Athenian Steel (Book I of the The Hellennium) (36 page)

Returning hand-in-hand to the door with his
new wife, Demosthenes was heartened to find not tears in Laonome's
eyes but only a mix of exhaustion and relief as she stood waving
and blowing kisses at the cheering crowd of friends, relatives, and
strangers until at last, long minutes later, the door was shut.
Eurydike came forward, knelt before Laonome and planted a kiss on
her hand. Thalassia did the same, if less girlishly, and then the
three women exchanged hugs more in the manner of friends than
mistress and slaves.

When that was finished, Laonome pressed
close to her new husband, resting her cheek on his chest. "Are you
as glad as I am that is over?"

"More," Demosthenes replied truthfully.

That night they went to bed early, or rather
they retired early to their bedchamber, where they made love in
several sessions punctuated by light sleep in one another's arms.
Laonome was a skilled lover, neither too timid nor too aggressive,
with a body full of pleasing curves. Demosthenes' lone complaint
was that being unused to sharing a bed for the purpose of sleep, he
found it hard to do so with a leg draped over him and the weight of
a head pinning his shoulder to the mattress. But in sleep Laonome
looked so serene he did not dare disturb her. He would get used to
it soon enough, he assumed.

Their second night began much as the first,
but when Demosthenes ran out of strength and seed, they talked. He
ran a finger over the scar on her upper lip, asking how it had come
to be there. When Laonome just self-consciously pushed his hand
aside and covered it, he kissed her gently and let the matter drop.
An hour later she raised the subject herself, tentatively and
unprompted. Years ago, she told him, her late husband, returning
home drunk as he often did, had shoved her, and in falling she had
struck her face on the edge of a table. She showed another scar on
her inner forearm where her husband, drunk again, had carelessly
cut her while threatening her with a sword.

They did not speak at all of how the
perpetrator of such abuse had met his death in Aetolia, yet neither
did that potentially sensitive matter hang over them.

On their third night of marriage, Laonome
said she was sore and invited Eurydike to join them. Laonome lay on
her side and watched with interest, occasionally stroking her
husband's arm or Eurydike's naked thigh. Just before culmination of
the act, she interrupted and took the slave's place so as not to
waste any chance to conceive. Showing no sign of dissatisfaction
with the new arrangement, Eurydike gathered her crumpled chiton
from the floor and left the room as giddy as she had arrived.

"Did you enjoy that?" Laonome asked when
they were alone.

Rather than speaking, Demosthenes grunted a
positive-sounding note, all he had strength for.

"My first husband whored behind my back for
many years. Eventually he took a concubine. Most nights I went to
sleep on linens damp with her juices. I do not want that
humiliation again. I know that Eurydike is
your 
pallake
, and I want you to keep her. Do whatever
pleases you, but give me the dignity of knowing."

Demosthenes held his new wife tight, kissed
the tip of her nose. "You are what pleases me," he said. "But
Eurydike is..."

"Thracian?" Laonome finished for him.

He laughed. "I was going to say complicated.
But Thracian works well."

"And Thalassia?"

He heard the name often enough, but for some
reason now it made the muscles of his body tense. "We did the deed
once," he confessed. He hoped he kept shame out of his voice. "But
not deliberately. I was drunk." Recalling Laonome's tales of her
drunken husband, he hastened to add, "It was the first time I have
been drunk in ten years, mind you. Neither are mistakes I shall
repeat."

"Why was it a mistake to fuck her? Have you
seen the way men stare at her in town? What flaw is it you see that
they do not?"

Uncomfortably considering his response,
Demosthenes wondered if the object of their conversation, with her
predator's ears, was eavesdropping now through the walls.

"She is... unstable," he lied. Or was it a
lie? He almost hoped Thalassia listened. She likely would laugh
that thin-lipped, breathy, inward laugh of hers which made the
giver proud to have earned it.

Laonome's own laugh, also a sweet sound,
turned his thoughts back to her, their more rightful object. 
She fingered the tiny hairs of his chest underneath the heavy
woolen blankets, outside of which the winter chill froze the
plaster and tile surfaces of the bedchamber.

"We women are all unstable, are we not?"
Laonome reflected. The question was rhetorical, something with
which any Athenian, male or female, with few exceptions, would
agree. "We are ruled by our bodies. I would think one like hers
would have certain needs."

"It does. She satisfies them with
Alkibiades."

"Him? You allow it?"

"I see no reason not to."

He was not about to explain right now, and
maybe not ever, that it was not for him to allow or disallow
Thalassia anything, or that one of his slaves was not really a
slave at all but in fact his partner in a conspiracy against
Fate.

He knew that if that battered deity were
present with them in the marriage bed, she might well have hissed
in his bride's ear, 
Your new husband consorts with a
star-whore and invites a doom far worse than that your last one
met!

But Fate, cowed for now by defeat, remained
silent.

Laonome stretched her neck up to peck her
husband's cheek, then laid her head down on his chest and shut her
eyes.

"A strange name, Thalassia," she remarked
lazily. "'Sea-thing.' Isn't that the wood that washes up on the
beach, that men whittle into animals and sell in the agora?"

"It is," Demosthenes confirmed, and squeezed
his wife's body tight against his bare flesh.

The next morning, Laonome bought Thalassia a
gift: a driftwood carving of a dolphin.

Morning filled Demosthenes' second-story
bedchamber with rays of cold winter sunlight, the scent of baking
bread, and the sounds of bustling activity. For the first time in
its current occupancy, that bedchamber was shared by husband and
wife. Both lazed naked under covers of wool and fur, and as had
been the case on each of the five mornings which had passed since
their wedding day, they were in no hurry to rise.

Thus Demosthenes was still half asleep when
the muted sounds of life in the deme of Tyrmeidai were drowned out,
then silenced, by the distant shrill wail of a trumpet, a long,
sustained blast. When the note ended, another soared with barely
the space of a breath between.

An alarm. He sat upright. Laonome did the
same, clinging to his side with deep worry overtaking sleep in her
almond-shaped eyes. 
What is happening?
 the look
asked, and Demosthenes answered with a comforting hand on her
wool-draped thigh. Since he knew no more than she, it was the best
answer he could give.

"Stay near to Thalassia," he told his bride,
and hoped his tone struck the right balance between urgency and
calm. "Do whatever she tells you, without question.
Understand?"

Laonome's look betrayed confusion at this
strange command to obey a slave, but she only nodded. As
Demosthenes made to leave the bed she clasped his wrist, pulled him
back and kissed his lips hard with the force of passion.

"I love you," she said for the fifth time in
as many days. He was blessed. These were words that most men never
in their adult lives heard spoken truthfully. "Do not make me a
widow again."

He tucked a lock of uncombed hair behind
Laonome's ear, reassured her with a smile. "Rise, dress, take
breakfast, go about your day. I shall be back very shortly."

He tried to rise but found Laonome's hand
still firmly clamped on his arm. "Promise me," she pleaded.
"Promise you will put me first. Before honor, before glory, before
elections. Before Athens. Just for a year. Then give yourself back
to the city if you must."

Demosthenes let the beginning of a chuckle
slip before he saw the fear and hope in his new wife's eyes, saw
the jaw clenched so tightly that it trembled, knuckles that were
white on his wrist as though her life depended on the grasp. Seeing
the intensity and sincerity with which she implored him, he lost
any thought of laughter and answered in a heartbeat, "I swear
it."

He dressed quickly in a himation suitable
for the winter chill, took up his short sword in its scabbard and,
with a final kiss gentler than their last, he left Laonome.

In the women's quarters, now a miniature
Persepolis to their former Sparta, he found his two slaves standing
in wait with his scale armor corselet. While they buckled it on him
Demosthenes shared a secret look with Thalassia, conveying without
need for words what was expected of her: 
Protect
them.

Her pale eyes calmly accepted the burden. He
slung his shield on his back, did the same with the canvas sack
containing his helmet and the rest of his war gear, and he
descended the stairs to emerge into a street where confusion
reigned.

"What has happened?" he asked his neighbors.
Some, like him, wore armor and carried weapons, while others yet
hoped the raising of the general alarm was some mistake. Their
answers proved them just as clueless as he.

Suddenly at the street's north end there
appeared dozens of men, women and children all moving south with
purpose in their strides. Demosthenes met the odd stream of
refugees at a run, shouting questions at whomever would listen.
When no one replied, he grabbed a fleeing male slave by the
arm.

"The Spartan prisoners," the slave blurted
in a panic, trying to wrench his arm away. "They are loose!"

Demosthenes let the man go and hastened
north, against the human current, in the direction of the jailhouse
and the sound of the still-blaring trumpet. Several minutes spent
at a run, sweating under the weight of his panoply, brought him to
the law courts. There he grabbed a stunned Scythian policeman who,
recognizing him, guided him not to the jail but to the edge of a
winding, densely built street in the nearby deme of Melite.

A cluster of soldiers and police captains
and generals stood there, Nikias and Kleon among them. Neither was
geared for war; likely they had been in the agora or civic offices
just next door when the alarm had sounded. It was where any
strategos would be at this time, if he was not using the excuse of
his recent wedding to laze about the house.

Nikias was issuing urgent orders to police
and armed citizens, while the City Protector, Kleon, loudly
punctuated each of the old man's commands with, "Yes, yes, as he
says!"

Demosthenes pushed his way through to them,
and Nikias filled him in.

"The prisoners dug a tunnel," the elder
general said. "We have them cordoned in this neighborhood, but they
have hostages and whatever weapons they have obtained from the
houses."

Demosthenes felt a surge of mingled anger
and relief: anger at the grievous lapse of security, relief that
his own household was in no immediate danger. There was little to
do but wait. Nikias seemed to have matters well in hand, even if
Kleon–whose official responsibility on the Board was homeland
defense–wished to believe the hand was his own.

The wait was short. In the narrow street
overlooked by the small plaza in which the generals stood, the
figure of a man appeared: a tall, long-haired Spartan in his prison
chiton bearing the mocking sign of the crimson alpha.

Demosthenes knew the man by sight, having
fallen to him in single combat.

Brasidas stood unarmed, holding aloft
horizontally over his head a makeshift herald's wand, a stick
garlanded with an anemic laurel vine doubtless cut from some
citizen's garden. Nikias's balled fist went into the air in a hold
command directed at the bowmen who stood on nearby rooftops with
arrows nocked and aimed. Brasidas was allowed to draw up to a point
just beyond the barricade of carts and tables and couches which the
Spartans had hastily thrown up at the head of the evacuated
street.

"Athenians!" Brasidas called out. "We hold
thirty citizen women and seventy children. They are untouched for
now, and we have no wish to harm them. All you need do to secure
their return is accede to our demands, which are simple. We want
our shields back and a guarantee of safe passage to Megara." He
paused briefly and scanned his rapt audience. "Is Demosthenes among
you?"

"I am here." Demosthenes stepped forward,
even as his thoughts went to his home and Laonome and their warm
twin comforts of a soft bed and her softer body.

Brasidas laughed, a cold sound. "Do your
countrymen know that it is a woman who gives them victory?"

Demosthenes' heart plunged, for the space of
one beat, into icy water. So Brasidas knew of Thalassia; Styphon
had told him of meeting Thalassia on the island, naturally. The
rest he must somehow have deduced on his own.

"Let the innocents go," Demosthenes said
flatly, more to change the subject than in real hope of achieving
that result. Brasidas was hardly about to relinquish his sole
advantage.

Addressing the whole crowd, Brasidas
shouted, "I will free twelve wives and all their children if
Demosthenes, who should be dead already, takes their place! If he
is brave enough! You have our demands. If our shield arms remain
empty a half hour from now, this street begins filling with
corpses!"

With that Brasidas spun on his heel and
receded down the captured street. His improvised herald's wand
clattered on the paving stones where he threw it. The time for talk
was over.

The generals present, which comprised most
of the Board, closed in a tight circle. Even though Kleon had
jurisdiction, all looked to Nikias for the first word.