Athenian Steel (Book I of the The Hellennium) (21 page)

Styphon sat rigid in his chair.  Gone
was his armor, of course, for that had been among the spoils.
 In its place he wore a plain chiton of undyed wool, on the
front of which had been painted, in deliberate mockery of
Lakedaemon's crimson lambda, a red alpha, which stood
for 
aichmolotos
, prisoner.  Shackles of black iron
were bolted about his wrists and ankles and connected to one
another by heavy chains which gently clinked.  His long black
hair was combed and tied back, and he had been allowed to shape and
trim his unruly facial growth.  The only similarity this man
bore to the ash-encrusted warrior of Sphakteria was the pair of
gleaming, flinty eyes that bespoke a lifetime of discipline and
which were, in fact, considerably more alert than those of his
jailers.

Demosthenes spoke first, not bothering with
the pleasantries and prefaces for which he knew Spartans had no
use.

“Tell me all you know of Thalassia,” he
demanded.

At first, Styphon's heavy, clenched jaw did
not budge as he engaged his interrogator in a round of staring.
 But at length his thick scowl twisted, and grated words
emerged: “Why should I?”

“I have influence in this city,” Demosthenes
said.  “More now than ever.  I could hasten your release,
or stand in its way.”  It was an empty promise, of course, for
nothing said here would bear on his votes in the Assembly.

The Equal snorted.  “You think I will
scramble to save our lives?  If our city sees fit to let us
rot here, or to be executed, then so be it.  Whatever our
fate, we will suffer it gladly.”

“Did Thalassia speak to you of your fate?”
Demosthenes asked.

Again there was a long delay.  Finally
Styphon said, “You took her offer.”

“Offer?” Demosthenes echoed.

The twitch that moved Styphon's lips was the
closest Demosthenes had ever seen to a Spartan smile.  “You
know of what I speak,” Styphon said confidently.  “She told
you the outcome of this war and made you believe you could change
it.”

He paused, and Demosthenes waited in
silence, trying his best not to let on that the Spartan was right.
 

“She tried to change things on the island,”
Styphon finally resumed.  His smugness had faded.  “She
failed, and here I sit, in chains”—he rattled them—“as she told me
was my fate.  But I am a man and an Equal.  I know my
place, and I accept it.”  A sudden sneer turned his lip.
 “That sea-bitch meddles in affairs that rightfully belong to
men and should be settled by men.  If you let her, she will be
the ruin of both our cities.  And more besides.  That she
would fight for whichever side would have her shows her to be no
more than a 
mercenary
.”  

This last word was a curse in the Doric
tongue, for Spartans held in great contempt all who would take up
arms for so base a cause as personal gain.

“Be rid of her,” Styphon urged.  “Carve
her up and throw the pieces back into the sea, as we should have
done.  Maybe she has already changed our cities' fates, but
maybe not.  Either way, let us not see our war decided by some
woman and outsider.  Let us fight it out as men and as
Greeks.”

“If she is so vile a creature,” Demosthenes
reasoned, “why did you try to win her passage to Sparta?”

The question did not throw the Equal, who
scoffed.  “She is a weapon, 
Athenian
.”  This
last word was almost a curse in Doric, too.  “If she cannot be
sheathed or unmade, at least she can be kept out of enemy hands.”
 His broad shoulders jerked in a chain-clattering shrug.
 “I need not tell you she has charms.”  He leaned forward
intensely over the table.  “I bet she has you stuffed right up
inside her woman parts, seeing what she wishes you to see, thinking
what she wishes you to think.”  He leaned back again, shook
his head and stared with his flint-hard eyes at his vanquisher.
 “But you came to me,” he said, “and that is a good sign.
 You have doubts.  Your instincts are yet your own.
 Trust them, Athenian, before they vanish.  Before she
comes down upon you, and everything you hold dear, like the hammer
of the gods.”

With that the chained beast arose from his
chair, signaling the end of the interview.  Demosthenes knew
it should be he who had the last word, but none came to him.
 Even if they did, his lips were painfully dry and jaw so
tightly clenched that it seemed his head would crumble if he opened
it.  And so he rapped on the wall behind him to summon a
guard, who took the Spartiate away.

It was a rare day when a Spartan's words
lingered past his leaving, but so they did today.

Boedromion in the archonship of
Stratokles  (September 425 BCE)

For many days after Demosthenes' visit to
Styphon, he hid his suspicions from Thalassia, trying to behave
around her as though nothing had changed.  He knew he was
failing.  She could not be lied to.  Yet, for reasons
apparently her own, she went along with the charade as they began
building the cover which would help them introduce her changes to
Athens.  

Demosthenes financed jointly with Alkibiades
a trading vessel assigned with bringing to Athens, along with the
more typical trade goods, whatever it could in the way of scrolls,
wax tablets and papyrii in any language.  The sailors would
not know or care what was written on them in various foreign
tongues, if they were even literate—and it did not matter, since
upon translation they would become whatever Thalassia wished them
to be: 'long lost' secrets of agriculture, weaponcraft, metallurgy,
medicine, and more, which then might be 'reintroduced' to
Athens.

Thalassia herself split her time between the
homes of her two co-conspirators, as Eurydike did between city and
country.  She furnished Demosthenes' empty women's quarters
perhaps more lavishly than he would have himself.  Demosthenes
bore the expense without complaint, largely out of a desire to
avoid any confrontation which might give her cause to raise other
matters between them.  But this strategy of avoidance could
only last so long.

At last, a month after his victory at Pylos,
Demosthenes returned home one afternoon to find Thalassia lying in
wait for him.  She stood alone in the megaron, dressed in the
long chiton the color of sea-foam which was her favorite, her hair
bisected by a straight part, on either side of which hung a tightly
braided pigtail.  The hairstyle gave her an absurdly childlike
appearance quite at odds with the jewel-like hardness of her wintry
eyes as she pushed the door shut behind him and set her back
against it—her trap sprung.

“I've waited patiently for whatever is
bothering you to go away.  Clearly it won't,” she said.
 “So out with it.”

Demosthenes laughed feebly.
 “Nothing... nothing is wrong.”

Thalassia declined even to respond, just
stood against the door freezing Demosthenes' feet to the floor
tiles with a gaze that he managed to meet for a short while before
deflating.

He felt relief, in a way, to have the
charade at an end.  He walked slowly to the low dining table
of ebony and stood by its edge.  Thalassia followed and faced
him across its polished, gilt-edged surface, which cast up a mirror
image of the stargirl's hard look and those wildly inappropriate
twin braids which framed it.  It was this dark reflection at
which he stared, rather than the real thing, while he searched for
words.

He found them rather easily. What took
slightly longer was digging up the courage to speak them.  “I
have changed my mind.”

“About what?”  Thalassia's stony
expression, devoid of sympathy, did not change.

He spoke still to the image in ebony, in a
voice just above a whisper.  “Everything.”

The lower half of the reflection's face
tightened.  “Continue.”

“Fate should not be tampered with,” he said.
 “I was wrong to start.”

“Hmm,” she said.  The sound was heavy
with judgment.  “So your new plan is to watch Amphipolis fall,
let your supplies be choked off and watch Athens wither until it's
time for you to fuck off and die in Sicily.”  Abruptly, she
commanded, “Look at me.”

Demosthenes did so.  Her pale eyes
bored through him.

“Is that what you want?” she insisted on
knowing.

“I have no other plan,” he admitted, and let
his gaze fall again.

Thalassia forced his chin up with the tip of
a finger.  “I said look at me.”  He complied, and
channeled into his eyes a rising anger at being spoken to like some
errant youth.  “If you were having doubts, you should have
come to me about them,” she said sharply.  “Tell me now.”

Far from cowing him, her belligerence and
lecturing tone only helped him find his voice.  “You care
nothing for this city or anyone in it,” he said.  “And I would
sooner go down in defeat alongside men who love Athens than win
victory by means of some … 
mercenary
.”  He barely
remembered to pronounce the word in Attic, rather than mimicking
Styphon's Doric dialect.

“Go on.”

Thalassia's calm made him wonder: was she
manipulating him even now?  Had her intention in trapping him
thus been to push him into open rage?

So what if it was?  He could not turn
back.  The temptation of release after a month spent
pretending was simply was too great.  His nightmare visions,
his visit with Styphon, the fears and doubts festering in his
thoughts, all of these had caused him to... if
not 
hate
 Thalassia, then something closely
resembling it.

“You care for none but yourself,” he said.
 “You respect the laws of neither gods nor men.  Every
one of us is but a marker in some great, cosmic game you play with
unseen opponents.  And if that weren't bad enough—”  

His next words he knew to be foolish even as
he spoke them, but such momentum had he built that he could
scarcely stop them spilling out.  

“—you put your cunt to work like a shameless
street whore, manipulating men into becoming your playthings.
 I will be no plaything.”

Having, for the moment, run out of harsh
words with which to follow these, he stopped speaking.  Anger
seethed behind Thalassia's calm features, and he tensed,
half-expecting another sudden attack like the one she had launched
on him in Pylos.

“It hurts that you would go to Styphon
instead of talking to me,” she said, relieving him somewhat... or
perhaps giving him fresh cause for concern, since it meant she knew
of his prison visit.  He had even fewer secrets from her than
he had thought.

She smiled frostily and raised the fingers
of one hand to the delicate choker of braided silver around her
neck.  

“What is this, Demosthenes?” she asked.
 When he did not immediately give reply to a question he took
to be rhetorical, she prompted more forcefully, “What is it?”

“A slave collar,” he said quietly.

“Yes, a slave collar.  You do recall
that I am one of the three most powerful beings on this fucking
planet, right?”  Her calm broke for the space of the
expletive, then returned.  “If I had wanted to, I could have
been a goddess.  I could have had the 
kaloi
kagathoi
 of Athens scraping at my feet, doing all they
could to please me so I wouldn't end their little lives.   Do
you think I 
need
 you to change this world?  I
could slaughter the Board of Ten.  I could walk into Sparta
and kill Brasidas and every one of their leaders.  I still
could, if I changed my mind. Yet instead, I walk behind you in
public and call you
master
.  Why is that?” she asked.
 “I hope you can tell me, Demosthenes, because I'm starting to
forget.”  Her calm broke again, and she grated:  “
Why
is that?
”

Her rage set back Demosthenes' own efforts
to keep his own rising anger in check.  “You are a curse upon
my world,” he snapped.  “You have the power of a god and the
mind of a 
child
.  My home, my city, my world, were
better off without—”

Demosthenes did not hesitate before speaking
his next word, but even as it poured out, he knew he should have
held it back.  Once spoken, it could not be taken back, just
as once a wall of spears was charged, no matter how great the fear
that gripped a man, there remained only one path—forward.

“—the 
Wormwhore!
”

In the several silent seconds which
followed, Thalassia showed no visible reaction.  She ended
them by looking down at the table, though hardly in concession.
 She stepped around its corner to draw closer to him, looked
at him with her jewel-hard eyes and commanded, “Say. That.
 Again.”

“I will not.”  In front of a charging
Demosthenes, the bristling wall of gleaming spear-blades neared.
 “You heard me.”

Deep within, he knew that it was likely his
life depended on an apology.  But he could not bring himself
to give it.  There was but the one path, whatever lay at its
end.

“Say it.”

“I will not.”

She screamed, “Say it!”

As if punctuating her command, Demosthenes'
hand rose, almost of its own accord, and delivered a hard slap
across Thalassia's cheek. 

A part of him knew that his life was ended
anyhow at this point, and so he did as she wished and spoke again
the forbidden word, filling it with venom: “
Wormwhore
.”

Like a golden javelin, Thalassia's hand shot
up, grabbed a handful of his hair and pulled, slamming Demosthenes'
forehead into the ebony table with skull-rattling force.
 Without releasing her grip, she used his hair to drag him to
his feet.

“You fucking asked for this,” she said.
 She strode toward the timber staircase at the megaron's rear,
pulling him behind her.  Demosthenes grabbed hold of her iron
wrist, but knowing the futility of trying to pry that hand loose,
he limited his aim to creating some slack to ease the pain in his
scalp as he walked in an awkward bow behind her.  Seeing her
foot mount the first step, he knew what would happen next but was
powerless to stop it.