by P. K. Lentz
By now, some number of the still undaunted phalanx had seen fit to retrieve spears from the ground, thinking them the better weapon after all with which to hack down or stab a cornered foe, but they were wrong; Demosthenes, in a battle-induced state of hyper-awareness, found their spear thrusts even easier to anticipate and intercept, whether with hoplon or blade. By dropping to one knee with a spear blade hooked on the shield's bottom rim, he was able to pull its wielder off balance so he tumbled onto waiting sword, running both hands down the edges as he instinctively tried to ward off death.
Just in time, he saw the next spear-point advancing from above and sprang upright, deflecting it with his stolen shield and attacking low underneath. He drew blood in a glancing blow to the leg of his attacker, who drew back his spear for a fresh assault. As it passed his head, Demosthenes saw blood on the blade, and his stomach lurched. The swiftest of glances over his shoulder, all he could afford, told him why.
Thalassia's gown was torn and stained deep red just under one shoulder. The attack he had deflected had instead struck the back of she whom it was his duty to defend. It was no fatal blow to the likes of her, and she would not have felt its sting, but he cursed himself no less for the grave lapse.
He moved to take out his anger on the spear's wielder, but too late, for that Equal screamed as Thalassia hacked his spear arm clean off at the elbow, and then he was silent but for a gurgle as her blade lighted briefly on his neck before flying off to drink of more strong Lakonian blood.
Rededicating himself to his task, Demosthenes dealt with two more Equals, killing one and wounding the other with a hoplon rim to the throat followed by a slash which bit unclad thigh. Then, breath heaving, he reset his blade, scanned the space in front of him and realized there was no one left to kill.
The ground just inside the jailhouse gates stood littered with the dead and dying. Some of the latter were still, with only low moans to distinguish them, while other wounded men left trails of gore on the hard-packed dirt as they attempted to drag themselves to imagined safety. Four of the less wounded had regrouped beyond the threshold of the open gates. Demosthenes was mildly displeased to recognize three as opponents he himself had failed to kill. Two of the four were fully armed, while two bore only shields. Their faces were blank, but the eyes glittering in the lamplight betrayed an inner struggle: to advance and die in honor, or to keep their lives?
“They'll run,” Thalassia declared quietly. She looked as though she had bathed in blood, her once-white chiton now slick and black and hugging every curve. Her face was spattered, and arms which still held swords ready for more were streaked red from knuckle to pit. “Shall we allow it?” this Fury asked. “Your call.”
Surely she was right: the men would flee. The prospect of being branded tremblers held less fear for them in this moment than did the nightmare vision before them. Demosthenes felt vaguely that he preferred that they die, but the thrill of the fight was fading, A bare toss of his head communicated the decision.
Accepting it, Thalassia took a lunging step forward, brandishing blood-coated swords in a feint meant only to terrify. It worked. The makeshift wall of four shields crumbled as two of its members turned tail and ran, or rather limped toward the watching crowd of civilians and slaves which had gathered a safe distance behind. The two who remained gave one another a glance, pressed closer together and backpedaled in a more orderly retreat.
“Fuck off!” Thalassia yelled at the spectators, and many heeded the command. Throwing down one sword, she set her emptied hand on the great door of bronze-sheathed wood and heaved it shut, dragging with it a few corpses that were in the way. Then she did the same with the second door and barred the two with the ten-foot timber she handled as though it weighed no more than a spear.
“We should go,” she said, retrieving her cloak from where she had set it before the battle.
Demosthenes, who had meanwhile found his own blue chlamys lying relatively unsullied by blood, followed her in the direction of their planned escape. Figuring the few exits would by now be watched, if not guarded, they instead went over the prison wall, Thalassia scaling it first and helping her less nimble companion to follow. They had partaken of a fair share of slaughter this night. Rather than invite more, they dropped silently into an unlit street, covered their bloodied clothes and skin with cloaks and stole away, hands clasped so as not to lose one another in darkness.
* * *
11. Blood & jasmine
Owing to the raised alarm and the sounds of battle which carried far in the quiet of night, the streets of Athens did not long remain empty. Men ventured out in search of what was amiss, and Scythian guards leaped at shadows, forcing the perpetrators of the prison break to move with extra stealth. After some minutes spent running in careful bursts, they halted their flight in a narrow alley between shuttered market stalls. Demosthenes leaned against one wall, Thalassia the other. So narrow was the channel that their knees touched. At first the only sound in Demosthenes' ears was that of his own heavy breath, but as he brought that under control, it was superceded by the drone of cicadas and the distant shouts of men.
Then an excited whisper from his companion. “You did so well.”
Cloak thrown back on her shoulders, Thalassia was a dark, glistening shape against the moonlit gray-brown brick behind her. Pale blue eyes gleamed in a smooth, blood spattered face.
“I killed four,” he said dispiritedly, remembering that this very number had been her prediction before the battle. “And wounded three. And allowed you to be wounded.”
“This?” A supple, bluish arm decorated with irregular black smears came up, and a sticky hand touched his cheek. “It's nothing. And four is great,” she said. “But you shouldn't be counting. Just kill until you win.”
She breathed a contented sigh.
“You did very well,” she repeated in a slower, more forceful whisper.
Demosthenes knew that tone. He knew the touch now, too, that of her hand sliding from his cheek down the side of his neck to rest on his collarbone. Both signaled what was coming next, and although a small fraction of his mind was disgusted for an instant, his body responded, and responded still more when Thalassia's wounded back left her wall of the alley so that her front might make tantalizing contact with his. Her breasts met his chest, pressing upon him through gore-and sweat-soaked linen.
“I love fighting with you,” she said. The crown of her head rested on his temple, her breathy voice tickling his earlobe, her hair smelling of blood and jasmine. With a deft motion she unpinned her cloak and let it fall. Her pelvis pressed against his. “There's another thing I love doing with you.”
“Half a city is hunting for us,” Demosthenes protested, mildly.
“So?”
“We're covered with—”
“We're alive. We can do—”
Now it was Demosthenes' turn not to let her finish. If he was to be a dweller in her city of madness, a citizenship which he had accepted, then the new madness was to resist its rules.
Bringing hands up between them, he shoved her back against the brick of her side of the alleyway and followed her across, grabbing a handful of disheveled hair that had fallen loose from its braid, and he kissed her hard on dark, parted lips flavored with an unmistakable tang. She kissed back gratefully and entwined his waist with one leg, insistent on drawing him closer. His fingers traced her shoulders, found the wet fabric there and slid it aside so that her chiton, rendered useless by the battle anyway, slid down her arms and hung suspended on bent elbows until she dipped her hands and it caught on her raised thigh. Soon enough it fell from there, too, and the garment ended its useful life forgotten, blood-drenched, trampled underfoot.
He ran his hands, as sticky as hers with half-dried blood, down her bare body, over soft breasts with dark, taut nipples that gave way and sprang back with every passage of palms which left trails of other men's life essences on honeyed skin which, but for the lack of light, would have appeared pink with
the same blood. One hand settled on her hip while the other traversed her flat stomach, with its bare hint of rippling muscle beneath, crested the low hill just south of it to advance into the unforested valley below where warm wetness refreshed the film of half-dried gore coating his fingers.
He rolled those fingers back and forth over the shrouded spot which she shared in common, as with all her outward anatomy, with women born of earthly seed. Like any of them would have in her place, in the unlikely event they were wicked enough not to mind the blood, Thalassia squirmed in response, raking his skin with crusted nails.
Soon her nails left his back, and the soft fingers appeared under the hem of his chiton, wrapped around his manhood, pulling it toward her with clear intent. He heard the sound of sandal hitting wall as she planted the foot of her raised leg on the wall behind him.
Her warm palm guided him to regions warmer still, and he thrust inside her, driving her back into the hard surface behind. She embraced him and moaned. Another scrape of sandal on plaster and Thalassia became weightless, holding her whole body aloft on spread legs braced between the two walls of the alley. Relieved of the resistance of her weight, each thrust up and forward became that much easier and more pleasurable.
After ten or a dozen such strokes, Thalassia came, with one hand on her sex, the other at the back of partner's neck, pulling his head against hers. Her more-than-human muscles tensed and shook, and from behind him Demosthenes heard a sharp crack which sent heart into throat and threatened to soften other organs now in use.
“Sorry,” Thalassia whispered hurriedly in his ear. She was breathless now, something she had not been in the orgy of slaughter just before. “I cracked the wall. Don't stop.”
He did not; the interruption only forestalled completion by seconds. With nose buried in black curls, inhaling death and nectar as she held him tightly, he let seed explode into the warm abyss of her womb.
They stayed thus for a very short while before Demosthenes unsheathed himself and fell back against the opposite wall. He looked behind him and in the dim starlight could discern a spider's web of black crevices in the plaster. He looked back up into another barely visible web, that of Thalassia's Mark. It reminded him that he, too, was wearing warpaint, and he scarcely wished to imagine his appearance below the neck.
“We will make grim sights come sunrise,” he observed. “We must wash.”
Thalassia clipped on her cloak, but left her bloody rag of a dress on the alley floor. “Phormion's?” she suggested.
“Our enemies will search there, and I would not see my cousin's life shattered like mine for aiding us. Nor anyone else's. No,” he concluded. “A great many Acharnians sheltered in Lakiadai during the Spartan sieges of years past. Many of the temporary shelters built for them now stand empty apart from vagrants.”
“Like us?”
“As you say. And should any eyes fall on us, the folk of that district are more hostile than most to Sparta. Collaborators will be few.”
Keeping to the darkness, a cloaked shadow leading the way, they crept away in search of shelter for the night.
* * *
12. Feel it
Navigating twisting back alleys, hiding from Scythian guards and clusters of bystanders awakened by the alarm, they reached the outskirts of of Lakiadai in inner Athens. The district's residents were Demosthenes' tribemates, and like him, cousins to the Acharnians, whose farms had been the most devastated by successive Spartan invasions. Thousands of Acharnians had sought shelter here, overflowing the homes of their relatives and necessitating the construction of temporary dwellings, since had fallen to disuse. They were ramshackle, single-room structures barely tall enough for a man to stand inside, effectively tents made of plank and plaster, not even worth tearing down to make fresh use of the materials.
Thalassia scouted the maze of these dwellings in search of one not presently occupied by beggar or vagrant while Demosthenes crept up to the community cistern with two pitchers 'borrowed' from a front garden. Minutes later, they met up again, and Thalassia led him to the shelter she had chosen.
Inside, she laid down her swords and let her cloak slide to the floor of filthy, matted straw. Blue light let in by the single, small window illuminated a ghastly, glistening wound on her upper back where a spear blade had opened her flesh. The sight of it made Demosthenes wince. Setting down the pitchers, he bid her crouch down so he might wash it.
Before commencing, he gingerly ran a finger along the edges of the wound, finding them slick with milky, translucent mucus, the same stuff which had coated her in death.
“You feel nothing at all?” he said, knowing the answer.
She half-turned to give him her profile, not her pale eyes. “I choose what to feel.”
That seemed not so much an explanation as it did, strangely, an apology.
“Does pain not have its uses?” Demosthenes contemplated aloud. “Does it not help us to know we are alive? And to keep us alive?”
“It does,” she said. “I'm aware of the damage. It just doesn't translate to pain. The sensation is blocked. Or muted to near nonexistence.”
“How long has it been since you felt pain? Physical pain,” he clarified, for he knew she could, and did, feel pain of other kinds.
“Other than slight and consensual,” she answered, not too cryptically, “a long time.”
“You can remove the block any time?”
She threw him a glare. “What are you getting at?”
By her tone, she knew exactly what he meant.
“Feel it,” he said quietly. It was a suggestion, not a command. “Just for a moment. Be one of us. Be alive. Be... Jenna.”
Thalassia scoffed, abruptly turning her head to give the asker a faceful of hair. “What would be the fucking point of that?”
After a moment's thought returned no point he could articulate, Demosthenes joined her in scoffing. “You're right. It's foolishness. I apologize.”
Lifting the pitcher, he poured water in a trickle over the wound while dabbing at it with the hem of his already bloodied cloak.
Suddenly Thalassia fell forward onto her knees and groaned sharply in an unmistakable way. Setting down the pitcher, Demosthenes pressed close and maneuvered to face her. She looked up at him with eyes narrowed and teeth clenched, emitting a low groan. Movement near the floor caught his eye, and he looked to find her fingers rapidly opening and closing in an insistent gesture.
He understood the request and set his palm into the clutching fingers, which Thalassia proceeded to squeeze so hard it seemed as though the skin of his hand must break open, blood and bone shooting out like pulp from a grape too long on the vine. Instinctively he wished to free it, but tempering instinct, he offered no resistance.
Whether from pride or some other motive, she had taken his challenge. The block was lifted, pain felt. The nasty, deep, gaping tear on her back was no longer just a cosmetic damage to her fast-healing flesh but a true wound of battle, the kind which made the bravest of grown men, Equals like tortured Arkesilaos, scream to the gods for mercy.
And so Demosthenes endured the crushing of his hand, knowing she endured far worse. Leaning close, he wrapped his free arm about her, set chin on her good shoulder and saw her face in starlit profile: eyes tightly shut, lips pursed as if in intense concentration. Her breaths came in short, sharp, irregular puffs.
“Enough,” he whispered into her ear, but she showed no sign of having heard him. “Stop,” he repeated. Again it was but a request, all he had the right to make. Thalassia's mind, like her body, was her own.
She remained thus, squeezing his hand, for the space of many more intense breaths. Then, at last, taut muscles fell slack and her iron hand opened. After a brief silence, she shrugged him away and looked up. He could see that the pain was gone, but her expression was bitter.
“Happy?” she asked.
“Likely never. But the gesture is appreciated.”
The twist of Thalassia's lip, and his hard-won sense o
f her, told him that she had intended to be angry at him but something, perhaps his choice of reply, had prevented it.
“That hurt like fuck,” she said. “I know, that was the point. But from now on... just accept that I'm better than you, and be glad for it.”
“I would not wish it otherwise,” Demosthenes said, resuming washing her wound. “I merely thought to give you an experience you may have forgotten.”
“What, of having an asshole enjoy seeing me suffer? I don't need that.”
“I won't lie to you, since it's pointless to try,” Demosthenes said. “I did not exactly enjoy it, but...”
“Yeah.” She cut off his search for words. “I know. That's why I did it. Now, if your troglodytic little monkey-brain is done coming up with ingenious ways of interfering with me, you need sleep.”
In that, Thalassia was right. He had not slept since Corinth, and there but briefly. “And you?” he asked, rinsing sticky blood from all her limbs.
“I have another three or four days before I need sleep.”
“You'll heal faster.”
“We need clothing,” she said. “I'll get us some.” While still in a crouch, she drew her cloak up around her and pinned it.
Demosthenes lowered himself onto his backside in the filth of the floor. “I would prefer you did not steal from my countrymen, if you can avoid it.”
“I'll go to Alkibiades' house,” she answered, rising and picking up one of her two swords. “If it hasn't been thoroughly looted, there will be something there.”
Demosthenes accepted the wisdom of the plan. “Just that, then. Please do nothing foolish.”
In the starlight, the purple shade looming above him scoffed. “That was the old me,” it claimed, not very convincingly. “Besides, a foolish act is just a clever one that didn't... something. Never mind.”
