Spartan Beast (The Hellennium Book 2) Page 8

  The Athenian did not appear to relish it either, his head subtly craning away from her.

  “He speaks the truth on all counts,” Eris announced. “He is a good man. I should know.” She faced Alkibiades. When next she spoke, her breath must have licked the Athenian's neck. “Did the Whore tell you anything of what would have been your future, but for her meddling?”

  It was clear that this piqued the prisoner's interest. He shot the pale enchantress a brief, sidewise look as he answered: “Thalassia said there was no recorded mention of me in history.”

  Eris's free hand rose to stroke the Athenian's shoulder over his soiled prison smock. “She lied. As she does so well. You were to have been a hero. A legend. In fact, now that I stand so close to you...”

  Her hand slid down the length of his arm and across to his abdomen. Alkibiades raised an arm as if to check her, but evidently thought better of it and stood still as Eris gripped his manhood through the fabric. Brasidas looked on with a smirk which soon spread into a grin.

  Styphon hardly envied the Athenian. Far better and less dangerous to have unwanted attention from a king—or even a venomous adder—than from this silken witch.

  After a few moments being held thus, Alkibiades expelled held breath when at last Eris withdrew her hand, by which time the fabric of his garment stood propped up from underneath.

  “Release him to my custody,” Eris said to Brasidas, though her strange eyes remained on her prey whose scruffy beard she scratched with a fingertip. “Let me groom him, tend his wound, and take him about his city to show him how well it has been treated. And I can tell him of the future out of which Geneva cheated him.”

  “I... would prefer my cell,” Alkibiades pleaded hopelessly with the polemarch.

  Brasidas, furrowing his scarred brow in feigned consideration (feigned because surely he and Eris had planned the whole affair) before granting consent. “I cannot conceive of safer hands,” he declared. “Just see that he understands the consequences of trying to escape you.”

  “I can see in his eyes that he does.” Eris stroked her charge's greasy locks then wiped fingers on the waist of her chiton. “Even if he behaves, I imagine he will soon enough be begging for release.”

  She took the silent, erect prisoner's hand and led him from the office, a wolf leading the sheep to his not unpleasant fate. Satisfaction permeated the gaze with which Brasidas watched them leave.

  * * *

  When they were gone, Styphon began to address his superior: “Polemarch, if I might make an observation which may have some bearing on the whereabouts of Dem—”

  An abruptly upraised palm from Brasidas silenced him.

  “You will return to Sparta with me, naturally,” he said. “Are you pleased with that news?”

  The question was strangely informal, and caught Styphon by surprise. He gave the safest reply any Equal could, one which paraphrased Lykurgan code: “It is not my place to be pleased or displeased with an order.”

  Brasidas laughed a genuine laugh, if a brief one. Styphon had on occasion seen Brasidas appear to relax his ever-heightened guard in private, but rarely to this degree.

  “You should be pleased, Styphon,” he said. “You are not my dog anymore. We conquered Athens together. You have a bright future now. It could be that one day, when I am an old man in the reserves, and you are a general, I will serve under you. I want to be sure you remember me well. So relax.”

  Styphon did not, but pretended to. Brasidas's smirk implied that he noted the difference as he fell to silence and looked to the door, as if waiting.

  “I think that ought to do,” he said quietly, at length. “She has incredible hearing, you know. If you mean to say what I think you do, best she remain in the dark. Report.”

  Understanding, if barely, Styphon proceeded. “Perhaps it is nothing, sir, but the timing given by Alkibades and others for the departure of Demosthenes from Dekelea coincides with—”

  “The disappearance of Equals in the hills of Parnes?” Brasidas finished for him.

  “Aye, sir.” Styphon suppressed mild disappointment.

  Brasidas tapped some parchments on his writing pedestal. “Three more Equals of late,” he said. “And an Arcadian. I believe you are correct, Styphon. If she knew of the missing soldiers. She surely would have drawn the same conclusion.” Styphon noted the perhaps deliberate avoidance of Eris's name, as if her sensitive ears might be attuned to its speaking. “But she is only freshly awakened, and I would as soon have her back in Sparta before she learns and elects to give chase.”

  “Forgive me, sir,” Styphon inserted, “but might it not be for the best if she found and killed them?”

  “It would be,” Brasidas agreed. “But is that outcome so certain? And if she did succeed, what cause would she have to return to us? There is a third she-daemon, you know,” Brasidas added almost in passing. “Sleeping under a mountain in the far east, beyond Scythia. The eldest of the three, it seems. Once vengeance is claimed, ours may simply opt to join her sister.”

  With a nod, Styphon conceded the point, endeavoring to put from his mind the blood-chilling notion of a third Fury akin to Eris and Thalassia.

  Brasidas thumped his writing pedestal. “Ah, I'll be glad to see the end of this administrative shit! It's all tally-sheets and numbers and money. And dealing with these Athenians—gods, is there even one man in this marble rat's nest who won't do anything for a few silver obols?” He snorted. “Then again, I suppose those are the only type of men who will serve their country's enemy.”

  “No, they are all like that,” Styphon joked, and was proud to make the polemarch flash a smile.

  It swiftly vanished, and Brasidas said, “Just one more thing before I dismiss you, Styphon.”

  There was nothing especially ominous about the polemarch's tone—if anything, since Eris had left the room, it had been ominously friendly. Still, something made Styphon dread whatever might follow.

  “I must congratulate you on having gained the king's favor,” Brasidas said. “It will certainly boost your career.” He gave a half-shrug of humility. “As you rise, I hope you will not forget who it was that dragged your name from the mire in the first place.”

  Feeling relief that this was all Brasidas wished to add, Styphon reassured him, “I shall carry that debt unto death, polemarch.”

  “Good.” Brasidas smiled. “Thank you. And merely out of perverse curiosity,” he chuckled, though his sharp eyes were intense, “has Agis had you procure whores for him?”

  Though momentarily taken aback, Styphon considered no answer but the true one: “Yes, polemarch.”

  With a satisfied smirk, Brasidas asked, “Where did you go? Aspasia's?”

  “Aye.”

  “Only the best for royalty, eh?”

  With some hesitation, Styphon agreed, “Aye, sir.”

  Brasidas flicked his fingers in a friendly wave of dismissal.

  “Go on,” he said. “Leave me to a few last hours of this mind-numbing shit before we sail.”

  With a final, curt, “Aye, sir,” Styphon ducked out of the office. He chose simply to be grateful for the change in Brasidas rather than expend thought on what, if any, dark motives might lurk behind it.

  The life left unanalyzed was a happy one, someone had said, or should have.

  * * *

  10. Walking to Corinth

  They walked to Corinth like two itinerant beggars, possessing nothing in the world except what they carried. Only one of them looked the part, gaunt and ungroomed, while the other suffered little more than hair which was limper and less lustrous than once it had been. On the first night of their journey, spent encamped in the hinterlands of the Attic-Megarian frontier, Thalassia partook of another Cyclopean portion of the cooked lamb, borne over her shoulder in a sack made from the cloak of a dead Equal, before declaring her post-rebirth hunger sated. Demosthenes nibbled, and they slept on separate beds of brush. Under normal circumstances Thalassia slept only one night out of six
, but these were not normal times for her; she was yet weak.

  Deep in that night, Demosthenes sobbed in his sleep from a dream which often plagued him, that of Laonome pleading with him from a field of asphodel to eat of the Sad Queen's fruit that he might join her. How he tried and tried to take the fruit from Laonome and crack its red shell and pluck out and swallow its sweet seeds... but ever did the fruit, and she, remain just out of reach.

  He was halfway between worlds when, from one realm or the other, arms encircled him, pulling his cheek against a soft, linen-clad breast while warm lips pressed to his scalp and whispered soothingly, “Shhhh....”

  Surrendering, Demosthenes accepted the embrace and wept into the softness for long minutes before he felt underneath him rough twigs, heard the cricket-song, realized that the scent filling his awareness belonged not to his wife but another he knew too well.

  “No!” he hissed into the linen. Raising an arm between them, he shoved Thalassia and twisted away, scrambling on all fours in the dirt to put distance between them. She yielded, watching him go from where she knelt by his bed of brush.

  “Dee,” she said when he had sat huddled inside his cloak in the cold darkness for a while, his back to her.

  “Don't speak to me.”

  She obliged. The hours seemed endless until dawn came. Even before there was light enough for mere mortal eyes to see by, they broke camp and resumed their journey. After a short while spent navigating wooded slopes in silence, Thalassia in the lead, she fell back beside Demosthenes and began speaking, aloud but as if addressing no one in particular.

  “The scene is a stable in Athens. Two slaves make cakes from heaps of shit for feeding to a giant dung beetle. The slaves' master, Trygaeus, they say, begs daily of Zeus not to sweep Greece away with this war that turns cities into empty husks. So insistent was Trygaeus to learn the god's intention that he strapped together a bunch of ladders and tried climbing them, but he only fell and cracked his head. So instead he found this giant dung beetle, his Pegasus, on the back of which he means to fly up to Zeus and ask him face-to-face about his intentions for—”

  “What is this? What are you talking about?”

  “A play,” she replied without looking at him or stopping. “It's called Peace. Aristophanes would have presented it a few years from now. He still might. No way to tell. I thought you'd like to hear it. It will pass the time, at least.”

  “A comedy is perhaps not what suits my mood now.”

  “You want more tragedy? I have those, too, but—”

  “Why...” Demosthenes began, then hesitated, wondering whether he should engage her at all. “Why are you being so kind?”

  She shot him a glare as they walked. “I've always been kind. You just never bothered to notice.”

  “On the day we met, you choked me near to death, kneed me in the groin and kicked me repeatedly while I lay on the ground.”

  “I didn't know you yet! And you stabbed me.”

  “Later, you dragged me up the stairs of my own home and threw me across the roof.”

  “I—well...” she hunted briefly for words. “I said I was sorry. And I paid the price. You hardly spoke to me for a year.”

  “That was for kidnapping the daughter of an Equal.”

  “Fine,” Thalassia conceded. “This is all ancient history anyway. If you insist on dwelling on it, I'll have to bring up what you did in Amphipolis, and you don't need that now. Do you want to hear the fucking play or not?”

  Demosthenes took a moment to consider, or rather just not to appear overeager, then answered, “Yes, I suppose. Your lips have been still so long, I would not deny you a return to running them nonstop.”

  Thalassia regarded him with raised brows, but smiled. “Now who's the kindly one?” she asked. “So Trygaeus comes out and starts talking to the beetle...”

  Over the next two days, they crossed the Megarid and the Isthmus, and thanks to the traveler-out-of-time with whom he traveled, the ears of Demosthenes became the only ones in his world to have heard works which now were as likely as not never to be written. During the comedies, he failed to laugh as he surely would have a year ago, but still, intellectually he appreciated the humor and was grateful for the diversion. Surely that was Thalassia's motive, for she was intimately familiar with those dark paths down which his mind, if left to form its own thoughts, would otherwise travel.

  They were the same paths on which Thalassia was a tool to be used by him, a thing instead of a companion who cared for his welfare. Did she know that, and was her behavior calculated to steer his mind in the direction most beneficial to her? That would hardly surprise. So often, it seemed that she could see his very thoughts, even if she claimed such was not among her powers.

  She was a woman, though. Perhaps that was enough.

  Before reaching Corinth, they bathed in a stream and washed their clothing, for what good it did. For lack of a razor, Demosthenes' face remained covered in wild growth. That was perhaps for the best given that Corinth was a Spartan ally, and her authorities might be on alert for a fugitive Athenian general and a Persian witch. Fortunately, if any city existed besides Athens where it was possible for strangers to pass unnoticed, it was the bustling port of Corinth, where ships put in every day carrying visitors who had never set foot in Hellas, and never would again.

  Reasonably confident of anonymity, they passed through the gates and made straight for the crowded docks that sat on the Gulf to the west which was named for the city. By late afternoon, Demosthenes had secured passage for them on a Zakynthan trader that planned to depart in two days' time for Naupaktos. For payment he handed over the only coin he possessed, since his nighttime flight from Dekelea had not allowed for a purse full of clinking silver: he spent his death-coin, a Mysian gold stater depicting Pegasos, intended as his payment for the boatmen should he fall in battle.

  Except for the simple fact of its beauty, it bothered him little to part with it. There was no room for fanciful beliefs in Thalassia's universe, the cold, rational one which he had little choice but to accept as his own. Her universe had its own gods and monsters which were human, or had been once.

  Demosthenes convinced the captain to begrudge him a few silver drachmae back from his gold, and these coins he pressed into Thalassia's palm.

  “They have nice things in the markets here, and they're cheap,” he said. “This should buy you a better dress and maybe some beads or something shiny. Just don't wear it until we board the ship.”

  Thalassia looked down at the coins and back up. “Are you saying I look awful, are you trying to make me happy, or do you just think I'm vain?” she asked. “Keep in mind that you can't lie to me and that I'll take the money regardless of your answer.”

  “I barely understand the question. But the choices are not exclusive of one another, so my answer is all three.”

  Her lips parted in offense. “You think I look awful?”

  Exhausted, Demosthenes shrugged. Her fingers enclosed the silver, all but one finger, which she put on his chest.

  “I understand,” she said, and her pale eyes said she did. “Thank you. I'll make it go as far as it can.”

  “I believe it,” Demosthenes said. He had never shopped with her, but Eurydike had on many occasions, and according to her, Thalassia had a way of getting whatever she wanted for any price she named. If sailors were more like market stall vendors, he might have let her negotiate their passage to Naupaktos.

  Thalassia went and did her shopping and by nightfall kept their arranged meeting at the steps of a temple on which men and women copulated, some for love, some for money. It was not for nothing that Corinth had the reputation it did.

  Thalassia watched the couples appraisingly as she and Demosthenes left for the place he had meanwhile selected for them to pass the night: a grassy, vacant lot just inside the city wall. There was little chance that the Corinthian authorities, who were rather tolerant of vagrancy, would give them any trouble. The greater risk was from robbers
, although more accurately, in their particular case, the risk was to the robbers.

  They settled down in the grass, Thalassia with her tightly wrapped bundle from the agora. Her eyes were on a lamplit street in the distance, well populated with milling crowds in high spirits. They seemed headed nowhere in particular, perhaps just anywhere but home. Their voices were a dull cacophony lapping at the nearby city wall.

  “Corinth seems nice,” Thalassia observed, not so idly.

  “I know what you're getting at,” Demosthenes said. “You want to have fun. Go.”

  “Not without you.”

  “Really, just go. You deserve it. Enjoy being alive.”

  “You're alive, too,” she said. She nudged him, pale eyes pleading. “Come on. I don't mean sex. Let's just take a walk, see what there is to see. Street performers, anything. I don't care.”

  Demosthenes gave some honest thought to her proposal, and within seconds rejected it. “I'll stay here.” He pointedly met Thalassia's eyes, wintry portals behind which all lies withered to dust. “I would not say this to you if I did not mean it. Go. Enjoy yourself. I want you to.”

  The piercing eyes tasted his words, accepted and swallowed them. Thalassia frowned disappointment, but she conceded and stood.

  “Don't sleep until I come back,” she said. “It's not safe. I won't be long.”

  “I don't need your protection,” Demosthenes returned acidly. “I've killed dozens of men with my own hands. Hundreds as a general.”

  “I know, I know,” Thalassia said. “But I'm leaving my stuff. I just don't want it stolen.”

  She turned and headed toward the crowds, but Demosthenes did not track the progress of her plain white chiton through the grass. He laid his head on whatever finery his death-coin had bought her and stared at the twilit clouds and wrestled with shades.

  Truly, it was but one shade which gave him grief. Its fingers were perpetually wrapped around his heart, ready to squeeze whenever darkness fell or he found himself with more than a moment's quiet. There was far less of the latter now that Thalassia was around, but Laonome seemed to be countering whatever relief that gave by making the pain burn even more intensely at the times it did flare.