Athenian Steel: Roman Annihilation 423 BCE (The Hellennium) Read online

  ATHENIAN STEEL:

  ROMAN ANNIHILATION 423 BCE

  by

  P.K. Lentz

  Text copyright © 2015 P.K. Lentz

  All Rights Reserved

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  I. The Stone Pit

  II. Blood-Drinker

  III. The Flower-Seller

  IV. Up the Tiber

  V. Invasion

  VI. The Battle for Roma

  VII. Thalassia Massacres the Entire Roman Senate

  VIII. Hail Demosthenes, Conqueror of Rome

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  Introduction

  In my Sci-Fi-Historical epic ATHENIAN STEEL, Thalassia, a rogue operative of an interdimensional army, lands in Greece in 425 BCE and strikes a pact with the Athenian general Demosthenes (d. 413 BCE) to bring Athens victory in its war with Sparta. In my original draft, Demosthenes and Thalassia end the Peloponnesian war in a treaty which binds the Greek city-states into a Hellenic League aimed at combating external, barbarian threats. At this time, Rome is no such threat, but as we (and Thalassia) know, one day it will subjugate Greece with little difficulty. Thalassia, further, has motives of her own for wishing to see Rome wiped out. The novel's original version thus differed from the published one in concluding with a climactic Greek assault on Rome, depicted here in this novella.

  Prior to that attack, Demosthenes' and Thalassia's initial scouting foray into Italy does not go as planned, and they wind up separated. Demosthenes is captured by slavers while Thalassia proceeds to Rome where she adopts a Latin equivalent of her name, Marina, and infiltrates the household of a Roman Senator. The Spartan Equal Styphon, here the leader of a band of Theban mercenaries, had a different and somewhat larger role to play than in the finished novel.

  If you have not read Athenian Steel, great! This novella can be read first and separately without major spoilers. You won't know as much about the characters involved, but I hope you’ll want to get to know them better and will grab a copy of ATHENIAN STEEL, and then the sequel, SPARTAN BEAST. If you have read Athenian Steel already, then here's a vision of what might have been. Fear not, for Demosthenes and Thalassia will take a bloody 'Roman holiday' in Book III of The Hellennium; it will just go down differently from this.

  I felt that some of this material, particularly the battle itself, as well as the glimpse of Thalassia's deadlier side, was too good to simply let vanish unseen. So here it is! I hope you enjoy.

  P.K. Lentz

  I. The Stone Pit

  His son, if he had one, would have taken steps on his own two feet by now. Soon the boy would be old enough to inquire about his father, a question which no one around him could answer. If the boy could be given a truthful reply, it would be thus: Your father is Demosthenes. He labors as a slave in a quarry somewhere in Italy, where at night he gazes into a sky bounded on all sides by sheer rock walls, and he dreams of you.

  Or perhaps he had a daughter, which would be a fine thing, too, even if it meant the end of his oikos. If she had borne a girl and the courts declared her husband dead, then poor Laonome would be a widow again, but now suitors would clamber at her door for the chance not only to become steward of the patrimony freshly passed down from Alkisthenes, free to dispose of its wealth as he saw fit, but also in thirteen years' time to betroth his own son or brother or nephew to the estate's heiress, the daughter of Demosthenes.

  Let his offspring be a daughter, then, even though it meant that. He would settle just for knowing. But how could he? With eighteen months having passed without word since his departure, all in Athens would assume him dead by now. He grieved at the thought of Laonome a widow again, and for her sake more than his own, he hoped she had borne him a male. She would have choices then, including the choice never to remarry unless doing so made her happy.

  He tried not to consider the possibility that the birth had killed her, which happened often enough. From what he knew, though, death was more common in a woman's first birth, and this would be Laonome's third, after the two sons she had outlived. She had outlived a second husband now, too, or so she must believe. And perhaps it was better that way, for the pain might be easier than that which could come from holding too long onto hope.

  Demosthenes had long ago surrendered hope. Thoughts of flight had dominated his first days in the dusty quarry-pit, but soon enough he had come to accept that unless and until he masters saw fit to free him, there was no escape but death. Entrance to and departure from the sheer-walled quarry was made by the use of a series of tall ladders which under the bright sun of the long workday were easily monitored from above and below by guards, bowmen all. At night, the ladders were pulled up, leaving the slaves, who comprised only a fraction of the total workforce so as not to give them strength in numbers, to eat and sleep in their cluster of ragged tents at the base of one of the pit's sheer walls.

  Half a year ago, Demosthenes had witnessed a newly arrived slave attempt a ladderless nighttime ascent. The wretch had made it about halfway before being spotted by the guards, who merely watched him with arrows nocked. Forced to choose between certain slaughter at the rim and making his way back down into a life of slavery, he had chosen the latter. Because the man had been new, and not least because slaves had monetary value, the masters were kind that day and had let him off with a few lashes.

  Most Athenians, most Spartans, and most men everywhere were fond of saying that it was better to die than to live as a slave. The Demosthenes who had set off to Italy so long ago might have said that himself. But he would have been wrong, just as all the others were wrong. Men who said such things had never simply opened their eyes one day to look on the world as a slave. Any who had known that experience knew that any life at all was better than death. A bleak tomorrow was better than no tomorrow.

  Perhaps he yet clung to a shred of hope after all, even if, thus far, all of his tomorrows (eighteen months' worth of them if he counted correctly) had been bleak ones. He labored in a team of ten men, most of them free, which could cut between one and ten stones from the rock face each day, depending on size. The stone was beige poros, a much softer and cheaper stone than marble and little used for monuments in Athens these days, but evidently it remained the material of choice in cursed, barbaric Italy. The ten men of his team divided work equally regardless of who among them were slaves and who free, and so some days Demosthenes had the back-breaking task of swinging the hammer against the wooden pegs set into the stone or hauling on thick ropes to unseat a colossal block from its place in the mountain, while other days he did finer work with an iron chisel.

  The latter days ever reminded him of the time just after his arrival, when the gash in his thigh was still healing and he had been excused from heavy toil. His soul had been filled with constant despair in those days, and so now he actually preferred the heavy work which had in the course of these long months made his arms and chest thick with muscle. The sun had browned him, too, and his head full of curls had become a bleached horse's mane which fell over his shoulders and clung to his face in sweat-soa
ked tendrils if he did not bind it back. He chose not to cut it for no better reason than none of the other slaves did. He must look like a Spartan now, he thought, if ever in that city's long history a Spartan had been fair-haired.

  At night on his mat of straw, caked in quarry dust, he dreamed. He dreamed of Laonome, of course, and on those nights he awoke wishing he could sleep forever, but more often he saw Thalassia. He saw her not as the woman he had known and almost grown to like, but as the black-eyed creature of his vision the day he had woken into captivity in the barbarian hut. She was an object of terror and hatred the sight of which alternately froze him in his tracks and sent him flying into a rage. He saw one night in his dreams a woman cloaked in black standing in an endless field of yellow asphodel, and his sleep-addled mind could not decide whether she was the star-nymph or the Mistress of Haides. He began to conflate the two more often in his dreams, though when he woke he could conceive of no similarity between them except perhaps that each was an exile from the world of her birth, condemned to dwell in a harsher place.

  Demosthenes prayed every day of his life as a slave, and even sacrificed some of his meager rations, but treating the dreams as a sign, he began to focus his prayers on Persephone. He begged of the goddess not to let him set eyes yet upon Haides' kingdom and to ward off Laonome too from hell's iron gates. He prayed for loyal Eurydike, whom he knew would be ready, if it were in her power, to take up her blunt Spartan knife and pass through those very gates to drag her master's shade back to sunlit earth. He prayed that the will he had left behind would be honored by the courts, giving Eurydike the freedom she had never wanted and silver enough to last her many years, even if he knew in his heart she would choose to stay by Laonome's side. He prayed to Zeus and Athena that his son or daughter would grow up in health and happiness, not mourning too much the father he or she would never know. He prayed to Apollon and His sister for forgiveness for his crimes against them, and to all the gods to forgive his having forsaken them in favor of Thalassia's falseness.

  He never prayed for freedom, for he knew that would be asking too much.

  For eighteen months, the prayers he sent up from a tiny crevasse in the mountains of Italy twisted into a steely sky with the scrawny wisps of smoke from his puny sacrifices, and only the gods knew whether or not they were heard. For eighteen months his mind and soul withered and his limbs grew strong. In summer the sweat poured off him like the rain that rarely came, and in winter when the rain finally did come, it came in torrents which made the pit's bottom an ankle-deep pool of grey mud and dust-clouded water. Then, at last, just after his second scorching summer in the pit, during the month he calculated to be Boedromion by the Athenian reckoning—what calendar was used here he hadn't a clue—change came at last.

  He had picked up only a smattering of the Thracian-like tongue spoken in this place, but he knew enough to understand what was being announced that day. All the quarry-slaves were to be released from service. Which was not to say they were being freed. On the contrary; they were to be sold. A few days later, he and the seven Italics who were his fellow slaves were brought to the base of a ladder and instructed to climb to the rim. They said their goodbyes to the free laborers with whom they had formed bonds of friendship and who by and large had treated them kindly, even bringing them gifts of food prepared by their wives. Every one of the slaves, not least Demosthenes, relished his long-awaited return to the surface world. There the quarry-slaves saw trees for the first time in countless dawns, and finally felt things beneath their feet other than rock and dust. But they were not allowed to linger, as without delay they were bound in a long line, ankle to ankle and wrist to wrist. The end of their tether was lashed to a waiting donkey cart, and they marched behind the cart for a day until they reached the coast, where Demosthenes felt joy at laying eyes again upon the sea, even if it was not his sea and even if it was to be his fate never again to cross it.

  In the coastal town they reached, the eight slaves were sold off in two groups to two buyers who took their purchases in different directions. A group of three was herded onto a rocking fishing boat destined for some spot up or down the coast while Demosthenes, to his regret, was in the remaining group of five which was lashed to a new master's cart along with nine or ten other unfortunates to strike off inland. For three days, they marched west across fallow plains in a caravan of four mule carts, as many horsemen and a handful of armed slavers on foot. On the fourth day they began a mountain crossing on roads that were hardly wider in places than sheep trails. The crossing lasted three days and cost them the lives of one slave to illness and one slaver to a careless misstep.

  Day eight saw them traveling north and west over fertile lowlands dotted with small and medium-sized towns. Here was civilization, Demosthenes sensed, or the closest thing to it he had seen since Cumae. Each population center through which they passed was larger than the last, but the caravan did not stop except to camp for a night in the middle of some disused field or another. By afternoon of the ninth day since their departure from the coast, they reached the city on the river which could not but be their destination.

  The sight of it crushed the heart inside Demosthenes' breast, stealing what little will to endure he had left after the arduous trek, for this place was magnificent. High stone walls flanked the colossal gate structure by which their caravan was to enter, and beyond the walls stood three high hills, two of which were crowned by temples rivaling anything Perikles had built in sheer size, if not artistry. The streets, paved with neat stone squares, bustled like those of Athens with people scurrying down every street, the men wearing neatly belted tunics, the women in long dresses with embroidered hems, silver pins holding hair upswept. Demosthenes trudged down street after street and saw not a single tent or mud-brick hut, no sheep or goat running loose, no piles of rubbish or trenches brimming with shit. As the caravan passed a well-kept park, he saw spearmen drilling in an ordered phalanx wearing full bronze breastplates and open-faced helmets. From their belts hung short stabbing swords. They might have been hoplites, except that their crimson shields were not round but oval.

  Barbarians did not fight in this manner; that was a large part of what made them barbarians. And thus this city was not a barbarian city. In all but blood, it was Greek, as if austere Sparta had been made more grand with temples and transported across a sea. The spearmen's red shields even bore a common device, as those of the Spartans did.

  The shields' device was a broad-winged eagle in gold, and the sight of it erased all doubt. This place was none other than Roma, and Demosthenes found scant humor in the irony of his arrival here not as the city's conqueror, the deliverer of Athens and all of Greece from predestined subjugation... but as a slave.

  II. Blood-Drinker

  The last time he had walked the streets of Athens it had been as a freshly released prisoner of war, a failure, a joke, the shame of Sparta. Now he walked those same streets as a man with no country and barely a name. Few knew him as Styphon any more. His former countrymen would call him 'trembler' if they spoke of him at all, which was unlikely. The men of the mercenary force he now commanded had called him, back when he had been but one of their number, haimatorrophos: 'blood-drinker,' in an insipid reference to the famous black soup of Lakedaemonian mess halls. More often they had just called him 'The Spartan,' but that was before other Equals who had been captured with him on Sphakteria began trickling into Thebes, sick of the treatment they had received back home. Sparta was a city where coin was outlawed and full-blooded citizens were forbidden to engage in trade, and so when a Spartan started selling his spear-arm to any king or archon or tyrant who could spare the silver, word traveled far and fast.

  Though the cities of Greece had reached an uneasy peace amongst themselves, there was plenty of fighting to be done. In the nine months since his release he had fought Illyrians, Macedonians, Thracians, and Thessalians, mostly in skirmishes, rarely pitched battles. He had killed men by the dozen and was proud of none of it. He wond
ered now and then if Andrea knew her father's name. Then he wondered whether it might be for the best if she didn't.

  Walking into Athens, Styphon drew lingering glances from the locals, for his long hair and coarse, undyed himation stood out in this city of pluckers and preeners. He had come in search of the home of one of those preeners, and not knowing the city he was forced to ask passersby for direction. They were happy to help a stranger, or more likely fearful of not helping one whose crooked nose, beady eyes and grim expression suggested might be inclined to violence if they declined. Everyone he asked knew of Alkibiades and so finding the man's residence posed no difficulty.

  The size and magnificence of the house was revolting. Its front garden overflowed with blossoming plants and marble statues, more than one of which, Styphon noted, bore the inscription 'Alkibiades.' As a servant led him inside, he found the walls adorned with colorful murals which rose up to greet sky-blue ceilings which were half again taller than they needed to be. Styphon was seated in one or another of the house's many chambers at an ornately carved, gilt-edged ebony table by a woman who poured him wine and informed him that Alkibiades would have to be fetched from the home of an acquaintance. Without resorting to words, she made clear that her flesh was on offer, too, if he so desired. “Leave,” Styphon told the wench, and repeated himself when she only stood by in amazement.

  Alone, he studied with distaste the finely painted wine cup which showed an elaborate scene of Achilles disguised as a woman fathering Neoptolemos on a princess of Skyros. After some minutes had passed, he grudgingly drained the cup's contents and winced at the dark wine's sweetness. He sat rigid on his cushion for the better part of an hour, sometimes taking advantage of the time to shut his eyes in half-sleep, until at last Alkibiades arrived. The fool looked just as Styphon recalled him: the smooth, fair skin, the hair composed of curls which might each have been separately and carefully sculpted, the embroidered linen chiton fit for a Persian prince. Pathetic he was, and he brought to mind the old Spartan expression that went, loosely, a man who puts his wealth on display must possess no other qualities worth displaying.