishing.” Even as Xanthos said it, he knew how absurd it sounded. They’d been sleeping long past sunup. True fishermen would’ve been on their way home by then. “But we were blown off course last night,” he added, hoping that would account for their presence.
The foreigner turned his gaze on Agathos. “And what say you?”
Agathos, near tears, looked at Xanthos, then back. “I—I just wanted to whisper in Poseidon’s ear. To send our father home.”
“Whisper in Poseidon’s ear?” Pactyes looked to Drakon for clarification.
He nodded to the cliff’s edge. “A shallow cave in the rocks at sea level. Some of the islanders believe if they whisper into it, Poseidon will hear their prayers.”
Pactyes scrutinized him for several long seconds, then turned back to the boys. “Perhaps Poseidon would be appeased by a sacrifice?” He nodded to one of the Lydians. “Kill them.”
Xanthos tried to throw himself over Agathos to protect him, but one of Pactyes’s men caught him and grabbed the back of his tunic, then drew a long knife, pressing the blade against the boy’s neck.