Excerpt
The sun rose bright on the day before Makron’s trial, and across the close grass, the rocks and the spring flowers, the Spartan army came raiding. With callused hands they swung heavy axes at the roots of olive-trees it would take a generation to replace. Horsemen swept through crops with blazing torches. Abandoned goats were killed and eaten, young herbs were trampled. Somewhere out in the Mesogaia, orange-tongued flames licked venomously at fine-tooled couches and tables in the rooms which had once housed Pamphilos’ Persian silver.

The light of the sun was already beating on the whitewashed walls of Artemis Street when Diokles left home for his usual visit to the Agora, but once he was there he was never seen at the bankers’ tables, at the bars or at Kleitias’ booth. He simply disappeared again back into the darkened side streets and could not be found for the rest of the day.

As evening fell, gnarled farmers watched with stone faces from the city walls as the dying purple of sunset gave way to a scarlet glow around the skyline from the west, the burning of villages from Eleusis all along the plain between Athens and Mount Parnes. Trapped in the city like caged fighting-cocks, charcoal-burners watched their home, Akharnai, rise in funereal smoke against the northern sky, wept with rage and planned unspeakable revenge.

Still no army marched out of the gate, no ships sailed from Peiraieus or Phaleron to harry the coasts of the Spartan homeland. Night began to draw an uneasy darkness over the cramped and angry city. Torches flickered in the streets, and somewhere among the thieves and ghosts in the Potters’ Quarter women began to dance on a rooftop, calling on the god Adonis with the wail of flutes and the jangle of tiny bells.

When Diokles finally returned, rousing Hylas by hammering on the street door, the night was almost sliding into the first damp grey of morning. He ignored Hylas, but as he crossed the fragrant courtyard his lips were moving, obsessively and in silence. In the women’s room he leaned over Helike, who lay on her back snoring gently like a kitten, and let her sleep on.

Tomorrow was the day of the trial. By the end of it Helike would know whether she would have an uncle, or...

Turning his back on the thought, Diokles padded to his bed and collapsed into the fitful sleep of the overtired and overwrought.