Athenian Steel (Book I of the The Hellennium) (20 page)

He walked to the single window of a
bedchamber which was not his, yet at the same time was, and threw
back the silken drape.  His lover came up behind him, set her
cheek and one hand on his shoulder, and together they looked out
over Athens, spread far below.

It was not the view from his home in
Tyrmeidai.

He could see Tyrmeidai, or what remained of
it.  The ruins of those buildings which were not flattened
utterly swam in a sea of ash.  In what once had been the
streets, now indistinguishable from what lay around, not a soul
stirred, even at this, the market hour.  The markets were
rubble.

"Come back to bed," Thalassia urged.

"No," Demosthenes answered glumly. "I love
you. But I do not love the chains that bind our fates together. One
day I shall be free of them. And you."

Thalassia stroked his hair. "Not soon,
my 
exairetos
. Not soon."

He turned, and Thalassia was gone. When he
turned back, the window had gone, too, and with it the bedchamber
and the ruins of Athens. In their place was a columned sanctuary on
a sunlit mountainside.

Demosthenes' knees buckled.  He sank
into tall, untended grass and cried out, for only now did his heart
explode with the pain and horror of the sight just seen, of Athens
laid waste and he its heartless lord, Thalassia his star-born
queen.  

On knees and forearms, he wept into the
weeds until some other sound, a woman's plaintive moan, began to
fill the spaces between his sobs.  He picked himself up and
moved toward the sound's source, the sanctuary.

He had been to Delphi once before in his
life, in his youth.  He had walked the winding trek up the
base of Parnassos, now behind and below him, but of course he had
not been privileged to approach the Pythia within her sacred walls.
 In his memory, the holy place was packed as far he could see
with pilgrims, but now it stood empty.  Two of the four
columns of the once-great façade had fallen, and all four were
festooned with green spirals of clinging ivy.  Solemn rituals
were meant to precede passage through that portico into the sacred
space beyond, but no priests had been here for some time, it
appeared, and so no one stopped him following the sad, beckoning
moan inside.

The sanctum was shrouded in a thick mist
which glowed with a light all its own, and the low moan echoed now
off walls invisible beyond the swirling clouds.

"Who is there?" Demosthenes said in a
whisper which echoed in his ears far more sharply and with greater
clarity than mere stone walls should have produced.  Cowed, he
said nothing further, but just followed his ears until he found the
sound's source.

She was young, perhaps just out of
adolescence, and she lay curled naked on the tile floor clutching a
blood-soaked cloth between white thighs that trembled.  He
knew without benefit of evidence that this was the Oracle herself,
the Pythia.  She should have been ancient and withered, or at
least all men said she was.

She moaned on.  Demosthenes crouched by
her side.  "Can I help?" he said, fearful of a harsh echo
which never came.

The moaning ceased.  The Pythia's head,
trailing long tendrils of oily brown hair twisted in the remnants
of what might once have been an elaborate style, rose slowly from
the floor.  Tears had stained her cheeks with streams of kohl
from blue eyes that looked up at Demosthenes first in confusion and
then, suddenly, abject hatred.

"You!" she shrieked.  More swiftly than
he would have thought possible, she launched a hand at him, its
thin fingers bent in a claw.

The attack grazed Demosthenes' face,
stinging his cheek and throwing him off balance so that he fell
back from his haunches.  Twisting, he got hands beneath him.
 His palms slapped on the mist-shrouded tile, and he scuttled
backward on the skirt of his chiton.

He soon stopped, for the naked, violated
virgin Pythia had collapsed prostrate on the tile, no breath for
chase left in her young frame.  With obvious effort, she
pushed herself up and folded a leg under her thin body.
 Questing in the thick mist, she found her bloody rag and
restored it to its place.

Demosthenes made himself more comfortable
but went no closer.  "You know me?" he asked.

She leveled an acid stare.  "I'm the
fucking Oracle!  Of course I know who you are, you fucking
cunt.  Everyone knows the Destroyer of All, the Arch-Coward,
the Whore-Slave, the sack of maggot-ridden pig shit
called 
Demosthenes
."  She spat into the fog and
lifted her stained cloth, shaking it at him.  "This
is 
your
 fault!"

He opened his mouth to protest, but it fell
shut.  The same way he had known her to be the Pythia, he knew
she spoke the truth.  

"How could I have known?" he countered
feebly.

The young Pythia sneered in disbelief.
 "How could you have known?" she mocked.  "How could you
have known that she would rip this world in two and piss down the
crack?"

She crawled forward a few inches, maybe
meaning to attack again but failing to find the strength.
 

"Hmm..." she resumed, "I'm a goddamn oracle,
so let me see if I can't advise you a bit on telling the future,
brainless one.  That bitch had the strength of Herakles, the
speed of Atalanta, the learning of a thousand philosophers, and if
you cut off her limbs she'd grow new ones like a fucking Hydra.
 There were two others of her kind out there who hated her,
just like everyone who's ever known her does.  The being she
wished to destroy, and the leader she betrayed—
twice!
—are
presumably even more powerful than she is.  Yet you foresaw no
danger in forming a pact with her?  Need I go
on, 
idiot?
"

Demosthenes declined to answer, only
swallowed hard.

"Kronos' ass, but you are dumb!" the Pythia
raged.  "She even helped your enemy at Pylos before she helped
you.  She told you she didn't give a shit about your city or
your war!  She only cares about her vengeance, and knowing
even a fraction of her history, you thought she would suddenly
start playing nice because—why?  She likes you?  Gods,
you kept your groin in check, so if you weren't thinking with that,
what exactly were you thinking with?  What's your excuse for
not seeing her for the lying, chaos-craving, world-devouring
Wormwhore that she is?  Can you not see, you sucker of
diseased cock, that this enemy of hers that she aims to wipe from
existence is not the Worm?  It is not one man at all.
 Her enemy is humanity!"

The Pythia stared at him with deep hatred
written in her sneer.  Demosthenes whispered blankly, "What
must I do to save us?"

"Moron!" Apollo's prophet roared in
frustration.  "How thick does Athens make men?  Kill
her!"

"But how?  I cannot plot against her,
for she will know—"

"Find a way, goat-scrotum, or watch Athens
burn!" the Pythia hissed.  Sending him a final look of utter
contempt, the raped virgin oracle laid back down in her fetal ball
and resumed her soaring, eternal moan just in time for the mists to
reclaim her.

A warm wind blew.  The mist faded, and
Demosthenes stood alone on a silent, corpse-strewn battlefield.
 No, not merely that, for not even in the days of Xerxes'
invasion could a field of corpses ever have stretched from horizon
to horizon in all directions.  Worse still, among the
bronze-clad warriors and their broken shields were women of all
ages, their rent garments of linen and silk clinging to crimson,
shredded hips and breasts.  There were slaughtered children,
too, some dressed in armor and with swords in their small, lifeless
hands.  The sky above was uniformly gray and heavy with
clouds, whilst underfoot the space between corpses, what little of
it there was, ran so deep with standing gore that it sloshed cold
between sandal and sole.  A shock of coppery curls bobbed in
that vile sea: Eurydike, her green eyes unseeing.  Not far
from her was the mangled form of lame Phormion.  Elsewhere lay
Kleon, Nikias, Alkibiades.

Demosthenes did not mourn them, for he knew
he had no right. Looking down he saw that he wore a blood spattered
breastplate of bronze embossed with the image of a twisting snake.
 No... a worm.  A short sword hung at his waist, its
handle gummed with blood, and where the blade protruded from the
scabbard, there was visible the start of some inscription.

He slowly drew the bloody blade out, wiping
it as he went, and revealed the letters one by one.
 M-A-Γ-Δ-A-Λ-

He dropped it back into place and looked up.
 He was not alone.  In the middle distance, a figure
walked toward him.  It bore a spear and wore a hoplite's
helmet of the Corinthian style which covered all but the eyes and a
sliver of mouth drowned in shadows.  Below the face was a
breastplate so coated with blood that its emblem, if it had one,
was lost.  The warrior's shins and forearms were covered by
greaves.  The only flesh left uncovered on the body of this
metal beast was that of its upper arms and the legs between knee
and the breastplate's leather skirts.  The limbs were slender
and caked in black blood.

Spear-butt thunking and splashing, the
hoplite approached him, sandaled feet churning gore.  It
stopped.  Released, the spear toppled sideward, and two
bloodied hands went to the helm, gripped the cheek pieces and
raised it.  A thick, black braid spilled out over the
hoplite's left shoulder.  The helmet crested a cocked head and
tumbled off into the human morass, and Thalassia stood
unmasked.

Thunder crashed.  The pregnant gray sky
let loose a gentle, misting rain.  Droplets tapped the bronze
on both of their bodies and sent tiny red rivulets coursing down
Thalassia's shell of gore, which could not be so easily washed
away.  She put out a hand palm-up as if to playfully catch a
few drops, then she smiled and slowly laughed.  It was a laugh
of triumph where no triumph had been expected, and far from making
Demosthenes the laughter's target, her pale, warm eyes invited him
to join her.

He did not laugh, but he did take a step
toward her.  He wanted to draw his sword on her but only got
as far as flexing the fingers of his right hand.  Thalassia
moved closer too, stepping on the tattooed arm of slaughtered
Eurydike.  She laid a hand on his neck and pulled him toward
her.  He wished to resist, but could not.  Instead, he
brought both hands up and planted them one on either side of her
encrusted armor to draw her body against his.  Bronze first
met bronze, then flesh met flesh in a tender kiss of affection.

"I love you," he said.  He said it
sadly, and the helplessly watching soul within him screamed in
revulsion.

"I know," the star-born Wormwhore said
sweetly to her slave, and she kissed him again.

Every night for twelve nights after the war
council in Alkibiades' garden, Demosthenes awoke in tears, and more
often than not fully erect, from gore-soaked nightmares of
Thalassia.  He was glad on those mornings when he could not
remember his visions, for the ones that he did recall went on to
haunt his days as well as his nights.

He tried his best not to let his demeanor
towards Thalassia change, but that grew ever more difficult the
longer the dreams continued unabated.  Even were she just a
mortal woman with mortal senses, Thalassia could not but have
noticed.  But evidently she knew mercy: apart from a look now
and then, and the increase in frequency and duration of her stays
with Alkibiades (which came rather as a relief) she did not force
the issue.  Eurydike meanwhile came and went between Athens
and Thria.  Demosthenes was pleased to have her back when she
came, for her presence in the house acted as a buffer and a
distraction.  When he was alone, his mind turned over and over
in endless cycles reviewing his few options.  Should he put
his reservations aside, hope that the baleful visions relented and
simply continue to trust Thalassia?  Or should he cast her out
of his home and hope he survived the wrath which was all but
certain to follow?

He even once let himself ponder the
unthinkable: taking her by surprise with a sword or heavy ax, doing
to her what she had done to Eden, only finishing the job.  If
there was some way to kill her kind, she had not shared it with
him, and he could scarcely ask... but burning her mangled remains
seemed a good start.  Surely that would be the end of her?
 If not, of course, the consequences would be terrible.
 And practically speaking, murdering a slave was not without
its legal consequences if the act were to be discovered.  This
was not Sparta, where slaves lived at their masters' whims.

No.  Both practically and morally,
killing her was out of the question.  He barred his mind
permanently from travel along that course.

Once or twice he saw Eden, too, in his
dreams.  However little he understood of Thalassia, he knew
less of the other.  Who was to say Eden was not in the right
and Thalassia the villain?  In fact, on nothing more than the
evidence at hand, that seemed more likely than not to be the case.
 Thalassia was the outcast, the traitor, the self-obsessed
fugitive, and if, as his visions warned, she truly was more monster
than woman, then Eden might one day prove a valuable ally against
her.  A counterbalance, at least.  As such, he resolved
not to remind Thalassia of her pledge to hunt down and eliminate
Eden in the coming year.

At some point during those twelve
vision-plagued days, it occurred to Demosthenes that there was yet
one other Greek in Athens besides himself and Alkibiades who was
aware of Thalassia's otherworldly nature.  And so on the
thirteenth morning, Demosthenes rose to an empty house (Eurydike
being in the country, Thalassia with her playmate) and set off to
gain audience with him.  

The sprawling jailhouse of Athens was not a
single structure but actually a complex of six buildings, each
added by a new generation to accommodate the growing legions of the
accused and convicted.  The wall which enclosed it all was
likewise a patchwork project that had changed its course a number
of times over the years, but it had only one gate, with a stout
guardhouse beside it, and that was where Demosthenes went.  He
had made no prior arrangements, but rather counted on his face to
win him the access he desired, and the plan worked.  The
jailer, half-asleep at his post, shook himself to alertness, then
appeared gratified to have as a visitor the very man who had helped
to fill his cells to bursting with prisoners of war.  He
summoned a guard to bring out the requested prisoner, and scant
minutes later Demosthenes sat in a cupboard-sized room staring
across a tabletop of knotted planks at the Spartan Equal whose
unprecedented surrender he had accepted at Sphakteria.