Athenian Steel (Book I of the The Hellennium) (47 page)

Brasidas laughed. "It is not worth her time
to dismount. She can put an arrow down your throat from where she
is. I am always glad to see my enemies die, but that would just
be...disappointing."

"Then you fight instead," Demosthenes
suggested, idly, but not without hope. "On the same terms."

"Save your breath," Brasidas scoffed. "The
duel was her idea. If it were up to me, the shield-walls would have
crashed already. So if your sea-wench isn't–"

Suddenly Brasidas, who had been gazing down
from atop his mount, looked up toward the Athenian army's right.
Demosthenes twisted his head to follow the gaze, then turned the
rest of his body and watched with a mix of awe and relief as a lone
horse and rider careened down the slope.

It was Phaedra, and on her back rode
salvation.

The first sight of Thalassia in her Amazon's
armor dragged a short peal of quiet laughter from Demosthenes: the
laughter of a condemned man around whose neck the garrote wire has
just snapped. Just as to such a man, in that instant, to
Demosthenes' mind it scarcely mattered whether the sentence of
death was lifted or the gods had only granted him a short reprieve;
it was relief all the same.

While Thalassia slowed to a canter for her
descent of the hill, Demosthenes looked over to see the mounted
Spartiate's reaction. Brasidas's look of assurance had faded, and
he seemed now to be reconsidering the wisdom of having ventured so
far from the protection of his allies, or at any rate from the one
ally capable of protecting him from she who approached. But rather
than turning tail, he stood his ground. The next few moments would
determine whether that decision was to his credit or regret.

From a distance, Eden on her black charger
watched unmoving. Undoubtedly her malevolent, cerulean eyes were
tracking her enemy's approach. Who knew what thoughts lay behind
them? Eagerness for the kill? Or perhaps under her hatred, as was
often the case, flowed a current of fear. This enemy had beaten her
once.

After an eternity, Thalassia reined in
Phaedra just short of Brasidas and dismounted. She thrust the
horse's reins at Demosthenes and ordered him in steely tones,
"Return to the lines." Not once did her pale stare focus on either
man present, but rather it stayed fixed in the distance on her
fellow star-born, right eye peering through the mourning veil of
black lace that was Magdalen's Mark.

Though he accepted the horse's lead from
her, Demosthenes hesitated to do as she asked. Thalassia seemed to
be in no mood for words, even what few they had time for, but he
felt the need for some. But what were they? How could one do
justice to the feelings she inspired? Stirring in his breast were
awe, pride, gratitude, and respect, but most of all he felt sadness
that this strange, flawed, infuriating being might shortly be
sacrificed to the incoherent rage of a blood-crazed beast.

Thalassia found words long before he did,
and they were anything but sentimental.

"I'm here, Spartan pig-fucker," she spat at
Brasidas, without sparing him her gaze. "Bring her."

It took Brasidas a few beats to answer. "You
will fight at the midpoint between our lines." The barely
perceptible tremor in his voice said he was acutely aware of what
Thalassia was capable of doing to him.

"If the cunt wants me, she can come and get
me."

Brasidas, burdened with no death wish,
showed his disappointment in a typical Spartan scowl. He kicked his
horse, turned it to face the Spartan lines and departed through the
field of waving grass at a fast trot. Thalassia drew her two short
swords, one then the other, and stood with legs parted, the twin
blades of gleaming Athenian steel forming an inverted lambda with
its apex between her knees, eyes locked on her distant, mounted
nemesis.

Standing behind Thalassia with impatient
Phaedra's reins in hand, Demosthenes could not see her pale eyes,
only a thick braid and the back of her bronze-studded leather
armor. Still perched above her ear was the purple blossom given to
her on the Dromos.

"Get away," she said without turning.

Yet Demosthenes stood frozen. He wanted to
embrace her or at very least say something to express his
gratitude, but no words came. Perhaps it was better that way. All
he could be to her at this pivotal moment was a distraction.

Half a battlefield away, Eden began slowly
to ride forward.

"Look, idiot," Thalassia said, her perfect
Attic edged with ice. "I am doing this for Red and Laonome, and
that only makes sense if you live. So fuck off already!"

The sound of the names of his loved ones
broke whatever enchantment he had been under. Setting his foot in
Phaedra's stirrup, Demosthenes mounted, and with one last look down
at his city's champion, he kicked the mare to a gallop. At the
crest of the hill, where Nikostratos and the rest still stood, he
stopped and dismounted. He had expected a flurry of inconvenient
questions but was greeted by only a sea of blank faces and mouths
hanging partly open.

Strangely, the battle brewing below did not
seem to be the cause of their distraction.

With one eye on the slow advance across the
plain of Sparta's she-daimon, Demosthenes asked of Nikostratos or
any of them, "What is wrong?"

The strategos swallowed hard. "News from
Athens."

During the grave pause which followed,
Demosthenes noted the presence of a panting messenger and a
sweating horse not far off.

"A naval assault at Piraeus," Nikostratos
said. "Spartans are within the Long Walls."

The news hit like a hammer blow. When
Demosthenes had recovered enough to draw breath, he used it to
inquire, "What is to be done?"

Nikostratos gave no answer, and Demosthenes
could not press him for one, because out in the swaying grass of
no-man's land, the star-born champions of two cities were about to
meet.

Eden trotted up, halted her black horse and
slid gracefully from the saddle some three spear lengths from the
place where Thalassia had rooted herself. In the same fluid
movement, she produced a short sword from a scabbard at the horse's
haunch, a second from her hip, and took a step forward, leaving her
mount to wander. Though it was hard to tell from such distance, a
smile seemed to haunt her pink lips. More easily discernible was
Eden's mark of Magdalen, a network of dark lines covering the upper
right quadrant of her face. Thalassia had said no two were alike,
but from this vantage they might as well have been.

Eden spoke some words which, even were they
audible, Demosthenes knew no being on earth (but for one other, who
slept beneath a mountain) could comprehend.

Thalassia, evidently, was in no mood for
words in any language.

She attacked.

From a standstill, Thalassia launched
herself panther-like across the few yards separating her from her
enemy. She closed the gap in an eyeblink, twin blades rising, but
Eden, showing no sign of alarm, dove under the charge, parried one
of Thalassia's swords and thrust her own second blade upward,
piercing Thalassia's shoulder. The blade punched easily through the
armor of Penthesilea to emerge on the other side coated in dark
blood, the first of the fight, and it was Thalassia's.

That blow, which would have ended any
contest of men, caused not even a pause in this one. Just as
quickly as it had entered, Eden's blade slid free. Thalassia's
momentum was barely broken, and in a heartbeat she had answered the
wound by reversing her right hand's grip on its sword and bringing
the blade down, like a priest's sacrificial dagger, into Eden's
hip.

The two parted, rivers of blood pouring from
mortal wounds, but neither showed any sign of pain or inclination
to break off the fight. On the contrary, within seconds they were
dealing fresh blows. As before, each was able to parry one of her
opponent's blades while the other struck home. Thalassia got the
better of it this time, if just. She hacked down onto Eden's
collarbone and received in exchange only a stab that glanced off
her rib cage. But on the side opposite, Thalassia parried not with
her sword but with leather-clad forearm: Eden's blade bit straight
through the hide and into her flesh, cleaving to the bone.

They parted, blood-covered like twin sirens
freshly slaked on sailors' blood. The pause lasted barely the
length of an indrawn breath, and then battle was rejoined.
Thalassia went again and again for the collarbone, as if her aim
were to hack the blond head from Eden's shoulders. She connected
twice, gouging a deep cleft and soaking the flaxen hair in red, but
Eden blocked her third stroke and paid her back by running
Thalassia through yet again, inches from the navel.

Demosthenes did not look to either side of
him, lest he miss the ending of a fight which plainly could not
endure much longer. Thus he could only assume that the rest of the
watchers on the hill were as transfixed as he by the spectacle,
albeit in rather more confusion. Only Nikias might have understood,
and if Nikias watched, it was only his bodiless shade.

The champions hacked and stabbed and
slashed, and more blows landed than were blocked, and the gore
spattered across the plain of Eleusis. Blood flowed in torrents
until the two combatants could scarcely be told apart, and still
they battled on. Each should have been killed ten times over, yet
limbs and blades flew on with undiminished fury, delivering mortal
blow after mortal blow. The fighters were beautiful, or had been,
but there was no grace or beauty in this struggle. It was no dance,
but a whirlwind of butchery. Every so often, one or the other woman
shrieked, never in pain but only in belligerence, and the sounds
were like those that heroes of yore must have heard in their
journeys to hell.

The next few seconds did not treat Thalassia
well. Each time Demosthenes managed, by a lock of hair, a glimpse
of armor, or pattern of wounds, to ascertain for certain which
bloodied combatant was which, it was the champion of Athens who was
on the defensive. The tide of the swift-flowing red current had
turned decisively in Eden's favor.

Some twenty seconds into the fight, one
blade of Thalassia's became lodged in Eden's ribcage–Eden twisted,
and the handle was wrenched from Thalassia's grasp. Thalassia began
employing her empty left hand as a shield, and in no time that limb
became so much meat dangling from her elbow. Thalassia stepped
back, back, and back again, toward the Athenian
lines–deliberately–and Demosthenes, loath as he was to wrench his
eyes away, knew he had to move. He looked to his right to find
Straton among the awestruck ranks, and he signaled to him.

Straton, transfixed as the rest on the
impossible battle below, already had his orders, and needed only to
be snapped out of his stupor.

"Straton!" Demosthenes cried sharply at
him.

At the sound of his name, Straton blinked
and acknowledged understanding, then set to shoving the bowmen
around him and hissing the code word 
makellon
:
slaughterhouse.

Thalassia stood unsteadily on one leg which
looked as though a great beast had mauled it, which very nearly was
the case. She resorted to grappling with Eden, holding tight to her
like a wrestler waiting out the end of a round, only there was no
respite to be had in this match, just victory or death. It seemed
almost certain now that the latter of these would go to Thalassia.
Eden hacked down again and again on her staggered foe, cutting
every time. After a mad frenzy of slashing, Thalassia's sword arm
flopped into the trampled grass, severed at the shoulder. At the
same time, Eden got a foot wrapped around the ankle of Thalassia's
mangled leg and tripped her.

Thalassia vanished into the grass, but mad
Eden, living up to the name of the goddess by whose name Sparta
knew her, let up not a bit. Blood flew in a mist from Eden's silent
lips as she cast aside one of her swords, took the other in both
hands and stabbed down into the waving grass, again and again and
again.

Though victorious, gore-soaked Eden had not
come through the combat unscathed. Where once she had moved like a
cat or a nymph, now she jerked about like a red-painted puppet
dangling on invisible strings.

Makellon
, Demosthenes prayed, would
cut her strings.

As Thalassia was falling and Eden beginning
her butchery, Straton ushered the plan, if belatedly, into effect.
The hoplites arrayed in front of the line of gastraphetes-wielding
archers sank into a crouch to allow three hundred belly-bows, each
loaded with two giant bolts tipped with razor sharp Athenian steel,
to take aim over their shoulders, helmets and shield rims. Straton,
taking aim down the stock of his own gastraphetes, uttered the
command to fire, and the hillside filled with the sound of twanging
sinews and of wooden shafts scraping iron rails. Six hundred
javelin-like missiles let fly from the hill's crest and sliced
straight down the grassy slope to converge on the spot where the
single combat had just concluded.

A volley like that could not miss, and it
did not. In her moment of triumph, Eden was cut down. At least a
dozen shafts struck her, some running her through, others ripping
great gashes in her limbs, while one opened up a skull that was
already so slick with blood, hers and her enemy's, that only a
single wisp of long, golden hair remained visible. Butchered,
Sparta's champion dropped into the grass alongside the rival she
had slain, the rival whose service to Athens shone no less for her
defeat.

Demosthenes let no cumbersome feelings slow
him, neither ones of mourning for she who had offered up her life
(one of them, anyway) for Athens, nor feelings of relief at the
elimination of a dire threat in the she-daimon Eden. He spared not
even a thought for gentle Laonome and playful Eurydike, no longer
safe back home in threatened Athens. He thought of nothing but the
immediate task which must be accomplished.