by P. K. Lentz
From there he learned that the object of the cowering senators' terror was a lone figure in the shadows behind the colonnade opposite. Having just cut the throat of the youthful senator wielding an ineffectual dagger, the figure stalked across the tile and dispatched a second just as quickly. The shade wielded two short swords, one in each hand, and it turned its deadly attention next to the right-hand side of the altar, where waited its largest cluster of remaining victims.
The wide eyes of those victims were on him and on Marcus, and they screamed, "Kill her! Kill her!"
Squinting into the firelight down the colonnade, Gaius studied the figure, which had not been still since his arrival. It moved still on a path for the altar. The killer was slight of build and spattered with copious blood, and dressed in—
The gown of a noblewoman, but it had been torn off above smoothly curved thighs.
A woman. Yet she swung swords like a hastatus and moved like a wild beast.
She passed into a swath of bright torchlight, and her profile was thrown into deep relief.
It was a profile Gaius knew well, for he had looked upon it night after night from his pillow.
His lips began to form Marina's name, but he remembered himself and shut his gaping jaw so as not to alert her to his presence. Instead he wondered in numb silence how this could be, and why. He certainly had never witnessed demure Marina picking up a weapon, but as surely as he stood in the Temple of the Twins, fingers quaking on his spear shaft, this was she. He recognized her now not only by her silhouette but by her lithe shape, the curve of her breasts, and he even knew the defiled dress as one he had bought her months ago.
Gaius watched this nightmare version of his love, his flower-girl, close in on the senators. She kept her body low to the ground, arms spread like wings ending in two-foot iron talons. At her hip bounced a leather satchel from which protruded the butt ends of javelins and the hilt of a spare sword. She was a goddess of war, a witch, a beast of ancient tales, and she had come to this place for slaughter and nothing else.
Without warning, Marcus burst from his hiding place and charged Marina with leveled spear. Gaius's mouth fell open and he longed to call his brother back, but dared not, lest his voice become the cause of his death. He wanted to follow, too, as he had followed Marcus through the doors, but his limbs, still paralyzed by the shock of revelation, refused. He knew his brother must have tried and failed to get his attention before attacking, but time was short for those senators cringing behind the altar, and so Marcus had attacked alone. Perhaps, Gaius let himself think as Marcus's hard footfalls echoed across the tile floor and into the high roof, with surprise on his side, Marcus could slay the beast-Marina where all those others whose corpses littered the floor alongside unbloodied swords had failed....
Gaius whispered a prayer to Jupiter, and to the Twins whose temple had been desecrated, to make that so, but the gods' ears were closed that day, or else whatever primeval force possessed his love was too powerful even for them. Marina halted and wheeled round to face Marcus, and she stood waiting for him with no worry on the smooth, olive-skinned face that Gaius just hours ago had cupped in his hands and gently kissed.
"Marina!" Gaius blurted, hoping he yet could save Marcus from the certain death from which he now was just three plodding steps away. "Stop!"
Marina's eyes found him across the length of the great hall. Her left hand opened and dropped one of her two swords, which clattered on the tile. For a second, Gaius felt a glimmer of hope that his plea had worked, or that at very least he had distracted this poor, possessed creature long enough to let Marcus's spear release her from enslavement to whatever dark god ruled her limbs. But Fortune was not in such a giving mood. With speed and ease the likes of which Gaius had never witnessed, Marina dodged Marcus's spear blade. Her newly empty hand flew down and clasped its shaft, wrenching it from his grip. Driven by momentum, and doubtless the horrific realization of his failure, Marcus plodded on past her. As he went, Marina pivoted and raised the snatched spear above her head with one hand as if it weighed no more than an arrow.
"No!" Gaius screamed.
No such plea, no scream escaped Marcus's lips as the blade of his own spear sank deep into his back. He carried on running a few steps then crashed to the floor in a great clatter of bronze. His body settled, and the wobbling spear shaft became an ashen spire reaching for the heavens. Having slaughtered his brother, Marina turned and faced Gaius, but her look was blank and lasted only as long as took her to bend down and retrieve her abandoned blade. Then she returned to the hunt.
A group of four senators, all unarmed, had used the distraction of Marcus's attack to make a dash for the temple doors. They had passed Marina by the time she gave pursuit, but the distance seemed to bother her none. She ran, her sandaled feet splashing in pooled blood, and when the senators saw that she was about to cut off their escape, they abruptly reversed course, screaming all the way.
Like some feral predator locked on the scent of its prey Marina adjusted course mid-stride and in seconds had her herd of victims trapped against the temple wall with nowhere left to run. They fell to their knees, begging and sobbing but Marina only flicked her swords four times, and they were silenced with blood gushing from their slit throats. The last of them was still twitching when she started back toward the altar.
On legs as heavy and lifeless as stone pillars, Gaius managed a faltering step out into the temple, then another and another until he reached the center, where he fell to his knees on the tile. "Marina!" he cried out, but the creature which had shared his bed denied him even a glance. He tugged the bronze helmet off his head and hurled it at her. It missed, striking the tile with a resounding clang and rolling into the wall. Marina ignored it. She was intent on her final target, the last surviving senators.
There were perhaps twenty of them, and seeing final doom upon them, they embarked en masse on a chaotic dash for the temple door. They separated, each man choosing his own path to maximize his chances, but escape was not to be. Not for any of them. Three fell to Marina's swords in hardly an instant, and then she was a bloody blur moving from man to man, outpacing them as they ran and felling each with a single, effortless slash. By the halfway point, no more than half of the screaming senators yet lived, and they had coalesced into two groups, one moving along the temple's west wall, the other the east. Marina first went after the western group, and slaughtered them all behind the painted colonnade, before turning to the others.
The second group made it nearly to the door, which yet stood ajar, taunting them with the prospect of freedom as they met their gruesome ends. One last groan, one last lifeless thump, made Gaius the only living being in the Temple of Castor and Pollux apart from the blood-hungry beast which wore his lover's face.
The slaughter complete, Marina went to the temple door. Stowing one sword briefly under her opposite arm, she slid her right index finger down the flat of the other blade. The finger came away slick with fresh blood, and she used it to draw some shape on its exterior surface before using the single hand, impossibly, to push the heavy barrier shut, cutting off what little sunlight it admitted and muting the sounds of the battle still raging without.
Now Marina turned, and Gaius, sitting crumpled on his haunches in an attitude of abject hopelessness, saw her full-on. Her limbs were greased to elbow and knee with the blood of Roma's highborn, the same blood which soaked her mauled pink dress, once a thing of beauty. He searched Marina's face for traces of the woman he had known, of the charming daughter of slaves who had set flowers on Claudia's grave, of the warm creature to whom he had opened his home and bed for half a thousand nights. But the ice-blue eyes which once had shone with warmth now were two frost-covered stones set in pits of bronze. His gentle flower-girl, his lotus, had gone, if ever she had been real, and in her place there stood a flower whose petals were cast of iron and reeked of blood.
Gaius let his head sink almost to the tile so that by the time Marina reached him he saw nothing bu
t her sandals. She had four pairs, of which these were her favorite, their straps of crossed leather adorned with silver studs. The only sounds that broke the mournful silence of the befouled holy place were those of ragged breathing and sobs, and both were Gaius's own. He half expected Marina to strike him dead then and there, but when some seconds passed and she did not, he cast his gaze upward and dared to behold the new Marina from within the reach of her deadly hand. She looked down at him as a man might on his freshly lamed horse, trying to decide whether the animal warranted saving. Gaius found himself unable to meet her hard eyes.
For all the slaughter she had just committed, Marina's breath did not even come heavy. Her voice was calm and even when she said, surprising him, "I'm sorry, Gaius."
She sounded sincere. But so too had she sounded sincere in other things which plainly had been lies.
"What are you?" Gaius asked. His eyes stuck on her swords and bloodied limbs rather than the face he adored.
"It does not matter." Her voice was not the hiss of a vile serpent or the scrape of cold iron across a gravestone, as he might have expected; it was the same voice he had come to know so well. "I know it is no comfort to you," she said, "but I could have stayed with you all your life and been happy. But I am loyal to another, and I believe he leads the invaders who have come today."
"You have made Iulia an orphan..." Gaius sobbed, throwing a tearful gaze up the colonnade at the skewered heap that was Marcus.
Marina answered plainly, "There are many orphans in Rome today."
"She adored you!" Gaius surprised himself with the force of the exclamation, and it gave him the courage to meet Marina's eyes. They were almost the soft, glittering eyes he knew, almost but not quite, like the beautiful mosaic-tiled pool of a fountain which bubbles and splashes all summer but in winter becomes a disc of ice.
"So did you," Marina said. Her voice likewise had an icy edge.
"And will you make my children orphans? Children you have tutored and bounced on your knee and sung lullabies to?"
Marina's face showed a hint of what might have been regret. Whether it was genuine or not, who could tell. She said, "I will try to save you."
She turned her face to the doors as if a sound there had drawn her attention. Gaius heard nothing but the same distant, muffled shouts and clashes which intermittently had made their way through the thick wood and stone. While Marina's head was turned, Gaius eyed the spear which lay on the tile alongside his knees where he had dropped it, and he thought of seizing it up and doing his best to run Marina through.
The thought did not long last. Marina had killed upwards of two hundred men today, including many who were better fighters than Gaius had been in his prime. If that were not enough to dissuade him, whatever were the Roman ideals of honor and virtue, they faded before the mental images of the weeping faces of two sons and three daughters whose only chance to see their father again, their sole remaining parent, depended upon his actions now.
Then there was the fact that Marina had seen the spear at his disposal and left it there, not even deeming him a threat. And so Gaius remained on his knees, leaving his life in the killing hand of the woman who had stolen his heart and eaten it whole and raw and let the blood course down her perfect chin.
Turning back to him, Marina said, "The Greeks are crying victory. They have broken through and will be here soon."
* * *
'Marina' has painted the Greek letter Theta in blood on the temple door, an unmistakable sign to one outside who knows her by another name...
VIII. Hail Demosthenes, Conqueror of Rome
On the temple steps, an aged, unarmored Roman lay face down in a pool of his own spilled innards. Stepping over the body, Demosthenes put his back to the temple door, braced his heels on the stone and heaved. Pain flared along his right side, but he ignored it and pushed anyway, for though he was not eager to face Thalassia he knew that no matter how hard he struggled, the gods would never relent in driving him back to her. So strong was their desire for this meeting that they would not even let him die and join his love without first attending to her, and so it seemed better to him that he embrace his fate rather than put himself at odds with the heavens.
The heavy door crept inward, creating a slowly widening gap. As soon as he judged it could accommodate him, he slipped inside. The colonnaded hall beyond smelled of smoke and blood and piss. The source of the former was the array of dwindling of torches that lit the hall, while the latter two odors rose from the sea of slaughtered Romans arranged in loose clusters and individually around the temple's mosaic floor. Far ahead, near the temple's twin altar, there sat a lone soldier, sobbing and cradling an armored corpse in his lap. In his grief the man paid Demosthenes no heed. Nor did Demosthenes' eyes linger long on him, for beyond that sight, descending the few steps leading up to the painted double altar, was Thalassia. She wore a black, fur-trimmed cloak much like the one in which he had last seen her, the one which had caught her eye in Cumae's market and the one which had fluttered behind her headless corpse as it plunged into some nameless Campanian valley.
The cloak hung open, and underneath it Thalassia wore a short, pink chiton that would have been vulgar and immodest by Athenian standards even were it not soaked with the same blood that covered her arms and legs and face. It was the the same blood, surely, Roman blood, which reddened the entire length of the downturned short sword she held loosely in her right hand. More weapons clattered in a pouch at her hip as she reached the tile floor where, as if in deference to those Athenian social mores which could scarcely bind one such as her, pulled her cloak shut with her free left hand and fastened it with a silver fibula. Most of the blood and weapons vanished, replacing the horror of her appearance, almost, with a graceful vision of beauty in black.
The two moved from opposite ends down the temple's axis, across a squelching lake of blood on tile, one limping, the other gliding. Thalassia was first to reach the center, where the floor was adorned with the mosaic image of a wide laurel ring within which were contained the figures of two youths jointly hunting a boar. Reaching it, Demosthenes tugged off his helmet and set it, along with his hoplon, on the floor. From behind sweat-soaked locks clinging to his face, he cast his eyes about the temple. Its floor was littered with at least a hundred corpses, perhaps double that, and their wounds were not the jagged, multiple wounds of battle but the single deadly strokes of the assassin's blade. Their faces were twisted masks of shock and terror, for how could they have felt anything else on seeing Death come upon them in the form it wore this day?
They came to face one another atop the mosaic disc, Demosthenes at one edge and Thalassia near its center. The makeup she had worn when last he'd seen her was absent. Her ice blue eyes shone, and the yellow firelight cast dancing shadows over her smooth olive skin and glinted off dark hair that was bound back tightly against her skull. From this distance he noticed the signs of careful repair about the neck and shoulders of her black cloak and realized that this was not a close copy but the very garment in which she had died. It took him several moments to gain the nerve to study Thalassia's face, and when he did, the look there surprised him. Where he had expected to find the empty gaze of a killer or the commanding stare of a queen he detected instead a sort of restrained joy. There was deference, too, in that she seemed reluctant to speak first and thereby set the tone of the encounter.
Demosthenes risked disappointing her, perhaps, by keeping his mouth drawn tight and doe eyes blank and narrow as they flitted between her, the carnage all around and the lone Roman sobbing by the altar.
Thalassia gave up waiting and spoke first, drawing Demosthenes' eyes back to her.
"Congratulations, general." Her words resounded in the silent chamber, and though the delivery was reserved, the sentiment seemed genuine.
With the silence broken, Demosthenes felt free to ask the question foremost on his mind. "Who were these men?"
Thalassia answered matter-of-factly, "Oligarchs."
&nb
sp; "I had intended to spare Roma from fire and sword."
"You still can."
Demosthenes looked past her black form at the solitary survivor. "Who is he?"
Thalassia did not turn to look, but kept her gaze steady as she answered, "A useful tool, I hope. A leader you might persuade to do your bidding."
"He's yours, isn't he? " Demosthenes blurted. "Your oligarch." A statement, not a question. Thalassia had not yet even closed her lips, and they froze parted for the briefest of moments.
That was enough of an answer, but Thalassia confessed anyway. "He is. His name is Gaius. The man he mourns is his brother, the father of Iulia, whom you met."
A stray thought flitted across Demosthenes' mind, like one of the dancing shadows in the temple, of striding over and cutting the throat of this potential rival, but he held back. Not only was jealousy an obscene emotion to feel at this moment, Thalassia could easily stop him if she so wished, and then the terms of their future relationship would be set to his disadvantage. There were better ways to handle this. He asked rather than demanded, "Why did you spare him?"
Thalassia stood firm. "So we might use him."
"I ask again," Demosthenes said, just as evenly as before, "why did you spare him?"
"I've told you."
"Then tell me who you mean by 'we'?"
"Athens. Or the League," Thalassia said. "Whomever it is under whose authority you stand here."
"I stand here because Alkibiades threatened war with Sparta if I refused," Demosthenes said with disgust. As he spoke, he picked a path between the pools of blood, giving Thalassia wide berth, in the direction of the mourning Roman. Thalassia's barbarian cloak rustled as she turned to track his movement.