by P. K. Lentz
At the threshold, one of the women hesitated, and only crossed over in halting steps when tugged across by her companion. If she was not a real Athenian wife or widow, this hetaira had truly inhabited her role.
The expansive hearth chamber far exceeded anything to be found in Sparta. Its tables were polished, its couches gilded, its pillows embroidered, and its every wall covered with frescoes depicting pastoral scenes of men, women, and beasts. Only two tools should be used to build a house, Styphon's late father Pharax had been fond of saying, quoting one of the ancient kings, An ax and a saw. That king would have spat in disgust at the army of laborers and implements it must have taken to construct even the humble dwellings Styphon had yet seen in Athens, never mind an aristocrat's home such as this. As such, Brasidas's quartering of Agis in such a place might have been intended as an insult to the king's manhood. That Agis had not objected suggested he failed to see it as such.
In a far corner of the megaron, some local slave boy tended the hearth. Beside it, Agis's two remaining bodyguards sat scowling; one had his left arm bound up tightly in linens, and the other's lip was fat and purple, among other minor cuts peppering his flesh. On the floor elsewhere, in the dancing shadows cast by oil lamps, the Minoan seer Phaistos sat hunched with staff laid over crossed legs. Under the fold of his black cowl, a swelling around one eye was barely visible.
Presently Agis arrived from the back rooms clad in a plain, brilliant white chiton, his long hair braided. Shutting the door, he glanced at the two women and raised a brow. “I halfway thought you'd show up with nothing but excuses,” he said. “And I would not have blamed you. But you came through! Good man!” Reaching him, he gave Styphon's arm a congratulatory slap.
The king then laid the same hand on the cloaked shoulder of one of the women, who flinched. He drew back his hand, pointed with it and said gently to both females, “Go to that writing desk. Record the names and demes of your husbands, and indicate whether or not they live. If you satisfy tonight, you shall get the promised reward.”
Perhaps taking cold comfort in this early sign that the bargain would be honored and their virtue not given away freely, the two went unhesitatingly to do as instructed. While they were thus occupied, Agis drew Styphon so close that their foreheads nearly touched.
“I presume Brasidas told you what occurred,” the king said quietly.
Styphon wanted no part in talk of the incident. He gave the most expedient answer, which happened to be the truth. “Yes, sire.”
“I'll assume his account was accurate. My men went to seize Eris's corpse and obliterate it. Phaistos tells me its the only way to be sure that Sparta is permanently rid of the witch.”
Whether he got his information from arcane lore, his imagination or, less likely, actual knowledge of these women from another world, the seer was right, Styphon knew. But he volunteered nothing of that.
Agis anyway expected no reply. He went on, “I apologize if you took any blame. Men such as you, fiercely loyal and desiring no part in politics, are the backbone of our state. Brasidas is right to put the faith in you that he does. Has he told you you shall accompany me to Dekelea?” Styphon nodded affirmative. “I look forward to having you by my side in battle.”
“Thank you, sire.” Styphon's gratitude was real; it was hard not to feel grateful for such a compliment from a king, even when the intent was surely to manipulate.
“Do you know why I consented to let Brasidas lead the invasion of Attica in my place?” Agis asked.
Styphon did not dare answer, not least because according to his understanding, Agis had not consented at all, but been ordered by the annually elected ephors of Sparta to stand down.
“Of course you do not know. Why would you?” Agis went on. “When the ephors voted three to five to give the invasion to Brasidas, the old men of the Gerousia, defenders of tradition, convinced me not to challenge the verdict. They had such little faith in Brasidas and his toys that they figured he would fail and we could get him exiled afterward, if not with the current batch of ephors, then with whatever five are chosen next year.”
Agis scoffed and waved his iron-ringed hand. “But now that Brasidas has given us Athens, he's more popular than ever. The old … Bah! It's the old men who stand discredited! They managed to persuade the ephors not to renew Brasidas's forty-day command of the invasion force, at least, so that I might be the one to fight this, the war's final battle. But trust me, our internal war not over, not with the ephors still on the side of Brasidas and his reforms.” The king accompanied his last words with a sneer, then leveled Styphon a dark look. “The coming year will determine our city's future, Styphon. Every Equal may be called upon to choose sides.”
Stark warning given, Agis blew a cleansing breath, as if to banish matters of state from his body. He turned a fresh eye toward the women at the writing desk.
“It is an unpardonable shame to ask a brother to deliver a feast and then eat it alone,” he said. “You will join me tonight?”
While Styphon pursed his lips and swallowed to delay his answer, Agis's arm snaked around his neck.
“You have a wife you aim to stay loyal to?” the king asked, sensing his hesitation.
“No, sire,” Styphon answered. “She passed long ago.”
“I love my wife,” Agis said without pausing for the condolences for which Equals had little use. “I love fucking my wife. But Spartan women...” His nose wrinkled. “There is nothing truly soft about them. They are all sharp angles. And slaves are, well, slaves. Hardly satisfying.”
Finished writing, the women looked anxiously over from the desk.
Agis's fingers pressed firmly into Styphon's neck. “You'll join me,” he said. It was now more order than invitation. “And thank me later.”
Releasing Styphon, the king advanced on the Athenians and offered to take their cloaks, which they removed and folded awkwardly before handing them over. Underneath, each wore a long chiton of supple, well-pleated linen, bound under the breasts (one pair ample, the other smaller) with a gilded cord. Unlike a Spartan woman's skirt, which was slit up the sides to facilitate sport, the hems fell to these more sedentary creatures' ankles, concealing their legs entirely.
Tossing their cloaks aside, Agis beckoned the women toward the back rooms. With one of Agis's hands set gently on each of their backs, they went, and Styphon followed. He caught a bitter look from at least one of Agis's guards, but then, any Equal who had had his shield arm bruised or broken in a fight with fellow Equals was bound to be in a bitter mood by day's end.
The windowless chamber behind Nikias's megaron was heavily curtained in shades of green, such that no trace of plaster showed. On the floor was a mosaic showing an olive tree wreathed with the leaves and fruit of the same. Soft couches lined the walls, and between them stood decorative glazed vases, the smallest of which stood half a man's height. The whole affair, which struck Styphon as modest by Athenian aristocratic standards, was dimly lit by silver wall-mounted braziers shaped like iris blossoms.
By one of the couches stood a krater of dark wine and set of silver drinking cups. Agis ladled out two cups and held them toward the women, who accepted with downcast eyes but refrained as yet from drinking.
“You both look simply stunning,” the king said to them when he had ladled two more cups and handed one to Styphon.
Agis drank, and the rest took their cue from him, for different reasons: Styphon because Agis was king, the women perhaps because they had not wanted to seem eager. They were eager, though. That much was clear by the speed with which the contents vanished, as if they were intent on drowning in advance, in a wine-dark sea, their memories of this night. It set Styphon to wondering once more about the women's origins, but he washed his curiosity away the same way that pair hoped to their inhibitions.
This drink, unlike that at the mess, he noted, was diluted more to the Spartan taste, which was to say barely. If Athenian women drank wine (and Styphon could not imagine such miserable creatures di
d not) they would not be accustomed to it at this strength.
Sipping from his cup, Agis raised a hand to touch the oiled, elaborate curls of the woman nearest him. She managed not to flinch, if just. Agis, with gentle voice and soothing smile, elicited both their names. He repeated each and commented on their pleasing sounds, matched by their owners' shapes. He poured them more wine and made one-sided conversation (if the girls were Aspasia's hetairae, they must have worked hard to suppress their certain talent for the latter).
Styphon said nothing, or gave minimal response when forced to by Agis.
When the women were on their second cups, Agis led them to a couch, where they reclined with the men flanking them on the floor. There they drank a third cup of the same courage which had helped their inferior men face a deadlier kind of Spartan spear, and they shielded themselves from more of Agis's stabs at conversation.
At length, with a sigh, the king remarked to Styphon, “I had hoped to make headway tonight by some method other than the same old frontal assault. But then I suppose some strategies see frequent use for a reason.”
Taking the wine cup from the woman nearest him—was her name Epione?—whichever was the smaller-breasted one—Agis rose and used her now-empty hand to bring her to her expensively-clad feet. He raised the skirt of his chiton, and her empty, pale-skinned hand soon was filled again: with the stiffening cock of the twentieth Eurypontid king of Sparta.
She averted her gaze and kept her slender fingers in place, working them along the shaft under their own impulse when the king removed his guiding hand. Her eyes she kept firmly averted, jaw set tight with unpainted lips a bloodless line. The idle thought flashed through Styphon's mind that a professional probably would have yielded to an instinct to please her client at this stage by giggling or giving some other sign of enjoyment.
“Styphon,” Agis said while he was pleasured, “do you now know it is bad form to remain at ease while your king rises?”
As Styphon made to climb to his feet, the king laughed. “You miss my meaning!”
Leaning over, Agis drew the second Athenian from the couch and compelled her to stand before Styphon and mirror the act of her countrywoman. Thence, on Agis's direction, the males occupied the couch while the Athenian wives went to their knees and opened, with reluctance, heretofore closed lips.
They were not particularly skilled, or they hid it if they were. Agis hummed faintly in satisfaction then looked to Styphon and asked casually, “So many widows left horny by the war, and you never thought to remarry?”
“No,” Styphon answered. He had not spoken to a soul about such things in an age, not out of any sense of privacy, for all Spartiates' private lives were matters of state. Simply, no one had asked.
“You owe Sparta a son,” Agis said. He toyed with the copious dark curls piled on the head that bobbed in his lap. “To the back of your throat, darling, the back,” he said to the mass of hair, pushing on it with a hand until a gagging sound resulted. “When you return home,” he continued to Styphon, “I shall have you meet a cousin of mine, Hippolyta. Tight and wet as they come, with just the right amount of fire in her. Who knows what may result?”
Evening wore into night, with plenty of wine and seed spilled down throats and elsewhere. A fair amount of the latter was Styphon's, though he did not share with his king the particular mania which left Agis insistent that his partner (and hence both women, since the pairs were hardly fixed) remain fully clad in their un-Spartan finery and dangling silver which caused her to jangle with each thrust. But the result was in Styphon's favor, for he had scant desire to see the two forced to undress, and in the females' favor, too, for they at least retained some shred of modesty while their virtue was taken.
Taken, yes, for Styphon met the women's glazed eyes enough times while taking it to leave him confident what would be the amount of Aspasia's bill.
* * *
6. Sleeper in Chains
23 days after the fall of Athens (May 423 BCE)
In the dark hole in the woods where he lived like an animal, the one-time general of a conquered city was dragged from nightmare-ridden sleep by the clink of metal. He knew of an instant what it meant. It was the sound he had waited for all these nights.
At last, it moved.
Pushing himself upright to what extent he could in the tiny cave he called home, he kicked away the brush that concealed the opening, letting in just enough pre-dawn light by which to see the whitish, human-sized lump which was the corpse of Athens' champion and destroyer, butchered on the plain of Eleusis by its star-born enemy Eden, whom the Spartans called Eris. In the days since, the body had exuded a white, pus-like fluid which hardened to form a flaky, irregular, semi-translucent chrysalis under which, day by day, its gruesome wounds healed.
This day, it would appear, the healing was complete.
The sound came again, the gentle clinking of iron, and this time he saw the accompanying stir of movement in the chain-bound chrysalis. Then again it stirred, the creature's limbs appearing to meet the resistance of its encircling chains. Then it fell still, and Demosthenes crawled closer, reaching out to begin clawing away the flaky white substance over its face.
Before he reached it, there was a sudden, jerkier movement, a louder, sharper sound—and the chain snapped. Demosthenes raised an arm too late to prevent its end grazing his cheek, stinging and perhaps cutting the flesh. He fell backward, but only a few inches before his shoulders pressed against damp, cold moss, and he rubbed the stricken cheek whilst before him the once-dead form rose and twisted, its white second-skin sloughing off in sheets. A hand came up, tearing the stuff from its head, and in the bleak light of a ruined world, Demosthenes beheld again the living face of the inhuman thing with whose fate his own was now irrevocably entwined.
Jenna Ismail Cordeiro had been its name once, when it was born a human on some distant heavenly body far-off in one of many futures.
Geneva it had become on entering the service of the strange demi-god Magdalen, its body and perhaps its soul remade to meddle in the affairs of countless worlds, some of them Earth, a living weapon wielded by its dark mistress.
Geneva had betrayed that mistress—twice—including in coming here, to his world, where it had taken the name which Demosthenes and others knew, the name which meant a thing from the sea, because it had crashed there and washed ashore.
He looked into the living, wintry eyes of Thalassia, and they looked back at him with a seeming lack of recognition. The face in which they were set was hard of expression, with tendrils of dark, damp hair matted to its smooth, new skin, which was of Persian tones.
“It's me,” Demosthenes said in a hoarse whisper. “Demosthenes. Do you remember?”
Its partly crusted lips did not crack to speak. It lifted a hand, and resting in its palm was a length of iron chain, which it looked down to regard briefly before its body fell forward, as if in exhaustion, onto Demosthenes. He caught it, its weight pushing him backward against the curved wall of his cave so that he looked upward into the creature's so-human face, just inches from his.
“Do you remember me?” Demosthenes asked again.
The wintry eyes, which had shut, now reopened, and so too did its mouth open.
“What the...” it began.
It stopped. Thalassia retched, and what passed next between them was not words. From between its lips, spewing onto the lower half of Demosthenes' bearded face and filling his mouth before he clamped it shut, came a warm and copious wave of the white, pus-like substance which had formed her chrysalis. In revulsion, spitting what tasted like thick, vinegared milk, he averted his face even as a second wave of it coated his tightly shut eyes.
Thankfully, that was the final deluge, but sputtering Thalassia continued to spray droplets of it over him with no apparent thought given to directing it elsewhere. Keeping eyes shut, forcing all he could of the viscous fluid from his mouth, Demosthenes waited several moments until silence reigned and Thalassia's head had sunk onto hi
s shoulder. Its form was naked, its linen chiton evidently having been dissolved or absorbed. The Amazonian armor Thalassia had worn in battle he had left behind in Dekelea as flight-slowing weight.
Wiping his face with a palm and spitting more forcefully, he shifted Thalassia into his lap so he might look down upon its face. The hard expression was gone, replaced by weariness.
“What do you remember?” he asked eagerly, the liquid assault having done nothing to dispel his feelings in this long anticipated moment. It was not happiness, not nearly, but it was something bright, when for so long he had felt nothing but grief and rage.
It drew a ragged breath and answered: “Of course... I f-fucking remember you. Idiot. I died for you. For... Athens.” Metallic clinking drew Demosthenes' gaze to Thalassia's hand. “Chains?” she said in wonder. “Did you... really think...” It did not finish, but said instead, “Idiot. They don't... make 'em here... to hold me.”
“It was a message,” Demosthenes said. “Not to leave if you awoke while I was away.”
Thalassia scoffed. “I know when you're... lying, remember? Anyway, you're literate, and I invented the fucking pen, so... next time, leave a note.” It blew a tired breath and scowled. “Maybe I don't know you... You look like a goat.” Its eyes took in the cramped, dimly lit cave. “Where are we? Shit... we didn't win.”
Demosthenes stared emptily at her, a shade of the man he once had been.
“No,” he said. “No, we did not.”
The human-like being shut its eyes, tightened its lips, stilled its breath. It asked, as one who does not wish to hear the answer, “Laonome?”
The empty shade of a general stared yet more, giving no reply.