Celestial Matters Read Online Free Page A

stepped onto the Phoenician ship and strode briskly toward me. As she neared, I began to make out the person under the steel. Her skin had the terra-cotta coloring that identifies the native of North Atlantea and her long, braided black hair, sharp features, and wiry, athletic build told me she was from the Xeroki city-states. But her eyes were a color I had never seen, golden like ’Elios, but with a glint that I thought at the time was coldness, as if the gates of her soul were two wards of frozen fire.
    “Commander Aias?” she asked in a voice that perfectly melded Xeroki syllabling with ’Ellenic enunciation.
    I nodded, unable to look away from her cold-gold eyes.
    “You must come with me,” she said like a judge passing sentence.
    “What?”
    She opened a thin leather pouch strapped to her belt and handed me a sheet of papyrus. It bore a few lines of mechanical block printing, two signatures, and the seal of the Delian League: two circles interlocked, the left one containing Athena’s owl, the right one ’Era’s peacock.
    The message read:
    The scholar Aias of Athens, scientific commander of the celestial ship Chandra’s Tear, is ordered to accept Captain Yellow Hare of Sparta as his bodyguard and obey any commands she deems necessary for the protection of his life.
    By order of
    Kroisos, Archon of Athens
    Miltiades, Archon of Sparta
    I read the letter thrice, hoping to make some sense of it. The idea of a Spartan captain assigned the lowly task of bodyguard was ludicrous; if the Archons had ever set my father such a menial job he’d have boiled into a rage, but this Yellow Hare seemed to accept it like a stoic. And why after three years did I suddenly need a bodyguard? Had the Archons somehow known about the battle kite? No, impossible!
    “What does this mean?” I asked her. “What’s happened?”
    “My orders had no explanation. I was called, I came.”
    “Do you know how that battle kite reached here?”
    “No.”
    “Do you know why it attacked this merchantman?”
    “It must have been sent to kill you,” she said. “Now come with me to the Lysander so I can prevent the next attempt.”
    “To kill me?” I said. “Of all the military targets in the Mediterranean why would the Middlers send a battle kite to kill me?”
    “I do not know,” she said. “But I was told that attempts would be made on your life. Commander Aias, I must insist that you come with me.”
    I found myself momentarily unable to move; my mind, honed by long years of Akademe training, needed to understand what was happening before I acted. And to leave the fragile Tyrian merchantman for the safety of the battleship would be to give in to ignorance. But I couldn’t defy the orders of the Archons or the Spartan confidence in Captain Yellow Hare’s voice; I gathered my traveling bag and followed her onto the Lysander. All the while my heart was churning up possible explanations for this impossible attack.
    My soft leather sandals slapped harshly against the steel deck of the warship, but my new bodyguard’s bronze leggings made no noise at all, as if the clash of metal against metal was a sacrilege she was too holy to commit.
    Leather-armored seamen stopped their work, leaving guns unloaded and decks unswabbed to salute her as we walked down the steel-canopied foredeck toward the battleship’s prow. But though they saluted, the sailors gave Captain Yellow Hare a wide berth, as if unsure how to treat the high-ranked landlubber.
    We passed by an open hatch in which I saw a ladder that led down to the crew’s quarters. Below there would be baths and a place to rid myself of my itchy, salt-stained robes. “I would like to change my clothes,” I said.
    Captain Yellow Hare shook her head. “The spaces below are too confined. An assassin might be hiding there.”
    “On a Spartan warship? That’s impossible.”
    “No more impossible than a battle kite reaching the heartlands of the League.”
    “But—”
    She chopped the