Athenian Steel (Book I of the The Hellennium) (50 page)

In the end, it did not matter much where he
kept his eyes, for he thought of them anyway, and the thoughts sat
like a lump of lead on his chest. The weight numbed him, preventing
him from feeling anything; he only acted. The events unfolding were
unreal, dreamlike. But then, what had the last two years been to
him if not training to exist in unreality, to live daily with
madness surrounding and infecting him and all he touched as surely
as the great plague, and as deadly.

As the procession made its way ever higher
into the hills, Alkibiades drew up to ride alongside him. He said
sadly, "She was the perfect being." His melancholy gaze was on
Thalassia's corpse. "Both hard and soft at the same time."

Demosthenes expelled his grief in a sigh and
begrudged the ward of Perikles his attention. "Mostly hard," he
observed. He lied.

"She had thick armor, to be sure,"
Alkibiades said. "And some manly traits. But at her core, she was a
woman." He smiled. "Just as we all have some woman in us. She was
showing hers more and more until–" There was no need to finish. He
looked up from her gently jostling corpse and said abruptly, "You
must know that she loved you."

Demosthenes left the assertion
unanswered.

Alkibiades went on. "She never said so. Just
call it my well-drawn conclusion as a student of the human...
and 
human-like
 heart."

"What I shall call it is horse shit,"
Demosthenes grumbled at him. He had the strange and utterly
unfounded feeling that Thalassia could overhear them even now, with
cold ears concealed by gore on a head that barely clung to its
spine.

Alkibiades' shrug was not one of concession.
"Suit yourself," he said. "I'm sure it was coincidence that I
always seemed to wind up with bruises shortly after your name came
up."

"She picked my wife, for fuck's sake,"
Demosthenes said, defying his better judgment by arguing. "And
could not have done a better job of it. Right before she moved
out."

The self-professed student of the human
heart laughed sharply. "Oh, please," Alkibiades scoffed. "You don't
see? She got sick of you refusing to touch her, so she put you off
limits. The problem with that strategy is that she resembles me in
a way. We always want most what we cannot have. Not only that,
though. I think she genuinely wanted you to be happy, which is what
I call–"

"Shut up," Demosthenes hissed.

"–love."

Bowing belatedly to the rebuke, Alkibiades
sighed and changed the subject. Almost. He mused philosophically,
"Socrates says love is a form of madness."

The last word rang in Demosthenes' ears.

"I said it first, though," Alkibiades
continued. "He borrowed it from me. I wonder how he fared today. He
was positioned in the center. I can guarantee you he was one of
those who stood his ground."

Demosthenes gave these comments no reply.
After riding in silence for some minutes, gazing out at the
forested peaks and valleys, Alkibiades renewed his efforts to make
conversation. His subject yet again was Thalassia.

"Damn, I wish I could have seen star-girl
fight!" he lamented. "Must have been a beautiful sight." As before,
he was undeterred by lack of reply. "Do you think she will return?"
He answered himself: "I don't. That's how it goes with stars that
shine brightly. Or star-girls. Like Achilles, they burn out in
their prime and go to join the gods. I intend do the same."

He might have shared further musings, but
Demosthenes, staring blankly ahead at the wooded, uneven ground and
the horde of aimless, defeated souls shambling over it, finally
managed to shut him out.

***

By late afternoon, the gravel-faced walls of
Dekelea were in view. Thanks to the outriders, the villagers were
expecting the band and met it with food, fresh water and words of
encouragement. The storehouses were already stuffed with
provisions, the villagers informed, and still more were en route
from the surrounding country, but that morsel of good news failed
to raise anyone's mood. The hastily gathered remains of Athens'
defeated army numbered a thousand by now, but that was not nearly
enough. They marched, with stooped shoulders and precious little
hope, through fresh-cut gates into the remote, fortified village
where they were to make their stand.

Dekelea was hardly more than a waystation on
the trade route from Athens to the coast., its unplastered,
single-story houses of wood and brick a far cry from what
city-dwellers were used to. None knew how long their stay here
might last. Much-needed rest might have changed their outlook some,
but there was no time for that. For one thing, a barracks would
have to be built, which meant felling trees and dragging them in
from the surrounding wood. After their ten-mile hike wearing bronze
armor in the afternoon heat, men were slumping to the ground
exhausted, only to rise again mouthing curses when their leader
divided them into work crews for the accomplishment of that task
and others. Demosthenes joined a crew himself, and lent Akmos as a
draught animal, though not before he and Alkibiades had reverently
removed Thalassia from his saddle, wrapped her loosely in linens
and laid her out in an old tool shed already stripped of its
contents by the work crews.

In the shed, Alkibiades cleaned her bloodied
face with a damp cloth, exposing her tattoo-like mark of Magdalen.
Her serene features were marred by deep slashes hopelessly packed
with trail grime. He stared down at her, bent and kissed her
parted, half-mangled lips. "Goodbye, star-girl," he whispered, and
rose. "Do you want to say anything?"

"I do not speak to corpses," Demosthenes
snapped.

Alkibiades drew up the linen shroud over her
face, but as they were leaving Demosthenes' conscience stopped him,
and he looked back.

"I have only met two servants of Magdalen,"
he said to the lifeless shell on the dirt floor. "But I say without
any doubt, the one who betrayed them is worth all the rest
combined."

With those words of tribute, he left behind
the silent, mutilated remains of a thing that the sea had coughed
up one day: a seeker of vengeance, a meddler in space in time, a
spreader of madness, the star-born benefactor of a city whose
defeat her aid had only hastened.

Chaining the rickety door of her unfitting
mausoleum, Demosthenes threw his aching heart into making Dekelea
an Attic thorn in Brasidas's grasping claw.

A fast drumbeat of footfalls slapped the
smooth tops of the walls of silent Dekelea. Demosthenes stood
behind the battlements staring southward over evergreens and crags
boldly lit by a violet dawn. As the wearer of the sandals pounding
the poured stone drew up to him, their rhythm slowed and
ceased.

"Hello, Andrea," Demosthenes said, failing
to feign good cheer. "Men are trying to sleep. Maybe you could run
barefoot."

It was the morning of the third day since
the fall of Athens. Two days ago the Spartlet had shown up at
Dekelea of her own accord, having taken a horse and ridden from
Alkibiades' country estate. Either her Lakedaimonian heritage had
bequeathed her a natural military mind or Alkibiades had had been
schooling her in the ways of war. Likely both.

"Maybe they should wake up earlier." It was
a Spartan answer, and Andrea reverted to her native Doric dialect
to deliver it.

Demosthenes permitted himself a dry chuckle.
"Maybe so."

"What's wrong?" the Spartlet asked. Her dark
eyes missed little.

"Can you keep a secret for just a little
while?" Demosthenes asked. "Until I have a chance to tell
everyone?"

Andrea's answer was a reproachful glare.
Demosthenes had been the target of such a look plenty of times
before, but from paler eyes. The behavioral resemblance to her
tutor was probably no coincidence. Sighing at the similarity, he
shared with Andrea, a child of the enemy, the fresh news which had
him so worried:

"Our watchers in Athens say Brasidas marches
here today with an army of six thousand. We are going to be under
siege."

"Haven't we been already?" the girl asked.
She pulled herself up onto the battlement and settled there with
wiry legs dangling. Demosthenes did not bother to offer her a
boost, knowing his help would be rejected.

"Almost," he said. He had learned by now not
to try to speak to Andrea as he might any other child. "Until now
we have had men–and women–slip back and forth from Athens and the
coast. We have ambushed enemy troops who try to pass. But now we
will have to shut our gates and keep them shut. No one in or out."
He frowned. "Alkibiades will insist that you leave."

The Spartlet scoffed. "He can't make me.
Anyway, there are lots of women and children here."

"They will be leaving, too."

Andrea spat on the battlements.
"Cowards."

Demosthenes inhaled to scold the child, but
instead expelled the air in silence.

Andrea did not linger on the subject. "Why
don't flies land on Thalassia's body?" she asked. She stared down
at her swinging heels as they kicked the poured stone underneath
her.

"I told you not to go in there," Demosthenes
chided her half-heartedly.

The Spartlet flashed a little girl's version
of her Spartiate father's scowl. "You don't know me very well, do
you?"

"I do. Too well." Demosthenes managed to
tousle the top of Andrea's long hair before she jerked her head
away. "I don't know why," he said in answer to her question. "Ask
the flies."

"Anyway, Uncle Alky said I could go in the
shed," she said haughtily. "I washed Thalassia's body and anointed
it and said prayers for her."

Demosthenes said quietly, "That was good of
you."

Andrea's mood suddenly sank, and she said
with a frown, "She was my favorite teacher."

"You were her favorite student."

Andrea clicked her tongue in reprimand, as
her teacher often had done. "I was her only student!" Abruptly she
deflated. "I miss her."

"Me too." Demosthenes covered the Spartlet's
small hand with his and was mildly surprised when she failed to
snatch it away.

She looked up, concern lighting her black
eyes. "Any news of Eurydike?" she asked. "Or your wife?" The former
was one of Andrea's favored playmates; the latter seemed to have
been added to her inquiry in a rare show of sensitivity.

"No," Demosthenes said.

The admission pained him. On the day of the
fall, he had sent a loyal man to Athens with instructions to take
the two into hiding, but word had failed to come back of either
success or failure. With full-blown siege imminent, the outcome now
was likely to remain unknown. "They are safe," he said, but it was
hope rather than certainty that he voiced.

By the accounts drifting out, Athens had
been treated as well as any conquered city could expect. Only the
Pnyx and a few other symbolic civic sites had been razed. The
democracy had been abolished and mass arrests made of individuals
deemed a threat to the new regime. Four generals of the Board of
Ten, Nikostratos among them, were en route to Sparta for trial and
possible execution, another three imprisoned in Athens. Women and
children were safe for now, though that could change with one word
from Brasidas.

"Finish your run," Demosthenes said to
Andrea, and hoisted her down from the crenelated wall, depositing
her on her feet before she had the chance to protest.

Instead of dashing off, Andrea looked up at
him. "Since you told me a secret," she said, "I'll give you one,
too."

"I would be honored," Demosthenes said,
crouching level with her to receive it.

"Uncle Alky likes to think he's Achilles, so
he'd be mad if he knew," the Spartlet confided with a note of pride
in her small voice, "but I've always thought the Trojans should
have won."

With a final sly smile she raced away,
sandals slapping the walkway.

***

In wave after wave of round shields bearing
the crimson lambda, the dark tide which was the army of Brasidas
spilled north. It washed over the forests and foothills and flowed
around crags jutting from the green earth. It swamped the broad
road from Athens, and by noon it would have lapped at the base of
Dekelea's walls, but for the threat posed by about sixty men atop
the wall with drawn bows. Some of the sixty were not even archers,
but those below could not know that.

Demosthenes stood on the walls, too,
watching the army come. Beside him stood Alkibiades and a half
dozen sub-commanders of the now-besieged force. They shared no
words, for none could matter now. None likely existed which would
suffice to convey the depth to which Athens' fortunes had sunk.

Before the waves of enemy fighters had even
stopped appearing on the horizon, a lone long-haired Spartiate came
forward from the black mass armed with a herald's wand. He stopped
in front of Dekelea's gate and called up in a voice barely audible
over the din of the assembling horde behind him, "I would
enter!"

"Fuck off!" Alkibiades shouted back
down.

"I offer generous terms of surrender!" the
Spartan came back, unperturbed.

"Shoot them out your ass!"

"I would enter!" the Spartiate repeated.
Then, "You need open your gate only a crack."

After grinning at the Spartiates doubtless
accidental pun, Alkibiades turned from the battlements to throw a
questioning look at Demosthenes. The ward of Perikles had found
time to polish his gear and stood resplendent in his breastplate of
enameled bronze.

"Let him in," Demosthenes reluctantly
agreed, and wasted no time heading for the stairs.

A cluster of sub-commanders accompanied him
to the village's south gate, where they gathered ten paces behind
the heavy double doors of bronze-clad timber. Thirty hoplites lined
up with their hands on the gate to hold it in place in the event of
trickery, and at Demosthenes' command they pulled one of its halves
open just enough to let a man pass. The Spartan herald slipped
through, and with a creak and a crash the massive door slammed
quickly back into place.