Athenian Steel (Book I of the The Hellennium)

by P. K. Lentz

  In the smile he returned, Demosthenes gave neither confirmation nor denial. He certainly would not burden her with the knowledge that the enemy possessed a goddess of its own.

  Giving his wife what he hoped would not be their last kiss before Hades, he preceded Thalassia out the door and, exerting an effort not to look back, walked the corridor of palms that bisected the garden. He secured his helmet and hoplon to the saddle of Balios's successor, a war-horse named Akmos, then set sandal in stirrup and threw himself astride the beast. Behind him, Thalassia mounted soundlessly on a mare called Phaedra which, like her armor, was borrowed from Alkibiades, under whose tutelage she had learned to ride at least as well as any plainsman.

  Turning, Demosthenes saw the women of his house standing in the open doorway, Laonome's face buried in a curtain of Thracian curls. He raised his hand in a final farewell which only Eurydike returned, and he kicked his mount's flanks and set off for war.

  "You were cold to them," Demosthenes observed to Thalassia as they rode the empty street.

  "Was I?"

  "There is a balance to be struck when leaving a loved one, for their sake more than yours. If you are either too emotional or too distant, they will know you are preparing for death." He added deliberately, "You might bear that in mind for next time."

  Whatever Thalassia's thoughts were on that matter, they remained private, and the focus of her pale eyes was distant as they cantered side-by-side. As they progressed north toward the city gate, the streets grew less empty. Not unexpectedly, Thalassia drew stares from all they passed. By mutual agreement they had determined that this day would mark the end of all efforts to conceal Thalassia's true nature from the public. What counted now was the city's safety, and anyway Eden was unlikely to exercise discretion. From now on, whatever the public of Athens saw, it saw.

  What it saw right now was an Amazon riding to war on behalf of the city which in a time long past, but hardly forgotten, had suffered invasion by her people. Not far from this very spot sat the graven stone which marked the point where tradition said the Amazon invasion had been thrown back under the leadership of Herakles and Theseus. By trick of time, those two saviors of Hellas, one-time allies, were the patron heroes of the opposing cities set to clash today.

  The stares grew thicker when they reached the broad thoroughfare called the Dromos, on which traveled a heavy stream of armed and armored men on foot. The banks of that stream were lined with women, children, and grandfathers showering their sons and brothers and husbands with well-wishes, prayers and cut blossoms. When Akmos and Phaedra turned onto the street and joined the stream, a hush fell over the onlookers. Even the eyes of the fighting men turned to see what had caused it. Thalassia paid the scrutiny no mind, and Demosthenes, beside her, acted as if nothing were amiss, merely guiding Akmos at the slow collective pace of the procession. The crowd's curiosity proved impermanent; few devoted any more than a handful of heartbeats to gawking at Thalassia.

  When they were halfway to the Dipylon Gate, via which the river of flesh and bronze and towering canvas-wrapped spear blades was to exit the city, a young girl pushed through the crowd to come up alongside Akmos and walk in pace with him. She was brown-skinned, the child of a slave or resident alien, and her small, outstretched hand held aloft a purple flower, an iris, which she waved by the stem. Demosthenes smiled at the girl, reached down and tried to pluck it from her hand, but before he could, the offering was withdrawn. The girl shook her head and pointed past him. Nodding understanding, Demosthenes anchored himself tightly to his mount, leaned down and hoisted the girl from the ground, setting her carefully on Akmos' neck. Thalassia looked over and, briefly letting a smile pierce her gloom, she leaned her head closer to let the girl insert the bloom's stem into her braid. That done, Demosthenes returned the flower-giver to the earth.

  For the better part of the next hour, they made their way slowly to the Dipylon Gate and passed through it into the countryside of Attica. There, unconstrained by streets, the human current spread thinner, and the mood among the fighters grew decidedly more somber as all began to set their minds to what lay ahead. Thalassia's mood was already grim, and that did not change. Demosthenes rode alongside her in silence, through the tall grass which flanked the Sacred Way, making no attempt to dispel whatever cloud it was that hung over her.

  Their plans were already made and required no further discussion. They were to separate. Thalassia was to ride with Alkibiades and a host of citizen cavalry on an attack across the frontier meant to destroy any remaining Spartan siege engines. Demosthenes, meanwhile, would report to the Athenian forces' left wing, nearest Eleusis, where Nikias, in overall command, would be stationed. It was also where Brasidas, doubtless leading the enemy right, the place of honor, would be, and where the 'special weapons,' as Nikias had called them, were to be deployed: belly-bows ready to skewer Equals, assuming Eden hadn't equipped them with some countermeasure, and firepots to be hurled into the rear ranks and burn men alive with clinging, unquenchable flame.

  How much more horrific could war become? Demosthenes scarcely had time to wonder. Thalassia knew the answer, no doubt, but he felt no desire to ask her, even if he got the chance.

  When the city had receded behind a hill at their backs and the land became more thickly wooded, Thalassia steered Phaedra into a copse of trees and there halted. Demosthenes followed and waited impatiently for Thalassia to make clear the purpose of her diversion.

  "It's time for you to know my last secret," she said.

  V. ELEUSIS 2. Her Last Secret

  Scenting war ahead, Akmos whinnied angrily at the delay. Thalassia slid from Phaedra's saddle in the stand of small trees and came toward the eager beast, whose rider swung down to meet her. Reaching him, Thalassia raised in her fingertips a small object which caught the sunlight. Demosthenes studied it: a sphere roughly the size of an olive, composed of a dark, highly polished metal. Barely visible on its surface were short inscriptions in some foreign alphabet.

  "What is it?" her silence forced him to ask.

  "A Seed," was her answer. She stared at it, rather than him. "Just as a temple begins its existence as stone in a quarry and the plans of an architect, so this Seed contains plans and a small amount of material."

  Demosthenes stared into the metallic sphere, brows furrowing in puzzlement. "Plans for what?"

  Her pale gaze rose from the object and fell upon his face, and she smiled as she made her simple reply. "Me."

  Demosthenes stared at her, then back at the so-called Seed, and shook his head.

  "Whenever we leave Spiral, we carry six of them inside our bodies," Thalassia explained. "If just one survives, then we can live again. Four of my six lie at the bottom of the sea. One is near my heart." With her free hand, she tapped Penthesilea's breastplate. "And this last I removed..." The same hand raised the stiffened leather and linen of her skirts to display a pink scar on her upper thigh as she finished, "to give to you."

  Now she took Demosthenes' hand and pressed the Seed into its palm, closing the fingers around it, and she clasped it there, her hands enveloping his. The sphere within seemed to radiate a warmth of its own.

  Thalassia lowered her face for her next words: "Know that in no world, in no layer, is there another hand in which I would sooner place this."

  Demosthenes scoffed, gently. "You have poor judgment. I have not treated you well."

  "Nor I you," she said quickly, still avoiding his gaze. "But we are past that. I don't know what it is that exists between us. Right now, it is small. But I believe that if it were allowed to grow, it could become something... terrible. And beautiful. And destructive. I have told you what is my life's greatest regret. It is what brought me here. But I think that..."

  Demosthenes sensed that she had composed these words in advance of this moment and so did not search for words but only the ability to speak them.

  Finding it, she finished, "If this were to be our final meeting, then I would end my existence with an even gre
ater regret." She laughed, and finally met his eyes, and they were bright but sad. "You should hope the opposite," she said, "that we never do meet again. It would be better for you, and your world. But... I would very much like for us to go to Roma together one day." Her gaze sank again, and she released his hand. "We could do a lot of damage, you and I."

  "Of that, I have little doubt," Demosthenes quietly concurred. "I hope it will be the case today. But..." He exposed the Seed in his open palm, marveling at the possibility that another Thalassia might spring forth from this shell fully formed, as Athena from the skull of Zeus. "What am I to do with this?"

  "If I felt the need to tell you that, then I would not be giving it to you. You do with it as you see fit. The Seed by itself will take the better part of a year to recreate me. Should you possess my body, or part of it, reunite it with the Seed. That will significantly speed the process. Lacking that, surrounding it with any meat, human or animal, will help, too. If ever you wish to destroy it–"

  "I will not–"

  "Let me finish. You need to know, to dispose of Eden, if for no other reason," she said. "Seeds are difficult to damage, but roughly the weight of a temple column will be a start. Then just keep adding weight until it's crushed. You could drop it in the sea, with my others. That would not destroy it, but it's easier. With Eden's, though, I recommend you take the more thorough approach."

  Sighing with what sounded disturbingly like resignation, armor-clad Thalassia started back toward Phaedra, whose tail whipped violently. Demosthenes took a last look at her gift to him, this share of her very existence, and dropped the polished sphere into the rawhide pouch under the skirt of his scale armor, where it warmed his death-token, the silver drachma which was to be placed in the mouth of his corpse for passage into Hades, should he fall.

  "Wait," he said, succeeding in halting her. "I... owe you something."

  Lips that pursed momentarily in mild derision said she understood what was owed. She scoffed. "Forget it."

  "It invites misfortune to let debts be erased," he said. "They should be paid."

  "Fucking hell," she cursed, then conceded, "All right. In that case, I owe you something, too."

  Demosthenes tried and failed to recall what this debt might be, but she preempted his asking by insisting, "You first."

  She clearly had no intention of making herself an easy recipient. Legs planted in the tall grass, she stood unmoving, forcing Demosthenes to approach her to give the thing owed. He was not entirely certain he wished to give it, but at least a part of him did. It was that same part which knew that the unique being now facing him, his ally, his... friend...was as likely as not to end this day as lifeless, mutilated meat. For that matter, so was he.

  He summoned up his will to act, or rather suppressed the will not to, and he moved. He stepped in close, set his hand behind Thalassia's neck, under her braid, and kissed her, paying back the debt accrued by his abuse of her in Amphipolis. He kissed her softly, but with neither passion nor tenderness. It was a simple kiss, one of affection, and Thalassia reacted to it not at all. Her lips were not quite iron, but something like it. Spun bronze, perhaps, but less pliant.

  He lingered on her mouth a second longer than he might have, hoping she would give in, but each heartbeat only increased the extent of potential embarrassment when they broke, and so before long, he withdrew in defeat.

  Thalassia's pale eyes regarded him distantly. Her mouth remained a thin line. She said nothing, and so it was up to him to move them past the awkward aftermath of his miscalculation.

  Trying not to show the dent in his pride, he asked, "What is it that you owe me?"

  Finally her stony mask cracked for a tick of her sublime features, less than a smile. "I just gave it."

  Demosthenes puzzled over this, and presently the memory surfaced. It had been almost two years prior, on his rooftop terrace, that her soft lips had been insistent, his the ones unwilling. Now she had repaid him back in kind, with rejection.

  He laughed at himself, easily, feeling neither discomfort nor embarrassment. "I suppose that settles accounts between us."

  "For a few hours, maybe," she said. "If I save Athens today,"–she held her hand out, palm up, and waggled its fingers–"I expect you to go broke making it rain fucking jewels on me."

  The sight before him, of Thalassia geared for war, her lips freshly parted from his, one hand extended to catch rain, sent a new memory coursing through his mind, and it weakened his limbs like a physical blow. This memory was of a long-ago nightmare, in which he had stood alone with blood-soaked Thalassia upon a field of endless slaughter.

  "Hmm," hyper-perceptive Thalassia intoned, with a vaguely dejected look. "I don't know exactly why you're looking at me like that. I would ask, but..." She glanced at the road to Eleusis fifty yards off, where the ongoing current of man, animal, bronze, and steel was barely visible between the trunks of trees. "We should go."

  When she turned her face back to him, it had changed: she wore her mark of Magdalen.

  "Warpaint," she offered in explanation.

  Demosthenes stared into the flowing, complex network of lines he had seen only once before. In turn, the bright eye at the web's center regarded him back with a distant glimmer of amusement. She made a surreal sight, this wintry eyed witch, a star-born Pandora in her Amazon's garb, with twin swords of Athenian steel on her hips, elegant and savage masque covering a quarter of her face, and lastly the forlorn purple flower, bizarre accompaniment to her panoply of war, helplessly adrift in a jasmine-scented wave of raven hair.

  Clearly the world had gone mad, or he had, or both, for this was the champion of Athens. And if dreams were windows on a future immutable, then to him Thalassia was more than just that. She was his lover and queen and his partner in visiting untold devastation upon all he loved. He might pray that those visions were only phantoms–except how could he even pray when she had stripped him of gods and left in their place only this figure before him?

  "We can't stand here all fucking day," said that terrible, beautiful figure. She spun to complete her earlier, aborted walk back to Phaedra.

  "Thalassia," Demosthenes called after her.

  She paused with her hand on Phaedra's mane.

  "Fucking kill her."

  The demigoddess' head whipped round, just far enough to reveal a faint, reluctant smile of approval. Mounting, without a final goodbye, she galloped off north to meet up with Alkibiades and undertake their appointed mission behind the Spartan lines, to seek out and destroy Brasidas's machines.

  Left alone in the grove, Athens' first Archon of Witches mounted, too, and went to meet his own half of their shared destiny.

  V. ELEUSIS 3. The Arrows of Eris

  The defenders of Attica, their ranks numbering in the thousands and swelling still, arrayed themselves on high ground in time to watch the army of Brasidas emerge from the shallow valleys of the Megarid. It spread across the green plains north of Eleusis like a great black blot spreading across the page from an overturned inkwell.

  "We should attack now, before they can form up," Demosthenes urged, but he did not hold command here. He was not even a general. The man beside him, Nikias, was the one charged with Attica's defense, and Nikias was a man both praised and derided for his excess of caution. The trait had served him well at times, been his downfall at others, but either way, his word was supreme this day.

  "Our forces are not ready," Nikias declared.

  He was right in that men were still streaming north from Athens to be dispatched to left, right or center based on need and on what weaponry they owned. But Brasidas' army numbered, by most accounts, no more than six thousand, while the Athenian forces stretching in both directions in an undulant line extending as far as the eye could see in either direction might already have numbered twice that. Not only every able-bodied citizen, but every foreigner, too, who called Athens home was coming out.

  "Much longer and we'll be fighting with the sun in our faces."

 
; This argument came from Nikostratos, friend and political ally of Nikias, his colleague on the Board of Ten and second-in-command this day. He was twenty years Nikias's junior and marginally less inclined to circumspection.

  But Nikias held fast: "We wait."

  And so Demosthenes watched from a grassy hilltop as the army of Brasidas formed up in orderly ranks. He watched the mass in particular for the sight of a crown of long blond hair, but he could no more pick that out over such a great distance than he could the red horsehair plume of Brasidas himself.

  Late in the morning a rider arrived, a scout of the prodromoi, the light cavalry, bearing dire news. A Theban army thousands strong was on the march south into Attica in support of Brasidas. Even if its full mass of footsoldiers did not arrive in time for the start of battle, their much-feared cavalry surely would.

  Nikias received the news stoically before instructing his junior strategos and band of gathered aides to send more of the fresh arrivals north to strengthen the right wing, where the Thebans were liable to strike. Then he said to Demosthenes, "Take the cavalry north and guard against the Theban horse. If Alkibiades and your witch have not launched their attack yet on the siege engines, cancel it and take them with you."

  "But that is–" Demosthenes cut short his protest. It was not his place to second-guess. And anyway, Nikias was right: the Thebans rolling up the Athenian right wing constituted a far more immediate danger than the lumbering siege engines. And so he conceded, "Aye."

  It was not long after news of the Thebans arrived that the mechanamai made their appearance on the western horizon. There were three of them pulled by teams of oxen, and their canvas shrouds had been removed, surely not because their use was imminent but rather because the Spartans had learned the hard lesson that the shrouds were flammable. The katapeltai each comprised a simple frame from which extended a tall, stripped tree trunk, tapered and topped with a sling. Only a handful of Athenians present knew that a massive projectile could be placed in the sling and hurled over great distances. The behemoth's certain target was the walls of Athens, and they could breach them with one well-placed blow.