by P. K. Lentz
“Then it is she who deceives you.”
“Careful,” the girl returned sharply. “I think what you mean to say is thank you.”
“Yes... thank you,” Demosthenes amended. “Will she not be angry when she learns of this?”
“It is Brasidas who wants you here,” Andrea said. “I am confident she prefers me over him. Help keep the chains silent.”
Demosthenes lowered his hands to the chains which for two days had dug into his ribs. Seconds later they fell loose, clinking lightly into the cloaking veil of frog noise, and he and his savior lowered them to the ground.
He was free. Weak of limb, but free. Small hands reached up and threw a black cloak over his shoulders that he might become, as was she, one with the night. Taking his hand, Andrea led him a few steps, looking all around. At her signal, Demosthenes moved behind her in a crouch along the edge of the faintly torchlit square and into the first alleyway which presented itself. From there she led him, sticking to shadows, to to the outskirts of the unwalled collection of towns that was Sparta.
The frog sound faded, then increased again as they entered a wooded grove where at last they halted—mercifully, for Demosthenes' body everywhere ached, even if he would gladly have walked ten stadia to ensure he kept his freedom.
Andrea guided him to a fallen trunk, where he sat and accepted from her a skin half filled with water.
He drained it and asked, “What next?”
“I shall return home. I advise you to get as far from here as possible. North and east will give the lowest likelihood of discovery. I...” she began to add, and hesitated. “I asked Eurydike to meet us here and escape with you. She refused.”
“That does not surprise,” Demosthenes said sadly. “She came to me.”
“I know.”
“The man I once was deserved her loyalty and affection. I am no longer him.”
“I know,” Andrea said again. “I must—”
“I would be disappointed in you, Andrea,” came a chilling, familiar voice through the darkness, “were I not so proud.”
Soundlessly, Eden appeared and took a seat on the trunk. Instinctively, Demosthenes flew to his feet, stumbling in the underbrush on weak legs before recovering. He did not run; even were he in full health, there was little point.
“And I am touched by your kind words, as well,” Eden continued. “Of course I prefer you over Brasidas. That fact is beyond question.”
In the darkness, Andrea's expression was unreadable, but her manner was subdued, as any child caught by parent or tutor in a misdeed.
“This act, and your success in it, only deepen my affection for you,” Eden said to her. “But I wonder if you would have done the same tonight if you knew that the man you rescued does not only want the life of Brasidas for his revenge. Will you tell her, turtle, or shall I?”
Demosthenes did not bother to answer, directing his racing thoughts instead toward salvaging his seemingly aborted flight to freedom.
“In Naupaktos,” Eden resumed, “I discovered a cave, much like the place where I create my own... nightmares. It was Geneva's, and within it she was developing a means of poisoning Sparta's grain supply. He would see you dead, along with every woman and child of Sparta, as payment for his wife and child. Ask him to deny it.”
Andrea's black eyes fixed on Demosthenes, flashing starlight.
“I did lay such a plan,” he hastily confessed. “But ample time remains to see it averted.”
“And will you?” Eden asked. “Avert it?”
Demosthenes knew Eden's reason for asking this; he had chosen his own words carefully.
“Yes,” he answered her. “If I go free, I will abandon that course.”
“He lies,” Eden declared with evident satisfaction.
“I do not lie,” Demosthenes insisted. “I shall keep my word.”
“Say it as many times as you like, turtle. It will be a lie every time. Your heart's hatred is too powerful to be bargained away, even in return for your own life.” She addressed silent, confused Andrea: “He would see Sparta destroyed. He said as much to me.”
“And did you not say to me that you would let Andrea burn if that were the price of escaping this world?” Demosthenes argued in desperate tones.
Eden chuckled. “Am I more likely to have spoken truly with you than with her? Andrea knows the truth. If I escape this world, it will be with her.” Still seated on the trunk, Eden clasped the girl's hand. “Enough blathering. We can kill him now. Brasidas needs only think Demosthenes alive. It need not be reality.”
“No,” Andrea quickly declared, to Demosthenes' great relief.
“Why not?” Eden scoffed. Releasing Andrea's hand, she produced a small pouch, which she upturned, spilling some small tiles of clay or stone onto the forest floor. “Because of this?”
The girl answered glumly, “Yes. Because of that. I have lived among Spartans and Athenians. Both peoples, for the most part, are petty, and thoughtless, and ignorant. But they are people. Not monsters. Monsters are made. Brasidas is one. Here in this clearing, there are two. The one who sent that message is not. And I want with all my heart not to be one.”
In the darkness Andrea sniffled, betraying invisible tears. She laid a small hand on Eden's cheek.
“We can love monsters,” Andrea said. “We can follow them down paths we would rather not travel, becoming as beasts ourselves. But if we are strong and determined, we can choose instead to show the monsters a better way.”
Eden's hand rose and settled atop the small one on Eden's cheek, a gesture which laid bare a truth now undeniable: the monster truly held affection for the girl.
The revelation inspired in Demosthenes no pity for the witch, only the girl. In so many ways Andrea was wise and clever, but in this one thing she was utterly foolish.
Just as her cleverness had proven useful, so now did her foolishness.
The starlit hands separated, and Andrea shakily sighed. “Given his intentions, I cannot let Demosthenes go free. But neither do I think it just for him to die. Yet.”
A shrill, resonant note split the night: a horn blown in alarm. The cause might be anything, but the greatest likelihood was the discovery of a suddenly empty execution stake.
Take him,” Andrea concluded. “Keep him for now. Safely, if you care for me. Feed him.”
Silence. Though less than pleased with the verdict, Demosthenes dared not protest lest a bad outcome turn worse.
He would live a while longer.
“Go,” Eden said gently to the girl. “Get home.”
“You are my home,” Andrea swiftly returned. Then, to Demosthenes, “If I regret this, you will find one day that my claws are sharp.”
She left the clearing, joining the night.
Eden rose from her seat and gave her captive a warning sneer. “Not a word from you, turtle. There are a hundred ways I could hurt you without leaving a mark.”
* * *
14. The second battle of Naupaktos - (iii) Black witchery
Ninety men lay dead, most Equals. Those who had breathed the yellow mist were not among the fatalities, so long as they had not suffered a bolt in the back while lying prone. After their fits of choking faded, they remained in a weakened state, their breaths shallow, lungs burning. They were not fit to fight, even if many yet wished to.
Brasidas confirmed it: the Hydra's Breath was not meant to kill men, only steal the fight from their limbs.
Late in the day, with mountains to the right and sea to the left, the regrouped and diminished army of revenge marched until the rough terrain broke and a flat expanse of grassland spread out ahead, checkered with empty fields of harvested crops. For all who saw it, some relief accompanied the sight, for it meant the choicest spots for ambush now lay behind. The witch had implied no further resistance until the river, but those were the words of a witch and a sworn enemy, scarcely to be trusted.
Around the time they reached the plain, riders of the Skiritai returned from the river
Mornos ahead and imparted to Brasidas some news which Styphon was not privileged to hear. Whatever it was, it seemed not to please him. Styphon thought he overheard in their report the word aichmolotoi, prisoners.
A short time later, when the march to the Mornos was complete, Styphon saw what the riders had seen.
The river at this spot was fordable absent other obstacles, stretching some forty feet from bank to bank and moving in a gentle current toward the sea. But today the river was not absent other obstacles. Near the midpoint between near bank and far, a barrier had been erected of wooden stakes, roughly half a hundred, each jutting up from the water's surface exactly the height of a man.
It was easy to tell that the stakes were the height of a man because affixed to each one was the lifeless body of one.
All wore the red cloaks of Equals, and on their lifeless left arms were the lambda-blazoned shields of Sparta. No man doubted, no man could, that here were the prisoners taken in Agis's failed assault.
A thousand prayers went up from the orderly phalanxes of the halted army, and then almost as many curses from the Equals looking upon the desecrated corpses of their executed brothers.
The curses abruptly ceased when from between the center-most stakes, their executioner waded into view. Clad in the black armor of leather and bronze which covered all her limbs, cropped hair tied tightly back, Thalassia wielded not her customary twin swords—they hung at her hip—but two large-headed axes such as the tree-cutters of Naupaktos surely used to harvest timber for their shipyards. Tree-cutters, though, swung them two handed; Thalassia stood waist-deep in the waters with one ax resting on either shoulder.
There was no mistaking what she meant for her harvest to be.
One of her two eyes which burned coldly with malice was encircled by the fine, web-like tracery which served her as the black witch's war-paint.
She stood there, flanked by corpses, in the river Mornos, waiting, unafraid of missiles which Brasidas did not order loosed because they would only further desecrate the flesh of the dead Equals.
“The Skiritai saw no sign of a defending army!” Brasidas addressed his force. “The coward Naupaktans have fled! We battle only the witch this day! She cannot stand against us all!”
While Brasidas spoke, a light commotion arose from somewhere in the lines, and by the time the polemarch finished, an angry Corinthian general in black-crested helm had pushed his way through the ranks.
“My men leave now, Brasidas! Corinthians shall not this day sacrifice themselves to a spawn of darkness so she might—”
Brasidas cut the general short by grabbing the upper rim of his breastplate and drawing him in, baring clenched teeth.
He remained thus for a few heartbeats, then shoved the Corinthian back, saying, “Go, then, and take your feeble whores! They are useless anyway! But your choice will not be forgotten!”
“Bah!” the Corinthian answered, and pushed his way back to his city's contribution, calling out orders to break from the army and march east, for home, where their flesh and shades were safe from witchery.
“She is flesh like us!” Brasidas screamed to the rest, his face red as spittle flew between the cheek pieces of his helm. “We can destroy her! We are fortunate, for there is more glory in sending this creature back to Erebos than in crushing an army of slaves! Full advance!”
The trumpeter sounded that order's clarion note, and before it faded it was drowned out by the bellowing war cries of a thousand men. On other days, in other battles than this, Equals went to war chanting inspiring words by the poet Tyrtaeos. But today was not such a day, and this not such a battle.
As Styphon raised hoplon and spear, shoulder to shoulder with Helots likewise armed, and strode forward in even strides, he welcomed the battle-calm which the great Founder Lykurgos intended. If his life was to be lost this day in service to Sparta, it was a right and fitting fate.
Styphon was not among the first to enter the water and begin wading toward the barrier of flesh and timber. But he did see, over the shoulders and shield rims ahead of him, the figure of Thalassia turning and retreating behind that grim wall, and she walked along it, axes striking in swift, sharp strokes at the back side of each stake she passed, as if to sever something hidden there.
The sight threatened to pierce Styphon's battle-calm. There would be more witchery to come before any clash of arms, he knew. Yet there was no path but forward. Those who thought otherwise had already fled, leaving not a man present who would heed any call to delay the advance
Styphon's and the Helots' sandals had just sloshed on the near bank by the time the first Equals, waist-deep, reached the wall of death and unhesitatingly dared to cross it by angling their shields to fit between the posts and brushing past the lifeless legs of the fallen. The war-cries were gone from their lips by now.
Thalassia, having spent the time of the army's crossing moving north to the furthest extent of the barrier, behind it, chopping whatever it was she chopped, now waded to the far shore to begin retracing her path on dry land.
Nearing the wall himself, as river water enveloped genitals which recoiled from its chill, Styphon glanced down on the water's surface and noted it was alive with rainbows; some slick film coated the gently rippling surface. He drew a sharp breath in alarm, for he knew of a sudden what the witch had planned.
“Out of the water!” he yelled, and he quickened his stride, lifting knees high to fight the water's resistance.
He set a hand on one of the stakes, using it to push himself forward, and his fingers found a cut rope, the mechanism by which some substance had been released from containers at the bases of the stakes. His foot struck one now on his way past.
Passing the wall, Styphon saw the witch on the far bank. She had donned a bronze helm that cast her face into shadow. Raising a burning torch, she drew back and cast it up and out over the heads of the Equals who even now mounted the far bank at a run with spears lowered to charge her.
As the torch flew, she restored her second ax to the briefly emptied hand, and with fresh cries from the mouths of the attackers, battle was joined.
But Styphon could not witness the clash of arms, the certain deaths of those Equals, for his eyes were on the flame as it descended from the twilit sky and met the water five spear-lengths upstream from him.
Where the flame touched the water, instead of vanishing in a hiss of smoke, it burst to new life and roared and spread like the bright fingers of Apollo. He saw, at the edge of his vision as he trudged for the far shore, one and then another of the staked corpses become swiftly immolated, as if they had already been treated with pitch or other inflammable substance, which surely they had. Sudden heat warmed Styphon's arm. He heard screams of pain, the roar of more stakes and more corpses catching alight, the pop of blazing wood, and the hot wind carried on it the odor of burning hair, which in an army of Equals was a plentiful thing.
* * *
15. The second battle of Naupaktos - (iiii) Thalassia's day of glory
Styphon pressed forward, the water becoming shallower. A tongue of fire crept up from behind and seared his thigh. Without stopping, he splashed water on it with his shield, but to little effect since it was the water itself which burned. Ignoring the pain, he trudged on while the roar of flame and the screams of the men behind him caught in the conflagration soared to deafening. Ahead and to the north lay the immediate destination of all those thus far to have set foot on the far bank, the focal point of the incipient clash.
Past ash spear and round hoplon, over the helms of his comrades, Styphon glimpsed a pair of swift moving tree-cutters' axes, trailing dark blood that glistened thicker with each stroke as necks were severed and breastplates split. But any final groans which passed their lips as they died were lost in the screams of burning men and the roar of the flaming river as the bank began to fill with cloying smoke that stank of roasting flesh.
The army of revenge had come to assault a city of slaves and found itself charging instead across t
he burning waters of Phlegethon into the scything blades of its deathless guardian, a creature with no other purpose but to reap their souls.
The reaper's ax clove an Equal's skull, then lodged in another's breast, and she let its handle go and drew a sword to replace it. As Styphon made haste toward the fray alongside his Helots, the invaders first out of the river, many burned but undeterred, began to encircle the witch.
Hoisting spear overhead, Styphon led his men toward a place behind the witch where he could plainly see that bodies were needed to complete the encirclement. But before they could plug that gap, black-clad Thalassia spun and quickly dispatched the few men behind her, clearing a path by which she escaped. Halting her flight on a rise not far away, she turned and flung her second ax, which buried itself in the face of an Equal who added silently to the high pile of Spartan corpses he had just been surmounting to give pursuit.
Before drawing the second of her short swords, Thalassia paused long enough to tug off her helmet, which itself became a weapon as she hurled it at her onrushing enemies. It dealt a man a glancing blow to the head, but he pushed on.
“Come, you men!” Styphon cried out to his Helot hoplites. “It is our turn for glory!”
And battle was joined anew, with the witch standing fast before a fresh tide of fighters whose shields were interlocked, their spears the teeth of a fearsome beast such as to strike terror into any foe. Any but this one. To her, the deadly ash spear-shafts were as broomsticks, batted aside as she plunged into the shield wall, dipping sword tips into the necks of the men who carried them, each death given no more attention that was needed to inflict it. Styphon, his own lambda-blazoned hoplon locked with those of Helots at either shoulder, joined the crush of men waiting for their turns to die.
Thalassia slew another two men, or five, or nine, and then there she was, within reach of Styphon's spear. Loosing a roar, he thrust its long blade at her bare face. She dodged, and her pale daimon's eyes caught his, even as her limbs persisted in the work of killing. Her lip curled in a look of—something.
