Athenian Steel (Book I of the The Hellennium) (51 page)

The Spartan came forward. Well before he
completed his advance, Demosthenes knew his identity. Though he had
not seen the face in a year, he was well accustomed to a smaller
and pleasanter version of it. Alkibiades recognized the man, too,
and was the first to speak his name in cool greeting.

"Styphon."

Forgoing acknowledgment, the Spartiate
announced loudly, so his voice echoed off the expanse of pristine
wall behind him.

"What you are doing here is pointless!
Athens has capitulated, and her new government has ordered an end
to resistance." Styphon drew a curled parchment from his belt and
tossed it into the dirt, where it remained. "Simply leave your arms
and armor behind, and come out. No harm will befall you, and none
shall be subject to arrest!"

His ringing words gave way to total silence,
which Demosthenes allowed to persist a few moments before
answering. He spoke, as Styphon had, at a volume intended to let
any Athenian within earshot hear clearly.

"Any who might have taken you up on that
offer have already gone to their homes. We keep no man here against
his will. So if that is all you've come to say, your work is
done."

Styphon was unfazed by the rebuff and by the
chorus of muttered agreement which followed. He returned in a more
conversational volume, directly at Demosthenes, "You ought to
reconsider. The consequences will be harsh, and I would as soon not
witness them. Attica has seen enough bloodshed. It is time for
peace."

"Then go home!" someone shouted.

Ignoring the outburst, Styphon nodded at
Demosthenes. "To you and him"–he indicated Alkibiades–"Brasidas
offers exile. Take your families with you and never set foot in
Attica again. In exchange, he demands the corpse."

He did not need to specify which.

"Before you reject this offer," Styphon
added heavily, "think hard about those who are not protected by
these walls."

Demosthenes spat. He felt both fear and
anger, but let only the latter show, as he spoke words which he
hoped passionately were true.

"I have heard such threats once before,
outside the jail in Melite," he said. "They were empty then and
empty now. Brasidas knows he will not long command respect if he
murders wives and children. That is not the Spartan way. If you are
half the man I believe you to be, you will be first in line to put
a knife in him when he descends to that."

"You have never known me," Styphon countered
calmly. "Even less do you know Brasidas." He shrugged his wide
shoulders, then raised the volume of his voice again for all to
hear. "You have heard our offer! No one need suffer if you just
pile your weapons and walk out. You have one hour!"

He turned his back to Demosthenes and faced
the closed gate and the thirty Athenians arrayed in front of it.
The faces of those men failed to give any hint of whether or not
they were tempted by the envoy's terms.

"There is one more matter I would raise with
you," Alkibiades said to Styphon's back. With a show of reluctance,
Styphon turned, and Alkibiades called out, his voice soaring over
the village, "Andrea, show yourself!"

Almost instantly, a small figure stepped out
from behind the thick corner post of a stockade fence attached to a
nearby dwelling.

"Come here," her guardian said. His were the
only eyes which did not follow Andrea's straight-backed march to
his side, where she inserted herself between him and Demosthenes.
"Do you recognize this man?"

The Spartlet answered in a voice that belied
her stature, "He is my father, and he means to kill us all."

Her guardian smacked her lightly on the back
of her head. "Answer the question as asked."

Andrea grated, "Yes."

"You owe your father respect." Then
Alkibiades addressed Styphon, whose reaction to the sight of his
offspring could not be read. "I ordered her out of Dekelea, but she
hid until the gates were sealed. I agreed to let her stay and help
however she could, but now that her father is present–"

Foreseeing what Alkibiades intended, Andrea
pleaded quietly, petulantly, "No."

"–he can be trusted to take her to
safety."

Styphon stood unspeaking. The black eyes
beneath his heavy brow failed even to shift down to the defiant
face of the girl in question.

Andrea's jaw set. "I won't go."

"You will do your duty," her guardian
insisted. He looked hard at Styphon. "If he'll have you."

A heavy silence settled between the gathered
Athenians and the lone, stone-faced Spartiate as the latter
pondered his decision. A minute later, and still without his black
eyes having settled on the girl, he delivered it with a nod.

"No!" Andrea's high-pitched shriek echoed
off of Dekelea's walls. She whirled, and her little arms flew up to
wrap around Alkibiades' ornate breastplate. "Uncle, please!" She
pressed her cheek hard against the bronze.

Alkibiades set a hand on his ward's
shoulder, bowed his head and said, "It's Spartan blood in you,
girl.  His blood. You owe him obedience. Have I not taught you
that much? Do as he says. If the gods let me live, I'll see you
again when all this is over."

Andrea sniffled, drew a shuddering breath
and detached herself from Alkibiades. She hardened her flint black
eyes, raised her chin high and met the bracing gaze of her guardian
as if drawing strength from it. After holding that posture for
several heartbeats, she turned and aimed a blanker stare at the
father she barely knew, but so resembled. Then in the steady,
shade-like gait of a condemned man walking to the garrote, she went
to unblinking Styphon and took a place by his left hand, facing the
Athenian contingent. Side by side they stood, Spartiate and
Spartlet, but there might as well have been a wall between them for
all the notice they took of each other. Maybe Styphon was aware, or
maybe Demosthenes only imagined, that behind the little girl's
laconic mask, she was choking on tears.

One who knew him well could see the pain in
Alkibiades' bright eyes, too, as he sent away the ward he had
raised for longer than a year: his little monster, first pupil in
the secret school he had hoped to found with Thalassia and his
friend and mentor Socrates. But now Attica was under the Spartan
heel, his star-girl was a corpse, and wise Socrates had gone down
in the Athenian center at Eleusis with a spear in his belly.

Alkibiades' dream was dead, but he steeled
his gaze and stood fast with the gentle hand which had been on his
Spartlet resting now on the hilt of his sword.

"You have our reply," Demosthenes said to
Styphon. "Now go and tell Brasidas that if he wants us, he can
fucking well come in and get us."

The undiplomatic utterance prompted a
flashed smile, if a melancholy one, from Alkibiades, who recognized
the shade of Thalassia speaking through him. Other Athenians took
up assailing the enemy envoy with jeers of their own, and so under
a hail of curses, Styphon wordlessly turned his back and marched to
the closed gate. A pace behind, Andrea followed mechanically,
keeping her gaze straight ahead. On Demosthenes' signal, the heavy
double doors were heaved open just a crack and the Spartiate
slipped through first. After a barely perceptible moment of
hesitation, his daughter followed.

The door thumped shut, but before even the
iron reinforced timber bars were set back in place, Alkibiades had
fallen back from the crowd to stride off into the unpaved streets
of empty, hopeless Dekelea alone.

The sun was a violent red disc pouring blood
over the western peaks when the Spartan army finished arraying
itself before the walls of Dekelea. To the south, Brasidas's
Peloponnesians were a dark forest of men and spears standing just
out of bowshot, while northward, deeper into the mountains, a
Theban force blocked the narrow pass through which in peacetime
flowed a large percentage of Athens' grain supply. A foreign force
that seized Dekelea could choke the life from Attica, and in a
never-would-be world, that had happened; here, instead Attica was
already in foreign hands and Dekelea the last resort of its
defenders.

The doe-eyed leader of those holdouts was
dead on his feet, a restless shade hovering in front of the shed
which housed dead Thalassia. Would that he needed as little sleep
as she did, barely one night out of every six. But Demosthenes was
mortal and did need sleep, and he itched, too, all over the scalp
under the hair which once had been blond but now was a helm of
flat, grime-encrusted tendrils, and on the jaw covered by five
days' worth of beard.

Why did he keep ending up here, at her shed?
Wherever in Dekelea he was headed, his feet seemed to choose a path
that took him past it. Its door was tied shut with a thick rope;
perhaps he hoped each time he passed to find that rope hanging
broken and Thalassia leaning casually on the wall with her supple
neck unbroken.

But the door was always locked, and
Demosthenes resisted whatever macabre impulse it was that urged him
inside to see if he might find some way to awaken Athens' fallen
champion in her adopted city's hour of need. But she had done her
part... more than her part, and earned her rest.

"Demosthenes!"

He was standing with his back against the
wall of a house opposite the shed, half asleep on his feet, when he
heard his name shouted from the walls.

"Here!" Demosthenes answered swiftly, before
he could be tempted to remain in hiding and sleep. He forced his
legs to bear him out into the open space of Dekelea's main
north-south road. There, looking toward the village's south gate,
he saw his summoner: Alkibiades, waving him over from atop the
wall. Coming alive again, or managing to make it seem that way,
Demosthenes picked up his pace and soon was climbing the nearest
stair to mount the protected walkway on which Alkibiades
waited.

"A party approaches," Alkibiades said when
he was within earshot. His manner was strangely subdued, even
guarded. "Brasidas is among them."

Demosthenes replied swiftly, "Tell Straton
to fill him with arrows, herald's wand or no."

Alkibiades hesitated. "I... don't think
you'll want to do that."

Certainly, the habitual blasphemer's
reluctance could not have come from any unwillingness to violate a
sacred protection. He must have had other reasons, but rather than
asking for them, Demosthenes brushed past Alkibiades and sped to
the battlements. There, on the rocky ground below, midway between
the dark line of besiegers and Dekelea's sheer walls, a
spear-studded group of ten or so figures advanced. Squinting to see
the band against the sunset, Demosthenes realized that the foremost
two figures were unarmed.

They were not even men, but a pair of women,
and they walked reluctantly on rope leads held by a Spartiate
walking a few paces behind. Sackcloth obscured their heads. The
female on the right was slight of build, with a short chiton of
soiled linen covering a minimal expanse of her pale flesh. The
other wore the long dress of a citizen woman, pleats stretched taut
over a bulging abdomen.

As paralyzing terror overtook Demosthenes,
Alkibiades appeared beside him and set a hand on his shoulder. He
might have thrown it off, but his limbs would not respond.

The advancing party drew to a halt within
easy shouting distance. The hooded prisoners' leads were jerked,
and the two human shields marching with hands bound in front of
them stumbled and twisted, but managed to stay upright. At the
party's center was a figure who wore nothing to distinguish himself
from any other of the long-haired Equals around him. It was this
man, Brasidas, who spoke.

"Everywhere there is celebration at the news
of Athens' defeat!" Brasidas bellowed. "The world is set free from
the yoke of empire! Nothing that happens at Dekelea today, or any
day to come, can reverse the spread of liberty! In that spirit of
celebration, I give you one final opportunity to lay down your arms
and–"

Rage built up in Demosthenes' tired limbs
and spilled over the battlements in the shape of a roar which
drowned out the Spartan general.

"
Let them go!
"

Brasidas aborted his speech. He might have
smiled as he gestured to the Spartiate holding the rope leads, who
obediently stepped forward and pulled the canvas sack from each
prisoner's head. Coppery curls tumbled from one, light brown locks
from the other. The two blinked in adjustment to the twilight and
cast bewildered looks all around as they came to grips with their
surroundings. Finding one another, they clung close, but it wasn't
long before their fearful eyes went to the wall, and up it to find
the husband and master whom they could not have failed to
comprehend, now more than ever, held their lives in his hand.

Demosthenes could not long return their
stunned gazes. Guilt turned his shocked eyes instead to the women's
captor.

"Release them now! They have no place
here!"

Brasidas refused to mirror his adversary's
fury. "I will gladly let them go," he called back evenly. "You know
the price. Open your gates."

For that moment, Demosthenes stood alone.
There were no ranks of defiant Athenians arrayed on either side of
him atop Dekelea's walls. There were no walls at all, and no
Dekelea. There was only Brasidas and his two hostages.

"You can have me," Demosthenes returned
resolutely. "For execution. Just let them go."

"That is not the trade at hand."

"The body you want, too! Have it!"

Demosthenes finally cast off the reassuring
hand of Alkibiades when the latter began to utter a syllable of
protest. Brasidas fell silent, and for an instant Demosthenes let
himself hope that this new exchange was being considered.

That hope was dashed when Brasidas only
repeated, "Lay down your arms and throw open your gates."