Athenian Steel (Book I of the The Hellennium) (32 page)

Thalassia lifted her gaze from the blanket
laid out with untouched food. When they found him, he saw in her
face first disbelief, then a quick return to melancholy, as one who
has just woken from a dream that a dead love yet lives: the joy
extends a heartbeat into reality, and then in a flash it is
gone.

A breeze off of the lake alerted Demosthenes
to wetness on his cheek. Under her gaze, he wiped the tear
away.

"Why did you let me do it?" he demanded,
more petulantly than intended. There was no need to name the deed;
she would know of what he spoke.

"For spite," she answered plainly. "To hurt
you. To scar your memory of me."

The pettiness of that answer momentarily
stunned Demosthenes. But Thalassia was human, he reminded himself,
and humans were petty creatures who hurt one another for no
profound reason. Of that, he was surely as guilty as she.

She surprised him by adding, in softer
tones, "You owe me a kiss." It was a plain observation, delivered
with cheek still laid on drawn-up knees.

"What?"

"Anyone who fucks me like an animal should
kiss me first, if I want it. So you owe me one. Soon we might need
another's permission."

At a loss for understanding, Demosthenes
stared at her. He found a faint glimmer of mercy in her eyes, if
not anywhere else. He had no wish to kiss her, nor speak on the
possibility.

Neither did he want to speak on his misdeed,
but he knew he must.

"I was not myself," he said lamely. "I do
not know what possessed me."

"The same thing that drives any man to
rape." Thalassia's soft voice competed with the soaring cries of
the lake birds. "The desire to tame. To reduce me to something you
need not fear."

The naked proclamation of his crime summoned
forth fresh tears that he worked to stifle. Anger came, too, not at
himself but at his victim, for no better reason than that she was
right. He had meant to diminish her, to master his fear. Something
in him remained desirous of those things even now.

"You try so hard to hurt me," she observed.
She might have plucked the thought from his own mind.

"And have I?" Was that hope in his
voice?

"Trying is success," Thalassia returned, and
thereby avoided voicing the simple, true answer.

The confirmation gave him no satisfaction,
only guilt, and in an instant that part of him which had desired to
do her harm shrank back into the primordial darkness, where it
slept. Freed of its influence, Demosthenes collected his thoughts
in the hope that reason and not emotion, negative or otherwise,
might rule him.

"Some have said the antidote to fear is
knowledge," he said. He was sure he had heard some sophist or other
say something like that. "Perhaps if I knew you better than I
do."

"You threw me out of your house and barely
spoke to me for a year."

"That... can be remedied. It shall be."

Demosthenes looked out over the lake and its
grassy shore, the blanket laid out with untouched food, a plain,
pastoral scene made surreal by the company.

Thalassia sighed, rolled onto her side,
reclining on the blanket with head propped on one bent arm which
became lost in a sea of dark hair. Abruptly, she pushed one of the
near-forgotten plates of food in Demosthenes' direction. "Will you
eat something already? Someone went to some amount of trouble to
provide this meal."

For the first time, Demosthenes gave his
attention to the food. "'Someone'? Not you?" he asked in mock
surprise.

In spite of Eurydike's efforts to improve
it, Thalassia's cooking was horrendous. Given how she excelled at
anything else she put her hand to, he wondered if the failure was
not by design, so that she might be spared the chore.

"I will eat only if you will," Demosthenes
said.

The condition won him a sneer, but Thalassia
yielded and took a morsel of bread, piled it with pickled
vegetables and popped it between the lips she preferred to use for
other pleasures than food. With a show of reluctance, she chewed
and swallowed, then opened her mouth wide to prove the deed was
done by displaying a wet tongue peppered with moist, clinging
fragments.

"Satisfied?" she asked with a fresh sneer.
But almost instantly, her features warmed. She shrugged and reached
for another bite. "It's not awful," she conceded. "Just
flavorless."

Having taken one mouthful himself by then,
Demosthenes could not agree. It was near perfection. He dug in, at
last giving his morning-after self the remedy it had craved for
some hours now, or would have craved had the pangs of guilt and
shame and fear not overshadowed those of hunger.

"So, this Italian town,
this 
Roma
," Demosthenes asked as he ate. "It will one
day subjugate all the cities of Greece?"

"And much more."

"Then..." Demosthenes mused, "perhaps... one
day, when my own 'little war' is over, for the good of my city and
country... I might go to Roma and help you to destroy it. Perhaps,"
he quickly emphasized, lest it be given the weight of a promise.
"It seems that doing so might serve both our purposes. If, that is,
you have not abandoned yours."

Thalassia stared into the tree-line by the
lake's edge and said with a decided lack of fire, "I will finish
what I started. But first..." She looked back at him with a wan
smile. "There is Sparta to finish, if you'll have me. And so many
pretty, shiny things in the agora."

"Aye," Demosthenes said, laughing although
he knew he should not, for his next words were no cause for
lightness. "It seems you are a gift that I am powerless to
reject."

For a while, Thalassia nibbled and he ate
voraciously.

"There is one last thing I must tell you,"
she said when the meal was nearly done.

Demosthenes stopped eating mid-bite, as all
thought of eating fled his mind. "Those words frighten me to no
end," he said. "It is a fear born of experience. I cannot help
it."

Thalassia smiled; he did not. Rather
worryingly, she looked away, up at the hazy winter sky which her
eyes so reflected and resembled.

"What?" he demanded, growing ever more
alarmed. "Tell me!"

At last she spared him a look which was
neither foreboding nor playful, the two looks she gave best, but
rather lay somewhere between.

"You know that you'll need to marry soon,"
she said, sounding unusually philosophical. "For the sake of your
reputation, career, estate, and–" Her gaze returned to the clouds.
"Honestly, I think it will be good for you."

Blood rushed in Demosthenes' ears, the sound
of alarm. "What are you saying? Out with it."

Star-born, pale-eyed Madness leveled another
look at him, apologetic but at the same time unyielding as stone.
"Eurydike and I have found you a prospective bride," she said. "A
widow. We meet her at the spring nearly every day. The war took her
husband, the plague her children, and now her brother is her
keeper. She lives in his home in misery, but remains quick to
laugh. She is accommodating but not docile, willful but not
impulsive. She is affectionate, intelligent, generous, patient, and
frankly, very fuckable. But she doesn't have a tin pisspot for a
dowry, so no man will touch her," Thalassia finished earnestly.
"Her name is Laonome."*

END OF PART III

--------

* Lay-ON-ah-mee.

Maimakterion in the archonship of Isarchos
(November 424 BCE)

Leuke
's square sail billowed overhead
in a too-strong wind (the season for smooth sailing was well past)
and white waves swirled in her wake as she cut a path for Athens,
one of ten triremes returning home with angry-eyed prows draped in
ivy garlands that were sure to be blown to the sea god well before
port. No one much liked having a woman aboard, but inevitably they
had to be transported, and anyway, this was the general's woman. As
was customary, extra prayers had been said, extra sacrifices made,
and the voyage then was surrendered into the hands of Fate.

Broken, vanquished, disgraced Fate. It only
remained to be seen whether she would stay down or staunch her
wound and rise to right the wrong done her.

Demosthenes stood near the prow alongside
his ship's bad luck charm. Thalassia had unbound her hair and let
it fly in the winter wind as though flaunting her womanhood to the
sailors who eyed her with suspicion. Demosthenes did not let the
indiscretion bother him. His spirits were always high in the early
hours of a sea voyage, before the boredom of the flat, unchanging
seascape set in.

"Let me see if I have everything straight,"
he said idly to her. "We currently exist in one of some very large
number of 'layers,' in a subset you call the Severed Layers because
of the difficulty in reaching or leaving them. Which is good for
you, because if your cult of Magdalen, this army of kidnappers and
exterminators that you have betrayed... twice... learned what you
were doing and got their hands on you, they would subject you to a
fate worse than death."

Thalassia's pale eyes stayed on the horizon,
face into the headwind. Her lips formed a distant half-smile.
"Mmh," she said. 
Go on.

"One more of your kind is asleep under a
mountain in Scythia and another is somewhere nearer, probably,
licking her wounds and biding her time before she pays you back for
stranding her, not to mention caving in her skull and cutting off
an arm."

Thalassia cocked her head as if in a silent,
dark laugh, but she did not interrupt.

"If you change the course of our war
drastically enough," Demosthenes continued, "maybe raze an Italian
city, then the one who wronged you will be wiped from existence,
and maybe so will Magdalen and her army, and–well, things past that
are fuzzy for both of us, it seems, so we shall leave it there for
now. Thanks to your help, Athens has held a town it should have
lost and captured one of the enemy's best commanders. That
accomplished, for some unknowable reason, you want to choose my
wife for me. How did I do?"

Her distant smirk turned to a chuckle. "Not
bad."

"Did I get something wrong?"

"Well, yes," she said, momentarily knocking
Demosthenes' pride. "Eden will be healed by now. Long since. I'm
not sure what's keeping her. And... the way you tell it, I sound a
little crazy. A compliment or two would not have been out of
place."

"Hmm," Demosthenes said neutrally, stalling
while he angled his head into the whipping wind to study her face
and determine, perhaps, whether he might be in physical danger if
he failed to stroke her ego.

He could not tell and so just took a chance
with his life. With only a rail and ten feet or so separating him
from the rushing waters, he declined to flatter a being capable of
tearing him in two. "I will be sure to fix that the next time I
tell it," he said.

Thalassia's eyes, vibrant in this space
between sea and sky, flicked toward him, and her easy smile
confirmed he had chosen his words well.

With her help, for better or worse, he was
learning not to fear her.

His half-laugh, half-sigh was lost on the
wind. "I have an interesting life," he observed.

"It's good that you can laugh about it,"
Thalassia said. "Very good."

***

Spartan command structure was a complex
beast with bones of pitted iron. Where most cities knew but two
ranks of
officer, 
lochagos 
and 
strategos
,
Sparta counted ten, and that time-tested structure did not simply
dissolve in an enemy prison. Thus, for the year-plus of his
imprisonment, Styphon had retained nominal command over the men
captured with him on Sphakteria, even if most singled him out for
resentment as the direct cause of their disgrace. If not for him,
they might have died warrior's deaths instead of languishing in
chains.

Now something had changed. Brasidas had
come, made prisoner in Thrace by the very same general who had
seized Pylos and filled the walls of this Athenian prison to
bursting. Since taking part in the naval assault on Pylos, Brasidas
had risen to become one of Sparta's five polemarchs, and from the
minute of his arrival in Athens there could be no question who
ruled the cell blocks and yards of the jail complex. Upon the
minute of the polemarch's arrival, it had become more likely than
not that, whether on direct orders from Brasidas or just with his
tacit approval, some violence, possibly death, would befall the
phylarch, the trembler, accursed Styphon who had led all present to
their miserable end.

Having arrived wounded, Brasidas was kept
for three days in a cell by himself, three days in which Styphon's
countrymen grew bolder in showing their contempt. But thanks to the
forty or so who remained loyal to their present commander and ready
(at least for now) to defend him, the displays rarely went further
than an icy glare or muttered insult.

Strangely, on the day that Brasidas entered
into the general population, nothing changed.

On the next, Styphon was summoned.
Duty-bound, he answered the call and went unafraid, for his life
and his fortunes meant far less now, in disgrace, than they had in
times past.

Twelve Equals formed a curtain of thick,
tanned limbs in front of Brasidas in the cell block's small
exercise yard. These were the general's freshly picked honor guard,
and among their number were several of those men who had long made
no secret of their desire to see Styphon deposed as leader, if not
worse. Some now wore triumphant smirks, others glowering looks with
which they tried, and failed, to intimidate the summoned. Some
moved aside only when Styphon shoved them, and then only forewent
retaliation for lack of permission from Brasidas.

Piercing the curtain of flesh, Styphon stood
face to face with the general.