Athenian Steel (Book I of the The Hellennium)

by P. K. Lentz

  “You should kill Brasidas if you can,” Thalassia observed at length. She might have been remarking on the chill in the air.

  Now it was Demosthenes' turn to scoff. He had been on his own for a month now, captain of two thousand men and not used to feeling second-in-command. He returned acidly, “Is there any particular spot where you would like his fucking corpse to fall?”

  Thalassia's harsh sigh was the very voice of frustration. She took her pale eyes off of the practice field to frown at her rebellious pawn.

  “I know you want to be your own man,” she said. “That's a good thing. You are. But I am on your side, idiot, and Brasidas is dangerous. That's all. He's smart and clever, and to be honest, if I had gone to Sparta, I probably would have picked him. So just kill him if you can, all right?”

  She turned her attention back in time to see Alkibiades, a grown child with a new toy, finally score a hit and raise the heavy gastraphetes skyward in triumph.

  “I am so tired of you,” Thalassia whispered. Her eyes were on Alkibiades, but it wasn't him she addressed.

  III. AMPHIPOLIS 2. To the Wolves

  She fucked Alkibiades that night in a room above the megaron of the modest, vacant home Demosthenes had rented from its owner for the duration of his stay in Amphipolis. He doubted that the sounds of slapping and groaning and laughter that drifted down through the thin floor of oak planks—Amphipolitan houses were built almost entirely of timber, on account of its abundance—just as he returned from meeting with a band of Thracian recruits represented any deliberate effort by Thalassia to spite him. But neither did he put it past her.

  Rather than sitting under the squeaking floorboards, or worse, going up and interrupting, he walked outside in the twilight. His aimless steps took him to the base of the acropolis and thence to a rocky outcropping above the barracks which still smelled of freshly cut pine. From this height one could look over the city wall of Amphipolis and see the mountains to the north looming over blue-tinted grassland that was alive in the night's gentle breeze.

  There he sat and tried to clear his thoughts. His head would need to be clear. According to accounts provided by sympathizers in Macedon, Brasidas was on the march, and his army was growing. The day of his arrival at Amphipolis, if indeed he chose to come here at all, knowing, as he must, that it was now defended, could not be known precisely. But it would be soon.

  Demosthenes had taken measures to ensure that Brasidas would at least try to claim the city. With Amphipolitan accomplices, he had planted bait. If Brasidas took it, he would come believing that the sole bridge over the Strymon, which lay within sight of Amphipolis, was to be turned over to him by pro-Spartan traitors in the town, allowing him to cross easily and lay siege.

  The traitors did exist. But so did the loyal men who were spying on those traitors, planting ideas in their heads and helping to compose their 'secret' dispatches to Brasidas.

  Yes, Brasidas would come. And he was clever and dangerous. Why had Thalassia felt the need to tell him that? As if he did not know, and as if he needed more weight on his shoulders than he already bore in knowing of Athens' fated defeat.

  Bitch.

  Athene would bring her favored city a victory, Demosthenes told himself. But he had trouble believing it. Not believing that victory would come, although that could scarcely be certain, but of who would bring it.

  Not the virgin goddess, but a whore and her slave.

  Thalassia's hubris, her easy dismissal of the gods, was infectious, and that was another reason he had come to resent her, he realized. Over the past year, he had slowly lost his gods, for was there any room for Olympians in Thalassia's universe of lines and layers? Praying had become a struggle for him, and when he did pray, it was so plainly insincere that it seemed impossible that Pallas, if she existed, could answer with anything but a sneer.

  If she existed. Damn, what had star-girl done to him?

  "Am I interrupting?"

  It was her voice, as if summoned by his thoughts. The sound of it tensed his limbs and sent pebbles tumbling off the outcropping from under his sandal as he shot upright. He looked up and saw her. Between her breasts Thalassia clutched a thin shift of Amorgos silk that wrapped her deceptively soft flesh. The garment was all but translucent in the starlight, and each gentle wind that gusted up the slope endeavored to steal it. Her feet were bare on the cold, rough rocks, but of course she would scarcely notice that.

  "Sorry if I scared you." She smiled, took a long stride that exposed her hairless cleft, and sat gracefully beside him.

  For a while they stared out over moonlit Thrace together.

  "I'm sorry about earlier," Thalassia finally said.

  "You are good at that," Demosthenes said.

  "At what?"

  "At saying and doing things and then apologizing for them later."

  In Thalassia's silence, Demosthenes sensed swallowed anger.

  Likely not the first thing she had swallowed that night, he thought, and was surprised by his own pettiness.

  But when Thalassia spoke, it was softly. "I think the words you were looking for were 'I accept.' Or if you actually give a shit, maybe 'I'm sorry, too.'"

  Demosthenes exhaled, and his breath turned to mist in the night air. Plains winters could be harsh. There might well be snow by the time battle came.

  "Alkibiades will be missing you by now," he said. "Do not let me keep you from him."

  "Just stop being an asshole for five minutes. I had hoped..." Thalassia bowed her head to look down either at the rocks or at her feet drawn up in front of her barely clad body. "Never mind. Let me tell you a story about those mountains in front of you."

  Indeed, Demosthenes' eyes were on the distant dark peaks, even if his mind was not.

  Without waiting for his approval, Thalassia began, "Of course you know of Sitalkes."

  He did. Some five summers ago, all Greece had shuddered in terror at the thought that the great horde raised by the Thracian king Sitalkes to ravage neighboring Macedon might next turn its attention south, to Greece. When instead the great army dissolved by internal intrigue, all Greece had heaved a sigh of relief.

  "His army was really a collection of tribal war bands," she said, once more stating the obvious. "The leaders of those bands did whatever was in their own interest, including using the forces they had raised for Sitalkes to settle old scores. One such band was on its way west to join the horde when its path took it through the territory of a rival tribe, where it paused long enough to raze villages and slaughter its enemy near to extinction.

  "Some lived, of course. One survivor was a girl of fifteen, a month away from her wedding. She was enslaved along with her younger sister. The two were taken west, through those mountains there." Thalassia's pale gaze was on them now, too. "The girls' captors beat and raped them every night."

  The tale's dark turn chilled Demosthenes' blood, but Thalassia pressed on.

  "The younger one was beaten to the edge of death. Since she could no longer walk, rather than carry her, her captors threw her off a cliff. Her sister tried to follow her, but she was pulled back from the edge and bound. She made it through the march alive and was sold to a Thessalian slaver, who sold her to another, who eventually brought her to the slave markets of Athens."

  Well before Thalassia had finished, a weight had settled on Demosthenes' chest and steadily increased, stealing his breath.

  Thalassia, as if in spite, added another stone to the pile: "The slaver gave the girl a new, Greek name," she said, "to replace the Thracian one he knew his buyers wouldn't like."

  Mercifully, she didn't speak the false name. Demosthenes knew it, and she knew he knew. Eurydike.

  Overcome, he shut his eyes and used a long breath to drag himself back from the brink of tears. "What name was she born with?" he asked feebly.

  "It doesn't matter," Thalassia said. "She never wants to hear it again." She nodded at the distant peaks. "Just as she would prefer not to look again on the mountains where he
r sister's corpse was food for wolves."

  As the speaker surely intended, the image sprang up of its own accord in Demosthenes' mind's eye of a half-dead Thracian girl plunging to her misery's end, while from above her sister watched, helpless screams resounding off the mountainside.

  The corners of his eyes stung anew.

  "She told you this?" Demosthenes asked.

  "Yes," Thalassia said. "I think she would have told you, too. If you had ever asked."

  Demosthenes gave her a hard glare. Though she was right, the shortcoming was his own, and Thalassia was only the messenger, she was present, and made a satisfying target besides, this woman who had stolen his gods and ate his manhood for breakfast.

  "You burden me with this now," he said angrily, "so soon before the most important battle of my life? Why? Because I didn't greet you warmly enough? Is that all you know how to do—cut down anyone who slights you?" He raised his hand in a wave of dismissal. "Go back to your man-whore and suck what pleasure you can from him before he looks at you wrong and you have to cut his throat."

  He finished with a growl that in fact masked fear. Why did he knowingly provoke her? Did some part of him wish to die?

  He did not dare look over at Thalassia, but he heard her wet her lips as though to speak. Ultimately she said nothing, just sat there in silence for long, agonizing moments in which Demosthenes could only stare with bated breath at the horizon and wonder whether his mad, almost suicidal assault had breached her walls to expose the molten fury he knew dwelt within.

  At long last he heard Thalassia stir. She rose, clutching her silk about her. Without sparing him a glance, and with nimble, soundless steps, she retreated from the outcropping. Demosthenes did not watch her go.

  For four days he did not see her. No one did. She vanished, and with her a horse from the cavalry stables.

  Four days passed, and Brasidas came.

  III. AMPHIPOLIS 3. Arrhidaeus

  "I fear treachery, my prince."

  This warning came from Beres, captain of Arrhidaeus's personal bodyguard, sworn to him in all things and trusted above all others by the young prince, who was nephew to Perdikkas, long reigning king of Macedon. The two rode side-by-side on the tree-lined western shore of Lake Koroneia, just north and east of Therme, the Macedonian port city where Arrhidaeus had spent the season.

  "You always do, Beres," the prince observed with a smile.

  "At least a quarter of the time, I am right," the older man replied. "It's why you're alive."

  "True, Beres. Very true. But our purpose in coming here today is to thwart treachery, is it not?"

  "One should never fully trust an unsigned note, my prince."

  Arrhidaeus waved a ring-laden hand. "Ah, but when said note offers to give up names in a plot against me, can you not see how the sender might be wise not to sign it? Should it be discovered, it would mean his death."

  Scarred, silver-haired Beres emitted a low growl. "Still, my prince..." His keen eyes never stopped scanning the wood and mirror-smooth surface of the lake.

  "We are solidly within Macedonian territory," Arrhidaeus reassured the man who had been his protector for all of the prince's twenty years. "Surely there could be no force at large this close to Therme that your men cannot handle. And all twelve of them are at present scouting the shores of the lake for the messenger we have been instructed to meet, which furthermore is to be a lone female. Hardly any threat, if that's what they find. And should they discover otherwise, I fully trust in you to deliver me safely back to town." The prince chuckled. "No, I feel no fear today, Beres. There is but opportunity afoot."

  "I suppose, my prince."

  A quarter-hour later, three riders of the Arridhaeus's personal guard galloped down from a rocky, pine-covered promontory overlooking the lake and halted before the prince and Beres. One of the three had seated on his horse in front of him a dark-haired, foreign-looking female passenger in a gray hooded cloak.

  That man reported to Beres, "She was alone, Captain, and unarmed."

  Arrhidaeus grinned. "You see, Beres. It is not always a trap!"

  The guardsman on whose horse the woman sat helped her to the ground, where she knelt.

  "Prince Arrhidaeus?" she asked.

  She used the Greek to give his title. Greek had only lately been adopted by the Macedonian court, but Arrhidaeus's Ionian tutor had served him well, and so he answered her fluently in that tongue. "You have found me, sweetling. I take it you have something for me? Better still if you are the something." He laughed, and so too did the guardsmen, even though they knew not a word of Greek between them.

  Beres, who did know Greek, laughed not at all. He rarely did. He only stared with narrowed eyes at the messenger, who momentarily stood.

  "Would you answer me a question, lord?" she asked in suitably respectful tones.

  "If I can and must," Arrhidaeus said. "But I hope it is only one."

  "It is, lord, and a simple one," she said. "Do you have any sons?"

  Arrhidaeus laughed. "Sons? No. And as yet no wife to plant one in. Is that all? Strange question."

  "Enough chatter," Beres interjected. "Give us the names."

  The woman whirled and in a flash had drawn the sword of the nearest mounted guard.

  "Kill h—" Beres began to shout, but before he finished, his neck was spouting blood from the deep gash carved into it with precision by the stolen blade. Hot droplets of it peppered Arrhidaeus's arm, which like his other limbs was frozen in place by disbelief.

  Two more guards were slain by the time Beres's silent corpse had finished sliding from the saddle to settle upon the earth in a heap. The third guardsman was raising his blade for an attack which had no hope of landing when Arrhidaeus at last found the presence of mind to wheel his mount and kick its flanks in desperate flight.

  A final groan rose behind the prince, and not a second later some force yanked him backward from his saddle. He landed hard on his back, the breath knocked from his body, and into view above him stepped the cloaked woman, the messenger, wielding the guardsman's sword, its blade smeared with blood.

  "Please..." Arrhidaeus whispered. "I will make you wealthy beyond imagining. You may have whatever you wish, only spare me."

  To Arrhidaeus's despair, she gave no answer. The expression on her youthful face was impassive, but the eyes... her two eyes were like shards of pale ice, and their gleam told Arrhidaeus something of his killer: this woman was no hapless, disposable wretch who had been bribed, coerced, or otherwise cynically manipulated, as many assassins were, into embarking on a virtually suicidal undertaking. No, here was an assassin who had slain many men before today, and the light in her eyes bespoke not pleasure—for a good assassin was no bloodthirsty cretin—but a certain calm satisfaction.

  "O sweet Koure, embr—," Arrhidaeus next intoned.

  His prayer to the Maiden went unfinished, for the sword borne by a supple, unlikely hand plunged swiftly down, piercing his breast from front to back, straight through the heart, and making of his royal blood an offering to that dark, venerable goddess.

  III. AMPHIPOLIS 4. Bridge of Death

  The quiet roar of two thousand soldiers lying in wait filled the broad space just inside Amphipolis's southwestern gate. Armor clattered, men's shields grated against those of their neighbors, and the butt-spikes of spears narrowly missed skewering feet, prompting muttered curses. Soldiers could be kept largely silent with threat of the lash, but horses could not, and there were two hundred of those drawn up with their riders behind Demosthenes this night, whinnying and snorting with little regard for stealth. But fortunately, an army lying in ambush needed only to be quieter than the army whose arrival it awaited, which was of necessity on the march and louder by far.

  For unknown but likely self-evident reasons, the closed gate behind which they waited was called the Horseman's Gate. Tonight it would live up to the name. When two pegs in Amphipolis's stone walls were yanked free, releasing massive counterweights and throwing op
en the gate's heavy double doors of iron-girt firs, the frost-hardened Thracian soil would shudder with the passage of a column of Athenian citizen cavalry five wide and forty deep.

  Demosthenes sat at the head of this waiting column, not astride Maia, who was not bred for war, but on a charger named Balios who perpetually tossed his black head back and forth in anticipation of the charge. The beast's neck and sides were armored with hanging sheets of stiff leather onto which were sewn thin plates of iron, and Balios' head was protected by a faceplate of contoured bronze. The horse's harness was equipped with reins, but they would see infrequent use, for war-horses were trained to respond to a rider's legs, leaving arms free for the business of dealing death.

  A season ago, when Demosthenes had charged the Boeotian cavalry at Megara, then as now atop Balios, reins and a felt saddle had been the extent of his riding gear, but Thalassia had changed that. On the beast's back was now a seat of stiff, padded leather and from its either side hung loops into which the rider placed his feet. They gave better leverage and control, Thalassia claimed, and from having trained with them Demosthenes knew she was right–when he could remember to keep his feet in them. A number of the other riders today would use the new equipment, but most had scoffed. Doubtless even more would laugh when and if they heard Thalassia's suggestion of giving their mounts iron shoes.

  Under his right arm Demosthenes cradled his lance, like a hoplite's spear but thinner and lighter and with a conical iron tip less likely than a flat blade to become lodged in its victim. Yet the lance inevitably would be lost or broken anyway, and that was when he would draw the long, slashing cavalryman's sword of virgin Athenian steel hanging in its hide scabbard beneath the armor of Balios's left flank. While most of the citizen cavalry wore the same bronze breastplates they wore when fighting on foot as hoplites, Demosthenes wore a corselet of overlapping iron scales, like the armor of his mount, which left his arms bare and stopped just above the thigh. His legs below the knee were wrapped tightly with strips of plain leather; few Athenian cavalrymen wore boots into war, for boots to them were signifiers of their membership in the hippeis class, too ornate and expensive to risk seeing slashed open or soiled with gore. His helmet was a shell of bronze which left the ears uncovered and flanked his bare face with scrolling, downturned cheek pieces, and from its crest flowed a mane of white horsehair, the sign of his rank.