Athenian Steel (Book I of the The Hellennium) (38 page)

Brasidas waved the band forward. They
filtered through the trees until they reached a clearing in which
rose a man-made hill of limestone, sandstone, marble, and granite:
boulders and plinths, broken pieces of fallen columns and statuary,
millstones, lintels–anything heavy which the barely victorious
Arkadians could find to heap upon the resting place of their deadly
foe. Surrounding the burial mound, hanging from wooden stakes in
the earth, were charms and wards of every variety, most comprised
of the skulls and bones of birds and other small animals.

Placed prominently at the base of the small
mountain was a stone slab bearing a scrawled
inscription: 
Here lies hateful ERIS, Destroyer of Men. Let
he who removes a single stone be dragged below to where she dwells,
his line forever mired in misery and suffering.

"Begin removing stones!" Brasidas called out
loudly, in a clear voice.

No Equal budged. Brasidas turned both ways,
surveying the band behind him. He spat. "I had no inkling that my
judgment was so poor! It seems I have brought with me a bunch of
cunts."

He strode forward to the base of the mound,
wrapped his thick arms around a chunk of limestone the size of his
chest, and heaved it aside. As that piece rolled and settled,
Styphon made his own choice, becoming the first among Brasidas's
band to join him in the surely foolhardy endeavor. Would that his
current circumstances allowed him the freedom to make wiser
choices; but they did not, and he could not. And so he hastened
forth to help his polemarch, his keeper, potentially unleash a
destructive force which dozens of men had given their lives to
contain.

Likely not wishing to be outdone by a coward
and dog in the eyes of their commander, the other ten Equals were
right on Styphon's heels, and the band set in silence to the work
of flattening a small mountain of rubble. The labor was rough, and
still incomplete when the better part of an hour had passed.
Styphon rolled a roundish boulder clear of the mound and paused,
leaning on it for but a moment to rest and wipe sweat from a
forehead cold with winter's chill.

"Tired already, dog?" Brasidas cackled at
him from behind, tossing a block of marble close enough to
Styphon's feet that he was forced to dodge.

"No, polemarch," Styphon said, straightening
and making to return to the mound.

That was when he witnessed, along with
Brasidas at his side, the sight of one, then another, heavy chunks
of debris fall aside by themselves, as if possessed of their own
motive force.

Only for seconds did the cause of their
movement remain a mystery, for out from the gap thus created rose a
slender, filthy arm, and then a head crowned with hair which
glinted gold in those few spots where it was not caked with all
manner of filth and dried gore.

"Equals, form up on me!" Brasidas
bellowed.

There was a bare moment's confusion among
the band on hearing this order in the midst of hard labor, but a
moment was all it took for them to remember that theirs was not to
question the voice of command. They threw down whatever was in
their arms and clambered over and around the constituent parts of
the much-diminished mound to reach Brasidas's position. As the
dropped stones tumbled, the blood- and soil-blackened apparition,
rag-clad, completed its emergence, freeing first one sandaled foot
and then the other, which was bare.

Just as Eris drew upright, an Equal named
Menes became the last of the band to pass by her. Her sea-blue
eyes, bright behind the crust of filth, caught and followed him,
and in that instant Styphon saw that Menes was doomed.

Eris lunged, and her arm flew out to grasp
the passing Equal's trailing cloak. She jerked it, and Menes fell
in a clatter of stones, and she fell into a crouch upon him,
sliding his sword from its scabbard. Although Menes fought her,
with one arm braced on her chest, the other trying to prevent the
theft of his weapon, his struggles were as nothing. Breaking his
grip, she plunged the blade straight down through Menes' chest,
piercing his armor of stiffened leather as though it were the
sackcloth of a slave.

"We seek only words with you!" Brasidas
called out over Menes' soft death groan. The rest of the band, as
one, drew their bronze swords–and surely every man, as Styphon did,
wished for the greater reach offered by his broad-bladed spear.

The eyes of Eris flitted to the speaker, but
her lips, faintly pink behind the filth, failed to part in
answer.

"We have no quarrel with you," Brasidas
continued, and even this most feared of Equals could not hide a
tremor in his iron voice of authority. "We came here to free you.
We can find common–"

The black apparition sprang from her perch.
Eleven men tensed in surprise and followed her path with their
blades–a path which led over their heads in an impossible leap. She
landed nearest to a man named Galatias and batted his blade aside
with her own before poking a hole in his throat with the point of
her sword. Antigonos was the next, her blade cleaving his skull as
he made an ineffectual swipe. Two more fell challenging her before
Brasidas cried out, "Scatter!" and the band of Equals, its renowned
courage in the face of certain death sorely tested by this army of
one, gladly obliged.

Only two did not budge: Brasidas, for
reasons his own, and Styphon, who, having chosen to put his fate
entirely in the polemarch's hands, opted to ignore his own instinct
and do as Brasidas did.

Now Eris leaped again, and down she came on
the back of fleeing Menandros, whose face met the earth moments
before his back was pierced by bronze and his life met an end.
Menandros had spoken last night of the girl he was due to wed,
Melissa.

She would have to find a new man now.

The twins Kallikrates and Dion went next to
the slaughter. They had shared the hour of their birth and now they
died each within seconds of the other, blood spilling from twin
wounds in their necks.

Apart from the general and his dog, only
three Spartans then remained of the twelve who had ventured into
the woods, and their six feet pounded the earth in a frantic dash
for the deep forest, as if it might bring them safety. But this
enemy was unrelenting, and as a lioness chases down her prey, she
bounded after them.

The Equal named Timon, one of those who had
been on Sphakteria and tormented Styphon in prison, lost his
footing and tumbled hard down a rocky slope. Eris swept her sword
across his flailing form, sending an arc of blood into the air,
delaying by not an instant her pursuit of the remaining two.

Long before those two reached the imagined
safety of the woods, she caught up with them. One fell with a
piercing shriek as her sword blade cut his legs from beneath him,
then his shriek was silenced with a earthward stab. The tenth
Spartan to die that day in the orgy of slaughter which had lasted
hardly more than sixty seconds, was felled by a hurled hand-ax,
taken from the belt of another fallen Equal. It caught him in the
base of his skull, and he collapsed against the trunk of a tree,
hugging it as if to keep himself upright. But he was dead already,
even if his desperate limbs were the last to know.

Ten Equals lay dead, and Eris turned to face
the last two remaining, who out of courage or stupidity had failed
to flee. The terrifying goddess did not run at them but rather
walked, bearing now two stolen swords, one in either hand.

"Convince her or kill her," Brasidas said
breathlessly. "I do not care which, and you'll be an Equal again. I
swear it."

Styphon could not help it: he laughed the
dry laughter of the doomed.

She was upon them now, a sinister smile
adorning her crusted lips. Her sword came up, and by the light in
her bluest of eyes, Styphon knew she was taking pleasure in the
slaughter. This was vengeance, perhaps, for her imprisonment–it
being apparently lost on her, or of no consequence, the difference
between Spartan and Arkadian.

The dealer of death was but two paces shy of
reaching them in her unhurried advance when a single word came
unbidden to Styphon's mind. He had forgotten its syllables, but
they returned now as if by the intervention of some benevolent god
at this moment when his very life depended on them.

Ten men today had tested the strength of
their arms or the swiftness of their feet against this enemy; all
had failed and died. Styphon put his faith instead in the tongue
which he managed to pry loose from tightly clenched jaw.

The word forced its way out without preamble
or explanation: "
Geneva.
"

The beautiful, terrible bringer of death
froze in her soundless tracks. Sensing salvation, Brasidas echoed
the foreign syllables just spoken by his dog.

Eyes like the depths of Ocean flitted
between the two speakers. Without lowering her bronze or relaxing
her guard, bloodstained Eris posed them a question in calm, heavily
accented Attic.

"What do you know of that worthless fucking
cunt?"

Being a practiced master of the Athenian
legal system, Kleon managed to carry forward with a public rather
than private lawsuit against the man whom no fewer than thirty
witnesses identified as the assailant who had done him harm. The
charges included assault, of course, but also obstructing the
duties of a public official and, worst of all, cowardice in the
face of the enemy. This last was the fourth most serious charge
(after murder, treason, and impiety) which could be leveled against
any public defendant.

The accused, Demosthenes of Thria, reported
to the law courts as ordered and entered his plea: guilty of all
but the final count. A day later, he went before the jury of a
thousand-and-one citizens and waited patiently while red-faced
Kleon exhausted the three hours allotted for his prosecution.

Then Demosthenes stood under the gray winter
clouds and spoke calmly in his defense. His argument was simple.
Eight days ago, he asserted, three hundred of the most feared
killers in all the world, implacable enemies of Athens, had taken
civilians prisoner in a quiet corner of Melite. Hours later, the
escapees had left the city and marched to the border where they
released the last of their hostages and went on their way.

"My prosecutor today should be thanking me
rather than accusing me," he said in the conclusion to his
abnormally short defense. "Had I not stepped in to relieve him of
the job for which he was eminently unqualified, the gutters of
Melite would have run red with children's blood, and Kleon would
stand in my place today, the target of half a hundred suits brought
by the husbands and fathers of wives and heirs put in the earth
before their time.

"Instead, no one lies dead. And Kleon calls
me a coward for not having taken the place of twelve of those women
whose lives my actions saved. Nine of their husbands you heard
speak today as witnesses on my behalf. I am a husband, too, do not
forget, and I swore to my bride that very morning that I would
return to our bed unharmed. Only by declining to deliver myself
into the hands of the enemy whom I humiliated at Amphipolis did I
keep that pledge.

"What I am guilty of, I freely admit:
silencing a voice of incompetence on my city's behalf. Punish me
accordingly for that if you must. Still, I would do the same again,
and laugh at the idea that I am a coward, if not for the sobering
knowledge of what might have happened had Kleon had his way."

With those words, composed a night prior,
Demosthenes put his fate in the hands of the jury, which proceeded
immediately to a vote. Muttering amongst themselves, a
thousand-and-one men shuffled over to two urns, one of copper, one
of wood, that were set at the rear of the open Heliaia. Each man
carried two nearly identical disc-shaped bronze ballots. One ballot
was marked for the prosecution, the other for the defense. When his
turn came, each juror deposited both of his discs into the
containers, one into each. Ballots dropped into the bronze bin
would count toward the verdict, while those in the wood would be
discarded. In the end, each urn would contain a thousand and one
ballots, and every individual vote was a secret, if the caster
wanted it to be so. Some jurors cared nothing for secrecy, of
course, and would walk up to one party or the other to wish him
luck or assure him that victory was his. It seemed to Demosthenes
that he received more of these well-wishes than Kleon, but such
observations were worthless, since men's mouths were under no legal
obligation to vote in the same direction as their hands.

In a private chamber of the court building,
in the presence of both prosecutor and defendant and any male
citizens chosen by each to serve as witnesses, the bronze urn was
overturned and counting began under the supervision of the hegemon.
Well before the process was complete, Alkibiades, a witness for the
defense, clapped his friend on the neck and gave him a celebratory
shake, for the verdict was clear: acquittal. A sputtering Kleon
departed early, without bothering to discover whether he had
achieved the one-fifth of votes needed to avoid being struck with a
fine.

He did, it turned out, if barely. But this
verdict was only on the charge of cowardice. Other charges existed
against which Demosthenes had put up no defense, and the jury yet
needed to decide upon his penalty. When the sentencing hearing
convened, Kleon returned and argued for a massive fine and
jail-time. Then the defendant made his counter-proposal. Precedent
clearly showed that it was rarely wise for a guilty defendant to
ask for no punishment at all, since the jurors were only able to
choose between one proposal or the other, and so Demosthenes made
no such argument this day.

As morning turned to afternoon, the
redistributed ballots were cast and a sentence was determined.