Spartan Read Online Free PDF

beards. From below, hundreds of ladders were
being placed against the walls, thousands of the enemy soldiers were climbing up from all directions, their weapons in their hands. In silence they scaled the city’s walls.
    The crowd on the bastions suddenly parted and a gigantic warrior appeared on the highest tower. His burnished bronze armour completely covered his body. From his side hung an amber-hilted sword.
Talos felt his eyes dim and his heart slow to match the beating of the drum. He looked again towards the scene that seemed to be fading. The warrior held the lifeless body of a young woman, draped
in black. A black drape, a rose of blood on her breast, a cloud of blonde hair, beautiful . . . how he wanted to touch that hair, caress those delicate, pale lips . . . Talos, the cripple.
    The drum sounded again, louder, always louder. The bronze warriors poured over the walls like a flooding river overflowing its banks. Their swords tore through the great shields of oxhide,
pierced the leather cuirasses. They advanced, endlessly, hundreds of them, towards the man still standing on the highest tower. The great warrior lay down the girl’s fragile body and lunged
into their midst, whirling his amber-hilted sword. Attacked from every direction, he disappeared and re-emerged like a bull among a pack of wolves.
    Silence. Smoking ruins, demolished houses. Dead, all dead. A blanket of dust carried by a warm, suffocating wind covered the martyred bodies, the dismantled walls, the falling towers. A
solitary, motionless figure sat on a smoke-blackened mass. An old man, bent over, with his face hidden in his hands, hands full of tears. The white head lifted . . . a face devastated by pain . . .
the face of Kritolaos!
    *
    Kritolaos’ face, illuminated by a ray of sunlight, was above him. The old man was saying something, but Talos couldn’t hear him at all, as if his mind and his senses
were still prisoners of another world. Suddenly, the boy found himself sitting up on his straw pallet as Kritolaos said, ‘It’s time to get up, Talos. The sun has risen, we must bring
the flock to pasture. What’s wrong with you, boy? Didn’t you sleep well? Come on, the fresh air will do you good and the cold spring water will wake you up. Your mother’s already
poured milk into your bowl. Get dressed and come to eat,’ he added, leaving.
    Talos shook himself. Still dazed, he held his head between his hands and looked slowly around him for the bow: nothing! The bow had disappeared! He searched under the pallet, among the
sheepskins that lay piled up in a corner of the room. Could it all have been a dream? he thought. No, impossible . . . but what, then? Dumbfounded, he moved aside the hanging mat that separated his
sleeping place from the rest of the house and went to sit before the bowl of milk that his mother had poured.
    ‘Where’s my grandfather, mother? I don’t see him.’
    ‘He’s gone out already,’ answered the woman. ‘He said he’d wait for you with the sheep at the high spring.’
    Talos quickly downed his milk, put a piece of bread in his pack, took his staff, and hurried to the place his mother had indicated. The high spring flowed from the mountain not far away from
Talos’ cottage. The shepherds of Mount Taygetus used this name to distinguish it from another that spouted at the large clearing at the edge of the forest, where they usually brought the
animals to drink in the evening before closing them in their pens. Talos crossed the clearing quickly and entered the forest. He started along the high path and soon saw Kritolaos in the distance,
driving the flock along with the able help of little Krios.
    ‘Grandfather, listen, I—’
    ‘I know, you didn’t find the bow.’ The old man smiled and opened his cape. ‘Here it is, boy. In good hands, as you can see.’
    ‘By Zeus, grandfather! I could have died when I didn’t find it this morning. Why did you take it with you? And why didn’t you wait