by P. K. Lentz
“I am not worried,” Demosthenes blurted.
Thalassia threw him a glance and resumed. “I didn't tell him anything. About myself, about us. But I still think you should consider it. I think we can trust him, and he could be a valuable tool.”
Demosthenes dismissed from his mind a vivid image of Thalassia on all fours, Alkibiades thrusting behind her. He snorted laughter.
“What?” Thalassia asked, smile at the ready.
“Nothing...” Demosthenes said. “Only that I know what Alkibiades would say to that. 'My tool is extremely valuable.' But—” Demosthenes quickly added, so as to deny Thalassia space in which to comment on Alkibiades' tool, “I will consider it. Especially now that you and he—”
“It's physical, and nothing more.”
Demosthenes raised a palm. “No more need be said. You are not my slave—and even if you were, as Eurydike's behavior attests, it would make no difference when it comes to Alkibiades. I would only point out that Eurydike, to her consternation, has grown fond of you. I hope that your new arrangement does nothing to change that.”
Thalassia nodded, rather genuinely. “If it bothers her, I'll stop.” She paused, threw Demosthenes another glance. “If it bothers you, I could stop, too.”
Demosthenes considered his reply carefully, mindful that Thalassia could not be lied to. To be sure, he would rather she did not dally with Alkibiades. It seemed a needless complication, but with or without the complication of Alkibiades sticking his tool in her, it was plain to see that dealing with Thalassia would be complicated. Trying to control her every action was doubtless a losing battle. And, of course, hanging heavily in her offer to stop was an unspoken insistence that he himself be prepared to step in and help her satisfy those urges which had sent her to Alkibiades' bed in the first place.
Rather than saying anything, even unwittingly, that she might sense as an untruth, Demosthenes summoned up the shade of the decrepit rhetoric tutor from his youth and circumlocuted.
“I appreciate your forthrightness,” he said. “Yet if I am to exert influence upon your actions, I would just as soon choose ones of greater import.”
So as not to extend conversation on a subject with which he felt no right to feel uncomfortable, yet did, Demosthenes excused himself and turned to descend into his home.
“He seduced me,” Thalassia said plainly when he was halfway to the hatch.
Demosthenes turned to find her leaning on the rail, facing him, the hem of her sea-foam gown rustling in the warm morning breeze. Dawn's light set Athena's temple aglow at her back.
“Who? Alkib—” he began. Had he taken but an instant to think, and looked first into Thalassia's eyes, he would have known. Not Alkibiades.
The Worm.
“Oh...” he said.
“He made me think he loved me. That I loved him. I... did love him. But he used me against the Caliate. Against Magdalen. When they captured me, Magdalen should have punished me in ways that are unimaginable to you. Instead, she just... forgave me.”
Finishing, Thalassia stood looking at him with wide eyes that appeared nothing short of sincere.
Demosthenes showed his gratitude with a faint smile. He was touched by this new willingness of Thalassia to lay herself bare—even while some part of him understood that she surely was better even than Kleon at making lies seem as truth.
He began to resume his exit, but turned again before leaving to address Thalassia once more. He did not want to hurt her... except that he did want to.
“You told Eden you were still loyal to Magdalen,” he said. “Is it under her orders that you came here, stranding your companions... or have you betrayed Magdalen yet again?”
Thalassia made no spoken reply, but her look and her silence gave the answer.
II. ATHENS 7. Lamia
The following morning, a team of laborers worked in front of Demosthenes' home to remove from its crowded storerooms and load into an oxcart his personal share of the captured Spartan arms and armor for transport to the family estate in Thria.
When the job was mostly done, the fast slap of sandals resounded down the empty street, and Eurydike appeared, a red-fletched arrow flying down the garden path. Her hair was tamed in a loose braid, and she was dressed for action in a short, boyish chiton cinched at the waist. From its belt hung the Spartan blade, her gift from Pylos, while over her shoulder was slung a sack containing the possessions needed for a stay of several days. Reaching the cart, she vaulted aboard, barely avoiding upsetting its neatly stacked contents.
With the harvest season getting underway, the time had come for Eurydike to begin splitting her time between city and country. Even though hard work was the purpose of her stay in Thria, she always found plenty of time to enjoy the open spaces of the farm, and so she looked forward to the days she spent there. Her excitement this time was somewhat tempered by disappointment that her unlikely best friend Thalassia would not be joining her. She would miss her home, and Demosthenes, too, but still, on balance she was ever eager to go.
Demosthenes mounted his brown mare Maia, freshly brought from the deme stables, as up ahead a farmhand on foot goaded the pair of hulking oxen and their burden onto the road. Their destination was the Thriasian plain northwest of Athens, the rural deme of Demosthenes' birth and home still to his ailing father Alkisthenes. Since Thria lay along the route to Eleusis, most of their journey made use of the best-maintained road in Attica, the Sacred Way, used each year for the procession of initiates into the Mysteries. Still, burdened by the ponderous pace of the two-wheeled cart, the journey consumed the bulk of the morning. When they arrived, Eurydike enjoyed the farm as she always did, shrieking and running and playing games with the farm workers' children, climbing trees and diving out of them to roll in the dust grappling with some hapless victim of her ambush, chasing rabbits (usually in vain) with her blunt dagger. Here, beyond the civilizing city walls, the barbarian heart in her was free.
To her master, Thria was more like a prison, the miserable warden of which was named Alkisthenes. The old man's first words on this visit, spoken in his coarse rattle of a voice, were not ones of congratulations for his son's success at Pylos. They were, “Xenon three farms over has a granddaughter just turned fifteen and ripe for ploughing. They say she's got fair looks and discipline. You should take her, unless you plan to die without an heir and let your cousins squabble like vultures over the shreds of my estate.”
Demosthenes begrudgingly promised to consider the pairing, but Alkisthenes called his bluff by threatening to summon Xenon presently for a meeting.
“Fine!” Alkisthenes spat when the truth came out. “If you won't find yourself a citizen womb and start filling it with babies, you could at least whelp a son on that addle-brained Thratta of yours. Maybe by the time he comes of age, the law will change to let bastards become citizens again.”
Thankfully, that was an end to the matter. For a while, anyway. Plenty of Athenian men looked forward to taking an adolescent girl into their homes and did so eagerly. With luck, she would already be well trained in the necessary arts—all but one, of course, the one which would fulfill the union's existential purpose. Having an heir was vital, certainly, to family, tribe, and state, but the responsibilities surrounding it seemed hardly attractive. Not only that, the need to add another female to his household in Athens had hardly seemed urgent before Thalassia's arrival, with Eurydike wearing him out in bed and keeping a decent house to boot. Now that he had sealed a bargain with a rogue immortal to save Athens, marrying appeared an even less wise idea.
Fed up with his father's company, Demosthenes took a walk alone through the olive groves. Half of the trees were close to harvest, while the rest were nothing more than stumps, casualties to Perikles' strategy of retreat behind the city walls whilst the Lakedaemonians ravaged the countryside. Thria had been especially hard hit, being directly in the path of the Spartan advance most years. Perhaps, thanks to victory at Pylos and the two hundred Equals captured there ser
ving as hostages, no more orchards would be razed or fields put to the torch. Perhaps the saplings which this season had been transplanted from safer soil to the east, as had been done every year, usually only to meet the same end a season later, might grow instead to bear fruit.
The walk and the solitude went some way toward relaxing him. For a time, at least, with the gentle breeze that shook the blade-like olive leaves cooling his sun-warmed skin, the war became remote and, perhaps more importantly, the suffocating atmosphere of unreality he had breathed since the taking of Sphakteria began to lift.
He was home.
But it could not last. In the early afternoon, he bid a cold goodbye to his father and a fond one to Eurydike, which included a fuck in the shade of a budding olive tree, then mounted Maia and rode for Athens and unreality.
***
The time alone in the fresh air of the groves had helped bring him to the decision to invite Alkibiades into his alliance with Thalassia. It had not been a hard decision. With any conspiracy, the fewer who knew, the safer were its secrets, but conversely the burden weighed more heavily upon each conspirator. In this case, Thalassia's secrets were of such weight that Demosthenes worried they might eventually fracture his mortal mind. The temptation of easing that burden by sharing it with a fellow Athenian was simply too great to resist.
Although he was often maddening, Alkibiades might be just the thing to keep him sane. But he did not need to know all; just enough to win him over. He needed not be told of Eden's existence, for example, or that Thalassia's motives had nothing to do with the welfare of Athens.
That evening, in Athens, Demosthenes walked with Thalassia to Alkibiades' deme of Skambonidae.
“Let me do the talking,” Demosthenes requested of her along the way, as childish plans hatched in his mind. “We may as well have some fun with him.”
She smiled her agreement.
From Alkibiades' door, a male house slave (one of the small, beautiful army of them that inhabited Alkibiades' lavish home, four times the size of Demosthenes' own) escorted them to the back garden where the master awaited. Spotting his guests, Alkibiades rose from one of a pair of benches which flanked the base of a life-sized marble statue of no other subject than Alkibiades himself.
“Demosthenes!” the genuine article greeted with an amiable grin. But he held back several paces while his eyes flicked to the one with whom he had fornicated last night. “I do hope the evening finds you in good spirits.”
Demosthenes glared, stone-faced.
Alkibiades chuckled nervously. “I know what this is about, Demosthenes. She came to me, you know. I made no effort to pursue—”
“I know,” Demosthenes interrupted calmly. “It was the same for me in Pylos, where I too succumbed. Would that I had possessed the will to resist. You stood no chance.”
The unwitting victim laughed again. “What are you talking about?”
Demosthenes conjured up a look of pity. “I belong to her, and now so shall you. She will drink every last drop of our lives' essences until we stand withered husks, longing for the grave. For Thalassia is no mortal woman. She is a lamia, my friend, and our skins are the vessels from which flow her favorite drink.”
Alkibiades' third laugh lasted for but a single breath. Then he only stared, plucked brows drawn together in puzzlement over aquiline nose. “Come on,” the youth said. “Only children and Spartans believe in that stuff.” But his bright eyes were laden with doubt. “Besides, you wouldn't let that happen to me... would you?”
“The choice was not mine. She owns me, spirit and flesh.” He sighed heavily. “Just as she now does you. And when she has sucked us dry, it will be across the Styx for us both.” As he spoke, Demosthenes pointedly avoided glancing at Thalassia, but he hoped that her eyes were full of the otherworldly malevolence which he knew first-hand she could produce.
She opportunely chose this moment to begin advancing on Alkibiades, step by agonizingly slow step with her head declined, eyes narrowed, teeth clenched and lips barely moving as she whispered in a fluid, alien tongue.
In the shadow of his own statue, Alkibiades raised a warding hand and backpedaled. “Whoa,” he said. “Thalassia, stop playing.”
The shapely shade's back was to Demosthenes, but by the expression of fear painted on her victim's face, her performance was an unqualified success.
“Please, Demosthenes, that's enough. Tell her to stop!”
Thalassia paid no heed, but persisted advancing until her increasingly terrified prey retreated behind one of the two stone benches that flanked the statue.
“There is one way out,” Demosthenes said, and Thalassia halted. “If you can defeat her in a test of strength, she is bound to free you. I failed—but then I lack the limbs of a demigod which all of Athens attributes to Alkibiades.”
“Yes, yes...” Alkibiades agreed. He rose to his feet behind the stone bench, nodding rapidly at the pale-eyed spawn of Hades. “A contest of strength! I challenge thee.”
Ponderously, Thalassia's head swiveled on an exquisite neck bisected by the slave choker which Athenian law required her to wear at all times in public. When she faced Demosthenes, he had to stifle surprise of his own, for the usually pristine skin of Thalassia's right cheek and temple was covered with a marking which had not been there just moments before: an intricate, lace-like design of scrolling lines etched in black. The bright eye at the center of that vortex of flowing lines gave Demosthenes a wink, and then she was a lamia again, raising one arm with an index finger aimed at the stone bench separating her from Alkibiades.
“She bids you lift the bench,” Demosthenes translated.
Alkibiades cast eyes wide with disbelief at the stone object which could not have been set into its current place by fewer than three able-bodied men. “But that...” he began despairingly. “It is not possible...”
Still, Alkibiades was never one to yield without a fight. All men who had stood beside him in battle swore he fought like a frenzied god. He had won the prize for valor at the battle of Potidaea, even if some said it should have gone to Socrates.
The youth drew a deep breath, steeled himself, widened his stance, and set his hands on each of the two long sides of the great stone bench. He muttered a prayer to Zeus, another to Athena, drew another deep breath, and he heaved.
The bench rose perhaps a finger's breadth from the ground then fell back into place with a soft thump.
Alkibiades groaned, exhaled a curse and said without casting eyes on his tormentors, “One more try.”
For his second attempt, Alkibiades crawled underneath the bench on all fours, braced his back against its underside and endeavored to stand. One half of the bench came up with relative ease, although he strained under its weight; the other half, however, remained rooted in place for long minutes whilst Alkibiades struggled and sweated and cursed. After a long minute had passed, in the space of which his two tormentors risked sharing a smile, the bench came up on all but one corner, at which point it capsized onto the flower bed behind it.
“There!” Alkibiades exclaimed. Breathing heavily, he crawled back onto the paved path and settled on the ground. “I did it! It left the earth, for just a moment!”
Thalassia looked down upon him with a grim expression and, in her own time, stepped over to the fallen bench where she set one slender hand underneath, the other on top. With no sign of strain showing in her supple golden limbs, the bench all but raised itself. Carrying it, she backed up a step and set it back in the spot where it had been rooted for perhaps a generation.
“No...” Alkibiades intoned, in utter disbelief. “No, no, no, that cannot be!” In despair, he threw himself forward onto all fours, crawled to Thalassia's feet and bowed his head. “I will not beg,” he declared. “Fair is fair. I concede defeat. But it is a beautiful soul which you claim today, foul creature, and one that was not finished by far doing great deeds!”
Standing over him, her face still bearing the intricate black tattoo, Thalassia threw
a look at Demosthenes, asking him silently whether it was time to cut the flopping fish off their line.
It was, and so Demosthenes walked to Alkibiades, knelt beside him and set a hand on his shoulder. The youth's well-groomed mane rose, revealing pretty features ashen with resignation.
“We are almost even now, friend,” Demosthenes said. “For your constant molestation of my household.”
Confusion spread across Alkibiades' fine features. His lustrous eyes flicked back and forth between his two tormentors. “I... I...” he stammered. “You mean... she is not truly...”
Thalassia smiled warmly at him. In the space of a moment, the strange markings faded from the skin of her face.
“But how did she—” His head sank, and he drew cleansing breaths of relief, after which he fell to laughing.
Demosthenes extended a hand to help the vanquished to rise. Standing, Alkibiades turned the gesture into an embrace, at the conclusion of which he grabbed and kissed Thalassia's fingers. “That was some deception with the bench,” he said to either or both of them. “How on earth you achieve it?”
“It was no deception, friend,” Demosthenes said. “Thalassia is no evil spirit, but neither is she human.”
“Yes, I am,” Thalassia corrected, not without offense.
“She is more than human, then,” Demosthenes amended. “She has come to us from the distant future. From the stars. She cannot be killed by normal means. She is stronger than any mortal man. And she intends, by means of her vast knowledge, to help Athens win this war, a war which, without her aid... we are fated to lose.”
II. ATHENS 8. Council of War
Momentarily overwhelmed, Alkibiades stared blankly at the speaker of such baleful words. After some time, he shifted to direct the same look at Thalassia. Slowly, he grinned.
“I knew you were something special,” he said proudly. “So what is it? Sorceress? Nymph? By Zeus' balls, you're not a full-on Olympian are you?”