Athenian Steel (Book I of the The Hellennium) (40 page)

It might have been in one of those sessions
that seed finally found purchase in her womb.

Laonome whispered in Demosthenes' ear one
night while seated in his lap on their bed, nothing separating
their two skins but a sheen of sweat: "I should have bled by
now."

The declaration took him by surprise.

He asked, "How late is it?"

"Very," she answered, laughing. Demosthenes
laughed, too, crushed her in an embrace and rolled playfully on top
of her. Her shriek summoned Eurydike, who knew already, of course,
for this was the kind of news women eternally shared with one
another first. She joined the pile and screamed with them as
spiritedly if the child to come were her own. She was all the more
enthusiastic, perhaps, for not having to bear the burden in her own
hard, flat belly.

He was to have an heir! Possibly. Or a
daughter. The former would be more practical, of course, but either
was an equal blessing, but for one consideration. If the gods, whom
he now doubted, saw fit to give him a girl, the influences most
certain come to bear in shaping her seemed as likely as not to be
ones which would turn her into an outright menace: an oversexed,
foul-mouthed, strong-willed, probably lethal, fucking beautiful
menace to Athens and the world.

But she would be his menace, and born of
love, and loved.

Mounichion in the archonship of Isarchos
(April 423 BCE)

The four cold winter months of his sentence
passed in what seemed as many heartbeats. He spent it not only
lazing and laughing and fucking, of course, though there was plenty
of all that. Demosthenes sent letters to influence the Board and
other key citizens seeking support for the war plans laid during
Thalassia's businesslike visits to Athens. He would lead a force of
Athenians, Argives, and Messenians–this last group eager to repay
the Liberator of Pylos–into wooded Arkadia. All would be light
infantry and archers, and their ostensible purpose would be to
disrupt and distract the enemy by destroying supplies, burning
crops, slaughtering herds and horses, making roads impassible,
inspiring Sparta's slaves and allies to rebellion, ambushing their
detachments. Damage done, they would melt back into the woods
whilst avoiding ever going shield-to-shield with the enemy in
pitched battles they could not win.

The force's arms would include two hundred
of a new weapon, a lighter version of the gastraphetes which men
had come to call a 
khiasmon
–loosely, "cross-bow,"–sure
to prove more useful in close combat than any traditional bow.

They would be raiders, marauders, saboteurs,
pirates of land. Demosthenes had led some fighting of this sort in
Aetolia. It had ended badly there, to say the least, but until
disaster had befallen, such tactics had worked extremely well in
allowing a small, light force to challenge a much stronger foe.

The Spartans did possess such fighters of
their own: the feared and elite Skiritai, Arkadian mountain men
who, when summoned to Sparta's defense, would have the added
advantage of operating in their homeland. So highly regarded were
they by their Spartan masters that to the Skiritai alone went the
privilege of scouting ahead of the King.

Thalassia would see to them. Going ahead of
Demosthenes' main force, she would assassinate as many Skiritai as
she could before Sparta even knew a threat existed. Thereafter, she
would remain in the Arkadian wood, shadowing Demosthenes' force and
acting on her own to spread terror and havoc, employing her skills
to making it appear as though Sparta faced an army of shades
capable of striking at will in ten places at once.

The effect, Demosthenes had told the Board,
would be to put Sparta so off balance that they would not feel
secure in mounting any assault on Athens, but would instead keep
their forces in Arkadia dealing with this threat so close to home.
In the best case, a general uprising of the helots–an everpresent
Spartan fear–might be achieved. In truth, he and Thalassia intended
even more. If all went well, then by harvest time, Sparta itself, a
city which lacked walls, might find itself at the mercy of a few
hundred lightly-armed troops–and one fighter not of this world.

Demosthenes' son or daughter would be born
in a city at peace.

Would have been. Might have.

Now, those plans were as dust.

On this, his first day of freedom,
Demosthenes had attended the Straegion expecting to be granted the
special dispensation from the Board of Ten which would allow a
private citizen to lead an armed force, as he had done at Pylos.
That was not to be. There was fresh news, and it was of a kind
which must be delivered immediately to Thalassia's ears, by him
alone. And so he left the city by the Acharnian Gate and rode Maia
north for Dekelea at a gallop, halfway wishing that he could slow
and savor the air and the open sky and the plains. He savored
instead speed, something else which had been denied him during his
term of house arrest. In short order, he traversed the
arrow-straight road across the plains, dodging rattling ox-carts
both coming and going, and the ground ahead began to rise up into
the peaks of the Parnes range in which Dekelea sat nestled. Now he
was forced to slow Maia, letting her rest and choose her footing on
the rockier, more sinuous path.

On the final approach, he found his way
blocked by a lone Spartan. This Spartan bore no shield or spear,
wore no armor and stood a good three heads shorter than shortest
Equal ever to take the field. Still, the hard glare of two coal
black eyes left Demosthenes with no choice but to rein in Maia and
take notice.

"Good morning, Andrea," he said.

The eleven-year-old glared. Her brown hair
was braided back, and the bare legs showing below the hem of her
short chiton were caked with dried mud.

"Why didn't you bring Eurydike?" the girl
demanded. Andrea had developed something of a bond with Eurydike
during the latter's regular visits to Dekelea.

"Laonome needs her help these days,"
Demosthenes answered. "Now, if you'll pardon me, I"

The Spartlet tossed her head in rejection of
the excuse and put herself once more in the way when Demosthenes
made to guide Maia around her.

"If Alkibiades agrees," he offered in the
hope of winning passage, "then I shall take you to visit Eurydike
on my return to the city. Now, I"

"The city is boring," Andrea scoffed.
"Tutors had taken the edge off of her coarse native Doric, but her
origins were plain enough when those tutors were not around.

"Ride with me the rest of the way to
Dekelea," Demosthenes offered.

"I'm used to riding on my own."

"Then you give 
me 
a ride,"
Demosthenes proposed, "and after you drop me off, you can take Maia
out."

With a petulant sigh, wiry Andrea stretched
up an arm to be pulled into Maia's saddle. Demosthenes set her in
front of him, gave the girl the reins, kicked Maia's flanks, and
together they rode the short distance to Dekelea's stout walls. The
walls were freshly built from giant blocks of Thalassia's liquid
stone, poured on site, and so were uniformly dull gray but for
embedded gravel of irregular shapes and hues. This last was a
concession to the engineers of Athens, who felt that the unadorned
liquid stone was simply too ugly. The resulting effect was similar
to what a tile mosaic might look like if no subject were depicted,
just swirling chaos.

Dekelea's gates had not yet been hung, so
they entered the village by passing between two empty pylons.
Silently, Andrea guided Maia to a bastion on the northern side,
where the walls were incomplete.

Reining the horse, she cried out,
"Uncle!"

Alkibiades appeared up at the tower's edge,
leaning over its low wall. He looked down and beamed. "Demosthenes!
Welcome back to the world!"

Demosthenes dismounted, leaving Andrea in
the saddle. No sooner was there soil beneath his sandals than the
Spartlet wheeled Maia and sped off.

"Feed and groom her!" Alkibiades yelled
after his charge. Then, to Demosthenes, "Freedom at last! How does
it feel?"

"Would that I could enjoy it. I bring grave
news freshly gained from"

A faint tinkling sound, then motion, drew
Demosthenes' eye to the base of the sixteen-foot bastion on which
Alkibiades stood. There, in an open, timber-framed portal stood a
familiar figure, unfamiliarly clad.

Thalassia was a vision in black. At the top,
her black gown left exposed an expansive patch of skin above her
breasts, where hung an elaborate necklace of dangling silver
pendants, matched by bracelets on her smooth forearms, all
barbarian creations, as the dress itself must have been. The
garment's pleated skirts flared out below a waist marked by a belt
of interlocking silver rings, many segments of which hung down,
tinkling like tiny bells with each movement of the pleats. The
skirt ended abruptly at mid-calf, leaving it a mystery how much
farther up the wearer's shapely legs climbed the vine-like laces of
sandals as black as the cloth. Her long hair was unbound and
tumbled over her shoulders in chaotic spirals, the twisting edges
of which screamed a playful violet, like unmixed wine, where they
were struck by rays of midmorning sun. The sun caught silver, too,
in her hair, threads of it binding a multitude of tiny braids
anchored in the depths of that dark, roiling sea.

Most startling of all were Thalassia's eyes:
bounded all around and artificially elongated with a thick
application of kohl which managed, impossibly, to render the
already striking pale irises more arresting still.

Mind and breath momentarily stolen,
Demosthenes stared in stunned silence for a time while she hung
there, suspended in the door. Then she lifted both arms, bracelets
sliding in a clatter, and casually set the palms of ring-adorned
hands on the timber frame to either side, filling the portal with
her dark, foreign presence.

A name flew to mind. She surely had not set
out deliberately to emulate that most famous and deadly of witches,
but the sight of Thalassia emerging from the base of that tower
could not have more fully resembled what the ancients must have
seen when sharp-hearted Medea stepped ashore from 
Argo
.
Perhaps Jason's first reaction on seeing his future bride, and the
slayer of his sons, had been such a chill burst of fear of the
unknown as Demosthenes felt now. But, likewise, that storied hero
must have quickly acknowledged the primal allure of such a creature
as this, a stirring of something deep within which certainly
included, but was not limited to, a flowing of blood to the
groin.

The ghost of a smile played on the witch's
lips. She saw what magic she had wrought.

"You... look..." Demosthenes sputtered after
some time, but he failed to finish.

"For fuck's sake!" the voice of Alkibiades
sailed down from above. "A compliment costs you nothing. Doesn't
obligate you to fuck her, either!"

"Thank you! You are a credit to Socrates!"
Demosthenes yelled back sharply, dragging his eyes from those of
the sorceress.

Upon this exchange between ground and tower,
Thalassia stepped out from the doorway, and said with a smile,
proving herself a merciful witch, "Grave news?"

"Aye," Demosthenes said, his sober mood
instantly returning. He bid Alkibiades descend so that he might not
be forced to shout information to which the public was not yet
privy. While he waited, Demosthenes stared at Thalassia, holding
her kohl-rimmed eyes as much as he could, but also looking her all
over with a feeling that he hardly knew her. She had never looked
thus on her visits to Athens. How many aspects of her existed? She
was assassin, lover, tutor, sister, sorceress, immortal, oracle,
physician, engineer, betrayer, matchmaker, artist,
vengeance-seeker. She seemed to shed and adopt guises with abandon,
settling not quite on any, or else on all. How could any man hope
to keep up?

"How is Laonome?" she asked when Demosthenes
persisted in but staring and thinking.

"A faint breeze and she vomits," he
answered. "The herbs you gave her help."

Behind the seamless gray wall of liquid
stone, echoing footfalls scraped a timber stair. Alkibiades leaped
down the final few steps and set a hand on the bodice of
Thalassia's barbarian gown, a gesture which the recipient subtly
appeared to forbear more than relish.

"Out with it," Alkibiades said eagerly.

Demosthenes obliged: "Sparta's invasion
force has already marched. It is not led by King Agis this year,
but by Brasidas. Since his escape and return with the other
prisoners, the ephors reportedly grant him leave to do almost as he
pleases. His army travels with some number of extremely large,
wagon-borne burdens of which nothing is known by our sources except
for a name: 
mechanamai
."

He let the word hang ominously. It might
refer to a literal device of some sort, a machine, but more
idiomatically, it could mean any complex contrivance, or a trick,
such as those used by Odysseus.

"Perhaps they bring us gifts of hollow
horses," Alkibiades suggested, unhelpfully. More helpfully, he
asked, "Any ideas, star-girl?"

"They will be siege engines," Thalassia
declared. "Unlike others you have seen. Likely they will be capable
of hurling very large stones over the Long Walls, causing
destruction within, or into the Walls, creating a breach."

Demosthenes met her pronouncement, the
accuracy of which he did not doubt, with grim silence. It was
Alkibiades who posed the question to which only he, of those
present, did not know the answer.

"How could they have built such machines?"
He scoffed. "Much less thought of them. One might almost think they
had starborn aid of their own!"