Athenian Steel (Book I of the The Hellennium)

by P. K. Lentz

  The ram, which had been discarded on the ground, was hoisted again, and this time Styphon was among those who set down their spears and slung its supporting chains over their shoulders. But instead of letting the ram swing free, the wielders hugged it close, and on the count of three, holding shields high, they charged with it through the breach.

  The Athenians, as expected, pounced with thrusting spears. The man ahead of Styphon took a blade to the leg and fell, but the rest took up his share of the load and pressed on with undiminished momentum. The Athenians could do nothing to prevent the bronze-crowned bundle of masts from entering their city at an acute angle to the doors. Once it was inside, the holders turned it parallel, using it as a barricade behind which the remainder of the invading host could spill through.

  Five of those who had held the ram were slain, but not for nothing. By the time the survivors slipped off the supporting chains, letting the bundled masts crush their comrade's corpses, and drew their short swords, a foothold inside the city was achieved. It would not be yielded. Within the breached city walls, Spartan warriors fought in a mass that swelled like a pool of crimson blood flowing from a freshly opened wound. An Equal in the rear ranks which had yet to join the battle raised a war chant of Tyrtaios, and those around him lent their voices, so the heart-raising sound competed with the insistent shriek of the Athenians' trumpeted alarm.

  Well before the last of the seven hundred plus Spartiates had set foot in the city, the defenders broke and fled. Styphon ordered his men not to pursue, but regroup instead by the broken gates. He looked down and made a rough count of fallen Spartan shields: ten, give or take, but there would be time for tallying corpses later. Just ahead and to the right of the broad, paved avenue before them stood the hillside theater called the Pnyx, the seat of Athens's beloved democracy and a place where, by all accounts, a dizzying array of demagogues were wont to make flowery speeches in praise of themselves.

  While the ranks were mustering behind him in even rows, Styphon picked out twelve men, told them to gather wood and anything else that could be used as kindling, and he pointed at the Pnyx.

  "Burn it," he ordered.

  V. ELEUSIS 5. Clash of the Star-Born

  "Our democracy is our greatest strength!" Nikostratos cried out over a sea of gently bobbing shields, the colorful menagerie of gorgons and lions and lizards that was the Athenian center. Behind the general, closely packed, facing the enemy and moving as he moved, were twelve hoplites with shields held high in a barrier against further attempts at assassination from afar. Demosthenes stood watching among the cadre of aides who were still in shock at the death of Nikias.

  "We do not depend, as other cities do," Nikostratos exhorted, "on the skill and virtue of one man, or even thirty, to lead us to victory. If one Athenian falls, strategos or not, another is ever ready to step into his place. Nikias served this city all his life, and gave her more than most, and we shall sorely miss him, but the demos lives on, and shall live on! Do not let this shameful display of cowardice on the part of our enemy make you think for a moment otherwise!

  "This is Attica!" Nikostratos thrust an arm at the occupied Megarian frontier. "And those blood-drinking vultures have no business being here!" He raised his hand skyward in a fist, and the ranks of hoplites raised a warlike roar in which Demosthenes could not bring himself to participate.

  The quarter-hour allotted by Brasidas had expired, and more time besides, with no sign of Thalassia. The likely explanation seemed that she was unaware of the deadline, but Demosthenes could not help but let another, less innocuous possibility enter his mind.

  Perhaps Eden, who had known Geneva far longer than he, was right about her. Perhaps a habitual traitor had decided, after all, to save her own perfect skin.

  He could not quite bring himself to fully believe that. She would come.

  The roar of the Athenian troops subsided rather too abruptly and became a murmur. Someone pointed out into the space between the two armies, and Demosthenes turned to follow the gesture to spy a pair of riders making its way over the field of swaying grass into Attica at a gallop. Without hesitation they came, and even before their identities became easily knowable by sight, Demosthenes knew them. Brasidas carried his shield and the herald's wand which he imagined, rightly or wrongly, rendered him inviolable, even after the shameful slaughter of Nikias. Or maybe his confidence came from who it was that rode beside him: Eden, silken blond locks fluttering over a brightly shining corselet that looked to be composed of hundreds of interlocked iron rings.

  Brasidas reined in his mount thirty yards out, at the base of the hill on which the Athenian lines stood. Instead of stopping with him, Eden turned in a wide arc and circled back, never even slowing, as if a boundless energy animated her. Her strange little bow bounced on the flank of her black horse (which she rode well, using stirrups, Demosthenes noticed).

  "Where is your champion?" Brasidas cried up the hill.

  Having not been informed of Brasidas's earlier ultimatum, Nikostratos, of course, had no inkling of what was meant. His aides rushed to his side, and all began speaking at once in hushed tones.

  Demosthenes meanwhile signaled to Straton, the captain of the belly-bowmen, and shared a glance with him that said all was ready. As Chief of Special Weapons, he had decided how the gastraphetes and the fire-pots would be deployed today. He hoped he had chosen well.

  He walked slowly, resignedly, to Nikostratos and said, "Send me."

  The general and his circle of advisers fell silent and stared, first at the speaker, then each other. One man nodded, then others, and then all agreed.

  "Fine," Nikostratos declared. "Once it is made clear to me what we stand to gain or lose."

  "Everything," Demosthenes answered dismissively, then turned his shoulder and headed down the hill with hand on the hilt of his sheathed sword.

  Ahead, Brasidas remained perched atop the horse for which he appeared to have no love, and vice versa, while beyond him Eden slowed her mount and wheeled, halting near the midway point between the two armies. Near the limit for accurate gastraphetes fire, Demosthenes could not help but notice.

  Descending the hill toward smirking Brasidas, he thought of the promise to Laonome he was breaking. It was not yet a year that they had been wed, and here he was putting city and duty first. There was no doubt in his mind she would forgive him the lapse, yet still, a part of him, perhaps the greater part, wished to turn back even now and race home to her embrace.

  Certainly Laonome's welcome would be warmer than that of Brasidas, who chuckled scornfully.

  "Left you, did she?" the Spartiate said. "Come to beg for more time?"

  "I have come to fight for Athens," Demosthenes said plainly. "Call forth your champion."

  Brasidas laughed. "It is not worth her time to dismount. She can put an arrow down your throat from where she is. I am always glad to see my enemies die, but that would just be...disappointing."

  "Then you fight instead," Demosthenes suggested, idly, but not without hope. "On the same terms."

  "Save your breath," Brasidas scoffed. "The duel was her idea. If it were up to me, the shield-walls would have crashed already. So if your sea-wench isn't–"

  Suddenly Brasidas, who had been gazing down from atop his mount, looked up toward the Athenian army's right. Demosthenes twisted his head to follow the gaze, then turned the rest of his body and watched with a mix of awe and relief as a lone horse and rider careened down the slope.

  It was Phaedra, and on her back rode salvation.

  The first sight of Thalassia in her Amazon's armor dragged a short peal of quiet laughter from Demosthenes: the laughter of a condemned man around whose neck the garrote wire has just snapped. Just as to such a man, in that instant, to Demosthenes' mind it scarcely mattered whether the sentence of death was lifted or the gods had only granted him a short reprieve; it was relief all the same.

  While Thalassia slowed to a canter for her descent of the hill, Demosthenes looked over to see
the mounted Spartiate's reaction. Brasidas's look of assurance had faded, and he seemed now to be reconsidering the wisdom of having ventured so far from the protection of his allies, or at any rate from the one ally capable of protecting him from she who approached. But rather than turning tail, he stood his ground. The next few moments would determine whether that decision was to his credit or regret.

  From a distance, Eden on her black charger watched unmoving. Undoubtedly her malevolent, cerulean eyes were tracking her enemy's approach. Who knew what thoughts lay behind them? Eagerness for the kill? Or perhaps under her hatred, as was often the case, flowed a current of fear. This enemy had beaten her once.

  After an eternity, Thalassia reined in Phaedra just short of Brasidas and dismounted. She thrust the horse's reins at Demosthenes and ordered him in steely tones, "Return to the lines." Not once did her pale stare focus on either man present, but rather it stayed fixed in the distance on her fellow star-born, right eye peering through the mourning veil of black lace that was Magdalen's Mark.

  Though he accepted the horse's lead from her, Demosthenes hesitated to do as she asked. Thalassia seemed to be in no mood for words, even what few they had time for, but he felt the need for some. But what were they? How could one do justice to the feelings she inspired? Stirring in his breast were awe, pride, gratitude, and respect, but most of all he felt sadness that this strange, flawed, infuriating being might shortly be sacrificed to the incoherent rage of a blood-crazed beast.

  Thalassia found words long before he did, and they were anything but sentimental.

  "I'm here, Spartan pig-fucker," she spat at Brasidas, without sparing him her gaze. "Bring her."

  It took Brasidas a few beats to answer. "You will fight at the midpoint between our lines." The barely perceptible tremor in his voice said he was acutely aware of what Thalassia was capable of doing to him.

  "If the cunt wants me, she can come and get me."

  Brasidas, burdened with no death wish, showed his disappointment in a typical Spartan scowl. He kicked his horse, turned it to face the Spartan lines and departed through the field of waving grass at a fast trot. Thalassia drew her two short swords, one then the other, and stood with legs parted, the twin blades of gleaming Athenian steel forming an inverted lambda with its apex between her knees, eyes locked on her distant, mounted nemesis.

  Standing behind Thalassia with impatient Phaedra's reins in hand, Demosthenes could not see her pale eyes, only a thick braid and the back of her bronze-studded leather armor. Still perched above her ear was the purple blossom given to her on the Dromos.

  "Get away," she said without turning.

  Yet Demosthenes stood frozen. He wanted to embrace her or at very least say something to express his gratitude, but no words came. Perhaps it was better that way. All he could be to her at this pivotal moment was a distraction.

  Half a battlefield away, Eden began slowly to ride forward.

  "Look, idiot," Thalassia said, her perfect Attic edged with ice. "I am doing this for Red and Laonome, and that only makes sense if you live. So fuck off already!"

  The sound of the names of his loved ones broke whatever enchantment he had been under. Setting his foot in Phaedra's stirrup, Demosthenes mounted, and with one last look down at his city's champion, he kicked the mare to a gallop. At the crest of the hill, where Nikostratos and the rest still stood, he stopped and dismounted. He had expected a flurry of inconvenient questions but was greeted by only a sea of blank faces and mouths hanging partly open.

  Strangely, the battle brewing below did not seem to be the cause of their distraction.

  With one eye on the slow advance across the plain of Sparta's she-daimon, Demosthenes asked of Nikostratos or any of them, "What is wrong?"

  The strategos swallowed hard. "News from Athens."

  During the grave pause which followed, Demosthenes noted the presence of a panting messenger and a sweating horse not far off.

  "A naval assault at Piraeus," Nikostratos said. "Spartans are within the Long Walls."

  The news hit like a hammer blow. When Demosthenes had recovered enough to draw breath, he used it to inquire, "What is to be done?"

  Nikostratos gave no answer, and Demosthenes could not press him for one, because out in the swaying grass of no-man's land, the star-born champions of two cities were about to meet.

  Eden trotted up, halted her black horse and slid gracefully from the saddle some three spear lengths from the place where Thalassia had rooted herself. In the same fluid movement, she produced a short sword from a scabbard at the horse's haunch, a second from her hip, and took a step forward, leaving her mount to wander. Though it was hard to tell from such distance, a smile seemed to haunt her pink lips. More easily discernible was Eden's mark of Magdalen, a network of dark lines covering the upper right quadrant of her face. Thalassia had said no two were alike, but from this vantage they might as well have been.

  Eden spoke some words which, even were they audible, Demosthenes knew no being on earth (but for one other, who slept beneath a mountain) could comprehend.

  Thalassia, evidently, was in no mood for words in any language.

  She attacked.

  From a standstill, Thalassia launched herself panther-like across the few yards separating her from her enemy. She closed the gap in an eyeblink, twin blades rising, but Eden, showing no sign of alarm, dove under the charge, parried one of Thalassia's swords and thrust her own second blade upward, piercing Thalassia's shoulder. The blade punched easily through the armor of Penthesilea to emerge on the other side coated in dark blood, the first of the fight, and it was Thalassia's.

  That blow, which would have ended any contest of men, caused not even a pause in this one. Just as quickly as it had entered, Eden's blade slid free. Thalassia's momentum was barely broken, and in a heartbeat she had answered the wound by reversing her right hand's grip on its sword and bringing the blade down, like a priest's sacrificial dagger, into Eden's hip.

  The two parted, rivers of blood pouring from mortal wounds, but neither showed any sign of pain or inclination to break off the fight. On the contrary, within seconds they were dealing fresh blows. As before, each was able to parry one of her opponent's blades while the other struck home. Thalassia got the better of it this time, if just. She hacked down onto Eden's collarbone and received in exchange only a stab that glanced off her rib cage. But on the side opposite, Thalassia parried not with her sword but with leather-clad forearm: Eden's blade bit straight through the hide and into her flesh, cleaving to the bone.

  They parted, blood-covered like twin sirens freshly slaked on sailors' blood. The pause lasted barely the length of an indrawn breath, and then battle was rejoined. Thalassia went again and again for the collarbone, as if her aim were to hack the blond head from Eden's shoulders. She connected twice, gouging a deep cleft and soaking the flaxen hair in red, but Eden blocked her third stroke and paid her back by running Thalassia through yet again, inches from the navel.

  Demosthenes did not look to either side of him, lest he miss the ending of a fight which plainly could not endure much longer. Thus he could only assume that the rest of the watchers on the hill were as transfixed as he by the spectacle, albeit in rather more confusion. Only Nikias might have understood, and if Nikias watched, it was only his bodiless shade.

  The champions hacked and stabbed and slashed, and more blows landed than were blocked, and the gore spattered across the plain of Eleusis. Blood flowed in torrents until the two combatants could scarcely be told apart, and still they battled on. Each should have been killed ten times over, yet limbs and blades flew on with undiminished fury, delivering mortal blow after mortal blow. The fighters were beautiful, or had been, but there was no grace or beauty in this struggle. It was no dance, but a whirlwind of butchery. Every so often, one or the other woman shrieked, never in pain but only in belligerence, and the sounds were like those that heroes of yore must have heard in their journeys to hell.

  The next few seconds d
id not treat Thalassia well. Each time Demosthenes managed, by a lock of hair, a glimpse of armor, or pattern of wounds, to ascertain for certain which bloodied combatant was which, it was the champion of Athens who was on the defensive. The tide of the swift-flowing red current had turned decisively in Eden's favor.

  Some twenty seconds into the fight, one blade of Thalassia's became lodged in Eden's ribcage–Eden twisted, and the handle was wrenched from Thalassia's grasp. Thalassia began employing her empty left hand as a shield, and in no time that limb became so much meat dangling from her elbow. Thalassia stepped back, back, and back again, toward the Athenian lines–deliberately–and Demosthenes, loath as he was to wrench his eyes away, knew he had to move. He looked to his right to find Straton among the awestruck ranks, and he signaled to him.

  Straton, transfixed as the rest on the impossible battle below, already had his orders, and needed only to be snapped out of his stupor.

  "Straton!" Demosthenes cried sharply at him.

  At the sound of his name, Straton blinked and acknowledged understanding, then set to shoving the bowmen around him and hissing the code word makellon: slaughterhouse.

  Thalassia stood unsteadily on one leg which looked as though a great beast had mauled it, which very nearly was the case. She resorted to grappling with Eden, holding tight to her like a wrestler waiting out the end of a round, only there was no respite to be had in this match, just victory or death. It seemed almost certain now that the latter of these would go to Thalassia. Eden hacked down again and again on her staggered foe, cutting every time. After a mad frenzy of slashing, Thalassia's sword arm flopped into the trampled grass, severed at the shoulder. At the same time, Eden got a foot wrapped around the ankle of Thalassia's mangled leg and tripped her.