Athenian Steel (Book I of the The Hellennium)

by P. K. Lentz

Demosthenes could not answer that. Something within him screamed to banish her from his sight. She was a witch, a Siren, a temptress, a creature of the dark. But something would not let him. A sense of responsibility? This monster had to be dealt with in some way, if not by him then by another.

  He pressed palms against his face, less to rub away sleep than to push back against the pressure of knowledge that mortal men should never possess.

  “I gave much thought last night to the things you said,” Demosthenes told her. “I have doubts... questions. I worry that your knowledge of future events will prove of less use than it seems. Once your actions alter one outcome, all that follows is thrown into question, is it not? The very use of your foreknowledge renders it useless. For example, now that you have warned me of my appointed death—for which, if nothing else comes of our acquaintance, you have my sincere gratitude—I promise you that Fate will have a fight on her hands ever to get me to Sicily.”

  There he stopped, seeing that a crooked smile had appeared on Thalassia's face.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “That's... very impressive,” she said. “That you would even think of that shows... Well, it's just very impressive. And not wrong. But if I might allay your concerns?”

  “Please.”

  “It's true that every change I... we make to the outcome of an event has an effect on what follows. But specific knowledge of outcomes is not the only weapon I can put at your disposal, nor even my most powerful one. As the Spartans' fortunes change, their plans, too, will diverge from what is known. They will adapt, but understanding them, I will be able to predict. And more than that...” She gave him a strange, dark look. “Demosthenes, what is a better weapon, a sword of bronze or one of iron?”

  “Well, iron, of course.”

  “Yes. What answer would Achilles give to that question?”

  Demosthenes thought briefly. “I suppose he could not properly judge, having known only bronze.”

  “Yet, today, you use iron. Does some other metal exist from which still stronger weapons might be made?”

  “No...” Demosthenes said. Then, beginning to grasp Thalassia's intended point, he added, “Not at present.”

  “If I were to ask you,” she went on, “what is better, an iron sword or one of steel, what would you answer?”

  “I could not know for certain, but I would venture to guess... steel.”

  Thalassia rose from her perch in the window and came to the bed, sat on it and put a hand on Demosthenes' forearm. The night spent in intimate proximity with her evidently had disposed of the feelings of revulsion which her touch had previously inspired. For better or worse, he was getting used to her.

  “I think you understand,” she said. “There is much I could teach your countrymen, and not only those who make weapons. Farmers, shipbuilders... healers. Had I come before the plague, many who died might have been spared. I can not only make your enemies' lives worse, but also help make the lives of Athenians better and happier, which will in turn make your city even harder to defeat.”

  Demosthenes sat absorbing this and concluded, “Very well. I grant that you have much to offer, troublesome as it may prove to convince old men to heed the teachings of a foreign female. But I have a further doubt which I fear will not be so easy for you to dispel. There are at least two others like you abroad in our world. What if they were to do for other powers as you propose to do for Athens?”

  A shadow fell over Thalassia's flawless face. “Lyka, as you must have heard, has fucked off and buried herself in a mountain. It's far from here, beyond what you call Scythia. She'll be of no concern. As for Eden... I won't bother to bring up again that I might have dealt with her if you could tell the fucking difference between a friend and an enemy.”

  Demosthenes cleared his throat. “I have few friends who have strangled me near to death.”

  Thalassia shrugged. “Well... you have one now.”

  “I do not,” Demosthenes corrected her sternly. Perhaps with the first glimmer of dawn after a night that was like the fever dream of a mad playwright, he was remembering himself. “You overstep and take too much for granted. You will not use me. My world, my city, will not be as tools in the pursuit of your personal vendettas. If I am to partner with you, it will be because I believe such partnership can do more good than harm for the people about whom I care most.”

  Sitting up in his bed, Demosthenes leaned forward, bringing himself closer to Thalassia, showing he would not be cowed.

  “You earlier maligned my view of women in insisting that I treat you as an equal. Well, I demand no less of you. I will play no pliant, backward barbarian to your cultured goddess from on high. If I am to take to you to Athens, it is my house in which you will dwell, and you must afford me proper respect both within its walls and without. Not just that, to all except us, you must appear as my slave, a spoil of war, for that is the only reasonable excuse I can give for taking you into my home. In truth, I know I cannot be your master, but neither will you be mine. Is that much understood?”

  The whole time he had spoken, Thalassia had but stared at him with an expression that was more attentive than usual, as though perhaps she was taking his words to heart. Her lips hung slightly open, but as he finished, they made no move to reply. Instead, Thalassia leaned swiftly and smoothly forward, not stopping until her warm, parted lips grazed his own. Demosthenes leaned back, and when that did not end her advance, he thrust up his palms such that they slid up Thalassia's ribs, all but cupping her bare breasts.

  “Will you stop trying to mate with me?” he demanded angrily, sliding across the bed. “If you heard invitation in my words, then your knowledge of Greek is less perfect than it seems.”

  A few feet away, naked Thalassia sighed and tucked a stray lock of dark hair behind her ear. It flopped out, not quite long enough to stay put. In the just-rising light from the window, Demosthenes glimpsed unbroken flesh under her left breast—a spot he had also just touched—confirming the absence of any sign of yesterday's mortal wound. There was not even a scar that he could see. Indeed, there were none to be seen anywhere on her anatomy.

  “I heard you,” Thalassia said soberly. “I accept it all.”

  “Good...” Demosthenes said, encouraged by the change in her manner. “Now, as for Eden—”

  An insistent thumping sounded on the chamber door, which seconds later flew wide. The bearded man behind it was Agathokles, captain of a force of Messenian exiles from the allied city of Naupaktos. Agathokles had uttered half of Demosthenes' name before the sight in front of him, that of a foreign beauty naked in the Liberator's bed, stilled his tongue.

  “Ah... apologies,” the Naupaktan said, recovering with a smile. He showed no trace of embarrassment, and gave as much effort to averting his gaze as Thalassia did to covering her nakedness, which was none. “I did not realize you had company.”

  “I... shall only be a few moments,” Demosthenes told him.

  “I know well the importance of the part she tends to,” Agathokles snickered, “however, other parts of you are much needed outside.”

  “I'll not be long,” Demosthenes said sharply. “If you would, please pass word to the servants that my guest here needs a garment. Anything will do.”

  The Naupaktan's glance fell upon the torn and stained orange chiton heaped on the floor by the bedside, and his smile spread wider. “Things got rough?”

  “Nothing that won't heal,” Demosthenes said. “Now, if you please...”

  With a final, lingering look at Thalassia, whose return smile he likely failed to notice, Agathokles left.

  Even as the door shut, Thalassia picked up where they had left off. “If Eden has not found me within a year,” she declared, “I will hunt the bitch down and destroy her. Deal?”

  Demosthenes pondered. A year? A being such as Eden—or Thalassia—could do a great deal of damage in a year. Should she not be found and slain sooner? He cursed himself for the fool move of intervening on Eden's behal
f yesterday. Yet who could blame him? What he had seen was a very human-looking woman having her skull turned to pulp by a second, crazed woman who had previously assaulted his own person.

  Now he wished Eden dead, but for all he knew Eden was in the right in her quarrel with Thalassia. The traitor. Wormwhore.

  “It will do,” Demosthenes decided, for he planned to give Thalassia far less than a year to fully open her own past to him.

  She smiled. “So. Are we... partners?”

  How many women down the ages had smiled at men in just this way and asked a similar question? Women whose minds were like those of men, only subtler and more dangerous. And how many men had those women consigned to misery and death by luring them into undertakings which, to those looking back, hearing the tale unfold in bard's song or seeing it acted upon a festival stage, are easily seen for abject folly?

  Yet... to be there, to be that man chosen to walk a privileged path, one set out upon by its share of fools, yes, but walked also by true heroes long before their names became known to all. Not only tragedy but triumph too was immortal.

  The risk in what Thalassia proposed was enormous, but so was the potential for reward. Athens might avert a generation of ruinous war followed by defeat and subjugation. It did not make a man guilty of hubris to desire that... did it? Fame and glory might result for a man whose name Thalassia claimed was doomed to be eclipsed by those of other men, but fame was incidental. It mattered not who it was who ensured the safety of generations of Athenians yet unborn, only that the job was done.

  At least, Demosthenes told himself that, but in truth he knew he had scant choice but to bind himself to Thalassia, for she was determined to wreak changes upon his world with or without him. If he declined, she would only take the same offer to another, or else strike off on her own path. Was it not better, then, for the sake not only of Athenians but of all men and women everywhere, that he stay by her side where he might exert the sort of stabilizing influence it was all too clear she needed?

  Still, he hesitated. Why could not he not bring himself to answer plainly, crying out his imminent challenge for the gods and Fates to hear? Yes!

  Conscious of the business awaiting him, Demosthenes slid from the bed and stood. He had slept in his chiton and so already looked presentable, if barely. He looked down upon Thalassia, on her haunches on the bed, and declared, if none too loudly, “We are partners. With equal say in all decisions, and no secrets held between us. All must stand revealed.”

  Thalassia shut her eyes in a blissful look, opened them and said with a grin, “Equals. No secrets.” If Demosthenes did not read her wrong, she seemed almost giddy. “I can't wait to get started!”

  END OF PART I

  II. ATHENS 1. Homecoming

  Metageitnion in the archonship of Stratokles (August 425 BCE)

  That the weather held for the voyage around the Peloponnese and home was doubly fortunate, for every shore passed by the fleet of beaked triremes and round-hulled cargo ships was a hostile one. It thus could not even put to anchor at night to let soldiers and sailors sleep on a beach or in a friendly port, of which there were none. The fleet could only sail on beneath the quiet stars, which was for the best, perhaps, since half of the men aboard had spent a season trapped at Pylos and were scarcely eager to delay their homecoming by even a day.

  A swift, unladen ship carried word of their victory ahead, and so a massive crowd was on hand at Pireaus, the port of Athens, in time for their arrival. Priests shouted prayers of thanksgiving and poured libations on the shore, while great masses of men stood in clusters to greet victorious sons and brothers and nephews leaping from the freshly beached prows. Even some citizen women came, under the watchful eyes of their lords, to seedy Piraeus, so auspicious was the occasion and so battered were the ancient social codes of Athens by years of siege and plague.

  Demosthenes had no wife, no brother, no mother awaiting him. Plague had spared only his father Alkisthenes, and the old man's health was too fragile to permit him the quarter-day's journey from the country estate where he passed his days, now that the Lakedaemonians weren’t slashing and burning it. Thus, while men around him were embraced by weeping kin, Demosthenes was sought out instead by a parade of city officials and various others who hoped he would remember their names when the time came to support their pet projects—a new garden or cult statue for their deme, a wider market road, or whatnot. He gave these sycophants short shrift, taking the slightest excuse to ignore them. Boys ran up in search of nothing more than to have their fathers' swords, one day to be theirs, touched by the hand of a hero. Those requests Demosthenes granted gladly, silly as they were. Still others wanted a lock of his sandy hair, but that request he smilingly refused, if only because he would otherwise return home with none left.

  Not all could share in the joy. Eighteen Athenians had fallen on Sphakteria, and their loved ones, not yet informed, would find themselves cast into grief this day. Still others present in the crowd would already know they had lost brothers or sons in the first Spartan assault on Pylos earlier in the summer. Shortly after landing, Demosthenes spied the white-bearded father of one such casualty, a tribemate of his, and pushed through the crowd to kneel and kiss the hem of the old man's flowing himation and deliver a promise to bring his son's arms and pay personally to his home. Tears welling in his bright eyes, the old man pulled Demosthenes to his feet for an embrace.

  At the top of the beach waited another old man: the statesman and general Nikias, with his lined face, square jaw, and gray hair which he kept trimmed back to a near-stubble. His unclouded eyes were fierce, and his limbs had more life in them than most men half his years. Nikias, more than anyone apart from the Spartans, was responsible for the hardship of Pylos. A word of support from him in the Assembly could have ended all debate and dispatched the needed reinforcements months ago, but instead it had taken a long and bitter siege and the posturing of a demagogue—Kleon, who at the moment was consorting with those same sycophants Demosthenes had shunned—to deliver final victory.

  But now was not the time to bear grudges. Nikias embraced Demosthenes warmly, showing none of the bitterness which he must surely have felt on seeing a venture he had so strenuously opposed end in a victory that was likely to change the course of the war.

  “You’ll not lose out for a generalship this year,” Nikias told him, and Demosthenes accepted the somewhat backhanded compliment graciously.

  Nikias had no compliment, not even a smile, for Kleon, even though decorum dictated he congratulate the man. The ruddy-faced demagogue grinned broadly anyway, as he had throughout the proceedings, shaking every hand and missing no opportunity to remind all comers of the prisoners he had brought back from Pylos in a glorious over-fulfillment of his already ambitious promise to the Assembly of swift victory. More than once, he lifted his hand palm up with fingers curled, as if to demonstrate how the fates of those prisoners rested in his own meaty grasp.

  There at the top of the beach, in the presence of most of the Board of Ten, the eponymous archon, who this year was a man named Stratokles, crowned the two triumphant commanders with laurel wreaths, then led them up onto the dusty harbor road where waited two quadrigas bedecked with garlands and pulled by four white horses each. Demosthenes boarded his chariot behind its driver, accepting his effusive welcome and looked back in the direction of the beach, where his trusted men and Kleon's were unloading the spoils and hauling in the empty triremes for drying and maintenance. He had asked Thalassia to follow him some fifty paces behind and she was heeding the request, it seemed, for at about that distance Demosthenes picked her out amidst the thronging crowd of returnees and celebrants. Plying the human sea with ease, she reached the roadside just as the two chariot drivers began whipping their teams forward, and the quadrigas' great wheels, which had flowering vines woven into their spokes, began to turn. She would have to walk alongside the procession, of course, for as far as anyone else in Athens knew, she was but a slave.

  At
a snail's pace, the procession made its way to Athens between the Long Walls that connected the city to its port. The walls were three times the height of a man and lined with evenly spaced bastions within easy bowshot of one another. By ensuring her access to the sea, the Long Walls had saved Athens from ruin in each of the past seven summers of Spartan siege—a ruinous tradition cut short this year by the successful attack on Pylos. So long as the walls ensured that Athens touched her beloved sea, the city could not fall.

  The crowd, traveling on foot and horse and two-wheeled donkey cart to the accompaniment of pipers and drummers and hymn-singers, clogged the wide, arrow-straight port-road for as far behind as Demosthenes could see. Near the center of that seething human mass marched the reason that many of today's spectators had made the trek to Piraeus: the prisoners. The Spartans walked in a formation eight abreast with each rank yoked by neck and arms to a ship's mast laid across their collective shoulders. Clamped on their ankles and hobbling them were irons which had been forged by and for their own freed Helot slaves in Pylos. A constant barrage of stones, mud, rancid vegetables, and anything disposable which came to men's hands assaulted the vanquished Spartiates from all sides, but the prisoners walked on as if the assortment of missiles were no more than a fine, misting rain. Now and then a prisoner would be struck hard in the head or face, but the rigid timbers borne by seven of his comrades ensured that he kept moving, and so the Lakedaemonians' formation remained intact, and with it what remained of their pride.

  Whilst engaging in idle chatter with the cluster of hangers-on near his chariot, Demosthenes cast frequent looks back at the prisoners. He understood the rage of the garbage-throwers, certainly, for here before them marched some of the very men responsible for their hot summers of misery, the years of plague and corpse-carts and daily mass pyres when all the folk of Attica had holed up in the teeming city while outside its inviolable walls, their farms were razed and livestock slaughtered by this enemy, perhaps by these very men.