by P. K. Lentz
"Perhaps they bring us gifts of hollow horses," Alkibiades suggested, unhelpfully. More helpfully, he asked, "Any ideas, star-girl?"
"They will be siege engines," Thalassia declared. "Unlike others you have seen. Likely they will be capable of hurling very large stones over the Long Walls, causing destruction within, or into the Walls, creating a breach."
Demosthenes met her pronouncement, the accuracy of which he did not doubt, with grim silence. It was Alkibiades who posed the question to which only he, of those present, did not know the answer.
"How could they have built such machines?" He scoffed. "Much less thought of them. One might almost think they had starborn aid of their own!"
"Nikias withdrew his support for our Arkadian campaign," Demosthenes said quickly, by way of changing the subject. "His allies followed suit. He believes it is too late for it to have an effect. He may be right. I pressed the Board instead for an ambush on Skiron's Road, where Brasidas's army will be at its most vulnerable before it enters Attica. That, too, met with refusal. Nikias and his party are too cautious, and Kleon and his allies are... well, let us say their personal feelings prevent them from agreeing with me."
"You must go anyway," Thalassia urged. "With or without an official appointment, you will find no shortage of volunteers. Those machines must not be allowed within range of Athens. If they are, and if the Board takes its past strategy of retreating behind the Long Walls for a siege, then Athens is doomed. The Walls will not stand."
"My understanding is that they will try to stop the invasion at the frontier, near Eleusis," Demosthenes said, "even though the fortifications there will not yet be complete. No one is ready for a return to the years of starvation and plague."
"Thank Virgin Athena's tits for that!" Alkibiades blasphemed. "We could have had this place finished by now, and the frontier besides, if the engineers would just listen to her." He nudged Thalassia. "But instead it's 'let's try this, let's try that!'" He sighed. "But they get there in the end, Dog bless 'em."
Demosthenes threw a glance at black-clad, silver-adorned Thalassia and remarked, "Some of us take longer than others to adjust to change. Now, Alkibiades, if it pleases you, I would share a few words with my... spoil in private."
Alkibiades laughed. "Of course, my friend." His hand, which had been on Thalassia's back, slid down her in a sort of parting caress, and he sped off shouting at some laborers stirring a vat of liquid stone.
"Shall we walk?" Demosthenes asked.
They started away from Dekelea's wall, heading deeper into the small mountain village which was presently being circumvallated. Thalassia, a black presence who left in her wake the scent of jasmine and an ethereal music of tinkling bells, drew lingering stares from the villagers they passed, and not a few warding signs against evil spirits.
"It must be her," Demosthenes said in a hushed tone, as if the mere mention of Eden might summon her into their presence. "Unless you have another explanation?"
"I know only what you have told me, and reached the same conclusion. We must assume the worst."
"Why should she aid Sparta? Has she guessed your aim and begun working to thwart it?"
"No." Of this Thalassia seemed certain, but the explanation which followed emerged with some hesitation: "By compounding any changes I have introduced, Eden's helping Sparta... is more likely to aid my purpose than hinder it. My original purpose. My present goal is only the safety of Athens. I hope you believe that."
"I do," Demosthenes said. Then, mindful that he could not lie to her, "Mostly. You were ready to fight and kill with us in Arkadia."
"More than ready," she interjected. "Looking forward."
"Will you take the field with us instead, and stand against the invaders?"
"I would consider no other course."
"Your secret will be out," Demosthenes reminded. "Your existence in Athens will be forever changed."
Thalassia considered this for no more than a beat, the would-be silence filled with the tinkling of tiny silver chains as she walked. She concluded, "I like change."
"So I see," Demosthenes agreed.
Their path through the village delivered them to the stables, in front of which they found Andrea grooming and watering Maia. Demosthenes thanked the girl, who declined his offer to take her with him to "boring" Athens, although Thalassia granted permission, and he mounted for his return ride. Sharing a last, long look with Thalassia, whom he knew he was not likely to see again before leaving to battle, but speaking no further words, he wheeled Maia and kicked her to a gallop, departing through the unhung gates beneath the kohl-blackened stare of Dekelea's witch.
IV. ARKADIA 11. On Skiron's Road
In the black of night they set out in four fishing boats from Eleusis, twenty volunteers cloaked in black or gray and wearing no conventional arms or armor apart from a short sword, strapped to each man's back, and these they hoped not to use. At their head was a two-time general who had twice had lost the post and who tonight, as at Pylos two years prior, acted as a private citizen. This time, unlike then, he had no special dispensation from the Board of Ten strategoi, but acted in defiance of the democracy. It was a crime for which there might well be a price to be paid even in victory.
The twenty beached their craft on the western side of the Bay of Eleusis, where the black land rose up sharply from the pebble-strewn shore into rugged mountains which blotted out clouds awash with starglow. The moment their feet were planted on solid earth, they began unloading their boats' cargo: twenty stoppered, liquid-filled amphorae each as big around as a man's waist and to which had been affixed rawhide straps so they might be worn on the back, slung from the shoulders. From the stopper of each jug dangled a length of thin, tarred cord.
Bearing these, along with heavy coils of climbing rope, the Athenians left their boats on the beach and struck up the slope to begin the treacherous climb. The ascent up the sheer rocks took the better part of the night, but by dawn they were in place overlooking the coastal road which ran from Megara to Athens. It was the route that Spartan armies had taken into Attica six times during the current war, and if the Board of Ten's informants in Megara were correct, then today it was the route by which yet another Spartan army would come. In ancient times, the bandit lord Skiron had plagued these mountain passes; this day, twenty Athenians would play the role of Skiron's bandits lying in wait, and Brasidas, with luck, would play the hapless trader and be deprived of the deadly goods he aimed to bring to Athens.
The sky began to brighten. Atop the sheer ridge, the volunteers spread out in groups of two and three so that they were spread over a half mile or more of road, and they anchored three heavy ropes along the span to ease their descent when the time came. Each group had a blacked-out oil lamp, and as the sun painted the clouds purple, they lit them, looked down on the road from their hiding places, and they waited.
Since Megara was a Spartan ally, traffic on the road into Attica was light. Parties on foot and donkey and mule passed by oblivious to the waiting ambush, but Brasidas's scouts, when they came by mid-morning, were easy enough to spot. Spartan Equals were taught to ride, but their ingrained contempt for cavalry led them to depend on allies to serve in that role. And so, unsurprisingly, the six light horse which passed below the rocks on which the Athenians perched were not Spartans but men from elsewhere in the Peloponnese. Perhaps if the scouts had been Equals or Skiritai, they might have been more watchful, might have noticed that the high, jagged rocks on the seaward side provided the ideal place for an ambush. Perhaps Equals would have doubled back to fetch climbers to scale the heights and ensure the way was clear. But these scouts were incautious allies, and they talked and joked with one another as they rode by, their voices and laughter echoing up the canyon walls.
Within minutes of their passage, a dust cloud became visible in the west. Minutes after that came the distant, rising thunder of an army on the march. A band of Equals came at the army's head, red-cloaked in the summer sun with lambda-blazoned
shields on their backs and helmets slung, spear blades cutting the air back and forth as the butts struck the hard earth with each step. The road here was wide enough for twenty or so men to march abreast, and that is how they went, but even Spartan discipline could not keep them in even ranks all the way from Megara to Athens, and so they looked more like a mob. After them came a dozen covered supply carts pulled by donkeys and oxen. The Spartans always traveled light on their invasions of Attica, intending to strip their sustenance from their enemy's farms before razing them.
Next came the Peloponnesian light infantry of peltasts and skirmishers, then a second, larger troop of Equals. It was this latter body which guarded the targets of today's ambush, the first of which Demosthenes and his volunteers watched in awe as it passed. The lumbering hulk was pulled by a massive team of oxen, six rows of beasts walking four abreast. Their burden, shrouded in sailcloth and bound with rope, was four times the length and height of a typical oxcart, and its eight wheels were thick and solid rather than spoked, like the wheels on the platforms on which Cyclopean blocks were transported from quarry to city. Taller than a house, it lumbered along, filling every ear in the seaside canyon with creaks and pops and the crunch of stones being ground to dust under iron-shod wood. A second behemoth rumbled by, and then a third, and each giant wagon and its train of beasts swam in a sea of red-cloaked Equals.
These could be nothing else but the mechanimai, Brasidas's siege engines.
A fourth came into sight, and then it was time. Demosthenes pushed the cord of his giant amphora into the flame of the blacked out lamp and held it there until the pitch-soaked fuse was well alight. The two Athenians beside him did likewise and signaled down the line of ambushers that the rest should make their payloads ready. Demosthenes heaved the heavy jug onto his shoulder, took careful aim down the steep, jagged slope at the foremost of the lumbering engines, and he heaved. The amphora, lit cord spinning, sailed out into space.
For a moment, time ceased. Then came a pop, barely audible over the din of the giant wagons' wheels. The amphora smashed into a thousand shards, and its viscous contents, the witch of Dekelea's recipe, formed an irregular black blot centered on the front right wheel of the second-to-last engine.
Spartans cried out in alarm, and Demosthenes' racing heart ceased beating. The black blot burst into flame. White hot, sizzling, intense, the fire engulfed the front of the engine and shot up the sailcloth covering it, just as two more amphorae flew down. One struck higher up than the first and doubled the blaze, the second landed just short, setting red cloaks alight and sending up screams of pain and terror.
All down the line, the scene was repeated. A second engine caught fire, along with the ground beneath it and a number of its escorts. Further back, a yoked pair of blazing oxen ran amok through a swarm of panicked soldiers. That put all the other snorting, braying beasts of burden were to fright, and they began pulling in every direction. The burning shroud fell away from the most immolated of the engines, revealing a complex wooden frame, toothed wheels, and a long, stout timber arm. It was a throwing arm, if Thalassia was correct, as she doubtless was, capable of heaving wall-smashing missiles over great distances.
In half a minute or less, all the Athenians on the heights had sent their deadly pots into the valley, and in as much time, the orderly advance of an army was transformed into fiery chaos. Six of Brasidas's great stone throwers, katapeltai, had been set alight to varying degrees. Perhaps more followed further back, but twenty men had done all they could today, and now all that remained was to retreat. The volunteers raced along the ridge to whichever of the three escape ropes was nearest them, and once there, each clipped on an iron ring that fastened his belt to the rope. Then, with as much haste as due caution allowed, he shoved off backward into the void.
Demosthenes, like the others, had practiced this means of quick descent on cliffs nearer Athens, and now, when it mattered, it came as second nature. Suspending the altogether natural fear of throwing oneself off a cliff, he plunged at stomach-churning speed from jagged rock to jagged rock, lighting for less than a heartbeat on each before shoving off again. He controlled his speed, barely, by means of rawhide straps covering his palms. Beside him, above and below, the band of volunteers likewise fell. At least one undisciplined soul let loose a triumphant wail which echoed over the bay, but declarations of triumph were premature in Demosthenes' mind, even if there was no sign yet of Spartan pursuit on the rocks above. There would not be, since even were enemy climbers to have sprung to action at the moment the ambush began, they would arrive at the top to find nothing but a few discarded oil lamps.
The ascent had been measured in hours; the return took but minutes. By the time Demosthenes' feet struck earth with bone-jarring force, others were already dragging the waiting boats down to the waterline and setting oars to oarlocks. In no time, and with no instruction needed, all four craft pushed out into the surf and rose and fell on the gently rolling waves on a return path for Eleusis.
While men around him congratulated one another and roared in exhilaration, Demosthenes' eyes continually checked the heights from which they had just come. They were empty still, and he hoped they would stay that way. A mortal man would hard-pressed to scale the height in time to achieve any result, but as he alone among the Athenians present knew, Brasidas' army did not consist entirely of mortal men.
Just as the four escaping craft reached cruising speed on the bay, the heart inside him sank. A lone, crouching figure stood up and was outlined against the bright sky, sunlight glinting off what at first appeared to be a polished helm until a gust of wind off the bay showed it for what it was: a crown of flowing, golden hair.
IV. ARKADIA 12. She Whose Wrath Is Relentless
Eden raised a short, curved stick at the end of an outstretched arm. Before Demosthenes even recognized the thing for a small, strangely double-curved bow, a groan sounded in the boat rowing alongside his, and a man by the name of Enytos fell back with an arrow in his eye. He was dead before he hit the boards, and his oar flew wild. A quick-thinking benchmate grabbed it, only to be struck down next by a shaft to the center of his chest. The boat of the two dead men veered right, one oar lost to sea, as the living in that craft, and in the remaining three boats, hunkered down to utter prayers or curses.
A third short, red-fletched arrow fell, and another rower in the same craft fell dead. No, not dead. Just wounded, but not for long–the fourth shaft did not fail to steal his life.
Even a troop of bowmen should have been capable of nothing more than harassment at this range, killing a man or two out of every fifty arrows, if luck was with them. But Demosthenes knew that this shooter's eye and arm were of the stars, built to kill, and she needed no luck.
The two men who yet lived in the boat of corpses, seeing that nothing awaited them but death, leaped overboard and began to swim. The closest shore was the one they had just left, but to go back there was certain doom. There was no way they could reach Eleusis either, and so they split the difference and headed for a point ahead of the invading army, in the hope they might beat its advance into Attica. If they reached land, perhaps they would live.
On the heights, Eden lowered her bow and vanished among the rocks. Demosthenes lost sight of her momentarily, then found her golden halo again atop the cliffs at the place where the drop to the sea was sheerest. She made some strange swift movements which he identified, with a feeling of dread, as the shedding of her outer clothes. Once those sat in a pile, she stepped to the cliff's edge and without a second's hesitation, dove off. Her form cut a smooth, straight line, a pale dart against the dark brown of the rock behind, and she slipped into the foaming sea with scarcely a splash.
"Steady on," Demosthenes told the four men in the craft with him, for lack of anything better. "Be ready for anything."
He sensed, if not knew, that the warning was useless.
The three remaining craft rowed on in silence but for some hushed pleas to the gods for deliverance and on be
half the shades of the dead. After several minutes of hard rowing, the oarsmen of each boat eased back, either from weariness or the belief they were out of bowshot. Whichever was the case, Demosthenes ordered fresh rowers to take the oars, taking one himself, and he urged no let-up. Even if they believed the danger was over and pursuit was impossible, they were stunned by the sudden loss of their comrades and so obeyed without question.
There were the sounds of a hollow thump and then screams, and Demosthenes' eyes flew to the source: the prow of the rearmost boat had dug into the waves, sending the aft flying upward, as might happen in a violent storm. All five men within tumbled screaming into the sea, where they treaded water and scrambled to reoccupy the empty hull.
One man slipped abruptly under the waves, as if tugged from below; then another. Moments later, both bobbed to the surface, dead, their dark cloaks billowing. Then a third was pulled down, thrashing and screaming, and when he surfaced, too, life had fled his limbs.
The two men left in the sea reached their boat and clambered aboard, while near them a smooth and flowing white shape, dolphin-like, grazed the green surface of the bay.
"Swords!" Demosthenes cried. Most of the surviving volunteers already had drawn the weapons strapped to their backs, but the rest did so now, all except those manning the oars, which included Demosthenes.
Three strokes of those oars was all their hidden enemy allowed. Then another boat lost an oar, yanked from below out of the rower's grip. The men around him brought their blades to bear and hacked blindly into the waves on the spot where it had vanished. While they were thus occupied on the port side, the boat's starboard lifted, dumping all three in a storm of flailing limbs. One by one they slipped into the deep and became prey to a sleek white shape flitting just below the surface, and then their corpses were set adrift on the gentle waves. The two rowers of that emptied craft gave up their oars, clasped hands and raised voices in prayer, and Demosthenes watched helplessly as a pair of white arms rose from the bay to clap hands on the boat's topstrake, and Eden emerged from the deep.