by P. K. Lentz
“And by cause, you mean ravaging Sparta with a fungal plague.”
“The means of destruction is of little importance.”
“Right,” Thalassia said. “The Naupaktans might disagree. Chances are high we'll be killing lots of Messenians, too, so... you may not want to mention that.”
“Agreed.”
They fell into a brief silence, into which Thalassia said, “Senet?”
“No.”
More silence, which Demosthenes sensed would not endure.
It did not. “I enjoyed killing those Equals back at the cave,” Thalassia remarked conversationally. “I'd like to do more of that. I never did much wetwork with the Caliate, and never with fucking swords.”
“'Wet' work?” Demosthenes asked. As usual, he allowed himself to be drawn into her bizarre orbit rather than following his better judgment and shutting both mind and mouth.
“Bloody,” she clarified.
“You mean to say you are new at killing?”
“Relatively. From up close, anyway.”
“Were you never trained at wielding a blade? Blades?” he corrected himself, for Thalassia fought with one in either hand.
“A bit. But my body just does it. Like yours sweats when you're hot.” She ran a fingertip across his temple.
“That's... horrifying, I suppose.”
“We'll have a lot of free time waiting for fungi to grow. We may as well go to Athens, you and I, and kill Equals. We might even end up liberating it.”
“Only the two of us?”
“It's better that way. If the Naupaktans sent men with us, some would die or be captured, and give away our location.”
Demosthenes shook his head. “It's too great a—”
“Just think about it,” she interrupted calmly. “You want to kill Spartans. I want to kill Spartans. So let's go kill some fucking Spartans. And Eurydike may be there. Don't you miss her?”
“I...” Demosthenes began. “I miss the existence of which she was a part. Times have changed.”
He swallowed a pang of mourning for the man he once was, a man who could feel things other than grief and rage. Whatever was her fate, laughing Eurydike surely did not deserve it, but such small wrongs would be righted with his righting of the greatest wrong: the existence on this earth of a city called Sparta.
“I will consider it,” he concluded.
Thalassia leveled him a look which assured he communed now with the more serious self which she so frequently concealed under layers of frivolity, glamour, or hedonism. She set a hand on his knee and said, earnestly, “Good. I hope so.”
As if she knew it was what he desired, which she probably did, she ceased speaking for a while and let him seek to empty his mind. That she read him thus was enough to set him wondering idly, as he had once or twice in the past, whether Thalassia herself were not a figment of his imagination, visible only to him.
But she could not be. Far too much death and tragedy were attributable to her for that to be the case.
Though they sat shoulder-to-shoulder on the steps, they shared no further word or glance in the hour it took for Agathokles to show himself. He arrived with a rapid-moving crowd of men whose importance, in their own eyes if no others, was evident by the way in which they bore themselves. Agathokles walked at the crowd's head, looking considerably better groomed than he had when Demosthenes had fought with him in besieged Pylos.
Flying to his feet, Demosthenes put himself in the group's path on the top stair, where Agathokles' gaze swiftly found him. His eyes narrowed and pace slowed, forcing two men behind him to stumble, and then his eyes went wide and he grinned through his short beard.
Quickening his pace, Agathokles reached the summit with arms spread for an embrace which Demosthenes gave, if less wholeheartedly than the Naupaktan. Several others in the party recognized Demosthenes, too, as the Athenian commander under whom they once had served, and they joined their leader in demanding a warm greeting. Demosthenes obliged them all, and managed to convey some false impression of good cheer, but not before hushing the first few who uttered his name aloud.
“If you must use a name, call me Diomedes,” he said. Perhaps because their fathers and grandfathers had been fugitive slaves freed by Athens from Helotry and transported here to turn a conquered, formerly hostile city into a friend, all quickly understood his need for discretion.
After his wide grin had lingered for just the right amount of time (the ability to gauge which was suggestive of a skilled politician), Agathokles put on a graver look in acknowledgment of the sad event which could not but be the immediate cause of their reunion: the fall of Athens.
“May I speak with you in private?” Demosthenes asked.
Agathokles readily agreed and bade his comrades continue on without him as he accompanied Demosthenes to a less well-traveled space to one side of the stone steps.
“I heard just yesterday of the fall of Dekelea, my friend,” Agathokles said.
That came as news to Demosthenes, but not as any surprise; he suppressed any reaction.
“Such a pity,” the Naupaktan went on. “Thank Zeus you evaded capture. It is an honor that you would make your way here. If you have come seeking sanctuary, you need not even ask. Consider it granted.”
“Do not let custom put words in your mouth that are better left to measured thought,” Demosthenes warned.
It was ironic advice, perhaps, coming from one who had very recently rejected Thalassia's counsel against rash action.
“Nonsense,” the Naupaktan protested. He paused, pursed his lips, flicked a glance downward and seemed to reconsider. “Well, perhaps I should hear you out.” His well-trimmed beard, tinged with gray, framed an apologetic smile. “This city is a democracy after all, thanks to Athens. At least, for now it is.” Leaving his last, cryptic comment unexplained, he continued, “Make your request and be certain it shall be looked on with favor.”
“I am certain of it,” Demosthenes said. He gave a friendly smile, which quickly faded as he began steeling himself for the necessary task of recounting the tragedy which had left vengeance his only reason to continue living.
He opted against preamble.
“On the first day of Dekelea's siege, Brasidas slaughtered my wife before my eyes.” The statement had its intended effect; Agathokles' features went slack in horror. “Had she lived, I might at this moment be holding my firstborn instead of standing here with no possessions except what I can carry.”
Agathokles gave a long look of abject pity, then hung his head and said quietly, “Your grief must be impossible to bear. I shall pray for her, friend.”
Demosthenes forwent telling the Naupaktan not to bother. Neither did he take time to indulge in that grief of which Agathokles spoke.
“I shall have my day with Brasidas in due course,” he pledged. “Before that, I will slaughter as many Equals as I can, by any means necessary. You will not likely want Naupaktos implicated. But perhaps, as a private citizen, you might give Diomedes a place to stay for a short while.”
Before Demosthenes had even finished the request, Agathokles was shaking his head. “You have not heard, my unlucky friend,” he said. “No wonder, given your recent ordeal. Sheltering you can hardly make us a target of Sparta's wrath, for we already are one.” The ever cheerful Agathokles grew utterly serious. “Not a week ago, a Spartan herald came bearing a demand that we dissolve our democracy and accept a new regime of Sparta's choosing. If we refuse, and they conquer us by force, every man woman and child of us will be put to death or returned to the slavery from which our fathers escaped, our city returned to the Lokrians from whom Athens seized it on our behalf.”
Demosthenes muttered under his breath a curse learned from Thalassia. “How long did they give you to decide?”
“Naturally, our assembly asked the herald that question. His answer was that we had however long it might take for Sparta to decide it was convenient to attack us, absent our submission.”
“I tak
e it by your words that a decision has yet to be taken?”
Agathokles frowned. “It needs proper debate, and to be honest, while Dekelea yet held out, we had hope Sparta might yet be struck another blow that would cause them to forget about us for a while. Now our last, slim hope lies with Argos, which has received a similar ultimatum. They have yet to give any response to our proposal of forming a league with them.” He sighed and shrugged. “No one in this city has any love for Sparta, and even less faith that they would uphold any agreement. My own inclination is toward resistance, but what's certain is that our little town stands no chance alone. It may be that soon you shall be forced to flee to another city. But until that time, you are welcome.”
Demosthenes hung his head and allowed a tiny, aggravating thought in the corner of his mind to swell first into an idea and then into words. Still, he hesitated to speak them, for they represented a distraction from his only true purpose.
“I may be able to give your city a fighting chance,” he said to the troubled Naupaktan. “In truth, not me so much as... her.”
He turned and indicated the cloaked figure standing halfway down the staircase, who threw her hood back in response to the unplanned signal.
Agathokles' brow furrowed as he gazed at her until recognition dawned and he smiled. “I saw her in your bed at Pylos!”
“Yes,” Demosthenes confirmed. “That was the day I met her. My life has not been the same since. Tell me, do the accounts you have heard of the battle at Eleusis include stories of two witches or goddesses joining the fight on either side?”
Staring at Thalassia, Agathokles answered, “They do. The slaughtergod's sister for Sparta, and for Athens, the last of the Amazons. Like most educated men, I did not count it as a literal truth.”
“It is true,” Demosthenes revealed to his comrade. “More or less. The woman you see is no Amazon, but she is a warrior, and a strategist and inventor, among many other things, and she did fight for Athens that day.”
Dividing his gaze between his friend and the cloaked figure, Agathokles adopted a puzzled expression. “Those same accounts say that both women fell with horrific wounds.”
“That, too, is true,” Demosthenes said. “Yet both live. I would not see this one fall in battle a second time, but perhaps she might be of help in devising some means of defending your city.”
Momentarily, the Naupaktan's ponderous look broke, and he laughed. “Although I cannot think of why you would deceive me in this, forgive me for saying I am unconvinced. However, lacking any other source of hope, I would be a fool to decline.” He clamped a hand onto Demosthenes' shoulder. “So the answer is yes, my friend. Please do lend us the aid of your Amazon—or whatever she is!”
Thalassia ascended the stair toward them, the hem of her gray cloak sweeping the stone. Agathokles offered her a warm smile which was met in kind.
“Modest Diomedes leaves out the other asset he brings to Naupaktos,” Thalassia said upon arrival, “which is the mind of one of Athens' greatest generals.”
For the sake of politeness, Demosthenes stopped short of scoffing. Perhaps, if nothing else, he was the best general ever to lead Athenians into a siege before slipping over a wall and leaving them to their fate.
Agathokles nodded agreement with her assessment, while a new light in his honest eyes hinted at rising hope.
“Can you give us a navy like theirs?” he asked directly of Thalassia. In spite of its strangeness, he showed no discomfort at addressing a female thus, in the presence of a male peer, on matters of war. “We have yet to see these new vessels, only heard stories of their matchless speed and maneuverability. It is said that Sparta only sends them out in numbers, lest one be captured and copied by enemies. Can you build us such ships?”
Surprisingly, Thalassia cast a glance at Demosthenes, seeking his assent before answering. Silently, he gave it.
“I can show you the design and methods. But building the ships and and training men to crew them would require more time than you are likely to have. More urgent will be establishing a defense against invasion.”
“You mean machines, like Brasidas' katapeltai, or these bows I hear you used at Amphipolis.”
“Machines are a crutch for unclever men,” Thalassia said, sounding surprisingly like a Spartan. “Depending on them instead of brains and flesh and bone is a mistake. However... yes, machines.”
“And will you take the field for us, as you did for Athens?” Agathokles pressed.
“No,” Demosthenes swiftly answered on her behalf. “If she is lost, there will be nothing to stop the Spartan beast from devouring all of Hellas. The freedom of Naupaktos means as much to me as it does to you,” he lied well, “but that freedom will never be assured unless that beast lies slain forevermore. That, and no less, is my current purpose. And hers.”
“Aye,” Agathokles said softly. His look was one of sympathy. “Countless of my forefathers have wished the same. Revenge... justice... was for them but a dream. Perhaps now...”
He did not finish, but merely looked at Thalassia. The look was not a hopeful one.
“There is support for both sides,” the Naupaktan continued, “resistance and capitulation. The outcome of an eventual vote is uncertain. What might tip the balance is some proof that you two can deliver on your pledge of aid. The thinking is that Sparta cannot consider moving against us so long as Argos yet stands in defiance. Should Argos yield or fall, however, it becomes a near certainty that our assembly will vote swiftly in favor of surrender.”
“Somehow, we will tip the scale,” Demosthenes said. “Naupaktos will fight and keep her well-earned freedom.”
“I pray so, friend.” Agathokles' smile lacked its former cheer, but surely not because he knew that his friend's pledge was an empty one. “In the meantime, by nightfall, I shall have a suitable bed ready for my two honored guests to share.” He laid a hand gently on Demosthenes' arm and said somberly, “Such tragedy, this shameless murder of your wife.” He tilted his head at Thalassia. “Thank the gods you have this one to ease the loss.”
* * *
1. Homecoming
PART II: RETURN TO ATHENS
36 days after the fall of Athens (June 423 BCE)
At Gytheio, the port of Sparta, some five hundred Equals and as many Helots walked the gangplanks down from lumbering troop ships to set foot for the first time in months on Peloponnesian soil. Since the port lay some twenty miles from Sparta herself, a considerable march yet remained before most of the travelers truly saw home.
Home. The place, the idea, had never held much allure to Styphon. It was thus for most every Equal, for whom campaigns were an opportunity to escape the tedium of a strictly regimented existence of constant drilling. Home was a patriotic ideal, a place in the heart, more than it was a country filled with friends and family, as it was to Athenians, Argives, and the rest. For the part-time armies of other cities, the departure to an uncertain fate in war abroad was a dark and ominous thing, while a return home in victory was joyous. To Spartiates, the opposite was true. There would be no triumphal parades, no flowing wine, for those Equals who had returned from war with their lives, only an absence of the shame which would have accompanied defeat. For that reason, the river of men that now overflowed the winding road from Gytheio to Sparta for the better part of a day flowed somberly.
Sparta was not even a city at all, by the standards of many men, but rather a union of five neighboring villages which, as a matter of pride, lacked defensive walls of any sort. There was therefore no single moment of return marked by a pair of massive gates like the ones Styphon had helped to batter down at Athens. Houses, each on an equal plot owned by one male citizen, simply began to appear on the roadside where before there had been none, at which point women, children, Helots, the old, and those younger men unfortunate enough to have remained at home emerged onto the twilit roadside to witness the homecoming.
The only voices raised in joy or otherwise were those of children who knew not that
the sight of an army returning from battle was no more a thing to be celebrated than if the men had been farmers trudging back from a day's labor in the fields. For where other men made their living in the latter way, and bore arms only on command, war was a Spartiate's livelihood.
The first Spartan village on the route of return was Kynosoura, where the column began to shrink as men who made their homes there broke away to rejoin their families for muted public displays of affection that were sure to grow more intense in the privacy of their simple homes. Styphon saw the reunions in the corners of his vision but paid them no particular heed as he continued his own march. Shortly, the houses of Kynosoura thinned out and vanished, and after a short stretch of desolate scrub, Sparta's acropolis broke the horizon. It was modest compared to that of Athens, which seemed to sprout marble columns as a swamp did reeds, but the difference was only fitting: where Athenians, and a majority of Greeks with them, placed value in pomp and wealth and display, Sparta favored simplicity in all of life's aspects.
Styphon's house, in the village of Mesoa at the foot of the acropolis, was like most, a single-room dwelling of unpainted wood, topped by a sloped roof of reeds. He came upon it as night fell. His feet and back ached, though he would not dream of letting it show in his gait as he walked the straight dirt path to its door.
To one side of that door there stood the slight figure of a female. Not his daughter, he knew right away. The month since Styphon had last seen Andrea was a short spell compared to the usual stretches of half a year or more, and so her form was fresh in his mind. No, the female by his door was the other whom he had shipped here from Athens twenty or so days prior, alongside Andrea. She was Eurydike, the Thracian slave of Demosthenes, captured by Brasidas and given into Styphon's keeping on the polemarch's whim.
Eurydike's tattooed arms were bound behind her back, and the thin iron collar which permanently encircled her neck was at present tethered by a cord to the roof's eave. Whoever had put her there certainly intended the rope to have been stretched taut, forcing the slave to stand on tiptoe to prevent hanging; instead, Eurydike's bare feet were flat on a rounded stone tall enough to let her stand in relative comfort.
