Athenian Steel (Book I of the The Hellennium)

by P. K. Lentz

  There next appeared at the head of Brasidas's horde a small cluster of spearless hoplites bearing the lambda blazon on their shields. They broke off from the assembling force and made their way slowly toward the Athenian lines. When they drew near enough and came to a halt, the identity of the man at the body's head became clear.

  Brasidas wore no crimson plume but rather just a simple pilos-style helmet like any of his men. He raised overhead a leafy herald's wand and cried out, "I would address Demosthenes!"

  Nikias looked nonplussed. It was Nikostratos who stepped to the front of the hilltop and called back, "It is Nikias who commands this army!"

  A wind blowing in from the nearby coast kept the Spartiate's flowing mane of black hair in constant motion. The same wind bore up the hill his bark of laughter.

  "I doubt that old man commands his bowels!" When his fellow Spartans had finished an uncharacteristic chuckle, Brasidas resumed, "You Athenians love to talk before you fight, do you not? Well, here is a Spartan willing to do the same, but only with Demosthenes!"

  Immediately, tens of pairs of puzzled, wary Athenian eyes turned to Demosthenes. He had avoided a face-to-face encounter with this man who so despised him once, after the jailbreak, but today there would be no avoiding it. Not even if it was a trap, which seemed as likely as not to be the case.

  Demosthenes stepped to the fore and tugged off and discarded his helmet of plain bronze, revealing himself. The summer breeze cooled a scalp matted with sweat-soaked, sand-colored locks. He was already unarmed, for his long cavalry sword was sheathed on the flank of Akmos, who snorted and churned the soil with his hooves some yards back, behind the crest of the hill which hosted the Athenian commanders. At an even pace, Demosthenes traversed the wide space between the Athenian line and Brasidas's Spartiates. Such a maelstrom of thoughts swirled in his head that he could scarcely even spare one to wonder if his deceptively confident march downhill was to end in his death.

  He came to stand three spear lengths from Brasidas, who stepped out from among his comrades, wielding his herald's wand like it was the club of some thug out spreading fear in the streets. The staff rose and fell, striking the palm of his other, empty hand.

  "Much as I would prefer to just get on with honest slaughter," he said, "there is another conflict which must be fought out first. Where is the bitch who wins your battles for you, coward?"

  "Where is yours?" Demosthenes came back. It was a feeble response, perhaps worse than none at all, but it was out of his mouth before he could stop it.

  Brasidas ignored him. "If she fails to show in a quarter-hour, Eris will turn her attention instead to that sad, motley wall of shields behind you. You know there can only be one result. If she is denied her fair fight, then when Athens is ours, it will be put to fire and sword, no woman or child spared from slavery."

  "This woman is no goddess, Brasidas!" Demosthenes cried back. "Not Eris! Her name is Eden, and all she wants is–"

  "–the Wormwhore's head. Yes, I know. I am giving it to her, and if Eris in turn wishes to help Sparta set Hellas free from the yoke of Athenian tyranny a generation early, I shall not refuse." He shrugged. "I hope she shows. We Equals always prefer a fair fight to one-sided butchery."

  With that pronouncement, Brasidas whirled and rejoined his comrades, who likewise turned and headed back down the slope with him toward the dark mass of Spartans and their Peloponnesian allies. Demosthenes returned to his lines, too, in no hurry in spite of the short deadline just set. There was little he could do but hope that wherever she was now in these hills, Thalassia with her superhuman ears had heard the challenge and would hasten back in time to meet it.

  He walked up the hill and rejoined Nikias and the others.

  "What did he want?" Nikias demanded. His justifiable bitterness at having his authority usurped was well disguised, but not absent.

  "Matters of witchery," Demosthenes reported, and left it there. What was the point of explaining to him at length the details of an arrangement entirely outside of his understanding and control?

  A scowling Nikias grudgingly accepted the answer and resumed discussion with his war council. Watching the distant enemy host assemble, Demosthenes paid them little heed.

  A lone horseman caught his eye. Typically, the Spartans brought little cavalry to war (the Thebans, it had turned out, were providing it today) so any rider would have stood out among them; but this one was even more conspicuous for being on its own, far from any mounted formation. It was moving, too, at full gallop, on a straight line oblique to the two armies, in the direction of the Athenian force.

  His eyes tracked the rider for half a minute or so before they caught the glint of a golden mane. Eden's left arm was outstretched, and in its hand was the same double-curved bow she had put to deadly use on the cliffs near Skiron's road. Demosthenes drew a breath with which to shout warning, but the words were stillborn, drowned out by other men's cries of shock and alarm. He turned and saw the generals' entourage in chaos, bright red blood covering someone's hands.

  His eye found Nikias. Eden's arrow had struck the old man's throat and bored right on through to emerge under the rear rim of his bronze helmet. The customary dignity and composure with which Nikias always held himself fled him now, and his limbs flailed wildly. Dumbstruck colleagues scrambled to restrain him and keep him upright, but his fate was clear. By the time he had slipped from Nikostratos' arms to bend over double, head striking the earth, the general in charge of Attica's defense was dead, his long life cut short by the woman the Spartans wrongly called Eris, Slayer of the Brave.

  Even as Nikias fell from his friend's grasp and his shade slipped the bounds of his body, Demosthenes was running for Nikostratos. He collided with the junior general bodily in a clash of bronze and iron and dragged him to the ground so close to the fresh corpse that the fletched end of the stubby arrow jutting from Nikias's throat scraped Demosthenes' arm as they landed.

  Just in time–a second arrow cut the air above their heads and descended past them to clip the heads off blades of tall grass and light harmlessly in the soil behind the hill.

  With tens of witnesses, half of them already crying out the news of Nikias's death, there was no way to stop word spreading up and down the lines: the gods were with Sparta today.

  V. ELEUSIS 4. Breach

  Like most Spartiates, and anyone the gods had blessed with an obol's worth of sense, Styphon had no love for the sea. Yet here he was, not only sailing it but sailing it in a vessel which lacked oars and had been designed by a witch who slew men for sport.

  The trireme had had its bronze ram removed, and its two sails were triangular, each shaped like a half-delta. The sails' complicated rigging was a mystery to Styphon, but luckily the ships' crew of mothakes—the bastard sons of Equals not entitled to full citizenship—had been training on them in secrecy in the Lakonian Gulf since spring. Somehow, by a method the sailors presumably understood, the delta-sails allowed the vessel to turn and travel in any direction, even into the wind. What happened when there was no wind at all, and no oars to pull, Styphon did not want to find out. The sailors' skills were adequate, it seemed, as were those of the shipwrights, for the new-style ships had been at sea two days without incident on this, their maiden voyage.

  Styphon's ship was named Potnia, Venerable, and her twelve sister ships dotted the waves around him, cutting the wind and water at greater speed than any that had sailed before them. Each hull, relieved of its need for a hundred and seventy rowers, now could carry eighty hoplites and all their gear, three times the usual capacity. Currently each held a conservative sixty, which translated to plenty of elbow room for the men, greater speed for the fleet, and fewer lives at risk should one or more of the experimental ships wind up on the sea floor.

  The destination of the fleet and its force of eight hundred came into sight past the looming, dark bulk of the isle of Aegina: Piraeus, the port of Athens. But between the fleet and landfall lay an obstacle: triremes of the Athenian harbo
r patrol, their square sails twisting this way and that in the effort to change course and intercept, as from their decks came the shouts of crewmen driven to near-panic by the sudden appearance of a fleet unlike any they had seen. Their efforts would be for naught, though, just as had been the case already for the lone Athenian sentry ship already left in the Spartan fleet's wake. That ship's crew, on learning they could not possibly hope to outrun or outmaneuver this new threat, had pulled down their sails and thrown masts overboard to give chase under oar. Athenian rowers were supreme in all the seafaring world, but soon enough the piper's shrill rhythm had faded and the pursuing ship had shrunk into a black dot on the southern horizon.

  The five Athenian patrol vessels ahead had no more luck, though they did their level best to put themselves in the path of the oncoming fleet. One ship even hurriedly furled its sail, dropped its oars and tried in vain to reach ramming speed with masts still in place. But the Athenian trierarchs, one and all, were unready for the speed and agility of which their stripped-down cousins were capable. The thirteen ships with lambda pennants fluttering on their prows ran the gauntlet with ease, and the defenders were left behind, undamaged but in a state of chaos and bitter confusion. The foremost sailors of the age, Athenians, whose skills had built them a maritime empire, had been foiled within sight of Attica by a land-loving enemy whose navy they were fond of mocking.

  No more. Now, the well-armed Equals who passed the Athenians by as if they were standing still were the ones doing the mocking, an activity which they undertook with voices triumphantly raised, and in some cases backsides exposed. Styphon took no measures to rein in such juvenile displays on his own ship or any of the others. An admiral, Knimos, commanded this fleet, but once land was made, another was to take charge. A man who six months prior had stood in disgrace, on the verge of being branded a trembler, stripped of his property and his rights as an Equal. In the Athenian jail, Brasidas had called him dog; now he was called lieutenant and had been entrusted with a task on which the outcome of a war may well depend.

  Styphon, son of Pharax, would lead this attack.

  The Spartan fleet sailed at speed past the squat guard towers flanking the harbor entrance of Pireaus, passing under thick volleys of spindles that managed to take no lives. It sailed across the quiet harbor and landed on the beach where the dry, empty hulls of the Athenian navy sat forlorn on their props and in ship-sheds, tinder for Spartan torches, were that the attackers' intention today; but the hoplites who spilled over the rails of the thirteen experimental ships into the surf and mounted the beach did not stop to burn. No, they only hacked down the few resisters they met and raced up shore into the virtually undefended harbor town.

  No orders were needed, and none given. Styphon entered into Piraeus riding a wave of slashing spears and unneeded lambda-blazoned shields, while behind him, on the beach, the oarless ships put back to sea, and a small team of Equals set to their specially appointed task of collecting the masts from the beached Athenian ships. The townsfolk, already alerted to the danger by a shrill trumpet, screamed and ran from their homes to flee in the direction of Athens. A few unlucky ones were cut down as they ran, but the invaders gave no attention to slaughter. Before long, the inhabitants of white-washed Piraeus with its long, straight avenues, learned that hiding in their homes was the safest course, and they did just that, for the tide of crimson and iron that had surged out of the Saronic Gulf this day had no interest in seizing the port. Their black eyes were on a much grander prize, toward which they moved relentlessly.

  A band of Athenian bowmen appeared on a rooftop firing straight down, and three or four Equals clattered dead or hurt onto the paving stones. A squad was sent up the stairs in pursuit, and the archers scattered and fled.

  This was the heaviest the fighting got. In no time, and with little blood shed on either side, Styphon's troops reached their destination, the northeast wall of Piraeus, and there they were stopped cold by the heavy timber gates blocking the long, straight road flanked by the Long Walls which connected city to harbor.

  Several of the small clusters of residents running ahead of the invasion force, desperate to escape, had slipped through those gates as the defenders were slamming them shut, but other refugees, now trapped in swiftly-conquered Piraeus, had to veer left or right, screaming children in tow, to seek shelter within the port. Fortunately for them, the invaders deemed them unworthy of notice. Instead, Styphon's hoplites secured the gate and waited. They waited some minutes, until thirty men arrived from the beach carrying six smooth Athenian trireme masts on their shoulders. Once at the gate, the men set the masts down on the paved street and began bundling them like a sheaf of javelins, using thick ropes brought especially for the purpose. Then they attached sets of chains at even intervals along the huge bundle's length and placed on the end which faced the gate another object borne on the ships from Sparta: a convex bronze drum with a spike at its center and a hollow wide enough in diameter to fit over the six masts. They hammered the drum into place, secured it with nails, then heaved the chains over the leather-clad shoulders of the ten stoutest Equals present and brought the completed battering ram forward to the gate.

  In drills in Sparta, men armed with such a ram had penetrated wooden walls the thickness of a typical city gate in seven blows. Piraeus's gate lasted six. The first three gave the double doors a bone-jarring rattle. The fourth and fifth created a crack and made it wider; and the sixth blow,produced a man-sized hole in the wood through which were visible the backs of dozens of stupefied Athenian defenders who now set to fresh flight. Equals poured through the breach unopposed and swung the gates wide to speed the passage of the rest.

  The bastions lining the Long Walls were meant to allow defenders to fire missiles outward, but they could almost as easily direct fire within. "Shields!" Styphon cried, but the Equals were already assembling into a tortoise-like formation. The centermost troops took turns bearing the weight of the battering ram, which would be needed again when they reached Athens, held their shields overhead while those on the edges kept them angled out. A hard rain sounded on the barrier, a constant thump-thump of iron heads striking hidebound wood and either embedding there or clattering onto the paved street. As it became clear the barrages posed little threat, Styphon ordered the formation's speed increased, and the thunder of missiles pounding nearly eight hundred bowl-shaped shields rose briefly before tapering off again as they passed each bastion.

  An hour into the march, Equals at the fore reported the Athenians in their path throwing up a hasty barricade which it seemed they then meant to set aflame. A force had been picked from among the Spartans to deal with just such an eventuality, and Styphon wasted no time calling it to action. He led the twenty men forward himself, all at a full run, screaming, shields high, spears forward. Faced with that sight, the Athenians scattered like ants, deserting their hasty barricade of wagons and market stalls, throwing their lit torches behind them in the hope the tinder would catch.

  It did not, and twenty of Greece's most feared warriors—nineteen after one Equal was laid low by a spindle in the back—became a work crew, using shields as ploughs to shove aside debris meant to block their path to victory. The blockade failed in its purpose, hardly even proving a delay. The Equals' steady progress up the broad, deserted street brought them soon to the end of the Long Walls, to the inner cross-wall from which hung, on two stone pylons, the gates of Athens herself, taller and sturdier than those of Piraeus.

  Beneath a shelter of shields, the ram was brought forward and its bronze spike, blunted by its earlier use, was set against the bronze-clad timbers on the small gap where the twin doors met. Three men drew the ram back from behind, the ten wielders set themselves and then, on cue, they heaved. The full weight of six ship's masts struck the doors, which rattled on their hinges but refused to yield. For the second and third attempts, a dozen more men lent their shoulders and arms to hammering the weapon home. The gates of Athens shook again, and a dent appeared in their bro
nze edging, where the ram's spike forced the doors apart just slightly. Letting loose a great bellow with each heave, the determined sons of Sparta drove the ram five more times into that same spot and achieved at last a break in the bronze, a splintered hole in the wood.

  The achievement came at a cost: at least ten of their number slain in the constant hail of white-fletched arrows sent down from atop the sheer walls that towered above them on three sides. But whenever an Equal fell, those around him merely closed the gap in their tight formation, providing first and foremost unbroken cover to those engaged in the back-breaking labor of swinging the great ram.

  At last, with a thunderous boom which must have shaken Attica, and a rousing cheer for which the people of Lakedaimon had waited the better part of a decade, the doors of Athens gave way. Its breakers did not waste much breath on celebration, for there yet was work to be done. The city's inanimate wall lay open, but ten paces beyond, visible through the small hole, stood a second wall of spears and set shield-arms yet to be breached. These could not be the cream of the Athenian hoplite class, and their numbers could not have been great, for the bulk of Attica's forces, assuming all had gone to plan, were currently arrayed against Brasidas on the Megarian frontier. Assumption, of course, was the enemy of victory (as the once-contemptuous Athenian navy had learned this day), but events thus far suggested no hitches in the smooth execution of Brasidas's strategy.

  The two forces glared at one another through the gap in the door, which after three more crushing blows of the ram became large enough for perhaps four fighters to pass if they packed tight. Neither side wished to be the first to approach, but the defenders held the advantage in that regard, for this was their city and time would only swell their ranks. Doubtless they would pounce the moment four or fewer Equals dared become the first to pass through the breach. All the while the rain of arrows continued, raising a curse here, a groan there. Taking stock of their position and the assets at hand, Styphon devised a plan and conveyed it, over the patter of arrow on shield, to a half dozen men around him, who conveyed it to a dozen more, and within minutes all was ready.