Athenian Steel (Book I of the The Hellennium) (7 page)

The only move Thalassia made was to take a
single step backward to remove her bare feet from the path of
Epitadas' crashing head.  The soiled red crest of the fallen
leader's helmet brushed her knees.

Dumbstruck, the onlookers raised shields
belatedly, distractedly, against the incoming Athenian barrage.
 Styphon didn't bother, entrusting his life instead to Fate
and a few paltry layers of stiffened leather.
 “
Goddess
...” he whispered.

He was alone in finding the breath with
which to speak, and alone in one other thing, too: the knowledge
that Epitadas had not been laid low by the Athenians or even by
Thalassia, but by Fate, whose unbreakable chains bound fast even
the eternal gods.  To the rest, it was clear that their leader
had been struck down by the Delighter in Arrows, the virgin
huntress Queen Artemis herself.  

Believing their own goddess against them, no
man, not even those closest to Epitadas, objected when
Styphon—demotion forgotten, since it had been issued in furtherance
of a sacrilege—voiced his intent to ask the Athenians for a
truce.

***

Word had come.  The Spartans, driven
back to a final redoubt at Sphakteria's north, wished to talk.
 Demosthenes was inclined to listen.  He stood now at the
the edge of a charred forest at the fore of fluid Athenian lines
which had only just coalesced in the wake of the enemy's wholesale
retreat.  The Equal coming to parley was named Styphon, a
lower-ranking officer to whom command of the Spartan force
evidently had fallen.  That was good news, for it meant
Epitadas lay among the fallen.

Would that Demosthenes waited alone for
Styphon, but beside him, chewing olives three at a time and
spitting their stones to the earth, was his co-commander, Kleon.
 Technically, Kleon was his superior, but in truth he was a
tag-along: a leader from the rear, a man whose fiercest blade was
his tongue.  Kleon's detractors in Athens (who comprised
virtually all of the aristocracy) had coined a new term to describe
him: 
demagogos
, a leader of the masses.

His always-red cheeks were purple with
delight as he chattered on about the impending humiliation of his
rival Nikias in the Assembly: “Sure, he made me look the fool for a
moment, but who will look the fool on my return?  I promised
them Sphakteria in twenty days, and how many will it have been on
my return?  Five, including the journey!  Ha!  And
I'll come with hundreds of Equals in chains to boot!  Men have
said there'll be birdsong in Tartaros before Spartiates condemn
themselves to chains.  Bah!”  He cupped greasy fingers
behind his ear.  “Do you hear that?  
Tweet,
tweet!
”

Demosthenes let the petty ranting of the
politician go unanswered.  Looking sidelong at Kleon, still
wearing the brightly polished, ivory-inlaid breastplate which would
scarcely need cleaning after the battle, Demosthenes failed to see
the appeal.  Sure, Kleon's rival, leader of the so-called
Peace party, Nikias, had let the siege of Pylos drag on all summer,
unnecessarily, out of conservatism or even jealousy that seizing
the city hadn't been his own idea.  Nonetheless, Demosthenes
thought, one Nikias was worth three Kleons.  Maybe more.
 

After too long, a lone figure appeared from
out of the burned wood and trudged across the field of ash in a
steady, unhurried gait.  The man was Kleon's height, which was
to say short, and approximately equal in mass, but this man wore
his girth in his chest, where Kleon's was in the middle.  Like
all Equals, the man wore his black hair long, a deliberate
disadvantage in close combat meant as a display of contempt for the
enemy.  No helm covered it, and the leather breastplate was
clean of the ash which clung to his legs, greaves, and trailing
edge of his faded scarlet cloak.

The man, presumably Styphon, carried no
shield or weapon in hand, but his short sword bounced in its
scabbard on his thigh.  His left hand rested on its hilt as he
drew to a halt within sword's reach of both his enemies.
 Demosthenes' hand fell casually, involuntarily to his own
blade.  Contempt showed in the black eyes which rested between
Styphon's heavy brow and at least once-broken nose.  He said
nothing for some seconds.

Kleon spit an olive pit, waved an arm,
urged, “Well, out with it!”

Demosthenes failed to stifle a frown.
 The Spartan’s black eyes, formerly shifting between the two,
now selected him as the one more worthy of address, if only by a
hair.  Eyes fixed, Styphon's right hand crossed his body and
its fingers wrapped around the handle of his sword.  Resisting
the urge to take a step back, an urge to which Kleon succumbed,
Demosthenes mirrored the Spartiate's move.  He'd never known
the Spartans to blatantly violate a ceasefire, but then they
weren't prone to surrender, either.

Styphon drew his sword.  The move was
ponderous and as such conveyed little threat, and so Demosthenes
let his blade remain sheathed while the Spartan shifted his grip to
his sword's neck and held the weapon aloft horizontally.  It
hovered for a moment in the space between the three leaders, while
over it intersected the narrow, black gaze of a Spartan and that of
the Athenian mockingly called 'Doe Eyes' in his youth.

The sword plunged groundward, landing with a
feeble thud in the ash at the sandaled feet of the day's victors.
 Its owner followed the symbolically dropped blade with a gob
of spit—or he tried anyway, but his cracked lips failed to produce
enough moisture.

“Fate is on your side today, preeners,”
Styphon grated.  “Next time, we shall see.”

Demosthenes nodded grimly, Kleon cackled,
and the hours which followed were consumed by the dispatching of
messengers to and from the Spartan force besieging Pylos as Styphon
sought and received permission from that force's commander to turn
the truce into surrender.  There were to be no conditions, but
one strange request was made.  Among the trapped Equals was a
priestess of Artemis whose return to Sparta they wished to
arrange.

“A priestess fights with them!” Kleon
scoffed.  “Sparta is harder up than we thought!”

Just after dawn, Demosthenes left his
headquarters in the squat, crumbling citadel perched atop the
acropolis of Pylos and descended into the town.  The priestess
captured on Sphakteria had requested an audience with him.  He
could come up with no reasonable explanation for why any woman,
priestess or otherwise, should have been present on the island.
 It was laughable to think the Spartans might have brought her
there deliberately.  Why then had she come, and for how long
had she been among them?  Her request for audience suited
Demosthenes well enough to consent to it, if for no better reason
than to satisfy idle curiosity. 

The streets he walked were narrow and
winding.  Until recently, Pylos had been a city of slaves, and
it showed.  The roofs of the Messenian Helots' modest homes
were thatched, the temple columns made of porous stone or even
wood, and there was scarcely a public garden to be found.
 Even at this early hour Demosthenes was accosted at every
turn by men and women rushing up and shouting barely coherent
praise.  Potters, weavers, carpenters, jewelers, sandal-makers
and hawkers of every ware emerged from their stalls as he passed,
offering up second-rate goods as gifts of thanks to the man they
called Liberator.  

Diplomatically refusing, Demosthenes managed
to lose the fawning crowds and reach his destination, a little
whitewashed cottage on a quiet side street of a southern
neighborhood.  It was of fresher construction than most in
Pylos, with a terra cotta roof and a small but parched garden in
front.  A Messenian guard by the entrance offered him a
cheerful greeting then rapped on the wooden door.  It swung
inward, and a mousy girl appeared.  

“I would see your mistress,” Demosthenes
said.

The Messenian girl answered with eyes
downcast, “Perhaps you might wait until she has taken her
breakfast, my lord.”

Demosthenes smiled impatiently.  “She
is the one who sought audience with me.  I promise not long to
delay her.”

Probably accustomed to serving harsher
masters, and unwilling to risk further offense in protecting her
lady’s privacy, the girl stepped aside, and Demosthenes passed
within.  The cottage's main room was furnished with a low
couch and a scattered assortment of cushions in gaudy hues.
 The soot-blackened corner hearth, gently aglow, was well
stocked with bronze cooking pots and utensils.  The Messenian
girl vanished through a faded turquoise curtain into the rear of
the house and spoke some words in an urgent whisper.  A second
female voice answered curtly, and the curtain was shoved aside.

“Welcome, lord general,” said the second
voice's owner, an older woman who bowed her head in servile Helot
fashion, beckoning Demosthenes in.

Smiling gratitude, he ducked under the
doorway's low lintel.  The rectangular inner room, decorated
with a woven rug and a pair of matching wall tapestries, was well
lit by a north-facing window.  Against the leftmost wall was a
neatly made sleeping mat, while to the right sat a low wooden table
flanked on either side by long sitting-cushions.  At the
table, seated on a cushion and facing Demosthenes over a breakfast
of bread soaked in dark wine, was the priestess.  Behind her
knelt a third young Messenian girl who was focused intently on an
effort to craft some elaborate hairstyle out of the priestess's
dark hair, in which effort she appeared to be hampered by the
insufficient length of said hair, the ends of which barely grazed
the preistess's shoulders.

“Leave us, please,” Demosthenes said.

The frustrated hairdresser loosed a petulant
sigh, but followed the two older maids out of the chamber.
 The curtain fell behind them, swaying gently.

Demosthenes' subordinates had seen to the
priestess's removal from the island, and so the present encounter
marked the first time he had laid eyes upon her.  Her eyes
were cool and pale like the surface of a mountain lake, and they
fixed him with a measuring stare.  Above them were perched
delicate brows and freshly washed black hair descending from a
central part in two lustrous waves that ended in a collection of
loose curls around the nape of her neck.  Her skin was of a
light gold complexion, the Eastern hue which Greeks called 'dark'
but which in reality was lighter than that of most sun-blasted
Greek islanders.  Her features were harder to place.
 Certainly she was pleasing to behold, her jawline delicate,
small nose tapering to a point.  Since her capture, the
Messenian girls assigned to her service had bathed her and dressed
her in a finely pleated, floor-length chiton of light orange
gathered under the breast with a braided rope.

The fact of this woman's physical perfection
was impossible to deny, even less to ignore.  Hers was the
sort of beauty which seemed to transcend reality, that which
inspired the tongues of poets and twisted those of other men.

Demosthenes had never been a poet.

The palely intense eyes never left him as he
took a seat across the table from her.  “Don't let me
interrupt your breakfast,” he managed to say.  “I hope you
find our hospitality sufficient.”

The lower half of her face formed a smile,
patently false, whilst higher up, her pale eyes observed him with
guarded interest.  She seemed not yet to have touched the food
on the terracotta charger, and made no move to start.
 Something about the fast-fading smile, and not least those
pale eyes, filled Demosthenes with disquiet.  Why should that
be?

He purged his unease in a chuckle, though he
felt no amusement.  “If you've no wish to exchange
pleasantries, I suppose it's up to me.  You must know my name,
since you asked to see me.  You, I am told, are called
Thalassia.”  His laughter was as forced as her smile had been.
 “Where I come from that is how we refer to a piece of
driftwood.  Not exactly a name many men would give to their
daughters.  Of course, we pronounce it with a double-tau,
Thalattia, where you use the Doric sigma.”

He realized he was babbling, and the
priestess's slightly bemused look suggested the fact was not lost
on her either.  He sank into silence, after a moment of which
he found himself forced to avert his eyes from hers.  He had
walked into this room a conquering general of Athens, Liberator of
Pylos, a man who, as of yesterday, had achieved what no other had
in history, compelling Spartans to consign themselves to irons.
 Yet now he sat cowed by some barbarian female, exquisite as
she was, who had yet to speak a word to him.

Something was not right about her.  He
could not think what it might be, but it made him long for a swift
departure from her presence.  Since pride did not allow for
flight, he instead lifted his gaze and started the encounter over
with a fresh resolve to dispense with chatter.

“The Spartans have agreed to your ransom,”
he declared.  “As soon as they produce the agreed sum, you
shall be on your way.”

“I don't wish to be ransomed,” Thalassia
said.  This, her first utterance, was no plea.  Her tone
matched his own in authority. It also served to revealed that she
spoke with an accent, no surprise given her appearance.

Her eyes were hard.  Demosthenes looked
into them and wondered if he had yet witnessed them blink.  He
certainly was blinking now, rapidly, in surprise at what she had
said.

He laughed, nervously. 
 What
was it about her?
  “I fear that is for men to decide,
not you.”

Amusement betrayed itself in a corner of
Thalassia's thin, dark lips.  A golden hand appeared and set a
scrap of black cloth upon the tabletop.

“Take it,” she said.

Frowning, Demosthenes knelt on the cushion
opposite her and did as she requested.  The black fabric was
as soft and supple as silk in his hands, but when he pulled it
taut, it stretched like no textile he had touched before.
 When the tension was eased, it snapped back to its former
shape and size.