Athenian Steel (Book I of the The Hellennium) (6 page)

Hours later, defeat came at the isle's
center.  The Athenians were refusing to do battle like men and
instead relied on weapons which killed from afar and drew no line
between brave men and cowards.  By all accounts, the island
was now flooded with bowmen and targeteers whose stock of spindles
seemed unending.

Looking south from atop the front wall of
Nestor's roofless fort, Styphon watched the volleys arc up and over
the distant, fire-ravaged landscape of the island, hang momentarily
in the air and then slash earthward, vanishing into the great cloud
of gray ash kicked up by the heels of Epitadas' main force of
Equals as it shuffled this way and that, advancing and falling back
in a desperate effort to engage its elusive, womanly foe.

No, to call the Athenians womanly was an
offense to women.  Spartan women would never behave thus in
love or in war.

A Spartiate's leather breastplate could only
half the time could stop an arrow, and even less often a javelin.
 The bronze pilos caps were little better.  The elders of
Sparta said 'the poorer the equipment the braver the man,' to
justify the melting down of the old heavy Corinthian helms, now
only worn by officers.  Whatever truth there was to that
adage, it could scarcely be put to the test against an enemy which
refused to stand face-to-face.

Only the lambda-blazoned shields of
Lakedaimon had never changed, and today more than ever, beneath a
rain of missiles, the lives of Spartans would depend on their round
shields.  All that any of the twenty Equals at Nestor's fort
could do now was pray that under cover of the great ash cloud
Epitadas would make some brilliant move which would catch the
too-clever Athenians by surprise and drive them back into the sea
they loved so much.  But all knew, none better than Styphon,
that such hope was in vain.  Discipline forbade any Equal from
saying so, but all knew that the best they could hope for now was
that some number of their comrades would succeed in falling back to
the fort rather than dying where they stood and leaving twenty
alone to face a thousand.  A Spartiate might say that such
odds sounded good, but he'd only be boasting to cheer his fellows'
spirits for the imminent trek to Haides.

It was past noon when a fresh Helot runner
burst out of the line of charred trees.  Panting and sweating
in the space below Styphon's perch atop the roofless fort's
south-facing wall, he shouted up his report.

“Epitadas comes with three hundred!” the
Helot said, and Styphon's spirits sank, for even though he knew
this must be counted as good news, he had secretly harbored hope
for a better showing.  “Hippagretas is among the fallen.”

The death made Styphon second-in-command on
the island.  It was one more thread thus woven on Fate's vast
loom, leaving only Epitadas standing in her inexorable path, one
life separating a 
phylarch
 from the curse of
command.  It seemed that the song sung by Fate as she worked
was an angry and pompous march, not some quiet lamentation so
delicate as to be thrown off tune by the single misplaced note of a
copper horn.

Dismissing the Helot, Styphon addressed the
men arrayed in a defensive line ten paces in front of the fort.
 The rears of their inadequate helms gleamed in the late
morning sun, so many times had their bored owners and Helot
shield-bearers polished them with mud and sand over the last
seventy days.

“Battle comes at last!” Styphon cried.
 The hoplites knew better than to turn their backs on the
distant enemy in order to look at him.  “It is battle such as
the feeble Athenians know it, but mark my words, they'll run out of
spindles before we run out of blood.  If you keep your shields
high and heads down, then before this day is done we'll have our
chance to show these fucking sons of whores how real men
fight!”

The Spartiates answered with a chorus of
roars, pretending they believed the empty words any more than did
their speaker.  The exhortation given, Styphon dismounted the
stockade wall and crossed over the scattered stones of the fallen
interior walls on a straight path for the fort's rear corner, where
dwelt, assuming she'd not flitted away on whatever current had
brought her, Thalassia.  He threw back her rag curtain and
found her still there.  

“Could you defeat the Athenians?” Styphon
demanded without preface.

Thalassia reclined with her back against the
corner, one bare arm resting on a bent knee just as bare.  Her
scarlet cloak hung open, only just obscuring her femininity.
 Judging by her open posture, which changed not a bit on
account of Styphon's entrance, she didn't much care about what was
covered and what wasn't.  In that, at least, she reminded him
of a Spartan woman.  Scattered around her were kernels of
barley and clusters of honeyed poppy seed, the shrapnel of her
bestial, daylong rampage through what was left of the camp's
provisions.

She raised her head from the stone and
looked up with interest.  Styphon hung on the movement of dark
lips that stood pregnant with promise. 

When finally they moved, their speech
disappointed.

“Possibly...” Thalassia said.
 “Probably.  But there would be no honor in that for
Sparta, would there?  And if I'm going to continue helping
you, that's not how it will work.  I can't do everything
myself.”

It was just as well, Styphon thought.
 He had felt shame in even asking, having been driven to it by
the desperation of seeing defeat looming so near.  Who knew,
anyway, if she really could fight an army?  She might claim
so, but then laughter-loving Aphrodite had joined battle on the
plains of Troy only to swiftly wing her way back to Olympos in
tears.

“But you can still win,” Thalassia said.

Styphon tried not to let hope swell in his
breast.  Like Thalassia's every promise, he knew it could not
but come with some heavy price attached.  

Still, he could not help but ask, “How?”

“Fight dirty,” she said matter-of-factly.
 “Ask the Athenians for a truce, then use it to find and
slaughter their archers.  Agree to meet with their generals,
and when you get close to them, cut their throats.”

Were Styphon's mouth not bone dry, he might
have spat.  Instead he hissed his disgust through clenched
teeth.  But in truth, he wondered.  Instinctively, such a
course was repellent, but Spartans were not above, as Thalassia put
it, fighting dirty.  Had not Kleomenes burned a sacred grove
when thousands of fleeing Argives took refuge there, with no harm
done to his reputation?  But then Styphon was no king and had
no other glorious deeds to his name to overshadow the
inglorious.

The choice between being remembered as the
first Equal ever to consign his comrades to chains and one who had
dishonored a sacred truce to assassinate enemy generals was not a
particularly hard one.  Yet questions of Fate muddied that
water.  A battle was not a war.  Could Sparta win this
day, instead of losing, as Fate demanded, but still emerge
victorious in the greater conflict?  Thalassia might claim to
know, but only the gods did.

If Styphon could be certain of just one
thing when it came to this creature before him, this golden-skinned
bitch that the sea had belched up, it was this: she was no fucking
goddess.

“Whatever happens, do not forget the thing
you have promised,” Styphon reminded her.  “Andrea.  She
dwells with the widow of her mother's brother.”

“I will not,” Thalassia said.  “But if
you make good choices today, there will be no need.”

She suddenly looked up over the low inner
wall of the ancient fort.  Styphon did likewise and saw
nothing, but soon heard the shouts of greeting which told him
Epitadas and the survivors of the rout at the island's center had
come.

“Fight dirty,” Thalassia urged one last
time.

Epitadas' men came in their hundreds,
shuffling and limping from the tree line, mixing with and vastly
outnumbering the polished inhabitants of Nestor's fort.  The
forlorn retreating force's mood was grim, its lips tight, its
shields bristling with arrows.  Some men walked with
white-fletched shafts lodged in their backs or breasts, and almost
all leaned heavily on their spears.  Reaching the stockade,
Helot attendants among them slumped to their knees against walls to
grab a moment’s rest before being kicked or spat upon by masters in
a mood to inflict harm on someone, anyone. Behind them all,
somewhere invisible as yet in the distance, an inexorable tide of
death was surging north up the island's length to swallow the men
of Lakedaimon, shields and all.

It did not take long for the new arrivals to
begin taking note of Thalassia's presence.  Soon a cluster of
ash-encrusted refugees had gathered at the curtain of rags, and
they pushed it back, revealing her.  Styphon knew some of the
men as close confidantes of Epitadas, and their  grumbled
words and black expressions bespoke displeasure at this proof that
the 
pentekoster
's command had gone ignored.
 Styphon inserted himself between those men and the
red-cloaked Thalassia, whose perfect, foreign features remained
placid.  

“She is a priestess of Artemis,” Styphon
lied.  “Killing her would turn the goddess against us.”
 

Largely, if not only, because Styphon
outranked them, the men yielded.  But they were still
whispering their dissatisfaction when a deep voice bellowed in rage
from somewhere behind.  “
Styphon!
”

It was Epitadas.  An inbuilt instinct
to obey made of Styphon's spine an iron rod.  The crowd of
battered hoplites which had swamped the fort parted to reveal
Epitadas stalking up in his old-style Corinthian helmet, its red
horsehair crest bouncing with every emphatic step of the his
sandaled feet.  Behind him walked a retinue of ten or more
hoplites who looked like stone statues come to life, all dull gray
ash marbled with dark blood.  Flanked by these ghosts,
the 
pentekoster
 drew up face-to-face with his
field-promoted second-in-command.  He inclined his bronze-clad
skull over Styphon's shoulder.

“Why does that 
bitch
 yet
live?”  The metallic voice might have belonged to the helmet
itself.

In spite the midday summer sun, Styphon's
skin went cold inside its shell of stiffened leather.  “She is
a priestess of Artemis, 
pentekoster
,” he lied
plain-faced to his superior, a punishable offense.  “We dared
not bring down the goddess's wrath.”

A sharp laugh emerged from Epitadas' mouth,
a pink hole framed by an overgrown black beard and the bronze cheek
pieces of his encompassing helmet.  “
We?
” he mocked.
 “Who commands here?  And it is true that you have 'dared
not'!”  He waved an arm at the arrow-riddled army of the
half-dead behind him.  “Here are the ones who
have 
dared
!”

Though Styphon knew that he and his men
could hardly be chastised for having remained at their assigned
posts, he held his tongue and accepted the rebuke.

Epitadas drew a short sword, the blade of
which still shone brightly in contrast to the rest of him.
 There was little chance the weapon had seen use this day,
given the way the enemy fought.  The sword's tip came to rest
on Styphon's breast, at his heart, daring him to move.

“You!”
the 
pentekoster
 barked at Thalassia.  “Come
forward!  Remove that cloak!  You haven't earned the
right to bleed in it!”

From behind him Styphon heard a soft rustle,
and seconds later, Thalassia stood at his left arm.  She must
have understood that she'd been summoned to her death, but for
reasons that could be obvious to no other than Styphon, she seemed
unafraid.

The sword point rapped the stiff leather of
Styphon's breastplate.   “The sea brought us this cunt,”
Epitadas said forcefully, “and then it brought us the Athenians
with their spindles.  By defying my command to throw her back,
son of Pharax, you brought us doom, and for that”—he tried to spit
in Styphon's face, but since he'd been breathing soot all day, no
moisture flew—“you are demoted.  As for you, whore,” he faced
Thalassia, “I told you to remove that cloak!”

Epitadas shifted his sword-point to
Thalassia, who neither flinched nor stepped back so much as a
hair's breadth.  Pale blue eyes unworried, she obeyed.
 The fingers which had been holding the crimson cloak in place
at her neck opened, and it slid from her shoulders to the
rock-strewn earth, revealing her nymph-like form in all its golden
splendor.

Spartiates were nothing at all if not
disciplined in their public displays, having been trained not even
to cheer a victory, since victory was to be expected rather than
celebrated.  Still, more than one Equal now could be heard to
gasp on the fall of that cloak.  Brazen-faced Epitadas was not
among them.  His blade went to the hollow of Thalassia's
supple neck, where it would take him less effort than was required
to swat a fly to soak the earth with her lifeblood.  Still,
his victim's hard eyes still showed no fear.

“
Pentekoster
, she is beloved by
Artemis,” Styphon pleaded.  His intent was not to save
Thalassia's life but that of Epitadas.  “I beg you,
reconsider.”

Epitadas snorted.  Around him, the
members of his blood- and ash-caked retinue eyed Styphon with hands
ready on their own sword handles, daring a
demoted 
phylarch
 to interfere.

It was at that moment, with sharp bronze
poised to open the throat of a woman who was no mortal woman at
all, that the first brutal shower of Athenian arrows fell on
Nestor’s fort.

The tip of one of those countless
white-fletched shafts, unshakable in their lust to return to the
earth whence they came, found the unshielded flesh at the back of
Epitadas’s neck.  Pierced between the skirt of his Corinthian
helm and the upper edge of his leather corselet, the pentekoster
spasmed.  His sword swiped wildly and flew from his hand,
bouncing off a moss-covered wall to land spinning on the stones of
the uneven floor.  The blade's movement only ceased when the
body of Epitadas crumpled to one side and fell atop it.