by P. K. Lentz
Styphon drew his sword. All those around him were silent, all but Hippolyta who had given up on escape and fell to begging instead. A hundred pairs of eyes rested on Styphon, the eyes of all Sparta as he laid the tip of his blade in the hollow between neck and collarbone, just inside the dull iron ring of her slave-collar.
“You wish to die, girl?” Styphon whispered down his sword.
The Thracian craned her neck to look up at him. Her green eyes, sunken and red-rimmed, held no light.
“No,” she said. “I wish to live. Far from Hellas, among better folk.” She hung her head again and breathed a sharp, nervous breath. “But since no god will ever grant me that wish, I beg of you... make it swift.”
As she whispered prayers to those cruel gods in her native Thracian, Styphon looked down on the head of this slave who had dwelt in his home for a season. She was friend to his daughter, object of his wife's misplaced affection. She had done little to earn the fate handed down to her.
His anger was at other females than this pathetic one... but this was the one kneeling before him, whose punishment by his hand was not only possible but demanded, sanctioned.
It could be no other way than this.
Firming up his grip on her collar, Styphon drove his blade deep, scraping the collarbone, slicing through the girl's Thracian heart. She tensed and whimpered then sighed out her shade while Hippolyta screamed. The deed done, Styphon released the iron collar. The body of Eurydike slid down the length of his wet blade and settled to the dusty earth, her short life finished.
* * *
“Let me go to her, you animals!” Hippolyta cried, twisting to escape the iron grips of the two Equals holding her. Tears coated her cheeks, but her rage of moments ago had melted into grief. Styphon, sword slick with Eurydike's blood, caught the eyes of her captors and silently gave them leave to release her. He was not their commander, but he was nominal master of the one in their custody.
The two let go and Hippolyta flew forward, falling onto her hands before scrambling to the new corpse at Styphon's feet. Dragging limp Eurydike into her lap, Hippolyta cradled the slave, kissing her brow in a display which stirred in Styphon feelings of pity, not for Hippolyta's loss, but for her weakness. He felt the sting of humiliation, too, for the emotional display reflected poorly on him.
Over that regrettable spectacle, he looked at his daughter, who stood more as a Spartan girl ought to, glaring hard-eyed and hard-hearted, a look which Styphon returned until Brasidas demanded his attention.
“You must go to Eris's lair and bring her here, Styphon,” he ordered. “Along with Demosthenes, unless you can convince her to kill him, or do it yourself.”
“With respect, polemarch,” Styphon objected, “Eris is more likely to kill me than heed me.”
“Are you averse to risking death?” Brasidas asked with a smirk.
“No, sir. Even though Thalassia swore to take my life and my wife's if I let Demosthenes die, I would put a blade in his heart now, given the chance. However, I believe my daughter spoke truly. Eris favors her. If she protects Demosthenes at the girl's behest, we may—”
Brasidas raised an open palm for silence, then instructed two Equals to return Andrea to incarceration.
She left willingly, under guard, but not before delivering a warning: “From the sound of you, regent, Geneva and Demosthenes may have already won.”
Scowling at her back as she left, Brasidas resumed to Styphon, “Eris must hear our side before the girl's. There is no sense in lying to her, of course, but the facts can be presented in a certain manner which I trust you to find. Her student will face no punishment from us. A mutual enemy approaches. A combined defense benefits all.”
The regent fell briefly to a fit of coughing before clapping Styphon on the shoulder and bidding him hoarsely, “Go. I must see that every spear is raised when she comes.”
And so, as trumpets sounded the call to arms in defense of an unwalled city which had not come under attack for generations, Styphon went alone to the lair of a witch whom he had previously conspired to destroy.
* * *
17. Lair of the white witch
The place to which Demosthenes was taken by his captor in the darkness of night was somewhere in the Lakonian countryside. He was no less a prisoner for not being bound; he knew the folly of attempting escape. Even were Eden not many times stronger and faster than any man, her star-born eyes, like Thalassia's, saw by night as well as day.
With a hand gripping the back of his befouled chiton, she guided him through the entrance of some structure and to a corner of its megaron, where she deposited him, less roughly than she might have, onto musty-smelling cushions.
“Sleep,” she said. She was a faintly white shape in the darkness, and then not even that as she withdrew.
“May I have water?” Demosthenes did not wish to ask, but days of deprivation left him no choice.
There was no answer, and he settled onto the pillows to pass the remainder of the night, either sleeping or simply laying still. He had just shut his eyes, causing scant difference in the darkness before them, when a faint sloshing sound accompanied by the scent of wet earthenware sent them open again.
He felt around the plaster floor, carefully, and found the pitcher freshly set there, cool to the touch. Righting himself, he drank, stopping briefly, when his throat was wet enough, to utter thanks to the unseen monster which had delivered it.
He neither heard nor saw any more of Eden until first light some hours later, which was also when he first glimpsed his surroundings. The place was a country mansion, barely furnished and unpainted in the Spartan style, but large, with several rooms opening off of the expansive megaron. The plaster was much cracked and the floor uneven, showing it to be an old construction, doubtless dating back many generations.
As he drew himself upright, Demosthenes found his eye drawn to an area of dark stains on the floor not far away. It was blood, to be sure, and none too old.
“You imagine terror and cruelty,” came the lilting, accented voice of Eden.
She appeared from another room, looking like some barbarian hunter of the far north, dressed in hide leggings, boots, and a loose upper garment of gray cloth over which her long, straight, golden hair flowed.
She walked to where the blood was. “I have been cruel and terrible, yes, but not here. In that spot, I taught Andrea anatomy using corpses. Knowledge useful for healing—and killing.”
After shaking the last drops of water from the pitcher into his open mouth, Demosthenes answered. “Geneva taught such lessons to healers in Athens. You two have more in common than not. Including your real enemy.”
Eden chuckled softly. “I call you turtle as an amusement, but you truly may as well be one. You know nothing and cannot manipulate me. Do not bother trying. Do not even speak of Geneva at all, or the Caliate or any other such matters. You may quickly find your captivity less pleasant.”
Calmly accepting the rebuke, Demosthenes asked, “Might I bathe?”
Eden led him to a stream on the bank of which she climbed onto a large rock and sat. Removing his sandals, but not his chiton, which needed washing as much as did his body, Demosthenes waded into the water and submerged himself, heedless of the chill. He spent some minutes thus, surfacing only for air, opening his mouth often and drinking of the water. At length he removed his garment and wrung and thrashed it many times, for it seemed unlikely that Eden had a fresh one to offer.
Whenever he looked over to where Eden sat, he found her position to be utterly unchanged and her azure eyes unseeing, almost glazed. Before he finished, remembering things Thalassia had told him in seasons past, he understood the reason.
Emerging unclothed and hanging his sopping chiton from a branch, Demosthenes chose a spot in the weak morning sun not far from his captor.
“You look upon other worlds, do you not?” he said, knowing Eden could hear him but not whether she would see fit to reply. “Inhabiting some false reality, the world lost
to you, perhaps. Worlds,” he corrected himself. “Not just a vision, but sights and sounds and feelings, a true imitation of reality. Geneva—”
Too late he recalled Eden's prohibition on that subject. But since she remained unresponsive, he pressed on.
“—mentioned such practices, made possible by those augmentations which make you more than human. Were I capable of such, to shape a new world according to my own desires, I cannot be sure I would ever leave it.”
Eden emitted a low growl which at first Demosthenes took for the arrival on the banks of some small animal. “You mean the worlds she stole from me. Yes, that is where I spend much of my endless days and nights in this wasteland. But be assured I am always present enough to make you regret failing to cease your pointless babble.”
Back at the estate, Eden produced a bowl of brown eggs.
She asked, “Do you know how to cook these?”
“I can manage.”
With that, Eden climbed the ancient ladder to the roof, leaving him alone. She spent most of the day up there, and much of the next, her body utterly still while her mind traversed other realms. Demosthenes rested his own much abused flesh, and when he had rested enough, he began undertaking calisthenics routines remembered from the military training of his youth in Athens. His body was much healed, yet his mind chafed at imprisonment. Even though escape was so unlikely as to be considered impossible, he might have begun considering the attempt were it not for the sure knowledge that the present state of enforced tranquility could not long last.
Death would come. War would come. Chaos would come.
She would come.
Whatever change came first, he would be ready.
It was late on the third day that change did come, announced by a distant horn. Demosthenes did not know the signal's precise meaning, but guessed it to be a call to arms.
Not long after, Eden descended from the roof—by leap rather than ladder. “Someone approaches,” she declared. “I think you share my distaste for him.”
“Styphon,” Demosthenes said when the Equal came into sight down the country trail leading to the house. “Would you stop me from killing him?”
Eden snorted. “A valid question. Let us hear what he has to say, and then decide.”
They took up positions on the trail, where Styphon halted his approach a spear-length from them. The Equal's expression, although controlled, subtly betrayed his fear of the witch. He gave a glance at Demosthenes, nearly his killer in Naupaktos, but otherwise paid him no heed.
“Lady Eris, Brasidas summons you to Sparta, along with his prisoner,” Styphon announced.
Eden returned, “He summons me, does he?”
“Might we speak outside the presence of the prisoner?”
“The prisoner asked my leave to kill you, and I did not tell him no. Do not test me.”
“Even if I did not have the advantage of being armed, I would welcome his attack,” Styphon said, throwing Demosthenes a bitter look. “Geneva comes. For him. For you. For all of us. We stand a greater chance of repelling her by—”
Styphon ceased speaking in the face of laughter from both of those whom he addressed.
They soon stopped, and Demosthenes was quickest to speak. “Apologies, sack of goat-shit, but I rarely have occasion to laugh anymore. The impending destruction of Sparta is quite a good one.”
“She will be stopped,” the sack of shit asserted.
“You imply that we need each other,” Eden said by way of explaining her own laughter, “when the truth is more one-sided. I've made no secret to Brasidas that I aid Sparta only insofar as it serves my ends, or at least does not run counter to them. I am no longer sure that is the case.”
“Will you come and tell Brasidas as much?” Styphon asked. “And hand over his prisoner?”
Eden did not answer, asking instead, “Where is your daughter?”
“Safe,” he replied.
“Where?”
“Imprisoned for the crime of aiding in this one's escape.” He aimed his dented nose at Demosthenes. “But she is not to be harmed.”
“Kill him,” Demosthenes urged his captor. “Or hand me a weapon.”
“No,” the white witch answered disappointingly. “We will accompany him to Sparta. I am bored of spear-fighting and plots and politics. It is time to end them.”
* * *
18. Between love and slaughter
The three shared no words on their walk to Sparta, and those whom they passed kept their silence, too. Owing to the call-to-arms heard earlier, the latter mainly consisted of women, children, and the ancient. All able-bodied men of sixteen to sixty had answered the summons.
Feeling no fear of the death which shortly could await him, Demosthenes found himself eager. Whatever was to come, there was truth in what Eden had said: in Sparta lay endings. The chain of events begun at Dekelea with Laonome's murder had led to this day, the sun of which would set on Brasidas lying dead, or Demosthenes, or them both. The same might be said of the two star-born interlopers whose conflict had shaped, and been shaped by, the war between two human cities.
Had his path to this day not stripped him of faith in the gods of his people, Demosthenes would have sent prayers to Zeus that he be granted his vengeance and that his enemies might be the ones to fall. But if those gods did exist in some other layer of reality, they were as inaccessible to a mortal man as were his multitude of twins who walked other earths, each wrongly believing himself unique.
Only in this singular world, this one layer, did Demosthenes of Athens presently walk toward Sparta between Eden of the Veta Caliate and an Equal whose city stood threatened by another of Eden's kind. For it was upon this earth and no other that Eden and Geneva dwelt among the people of Hellas, forever changing the destinies not only of those Greeks but of many generations yet unborn, in cities unfounded.
Ahead in Sparta lay endings, but the echoes of this day, and those already past, seemed likely never to end.
Inside the unwalled bounds of Sparta proper, Equals in full panoplies of war marched in small formations according to whatever plan had been devised to defend the city from a lone, deathless invader. Other days, Demosthenes would have looked on those Spartiates with rage and contempt, but today he hardly gave them a glance, instead keeping his eyes forward.
The formations of red cloaks and lambda-blazoned hoplons grew larger and denser as the trio approached Sparta's center, and it was there that Demosthenes spied the one he sought. Brasidas was pointing in every direction and shouting orders to various officers subordinate to him in Sparta's labyrinthine chain of command.
As Demosthenes entered what passed in Sparta for a main marketplace, the square in which he had previously hung upon the execution stauros, Brasidas paused briefly in directing his troops—to cough.
And Demosthenes could not help it: he laughed.
Not loudly, but perhaps because laughter was a sound not commonly heard in this city even in better times, Brasidas looked over. Or perhaps he had not heard at all but just glimpsed the gold of Eden's hair and pale white of her skin at the corner of his vision. Either way, his sharp gaze found the face of Demosthenes. Immediately, the foremost general of Sparta fell silent, glaring for a few beats before giving one last instruction to an aide and then striding through the crowd.
Demosthenes halted, as did Eden, while Styphon proceeded forward to meet his fellow Equal and stand beside him, facing the two arrivals who were not of Lakonian blood.
“Thank you, Eris,” Brasidas addressed the more distantly born of the pair, “for heeding Sparta's call—and returning to us our prisoner, whose execution is overdue.”
Smile long faded, with Brasidas so near, Demosthenes now felt the familiar hatred rise from deep within his flesh, urging him to suicidal attack. But he quelled it, waiting with held breath to learn whether Eden—as unpredictable now as Thalassia had been in her first days in Pylos and Athens—would surrender him.
“His death will have to wait a while
longer,” Eden said, giving hope. “He is my prisoner now, by way of Andrea. Bring the girl out.”
Brasidas endeavored to look at ease, and halfway succeeded even if his brow glistened with sweat which could scarcely have been due to the weather. Neither did it seem to have resulted from exertion. He cleared his throat and began, “Styphon must have told you that—”
“Geneva is on her way,” Eden finished. “Yes. How fared your assault on Naupaktos, polemarch?”
“We razed the city, as we set out to do,” he answered. Somewhere in the square, unseen, another man was overcome by a fit of harsh coughing. “If you wish to keep the prisoner, keep him. He is inconsequential. What matters is the destruction of our common enemy. You bested her once and shall again, surely.”
“Surely,” Eden half-agreed. “I requested the presence of Andrea. Must I ask again?”
“An oversight,” sweating Brasidas assured her, and he bade Styphon beside him, “Fetch your girl.”
Drawing back a step, Styphon spun and hastened off. Brasidas wiped his brow with wrist, then used the same to stifle a fresh cough while looking up the bridge of his beakish nose at Demosthenes.
“What are you smiling at, Athenian?” he grated when his fit had passed.
“Was I? Apologies.” Demosthenes lowered the corners of his lips, but ensured that his eyes remained alight. “Let me hazard a guess, polemarch. Did your army eat of grain you found in Naupaktos? Because I have seen these symptoms in Equals. Alas, I was abducted before learning how long any of them lasted. Not terribly long, I suspect.”
The red-rimmed eyes of Brasidas narrowed with rage. “You think I do not know what's been done? You are so small minded, Athenian. You have at hand a weapon unlike any a man could ever craft, and rather than employ it to shape the world, you...” He stopped to cough. “You use it to settle your own petty quarrels, matters to be forgotten in a few years' time. You think I have done what I have for Sparta alone? I must tell my city that, yes, but I have worked for the good of all Greece. Twenty years from now, I would see all its cities united, every Greek a citizen and an Equal, none a slave, united in a Hellenic empire to last a thousand years and spread across the maps which I know Geneva has drawn for you, as Eden has for me. By then, we will have ships to navigate Ocean, and the land across it would be ours, too.