Athenian Steel (Book I of the The Hellennium) (26 page)

Rather than sitting under the squeaking
floorboards, or worse, going up and interrupting, he walked outside
in the twilight.  His aimless steps took him to the base of
the acropolis and thence to a rocky outcropping above the barracks
which still smelled of freshly cut pine.  From this
height one could look over the city wall of Amphipolis and see the
mountains to the north looming over blue-tinted grassland that was
alive in the night's gentle breeze.

There he sat and tried to clear his
thoughts.  His head would need to be clear.  According to
accounts provided by sympathizers in Macedon, Brasidas was on the
march, and his army was growing.  The day of his arrival at
Amphipolis, if indeed he chose to come here at all, knowing, as he
must, that it was now defended, could not be known precisely.
 But it would be soon.

Demosthenes had taken measures to ensure
that Brasidas would at least try to claim the city.  With
Amphipolitan accomplices, he had planted bait.  If Brasidas
took it, he would come believing that the sole bridge over the
Strymon, which lay within sight of Amphipolis, was to be turned
over to him by pro-Spartan traitors in the town, allowing him to
cross easily and lay siege.

The traitors did exist.  But so did the
loyal men who were spying on those traitors, planting ideas in
their heads and helping to compose their 'secret' dispatches to
Brasidas.

Yes, Brasidas would come.  And he was
clever and dangerous.  Why had Thalassia felt the need to tell
him that?  As if he did not know, and as if he needed more
weight on his shoulders than he already bore in knowing of Athens'
fated defeat.  

Bitch.

Athene would bring her favored city a
victory, Demosthenes told himself.  But he had trouble
believing it.  Not believing that victory would come, although
that could scarcely be certain, but of who would bring it.
 

Not the virgin goddess, but a whore and her
slave.

Thalassia's hubris, her easy dismissal of
the gods, was infectious, and that was another reason he had come
to resent her, he realized.  Over the past year, he had slowly
lost his gods, for was there any room for Olympians in Thalassia's
universe of lines and layers?  Praying had become a struggle
for him, and when he did pray, it was so plainly insincere that it
seemed impossible that Pallas, if she existed, could answer with
anything but a sneer.

If she existed.
  Damn, what had
star-girl done to him?

"Am I interrupting?"

It was 
her
 voice, as if
summoned by his thoughts.  The sound of it tensed his limbs
and sent pebbles tumbling off the outcropping from under his sandal
as he shot upright.  He looked up and saw her.  Between
her breasts Thalassia clutched a thin shift of Amorgos silk that
wrapped her deceptively soft flesh.  The garment was all but
translucent in the starlight, and each gentle wind that gusted up
the slope endeavored to steal it.  Her feet were bare on the
cold, rough rocks, but of course she would scarcely notice
that.

"Sorry if I scared you."  She smiled,
took a long stride that exposed her hairless cleft, and sat
gracefully beside him.  

For a while they stared out over moonlit
Thrace together.

"I'm sorry about earlier," Thalassia finally
said.

"You are good at that," Demosthenes
said.

"At what?"

"At saying and doing things and then
apologizing for them later."

In Thalassia's silence, Demosthenes sensed
swallowed anger.

Likely not the first thing she had swallowed
that night, he thought, and was surprised by his own pettiness.

But when Thalassia spoke, it was softly.
 "I think the words you were looking for were 'I accept.'
 Or if you actually give a shit, maybe 'I'm sorry, too.'"

Demosthenes exhaled, and his breath turned
to mist in the night air.  Plains winters could be harsh.
 There might well be snow by the time battle came.

"Alkibiades will be missing you by now," he
said.  "Do not let me keep you from him."

"Just stop being an asshole for five
minutes.  I had hoped..."  Thalassia bowed her head to
look down either at the rocks or at her feet drawn up in front of
her barely clad body.  "Never mind.  Let me tell you a
story about those mountains in front of you."

Indeed, Demosthenes' eyes were on the
distant dark peaks, even if his mind was not.

Without waiting for his approval, Thalassia
began, "Of course you know of Sitalkes."

He did.  Some five summers ago, all
Greece had shuddered in terror at the thought that the great horde
raised by the Thracian king Sitalkes to ravage neighboring Macedon
might next turn its attention south, to Greece.  When instead
the great army dissolved by internal intrigue, all Greece had
heaved a sigh of relief.

"His army was really a collection of tribal
war bands," she said, once more stating the obvious. "The leaders
of those bands did whatever was in their own interest, including
using the forces they had raised for Sitalkes to settle old scores.
 One such band was on its way west to join the horde when its
path took it through the territory of a rival tribe, where it
paused long enough to raze villages and slaughter its enemy near to
extinction.

"Some lived, of course.  One survivor
was a girl of fifteen, a month away from her wedding.  She was
enslaved along with her younger sister.  The two were taken
west, through those mountains there."  Thalassia's pale gaze
was on them now, too.  "The girls' captors beat and raped them
every night."

The tale's dark turn chilled Demosthenes'
blood, but Thalassia pressed on.

"The younger one was beaten to the edge of
death.  Since she could no longer walk, rather than carry her,
her captors threw her off a cliff.  Her sister tried to follow
her, but she was pulled back from the edge and bound.  She
made it through the march alive and was sold to a Thessalian
slaver, who sold her to another, who eventually brought her to the
slave markets of Athens."

Well before Thalassia had finished, a weight
had settled on Demosthenes' chest and steadily increased, stealing
his breath.

Thalassia, as if in spite, added another
stone to the pile: "The slaver gave the girl a new, Greek name,"
she said, "to replace the Thracian one he knew his buyers wouldn't
like."

Mercifully, she didn't speak the false name.
 Demosthenes knew it, and she knew he knew.
 
Eurydike
.

Overcome, he shut his eyes and used a long
breath to drag himself back from the brink of tears.  "What
name was she born with?" he asked feebly.

"It doesn't matter," Thalassia said.
 "She never wants to hear it again."  She nodded at the
distant peaks.  "Just as she would prefer not to look again on
the mountains where her sister's corpse was food for wolves."

As the speaker surely intended, the image
sprang up of its own accord in Demosthenes' mind's eye of a
half-dead Thracian girl plunging to her misery's end, while from
above her sister watched, helpless screams resounding off the
mountainside.

The corners of his eyes stung anew.

"She told you this?"  Demosthenes
asked.

"Yes," Thalassia said.  "I think she
would have told you, too.  If you had ever asked."

Demosthenes gave her a hard glare.
 Though she was right, the shortcoming was his own, and
Thalassia was only the messenger, she was present, and made a
satisfying target besides, this woman who had stolen his gods and
ate his manhood for breakfast.

"You burden me with this now," he said
angrily, "so soon before the most important battle of my life?
 Why?  Because I didn't greet you warmly enough?  Is
that all you know how to do—cut down anyone who slights you?"
 He raised his hand in a wave of dismissal.  "Go back to
your man-whore and suck what pleasure you can from him before he
looks at you wrong and you have to cut his throat."

He finished with a growl that in fact masked
fear.  Why did he knowingly provoke her?  Did some part
of him wish to die?

He did not dare look over at Thalassia, but
he heard her wet her lips as though to speak.  Ultimately she
said nothing, just sat there in silence for long, agonizing moments
in which Demosthenes could only stare with bated breath at the
horizon and wonder whether his mad, almost suicidal assault had
breached her walls to expose the molten fury he knew dwelt
within.

At long last he heard Thalassia stir.
 She rose, clutching her silk about her.  Without sparing
him a glance, and with nimble, soundless steps, she retreated from
the outcropping.  Demosthenes did not watch her go.

For four days he did not see her.  No
one did.  She vanished, and with her a horse from the cavalry
stables.

Four days passed, and Brasidas came.

"I fear treachery, my prince."

This warning came from Beres, captain of
Arrhidaeus's personal bodyguard, sworn to him in all things and
trusted above all others by the young prince, who was nephew to
Perdikkas, long reigning king of Macedon.  The two rode
side-by-side on the tree-lined western shore of Lake Koroneia, just
north and east of Therme, the Macedonian port city where Arrhidaeus
had spent the season.

"You always do, Beres," the prince observed
with a smile.

"At least a quarter of the time, I am
right," the older man replied.  "It's why you're alive."

"True, Beres.  Very true.  But our
purpose in coming here today is to thwart treachery, is it
not?"

"One should never fully trust an unsigned
note, my prince."

Arrhidaeus waved a ring-laden hand.
 "Ah, but when said note offers to give up names in a plot
against me, can you not see how the sender might be wise not to
sign it?  Should it be discovered, it would mean his
death."

Scarred, silver-haired Beres emitted a low
growl.  "Still, my prince..."  His keen eyes never
stopped scanning the wood and mirror-smooth surface of the
lake.

"We are solidly within Macedonian
territory," Arrhidaeus reassured the man who had been his protector
for all of the prince's twenty years.  "Surely there could be
no force at large this close to Therme that your men cannot handle.
 And all twelve of them are at present scouting the shores of
the lake for the messenger we have been instructed to meet, which
furthermore is to be a lone female.  Hardly any threat, if
that's what they find.  And should they discover otherwise, I
fully trust in you to deliver me safely back to town."  The
prince chuckled.  "No, I feel no fear today, Beres.
 There is but opportunity afoot."

"I suppose, my prince."

A quarter-hour later, three riders of the
Arridhaeus's personal guard galloped down from a rocky,
pine-covered promontory overlooking the lake and halted before the
prince and Beres.  One of the three had seated on his horse in
front of him a dark-haired, foreign-looking female passenger in a
gray hooded cloak.

That man reported to Beres, "She was alone,
Captain, and unarmed."

Arrhidaeus grinned.  "You see, Beres.
 It is not always a trap!"

The guardsman on whose horse the woman sat
helped her to the ground, where she knelt.

"Prince Arrhidaeus?" she asked.  

She used the Greek to give his title.
 Greek had only lately been adopted by the Macedonian court,
but Arrhidaeus's Ionian tutor had served him well, and so he
answered her fluently in that tongue.  "You have found me,
sweetling.  I take it you have something for me?  Better
still if you 
are 
the something."  He laughed,
and so too did the guardsmen, even though they knew not a word of
Greek between them.  

Beres, who did know Greek, laughed not at
all.  He rarely did.  He only stared with narrowed eyes
at the messenger, who momentarily stood.

"Would you answer me a question, lord?" she
asked in suitably respectful tones.

"If I can and must," Arrhidaeus said.
 "But I hope it is only one."

"It is, lord, and a simple one," she said.
 "Do you have any sons?"

Arrhidaeus laughed.  "Sons?  No.
 And as yet no wife to plant one in.  Is that all?
 Strange question."

"Enough chatter," Beres interjected.
 "Give us the names."

The woman whirled and in a flash had drawn
the sword of the nearest mounted guard.

"Kill h—" Beres began to shout, but before
he finished, his neck was spouting blood from the deep gash carved
into it with precision by the stolen blade.  Hot droplets of
it peppered Arrhidaeus's arm, which like his other limbs was frozen
in place by disbelief.

Two more guards were slain by the time
Beres's silent corpse had finished sliding from the saddle to
settle upon the earth in a heap.  The third guardsman was
raising his blade for an attack which had no hope of landing when
Arrhidaeus at last found the presence of mind to wheel his mount
and kick its flanks in desperate flight.

A final groan rose behind the prince, and
not a second later some force yanked him backward from his saddle.
 He landed hard on his back, the breath knocked from his body,
and into view above him stepped the cloaked woman, the messenger,
wielding the guardsman's sword, its blade smeared with blood.

"Please..." Arrhidaeus whispered.  "I
will make you wealthy beyond imagining.  You may have whatever
you wish, only spare me."

To Arrhidaeus's despair, she gave no answer.
 The expression on her youthful face was impassive, but the
eyes... her two eyes were like shards of pale ice, and their gleam
told Arrhidaeus something of his killer: this woman was no hapless,
disposable wretch who had been bribed, coerced, or otherwise
cynically manipulated, as many assassins were, into embarking on a
virtually suicidal undertaking.  No, here was an assassin who
had slain many men before today, and the light in her eyes bespoke
not pleasure—for a good assassin was no bloodthirsty cretin—but a
certain calm satisfaction.