Kratos's Arc

Chapter 5 of 11

By dawn the recruits stood on the wet training ground. Chiron had summoned them: hard men and women who came for the promise of a captain. They eyed the flag over the fortress. Kratos read their faces. They did not see him. They saw Zeus's colors, and they waited to be told whose word they truly served. Chiron trotted the line. "I train fighters for a name," he said. "Your captain flies a borrowed one." He pointed his chin at the blue-and-white banner snapping on the tall metal pole. "Bow to that, and you bow to the king. Not to him." A broad recruit spat on the stone. "Then why kneel to Kratos at all?" Others muttered. Kratos felt the ground slipping. Trained soldiers were no use if they answered to the flag and not to him. He could shout them down. He knew it would not hold. Bia stepped beside her brother. She signed, sharp and low. *Take it down.* Kratos frowned. The banner was Zeus's grant. To lower it looked like a break with the king. She signed again, harder. *You are not the flag. Be the name.* Kratos crossed to the pole. He gripped the rope. The recruits went quiet. He hauled the banner down, folded the blue cloth once, and set it against a Greek-carved dumpster at the field's edge. The pole stood bare and bright above them. "I serve Zeus," Kratos said. "That is true. But you do not serve Zeus. You serve me. When I send you, you go under my word, not his cloth. If that shames the king, he can tell me himself." The broad recruit stared. "And when Zeus asks why his flag is down?" "I will answer for it," Kratos said. "You answer to me." Chiron watched, still. Then he struck the stone with a hoof. "That," he said, "is a name worth training for." He turned to the recruits. "Line up. First lesson is falling." They moved. Not all of them fast, but they moved for Kratos, not the pole. Bia caught his eye and gave one short nod. Kratos looked at the folded banner by the dumpster. He had won his recruits by setting the king's colors aside. That would reach Olympus before nightfall. Hermes carried gossip faster than any wind, and a bare pole above a stronghold Zeus had granted was a story worth telling. The field was his now, and the fighters on it were his. But the banner lay folded on the ground, and somewhere the king would hear of it. Kratos had traded Zeus's shelter for his own command. He did not yet know the price.