Sunset of the Gods by Steve White

mind.” Jason decided not to pursue the matter, at least for now.
    And maybe not at all , he thought. There’s no point in making an issue of something that I’m hoping will never become an issue.

    In addition to clothing and weapons, something else produced with careful attention to period detail was the money they would be carrying. It was a great convenience that money existed in this target milieu, unlike the Bronze Age, where Jason and his companions had had to carry a load of high-value trade goods, well-concealed (but stolen anyway, to Jason’s still unabated annoyance). The coinage of the period was chaotic, with each city-state issuing its own, but all were widely accepted. They carried Athenian silver oboloi , six of which made a drachma , which would buy a tavern meal with wine, and four of which made a stater. Also, because it would be natural for people coming from Macedon, which had been under Persian influence for a couple of years, they carried Persian gold darics worth about twenty-five drachmai, showing the Great King drawing a bow.
    “The street name for these coins was ‘archers,’ for obvious reasons,” Landry told them. He chuckled. “In the next century, when the Persians finally learned that the way to neutralize the Greeks was to subsidize them to fight each other, one Great King quipped, ‘It would seem that my best soldiers are my archers.’”
    In addition to gear, they needed names. Jason could use his own given name. So could Mondrago; “Alexander” wasn’t uncommon enough to make his being a namesake of his former king remarkable. There was nothing in Greek even close to the other two’s names, so Rutherford let them choose from a list. Landry would go by Lydos, Chantal by Cleothera. In the relatively elementary society of Macedon, people generally had no second names, identifying themselves as “son/daughter of so-and-so” if necessary. Chantal would be a cousin of Jason’s, under his protection and that of his follower Alexander. Landry would be a part-Thracian family retainer, son of freed slaves, educated in Athens years earlier before returning to Macedon, who had been “Cleothera’s” tutor and was still in her service.
    Rutherford lectured them on the timing of their expedition. “Traditionally, it was believed that the Battle of Marathon took place on September 12. But for this to make sense the Persian fleet would have had to spend an inordinate amount of time getting across the Aegean. Furthermore, it is based on the Spartan calendar, which may have been a month ahead of the Athenian. And finally, it rests on unrealistic assumptions about logistics—specifically, the ability of the Persians to keep an army of such size fed. So the weight of scholarly opinion has shifted steadily in favor of a date in August. This is one of the questions you will be able to settle.
    “You will arrive in Attica on July 15, 490 b.c. This will give you time to establish yourselves in a position to observe events, and also to discover the answers to the various unsettled questions concerning the preliminaries to the battle. But this expedition does not involve the evaluation of long-term effects, so an extended stay will be unnecessary. You will only remain for sixty-five days, after which your TRDs will activate on September 18, almost a week after the battle’s latest possible date, although no one really takes the September 12 dating seriously anymore.”
    Landry’s disappointment at the brevity of their stay was palpable.
    “The experience of temporal displacement,” Rutherford continued, “is a profoundly unnatural one which can cause disorientation. We have learned that this effect is intensified—sometimes dangerously so—if it takes place in darkness. Therefore, despite our preference for minimizing the chances of local people witnessing the, ah, materialization, you will arrive not in the dead of night but just after daybreak. Commander Thanou, with his extensive