Athenian Steel (Book I of the The Hellennium) (44 page)

For the better part of the next hour, they
made their way slowly to the Dipylon Gate and passed through it
into the countryside of Attica. There, unconstrained by streets,
the human current spread thinner, and the mood among the fighters
grew decidedly more somber as all began to set their minds to what
lay ahead. Thalassia's mood was already grim, and that did not
change. Demosthenes rode alongside her in silence, through the tall
grass which flanked the Sacred Way, making no attempt to dispel
whatever cloud it was that hung over her.

Their plans were already made and required
no further discussion. They were to separate. Thalassia was to ride
with Alkibiades and a host of citizen cavalry on an attack across
the frontier meant to destroy any remaining Spartan siege engines.
Demosthenes, meanwhile, would report to the Athenian forces' left
wing, nearest Eleusis, where Nikias, in overall command, would be
stationed. It was also where Brasidas, doubtless leading the enemy
right, the place of honor, would be, and where the 'special
weapons,' as Nikias had called them, were to be deployed:
belly-bows ready to skewer Equals, assuming Eden hadn't equipped
them with some countermeasure, and firepots to be hurled into the
rear ranks and burn men alive with clinging, unquenchable
flame.

How much more horrific could war become?
Demosthenes scarcely had time to wonder. Thalassia knew the answer,
no doubt, but he felt no desire to ask her, even if he got the
chance.

When the city had receded behind a hill at
their backs and the land became more thickly wooded, Thalassia
steered Phaedra into a copse of trees and there halted. Demosthenes
followed and waited impatiently for Thalassia to make clear the
purpose of her diversion.

"It's time for you to know my last secret,"
she said.

Scenting war ahead, Akmos whinnied angrily
at the delay. Thalassia slid from Phaedra's saddle in the stand of
small trees and came toward the eager beast, whose rider swung down
to meet her. Reaching him, Thalassia raised in her fingertips a
small object which caught the sunlight. Demosthenes studied it: a
sphere roughly the size of an olive, composed of a dark, highly
polished metal. Barely visible on its surface were short
inscriptions in some foreign alphabet.

"What is it?" her silence forced him to
ask.

"A Seed," was her answer. She stared at it,
rather than him. "Just as a temple begins its existence as stone in
a quarry and the plans of an architect, so this Seed contains plans
and a small amount of material."

Demosthenes stared into the metallic sphere,
brows furrowing in puzzlement. "Plans for what?"

Her pale gaze rose from the object and fell
upon his face, and she smiled as she made her simple reply.
"Me."

Demosthenes stared at her, then back at the
so-called Seed, and shook his head.

"Whenever we leave Spiral, we carry six of
them inside our bodies," Thalassia explained. "If just one
survives, then we can live again. Four of my six lie at the bottom
of the sea. One is near my heart." With her free hand, she tapped
Penthesilea's breastplate. "And this last I removed..." The same
hand raised the stiffened leather and linen of her skirts to
display a pink scar on her upper thigh as she finished, "to give to
you."

Now she took Demosthenes' hand and pressed
the Seed into its palm, closing the fingers around it, and she
clasped it there, her hands enveloping his. The sphere within
seemed to radiate a warmth of its own.

Thalassia lowered her face for her next
words: "Know that in no world, in no layer, is there another hand
in which I would sooner place this."

Demosthenes scoffed, gently. "You have poor
judgment. I have not treated you well."

"Nor I you," she said quickly, still
avoiding his gaze. "But we are past that. I don't know what it is
that exists between us. Right now, it is small. But I believe that
if it were allowed to grow, it could become something... terrible.
And beautiful. And destructive. I have told you what is my life's
greatest regret. It is what brought me here. But I think
that..."

Demosthenes sensed that she had composed
these words in advance of this moment and so did not search for
words but only the ability to speak them.

Finding it, she finished, "If this were to
be our final meeting, then I would end my existence with an even
greater regret." She laughed, and finally met his eyes, and they
were bright but sad. "You should hope the opposite," she said,
"that we never do meet again. It would be better for you, and your
world. But... I would very much like for us to go to Roma together
one day." Her gaze sank again, and she released his hand. "We could
do a lot of damage, you and I."

"Of that, I have little doubt," Demosthenes
quietly concurred. "I hope it will be the case today. But..." He
exposed the Seed in his open palm, marveling at the possibility
that another Thalassia might spring forth from this shell fully
formed, as Athena from the skull of Zeus. "What am I to do with
this?"

"If I felt the need to tell you that, then I
would not be giving it to you. You do with it as you see fit. The
Seed by itself will take the better part of a year to recreate me.
Should you possess my body, or part of it, reunite it with the
Seed. That will significantly speed the process. Lacking that,
surrounding it with any meat, human or animal, will help, too. If
ever you wish to destroy it–"

"I will not–"

"Let me finish. You need to know, to dispose
of Eden, if for no other reason," she said. "Seeds are difficult to
damage, but roughly the weight of a temple column will be a start.
Then just keep adding weight until it's crushed. You could drop it
in the sea, with my others. That would not destroy it, but it's
easier. With Eden's, though, I recommend you take the more thorough
approach."

Sighing with what sounded disturbingly like
resignation, armor-clad Thalassia started back toward Phaedra,
whose tail whipped violently. Demosthenes took a last look at her
gift to him, this share of her very existence, and dropped the
polished sphere into the rawhide pouch under the skirt of his scale
armor, where it warmed his death-token, the silver drachma which
was to be placed in the mouth of his corpse for passage into Hades,
should he fall.

"Wait," he said, succeeding in halting her.
"I... owe you something."

Lips that pursed momentarily in mild
derision said she understood what was owed. She scoffed. "Forget
it."

"It invites misfortune to let debts be
erased," he said. "They should be paid."

"Fucking hell," she cursed, then conceded,
"All right. In that case, I owe you something, too."

Demosthenes tried and failed to recall what
this debt might be, but she preempted his asking by insisting, "You
first."

She clearly had no intention of making
herself an easy recipient. Legs planted in the tall grass, she
stood unmoving, forcing Demosthenes to approach her to give the
thing owed. He was not entirely certain he wished to give it, but
at least a part of him did. It was that same part which knew that
the unique being now facing him, his ally,
his... 
friend
...was as likely as not to end this day as
lifeless, mutilated meat. For that matter, so was he.

He summoned up his will to act, or rather
suppressed the will not to, and he moved. He stepped in close, set
his hand behind Thalassia's neck, under her braid, and kissed her,
paying back the debt accrued by his abuse of her in Amphipolis. He
kissed her softly, but with neither passion nor tenderness. It was
a simple kiss, one of affection, and Thalassia reacted to it not at
all. Her lips were not quite iron, but something like it. Spun
bronze, perhaps, but less pliant.

He lingered on her mouth a second longer
than he might have, hoping she would give in, but each heartbeat
only increased the extent of potential embarrassment when they
broke, and so before long, he withdrew in defeat.

Thalassia's pale eyes regarded him
distantly. Her mouth remained a thin line. She said nothing, and so
it was up to him to move them past the awkward aftermath of his
miscalculation.

Trying not to show the dent in his pride, he
asked, "What is it that you owe me?"

Finally her stony mask cracked for a tick of
her sublime features, less than a smile. "I just gave it."

Demosthenes puzzled over this, and presently
the memory surfaced. It had been almost two years prior, on his
rooftop terrace, that her soft lips had been insistent, his the
ones unwilling. Now she had repaid him back in kind, with
rejection.

He laughed at himself, easily, feeling
neither discomfort nor embarrassment. "I suppose that settles
accounts between us."

"For a few hours, maybe," she said. "If I
save Athens today,"–she held her hand out, palm up, and waggled its
fingers–"I expect you to go broke making it rain fucking jewels on
me."

The sight before him, of Thalassia geared
for war, her lips freshly parted from his, one hand extended to
catch rain, sent a new memory coursing through his mind, and it
weakened his limbs like a physical blow. This memory was of a
long-ago nightmare, in which he had stood alone with blood-soaked
Thalassia upon a field of endless slaughter.

"Hmm," hyper-perceptive Thalassia intoned,
with a vaguely dejected look. "I don't know exactly why you're
looking at me like that. I would ask, but..." She glanced at the
road to Eleusis fifty yards off, where the ongoing current of man,
animal, bronze, and steel was barely visible between the trunks of
trees. "We should go."

When she turned her face back to him, it had
changed: she wore her mark of Magdalen.

"Warpaint," she offered in explanation.

Demosthenes stared into the flowing, complex
network of lines he had seen only once before. In turn, the bright
eye at the web's center regarded him back with a distant glimmer of
amusement. She made a surreal sight, this wintry eyed witch, a
star-born Pandora in her Amazon's garb, with twin swords of
Athenian steel on her hips, elegant and savage masque covering a
quarter of her face, and lastly the forlorn purple flower, bizarre
accompaniment to her panoply of war, helplessly adrift in a
jasmine-scented wave of raven hair.

Clearly the world had gone mad, or he had,
or both, for this was the champion of Athens. And if dreams were
windows on a future immutable, then to him Thalassia was more than
just that. She was his lover and queen and his partner in visiting
untold devastation upon all he loved. He might pray that those
visions were only phantoms–except how could he even pray when she
had stripped him of gods and left in their place only this figure
before him?

"We can't stand here all fucking day," said
that terrible, beautiful figure. She spun to complete her earlier,
aborted walk back to Phaedra.

"Thalassia," Demosthenes called after
her.

She paused with her hand on Phaedra's
mane.

"Fucking kill her."

The demigoddess' head whipped round, just
far enough to reveal a faint, reluctant smile of approval.
Mounting, without a final goodbye, she galloped off north to meet
up with Alkibiades and undertake their appointed mission behind the
Spartan lines, to seek out and destroy Brasidas's machines.

Left alone in the grove, Athens' first
Archon of Witches mounted, too, and went to meet his own half of
their shared destiny.

The defenders of Attica, their ranks
numbering in the thousands and swelling still, arrayed themselves
on high ground in time to watch the army of Brasidas emerge from
the shallow valleys of the Megarid. It spread across the green
plains north of Eleusis like a great black blot spreading across
the page from an overturned inkwell.

"We should attack now, before they can form
up," Demosthenes urged, but he did not hold command here. He was
not even a general. The man beside him, Nikias, was the one charged
with Attica's defense, and Nikias was a man both praised and
derided for his excess of caution. The trait had served him well at
times, been his downfall at others, but either way, his word was
supreme this day.

"Our forces are not ready," Nikias
declared.

He was right in that men were still
streaming north from Athens to be dispatched to left, right or
center based on need and on what weaponry they owned. But Brasidas'
army numbered, by most accounts, no more than six thousand, while
the Athenian forces stretching in both directions in an undulant
line extending as far as the eye could see in either direction
might already have numbered twice that. Not only every able-bodied
citizen, but every foreigner, too, who called Athens home was
coming out.

"Much longer and we'll be fighting with the
sun in our faces."

This argument came from Nikostratos, friend
and political ally of Nikias, his colleague on the Board of Ten and
second-in-command this day. He was twenty years Nikias's junior and
marginally less inclined to circumspection.

But Nikias held fast: "We wait."

And so Demosthenes watched from a grassy
hilltop as the army of Brasidas formed up in orderly ranks. He
watched the mass in particular for the sight of a crown of long
blond hair, but he could no more pick that out over such a great
distance than he could the red horsehair plume of Brasidas
himself.

Late in the morning a rider arrived, a scout
of the 
prodromoi
, the light cavalry, bearing dire news.
A Theban army thousands strong was on the march south into Attica
in support of Brasidas. Even if its full mass of footsoldiers did
not arrive in time for the start of battle, their much-feared
cavalry surely would.

Nikias received the news stoically before
instructing his junior strategos and band of gathered aides to send
more of the fresh arrivals north to strengthen the right wing,
where the Thebans were liable to strike. Then he said to
Demosthenes, "Take the cavalry north and guard against the Theban
horse. If Alkibiades and your witch have not launched their attack
yet on the siege engines, cancel it and take them with you."