Athenian Steel (Book I of the The Hellennium)

by P. K. Lentz

  No, this torturer needed no instruments but her mind and tongue.

  Thalassia took the bundle to a spot on the grass, where Demosthenes joined her after leaving the horse to drink. She spread out a blanket and laid out on it the bundle's contents: bread and relish, meat pies, a clay jug of water and two cups. Throwing off the cloak she had no need for against the chill, she seated herself on the grass beside the square of white linen with legs crossed under the skirts of her sea-foam chiton. Demosthenes lowered himself to the grass beside her, facing, as did she, the tranquil lake.

  Thalassia continued the surreal, oddly domestic display by pouring water for them both. She handed him his cup, and he drank. Thalassia drank, too, something which she did far more frequently than she consumed the Athenian food she neither required nor particularly liked; she ate only often enough to keep Eurydike convinced that she needed to. Over her cup's rim she stared out at the lake's still, reflective surface. Though he tried, Demosthenes could not read what thoughts might inhabit those pale eyes. At one time he had thought himself able, but no longer.

  She drained her cup and set it down while he sipped at his, neither speaking until at last Demosthenes could bear the silence no longer. He thought perhaps he should ask her if she had made the food herself, thank her or compliment her if need be, but he could not bear the thought of engaging in small talk while words relating to other, more important matters clawed at his throat, begging for release.

  There was one matter, however, on which he did not wish to speak. And so he did not.

  "You plan to leave," he said. Through the haze of last night's drunkenness, Demosthenes recalled her having begun to bid him farewell. Before he had interrupted her and...

  She looked over at him, and their eyes met, perhaps not for the first time that day, but it was the first time the contact lasted more than an instant. While it endured, Demosthenes' heart began to fill with regrets, as though someone had poured them from above, searing hot, into the open cavity of his chest. Last night Thalassia had been a malign force in the darkness, a body deprived of the face and name she had spent more than a year earning alongside him and Alkibiades and Eurydike in Athens. The face he had known had been too easily erased by hardly a month of separation, and written over the blank space where it had been were his own fear and hatred. The face of a monster.

  What he looked upon now was no monster.

  "I am sorry," he said in a whisper, even before she had answered his prior question.

  Thalassia turned her head and gazed out over the little lake and the forests of Thrace on its far edge. "I know," she said. Then, "You should eat."

  He did not, could not. But he did swallow his emotions, a meal of guilt and pity, lest he be driven by such hot forces where cold reason must rule. He asked, "Where will you go?'

  She sighed and spoke idly. "There is a city in Italy called Roma. Right now it is probably no greater in significance than Athens, but in a few generations it will carve an empire to make Alexander's look small."

  Ignoring the insult to city and people, to which he had by now become almost accustomed, Demosthenes asked, "What will you do there?"

  "Destroy it," she said. "Kill them all. A few generations from now, this world will be unrecognizable compared to what it would have been."

  "And your task will be complete," Demosthenes ventured. "The Worm will never exist."

  "I suppose," she said indifferently. "It doesn't matter much. I have spent a year here. I will spend a few there. And then maybe somewhere else. Maybe he will blink out of existence, or maybe he won't. Maybe the Caliate will cease to exist without a Worm to oppose it." She spoke the name smoothly, without falter or hesitation. "Maybe this whole layer, and others, will crumble to dust. Maybe the whole universe will collapse into a single point." She scoffed. "I don't know. Maybe Magdalen knows. Maybe she knew that I would come here, and it's all part of her plan. I don't care anymore."

  Demosthenes listened with mouth agape. Her enemy is humanity! the Nightmare Sibyl had screamed. He swallowed hard, opted not to address those matters of layers and universes, which he could scarcely comprehend.

  "Is your aim to get me to beg you to stay?" he asked.

  Thalassia looked over at him blankly, resignedly. "I wish you wouldn't say things like that." She shifted to draw her legs up in front of her, a finger absently picking the braided leather cord at the top of one well-wrought but well-worn sandal. "You think I am always trying to manipulate you." Anger rose in her voice. "Of course, I fucking want you to ask me to stay, idiot." As quickly as it had come, the fury faded, but bitterness remained. "Decide for yourself. I'm done trying to ingratiate myself all over again every time you change your mind about me." She shrugged. "I've enjoyed Athens. I love Eurydike. I... care for you all. In my own way. You amuse me." She frowned, corrected herself, "No, not amuse. More than that. Much more. I told you a year ago what were the best years of my life... but maybe..." She shook her head thoughtfully and bit her lower lip, declining to finish.

  So human...

  She laid her head atop the folded arms that bridged her knees and looked sidewise at Demosthenes. Her pale eyes seemed as though they might at any moment begin to well with more of the tears he had witnessed once before. But her gaze eventually drifted groundward, and she waited, presumably for some reply.

  She deserved a clear answer, but what? Wish her well in destroying Roma, or ask her to remain? With Amphipolis in Athenian hands, Fate had already been beaten once. The plans set in motion a year prior in Alkibiades' garden had been achieved. And perhaps it was enough. Perhaps the long war would end more quickly now, with Athens the victor and Sparta finally yielding, while Thalassia went far away, to where whatever destruction she wrought would have scant effect on distant Athens during a mortal's lifetime.

  There was much to recommend letting her go. Had he not wished time and again to be rid of her? She was a powerful weapon, yes, but also a curse to the wielder, on whose back she laid the responsibility of battling Fate to avert tragedy and ensure a bright future for all those he loved.

  What was the alternative? Bring her back to Athens, continue to exploit her as a weapon on the city's behalf, holding her to her promises of an Athenian victory, while trying his best behind closed doors to coexist with her? Why was that so impossible? Thalassia possessed flaws, but did not everyone in his life, not least those closest to him? Alkibiades, Eurydike, his father Alkisthenes... One might fairly say of each of them that their negative qualities outweighed the positive. Deny it as some might–as Alkibiades did–every man and woman who walked this earth was deeply flawed. Just because she had fallen into it from the heavens, was Thalassia to be held to some higher standard of perfection?

  Last night, his drunken self had insisted she was no goddess, and that was true. She had never claimed to be. Yet some part of him insisted that she be just that, or at least more than mortal, for she had upturned all he previously held as ironclad fact and unquestioned law, stripped him of his ability to believe in words spoken by anyone but her. Yet she was as flawed as anyone. More. His faith, his gods were gone, and in their place was a treacherous, manipulative, vain, vindictive, volatile, broken being of neither this realm nor the next. An in-betweener, an exile, a paradox, an enemy of democracy, a slayer of men, a friendless nomad of space and time upon whose altar, his dreams yet screamed at him now and then in terror, the bleating lamb of his own Fate was bound by chains every bit as thick and oppressive as those freshly broken on the plain of Amphipolis.

  This being seated beside him on the lakeshore was lonely, unique, so strong yet so fragile, repugnant yet beautiful. She was Madness. She was the Wormwhore. She was Geneva. Jenna. Thalassia. Star-girl.

  "Do not go," he pleaded, before even he knew he was saying it, before tongue could gain mind's approval for what foolish heart had chosen.

  Thalassia lifted her gaze from the blanket laid out with untouched food. When they found him, he saw in her face first disbelief, then a qu
ick return to melancholy, as one who has just woken from a dream that a dead love yet lives: the joy extends a heartbeat into reality, and then in a flash it is gone.

  A breeze off of the lake alerted Demosthenes to wetness on his cheek. Under her gaze, he wiped the tear away.

  "Why did you let me do it?" he demanded, more petulantly than intended. There was no need to name the deed; she would know of what he spoke.

  "For spite," she answered plainly. "To hurt you. To scar your memory of me."

  The pettiness of that answer momentarily stunned Demosthenes. But Thalassia was human, he reminded himself, and humans were petty creatures who hurt one another for no profound reason. Of that, he was surely as guilty as she.

  She surprised him by adding, in softer tones, "You owe me a kiss." It was a plain observation, delivered with cheek still laid on drawn-up knees.

  "What?"

  "Anyone who fucks me like an animal should kiss me first, if I want it. So you owe me one. Soon we might need another's permission."

  At a loss for understanding, Demosthenes stared at her. He found a faint glimmer of mercy in her eyes, if not anywhere else. He had no wish to kiss her, nor speak on the possibility.

  Neither did he want to speak on his misdeed, but he knew he must.

  "I was not myself," he said lamely. "I do not know what possessed me."

  "The same thing that drives any man to rape." Thalassia's soft voice competed with the soaring cries of the lake birds. "The desire to tame. To reduce me to something you need not fear."

  The naked proclamation of his crime summoned forth fresh tears that he worked to stifle. Anger came, too, not at himself but at his victim, for no better reason than that she was right. He had meant to diminish her, to master his fear. Something in him remained desirous of those things even now.

  "You try so hard to hurt me," she observed. She might have plucked the thought from his own mind.

  "And have I?" Was that hope in his voice?

  "Trying is success," Thalassia returned, and thereby avoided voicing the simple, true answer.

  The confirmation gave him no satisfaction, only guilt, and in an instant that part of him which had desired to do her harm shrank back into the primordial darkness, where it slept. Freed of its influence, Demosthenes collected his thoughts in the hope that reason and not emotion, negative or otherwise, might rule him.

  "Some have said the antidote to fear is knowledge," he said. He was sure he had heard some sophist or other say something like that. "Perhaps if I knew you better than I do."

  "You threw me out of your house and barely spoke to me for a year."

  "That... can be remedied. It shall be."

  Demosthenes looked out over the lake and its grassy shore, the blanket laid out with untouched food, a plain, pastoral scene made surreal by the company.

  Thalassia sighed, rolled onto her side, reclining on the blanket with head propped on one bent arm which became lost in a sea of dark hair. Abruptly, she pushed one of the near-forgotten plates of food in Demosthenes' direction. "Will you eat something already? Someone went to some amount of trouble to provide this meal."

  For the first time, Demosthenes gave his attention to the food. "'Someone'? Not you?" he asked in mock surprise.

  In spite of Eurydike's efforts to improve it, Thalassia's cooking was horrendous. Given how she excelled at anything else she put her hand to, he wondered if the failure was not by design, so that she might be spared the chore.

  "I will eat only if you will," Demosthenes said.

  The condition won him a sneer, but Thalassia yielded and took a morsel of bread, piled it with pickled vegetables and popped it between the lips she preferred to use for other pleasures than food. With a show of reluctance, she chewed and swallowed, then opened her mouth wide to prove the deed was done by displaying a wet tongue peppered with moist, clinging fragments.

  "Satisfied?" she asked with a fresh sneer. But almost instantly, her features warmed. She shrugged and reached for another bite. "It's not awful," she conceded. "Just flavorless."

  Having taken one mouthful himself by then, Demosthenes could not agree. It was near perfection. He dug in, at last giving his morning-after self the remedy it had craved for some hours now, or would have craved had the pangs of guilt and shame and fear not overshadowed those of hunger.

  "So, this Italian town, this Roma," Demosthenes asked as he ate. "It will one day subjugate all the cities of Greece?"

  "And much more."

  "Then..." Demosthenes mused, "perhaps... one day, when my own 'little war' is over, for the good of my city and country... I might go to Roma and help you to destroy it. Perhaps," he quickly emphasized, lest it be given the weight of a promise. "It seems that doing so might serve both our purposes. If, that is, you have not abandoned yours."

  Thalassia stared into the tree-line by the lake's edge and said with a decided lack of fire, "I will finish what I started. But first..." She looked back at him with a wan smile. "There is Sparta to finish, if you'll have me. And so many pretty, shiny things in the agora."

  "Aye," Demosthenes said, laughing although he knew he should not, for his next words were no cause for lightness. "It seems you are a gift that I am powerless to reject."

  For a while, Thalassia nibbled and he ate voraciously.

  "There is one last thing I must tell you," she said when the meal was nearly done.

  Demosthenes stopped eating mid-bite, as all thought of eating fled his mind. "Those words frighten me to no end," he said. "It is a fear born of experience. I cannot help it."

  Thalassia smiled; he did not. Rather worryingly, she looked away, up at the hazy winter sky which her eyes so reflected and resembled.

  "What?" he demanded, growing ever more alarmed. "Tell me!"

  At last she spared him a look which was neither foreboding nor playful, the two looks she gave best, but rather lay somewhere between.

  "You know that you'll need to marry soon," she said, sounding unusually philosophical. "For the sake of your reputation, career, estate, and–" Her gaze returned to the clouds. "Honestly, I think it will be good for you."

  Blood rushed in Demosthenes' ears, the sound of alarm. "What are you saying? Out with it."

  Star-born, pale-eyed Madness leveled another look at him, apologetic but at the same time unyielding as stone. "Eurydike and I have found you a prospective bride," she said. "A widow. We meet her at the spring nearly every day. The war took her husband, the plague her children, and now her brother is her keeper. She lives in his home in misery, but remains quick to laugh. She is accommodating but not docile, willful but not impulsive. She is affectionate, intelligent, generous, patient, and frankly, very fuckable. But she doesn't have a tin pisspot for a dowry, so no man will touch her," Thalassia finished earnestly. "Her name is Laonome."*

  END OF PART III

  --------

  * Lay-ON-ah-mee.

  IV. ARKADIA 1. Dog

  Maimakterion in the archonship of Isarchos (November 424 BCE)

  Leuke's square sail billowed overhead in a too-strong wind (the season for smooth sailing was well past) and white waves swirled in her wake as she cut a path for Athens, one of ten triremes returning home with angry-eyed prows draped in ivy garlands that were sure to be blown to the sea god well before port. No one much liked having a woman aboard, but inevitably they had to be transported, and anyway, this was the general's woman. As was customary, extra prayers had been said, extra sacrifices made, and the voyage then was surrendered into the hands of Fate.

  Broken, vanquished, disgraced Fate. It only remained to be seen whether she would stay down or staunch her wound and rise to right the wrong done her.

  Demosthenes stood near the prow alongside his ship's bad luck charm. Thalassia had unbound her hair and let it fly in the winter wind as though flaunting her womanhood to the sailors who eyed her with suspicion. Demosthenes did not let the indiscretion bother him. His spirits were always high in the early hours of a sea voyage, before th
e boredom of the flat, unchanging seascape set in.

  "Let me see if I have everything straight," he said idly to her. "We currently exist in one of some very large number of 'layers,' in a subset you call the Severed Layers because of the difficulty in reaching or leaving them. Which is good for you, because if your cult of Magdalen, this army of kidnappers and exterminators that you have betrayed... twice... learned what you were doing and got their hands on you, they would subject you to a fate worse than death."

  Thalassia's pale eyes stayed on the horizon, face into the headwind. Her lips formed a distant half-smile. "Mmh," she said. Go on.

  "One more of your kind is asleep under a mountain in Scythia and another is somewhere nearer, probably, licking her wounds and biding her time before she pays you back for stranding her, not to mention caving in her skull and cutting off an arm."

  Thalassia cocked her head as if in a silent, dark laugh, but she did not interrupt.

  "If you change the course of our war drastically enough," Demosthenes continued, "maybe raze an Italian city, then the one who wronged you will be wiped from existence, and maybe so will Magdalen and her army, and–well, things past that are fuzzy for both of us, it seems, so we shall leave it there for now. Thanks to your help, Athens has held a town it should have lost and captured one of the enemy's best commanders. That accomplished, for some unknowable reason, you want to choose my wife for me. How did I do?"

  Her distant smirk turned to a chuckle. "Not bad."

  "Did I get something wrong?"

  "Well, yes," she said, momentarily knocking Demosthenes' pride. "Eden will be healed by now. Long since. I'm not sure what's keeping her. And... the way you tell it, I sound a little crazy. A compliment or two would not have been out of place."

  "Hmm," Demosthenes said neutrally, stalling while he angled his head into the whipping wind to study her face and determine, perhaps, whether he might be in physical danger if he failed to stroke her ego.