Athenian Steel (Book I of the The Hellennium) (10 page)

Leaping to her feet, Thalassia ran after.
 As she went, she reached around behind her, grabbed the
handle of Demosthenes' blade and slid it from her chest to wield it
as though she had just drawn it from a scabbard.  Two swords
in hand, showing no sign of flagging in spite of her fatal wound,
she vanished around the back of a row of empty houses.

Both women ran at exceptionally high speed.
 Even were Demosthenes so lacking in good judgment as to
attempt chase, he could not have kept up, much less overtaken them.
 Left alone, he stood silent and frozen, watching the place
where they had vanished.  Slowly his gaze went to the blood
pooled in the road, proof that what he had just witnessed was no
delusion.  He looked down at his hands and found them
trembling, glanced around to see if anyone else was near.
 Thankfully, no one was.

Should he flee?  He quickly decided
there was no point.  If her spun bronze and iron grip had
failed to convince him entirely of the truth of Thalassia's claim
not to be of this world, now there was no room for doubt.  If
a being such as she judged that he had to die, there was no
escaping it.  Better to face his fate like a man than run away
and be hounded to his death by a seething Fury while hoping in vain
for some merciful god to step down from the heavens and save
him.

He steadied himself, spoke a few words aloud
to Pallas, and he waited for judgment.

Within a few minutes Thalassia reappeared,
walking slowly with just one sword in her right hand.  In the
left was what looked like a fat, bent branch.  A bright red
stain covered nearly the entire midsection of Thalassia's orange
dress, centered on the wound Demosthenes had inflicted on her, and
her golden skin was everywhere spattered with blood.  She was
as something stepped straight from the depths of Tartaros, and her
icy stare, like her slow but inexorable march, had but one object:
Demosthenes.

Without breaking her gaze on him, Thalassia
stopped five paces away and threw down the bent branch, which
landed with a strange, soggy flop.

It was no branch.  It was her defeated
adversary's arm, severed midway between shoulder and elbow.

There was no time to stare in fresh horror
at that sight, for Thalassia raised the sword's tip and aimed it at
Demosthenes.  “Stay.”

She did not bother to imbue the word with
any tone of command.  None was needed.

Dropping to her knees before the severed
arm, she clasped its wrist in her free hand and plunged her sword's
tip into its bicep.  From there she proceeded to slice down
its length, opening the flesh from one end to the other, cutting
down to the bone, as if gutting a fish.  When that was done,
she set down the sword and used her fingers to peel back flesh and
muscle and sinew.  She worked methodically, going from wrist
to bicep, digging through the bloody mess as
if... 
searching
 it.

The sight forced Demosthenes to put the back
of one hand to his lips against a stream of acid rising from his
stomach.  Thalassia glanced up and delivered a malign smirk
before resuming her bloody endeavor.

“Fuck!” she cursed when her fingers had
traveled from one end of the severed limb to the other and back
again, leaving it an unrecognizable mass of meat at the center of a
dark red pool.

Would that she had found whatever she was
seeking, for it was now in an even fouler mood that she retrieved
her sword in blood-covered hand, rose to her sandaled feet and
approached the object of her anger.  She gazed down her
tapered nose at Demosthenes and said nothing for a time, only eyed
him with the kind of look a judge might give a defendant accused of
patricide or some other unspeakable blood-crime.  Demosthenes
did his best to meet the look unflinchingly.

At length, Thalassia exhaled loudly and
declined her chin.

“Are you fucking serious?” she asked.
 “Did you really just stab me instead of her?  What the
fuck is wrong with you?  What do you have for brains?
 An 
olive
?”  Her blade cut an invisible line
back and forth between them.  “I thought we had a connection!”
she lamented.

Suddenly baring gritted teeth, Thalassia
balled her left hand into a fist with which she made to strike
Demosthenes.  But she held back as if in deliberation.

“I'm sorry to have to do this,” she
concluded.  Then, with an almost apologetic look, she punched
Demosthenes square in the stomach, doubling him over.
 “You 
dumb
...”—a linen-veiled knee connected with
his sternum—“
dumb
...”—her foot hooked behind his calves,
sweeping his legs out from under him—“
fucking
...”—he fell
hard into the dirt, where Thalassia screamed a final, made-up word
into in his face—“
FUCKWIT!
”

Knowing it futile, he chose not to defend
himself.  Leaning down, the raven-haired Fury gripped a
handful of sandy curls at the back of his head and pulled, forcing
him to face her.

“I could have destroyed her,” she grated.
 “Instead, she escaped into the sea, and all I got was an arm.
 That's your fault.”  She released her grip on his hair
and with the same hand began to stroke it. “But you know what?
 I forgive you.  Why?  Because we're friends, aren't
we, and you're going to take me to Athens...
right?
”

“R-right,” Demosthenes said between labored
breaths.

Helping him up, Thalassia presented to him
the gore-coated sword—his own, which had pierced her—handle-first.
 He took it, and she set to straightening and brushing off his
chiton. 

When she was done, she warned him darkly,
upraised finger in his face, “Don't you
ever, 
ever
 stab me again.  Understood?”

Demosthenes cleaned his blood-smeared sword
the best he could on a nearby tuft of tall grass before sheathing
it. "You can't be seen in town looking like that," he observed to
the woman whom he now viewed less as his prisoner and more as a
captor.

Looking down at her utterly ruined dress,
Thalassia frowned. "True. We'll separate. I'll meet you tonight at
the fort."

Before dashing off down a deserted alley,
she gave Demosthenes a look with her pale eyes which promised the
appointment would be kept whether he wished it or not.

He nodded as though he had a choice.

***

As he resumed his day's duties, Demosthenes
tried to put out of mind Thalassia's imminent return, as well as
the appetite-stealing sights of one woman mutilating another and
butchering her severed limb. Not surprisingly, he failed. Still, he
accomplished what had to be done: loading the prisoners and the
spoils of war onto the ships, overseeing the construction of a
trophy on Sphakteria, helping the city's Messenian leaders and
their cousins of Naupaktos plan how best to preserve Pylos'
newly-earned freedom, and enduring the political prattling of the
demagogue Kleon, who made clear his intention to claim all the
credit for the victory just won upon their return to Athens.

By the time the sun sank and he retired to
his private chamber in the citadel, Demosthenes had arrived at a
quiet, reluctant admission. He believed Thalassia. After what he
had seen, how could he not? What to do about her proved more
elusive...

She did not keep him waiting. As the first
stars made their appearance in his window on the fort's third
story, so did she, via the same aperture. Climbing in cat-like,
Thalassia stood against the wall in the light of an oil lamp.

"Hello again," she said. Her manner was
subdued, her head hanging at an angle of humility heretofore
unseen. Before he could wonder why, she explained.

"I'm sorry about earlier," she said. "I
should not have..." She searched for words and gave up. "I just
shouldn't have. I'll try not to do it again."

Demosthenes sat on a stool facing her across
the wool- and reed-stuffed mattress of his simple timber bed.
"
Try?
"

"
Try
," she repeated with a
self-deprecating smirk.

She advanced toward the bed, got on it,
crawled to its center and settled back onto her haunches. She still
wore her tattered orange gown, but she appeared to have washed it
in the sea, since around the faded bloodstains, in swirls like the
tendrils of a sea creature, were lines of dried salt.

"I have given much thought to the things you
said... and did." Demosthenes told her.

"And?"

"Lacking any other explanation, I am forced
to take you at your word. More or less."

"Good." Bringing one leg out from underneath
her, Thalassia began unlacing her sandal. "Part of me thought that
when I came here, you'd have twenty armed men waiting for me. I'm
glad you didn't."

"What would have happened?"

"Twenty dead men," she said plainly. She
tossed the sandal on the floor and started removing the other. She
flashed him a cold look and amended, "Twenty-one."

"I stand here willing to believe,"
Demosthenes said. "Can we not dispense with threats?"

She smiled. "Yes. Yes, you're right. As we
come to trust one another, I'm sure I'll stop that."

"If I am to trust you, I must know more. Not
only scraps that you see fit to throw to me, as though I am some
dog lapping at your heels, but 
everything
 worth
knowing. I will not ally myself with an enigma, nor will I stake my
city's future on one."

Thalassia's look was one of disappointment.
She shrugged and said, "So ask me something."

There were many questions in Demosthenes'
mind, a roiling sea of them, all begging answer, but if forced to
choose but one...

"How do you know these things?" he asked.
"About the war's outcome? About..."–it was hard to say aloud–"my
death."

"That's easy," Thalassia answered. "Well,
perhaps it is, depending on... never mind, we'll soon find out.
Imagine that every bit of recorded knowledge from every city you
have ever heard of could be compressed to fit on the head of a pin.
All the literature, art, music, speeches, civil records, land
deeds, account books–everything, all of it. And then the pin could
be stuck into your flesh where you would have all of that
information at your disposal, to access as quickly as you can think
about it. Are you with me?"

"I... I suppose so."

"You're half lying, but I'll go on anyway.
Now imagine that the knowledge on that pin was recorded not today
but fifty years from now. A hundred years. A thousand years. Ten
thousand years. From where you stand, the people who inscribed the
pin are not yet born. To them, what happens here today, what
happens tomorrow and every day for the rest of your life, including
how you die, is–"

"History," Demosthenes finished for her.

Thalassia rewarded him with a pleased
nod.

"And you have such
a... 
pin
 inside of you?"

"So to speak."

"Where are you from that such things are
possible?"

Thalassia blew a huge sigh and flopped back
on Demosthenes' bed. "I realize you feel a need to know these
things, but must we do it now?" she asked petulantly. "I can't
explain to you in a few minutes how the universe works. It's much
more complex and fluid than you can imagine. It's much more complex
than even I could have imagined before... never mind. Later. For
now, what's important is that I know what the Spartans will do even
before they do." She propped her head up on one elbow and arched a
brow at Demosthenes. "Do you think that might be useful?"

Demosthenes scoffed. "I see that wherever it
is you come from, they have knowledge of the 
rhetorical
question
." He leaned forward on his stool, fixing the
too-casual Thalassia with a serious glare. "I do not 'feel a need
to know' these things, I 
do
 need to know them. And
you will tell me, if not today then soon. But perhaps there is a
more important question to be answered than where you came from,
and that is what interest does someone like you have in seeing one
Greek city triumph over another?"

"Does it matter?" Thalassia dragged herself
back into a seated position, hands resting on ankles, bare arms
framing the blood-stained hole in her dress, and presumably the
body under it. "Victory is victory."

"You know that to be a lie," Demosthenes
chided. "Victory, too, is a 'complex and fluid' thing. So tell me,
what do you care about our war? Does
this 
Magdalen
 person wish for us to win, whoever
that is? Or... the 
Worm
?"

Thalassia bowed her head. Demosthenes sensed
in her reaction, a momentary look in her eyes–there one instant,
gone the next–the truth of something she had said to Eden. She did
hate this man or creature they called the Worm. The name caused her
pain, and shame, too, if Demosthenes was not mistaken. Perhaps it
was made worse by knowing, as surely she did, that its speaking now
could not help but cause a second word to spring to
mind: 
Whore
.

He would not dare speak aloud to Thalassia
the name which Eden had translated into Greek for his benefit, the
vulgar epithet she claimed that Thalassia's treachery had earned
her. He would not say the name, but neither could he let Thalassia
fail to explain why Eden and others called her by it.

"Why?" Demosthenes pressed when she did not
answer immediately. "If you cannot even answer that, then I must
demand that you leave. Even if it costs me my life."

She thought for a moment, sighed, answered,
"I'm sure you'll have no trouble grasping that the outcome of one
day shapes the events of the next. Had your invasion failed
yesterday, your day today would have been very different, correct?
You might even be dead. Do you have children, Demosthenes?"

"Do you not know? You know all else about
me."

"I only know what people of your time
thought worth recording."