Spartan Beast (The Hellennium Book 2)

by P. K. Lentz

  With her fingers clawing not too hard at the skin of his forearm, he brought her to the foot of the sleeping pallet. She had worn a short, loose shift of bright white linen, but now he stripped her of that, the garment coming away easily with the yank of a single tie at the shoulder. Keeping his grip on her hair, he cleared the wadded clothing and blanket from the pallet, revealing a clean white sheet spread over a thin mattress. He forced her down onto that, finally released his grip on her hair, straddled her naked, writhing body and batted away the flailing arms she endeavored to put between them. After a brief struggle, more show than substance, her arms were pinned to the bed. Styphon's own long hair fell down to frame a bride's features twisted in faux defiance even as her body fell still.

  “It is no use fighting,” he said, having no trouble playing the part assigned him. “It will only hurt more.”

  Hippolyta chuffed at him like a trapped beast. It was a fighting sound, but her eyes held invitation. Holding her wrists together over her head in one hand, Styphon employed the other to forcibly part clamped thighs. They slipped out of his grasp a few times, but eventually he caught her, she yielded, and his groin settled against hers. A few flicks of his hand pushed his chiton clear and set their parts in alignment, making all ready. Only a thrust was needed now to couple them in the one manner they had not yet enjoyed, for she had preserved it through twenty-four years until this, her wedding night—not so much to honor any goddess or moral code as to prevent her becoming a mother before her time.

  Still restraining her, Styphon pushed his way inside. The first stroke met with resistance, but in drawing back and renewing the assault twice more, he broke through into a slick, warm haven. Hippolyta yanked her hands free, and they flew to his back, clawing. She held her breath. Pretended defiance faded from her face, and replacing it was genuine uncertainty, as if she had yet to decide whether or not the new sensation was a welcome one.

  Styphon stayed still inside of her, holding her, awaiting the verdict. She gave it to him with a hand at the back of his head, pulling his face down into a kiss.

  “Fuck me,” she breathed into his ear, and her new husband complied.

  * * *

  They finished, or Styphon did at any rate, but they could not linger. This was, after all, an abduction. Were he under thirty, he would return now to the barracks, but he was four years past that and the master of a house to which his wife must now be taken. Rising, he pulled Hippolyta up behind him,pausing as she used the bed's white sheet to wipe his genitals and hers. On rare occasions (Styphon knew thanks to Andrea's mother) the bridal sheets would wind up stained with blood. More often than not, though, a Spartan woman had broken her own barrier by phallus or finger or exercise long before her wedding night.

  The abductee quickly dressed herself and let her abductor lead her to the window, where with bare foot planted in his hand, she climbed up. Her royal cousin helped her down, and when she was clear, Styphon hoisted himself by strength of arm alone and joined them outside, just as the cousins were finishing an embrace.

  “Will you run, or shall the lucky groom carry you over his shoulder?” Agis asked. Some men, half in jest, were known to carry their new wives all or part of the way home. Most weighed less than war gear, so the challenge was not great.

  Hippolyta answered by grabbing Styphon's hand and pulling hard to force him into a run. With a last look at Agis, Styphon let himself be led a few strides before, as a matter of pride, he overtook her.

  They reached his home, the size of which had expanded of late by the addition of a separate bedroom for Equal and wife. To build it, Agis had summoned some members of his guard who had completed the task in two days, not begrudging Styphon the favor a bit. It was to this newly built room which Styphon took his bride, passing first through the larger main chamber, where Eurydike slept by the hearth. Andrea was elsewhere, in quarters arranged for her by Agis on the reasoning that her absence helped to ensure that the introduction of daughter to step-mother waited until daylight, when circumstances ought to prove rather more favorable for all involved.

  There, in Styphon's new bed, which differed from the old one not only in size but also in having some padding and being raised off the ground for greater warmth, they conjugated their union again, held each other for a while and finally slept, limbs entangled, as husband and wife.

  * * *

  8. Piss & driftwood

  On the day of his rebirth, Demosthenes had sought out Agathokles to present him with his intention of journeying with Thalassia to occupied Athens. The Naupaktan, not unexpectedly, had tried to dissuade him.

  Demosthenes had held fast: “I must return. I know not even whether my wife was laid in a proper grave or if my father yet lives. Thalassia tells me there is resistance in Athens. If our aid can be of use to this so-called Omega in the liberation of my city, then we must offer it, as we have to Naupaktos.”

  Still, Agathokles had argued against their going.

  “Athens is ruled at present by a pack of tyrants under the leadership of some weasel named Isodoros,” he said. “They treat the city harshly in response to every act of resistance. The jails are full of the innocent and the streets full of informers eager to collect the generous reward that would surely be theirs for turning you in.”

  “It is a risk I must take,” Demosthenes had said, making it his final word on the matter. “We will be gone but a few days, and Thalassia has given your craftsmen and engineers more than enough to do in her absence. When we return, we will help rally your countrymen to ensure the vote on Sparta's ultimatum goes in favor of war.”

  In conceding, Agathokles had cast his eyes on Thalassia and implored her, “Bring him back alive, good witch.”

  “More alive than he is now,” she had pledged in reply.

  The following day had seen them boarding a trading ship bound for Corinth to repeat in reverse their earlier voyage to Naupaktos. A day later, Demosthenes sat with reins in hand atop a horse bought in Corinth for the overland leg to Athens. Thalassia sat in front of him in the saddle, her black, jasmine-scented single braid bouncing in time with the galloping hooves, and the warm flesh of her buttocks rubbing his groin, maybe not always inadvertently. The riding gear they had brought from Naupaktos lacked stirrups, of course, those being an innovation of Thalassia's which had never spread beyond the now-disbanded citizen cavalry of Athens. They were useful, to be sure, but he had ridden most of his life without them and did not regret their absence. At any rate, they would have brought unwanted attention, and to the right observer, revealed the riders' identities.

  Not that they could hope to go long unrecognized once they drew near Athens, where both were well-known. They would have to avoid public spaces, perhaps even moving only by night.

  One thing he knew, or two perhaps: he did feel alive, and he was greatly eager to see his city again, even if only by starlight.

  As they rode, he voiced this thought to her.

  “You need another name for me when we're alone,” was her tangential reply. “Like I have Dee.”

  “I wish you did not.”

  “I don't have time for four syllables. Neither do you.”

  “Thalassia,” Demosthenes intoned. “Despite its length, I have no trouble wrapping my tongue around it.”

  “Well said.”

  “But if you insist, I could call you... Lassie,” he suggested idly. “Or... this Omega fellow makes his name a letter of the alphabet. I could call you Theta. Or even just the sound Th. That would save a great deal of time.”

  Thalassia's neck twisted that she might regard the rider at her back with a look of surprise and amusement.

  “First,” she said, facing forward once more, “I like this new you. Second, Thalassia is just what some Spartans decided to call me two years ago. I like it, and it's who I am here, but it isn't actually my name.”

  “Geneva is scarcely shorter, and less... graceful.”

  “That's my Caliate name. You could call me by the one I wa
s born with.”

  “Jenna Cordeiro?”

  “Just Jenna. Sometimes. If you want.”

  Demosthenes gave no reply, only rode.

  “But if not,” she added after some time, “I'm happy to be Thalassia.”

  They reached Athens just before dusk. While on the road, Demosthenes had pondered which of the fifteen or so gates of Athens would be the easiest to pass through unnoticed. On arrival, he learned that his answer did not matter, for the walls of Athens were mostly dismantled. Already there were large gaps, and so it was through one of those by which they slipped into the city.

  He knew where he must go: if there was one man in Athens whom he could trust not to turn him in, it was his cousin Phormion. Phormion's house was in the same deme as his own, where the likelihood of being recognized was greatest, but declining Thalassia's suggestion that he wait while she fetched his cousin to some safer location, Demosthenes insisted they go together.

  He wished to visit his home.

  Thalassia could see equally well by night as by day and creep as silently as any shadow. She would be his eyes, reporting whether the way was clear, and if it was not, clearing it.

  She went ahead, cloaked and hooded, while he skulked in the shadows of a nearby alley until she returned to report a lone, unarmed watcher, disguised as a beggar, near the front. If Demosthenes merely followed a circuitous route and entered by a rear window, he could access his home undetected.

  “Go make contact with Phormion,” he told her. “I won't be long.”

  Nodding simple acceptance, she vanished into the twilight, and following her instruction, Demosthenes slipped like a thief into his own deserted home.

  The megaron's floor was strewn with refuse, the plain walls and pillars inscribed all over with graffiti: Lakonian names and vulgar rhymes. The hearth sat cold and stained with a dozen spills never cleaned. The drapes were torn down and trampled. The air reeked of shit and urine.

  Clearly, his home had seen use as a barracks—until fairly recently, judging by the state of some the more disgusting evidence.

  There at the base of the hearth were the clay fragments of the pot from which Eurydike was ever digging out a bronze obol before running to buy a new spark from the priestesses of Hestia to rekindle the flame she had let flicker and die. Elsewhere, in splinters, lay the polished ebony table which had been the first item to furnish the house when it was built. In a small room off of the megaron, the recessed bath buzzed with flies on account of its having been used as a latrine.

  He surveyed all this damage, these insults, and they bothered him little. He had not expected the place to look as he had left it on the day of Athens' fall. He had come for two reasons: one, just to show that it was his and he had the right, and two, in search of some sign of his wife's last days, some token left behind for him in the hope he would find it.

  The light was failing; there was not long to look. He went to the most obvious place, a hollow underneath a floor tile in a storeroom where once he had kept valuables; not surprisingly, it lay open and emptied of its contents. He ascended the stairs, fighting off a tendency of his mind to drag him back to when he had been glad to climb them. The path took him through what had been the women's quarters, which had been sparsely furnished before Thalassia and Laonome had filled it with soft and shiny things, now all gone.

  He went to his bedroom, which he knew with near certainty had been the stopping place of any number of whores, each of whom had taken away something of his wife's until all that remained was what he saw now. Just a stained, torn mattress on the floor, missing even the carved bedframe which had supported it. He gave the chamber a cursory search, but found nothing.

  There was nothing to find. There never had been. What had made him think there might be? The universe which he now knew did not work that way. The slaughtered did not get last words or the chance to leave tokens behind for those who loved them. They simply breathed one moment and did not the next, their bodies banished into cold earth and their shades into permanent oblivion.

  The last of the day's light nearly gone, he returned to the stairs. As he walked, his toe struck some item which skittered across the tiles. Stooping and sweeping his hand over filth, he found it and raised it into what light he could find.

  It was a dolphin carved of driftwood.

  Laonome had bought it in the agora in the first days after their wedding, a gift for Thalassia. It was a token of friendship, and a joke of sorts, since thalattia was what men sometimes called the smooth wood from which such carvings were made.

  It was stained now, missing its dorsal and one flipper. Since it had been given as a gift, it belonged to Thalassia, not to him, but it had passed through his wife's hands. She had picked it up in a market stall, set coin into craftsman's palm, and carried it here.

  It made a poor token of his wife, and certainly was no final expression of love, but it would have to do. Taking it, he stole out into the night the way he had come, knowing in his heart that this place would never again be his home, that he would never return, not even should Athens one day be restored to freedom. He was a citizen of Athens no more, except perhaps in some small corner of his heart. He was a wanderer and an exile now.

  Like she who once had been called Jenna and made her home somewhere in the stars.

  Driftwood.

  * * *

  9. Necropolis

  Sticking to shadows, Demosthenes approached the home of his cousin Phormion. Before reaching it, he heard a low whistle which almost might pass for that of some night bird to one who was not alert for such a signal. Following the sound, he found Thalassia. Cloaked and hooded like himself, she was all but one with the night.

  She put a hand on his shoulder and found his eyes with hers, which glowed like moons, and asked without words what his pilgrimage had yielded. He produced the dolphin. She saw it and smiled sadly. He tried putting it in her hands, for it belonged to her, but she pushed it gently to his breast. Accepting, he tucked the carving into the pocket formed by the fall of chiton over belt and let her lead him over a low wall into his cousin's garden.

  Phormion stood waiting for them in the light of an oil lamp, where he wasted no time dragging his fugitive cousin into an embrace. “I was sure you had died,” he said gravely. “Then I heard they were searching for you.”

  They separated, and Phormion, who was lame in one leg from a childhood injury, leaned on his walking stick as they retreated into the darkened megaron of his house.

  “You are right to be careful,” Phormion said. “Should you happen past the wrong eyes, you will find yourself in chains.”

  “They can try,” Demosthenes said.

  Phormion's gaze went to Thalassia. “This one is legend to the hundreds who saw her that day,” he said. It was harder for him, apparently, than for slave-descended Agathokles to break the habit of speaking of females rather than to them. “Of the rest, some believe, others do not. What is she?”

  “Difficult to explain,” Demosthenes evaded. “Suffice to say that with her nearby, I need have little fear for my life.”

  “I am glad to give you shelter. But the authorities may expect your presence here. It may not be wise.”

  “We need no shelter and would not endanger your house. My present desire is for information.”

  “Whatever I can provide.”

  Demosthenes asked, “Was Laonome given burial?”

  “Aye. May the Maiden embrace her. The Spartans turned over her corpse, and I myself oversaw her placement in the family plot.”

  The pang of grief gave Demosthenes only momentary pause before he inquired, “What of Alkibiades and Eurydike?”

  Phormion answered quickly, “The former is said to have been captured alive and taken to Sparta. As for your concubine, I have not seen her since the fall.”

  “And my father?”

  Phormion's face was deep in shadow, but Demosthenes detected the change in its expression. “You have not heard,” he said somberly. “Days aft
er your wife was slain, Brasidas had Alkisthenes bound behind a chariot which was driven up to the walls of Dekelea. Not three days after your wife's interment, I tended to his.”

  A fresh pang of grief followed quickly on the heels of the last, and Demosthenes hung his head. Alkisthenes had been a harsh man of foul temperament, and scarcely in his adult life had Demosthenes ever enjoyed the man's company. Still, blood was blood, and the severity of the crime not mitigated by such details.

  Thalassia's hand appeared on his shoulder. He shrugged it off.

  “Brasidas has already doomed himself and his city,” he said. “No act he commits now can worsen his fate.”

  “I, too, pray for justice, cousin,” Phormion said. He had no grasp of the full meaning of Demosthenes' words, but how could he? No gods would have a say in events to come.

  “Brasidas,” Phormion said, and grimaced as though the name were rancid meat, “has left the city, leaving his sandal-lickers in charge, men whom any Athenian should be ashamed to share a tribe with. Chief among them is—”

  “Isidoros,” Thalassia finished for him. “We hear the new regime has not gone unchallenged.”

  Phormion nodded at her, but addressed his answer to his fellow citizen, whether out of persistent habit or intimidation. “The man called Omega and his followers have killed a small number Spartans and a few collaborators. No one knows his identity.”

  “Surely it is best that few know,” Demosthenes said. “We need not know his name, or meet him, to aid his cause. But before we do, I must attend my wife's grave.”

  His cousin's face showed understandable concern. “It is certain to be watched.”

  “I know.” Having obtained from Phormion all he desired, Demosthenes seized his cousin's hand. “I take my leave now. Know that there was no other man in the city I considered coming to first. I am in your debt.”