by P. K. Lentz
Thalassia blew a huge sigh and flopped back on Demosthenes' bed. "I realize you feel a need to know these things, but must we do it now?" she asked petulantly. "I can't explain to you in a few minutes how the universe works. It's much more complex and fluid than you can imagine. It's much more complex than even I could have imagined before... never mind. Later. For now, what's important is that I know what the Spartans will do even before they do." She propped her head up on one elbow and arched a brow at Demosthenes. "Do you think that might be useful?"
Demosthenes scoffed. "I see that wherever it is you come from, they have knowledge of the rhetorical question." He leaned forward on his stool, fixing the too-casual Thalassia with a serious glare. "I do not 'feel a need to know' these things, I do need to know them. And you will tell me, if not today then soon. But perhaps there is a more important question to be answered than where you came from, and that is what interest does someone like you have in seeing one Greek city triumph over another?"
"Does it matter?" Thalassia dragged herself back into a seated position, hands resting on ankles, bare arms framing the blood-stained hole in her dress, and presumably the body under it. "Victory is victory."
"You know that to be a lie," Demosthenes chided. "Victory, too, is a 'complex and fluid' thing. So tell me, what do you care about our war? Does this Magdalen person wish for us to win, whoever that is? Or... the Worm?"
Thalassia bowed her head. Demosthenes sensed in her reaction, a momentary look in her eyes–there one instant, gone the next–the truth of something she had said to Eden. She did hate this man or creature they called the Worm. The name caused her pain, and shame, too, if Demosthenes was not mistaken. Perhaps it was made worse by knowing, as surely she did, that its speaking now could not help but cause a second word to spring to mind: Whore.
He would not dare speak aloud to Thalassia the name which Eden had translated into Greek for his benefit, the vulgar epithet she claimed that Thalassia's treachery had earned her. He would not say the name, but neither could he let Thalassia fail to explain why Eden and others called her by it.
"Why?" Demosthenes pressed when she did not answer immediately. "If you cannot even answer that, then I must demand that you leave. Even if it costs me my life."
She thought for a moment, sighed, answered, "I'm sure you'll have no trouble grasping that the outcome of one day shapes the events of the next. Had your invasion failed yesterday, your day today would have been very different, correct? You might even be dead. Do you have children, Demosthenes?"
"Do you not know? You know all else about me."
"I only know what people of your time thought worth recording."
Taking a beat to recover from that blow, Demosthenes answered, "No. No, I do not."
"But surely you intend to. If you had died on the island, any children you might one day have fathered would never exist, would they? Nor their children's children, or their children, and so on. So... suppose I knew that some one of your descendants not yet born would become my enemy," Thalassia continued. "What might I do to destroy him?"
"You could... kill me," Demosthenes said, feeling suddenly ill at ease with the topic.
"And what if I didn't know that my enemy was your descendant, but just... someone's, somewhere?"
Demosthenes considered. He did not like where his thoughts took him. "If you were devoid of conscience, if you were a monster," he said, "then I suppose you might kill a great many people, in the hope that the right one was among them."
Thalassia rolled her eyes, dismissing his judgment. "Or," she began emphatically, "one could simply change the courses of events so that different people died, and different ones were born. Not more or fewer, necessarily, just different. Instead of a hundred Athenians lying dead on a certain battlefield, a hundred Spartans do. Your aims are served, and so are mine."
"Whose line is it that you would see wiped out?" Demosthenes asked quietly.
From her place on the bed, Thalassia fixed him with a glare of an intensity he had only previously observed in the moments before she had attacked him. "You know," she said. "If I wasn't wrong to choose you, then you already know."
"The Worm," Demosthenes declared with confidence. "What did he do to you?"
Lips tight, Thalassia shook her head. "One day you can ask me that and I'll answer... but not today." Rolling forward, she crawled closer to him and settled on the corner of the bed. She said with mischief in her cool eyes, "Today... was a bad day. I got attacked. Stabbed."
She slipped first one shoulder and then the other out of her trashed chiton. The garment settled onto her thighs, but remained there but a moment before she shifted her legs to remove it entirely. Kneeling on the bed, she reached out and set a hand on Demosthenes' knee.
"I would very much like to end it," she said, "...in a better way."
She must have bathed herself in the sea along with her garment, for her honey-colored skin was covered all over with a fine tracery of brine. Her breasts would have served Praxiteles fine as models for those of a nymph carved in Parian marble, but Demosthenes' eye was drawn to the raw, black gash just underneath them. The half-day-old wound was covered by a scab and surrounded by a faint pink halo and clinging flecks of dried blood.
Demosthenes dragged his eyes to a random wrinkle in the bedclothes. He said nothing, for he was not entirely sure how best to reject woman who would smash her enemies' skulls and hack off their limbs, or else wipe them and their lines from existence entirely.
Thalassia sighed, withdrawing her hand. "I understand," she said. "You're Athenian. You like boys, don't you?"
"I.. I like women just fine," Demosthenes returned. He was unsure where to focus his gaze, and so it flitted around even while powerful base instincts urged it back to Thalassia's body. "But I prefer women who do not have a history of assaulting me. And, for that matter, ones who... lack stab wounds."
"Pfft, you gave me that," she said. "But fine, I'll wrap it so you won't even notice. It's not like you have to stick your cock in it. Unless you want to, I guess. As for the other thing... I said I was sorry."
"I know, but... still."
Thalassia scoffed, settling back into a casual pose which left her legs parted shamelessly. Her body had not a wisp of hair upon it below the neck, Demosthenes could not help but note before he shifted his gaze even farther from her, onto the patterned plaster floor.
"If you think this isn't my real body," she assured him, "it is. I haven't got tentacles, talons, feathers, snakes for hair, or anything like that. This is really how I look. I'm as human as you... only better."
"It is not that." This much was true. Had not the physical forms of deadly Medea, bewitching Kirke, treacherous Klytaimnestra and a hundred other women, mortal and demigoddess alike, been those of pleasing females? Not all dangerous women had claws.
"What, then?" Irritation edged Thalassia's voice.
Demosthenes searched for gentle words with which to voice the thinking that kept his cock firmly in check... or rather kept it unfirm. He failed to find them quickly enough.
"Our brief history leaves me hesitant to speak any ill of you," he admitted.
With a sigh, Thalassia levered her splayed thighs shut. "No," she said resignedly. "Speak freely. I won't hurt you, I promise."
"Very well..."
Still, what to say? In spite of her promise, he could hardly risk speaking the undiluted truth, which was that based on the few hours of their acquaintance, he had found Thalassia to be an opportunistic, foul-mouthed, ill-tempered butcher, possibly a traitor, possessed of neither modesty nor morals.
She was, in short, everything a good woman should not be.
Just in time, Demosthenes' straining mind produced an excuse which was equally true, yet less likely to provoke.
"If you would have me enter into partnership with you," he said, "I would prefer my judgment not be clouded by the pleasures of your flesh... which, doubtless are... significant." She struck him as one susceptible to a well-plac
ed compliment, and this was no lie.
He finished and held his breath while Thalassia's pale eyes appraised him. At length, her hard expression broke into a half smile. "I thought you said Athenians loved the truth."
Demosthenes released his held breath and drew another with which to speak, but found himself lost for a plausible denial.
"You can't lie to me," she said, thankfully without a hint of remonstration. "My senses are far better than yours. Your skin, your breath, your heartbeat give you away. Give me the real reason. I can take it."
Feeling defeated, but at the same time reassured, Demosthenes resolved to oblige her. Still, he spoke in terms rather milder than he might have. "It is... not only a repellent outer form which makes a monster," he said.
"Hmmh," Thalassia intoned. "A pretty monster, am I?" She shrugged and clicked her tongue. "That's fine. I've been called..."
She hesitated, and Demosthenes knew why. Traitor. Wormwhore...
"...worse," she finished. "It's your loss. Where I come from, men aren't so afraid of women."
"It is not fear that–" Demosthenes began to object. Then he said instead, in anger, "This is my world. I have no obligation to defend it, or myself, against your criticism."
"Fine." Thalassia sat on the bed with legs tightly crossed, frowning down at a naked thigh which she tapped absently with the tip of one finger. "If you change your mind soon," she said, "the invitation stands. But as your ally, I should warn you that if you don't... and maybe even if you do... I'll find someone else."
They sat for some seconds in a silence which Demosthenes recognized as awkward. Whether Thalassia thought the same, he could scarcely know or tell.
"So this place you come from that is full of braver men than I," Demosthenes asked to break the silence, "what is it called?"
With a groan, Thalassia flopped back on the bed. "I'm sick of talking. But if we have to do that instead of having fun, at least come lie next to me. I'm cold."
Demosthenes touched hand to brow; it came away moist with sweat. "Even were it not high summer, I would have trouble believing that a draft causes you discomfort where a blade between the ribs does not."
"All right, then I'm lonely. Just get over here."
Seeing no immediate harm in it, Demosthenes rose from his stool and crawled onto the bed beside naked Thalassia. As soon as he was in place, she laid her cheek on his shoulder, her soft hair tickling his neck. A warm hand settled onto his chest.
It was of no concern.... His mind and his will were strong. He was no animal or barbarian, enslaved to the body's baser instincts. Thalassia's touch, in fact, far from exciting him, caused his flesh to recoil, so long as he kept at the forefront of his mind the grim vision of what those soft hands had done to Eden.
"You were going to tell me where you came from," Demosthenes prompted when she seemed content to just lie there.
"The Veta Caliate," she finally said. "It's not a place so much as a thing. An army, of sorts, led by Magdalen. We are recruited from throughout time and space. Mostly women, but not entirely."
"An army of women," Demosthenes mused. It was an idea far removed from the realm of the possible in Athens, indeed anywhere in the civilized world. "For what purpose?"
"Magdalen's," Thalassia answered. "No one but she sees more than a fraction of the whole. We are given orders not knowing what they mean, except that they serve her plan."
"What sort of orders?"
Thalassia was a warm weight on his shoulder, a silken voice in his ear. "Assassination of one target or many. Transport of individuals from one layer to another. Sometimes we'll compel two people to breed together."
"Compel them to–"
Demosthenes did not bother to finish. Better simply to move on. Likewise, he would have to be sure to ask Thalassia some other day, among so very many other things, about this term layers. Eden had also used it.
"You mean to say that you kill people, and commit these various other acts upon them, without ever knowing why?"
"Magdalen commands, the Caliate obeys," Thalassia answered. "It is the price for the beings we become, the lives we lead, the wonders we see. But... I have not done many of those things myself. Mostly I transport the ones who do. I am... was... a pilot."
Demosthenes could scant imagine the sort of craft in which she and her kind must travel. But lessons in shipcraft were not his foremost objective at present; that was knowledge of those who used them, particularly the one before him.
"Does your kind feel pain?" he asked, thinking of the sword piercing Thalassia's heart, of Eden's head reduced to a mound of pulp and splintered bone.
"I feel as much or as little as I wish," Thalassia said. "If I want, and sometimes I do, I can make it so that the slightest touch"–her finger traced a delicate, meandering line on Demosthenes' linen-clad breast–"sends me to the peak of ecstasy. I can turn intense pain into pleasure. Every bit of my body, inside and out, is in my control." She laughed faintly. "Maybe that adds to your understanding of why we are so willing to follow Magdalen."
It did, Demosthenes thought, even if he did not much like what it said about Magdalen's followers. It also told him nothing about why Thalassia would betray them, assuming Eden had spoken truly.
Thalassia sighed lightly, hot breath tickling the skin of Demosthenes' neck. She was so solid and real, and yet how could she be anything but a wisp, a fantasy?
"I don't need much sleep," she said. "But this hole you put in me will finish healing faster if I do." She added hopefully, "Unless... you've changed your mind?"
"No," Demosthenes said gently. He glanced down at the head on his shoulder and saw that Thalassia's eyes were shut. Since he had lain beside her, Thalassia's tone had grown ever more relaxed. If he was not mistaken, her accent had faded to where she could almost be mistaken for a native Athenian.
A long silence ensued, filled only by Thalassia's soft, slow breathing and the equally rhythmic, echoing crash of waves breaking far below the chamber window on the rugged shore of Pylos harbor. Her heart beat pulsed against Demosthenes' side. She had a heart, then. One which he had cut in half today, yet there it was, still beating...
Just when he thought she was surely asleep, the naked, beautiful monster upon his shoulder asked, "You will take me to Athens?"
"I see little choice," Demosthenes answered. "You are far too dangerous to leave behind to proposition men of other cities... as I presume you did the Spartans on the island." He pondered a moment and concluded, "You warned them of my attack."
Thalassia confessed without shame, "Yes."
"Then your help did them little good... or did it?"
"Styphon made his choice. Things might have been different. But the Spartans are a backward-looking people. You and yours are different, I hope. I wish only to look forward."
"I would look in all directions," Demosthenes said. "As you say yourself, the past bears heavily on the future, and you must open your past to me, Thalassia. Completely. If I am to work alongside you, I must have greater forthrightness than I yet have witnessed from you."
He looked down and found Thalassia asleep. No matter. If her senses really were so keen as to let her discern truth from lie, then she had heard him. She had heard.
I. PYLOS 13. Spoil
Sleep was fitful. Demosthenes awoke more than once, and if not for the warmth next to him and the mass of dark hair on his chest, he might have thought himself emerging from a dream. Each time he awoke, realization hit him in the pit of his bruised stomach that his life had been forever changed by this being's entrance into it. In the light of day, he had seen no choice but to accept her, but night was ever the time in which doubts drifted up from the mind's murky depth to bob on the surface. And so, in between rounds of shallow sleep, he began to second-guess himself.
Had it been a mistake not to reject Thalassia utterly? What she suggested was sheer madness, a course of action which had destroyed countless men and toppled empires. Only the worst of fools challenged Fate. The g
ods ever struck them down with the greatest of wrath.
If Croesus goes to war, a mighty empire will fall, the Pythia once had prophesied. Brimming with pride, Croesus went to war, and an empire did fall. His own.
Two years, Thalassia wanted. Two years to win this war which had burned openly for seven already and simmered for decades prior, flaring now and then when opportunity arose for one side to do the other harm. She claimed that Fate was on Sparta's side, but even if she was right, the question lingered: was it better to stand defiant in Fate's path and risk annihilation... or to surrender to it and be carried on its current to less than pleasant shores? A hundred philosophers would argue the latter, but then, they had never actually had the choice.
At some point, after the blackest depths of night had passed, Demosthenes opened his eyes and found the warm presence beside him gone. He experienced the briefest moment of relief, but the weight came crashing down again when his eyes flicked to the window and found the pretty monster of his dream, or nightmare, filling it. Still unclad, she sat sideways on the window sill with her back against one side and both feet planted against the other, bending her brine-frosted nymph's body into a pleasing, seahorse-like curve.
She turned her head toward him and smiled, but the smile was distracted, as though heavy thoughts weighed upon her mind as she looked out over the black, roiling waters of Pylos harbor.
“Good morning,” she said. Her voice, like the smile, was contemplative.
Demosthenes sat up on the bed, returning the greeting with a bare nod. Thalassia swung her legs down and sat facing him framed by the lightening sky.
“I forgot to tell you congratulations yesterday,” she said. “For taking the island. I didn't mean to diminish it.”
“I thought I might wake to find I had imagined you,” Demosthenes observed, shaking off sleep.
“You mean you hoped.”
As it was impossible to lie to Thalassia, Demosthenes elected not to reply.
Allowing the lapse, she asked, “So where do we stand, you and I?”