by P. K. Lentz
Without awaiting his reply, she dove off: head first, arms down, legs pressed together, her nymph's body a golden javelin which the sea lord could only welcome with open arms.
With barely a splash, she pierced the waves a fair distance from the nearest rocks and vanished for several seconds before her head emerged, dark hair clinging tightly to her skull and bare shoulders.
Demosthenes stood with clenched fists, staring at the ground at his feet and the open space one step beyond.
Was that step, as Thalassia claimed, the necessary next step on his path? A step into rebirth instead of failure, defeat, death?
Rebirth as what? A creature of vengeance? If anyone should know that path, it was she.
She had asked him what he had to lose by jumping. That answer was clear. Not much at all. Within seconds of Thalassia's dive, he had known that walking down from this place the way he had come was no option.
The way was forward. Down.
He stepped back several paces, putting Thalassia and the sea out of sight. Then, throwing off his chiton, he strode once more toward the cliff, swiftly lest he give himself time to change his mind. Strong wind at his back, he timed his steps so that his final stride landed right at the cliff's edge.
Without looking down, he launched himself into void.
His stomach, and other organs besides, seemed to remain on the cliff whilst the rest of him plunged relentlessly down, down, sea and rocks rushing up as if with the sole intention of ending his life. Though it lasted just a few seconds, packed into that descent was an eternity's worth of regret that his feet were not still planted firmly on earth.
There were other regrets, too, which tried and failed to coalesce, largely for lack of time.
He arrowed his body just in time to strike the shield of waves feet-first. Still, the waves won: the waters of the Gulf of Corinth pummeled and tossed him, dragged him under and stole his breath, a precious gift which could not be replaced until mouth found something other than brine to gulp.
Water-bound limbs working too slowly, at last he broke the surface, where as if to add one final insult, a wave slapped him square in the face. He wiped his eyes, opened them and cast stinging eyes around to gain his bearings.
He had missed the sea-worn rocks at the cliff base by a wide margin. Thalassia had been right; it was safe, and not just for a near-immortal. He looked up, and there was her sleek head, watching. Over the crash of surf and through the water in his ears, he heard her scream in triumph on his behalf.
As if the sea which shoved him rudely from side to side were nothing but a tranquil pool, she swam in his direction. “The beach!” she called, gesturing east. “Can you make it?”
He was breathless, shaken, his limbs almost numb with cold, but there was not a chance he would allow her to carry him to shore.
The long swim to land was far harder than the leap, and made the whole experience far less pleasant. By the time he could reach bottom and crawl the remainder on hands and knees, his body ached all over. That Thalassia arrived at the same time as he left little doubt that she had held back to keep pace with him. He was used to such gestures from her and had learned to suppress the natural humiliation they inspired.
A few yards before the shore, her magnanimity ended and she waded rather than crawled. Where Demosthenes collapsed on the beach with chest heaving, she lowered herself with perhaps marginally less grace than usual.
Side-by-side and naked, they lay on the white sand, hearing the surf, looking up at a cloud-streaked sky, saying nothing for a time while wind and sun dried brine-soaked skin. Eventually, Demosthenes' panting gave way to controlled breath.
Thalassia broke their silence first. “Ready to go again?”
“Just give me a year or two on this spot first,” Demosthenes answered.
“I could do that,” she agreed. “Thank you for trusting me.”
“It's less a choice than a compulsion.”
“You're alive,” she returned. It was a plain statement rather than any defense of her influence on him. After a few moments of silence she repeated, “You're alive. So be alive, Dee. If revenge is what you live for, so be it. But live.”
“Is that what you live for? Revenge?”
“No,” she answered slowly. “It's always there. But no. If it were, I'm reasonably sure I would not be cliff diving with a sad vagrant this morning. I would be out in the world making it a worse place for a lot more people than just you.”
“And every other Athenian,” Demosthenes reminded her.
He had spoken absently rather than accusingly, but Thalassia's reply was unusually earnest:
“I tried,” she said. “I want to try to make it better.”
Lying on his back, Demosthenes let his head fall sidewise to face her. He found Thalassia lying fully on her left side, cheek resting on the back of one hand. Her pale eyes were on him in a strange way, like one might look upon a grave of a friend, a friend put under the cold earth not by tragedy but by his own foolish action. It was sorrow mixed with disappointment, but not pity for either the living or the dead.
He had been about to say something the moment before he looked at her, but he forgot what it might have been. While his mind flailed in search of the lost thought, he kept his eyes locked eyes with hers for too long, leaving him no graceful way to disengage. The result was an uncomfortable silence.
Thalassia oftentimes could be relentless, unforgiving, but she was capable of mercy. She showed it now by averting her eyes.
“You should stay and rest and enjoy this place,” she said faintly. “I'll go, if you'd like.” They were hollow words, spoken without meaning and showing no sign of reflecting true intent. She stayed where she was, warm and naked and inches away.
For two years, Thalassia had been his guiding star and his madness. Yet, at present, she was all that anchored him to the firmament. Her mad voice somehow had become the voice of reason, and it had kept on speaking to him even as he refused to listen. Thalassia knew him better than any man or woman ever had, well enough to know what it would take to force him to cease pitying himself and see the way forward.
It had taken a leap from a dangerous precipice, a leap which part of him, he realized, had not survived. A new man had indeed emerged from those waves, still bent on vengeance but rid of those soft, unneeded things which held him back. Despair. Hopelessness. Self-pity.
He was a new man, and this new man began to experience thoughts which the old one had not dared entertain. Laying here in the sand beside him was one who had ushered him through darkness and into new light. He stared at her silently and had these new thoughts, yet remained uncertain of what to do with them.
Thalassia's pale eyes flicked down the length of his body, as his had not yet done to hers, but wished to. They flicked back up with sure knowledge of at least one thought of his new self, for there existed some secrets which the male anatomy was scarcely capable of keeping.
Thalassia touched his wrist, tentatively, with the tip of one finger, setting the hairs of his arm on end. “The thing you're thinking of doing,” she said, “you're welcome to do it.” Hopeful eyes backed up the invitation. “Very welcome.”
For days now, another, weaker Demosthenes had taken perverse pleasure in disappointing this one being on earth who truly had faith in him. Now, he did not even consider letting her down. Rolling over so their bodies faced, he laid his left hand upon Thalassia's cheek and kissed her.
It was not the first time he had tasted her lips, but the first time in which all four lips both gave and received. Hers were softer than they looked, and touched with brine that only enhanced their flavor. She tasted, above all, so very human.
Grains of sand found their way between them but were ignored as Thalassia kissed back gently, unaggressively, deploying the tip of her warm tongue between his open lips. Her hand slipped behind his head, fingers nesting in his sodden hair and applying just enough inward pressure to make clear that she was in no hurry for the engagement to
end.
Demosthenes gladly obliged. He wrapped an arm around her torso and pulled her star-born body close. Her leg enveloped him, the touch of her flesh everywhere warming his, and for long minutes their lips never parted for more than the instant needed to find a new angle and press home again.
During those minutes, her hot fingers and soft palm found his cock, from which the adverse effects of the frigid sea had long since fled. She stroked it with skill, and he repaid in kind with a finger slipped into the folds of her hairless cleft. Her hips reacted eagerly to the pressure. Before long, the light touch with which she pleasured him became a firm grip used to tug him into her parting thighs. Just when he felt the first trace of wetness, she sprang up from the sand and mounted him as gracefully as any Scythian might an unsaddled horse. The maneuver put Demosthenes on his back as he entered her, again not for the first time, but for the first time sober and with neither party acting only to diminish the other. This was pure, wild lust with no thought devoted to anything but gratification and release.
After some time spent underneath her, the mount heaved and toppled its rider, throwing her to the sand with an impact that would have taken the breath from another woman. With one knee braced in the moist sand, he became a farmer and she the mired plough he struggled to drive upfield. Thalassia wore her pleasure openly, intensely, on her face but rarely met his eyes, nor he hers. Pulling him into her with an iron hand on the back of his neck, her other rubbing their point of union, she achieved shuddering release. Then she expelled him into the cold air, but for barely a second while she rolled onto her shoulders and knees, head down, showing him her sinuous panther's back. He reentered from behind, her rounded backside grinding against him in movements which led her to another climax, and then him to his. He took no care to withdraw, but just spilled seed inside a womb he knew to have been rendered barren, lest Thalassia and her kind criss-cross time and space spewing out bastards.
Spent, he lowered himself atop her back, careful to remain inside of her and enjoy the lazy back-and-forth motion by which she continued to softly milk him. He set his cheek on hers, shut his eyes and tried not to let the imminent, inevitable end of what could only ever be a fleeting, Lethean interlude spoil the warm tingle of her flesh against his.
But ending was inevitable. At some point they would have to speak again and leave this beach and find ways to interact when fluids were not being exchanged. He would have to go back to feeling hatred and rage and regret and annoyance and confusion again, day in, day out, instead of the freedom and contentment he felt now.
Thalassia became the first to speak, in words slightly distorted by the compression of her jaw between his weight above and the beach underneath. “Tell me we'll do that again,” she said.
“I'll need a small amount of time,” Demosthenes answered.
A brief, nasal laugh stirred grains of sand under Thalassia's face. “Not what I meant. But definitely, as soon as you're ready again and I scoop the sand out of me. What I meant was … tomorrow. And the next day, and after. Do you want that?”
With that question, the poised ax fell, shattering the dreamworld into which the sea had expelled him.
On its surface, the question required little thought: of course he wanted that. But there were other things of which he was equally certain he wanted no part.
He rolled off of her to lay on his back, while she remained on her stomach, looking over at him expectantly.
“The day you died,” he said directly, for his new self was direct. “Alkibiades told me you loved me. Do you?”
He did not watch Thalassia's face while she considered her answer. Perhaps he should have, but in the end, Thalassia was, among many things, a consummate actress: he would never see on her face anything but what she wished him to see.
“Alkibiades,” she began softly, but with emphasis, “is full of two things. Himself, and shit.” After a brief pause, she said in more subdued tones, “I don't do love anymore. Not ever.”
Unsurprisingly, as he looked into them, Thalassia's wintry blue eyes told the same story as her pleasing lips.
“Nor I,” Demosthenes said. As he made the assertion, it occurred to him that although it was no lie, neither could he be certain of its truth. Perhaps, one day, he would feel love again, after vengeance was taken. If he lived through its taking.
But he could not love her. The sight of her reminded him too much of what he had lost. If he was to love again, it must be someone new, he thought, someone who had naught to do with all this devastation and death and torment, someone who could make him forget for more than just the span of a kiss or an embrace.
“Good,” Thalassia said. “Sad, but good. Then we'll do more of this?”
“When there is time. We shall be busy.”
“Doing?” She slid closer, crossing his thigh with hers, setting fingers on his sandy chest.
“Sinking every ship that Sparta sends toward this town. And going back to Athens to kill some fucking Equals.”
Thalassia laughed a wicked little laugh, and her hand slid down his torso to a place which soon began to feel rebirth of its own. “Let me just remove that sand for you...” she said, and proceeded to do so in a manner which precluded further speech.
* * *
7. Abduction
50 days after the fall of Athens (July 423 BCE)
In the black of night, unannounced, Styphon came to the shuttered window behind which waited the object of his hunt. By his side was the assistant to which tradition said he was entitled this night. In his case, the man fulfilling that role just happened to be a king of Sparta.
Agis set his back to the wall of unpainted clay brick at one side of the window. Styphon did likewise on the other. Sending one hand overhead, up past the window sash, the king slipped a finger behind the closed wooden shutter and exerted slight outward pressure. It moved, and Agis withdrew his hand, conclusion drawn: it was unlocked.
The king gave a sly smile, knelt before his subject and put both hands near the ground with fingers interlaced for use as a step. Being the one who was to proceed alone through the aperture, Styphon did not return his smile, but just drew a quiet breath and set his sandal into the king's hands. Agis boosted him up, and when Styphon had his balance, he carefully opened both shutters and crept through.
He did not go silently. That was impossible, particularly when the only covering sounds were the calls of crickets and night birds. But then, utter stealth was not required. For all that his entry was surreptitious, it was expected.
Styphon lowered himself into the enclosed candlelit space on the window's other side. He had been in the house before, a few days prior, but not this corner of it. The furnishing was plain and sparse, of course, as it was in the dwelling of any Spartiate family desirous of a sound reputation, consisting of just a sleeping pallet, large wicker basket for storage, and a woven mat to cover the floor of hard-packed earth. Near the pallet, a candle burned in a clay stand, its flickering light illuminating a human-sized lump covered entirely by a wool blanket. It was to this lump that Styphon walked. Crouching by the bedside, he gripped an edge of the blanket, and with a heart that quickened in expectation, he threw it back.
The sight revealed was that clothes wadded up in a surely deliberate imitation of a sleeping form. Styphon stood and turned toward the only remaining place where his quarry could hide. Setting his gaze on the wicker basket, he searched for signs of movement and listened for breath, detecting neither, then walked slowly in its direction. He reached it and stopped, set fingers on its worn handle, and pulled.
Inside, curled up tightly, looking up at her discoverer past brows crumpled in anger and up the short length of a dagger held tightly in both hands, was Hippolyta.
A little puzzled, Styphon froze and gave her a questioning look which might have been lost in the darkness. Had she had second thoughts?
She growled at him, softly, then whispered through grit teeth, “Don't touch me!”
Styphon's eyes fle
w to the curtain behind which likely slept, or sat awake, any or all of Hippolyta's parents and siblings. Whose side would they take if tonight went wrong?
“I won't let you,” Hippolyta promised, again keeping her voice low. It seemed she had no wish to see her family rush in to her aid. “I will not let you take this knife from me, drag me to my bed, force your cock in where none has been before, pound me until I quiver and melt underneath you, surrendering what I've saved for my husband. I may not have the strength to stop you, but I shall not go easily.”
Looking into Hippolyta's eyes, Styphon saw the gleam there and felt relief. This was a game. From what he knew, most Spartiate women underwent their bridal abductions eagerly, or at least passively, and why not?—the groom was a man of their choosing and the night of his coming known in advance.
Hippolyta was eager for her abduction, too, but pretended otherwise. The tradition, after all, could only have arisen in less civilized days, when wives had been taken by force.
Styphon knelt by the basket, and Hippolyta's eyes and dagger tip followed him. She gave him another low snarl.
“Theria,” he addressed her firmly but affectionately, “I shall take what I want, and what I want is your stain on that sheet.” He put his palm out. “Hand me the knife.”
She stabbed in the direction of his face, not enough to make him flinch. Styphon sent his other hand over the basket rim, behind her head, and clutched a handful of her hair. It had been cut short in preparation for this night, the shorn locks dedicated to Artemis. What remained fell barely to the nape of her neck. He pulled and twisted, forcing her head back, palm still open near her chin to receive the weapon.
Her lips curled in pain and defiance. She made no effort to use the knife, but did not surrender it either, and so after several seconds Styphon grabbed the blade by its flat, wrenched it from her grasp and laid it gently on the floor. He stood, dragging her up with him by the roots of her cropped hair. She twisted her body as best she could and took some deliberately ineffectual swipes at him. Taking no notice, he started toward the bed, leaving his bride with little choice but to step out of the basket.
