by P. K. Lentz
He trailed off, as if catching his loose tongue. But he had caught it too late; there could be only one 'exception' in these cells.
Styphon leaned forward, chains dragging on the floor. "If it is Brasidas you mean," he said conspiratorially, "he may be my superior and my countryman, but he is no friend. I ran this place until he came. Now his word is the only thing separating me from death, and I fear the barrier may fall any day."
Another, briefer appraisal, and Alkibiades smiled. "There is talk of executing him," he divulged. "It would be madness, of course. He is too valuable, and not to mention it would doom the next Athenian strategos to find himself in Spartan hands. But then, Kleon has a talent for making madness sound as reason." He chuckled. "I am a little jealous of it, actually. I shall surely vote for it. Reason is overrated." His light expression grew grave as he urged, "Keep yourself alive another month, Styphon. You may yet find yourself a tyrant again." He grinned, teeth agleam. "Tyrant of Shitopolis, sure. But better that than its fool, right?"
The real fool present, the Athenian, rose from his chair.
"It was a pleasant chat," he said. "I hope the next time we have the pleasure, Andrea can be present with us. Somehow, somewhere. I have learned of late something that I only suspected before: that nothing is impossible."
The princess punctuated those final, hopeful words with a knock on the doorframe. An invisible iron bolt slid back, the door was opened from without, and Alkibiades' presence in the tiny room was replaced by that of the guard. While returning to the yard, Styphon pondered carefully his next move. Plenty of men had seen him taken into the prison office. Likely someone had already reported the summons to Brasidas. That left no option but to go straight to the general himself and make a report, lest it seem he was hiding something.
All eyes were on him as he returned. Meeting some of the hardest of those eyes with his own dark gaze, he marched straight to Brasidas. The general shared a cell meant for twenty in the overcrowded jail with just the twelve members of his honor guard. Six were present. The most senior put a hand on Styphon's chest, barring his way.
"You know the drill, dog," the guard warned. Behind him, Brasidas looked down his sharp nose with neither approval nor disapproval, but no intention of interfering.
Swallowing his pride, a task which had become easier by the day since Sphakteria, Styphon lowered himself to his hands and knees in the open cell door. To howls from the honor guard and not a few kicks in the rear, he crawled forward, the ends of his long, matted hair gathering pebbles and dust from the floor of packed dirt.
"Leave us," Brasidas said to his guard, silencing them, more or less. When they were alone, Brasidas commanded, "Sit up and speak, dog."
Styphon fell back onto his haunches before his pitiless master and related tonelessly, "An Athenian by the name of Alkibiades visited me."
"Perikles' ward." Suspicion lit Brasidas' keen eyes. "Why should he come to you and not me?"
"I have no idea, sir," Styphon lied, and swiftly moved on. Though the prospect of seeing Brasidas dragged off to face the garrotte before a cheering Athenian mob was not without its allure, the sense of obedience drilled into him from birth forced the truth from him: "He says that their Assembly will soon consider your execution."
Brasidas failed to appear shocked by the pronouncement. He directed a blank stare over Styphon's head and mused, "Execute me, hmm? Do you gather that this Alkibiades is a traitor?"
"He gave a few reasons for sharing the information with me," Styphon improvised. "Spartan sympathies, the belief that you are too valuable to kill, distaste for the politician behind the proposal."
All true, of course, but none the truth itself: that the information had been coaxed from Alkibiades by means of a bond best kept secret.
Pursing his lips, the polemarch sank into thought while absently twisting strands of long, straight hair between thumb and forefinger. Momentarily his focus returned, and he said to his kneeling dog, "I rather suspect you are hiding something. But never mind that. Our escape needs a new timeline. I think we might just make do with one tunnel instead of two, don't you?"
IV. ARKADIA 5. Wedding
Gamelion, the winter month which drew its name from the fact that most Athenians considered it ideal for a wedding, was fast approaching, but no one involved in this particular union, not least the groom, saw fit to delay the ceremony until then. And so, only a few short weeks after their betrothal, declarations were made and witnessed in the law courts that both parties were the legitimate offspring of two citizen parents, and Laonome's keeper Autokles gave her willingly into the guardianship of her new lord, Demosthenes of Thria.
The gamete, the wedding feast thrown by Autokles, was as small an affair as could be managed when one of the principals was a person of some renown. At its conclusion, Laonome was borne in a garlanded wagon trailed by a small entourage of singing and dancing women to her new home in Tyrmeidai. By the time it had completed its passage through the interlying demes, the procession had swelled with enough clingers-on to clog the streets for blocks. In Athens, few men (and fewer women, where weddings were concerned) were willing to pass up the chance to join in a celebration of any kind.
Having gone on ahead from the banquet, Demosthenes awaited the arrival of his bride at his home alongside his two slaves, both of whom were dressed in their finest. As slaves, of course, they could not participate in feast or procession. Eurydike seemed genuinely excited, while Thalassia's expression, if he read it right, which was hardly certain, held a glimmer of pride at having made it happen.
When the sound of flutes and singers came to ear, Eurydike raced to the window hoping to catch first glimpse of the procession.
"It's here!" she cried, and ran back to take her place at her adoptive sister's side, a step behind her master.
The wagon drew up and halted in front of Demosthenes' garden, its followers choking the street. The bride's chief attendant, the nympheutria, Chrysis, descended from the wagon and extended an arm to help Laonome down in her flowing, borrowed gown of gold-trimmed yellow. Her hair was molded into elaborate ringlets piled high on her head, and draped over it, partly obscuring her face, was a veil of translucent Amorgos silk. She walked the garden path under gently swaying palm fronds to reach the open doorway in which her husband waited.
At the threshold, with Chrysis gathering up the gown behind her, Laonome lowered herself and raised a braceleted forearm above her head. Demosthenes responded by clasping the proffered wrist, drawing the bride to her feet and walking her through the doorway and to the hearth of her new home. In Sparta it was said they clung even more closely to the ancient practice of bridal abduction, but today, in Athens, this was the civilized remnant of a barbaric past.
Returning hand-in-hand to the door with his new wife, Demosthenes was heartened to find not tears in Laonome's eyes but only a mix of exhaustion and relief as she stood waving and blowing kisses at the cheering crowd of friends, relatives, and strangers until at last, long minutes later, the door was shut. Eurydike came forward, knelt before Laonome and planted a kiss on her hand. Thalassia did the same, if less girlishly, and then the three women exchanged hugs more in the manner of friends than mistress and slaves.
When that was finished, Laonome pressed close to her new husband, resting her cheek on his chest. "Are you as glad as I am that is over?"
"More," Demosthenes replied truthfully.
That night they went to bed early, or rather they retired early to their bedchamber, where they made love in several sessions punctuated by light sleep in one another's arms. Laonome was a skilled lover, neither too timid nor too aggressive, with a body full of pleasing curves. Demosthenes' lone complaint was that being unused to sharing a bed for the purpose of sleep, he found it hard to do so with a leg draped over him and the weight of a head pinning his shoulder to the mattress. But in sleep Laonome looked so serene he did not dare disturb her. He would get used to it soon enough, he assumed.
Their second night
began much as the first, but when Demosthenes ran out of strength and seed, they talked. He ran a finger over the scar on her upper lip, asking how it had come to be there. When Laonome just self-consciously pushed his hand aside and covered it, he kissed her gently and let the matter drop. An hour later she raised the subject herself, tentatively and unprompted. Years ago, she told him, her late husband, returning home drunk as he often did, had shoved her, and in falling she had struck her face on the edge of a table. She showed another scar on her inner forearm where her husband, drunk again, had carelessly cut her while threatening her with a sword.
They did not speak at all of how the perpetrator of such abuse had met his death in Aetolia, yet neither did that potentially sensitive matter hang over them.
On their third night of marriage, Laonome said she was sore and invited Eurydike to join them. Laonome lay on her side and watched with interest, occasionally stroking her husband's arm or Eurydike's naked thigh. Just before culmination of the act, she interrupted and took the slave's place so as not to waste any chance to conceive. Showing no sign of dissatisfaction with the new arrangement, Eurydike gathered her crumpled chiton from the floor and left the room as giddy as she had arrived.
"Did you enjoy that?" Laonome asked when they were alone.
Rather than speaking, Demosthenes grunted a positive-sounding note, all he had strength for.
"My first husband whored behind my back for many years. Eventually he took a concubine. Most nights I went to sleep on linens damp with her juices. I do not want that humiliation again. I know that Eurydike is your pallake, and I want you to keep her. Do whatever pleases you, but give me the dignity of knowing."
Demosthenes held his new wife tight, kissed the tip of her nose. "You are what pleases me," he said. "But Eurydike is..."
"Thracian?" Laonome finished for him.
He laughed. "I was going to say complicated. But Thracian works well."
"And Thalassia?"
He heard the name often enough, but for some reason now it made the muscles of his body tense. "We did the deed once," he confessed. He hoped he kept shame out of his voice. "But not deliberately. I was drunk." Recalling Laonome's tales of her drunken husband, he hastened to add, "It was the first time I have been drunk in ten years, mind you. Neither are mistakes I shall repeat."
"Why was it a mistake to fuck her? Have you seen the way men stare at her in town? What flaw is it you see that they do not?"
Uncomfortably considering his response, Demosthenes wondered if the object of their conversation, with her predator's ears, was eavesdropping now through the walls.
"She is... unstable," he lied. Or was it a lie? He almost hoped Thalassia listened. She likely would laugh that thin-lipped, breathy, inward laugh of hers which made the giver proud to have earned it.
Laonome's own laugh, also a sweet sound, turned his thoughts back to her, their more rightful object. She fingered the tiny hairs of his chest underneath the heavy woolen blankets, outside of which the winter chill froze the plaster and tile surfaces of the bedchamber.
"We women are all unstable, are we not?" Laonome reflected. The question was rhetorical, something with which any Athenian, male or female, with few exceptions, would agree. "We are ruled by our bodies. I would think one like hers would have certain needs."
"It does. She satisfies them with Alkibiades."
"Him? You allow it?"
"I see no reason not to."
He was not about to explain right now, and maybe not ever, that it was not for him to allow or disallow Thalassia anything, or that one of his slaves was not really a slave at all but in fact his partner in a conspiracy against Fate.
He knew that if that battered deity were present with them in the marriage bed, she might well have hissed in his bride's ear, Your new husband consorts with a star-whore and invites a doom far worse than that your last one met!
But Fate, cowed for now by defeat, remained silent.
Laonome stretched her neck up to peck her husband's cheek, then laid her head down on his chest and shut her eyes.
"A strange name, Thalassia," she remarked lazily. "'Sea-thing.' Isn't that the wood that washes up on the beach, that men whittle into animals and sell in the agora?"
"It is," Demosthenes confirmed, and squeezed his wife's body tight against his bare flesh.
The next morning, Laonome bought Thalassia a gift: a driftwood carving of a dolphin.
IV. ARKADIA 6. Jailbreak
Morning filled Demosthenes' second-story bedchamber with rays of cold winter sunlight, the scent of baking bread, and the sounds of bustling activity. For the first time in its current occupancy, that bedchamber was shared by husband and wife. Both lazed naked under covers of wool and fur, and as had been the case on each of the five mornings which had passed since their wedding day, they were in no hurry to rise.
Thus Demosthenes was still half asleep when the muted sounds of life in the deme of Tyrmeidai were drowned out, then silenced, by the distant shrill wail of a trumpet, a long, sustained blast. When the note ended, another soared with barely the space of a breath between.
An alarm. He sat upright. Laonome did the same, clinging to his side with deep worry overtaking sleep in her almond-shaped eyes. What is happening? the look asked, and Demosthenes answered with a comforting hand on her wool-draped thigh. Since he knew no more than she, it was the best answer he could give.
"Stay near to Thalassia," he told his bride, and hoped his tone struck the right balance between urgency and calm. "Do whatever she tells you, without question. Understand?"
Laonome's look betrayed confusion at this strange command to obey a slave, but she only nodded. As Demosthenes made to leave the bed she clasped his wrist, pulled him back and kissed his lips hard with the force of passion.
"I love you," she said for the fifth time in as many days. He was blessed. These were words that most men never in their adult lives heard spoken truthfully. "Do not make me a widow again."
He tucked a lock of uncombed hair behind Laonome's ear, reassured her with a smile. "Rise, dress, take breakfast, go about your day. I shall be back very shortly."
He tried to rise but found Laonome's hand still firmly clamped on his arm. "Promise me," she pleaded. "Promise you will put me first. Before honor, before glory, before elections. Before Athens. Just for a year. Then give yourself back to the city if you must."
Demosthenes let the beginning of a chuckle slip before he saw the fear and hope in his new wife's eyes, saw the jaw clenched so tightly that it trembled, knuckles that were white on his wrist as though her life depended on the grasp. Seeing the intensity and sincerity with which she implored him, he lost any thought of laughter and answered in a heartbeat, "I swear it."
He dressed quickly in a himation suitable for the winter chill, took up his short sword in its scabbard and, with a final kiss gentler than their last, he left Laonome.
In the women's quarters, now a miniature Persepolis to their former Sparta, he found his two slaves standing in wait with his scale armor corselet. While they buckled it on him Demosthenes shared a secret look with Thalassia, conveying without need for words what was expected of her: Protect them.
Her pale eyes calmly accepted the burden. He slung his shield on his back, did the same with the canvas sack containing his helmet and the rest of his war gear, and he descended the stairs to emerge into a street where confusion reigned.
"What has happened?" he asked his neighbors. Some, like him, wore armor and carried weapons, while others yet hoped the raising of the general alarm was some mistake. Their answers proved them just as clueless as he.
Suddenly at the street's north end there appeared dozens of men, women and children all moving south with purpose in their strides. Demosthenes met the odd stream of refugees at a run, shouting questions at whomever would listen. When no one replied, he grabbed a fleeing male slave by the arm.
"The Spartan prisoners," the slave blurted in a panic, trying to wrench his arm away. "Th
ey are loose!"
Demosthenes let the man go and hastened north, against the human current, in the direction of the jailhouse and the sound of the still-blaring trumpet. Several minutes spent at a run, sweating under the weight of his panoply, brought him to the law courts. There he grabbed a stunned Scythian policeman who, recognizing him, guided him not to the jail but to the edge of a winding, densely built street in the nearby deme of Melite.
A cluster of soldiers and police captains and generals stood there, Nikias and Kleon among them. Neither was geared for war; likely they had been in the agora or civic offices just next door when the alarm had sounded. It was where any strategos would be at this time, if he was not using the excuse of his recent wedding to laze about the house.
Nikias was issuing urgent orders to police and armed citizens, while the City Protector, Kleon, loudly punctuated each of the old man's commands with, "Yes, yes, as he says!"
Demosthenes pushed his way through to them, and Nikias filled him in.
"The prisoners dug a tunnel," the elder general said. "We have them cordoned in this neighborhood, but they have hostages and whatever weapons they have obtained from the houses."
Demosthenes felt a surge of mingled anger and relief: anger at the grievous lapse of security, relief that his own household was in no immediate danger. There was little to do but wait. Nikias seemed to have matters well in hand, even if Kleon–whose official responsibility on the Board was homeland defense–wished to believe the hand was his own.
The wait was short. In the narrow street overlooked by the small plaza in which the generals stood, the figure of a man appeared: a tall, long-haired Spartan in his prison chiton bearing the mocking sign of the crimson alpha.
Demosthenes knew the man by sight, having fallen to him in single combat.
Brasidas stood unarmed, holding aloft horizontally over his head a makeshift herald's wand, a stick garlanded with an anemic laurel vine doubtless cut from some citizen's garden. Nikias's balled fist went into the air in a hold command directed at the bowmen who stood on nearby rooftops with arrows nocked and aimed. Brasidas was allowed to draw up to a point just beyond the barricade of carts and tables and couches which the Spartans had hastily thrown up at the head of the evacuated street.