by P. K. Lentz
"Does he understand Greek?" Demosthenes asked of Roma's last oligarch.
Thalassia answered plainly, "No."
He halted a pace in front of the man, who at last acknowledged Demosthenes' presence with a look. The shadows played over deep eye pits, a prominent nose and straight black hair cut close to the scalp. The creases of middle age and the fresh tracks of tears marred his fair skin. The look he spared for his city's conqueror was a brief one. Then his head fell, and he resumed his mourning.
"Why did you spare him?" Demosthenes asked again, this time with a hard edge to his voice.
Subdued, Thalassia gave a sigh that echoed through the chamber. "It seems there is only one answer you want."
"What I want is the truth." In a the space of a breath, Demosthenes made a choice to lay his thoughts bare to Thalassia. "I accept that I am bound to you for the span of my life, however long that might be, and that when I die it will likely be in pursuit of whatever aim you have put before me. But if I am not to chafe under that yoke until the day I put sword to breast, I must trust you. I need to believe that I and no other am your exairetos and that you are as bound to me as I am to you."
Unfazed, Thalassia answered with a question. "Did you not receive my gift?"
"Which?" Demosthenes asked brusquely. "The pendant? The scroll?" He inclined his chin to indicate the slaughter surrounding them. "This? None of it is enough to convince me that anything but doom awaits me if I follow you."
"I will swear an oath, then," Thalassia said swiftly.
He scoffed. "What good is an oath from one to whom the names of gods are tools with which to deceive the faithful?"
She walked an oblique line that crossed the laurel ring and closed some of the distance separating them. "There is an oath that Eurydike's people use which requires no gods, only drops of our blood."
Demosthenes knew of blood oaths. Barbarians used them, and so had Greeks before the dawn of laws. They were more often the source of chaos and slaughter than anything else. Besides, somehow the thought of letting his blood mingle with Thalassia's repelled him, as if the act might make her contamination of his soul complete and irreversible.
"Another's blood will suffice," he said. He drew his sword and put its tip to the back of Gaius's hung head. Its blade was sticky with congealing blood, but no less sharp for the action it had seen this day. The oligarch seemed to take no notice. Demosthenes locked eyes with the star-nymph, searching her face to gauge her reaction, if there was one, and for signs she would intervene to save the man whose pallake she had been. Seeing neither, he gave her his shoulder, half-turning to look down on his victim, and drew back his elbow to deliver a fatal stab.
"Stop," Thalassia called. Her sandals slapped urgently on the wet tile, and almost by the time he had turned his head, frozen with downturned blade poised, she had drawn up alongside him and laid her empty left hand on his sword arm.
Here was his answer. She had lied to him to try to save this man. No oath she swore could ever rightly serve to ease his doubt.
A distant look came over Thalassia as she met his eyes. "I spent a year in this man's home, and he treated me with more kindness and respect than you ever did." The words accused, and harshly so, but her tone did not. "Yet if you demand his life to bind my oath, then so be it."
She let her left hand fall from Demosthenes' arm, and as she did, he saw that her right hand was clenched tightly around the grip of her sword, and that sword's blood smeared point ran parallel to his own, its point nestled in the shallow well between Gaius's bent neck and his collarbone.
The Roman looked up, and his dark eyes were filled with tears and resignation. Demosthenes opened his lips to confess that it had only been a test, that he had not truly intended to execute an unarmed man on the floor of a holy place.
Thalassia spoke some soft words to Gaius in the Roman tongue. Then her hand moved earthward, plunging her blade with impossible ease straight through Gaius's chest, cleaving his heart in two. He made not a sound, and when the killing stroke was complete the oligarch sat as he had sat all along, but now devoid of life, held upright only by Thalassia's hand on the sword which was buried to the hilt inside him.
She released it, and his body crumpled forward over that of the brother he mourned, their breastplates first clashing, then grinding as the fresher corpse slid off to one side and came to rest with one arm pinned under his torso on the mosaic tile. Blood seeped from the wound at his neck, coating the sword's handle and coursing off it in a steady flow that stained the lifeless cheek of Roma's last oligarch.
His own breath momentarily as absent as that of the newly made corpse, Demosthenes looked up into Thalassia's face, which stood serene above her fur-trimmed collar. Her gaze was distant, as if perhaps she imagined some other vista before her, some alien scene from her home in the stars. Then she blinked and met Demosthenes' stare, and she frowned. Whether her failure to spare a glance for her dead lover's corpse was deliberate avoidance or not, he could scarcely know.
After some moments, Demosthenes found breath and used it to voice the realization he had made too late for it to matter. "You knew," he said. "You knew I would not have killed him." Thalassia always knew truth from lies.
The star-nymph's defeated expression did not change. The slowly spreading pool of hot lifeblood reached Demosthenes' sandal. He glanced down and considered moving, but did not.
"What did you say to him?" he asked, watching the creeping red tide.
"Before meeting me, he had lost his wife of many years. I said, 'Go be with the one you loved far more than you did me.'"
Demosthenes' face began to sting as though buffeted by a hot, smoke-bearing wind. He closed his eyes just as tears slid free, and he cursed himself for showing his to be the softest of the two souls left alive in the temple.
"Laonome," he choked by way of explanation, as if he owed Thalassia any. He had thrown himself into the planning of this invasion, lost himself in it, really, so soon after learning of his wife's death that he had scarcely allowed himself time to mourn. Now, in a day of violence, all that planning was spent, leaving him hollow. Grief rushed in to fill the void.
With eyes shut, he could not see the star-nymph's reaction, but he felt her warm hand brush aside long, clinging hairs at his neck and settle gently on the skin beneath, and he heard her say, her soft voice tinged with anguish, "I am so sorry." She paused while he sobbed, then she asked quietly, "Was it before or after?"
She could only mean one thing. "After," he whispered bitterly. "A son. Thinking I was dead, she gave him my name."
"And he lives?"
Demosthenes nodded. As he did he began to collect himself, stemming his tears lest he appear hopelessly feeble in front of the star-born enchantress whose grip was as inviting as it was impossible to break.
"Thank the gods," she said.
With a sigh and a bleak chuckle, Demosthenes found the strength to remove Thalassia's sympathetic hand from his neck. "This holy space is full to bursting with shades of men you murdered, and you speak of gods as if you honor them." He hung his head, and the eyes from which he cuffed tears fell on the still warm Roman corpse. "You suck men dry," he said blankly, for he could not find the strength to imbue the insult with the force of conviction, "and you leave them empty shells, whether living or dead. How can I know it will not be me in his place a year from now, or five, or ten?"
He had not expected an answer, but Thalassia gave one, and gave it with conviction. She stepped in close to him, her sandaled feet right alongside his in the pool of Roman blood, and she raised the hand he had only just thrown off and used it to cradle his cheek. The touch sent a wave of warmth down his limbs. He shut his eyes and had to hold back fresh tears because, gods help him, he found her nearness so reassuring. He realized in an instant how easy it would be to surrender all free will to her and make of himself a mere pawn, safe in her strong embrace until she tired of him.
"I am human, Demosthenes," she said. Her face was so close h
e felt her breath on his cheek. Had she ever addressed him by his name? "I have flaws. I make mistakes. I forgive and I need forgiveness. I ask it of you now. Forgive me, and I swear on Magdalen that I will commit no more sins against the gods and make amends for those of the past. I will renew my oath to defend your oikos and ask no oath of you in return, only your forgiveness. Let us have a fresh start and go forward from this day as friends."
Demosthenes slowly, reluctantly, absorbed her words. "Forward? To where? What else must be done?"
"Much," Thalassia said. Though her words were poison, the voice with which she spoke them was as silk. "You have put fate on a new course, but that course lies shrouded in mist and may yet lead us into darkness. We have only begun."
The clatter of metal on a hard surface reverberated in Demosthenes' ears. Looking down he realized his sword had slipped from his hand. Next his knees buckled and he sank down onto his haunches, the curved bronze of his left leg-greave slipping in a stream of the two Roman brothers' mingled blood as it trickled toward some invisible low point in the seemingly level floor. For a moment, Thalassia towered over him in her black cloak and with her face unseen she might have been Persephone. But quickly she lowered herself to his side, throwing one arm and a fold of her cloak over his back. She pressed her blood-soaked form close to his. Her hand was warm on his bare arm and the fine hairs of her fur collar tickled his neck. Their cheeks grazed.
She whispered, "I shall not waver from the path I have set, nor ever break my loyalty to you. Let us carve a bright path down the ages, you and I, the general and the witch, partners and equals until the end. Who can stop us?"
Demosthenes felt otherworldly breath on his skin, and the words it carried, Thalassia's words, enchanted him. He wanted so much to say yes, yes, and let the rage boil up in him until it erupted forth in a frenzy of violence against the world, a frenzy which did not stop until he was its ruler, enthroned in safety behind his terrible star-born defender. But these were primal, barbaric thoughts that had no place in the mind of an Athenian, and so between gentle sobs he answered weakly, "The gods. The gods can stop us."
Thalassia, in the manner of witches and hetaerae, was quick with an answer. "Some god favored you with victory today." She stroked his matted hair. "Why should the same not be the case again, if we do our best to keep them happy?"
Adrift in the current of her soft, pleasant voice and the treasures it offered, Demosthenes wanted nothing more than to give in. But still he fought. "You have the strength of Herakles," he said, and could barely hear his own voice, "the speed of Achilles, and your blade takes lives by the score. Yet it is your tongue that consigns armies to the earth and cities to ashes."
A breathy chuckle warmed his ear. "My tongue has good uses, too," she said. "With your help it could bring men better lives, your city a brighter future."
She paused. Demosthenes opened his eyes to find her head turned toward the temple door.
"The Romans have finished withdrawing to the hill," she said. "The sacking has begun in earnest. If your plans do not include fire and slaughter, then your place is out there."
Supporting himself on a slender, blood-greased forearm as steady as an iron beam, Demosthenes rose. "My plans?"
"You're the general."
With the star-nymph's unexpected deference and the intrusion of the outer conflict into the gore-soaked cocoon of the desecrated temple, Demosthenes' mind began to clear. He knew the effect was only temporary, a mere deferment of Thalassia's talk of oaths and fate until the next time she could put her honeyed lips to his ear.
"I am not the only general," Demosthenes said.
"Alkibiades?"
He nodded, and her honeyed lips formed a frown. "Then may the gods help Roma."
* * *
After mopping up at Rome, Demosthenes, Thalassia, Alkibiades, and Styphon return to Athens to learn that the treaty creating the Hellenic League has gone the way of most treaties between Greek city-states in this era, which is to say: it fell apart. Sparta and her allies have broken out of the League and conquered Athens. Demosthenes' slave Eurydike and Styphon's daughter Andrea have fled to Thebes with Demosthenes' infant son. The four set off to find them... and there ended the original Book I.
* * *
If you got this far and you haven't yet read Athenian Steel,
what are you waiting for?
5-Star Praise for Athenian Steel:
***** "Masterfully Intelligent Historical Adventure..."
***** "Stunning is not an exaggeration."
***** "An intriguing, addictive book crafted by a master."
***** "It is the best book I have read in the last 15 years and easily makes it in my top 10 of all time (most of which are Hugo and/or Nebula award winners)."
***** "I've read many F & SF books over the past 50 years. This is right among the best... Can't wait for the next one!"