Athenian Steel (Book I of the The Hellennium) (18 page)

When the job was mostly done, the fast slap
of sandals resounded down the empty street, and Eurydike appeared,
a red-fletched arrow flying down the garden path.  Her hair
was tamed in a loose braid, and she was dressed for action in a
short, boyish chiton cinched at the waist.  From its belt hung
the Spartan blade, her gift from Pylos, while over her shoulder was
slung a sack containing the possessions needed for a stay of
several days.  Reaching the cart, she vaulted aboard, barely
avoiding upsetting its neatly stacked contents.

With the harvest season getting underway,
the time had come for Eurydike to begin splitting her time between
city and country.  Even though hard work was the purpose of
her stay in Thria, she always found plenty of time to enjoy the
open spaces of the farm, and so she looked forward to the days she
spent there.  Her excitement this time was somewhat tempered
by disappointment that her unlikely best friend Thalassia would not
be joining her.  She would miss her home, and Demosthenes,
too, but still, on balance she was ever eager to go.

Demosthenes mounted his brown mare Maia,
freshly brought from the 
deme
 stables, as up ahead
a farmhand on foot goaded the pair of hulking oxen and their burden
onto the road.  Their destination was the Thriasian plain
northwest of Athens, the rural 
deme
 of
Demosthenes' birth and home still to his ailing father Alkisthenes.
 Since Thria lay along the route to Eleusis, most of their
journey made use of the best-maintained road in Attica, the Sacred
Way, used each year for the procession of initiates into the
Mysteries.  Still, burdened by the ponderous pace of the
two-wheeled cart, the journey consumed the bulk of the morning.
 When they arrived, Eurydike enjoyed the farm as she always
did, shrieking and running and playing games with the farm workers'
children, climbing trees and diving out of them to roll in the dust
grappling with some hapless victim of her ambush, chasing rabbits
(usually in vain) with her blunt dagger.  Here, beyond the
civilizing city walls, the barbarian heart in her was free.

To her master, Thria was more like a prison,
the miserable warden of which was named Alkisthenes.  The old
man's first words on this visit, spoken in his coarse rattle of a
voice, were not ones of congratulations for his son's success at
Pylos.  They were, “Xenon three farms over has a granddaughter
just turned fifteen and ripe for ploughing.  They say she's
got fair looks and discipline.  You should take her, unless
you plan to die without an heir and let your cousins squabble like
vultures over the shreds of my estate.”

Demosthenes begrudgingly promised to
consider the pairing, but Alkisthenes called his bluff by
threatening to summon Xenon presently for a meeting.

“Fine!” Alkisthenes spat when the truth came
out.  “If you won't find yourself a citizen womb and start
filling it with babies, you could at least whelp a son on that
addle-brained Thratta of yours.  Maybe by the time he comes of
age, the law will change to let bastards become citizens
again.”

Thankfully, that was an end to the matter.
 For a while, anyway.  Plenty of Athenian men looked
forward to taking an adolescent girl into their homes and did so
eagerly.  With luck, she would already be well trained in the
necessary arts—all but one, of course, the one which would fulfill
the union's existential purpose.  Having an heir was vital,
certainly, to family, tribe, and state, but the responsibilities
surrounding it seemed hardly attractive.  Not only that, the
need to add another female to his household in Athens had hardly
seemed urgent before Thalassia's arrival, with Eurydike wearing him
out in bed and keeping a decent house to boot.  Now that he
had sealed a bargain with a rogue immortal to save Athens, marrying
appeared an even less wise idea.

Fed up with his father's company,
Demosthenes took a walk alone through the olive groves.  Half
of the trees were close to harvest, while the rest were nothing
more than stumps, casualties to Perikles' strategy of retreat
behind the city walls whilst the Lakedaemonians ravaged the
countryside.  Thria had been especially hard hit, being
directly in the path of the Spartan advance most years.
 Perhaps, thanks to victory at Pylos and the two hundred
Equals captured there serving as hostages, no more orchards would
be razed or fields put to the torch.  Perhaps the saplings
which this season had been transplanted from safer soil to the
east, as had been done every year, usually only to meet the same
end a season later, might grow instead to bear fruit.

The walk and the solitude went some way
toward relaxing him.  For a time, at least, with the gentle
breeze that shook the blade-like olive leaves cooling his
sun-warmed skin, the war became remote and, perhaps more
importantly, the suffocating atmosphere of unreality he had
breathed since the taking of Sphakteria began to lift.

He was home.

But it could not last.  In the early
afternoon, he bid a cold goodbye to his father and a fond one to
Eurydike, which included a fuck in the shade of a budding olive
tree, then mounted Maia and rode for Athens and unreality.

***

The time alone in the fresh air of the
groves had helped bring him to the decision to invite Alkibiades
into his alliance with Thalassia.  It had not been a hard
decision. With any conspiracy, the fewer who knew, the safer were
its secrets, but conversely the burden weighed more heavily upon
each conspirator.  In this case, Thalassia's secrets were of
such weight that Demosthenes worried they might eventually fracture
his mortal mind.  The temptation of easing that burden by
sharing it with a fellow Athenian was simply too great to
resist.

Although he was often maddening, Alkibiades
might be just the thing to keep him sane.   But he did not
need to know all; just enough to win him over.  He needed not
be told of Eden's existence, for example, or that Thalassia's
motives had nothing to do with the welfare of Athens.

That evening, in Athens, Demosthenes walked
with Thalassia to Alkibiades' deme of Skambonidae.

“Let me do the talking,” Demosthenes
requested of her along the way, as childish plans hatched in his
mind.  “We may as well have some fun with him.”

She smiled her agreement.

From Alkibiades' door, a male house slave
(one of the small, beautiful army of them that inhabited
Alkibiades' lavish home, four times the size of Demosthenes' own)
escorted them to the back garden where the master awaited.
 Spotting his guests, Alkibiades rose from one of a pair of
benches which flanked the base of a life-sized marble statue of no
other subject than Alkibiades himself.

“Demosthenes!” the genuine article greeted
with an amiable grin.  But he held back several paces while
his eyes flicked to the one with whom he had fornicated last night.
 “I do hope the evening finds you in good spirits.”

Demosthenes glared, stone-faced.

Alkibiades chuckled nervously.  “I know
what this is about, Demosthenes.  She came to 
me
,
you know.  I made no effort to pursue—”

“I know,” Demosthenes interrupted calmly.
 “It was the same for me in Pylos, where I too succumbed.
 Would that I had possessed the will to resist.  You
stood no chance.”

The unwitting victim laughed again.
 “What are you talking about?”

Demosthenes conjured up a look of pity.
 “I belong to her, and now so shall you.  She will drink
every last drop of our lives' essences until we stand withered
husks, longing for the grave.  For Thalassia is no mortal
woman.  She is a 
lamia
, my friend, and our skins
are the vessels from which flow her favorite drink.”

Alkibiades' third laugh lasted for but a
single breath.  Then he only stared, plucked brows drawn
together in puzzlement over aquiline nose.  “Come on,” the
youth said.  “Only children and Spartans believe in that
stuff.”  But his bright eyes were laden with doubt.
 “Besides, you wouldn't let that happen to me... would
you?”

“The choice was not mine.  She owns me,
spirit and flesh.”  He sighed heavily.  “Just as she now
does you.  And when she has sucked us dry, it will be across
the Styx for us both.”  As he spoke, Demosthenes pointedly
avoided glancing at Thalassia, but he hoped that her eyes were full
of the otherworldly malevolence which he knew first-hand she could
produce. 

She opportunely chose this moment to begin
advancing on Alkibiades, step by agonizingly slow step with her
head declined, eyes narrowed, teeth clenched and lips barely moving
as she whispered in a fluid, alien tongue.

In the shadow of his own statue, Alkibiades
raised a warding hand and backpedaled.  “Whoa,” he said.
 “Thalassia, stop playing.”  

The shapely shade's back was to Demosthenes,
but by the expression of fear painted on her victim's face, her
performance was an unqualified success.

“Please, Demosthenes, that's enough.
 Tell her to stop!”

Thalassia paid no heed, but persisted
advancing until her increasingly terrified prey retreated behind
one of the two stone benches that flanked the statue.

“There is one way out,” Demosthenes said,
and Thalassia halted.  “If you can defeat her in a test of
strength, she is bound to free you.   I failed—but then I lack
the limbs of a demigod which all of Athens attributes to
Alkibiades.”

“Yes, yes...” Alkibiades agreed.  He
rose to his feet behind the stone bench, nodding rapidly at the
pale-eyed spawn of Hades.  “A contest of strength!  I
challenge thee.”

Ponderously, Thalassia's head swiveled on an
exquisite neck bisected by the slave choker which Athenian law
required her to wear at all times in public.  When she faced
Demosthenes, he had to stifle surprise of his own, for the usually
pristine skin of Thalassia's right cheek and temple was covered
with a marking which had not been there just moments before: an
intricate, lace-like design of scrolling lines etched in black.
 The bright eye at the center of that vortex of flowing lines
gave Demosthenes a wink, and then she was a lamia again, raising
one arm with an index finger aimed at the stone bench separating
her from Alkibiades.

“She bids you lift the bench,” Demosthenes
translated.

Alkibiades cast eyes wide with disbelief at
the stone object which could not have been set into its current
place by fewer than three able-bodied men.  “But that...” he
began despairingly.  “It is not possible...”

Still, Alkibiades was never one to yield
without a fight.  All men who had stood beside him in battle
swore he fought like a frenzied god.  He had won the prize for
valor at the battle of Potidaea, even if some said it should have
gone to Socrates. 

The youth drew a deep breath, steeled
himself, widened his stance, and set his hands on each of the two
long sides of the great stone bench.  He muttered a prayer to
Zeus, another to Athena, drew another deep breath, and he
heaved.

The bench rose perhaps a finger's breadth
from the ground then fell back into place with a soft thump.

Alkibiades groaned, exhaled a curse and said
without casting eyes on his tormentors, “One more try.”

For his second attempt, Alkibiades crawled
underneath the bench on all fours, braced his back against its
underside and endeavored to stand.  One half of the bench came
up with relative ease, although he strained under its weight; the
other half, however, remained rooted in place for long minutes
whilst Alkibiades struggled and sweated and cursed.  After a
long minute had passed, in the space of which his two tormentors
risked sharing a smile, the bench came up on all but one corner, at
which point it capsized onto the flower bed behind it.

“There!” Alkibiades exclaimed.
 Breathing heavily, he crawled back onto the paved path and
settled on the ground.  “I did it!  It left the earth,
for just a moment!”   

Thalassia looked down upon him with a grim
expression and, in her own time, stepped over to the fallen bench
where she set one slender hand underneath, the other on top.
 With no sign of strain showing in her supple golden limbs,
the bench all but raised itself.  Carrying it, she backed up a
step and set it back in the spot where it had been rooted for
perhaps a generation.

“No...” Alkibiades intoned, in utter
disbelief.  “No, no, no, that cannot be!”  In despair, he
threw himself forward onto all fours, crawled to Thalassia's feet
and bowed his head.  “I will not beg,” he declared.
 “Fair is fair.  I concede defeat.  But it is a
beautiful soul which you claim today, foul creature, and one that
was not finished by far doing great deeds!”

Standing over him, her face still bearing
the intricate black tattoo, Thalassia threw a look at Demosthenes,
asking him silently whether it was time to cut the flopping fish
off their line.

It was, and so Demosthenes walked to
Alkibiades, knelt beside him and set a hand on his shoulder.
 The youth's well-groomed mane rose, revealing pretty features
ashen with resignation.

“We are almost even now, friend,”
Demosthenes said.  “For your constant molestation of my
household.”

Confusion spread across Alkibiades' fine
features.  His lustrous eyes flicked back and forth between
his two tormentors.   “I... I...” he stammered.  “You
mean... she is not truly...”  

Thalassia smiled warmly at him.  In the
space of a moment, the strange markings faded from the skin of her
face.

“But how did she—”  His head sank, and
he drew cleansing breaths of relief, after which he fell to
laughing.

Demosthenes extended a hand to help the
vanquished to rise.  Standing, Alkibiades turned the gesture
into an embrace, at the conclusion of which he grabbed and kissed
Thalassia's fingers.  “That was some deception with the
bench,” he said to either or both of them.  “How on earth you
achieve it?”