Athenian Steel (Book I of the The Hellennium) (14 page)

He had barely begun the walk home when he
heard a sudden crunch of hurried footfalls to his left and looked
over in time to see a figure which might have been one of those
nymphs to whom the wood was dedicated fall into step beside him on
the trail. 

How Thalassia had managed to keep track of
him in the Pynx, a place where no woman was allowed, remained a
mystery.  It was one she could keep for now.  He had not
seen his home in three months and would let nothing slow his
return.

At some point in his flight, the laurel
crown which had been set upon Demosthenes' head in Piraeus tumbled
off.  He left it where it fell as an offering to the
whispering goddesses.  Thalassia might have been one of those
nymphs, a silent shade moving alongside him with no evidence of
exertion.  They shared no words during the swift passage
through the wood, and soon entered onto streets which were mostly
deserted on account of the very festivities they had fled.  A
few turns down residential streets, past houses painted in pale
reds and yellows, their neatly kept rooftop terraces and flowering
gardens empty but for fleeting glimpses of wives, daughters and
slaves, brought them to the well-made wooden gate of Demosthenes'
modest residence.

He had scarcely put his hand on the gate's
latch to enter its short colonnade of palms when a piercing shriek
assaulted his ears.  Out of the dwelling's main entrance burst
a slight, pale figure with flowing hair of deepest red that tumbled
in loose curls from beneath a silvered fillet.  Dressed in her
finest embroidered long chiton, Eurydike scrambled down the
palm-lined path, clutching against her chest the house's ceremonial
rhyton, a glossy black horn-shaped vessel painted with a scene of
Odysseus skewering five suitors of Penelope.  Its contents
sloshed in time with the slap of her sandals on the flagstones.
 

At the small marble cult statue of Zeus that
stood just beyond the gate, she skidded to a halt.  The two
silver pins that fastened her garment over freckled shoulders
heaved, and so did the full breasts between which the rhyton was
pressed.  The lips on Eurydike's likewise freckled face were
twisted in barely suppressed laughter.

Demosthenes could scant help but chuckle
softly himself.  He had purchased Eurydike two years prior to
replace a male housekeeper loaned from his father Alkisthenes.
 He had gone to the slave markets intending to bring back
another male, but red-haired Eurydike, just out of girlhood, had
caught his eye.  She alone among the poor wretches on offer
had a rag clutched between her teeth.

“A beating if she drops it,” the slaver
explained.  “Foul mouth on that one!  Since you've got
the funds, I can't think why you'd want a Thratta anyway.”  
He laughed.  “Those sheep-brains live in mud holes and eat
straw, so what can they know about housekeeping, eh?  Besides,
like I say, this one's got a mouth on it.  If she ain't using
it to curse or spit at you, she's biting you, the little bugger.”
 He sounded as though he spoke from experience.  “Bite
your nutsack clean off, she will.  No, come over here instead.
 I've got a fresh-faced little Arkadian for you.  Good
and docile.”

“Let me hear her,” Demosthenes requested,
for Eurydike's bright green eyes had captured his attention.
 Those eyes, along with her freckled skin, copper hair, and
the bands of black pigment encircling each of her upper arms made
her appearance typically tribal Thracian.

Reluctantly, the slaver tugged the rag from
Eurydike's mouth.

“Choose me, lord!” she said urgently.
 “I swear I will be good to you!”

With that, to the slaver's dismay, the deal
was done, and Demosthenes walked off with a foul-mouthed barbarian
girl in tow, having spent barely half the silver with which he had
come prepared to part.  Whenever Eurydike angered him, which
was often enough, he could recall that day and his anger faded.
 He had been warned away but taken her anyway, out of spite
and perhaps the love of a challenge.

Today, behind the bounding Eurydike on the
garden path leading to his home, making his approach in a more
dignified manner, was Phormion, Demosthenes' paternal second cousin
and the keeper of his home while he was away.  Phormion bore a
superficial resemblance to his elder cousin thanks to the sandy
curls which crowned his head.  His career, too, might have
resembled his cousin's but for the fall in his youth which had left
him lame in one leg.  And so, although he was in his early
twenties, Phormion hobbled up to the gate like a man three times
that age, leaning on an Egyptian walking stick, a gift from
Demosthenes, its ebony head carved in the likeness of a jackal.

Reaching the gate, Phormion opened it while
impatient Eurydike bounced on sandaled heels behind him, frothing
the wine inside its horn-shaped flask.  However eager she was
to share fond words and an embrace with her master, etiquette
dictated that a slave wait until after any citizens present had
said their greetings.

On the threshold, the cousins embraced.
 “You bring us great pride,” Phormion said.  He produced
in one hand, dangling from a leather thong, the iron key to
the 
oikos
.  Even if the house's gate was rarely
locked, its key was the symbol of its mastery.  Handing it
over, Phormion spoke formulaic words, “I gladly surrender back unto
thee that which you charged me to protect.”

By now Eurydike threatened to vibrate out of
her speckled Thracian skin.  Green eyes beaming, she raised
the black rhyton in both hands and practically threw it into
Demosthenes' arms.  Accepting the horn, Demosthenes removed
the cover at its tip and splashed wine onto the stone plinth atop
which rested the thick-bearded marble bust of 
Zeus
Herkeios
, Zeus of the Courtyard.  As he poured wine onto
stone already well-stained purple by libations past, he spoke
simple words of gratitude for his safe homecoming.  When the
rhyton was empty, he stoppered it and set it beside the bust.

No sooner had he put it down than Eurydike
lunged, flinging tattooed arms about his chest and burying her
cheek in his chiton.  Accepting her into his arms, Demosthenes
told her, “How I have missed you, bright eyes.”

Eurydike turned her face upward and asked
excitedly, “Really?”

“How could I not?”  He bent his head
and kissed her forehead at the center of the triangle formed by the
two halves of her center-parted copper hair and the fillet of
silver which secured them above her brows.  Eurydike despised
imprisoning her tumble of curls in fashionable plaits and braids,
perhaps because they did not readily lend themselves to taming.
 A fillet and the occasional ribbon were the most she ever
suffered.

“I have a gift for you,” Demosthenes said,
and the slave beamed still more.

Her gift, hanging at his thigh by a short
cord from the belt of his chiton, was the only spoil of Pylos he
had carried on his person from the ships.  Detaching Eurydike
to get at it required more effort than detaching the gift.

“A Spartan's iron dagger,” he announced when
he had succeeded at both tasks and held the gift out by its plain
rawhide scabbard.  

Squealing her gratitude, Eurydike took the
handle, drew it and admired the blade with mouth agape.  The
knife was blunt, its edge even curled over in some places, for it
had probably been put to every imaginable use by the besieged
Lakedaemonians.  But that didn't matter one bit to Eurydike.
 She knew as well as the giver that the item was not truly
meant to be useful.  It was a token of trust, for an armed
slave was one with the power to cut her master's throat in the
night.

Tears welled in Eurydike's green eyes by the
time Demosthenes shifted her to his left side, where she nestled
under his arm, clutching her gift more tightly than she had the
rhyton.

“For you, cousin,” Demosthenes said to
Phormion, who knew well why he had to come second and betrayed no
offense, “a full Spartan panoply.  It will be brought to your
home.  Alas, minus the shield,” he added disapprovingly.
 “Kleon intends to use those to line the Painted Stoa as
testament to the victory which even now he claims as his own.”

As was customary, Phormion tried twice to
refuse the gift, but once the attempts were rebuffed, he accepted
with obvious pleasure.  Greetings over and gifts given, there
was little more to be done to forestall a potentially fraught
introduction.  Up until now, Thalassia had stood a mute shadow
in the street several paces away, drawing occasional flicked
glances from Phormion and Eurydike. Now both sets of eyes locked
upon her.

Demosthenes waved an arm in her direction.
 “This is Thalassia.  She is...”

Conscience made him hesitate.  How
could he lie to his blood-kin and the 
pallake
 he
trusted so deeply as to gift her a dagger?  Surely, the
charade was doomed to crumble.  Perhaps this was all a
mistake...

“A spoil of the battle, my lord,” Thalassia
finished for him with head bowed, hands demurely clasped in a
pretense of humility that actually was convincing. “Your humble
slave.”

Demosthenes tightened his arm around
Eurydike's shoulders, mostly to reassure the girl, but also to
restrain her if need be.  Indeed, she tensed.  How could
she not upon learning that the size of her master's household was
to grow by half, and that worse still, the new addition was, by
most standards, more desirable than she.  Thracian slave
girls, 
Thrattai
, were commonplace in Athens, while
women of Thalassia's more Persian tint were rarer and fetched a
higher price.

Eurydike's worries might have been eased
then and there by simple reassurance that her master's bedchamber
would remain her territory exclusively, but now seemed hardly an
appropriate time.  Eurydike knew, too, that neither was this a
proper time for her to openly express her displeasure, and so she
instead gave Thalassia a forced, bloodless smile of the kind in
which another woman could not fail to detect stark
warning:
 I will make your life hell!

Phormion only said to his cousin with an
approving smile, “Well done.”

All four, two citizens and two slaves,
started down along the palm-lined, stone-paved path to the house.
 Eurydike walked proudly, and no doubt pointedly, adhering to
her master's hip.  

“I kept the hearth going the whole time you
were gone,” she bragged.  “Well, almost.  And—”  She
went up on tiptoe, and Demosthenes bent his ear obligingly to her
lips so she could whisper to him in her lilting accent of the
northern plains, “I was very naughty with Alkibiades again.
 You will have to 
punish
 me.”

The comment failed to shock Demosthenes, for
it was rare to find a concubine in Athens who
had 
not
 been molested by Alkibiades, and Eurydike
was one of the playboy's favorites.  Not only that, she was
ever out to give her master reasons to redden various expanses of
her freckled skin as prelude to other activities.

When Demosthenes hushed her, Eurydike
obligingly changed the subject.  “Why is her
name 
'sea-thing'?
”  Her voice was over-loud and
laced with calculated derision.

“Be kind,” Demosthenes scolded quietly.
 “You have nothing to fear from her.”

Reassured, or at least feigning it, Eurydike
set her cheek against his arm and fell silent.

Demosthenes' home was modest by the
standards of his social class.  It consisted of two stories
with plain, whitewashed walls and a flat roof which served as a
terrace from which a quarter of Athens could be seen, not least the
soaring, temple-crowned acropolis.  They entered into the
house's lower floor, which apart from a pantry, storage area, and
private bath, consisted entirely of a single room, the megaron,
with a round stone hearth at its heart.  The room's floor was
of hard lime plaster tinted deep red, while the walls and four
supporting columns, also plastered, were plain white but for two
simple stripes echoing the hue of the floor.  Visitors to his
home were ever pleading with him to let some artist they favored
decorate the blank expanses with frescoes, as had become the
fashion of late, but always Demosthenes resisted, joking that the
Spartans, thick-skulled as they were, got some things right.

The megaron was furnished with a low ebony
dining table flanked by reclining couches.  The inherited
table was the room's lone extravagance, its edges gilt and legs
carved to resemble bear claws.  In a rear corner of the
megaron, a well-built timber staircase ascended to the private
quarters above, while at the room's center, its focal point, the
hearth fire burned at a relative flicker. The radiant heat made the
air inside the house over-warm and somewhat stifling.  It was
a typical state, for hearth fires burned even in the depth of
summer, not only because it was deemed bad luck to let one die, but
also to avoid the necessity of a trek to the nearest shrine of
Hestia for a fresh spark.  The priestesses charged only a
bronze obol, but the little coins quickly added up if one wasn't
careful.  Eurydike visited Hestia's shrine rather too often,
as evidenced by the frequency with which the clay coin-pot on the
stone wall of the hearth needed replenishment.

Eurydike went to fetch wine while Thalassia
walked to a wall of the megaron, placed an open palm on its surface
and walked absently from corner to corner, dragging the hand behind
her.  Perhaps she was comparing her new home to whatever sort
of dwelling it was to which she was accustomed.  Demosthenes
and his cousin meanwhile retired to the couch.  Phormion
lowered himself on his ebony cane, and they began to quietly
converse.

Phormion explained that since the Spartan
invasion force had been recalled to deal with the capture of Pylos,
Athens had known its first summer of peace since the war's outset.
 Harvests were being brought in, flocks multiplied, and men
and goods came and went between city and countryside as they
pleased.  Demosthenes' own family estate in Thria, where his
father Alkisthenes dwelt in ill health, had borne its first fruit
in many seasons.