by P. K. Lentz
If so, then he had acted none to soon in detaching her from Eris.
The sharp-nailed fingers applied greater pressure. Running blind, thrusting his head wildly about, Styphon finally lost his footing and careened headlong into the grass. Still he maintained his grip on his squirming burden, even as all his weight landed on his right arm on the rocky soil underneath.
Andrea's fingers left his eyes, by accident or design, but as soon as Styphon opened them on an expanse of cloudy sky, a blow struck his left elbow in just the spot to send arrows of pain lancing to wrist and shoulder. It broke his grip, and a like a caught fish fighting to return to sea, Andrea slipped away.
Styphon lunged in the direction he knew she would be headed: toward Eris and her assassins.
His hand caught her ankle and clamped around it, and she fell. Breaking the fall with her hands, Andrea twisted and lashed out with her free foot at Styphon's face. He grabbed that foot, too, but the sandal came off in his hand, setting the limb free to draw back and renew the attack. Styphon did not wait, but surged forward, letting the blow glance off of his shoulder as on all fours he scrambled up the length of Andrea's body, grabbing her knee, then the belt of her chiton, and finally throwing all of his considerable weight onto her back. His arms sought and found her wrists and pinned them to the earth, into which her fingers dug in the effort to pull free and race to Eris' side.
“Cease this!” Styphon growled in his daughter's ear. “You cannot save her!”
Their heads were side by side, her body pressed to the ground under his. Andrea's gaze was lifted and fixed on the battle underway on the road, and soon, so too was Styphon's.
Eris stood at the center of a shifting, shouting vortex of red cloaks, lambda-blazoned shields and erratically waving spears. Far from being the calm center of this storm, Eris was a frenzy of movement: a pale head, blonde braid trailing, peeking up above a bronze helmet here, shield-rim there. A spear moved with her—no, two—seized from her attackers. They moved quickly, more quickly than the surrounding Equals' blades, and with every swipe a man groaned and a fresh coat of blood painted the polished iron, red droplets spraying the air in graceful arcs. No sound came from her tightly shut lips, but no move of her limbs failed to part a victim's lips in a groan at least of pain, more likely of death.
Before Styphon's eyes, and another pair of black eyes so like his own, one man after another of the king's elite fell under the blade of Eris—one clutching his throat, another a thigh, another missing a right hand, never again to clutch spear. They dropped where they stood or else fell back to let a comrade fill the gap in the sharply-bladed, slowly shrinking, ring-shaped wall of flesh and bronze and leather and iron imprisoning the she-daimon.
Hope was not lost. Some of the fallen, before dying, or limping off to die later, inflicted blows of their own on the victim. However great her powers, however lethal a weapon was in her hands, Eris could not ward off the near-simultaneous onslaught of twenty or more spears. She avoided the thrusts and swipes of most, knocked a few others aside with her pair of stolen shafts, but not a few blades found their mark. The cuts and gashes which those blows inflicted on Eris's white flesh were mortal by any measure. Any measure but hers. Blood had soaked her garment, which now clung red to every curve of the mutilated flesh underneath, yet she fought on with speed and fury undiminished. Despite the cloak of blood, no drop yet touched her face: a grim, expressionless, feminine death-mask of alabaster.
All this Styphon witnessed in the space of a few fast, shallow breaths while pinning his daughter to the ground. Andrea watched, too, offering no further struggle.
For a time, at least, she did not. Then, of a sudden, her limp body came to life underneath him, and Styphon was forced to drag his attention away from the still undecided battle and focus on preventing Andrea from foolishly, suicidally, attempting to join it.
Worm-like, she writhed out from under him and sprang to the feet which had won her the laurels at half a dozen festival races and many times that number unofficially. Knowing he had no hope of catching her once she found her stride, the moment his foot was planted Styphon launched himself into a desperate lunge.
Again, his hand caught Andrea's ankle and again he brought her down. With no concern for bruising the flesh of his flesh, he clamped fingers around the thin leg and dragged her back by it. Her hands clawed clumps of grass, her free foot lashed at his face and connected, but a few seconds of wild struggle put him atop her again, this time with one palm planted on the side of her head, his weight behind it, pressing down into the earth as if to crush her skull.
Were she not his daughter, he might have, so strong was his rage by now at her foolish resistance, fueled by fresh worry that the assassination may fail. When he had seen Eris slay twelve Equals, they had been the ones caught by surprise, and those men had not been decorated champions, as most of Eris's attackers were today.
The feeling in Styphon's breast came near to the battle madness to which most Greeks regularly surrendered but which every Equal was trained to suppress. He suppressed it now, so as not to slay his child. Perhaps sensing how fragile was her young life in her father's hands, or else having had opportunity to reconsider her choice of sides in the sudden conflict sprung upon her, she fell limp. It was not unconsciousness; Styphon's eye was level with hers, and he saw it turn in the direction of the battle, a source of continuing bellows of anger and agony.
Eris, the white-faced, blood-cloaked Beast of Sparta, battled on. She had broken out of the ring of assassins to fight with her back unthreatened, and those Equals who remained standing to challenge her—half or less of the original number—were forced to maneuver around the heaped corpses and near-corpses of their comrades. Apart from a gravely wounded few dragging themselves away, minds clouded by pain, none so far had quit the battle.
None had quit, even though the day was lost. That much was apparent to Styphon, as it must have been to those looking down doom at the points of the she-daimon's spears.
Styphon would shortly gaze up one of those shafts himself, he knew, into the pale face and heartless, alien eyes of death.
Even if he ran, he would die. There was no point now in bearing Andrea away to safety. He would hold her here until the battle, and a girl's opportunity for rash action, had ended. Then he would face his own fate, to be slaughtered on the ground like a hog if that was what Eris decreed.
She was a false goddess, not the sister of Ares whose name she had adopted, but she may as well have been. If the slaughter before him was any indication, this Eris was the God of Sparta now, and her will ruled all.
* * *
5. The god of Sparta
Eight Equals remained, fighting on as if victory still were possible. Doubtless each believed it was, and that he would be the one to land the single fatal stroke needed to lay low their strange enemy. They tried. They acted in concert, sharing grunted words and silent signals in an effort to pierce Eris's defenses. She was not untouchable; the ragged flap of flesh hanging from her left bicep, a gash above her right hip and any number of smaller wounds lost to sight in her second skin of blood stood testimony to that. But those had been inflicted when her attackers numbered four times their current strength, and her wounds seemed not to have slowed her down an iota.
Now the advantage was all hers. She did not quite toy with her remaining opponents—now seven, now six—but she might have. The spears in her hands, like living extensions of her arms, stayed in constant motion, but when the time came to kill, as it did every few seconds, she dispatched men with quick, decisive strokes, no more than was needed.
Five left, now four. These victims made no sound, neither in struggle nor in death. All breath was needed to fight. Death sounds, anyway, were for those unprepared for death, and the three Equals yet standing had had plenty of time to come to grips with the impending flight of their shades from rent flesh and broken bone.
Three remained. They shared a silent look. One raised a war cry, in which the others jo
ined, and then all three charged. They knew that as well as Styphon did that it was certain suicide, but at least it was the best kind of suicide: committed with another man's blade held by enemy hand.
Well, this hand was a woman's.
Second best, then.
They fell within instants of each other, two slashed in darting motions of one spear, the third impaled at the end of the second, which Eris released and let fall along with his corpse. It pointed briefly skyward before the weight of its butt-spike sent it toppling, twisting the spasming torso from which its iron drained the last lifeblood.
The fight might have been measured in an easily countable number of heartbeats. In all her battles, Sparta had perhaps never seen the loss of so many of its elite in so short a span.
Eris stood alone on the road of death, surveying the human wreckage scattered by her storm of wrath. Her gaze went to motion in the sparse grass a few yards from her and she walked to the place, casually, raised her spear and brought it down between the shoulder blades of a man struggling to rise. Next she went to another spot and there put another out of his misery.
“Eris!” Andrea called out, her voice distorted by jaw yet pressed hard against the earth. Knowing he was to die, Styphon released his offspring and slowly got to his feet, meeting the freshly drawn stare of the one who was to be his slayer. He would die standing.
In no hurry, bloody Eris walked toward them, butt-spike of her spear stabbing reddened earth with each step until, still a ways off, she raised the weapon and leveled it at Styphon, her stride quickening. By then, Andrea was up and racing toward her tutor as if to share an embrace.
Though it was not aimed at her, the raised spear stopped Andrea, who quickly put her hand on the ash shaft, behind its blade, and blurted, as if in surprise, “No!”
Styphon was surprised, too—not at Eris's intention to skewer him, of course, but that Andrea would elect to interfere.
Eris halted. Over Andrea's head, on which a red ribbon adorned long, disheveled hair, Styphon met and matched the white witch's scorn-filled gaze.
Girl begged slayer of men: “Please, do not kill him. Whatever love I had for him is gone, but he is still my father. Do not make an orphan of me.”
Damaged limbs yet pregnant with the promise of slaughter, Eris asked coldly, without a glance spared for her student, “His life belongs to me now. What do you offer in return?”
“Nothing,” Andrea said. A bold answer in which Styphon could not help but feel pride. “Except what I have given you already. He deserves death. But if you kill him, I will not forgive you.”
Evil eyes on him, Eris seemed to ponder. Styphon watched her in return, idly considering some action against her in this silent interim.
And then his daughter would look the fool, having purchased a life subsequently thrown away. A strange thought, sure, but then the nearness of death could bring strange thoughts.
Finally, Eris withdrew the spear, spun it, and jammed it blade first into the earth, where it remained. “Be a little angel, Andrea,” she said, hard gaze still on Styphon, “and run and fetch Brasidas. Send him, alone, to...” She pondered and concluded, “The Satyrs' Ring, in the woods east of here.”
“What shall I tell him?”
The death mask of Eris cracked a humorless smile. “I have faith you will convince him of the gravity of the situation.”
Andrea nodded, and before departing on a pair of the swiftest feet of her generation, she directed a final, tight-lipped look at her father.
She looked at him as she would a stranger.
She ran off on the road to Sparta. Eris watched her disappear, while Styphon watched Eris, for one did not take one's eyes off a snake coiled to strike.
“She is mine now,” the snake said, coming closer, sans spear.
It was a humiliating gesture, confirmation that she considered him no threat at all, probably would not have, even were he armed. Now that she was so close, he saw the extent of her wounds. In addition to the flesh which had been stripped from one arm, her legs were cut in several places to the bone, or close, and a deep cut ran from her collarbone down the side of one breast. They were wounds of a kind one expected to see only on a corpse.
“Do not ever try to reclaim her,” Eris said. She spoke in a casual tone, knowing the words themselves constituted threat enough. “I should thank you. I have her in my debt now for sparing you.” She chuckled, a sound like melting ice falling to ground. “The funny thing is that I would not have killed you anyway, and not only for Andrea's sake. If it were just that, I probably would have cut your dog-face in half and worried about your daughter's feelings later.” She raised a blood-gummed fingertip and drew a line with it down the bridge of his nose, illustrating the cut with something like regret or longing. “I need a witness to what happened here. And anyway, Brasidas wants you alive.”
The last remark surprised Styphon, but being surprised already just to remain alive, he gave not much thought to this lesser matter.
Eris gave a groan of annoyance, a decidedly human expression. “You Spartans...” she lamented. “You paint Athenians as liars, and maybe they are, but you are worse. You exert such control of your bodies. You suppress your true reactions, hide your fears, your desires. You become machines, almost. I knew you were hiding something from me today, but not this.” She waved a hand at the carnage, the hand which had created it. “I did not suspect your lie was this big.” She gave a wry, sidelong smile. “So congratulations. Now come, let us be off before anyone else comes along and forces me to kill him.”
She turned away and walked off, a victorious, mutilated ghost, blonde braid slithering down blood-drenched back as she stepped with a serpent's grace over the carcasses of Agis's royal guard. A trio of crows, the vanguard for a larger force sure to come, landed to sample the banquet left for them.
Eris's passage did not disturb the birds, but Styphon's did as he trudged along behind. The birds took briefly to wing and then quickly resettled, finding new sightless eyes at which to peck.
* * *
6. Curse of greatness
The so-called Satyrs' Ring was a roughly circular clearing in a forest northeast of Sparta. At its center sat a moss-encrusted boulder whose visible surfaces were crudely engraved with pictograms bearing vague resemblance to men and horned animals. Greeks almost certainly had not made these markings; some other people had in the shadowy time before the sons of Herakles had swept into the Peloponnese, killing or enslaving the earlier inhabitants and erasing most of their mark upon the land. Now there was just this rock in a clearing, and a few other such places. Someone long before Styphon's birth had named the Satyrs' Ring according to what was perhaps the most obvious vision it conjured: that of Pan or some other woodland god piping on the rock whilst the cloven hooves of half-men wildly pounded the forest floor around him.
A number of beaten trails led to the site, and it was on one of these that Styphon arrived in the clearing behind Eris. Immediately the false goddess went to the boulder, stepping over the offerings of beads and bones and amulets intermingled with detritus which lay at its base. She vaulted up onto its flat top, which was level with her shoulders, a near impossible feat for most mortal men. There she sat with legs crossed, enveloped in a crimson cloak pilfered from the dead to replace the soaked garment (almost as red) which she had peeled from her broken body and left behind at the scene of slaughter.
She shrugged the cloak from her left shoulder, baring soft, white flesh that, even had she been uninjured, would have aroused no more interest from Styphon's cock than did the statues of nude Artemis that the white witch's form somewhat resembled.
Eris looked down at the glistening red void on her left upper arm, the chunk of flesh hanging from it by a thick ribbon. “Look what you've done,” she said, sighing. She raised the flap and pressed it back into place. “That will take days to heal.”
After a lingering, angry glare at Styphon, she found a bottom corner of her stolen cloak and by hand and toot
h tore a strip of wool from it. Using her teeth again as aid, she used the strip to bind her arm such that the wayward flesh was held in place. That done, she stared down at her mutilated thighs, which prompted another venom-filled look at the one she held responsible.
“You know,” she mused with a half-smile, “Brasidas would not be more than annoyed if I were to kill you.” Behind her narrowed eyes, wicked visions danced. “And I doubt he'd be bothered at all if I just hurt you a little. By which I mean a lot.”
Covering her half-minced nudity with the cloak, she shrugged off the idea, for which Styphon masked relief.
“Andrea might, though,” she reflected. “The trouble is not worth whatever brief pleasure it would bring me. Ironically, your daughter with her fleeting lifespan has helped teach me patience. I am sure the chance will come for me to kill you eventually.”
“Put a weapon in my hand,” Styphon said. “I will take away your need to wait.”
However honest the spirit of the threat in that moment, it was empty, as Eris surely knew: he had stepped over dozens of fallen spears and as many swords to get here, walking at his enemy's back, no less, yet he had passed up the chance to attack. And be cut down.
Eris said condescendingly, “If you are that eager to die, I'll oblige. But not today. Hatch another plot against me, you and Agis,” with a sneer she identified the plan's originator, “and see what happens.”
Styphon turned his back on a malevolent smile from the witch on her ancient, mossy pedestal, and exchanged no further words with her until the polemarch arrived.
* * *
The sound of swift but measured footfalls in the forest was followed by the entrance of Brasidas into the clearing. He stopped at the Ring's edge and regarded the two awaiting him: witch first, then man. Surprisingly, his look was one of cool contemplation, not anger or even urgency. Styphon knew the polemarch as one rarely to act without measured thought (in that, as in many things, Brasidas fit the Spartiate ideal) but even a man of stone could be forgiven for flying into a hot rage on hearing such news as he just had from Andrea. Yet he did not.
