Athenian Steel (Book I of the The Hellennium) (11 page)

Taking a beat to recover from that blow,
Demosthenes answered, "No. No, I do not."

"But surely you intend to. If you had died
on the island, any children you might one day have fathered would
never exist, would they? Nor their children's children, or their
children, and so on. So... suppose I knew that some one of your
descendants not yet born would become my enemy," Thalassia
continued. "What might I do to destroy him?"

"You could... kill me," Demosthenes said,
feeling suddenly ill at ease with the topic.

"And what if I didn't know that my enemy
was 
your
 descendant, but just... someone's,
somewhere?"

Demosthenes considered. He did not like
where his thoughts took him. "If you were devoid of conscience, if
you were a 
monster
," he said, "then I suppose you might
kill a great many people, in the hope that the right one was among
them."

Thalassia rolled her eyes, dismissing his
judgment. "Or," she began emphatically, "one could simply change
the courses of events so that 
different
 people
died, and 
different
 ones were born. Not more or
fewer, necessarily, just 
different
. Instead of a
hundred Athenians lying dead on a certain battlefield, a hundred
Spartans do. Your aims are served, and so are mine."

"Whose line is it that you would see wiped
out?" Demosthenes asked quietly.

From her place on the bed, Thalassia fixed
him with a glare of an intensity he had only previously observed in
the moments before she had attacked him. "You know," she said. "If
I wasn't wrong to choose you, then you already know."

"The Worm," Demosthenes declared with
confidence. "What did he do to you?"

Lips tight, Thalassia shook her head. "One
day you can ask me that and I'll answer... but not today." Rolling
forward, she crawled closer to him and settled on the corner of the
bed. She said with mischief in her cool eyes, "Today... was a bad
day. I got attacked. 
Stabbed
."

She slipped first one shoulder and then the
other out of her trashed chiton. The garment settled onto her
thighs, but remained there but a moment before she shifted her legs
to remove it entirely. Kneeling on the bed, she reached out and set
a hand on Demosthenes' knee.

"I would very much like to end it," she
said, "...in a 
better
 way."

She must have bathed herself in the sea
along with her garment, for her honey-colored skin was covered all
over with a fine tracery of brine. Her breasts would have served
Praxiteles fine as models for those of a nymph carved in Parian
marble, but Demosthenes' eye was drawn to the raw, black gash just
underneath them. The half-day-old wound was covered by a scab and
surrounded by a faint pink halo and clinging flecks of dried
blood.

Demosthenes dragged his eyes to a random
wrinkle in the bedclothes. He said nothing, for he was not entirely
sure how best to reject woman who would smash her enemies' skulls
and hack off their limbs, or else wipe them and their lines from
existence entirely.

Thalassia sighed, withdrawing her hand. "I
understand," she said. "You're Athenian. You like boys, don't
you?"

"I.. I like women just fine," Demosthenes
returned. He was unsure where to focus his gaze, and so it flitted
around even while powerful base instincts urged it back to
Thalassia's body. "But I prefer women who do not have a history of
assaulting me. And, for that matter, ones who... lack stab
wounds."

"Pfft, you gave me that," she said. "But
fine, I'll wrap it so you won't even notice. It's not like you have
to stick your cock in it. Unless you want to, I guess. As for the
other thing... I said I was sorry."

"I know, but... still."

Thalassia scoffed, settling back into a
casual pose which left her legs parted shamelessly. Her body had
not a wisp of hair upon it below the neck, Demosthenes could not
help but note before he shifted his gaze even farther from her,
onto the patterned plaster floor.

"If you think this isn't my real body," she
assured him, "it is. I haven't got tentacles, talons, feathers,
snakes for hair, or anything like that. This is really how I look.
I'm as human as you... only better."

"It is not that." This much was true. Had
not the physical forms of deadly Medea, bewitching Kirke,
treacherous Klytaimnestra and a hundred other women, mortal and
demigoddess alike, been those of pleasing females? Not all
dangerous women had claws.

"What, then?" Irritation edged Thalassia's
voice.

Demosthenes searched for gentle words with
which to voice the thinking that kept his cock firmly in check...
or rather kept it unfirm. He failed to find them quickly
enough.

"Our brief history leaves me hesitant to
speak any ill of you," he admitted.

With a sigh, Thalassia levered her splayed
thighs shut. "No," she said resignedly. "Speak freely. I won't hurt
you, I promise."

"Very well..."

Still, what to say? In spite of her promise,
he could hardly risk speaking the undiluted truth, which was that
based on the few hours of their acquaintance, he had found
Thalassia to be an opportunistic, foul-mouthed, ill-tempered
butcher, possibly a traitor, possessed of neither modesty nor
morals.

She was, in short, everything a good woman
should not be.

Just in time, Demosthenes' straining mind
produced an excuse which was equally true, yet less likely to
provoke.

"If you would have me enter into partnership
with you," he said, "I would prefer my judgment not be clouded by
the pleasures of your flesh... which, doubtless are...
significant." She struck him as one susceptible to a well-placed
compliment, and this was no lie.

He finished and held his breath while
Thalassia's pale eyes appraised him. At length, her hard expression
broke into a half smile. "I thought you said Athenians loved the
truth."

Demosthenes released his held breath and
drew another with which to speak, but found himself lost for a
plausible denial.

"You can't lie to me," she said, thankfully
without a hint of remonstration. "My senses are far better than
yours. Your skin, your breath, your heartbeat give you away. Give
me the real reason. I can take it."

Feeling defeated, but at the same time
reassured, Demosthenes resolved to oblige her. Still, he spoke in
terms rather milder than he might have. "It is... not only a
repellent outer form which makes a monster," he said.

"Hmmh," Thalassia intoned. "A pretty
monster, am I?" She shrugged and clicked her tongue. "That's fine.
I've been called..."

She hesitated, and Demosthenes knew
why. 
Traitor
. 
Wormwhore
...

"...worse," she finished. "It's your loss.
Where I come from, men aren't so afraid of women."

"It is not fear that–" Demosthenes began to
object. Then he said instead, in anger, "This is my world. I have
no obligation to defend it, or myself, against your criticism."

"Fine." Thalassia sat on the bed with legs
tightly crossed, frowning down at a naked thigh which she tapped
absently with the tip of one finger. "If you change your mind
soon," she said, "the invitation stands. But as your ally, I should
warn you that if you don't... and maybe even if you do... I'll find
someone else."

They sat for some seconds in a silence which
Demosthenes recognized as awkward. Whether Thalassia thought the
same, he could scarcely know or tell.

"So this place you come from that is full of
braver men than I," Demosthenes asked to break the silence, "what
is it called?"

With a groan, Thalassia flopped back on the
bed. "I'm sick of talking. But if we have to do that instead of
having fun, at least come lie next to me. I'm cold."

Demosthenes touched hand to brow; it came
away moist with sweat. "Even were it not high summer, I would have
trouble believing that a draft causes you discomfort where a blade
between the ribs does not."

"All right, then I'm lonely. Just get over
here."

Seeing no immediate harm in it, Demosthenes
rose from his stool and crawled onto the bed beside naked
Thalassia. As soon as he was in place, she laid her cheek on his
shoulder, her soft hair tickling his neck. A warm hand settled onto
his chest.

It was of no concern.... His mind and his
will were strong. He was no animal or barbarian, enslaved to the
body's baser instincts. Thalassia's touch, in fact, far from
exciting him, caused his flesh to recoil, so long as he kept at the
forefront of his mind the grim vision of what those soft hands had
done to Eden.

"You were going to tell me where you came
from," Demosthenes prompted when she seemed content to just lie
there.

"The 
Veta
 
Caliate
,"
she finally said. "It's not a place so much as a thing. An army, of
sorts, led by Magdalen. We are recruited from throughout time and
space. Mostly women, but not entirely."

"An army of women," Demosthenes mused. It
was an idea far removed from the realm of the possible in Athens,
indeed anywhere in the civilized world. "For what purpose?"

"Magdalen's," Thalassia answered. "No one
but she sees more than a fraction of the whole. We are given orders
not knowing what they mean, except that they serve her plan."

"What sort of orders?"

Thalassia was a warm weight on his shoulder,
a silken voice in his ear. "Assassination of one target or many.
Transport of individuals from one layer to another. Sometimes we'll
compel two people to breed together."

"
Compel them to
–"

Demosthenes did not bother to finish. Better
simply to move on. Likewise, he would have to be sure to ask
Thalassia some other day, among so very many other things, about
this term layers. Eden had also used it.

"You mean to say that you kill people, and
commit these various other acts upon them, without ever knowing
why?"

"Magdalen commands, the Caliate obeys,"
Thalassia answered. "It is the price for the beings we become, the
lives we lead, the wonders we see. But... I have not done many of
those things myself. Mostly I transport the ones who do. I
am... 
was
... a pilot."

Demosthenes could scant imagine the sort of
craft in which she and her kind must travel. But lessons in
shipcraft were not his foremost objective at present; that was
knowledge of those who used them, particularly the one before
him.

"Does your kind feel pain?" he asked,
thinking of the sword piercing Thalassia's heart, of Eden's head
reduced to a mound of pulp and splintered bone.

"I feel as much or as little as I wish,"
Thalassia said. "If I want, and sometimes I do, I can make it so
that the slightest touch"–her finger traced a delicate, meandering
line on Demosthenes' linen-clad breast–"sends me to the peak of
ecstasy. I can turn intense pain into pleasure. Every bit of my
body, inside and out, is in my control." She laughed faintly.
"Maybe that adds to your understanding of why we are so willing to
follow Magdalen."

It did, Demosthenes thought, even if he did
not much like what it said about Magdalen's followers. It also told
him nothing about why Thalassia would betray them, assuming Eden
had spoken truly.

Thalassia sighed lightly, hot breath
tickling the skin of Demosthenes' neck. She was so solid and real,
and yet how could she be anything but a wisp, a fantasy?

"I don't need much sleep," she said. "But
this hole you put in me will finish healing faster if I do." She
added hopefully, "Unless... you've changed your mind?"

"No," Demosthenes said gently. He glanced
down at the head on his shoulder and saw that Thalassia's eyes were
shut. Since he had lain beside her, Thalassia's tone had grown ever
more relaxed. If he was not mistaken, her accent had faded to where
she could almost be mistaken for a native Athenian.

A long silence ensued, filled only by
Thalassia's soft, slow breathing and the equally rhythmic, echoing
crash of waves breaking far below the chamber window on the rugged
shore of Pylos harbor. Her heart beat pulsed against Demosthenes'
side. She had a heart, then. One which he had cut in half today,
yet there it was, still beating...

Just when he thought she was surely asleep,
the naked, beautiful monster upon his shoulder asked, "You will
take me to Athens?"

"I see little choice," Demosthenes answered.
"You are far too dangerous to leave behind to proposition men of
other cities... as I presume you did the Spartans on the island."
He pondered a moment and concluded, "You warned them of my
attack."

Thalassia confessed without shame,
"Yes."

"Then your help did them little good... or
did it?"

"Styphon made his choice. Things might have
been different. But the Spartans are a backward-looking people. You
and yours are different, I hope. I wish only to look forward."

"I would look in all directions,"
Demosthenes said. "As you say yourself, the past bears heavily on
the future, and you must open your past to me, Thalassia.
Completely. If I am to work alongside you, I must have greater
forthrightness than I yet have witnessed from you."

He looked down and found Thalassia asleep.
No matter. If her senses really were so keen as to let her discern
truth from lie, then she had heard him. She had heard.

Sleep was fitful.  Demosthenes awoke
more than once, and if not for the warmth next to him and the mass
of dark hair on his chest, he might have thought himself emerging
from a dream.  Each time he awoke, realization hit him in the
pit of his bruised stomach that his life had been forever changed
by this being's entrance into it.  In the light of day, he had
seen no choice but to accept her, but night was ever the time in
which doubts drifted up from the mind's murky depth to bob on the
surface.  And so, in between rounds of shallow sleep, he began
to second-guess himself.