Athenian Steel (Book I of the The Hellennium) (45 page)

"But that is–" Demosthenes cut short his
protest. It was not his place to second-guess. And anyway, Nikias
was right: the Thebans rolling up the Athenian right wing
constituted a far more immediate danger than the lumbering siege
engines. And so he conceded, "Aye."

It was not long after news of the Thebans
arrived that the 
mechanamai 
made their appearance
on the western horizon. There were three of them pulled by teams of
oxen, and their canvas shrouds had been removed, surely not because
their use was imminent but rather because the Spartans had learned
the hard lesson that the shrouds were flammable.
The 
katapeltai 
each comprised a simple frame from
which extended a tall, stripped tree trunk, tapered and topped with
a sling. Only a handful of Athenians present knew that a massive
projectile could be placed in the sling and hurled over great
distances. The behemoth's certain target was the walls of Athens,
and they could breach them with one well-placed blow.

There next appeared at the head of
Brasidas's horde a small cluster of spearless hoplites bearing the
lambda blazon on their shields. They broke off from the assembling
force and made their way slowly toward the Athenian lines. When
they drew near enough and came to a halt, the identity of the man
at the body's head became clear.

Brasidas wore no crimson plume but rather
just a simple pilos-style helmet like any of his men. He raised
overhead a leafy herald's wand and cried out, "I would address
Demosthenes!"

Nikias looked nonplussed. It was Nikostratos
who stepped to the front of the hilltop and called back, "It is
Nikias who commands this army!"

A wind blowing in from the nearby coast kept
the Spartiate's flowing mane of black hair in constant motion. The
same wind bore up the hill his bark of laughter.

"I doubt that old man commands his bowels!"
When his fellow Spartans had finished an uncharacteristic chuckle,
Brasidas resumed, "You Athenians love to talk before you fight, do
you not? Well, here is a Spartan willing to do the same, but only
with Demosthenes!"

Immediately, tens of pairs of puzzled, wary
Athenian eyes turned to Demosthenes. He had avoided a face-to-face
encounter with this man who so despised him once, after the
jailbreak, but today there would be no avoiding it. Not even if it
was a trap, which seemed as likely as not to be the case.

Demosthenes stepped to the fore and tugged
off and discarded his helmet of plain bronze, revealing himself.
The summer breeze cooled a scalp matted with sweat-soaked,
sand-colored locks. He was already unarmed, for his long cavalry
sword was sheathed on the flank of Akmos, who snorted and churned
the soil with his hooves some yards back, behind the crest of the
hill which hosted the Athenian commanders. At an even pace,
Demosthenes traversed the wide space between the Athenian line and
Brasidas's Spartiates. Such a maelstrom of thoughts swirled in his
head that he could scarcely even spare one to wonder if his
deceptively confident march downhill was to end in his death.

He came to stand three spear lengths from
Brasidas, who stepped out from among his comrades, wielding his
herald's wand like it was the club of some thug out spreading fear
in the streets. The staff rose and fell, striking the palm of his
other, empty hand.

"Much as I would prefer to just get on with
honest slaughter," he said, "there is another conflict which must
be fought out first. Where is the bitch who wins your battles for
you, coward?"

"Where is yours?" Demosthenes came back. It
was a feeble response, perhaps worse than none at all, but it was
out of his mouth before he could stop it.

Brasidas ignored him. "If she fails to show
in a quarter-hour, Eris will turn her attention instead to that
sad, motley wall of shields behind you. You know there can only be
one result. If she is denied her fair fight, then when Athens is
ours, it will be put to fire and sword, no woman or child spared
from slavery."

"This woman is no goddess, Brasidas!"
Demosthenes cried back. "Not Eris! Her name is Eden, and all she
wants is–"

"–the Wormwhore's head. Yes, I know. I am
giving it to her, and if Eris in turn wishes to help Sparta set
Hellas free from the yoke of Athenian tyranny a generation early, I
shall not refuse." He shrugged. "I hope she shows. We Equals always
prefer a fair fight to one-sided butchery."

With that pronouncement, Brasidas whirled
and rejoined his comrades, who likewise turned and headed back down
the slope with him toward the dark mass of Spartans and their
Peloponnesian allies. Demosthenes returned to his lines, too, in no
hurry in spite of the short deadline just set. There was little he
could do but hope that wherever she was now in these hills,
Thalassia with her superhuman ears had heard the challenge and
would hasten back in time to meet it.

He walked up the hill and rejoined Nikias
and the others.

"What did he want?" Nikias demanded. His
justifiable bitterness at having his authority usurped was well
disguised, but not absent.

"Matters of witchery," Demosthenes reported,
and left it there. What was the point of explaining to him at
length the details of an arrangement entirely outside of his
understanding and control?

A scowling Nikias grudgingly accepted the
answer and resumed discussion with his war council. Watching the
distant enemy host assemble, Demosthenes paid them little heed.

A lone horseman caught his eye. Typically,
the Spartans brought little cavalry to war (the Thebans, it had
turned out, were providing it today) so any rider would have stood
out among them; but this one was even more conspicuous for being on
its own, far from any mounted formation. It was moving, too, at
full gallop, on a straight line oblique to the two armies, in the
direction of the Athenian force.

His eyes tracked the rider for half a minute
or so before they caught the glint of a golden mane. Eden's left
arm was outstretched, and in its hand was the same double-curved
bow she had put to deadly use on the cliffs near Skiron's road.
Demosthenes drew a breath with which to shout warning, but the
words were stillborn, drowned out by other men's cries of shock and
alarm. He turned and saw the generals' entourage in chaos, bright
red blood covering someone's hands.

His eye found Nikias. Eden's arrow had
struck the old man's throat and bored right on through to emerge
under the rear rim of his bronze helmet. The customary dignity and
composure with which Nikias always held himself fled him now, and
his limbs flailed wildly. Dumbstruck colleagues scrambled to
restrain him and keep him upright, but his fate was clear. By the
time he had slipped from Nikostratos' arms to bend over double,
head striking the earth, the general in charge of Attica's defense
was dead, his long life cut short by the woman the Spartans wrongly
called Eris, Slayer of the Brave.

Even as Nikias fell from his friend's grasp
and his shade slipped the bounds of his body, Demosthenes was
running for Nikostratos. He collided with the junior general bodily
in a clash of bronze and iron and dragged him to the ground so
close to the fresh corpse that the fletched end of the stubby arrow
jutting from Nikias's throat scraped Demosthenes' arm as they
landed.

Just in time–a second arrow cut the air
above their heads and descended past them to clip the heads off
blades of tall grass and light harmlessly in the soil behind the
hill.

With tens of witnesses, half of them already
crying out the news of Nikias's death, there was no way to stop
word spreading up and down the lines: the gods were with Sparta
today.

Like most Spartiates, and anyone the gods
had blessed with an obol's worth of sense, Styphon had no love for
the sea.  Yet here he was, not only sailing it but sailing it
in a vessel which lacked oars and had been designed by a witch who
slew men for sport.  

The trireme had had its bronze ram removed,
and its two sails were triangular, each shaped like a half-delta.
 The sails' complicated rigging was a mystery to Styphon, but
luckily the ships' crew of mothakes—the bastard sons of Equals not
entitled to full citizenship—had been training on them in secrecy
in the Lakonian Gulf since spring.  Somehow, by a method the
sailors presumably understood, the delta-sails allowed the vessel
to turn and travel in any direction, even into the wind.  What
happened when there was no wind at all, and no oars to pull,
Styphon did not want to find out.  The sailors' skills were
adequate, it seemed, as were those of the shipwrights, for the
new-style ships had been at sea two days without incident on this,
their maiden voyage.  

Styphon's ship was named 
Potnia
,
Venerable, and her twelve sister ships dotted the waves around him,
cutting the wind and water at greater speed than any that had
sailed before them.  Each hull, relieved of its need for a
hundred and seventy rowers, now could carry eighty hoplites and all
their gear, three times the usual capacity.  Currently each
held a conservative sixty, which translated to plenty of elbow room
for the men, greater speed for the fleet, and fewer lives at risk
should one or more of the experimental ships wind up on the sea
floor.

The destination of the fleet and its force
of eight hundred came into sight past the looming, dark bulk of the
isle of Aegina: Piraeus, the port of Athens.  But between the
fleet and landfall lay an obstacle: triremes of the Athenian harbor
patrol, their square sails twisting this way and that in the effort
to change course and intercept, as from their decks came the shouts
of crewmen driven to near-panic by the sudden appearance of a fleet
unlike any they had seen.  Their efforts would be for naught,
though, just as had been the case already for the lone Athenian
sentry ship already left in the Spartan fleet's wake.  That
ship's crew, on learning they could not possibly hope to outrun or
outmaneuver this new threat, had pulled down their sails and thrown
masts overboard to give chase under oar.  Athenian rowers were
supreme in all the seafaring world, but soon enough the piper's
shrill rhythm had faded and the pursuing ship had shrunk into a
black dot on the southern horizon.

The five Athenian patrol vessels ahead had
no more luck, though they did their level best to put themselves in
the path of the oncoming fleet.  One ship even hurriedly
furled its sail, dropped its oars and tried in vain to reach
ramming speed with masts still in place.  But the Athenian
trierarchs, one and all, were unready for the speed and agility of
which their stripped-down cousins were capable.  The thirteen
ships with lambda pennants fluttering on their prows ran the
gauntlet with ease, and the defenders were left behind, undamaged
but in a state of chaos and bitter confusion.  The foremost
sailors of the age, Athenians, whose skills had built them a
maritime empire, had been foiled within sight of Attica by a
land-loving enemy whose navy they were fond of mocking.  

No more.  Now, the well-armed Equals
who passed the Athenians by as if they were standing still were the
ones doing the mocking, an activity which they undertook with
voices triumphantly raised, and in some cases backsides exposed.
 Styphon took no measures to rein in such juvenile displays on
his own ship or any of the others.  An admiral, Knimos,
commanded this fleet, but once land was made, another was to take
charge.  A man who six months prior had stood in disgrace, on
the verge of being branded a trembler, stripped of his property and
his rights as an Equal.  In the Athenian jail, Brasidas had
called him 
dog
; now he was
called 
lieutenant 
and had been entrusted with a
task on which the outcome of a war may well depend.

Styphon, son of Pharax, would lead this
attack.

The Spartan fleet sailed at speed past the
squat guard towers flanking the harbor entrance of Pireaus, passing
under thick volleys of spindles that managed to take no lives.
 It sailed across the quiet harbor and landed on the beach
where the dry, empty hulls of the Athenian navy sat forlorn on
their props and in ship-sheds, tinder for Spartan torches, were
that the attackers' intention today; but the hoplites who spilled
over the rails of the thirteen experimental ships into the surf and
mounted the beach did not stop to burn.  No, they only hacked
down the few resisters they met and raced up shore into the
virtually undefended harbor town.  

No orders were needed, and none given.
 Styphon entered into Piraeus riding a wave of slashing spears
and unneeded lambda-blazoned shields, while behind him, on the
beach, the oarless ships put back to sea, and a small team of
Equals set to their specially appointed task of collecting the
masts from the beached Athenian ships.  The townsfolk, already
alerted to the danger by a shrill trumpet, screamed and ran from
their homes to flee in the direction of Athens.  A few unlucky
ones were cut down as they ran, but the invaders gave no attention
to slaughter.  Before long, the inhabitants of white-washed
Piraeus with its long, straight avenues, learned that hiding in
their homes was the safest course, and they did just that, for the
tide of crimson and iron that had surged out of the Saronic Gulf
this day had no interest in seizing the port.  Their black
eyes were on a much grander prize, toward which they moved
relentlessly.

A band of Athenian bowmen appeared on a
rooftop firing straight down, and three or four Equals clattered
dead or hurt onto the paving stones.  A squad was sent up the
stairs in pursuit, and the archers scattered and fled.  

This was the heaviest the fighting got.
 In no time, and with little blood shed on either side,
Styphon's troops reached their destination, the northeast wall of
Piraeus, and there they were stopped cold by the heavy timber gates
blocking the long, straight road flanked by the Long Walls which
connected city to harbor.