Athenian Steel (Book I of the The Hellennium) (4 page)

Styphon shook his head.  He was trying,
short of clapping hands over ears, to block out her voice.

"I don't think Sparta breeds stupid men,"
were the next words to flow from her honeyed tongue.  "Look at
the evidence.  I rose from the dead.  I am stronger than
you.  If you didn't notice, I knew your father's name.
 So if I also tell you that I am an oracle, I dare say you
have cause to take me seriously."

She was right that the
Lykurgan 
agoge
 did not turn out brainless fools,
no matter how loudly and often Sparta's enemies made the opposite
claim.  And she was right that it would be the height of
idiocy to take less than seriously such a being as she.

Styphon treated her to a resentful glare and
grated, "It is no mortal's place to know the future!"

"What mortals know is for immortals to
decide," she said.  The creature's once-broken Greek was by
now nearly flawless, if still strangely accented.  "And one
now has chosen to tell you that before dawn on the day after next,
the Athenians will assault this island, disguising their movements
as the regular changing of patrol ships.  Your two commanders
will be among the fallen, and you, Styphon son of Pharax, will
consign to irons all the Equals who survive."

"Why tell me this?" Styphon growled.
 He might have roared it were he not conscious of the need for
discretion.  His men were in easy earshot and doubtless
curious about the goings-on behind the curtain.  "The threads
of Fate bind me no less for knowing that I am to disgrace
myself!"

The red-cloaked oracle frowned.  "The
threads of Fate are threads, not chains," she said, "and as easily
snapped.  Knowing of the attack, you might thwart it.
 Failing that, instead of yielding you could choose to die
with hon—"

"I have heard enough!" Styphon hissed.
 "I will take you to Epitadas.  You may give him your
oracles."

"You mean the man who ordered me thrown from
a cliff?  No, I choose you.  Tell me, Styphon, does
Pharax yet live?"

His mouth was already open to insist that
she meet Epitadas, but his protest died as he realized she could
tell the 
pentekoster
 anything she liked, easily
making Styphon look the fool.  Instead he just answered her
question.  "No."

"How did he die?"

"In battle."  With resignation, Styphon
began to sense the direction of her argument.

"Good for him," Sea-thing said.  "Do
you have a family of your own?"

By now Styphon was responding blankly,
mechanically, wishing he were elsewhere, but unable to leave.
 "Only a daughter.  Andrea."

"There's nothing 
only
 about
a daughter," she reprimanded him, then asked, "What will happen to
Andrea if you are declared a 
trembler
?"

Styphon's eyes followed the snakes of bright
green moss that filled the gaps between the black stones of the
fort's crumbling wall, and his mind followed the unpleasant course
of Sea-thing's thinking.  Were he to disgrace himself here,
his daughter would suffer a lonely life of misery and shame.
 No Equal would ever wed her, for who would wish to plant his
seed in a womb through which flowed a coward's blood?

Perhaps those piercing eyes could see inside
his mind, for Sea-thing said next, quietly, "That is what Fate has
in store, unless you choose to make it otherwise."

"How?" Styphon asked hopelessly.
 "Epitadas is the only one who can act on your warning, and
you refuse to speak to him."

A hand emerged from her crimson shroud to
point at the battered copper horn which hung from the belt of
Styphon's chiton.  The horn had gone unused these long months,
but remained always by his side, lest it not be at hand the moment
it finally was needed.

"That is an alarm, is it not?" she said.
 "You need but sound it when the time comes."

Styphon's hand fell to the horn and clutched
it tightly.  "You said you do not think Spartans stupid, yet
you would have me do something only a fool would do: stand against
Fate."

The creature sighed a feminine, nasal sigh
of exasperation.  It reminded Styphon of Alkmena at times when
she had found him too bull-headed to be swayed by her wise
counsel.

"I cannot make the choice for you,"
Sea-thing conceded.  "You can serve Fate and live a life of
lasting shame... or serve Sparta, and live or die with some glory
that might anger the gods a little.  I know what I would
choose.  But then I like making gods angry."

Mind reeling, Styphon realized his fingers
were white around the neck of the copper horn.  He released
his grip.  "I know not your reason for wishing me to do this
thing," he said.  "But it hardly matters.  Now that you
have cursed me with this knowledge, I cannot stand by and watch
disaster claim the lives of my countrymen.  I will warn
Epitadas, on the slim chance he might listen.  If he does
not... I will consider what to do."  Meeting the eyes of the
Sea-thing, whatever she was, he swallowed dust and steeled himself.
 "But I would ask something in return."

The corners of her expressive mouth turned
earthward.  "You want more?  More than the chance to
escape doom for Sparta and disgrace for yourself?"  She
scoffed lightly.  "Fine.  Ask, and we'll see."

"I would see my daughter spared from the
consequences of my actions," Styphon said.  "Whatever course I
take, if I should wind up in dishonor, take Andrea from Sparta and
find her a new home.  A temple of Artemis or some other place
where she will learn to honor the gods.  And tell her that her
father was no coward, but only tried to do what was best."

Where Styphon had hoped to find some measure
of sympathy light the creature's pale eyes as he finished, he found
only hard calculation.  "I could do that..." she answered,
ominously, "but you would owe me another favor."

Styphon's heart went cold at the thought of
enslaving himself to this creature.  Better an Athenian
prison, with bars and walls which could be seen and touched, than
the invisible cages so often used by human women and inhuman
creatures of legend.

She must have seen the horror on his face,
for Sea-thing's features softened.  She reassured him, "I may
never collect.  But when one is new to a world and poor of
possessions, it rarely hurts to gather favors."

Styphon wanted to believe that he would
never see her again, that she would never call in his debt.
 Somehow he doubted it, but it offered a shred of hope to
which he might cling as he nodded his assent to the black
bargain.

"I agree," he said.  "But I have
forgotten your name."  She had uttered it just once, in the
raking voice with which she had first awakened, and its syllables
had been ugly and barbarian besides.

The raven-haired being whose corpse the
ravens would not touch smiled.  "I've overheard your men
talking about me.  They call me 
Thalassia
," she
said.  "
Thing from the sea
."  Styphon nodded the
truth of it.  "That will do," she said.  "Now, I'm really
very hungry, if you could spare some provisions.  Something
with honey, preferably.  You won't likely be needing food much
longer."

Styphon gave the men of the camp the story
that Thalassia was in fact a priestess of Artemis, whom they dared
not harm for fear of bringing down the wrath of the one she served.
 Though Epitadas' order to kill her was common knowledge by
now, the men all concurred, at least outwardly, with Styphon's
choice to defy it.  Even if some few of them thought it was
better to be rid of a woman's unlucky presence, none wished to bear
the ritual impurity of having done the deed himself.

Not that any five of them combined would
necessarily be capable of killing her, only Styphon knew.  But
he did not tell them that, for such a claim would rightly cause
them to question his grip on reality.  And so Thalassia lived,
sitting in seclusion behind her curtain and devouring barley cakes
as quickly as Styphon could sneak them to her from the store of
rations which, if she was to be believed, would soon be unneeded.
 Another day passed and another night fell, a night that to
all but one Spartan on Sphakteria was no different then the seventy
before it.  To that one, who knew this night to be their last,
little sleep came, and when it did it was plagued by dreams of
vengeful gods, and monsters from the mists of legend.

Early the next morning, Styphon heard by way
of messenger that the Athenians had sent to the island with a
demand for surrender in exchange for mild treatment of all
prisoners until such time as a general settlement could be reached
between their cities.  Thalassia had foretold that just such
an offer would be made.  Naturally, as no powers of oracle
were needed to foresee, Epitadas refused.  Styphon chose that
moment to send his own messenger from Nestor's fort to the main
body of troops at the island's center with the suggestion that the
demand for surrender, coming so soon on top of the arrival of
reinforcements, erased all doubt that an attack was imminent.
 The runner returned Epitadas' terse reply:
"The 
phylarch
's opinion is noted."

Night fell on the second day since
Thalassia's arrival, and the gods and glittering stars looked down
upon Sphakteria and dared a mere mortal man to stand alone against
their divine order.  Laying on his back on the cold earth,
Styphon gazed up with heavy eyes and heavier heart.  As night
wore on, meager rations combined with lack of sleep caused his
thoughts to meander.  In his visions he saw Alkmena, smelled
the scent of sage in her dark curls and looked down upon the
shallow white depression in the small of her bare back as she lay
face-down on their marital bed, awaiting him

He saw Alkmena's grave, white as her skin
but far colder, a block of stone set atop a mound of distant
Lakonian earth, watered with women's tears.  As Alkmena hadn't
died in childbirth, her stone was unmarked, as any man's would be
if he died outside the battlefield.

Realizing he was drifting off, he roused
himself.  His hand went instinctively to his waist in search
of the copper horn which tonight was to be Fate's unlikely
instrument.

It was gone.  He sat bolt upright and
searched around him in the darkness, palms frantically brushing the
rocky soil, but to no avail.  There was nothing around but the
scattered bodies of slumbering Spartans, dark hulks barely
distinguishable from the weathered rocks which jutted up all over
camp.  Rising, Styphon picked a path through both sets of
obstacles in the direction of Nestor's fort.  Sleep fled his
limbs, and he moved with the speed and urgency of a man certain of
his destination.  

Seconds later, he thrust back the curtain of
rags.  Behind it, wrapped in her cloak, Thalassia perched
owl-like on a fallen wall stone, all of her weight on the
ash-coated toes that peered out from beneath the crimson cloth's
tattered edge.

Sudden as his arrival had been, he failed to
surprise her.  Not only that, she knew why he was there, and
proved it by opening the cloak and exposing a hand blue-tinged by
moonlight.  In it was clutched the copper horn.

"Give it to me!"  Styphon lunged at
her.  To his surprise, Thalassia made no effort to thwart him,
allowing him to snatch the instrument from her open palm.  She
might as well have been part of the ancient masonry for all that
the flurry of motion affected her balance.

"Why?" Styphon demanded in a harsh
whisper.

"It's time."  Thalassia's face was
expressionless in the moonlight.  "Blow it."

Anger fled Styphon.  "Just a little
longer," he said.  "If the men wake and see nothing, how will
I explain?  Let me climb to the heights and look for
myself."

Even as he spoke, he knew it was only an
excuse to delay the his first step down an irreversible course, the
defiance of Fate.

"By then, it will be too late," Thalassia
said.  She reached down into a corner of her sanctuary, where
Styphon now noted the presence of provisions in excess of what he
had brought her.  She must have crept through the camp,
stealing food.  From a pile large enough to feed three men for
three days, she plucked two cakes of honey and poppy seed and
pushed them one after the other into her mouth.

"You have told me how this siege is meant to
end," Styphon said, ignoring her breach of the common good.
 "But what of the war?  We are but a few hundred, of no
significance.  If we fall today, what becomes of our city?
"

Thalassia finished chewing and hung her
head.  "I could lie to you," she said.  "If you were a
less decent man, I would.  But the truth is... you'll win.
 Twenty years from now, and at such terrible cost that other
cities will eclipse yours within a generation."

Styphon's heart, briefly stilled, took
halting and tentative flight.  "But Sparta will be
victorious?" he asked in disbelief.

"Yes."  Her admission was reluctant.
 "Barely.  Only barbarians benefit when Greeks slaughter
each other.  A victory here might shorten the war and—."

"'
Might
'?" Styphon echoed, receiving
in reply only a dismissive flick of Thalassia's starlit
features.

Thalassia groaned.  "With my help,
victory will be all but certain.  I can give you ideas,
weapons, that will put you far beyond any who might challenge you.
 I 
am
 a weapon," she added with sudden
ferocity.  "The most dangerous fucking weapon on this earth,
and you sit there looking at me like—"

She drew a sharp, calming breath, and
smiled.

"Never mind," she said sweetly.  "Just
blow the horn like we agreed.  You won't regret it."

"I will not," Styphon said.  He had
seen and heard enough.  The glimpse of rage he had just
witnessed escape through Thalassia's carefully controlled facade
made him even more certain what his decision must be.  Yes,
this creature was dangerous, he was sure of that.  She would
be the ruin of every man who came in contact with her.