Cursed by the Sea God (3 page)

From behind me came a cry of triumph. I snapped my head around to see Ury
sawing at the silver cord with his knife. Couldn’t he guess what the sudden wind
whipping his beard meant? As I lunged at him, the cord parted and the mouth of
the sack billowed open.

A scream escaped the bag like a hurricane unleashed. Ury was blasted off his
feet and thrown through the air into the sail, sliding down to sprawl across the
benches below. In the sudden wind the ship bucked like a terrified steed,
tossing first one, then a second screaming man over the rail to vanish
into the churning sea below. I scrambled up the tilting deck,
already slippery with salt spray, trying to reach the sack before it could empty
itself. The ship was thrown the other way and pitched me headlong onto the sack.
A powerful splash of salt water from the surging waves below broke across the
rail, soaking me as I struggled to seal the sack again but without the cord, my
hands were too weak to pull it shut.

“Alexi! What are you doing!” A shout came from behind me. I spun around, still
grappling with the sack, to see Lopex, soaking wet from the last wave,
struggling to his feet. He stared at the sack in my hands. “What are you doing?”
he repeated. His eyes narrowed. “What have you done?”

“It wasn’t me!” I bawled back over the howling wind, but he couldn’t hear.
Snatching the sack from me, he struggled to close it, but without the cord even
his mighty grip couldn’t force it shut, and the last of the wind whipped through
his hands and out of the sack.

The ship began pitching wildly, huge waves coming at us from all sides at once.
“Oars out!” Lopex called, dropping the sack and making an arms-out gesture.
Tumbling back and forth on their seats, the men struggled to obey. “Phidios!” he
shouted, beckoning the rowing master to the stern. “Zanthos and Praxy, take your
places!”

As Phidios and the steersmen struggled back across the spray-slicked benches, I
felt the motion of the ship change. The hurricane winds, until now dashing about
randomly, had chosen a single direction.

Lopex identified it immediately. “Get that sail down!” he
shouted. “The winds are heading home! Furl it now or they’ll drag us with
them!”

The men struggled, but the tension on the sail was too strong to undo the ropes
that held it in place. Lopex growled and headed forward, knife in hand. As I
struggled to keep my balance, another wave broke over the stern and knocked me
over. The steady wind was piling the waves up into the same mountainous peaks
that had nearly swamped us after Ismaros, bringing back Zanthos’s words about
the sail:
It keeps us ahead of the waves; without it, they’d spin us
broadside and swamp us out!

Struggling to reach the sail, Lopex hadn’t noticed. The bow dropped as the
Pelagios
crested a wave and shot down into the following trough,
leaving us momentarily out of the wind. Zanthos the steersman, wrestling with
his steering oar in his seat nearby, saw the problem instantly. “Stop him, boy!
We need that sail up!”

I stared at the pitching deck, the benches soaked with spray. Lopex had reached
the port stay line, knife in hand. “It’s too far!” I shouted over the
noise.

“You’ve got a good arm, boy! Throw something!”

I glanced around and spotted the stern fire pot, long since extinguished by the
waves. I staggered as I hefted it, trying to keep my balance on the pitching
deck.

“Throw it! Throw it!” Zanthos was shouting. Struggling for balance, Lopex was
sawing at the stay line as the ship climbed
out of the trough. In
a moment we would crest the next wave and the wind would catch us again. I took
a breath and heaved the fire pot as hard as I could, aiming for his broad back.
The weight behind the throw overbalanced me and I sprawled on the deck as the
fire pot caught him squarely between the shoulders.

He staggered and spun about furiously but Zanthos took a hand from his oar to
point at the waves. Lopex glanced angrily over the railing, then drew back, his
face pale as he understood.

Only a day later, I watched him walk back down from the palace of Aeolus, his
back hunched against a cold drizzle. It had taken us three days and nights to
reach the waters of Ithaca, but swept before the full fury of that howling gale,
we returned in a single day and night, bailing constantly to sweep out the water
that cascaded over the bows. The winds had died as they returned to their roost
in the bronze tower, and as we made the lines fast Lopex had walked up to the
king’s palace to ask the same favour once again. From his empty sack and
slumping shoulders, the king’s answer was clear.

I ran down the pier to explain but he threw the empty sack in my face. “This is
your doing, you little
su’eromenoi
!” he said bitterly. “But for you, we
would be home now. Was that your plan all along,
Trojan
? To keep me from
my home and family?”

“It wasn’t me!” I began, yanking the sack from my face. “Ury—” I choked as Ury
came up and snapped his powerful
left arm around my neck, cutting
off my air and lifting me off the ground. I kicked frantically, trying to catch
one of his shins with my heel, but I might as well have been kicking rock.

“I told you he was filth,” he growled. “Didn’t I tell you, Lopex?”

Unable to breathe, I struggled to pull his arm free. It was like trying to bend
a bronze cart-axle. To my horror, Lopex nodded. “You were right, Ury. I should
have known.” He spoke up so that the ship’s entire crew, clustered behind us on
the pier, could hear. “I hereby withdraw this slave’s
hagios
.” He turned
back to Ury. “Make it quick.”

I twisted as best I could toward them. “Wait! Stop him!” I gasped.

Nobody moved. “Puffed-up little
koprophile
,” someone muttered. “No more
than he’s got coming, if you ask me.”

Ury draped me across the stone pier like a rag doll and straddled my chest.
“I’ve wanted to do this since the day I met you, boy,” he hissed, kneeling
heavily atop me and clamping a hand over my mouth. I struggled to pull my arms
free but he had pinned them painfully beneath his heavy knees.

“Go ahead, boy. Struggle. You and that sharp tongue of yours. I’ll add it to my
collection.” His right hand, lumpy and misshapen with scars, stroked my ear as
he buried his nose in my hair and breathed deeply. “Too bad we don’t have a
little more time.”

Thrashing hard, I kicked my legs up to drive my knees into his back, but he
just grunted and brought the knife up to my
throat. Sweet Athene,
was this it? Opening my mouth wide beneath his hand, I bit down hard, trying for
a flap of his skin, but he snatched his hand away. He slapped it back over my
mouth, but not before I had put my breath into a final, desperate shout.
“Greeks! I’m your
healer
!”

It didn’t work. Ury grunted in irritation and hooked his grimy thumb beneath my
chin, forcing my head back against the pier and exposing my neck. I squirmed as
I felt the knife-point. Even as I flailed, I felt my body tense, ready for the
thrust.

“Hold, Ury.” Lopex’s expressionless voice came from behind me. “He’s right.
He’s our only healer. You’ll have to keep him alive until we get a new one.
Until then he’s yours. Just make sure he can still work. And you, slave,” he
added tonelessly, “If you ever speak to me again, I’ll kill you.”

“WATCH OUT, YOU sheep-hearted clod!” Yason, another scowling
friend of Ury’s, growled at me as I pitched into him on his rowing bench. Ury
had tripped me as I came by with a water skin, sending me scrambling to keep
from falling between the benches into the hold. I glared back, but Pharos,
across from Yason on the same rowing bench, caught my shoulder and shook his
head slightly.

He was right, of course. Since we’d left Aeolia for the second time, nobody
would speak up for me, or even to me. Even Pen avoided my gaze, and Lopex acted
as if I didn’t exist. Pharos leaned toward me as he set me back on my feet.
“Very
bad, to be slave of Ury,” he rumbled in my ear. “Young
healer must take care.”

No kidding. “On land, beware,” he added quietly. “Be found never, outside of
camp. Ury will not harm while Pharos is near.” I glanced at him, surprised, but
he had turned to face back out to sea again as though he hadn’t spoken.

It was the morning of our fourth day out of Aeolia. The navigator had taken us
north in search of the coastline but we had sighted no land, and now, after
three hot days of steady rowing, the cisterns were running low. To everyone’s
relief, the navigator spotted a low cloud in the distance off the port
bow.

We arrived at an island completely surrounded by high red cliffs that plunged
into the sea. Circling it, we passed a tight inlet on the east side, and seeing
nowhere better, Lopex had the ships turn and row back to it. By the time the
Pelagios
arrived, the other ships had already pulled into the small
inlet through its narrow mouth, filling it completely and leaving us no
space.

“Just as well,” he muttered, watching their hulls grinding against one
another. The navigator brought the ship right up against the cliff edge just
outside the inlet, and we tied up to some straggly pine trees growing from the
rocks.

“Ury!” Lopex shouted from the bow. “Take a couple of men and search the island.
We need to know who lives here.”

I ducked into the hold but Ury spotted me. “You! Thief!” he shouted down. “Get
up here!”

Recalling Pharos’s advice, I held my tongue. As I climbed back
to the stern deck, a heavy coil of ox-hide rope landed on my shoulders, nearly
knocking me back down the hold ladder.

Ury wrenched me up by my arm. I glanced around and spotted Pharos watching us
from his bench. Ury, following my gaze, muttered something and let go. “Get up
there,” he grunted, pointing up the cliff face. “Tie that off at the top and
drop the end down. And by the gods, if your knot doesn’t hold, I’ll throw you
down the cliff myself.”

I scrambled down the boarding net against the hull and jumped across the gap to
the base of the cliff. There were no handholds in the rock, forcing me to pull
myself up by grasping at the scrub pines that grew from the crevices, covering
myself with their sticky, pitch-scented resin. Back in Troy, I’d never learned
much about climbing, but I was small and light, and just here the cliff wasn’t
quite as steep. Even so, my hands were red and throbbing by the time I reached
the top, my arms dotted with pinpricks from the needles.

“Move it, boy! Throw that rope down!” Ury’s angry shout reached me clearly from
the ship.

Scattered along the cliff edge were piles of irregular stones. I looped the
rope around a large boulder nearby, knotted it with a surgeon’s bind, then added
three more for good measure and threw the rope down to uncoil as it fell.

From down on the stern deck, Ury’s voice was just audible. “Get going,
heretic.” So he was sending Deklah first. I was suddenly glad I’d put in the
extra knots. Deklah climbed onto
the stern rail, tugged at the
rope and scrambled up to join me at the top. Behind him came Yason, then Ury
himself.

A steady, dry wind at the top whisked the sand across the flat plateau and into
our eyes. Ury set off on a narrow trail that wound away between the windswept
scrub brush and scattered boulders. The trail headed inland to meet up with a
larger one, a gravel-lined road that took us down into a valley where the trees
had grown into a patchy forest. A little distance inside it was a spring beside
the road. A low rock wall had been mortared into place around it, creating a
waist-high pool that was kept full by the spring inside.

“Huh.” Ury scratched his head.

At that moment we spotted a barefoot woman carrying a small amphora on her
shoulder, apparently to fill it at the spring. She was short and
broad-shouldered, a vacant expression in her eyes. A flat nose covered half of
her paste-white face.

“You! Slave girl! What land is this?” Ury called out, looking at her bare
feet.

She lifted her head and faced around expressionlessly. Her flat gaze paused at
us for an instant, but continued past us. As she reached the well, Ury tried
again. “Do you understand me?” he said loudly. She raised her head and turned it
in all directions, but once again didn’t seem to notice us. Her amphora filled,
she balanced it on one shoulder and turned to walk back the way she had
come.

“What sort of imbeciles do they raise here?” Ury grunted,
striding forward to grab her shoulder, but Deklah caught his arm. “Wait, Ury.
She’s carrying that water back to town. We can follow her.”

We fell into step behind her. If she heard our tread and Ury’s occasional
coarse comments, she didn’t look back but proceeded down the road for a while
into a small town, stepping carefully as though finding the path with her feet.
At a second glance, it didn’t look like anything I could have called a town. On
either side of the wandering dirt road were dome-shaped huts of mud brick. Each
had a single door, but no windows or chimney. As we followed the flat-faced girl
up the winding road between them, we saw a few other trudging, thickset men and
women with the same sightless gaze and broad nose as the girl. Most carried
burdens on their heads or shoulders, wrapped in thick cloth bundles. Twice we
had to dodge aside as a heavily laden man or woman trudged across our
path.

“You know, there’s something very strange here,” Deklah remarked, apparently
to nobody. “They don’t even seem to notice us. You’d think strangers would get
stares, at least. And they can’t all be slaves, even if they are
barefoot.”

Was he speaking to me? I nodded carefully and tried a reply. “Nobody speaks,
either.” Even when two of them met, they touched one another’s faces with their
hands and parted without a word. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see
Deklah’s half-nod.

Just ahead, Ury fell back to walk between us. “What’s wrong
with
these people, anyway?” he growled, his eyes darting to either side. “They’re
acting like animals, or something.” He caught my glance at Deklah and glared.
“Do you know about this, boy? Speak up!”

I was opening my mouth to deny it when Deklah pointed. “Look there.”

The road between the houses was coming up on a sprawling, low building of mud
brick, laid in wandering courses. Dozens of seams in the exterior wall suggested
it had been broken open and extended many times, and newer sections of
lighter-coloured brick grew off it on both sides. The few irregular windows were
small and high up, clearly for ventilation, not beauty.

Directly in the centre, two wide wooden doors were flanked by what had to be
guards. Their eyes were as empty as all the others, but their faces were hard
and hostile. Both wore identical dark leather breastplates and smooth, black
helmets. Strapped across their chests were two cruel-looking curved scimitars
whose sharp inside edges glittered with thorny spikes. Ahead of us, the girl
walked right up to the wide wooden doors, which opened as she approached. The
guards didn’t move, and the girl vanished inside.

“Quick!” Ury hissed. “Follow her!” He sped up to close the gap.

“Ury, I’m not sure—” began Deklah, but it was too late. As the three of us
reached the doors, the guards moved. Their scimitars flashed out simultaneously,
the spiky inner edges
digging painfully into the sides of our
throats. Six more guards poured out through the double doors, seizing us and
binding our arms painfully behind us. Yoked together by a twisted rope around
our necks, we were yanked inside and hauled, stumbling on the dirt floors,
through dim, downward-sloping tunnels. Pallid, hairless workers scuttled past,
paying us no more attention than if we’d been bits of furniture. After passing
several storerooms filled with giant earthenware pots, we were led down a ramp
to a large, windowless chamber, the air inside uncomfortably warm and moist. As
my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I gasped. Lying on her side atop a padded litter
in the centre of the room was the largest woman I had ever seen.

In every sense, she was enormous. Standing, she would have been as tall as
Pharos, but it wasn’t her height that caught my eye. She was hugely, grossly
fat. Her bloated arms were as thick as Ury’s thighs, and her own pale thighs
were so wide I doubted I could get my arms around one. Folds of fat surrounding
her dark eyes had squeezed them nearly shut, and billows of blubber the size of
two sheep wobbled beneath her coarse robe, threatening to ooze out across her
padded litter.

Around her, a dozen hairless attendants fussed and twittered, cleaning her
skin, brushing her hair and pouring wine between her lips from a wide-brimmed
vessel. One stood by her head, chewing cake-like lumps from a bowl before
spooning it out of her own mouth and into the open maw before her. I stared,
horrified, but couldn’t turn away. At that moment her expression changed to a
frown of concentration, and a
moment later, a foul smell crept
through the moist air. From behind her vast buttocks another attendant appeared,
carrying a broad silver bowl and poking anxiously at its steaming contents as
she scurried off through one of the room’s many doorways.

“Incredible,” murmured Deklah, standing beside me. “That must be their queen.
You know, I’d bet she’ll spend her whole life on that litter.” I didn’t doubt
it. There was no chance that mountain of flesh could stand up, even on those
tree-trunk legs.

One of the attendants made a clicking noise, and the other workers stopped what
they were doing to push and heave her bloated mass until they had rolled her
onto her other side. I got a glimpse of her enormous buttocks beneath a leather
girdle before the eight sweating men carrying her litter turned it to face us
again and her attendants ringed her in once more.

Beside me, Ury chuckled. “Now that’s what I call a woman,” he muttered, his
voice raw and earthy.

At the sound, the queen tilted her head to face us. Sausage lips twitched as
she chattered a low-pitched string of chirps and clicks. The other attendants
stopped what they were doing and looked up as her blank gaze swept across us,
stopping at me. She spoke again and one of our guards severed the rope binding
me to the other three Greeks with a precise twitch of one scimitar, then dragged
me over to her. Another word from her and his blade sliced away the cord around
my wrists.

This close, she was even more disturbing. The rolls of fat on her chin had
merged into a single giant bullfrog sack that
spread all the way
down her breastbone, jiggling when she spoke. One corpulent arm reached out to
slide field-mouse fingers slowly down my cheek. I stood stock still, desperately
willing myself not to flinch. What did she see me as? A pet? A mate? A meal? I
shut my eyes, sweat starting from my brow in the humid air.

In the silence I heard Ury chuckle faintly, licking his wet lips. “Looks like
she likes you, boy,” he called out. “Be sure to save some for the rest of us.”
Gods, I hoped he was joking.

The queen had turned her head at his voice and was chattering something. A
guard with the other Greeks jerked hard on the rope around Ury’s neck. He
staggered, cursing.

“You want to jerk something,
gloutos
-breath?” he snarled, twisting
around. “Jerk this!” Hands tied behind his back, he lowered his head and butted
the guard savagely in the neck, knocking him backwards. As Ury’s rush carried
him forward, the rope binding him to the two others went taut and pulled them
off balance. They tottered for a moment, then all three Greeks collapsed with a
clatter, knocking two of the guards down with them.

The razor-sharp scimitars of the remaining guards flashed out instantly and
landed on either side of the men’s necks like giant pincers. One of them turned
to face the queen and chittered a question.

Her frown could mean only one thing. I hesitated. I wouldn’t cry if Ury died,
but Deklah . . . besides, I wasn’t likely to get out without them. I needed a
distraction.

Before she could reply, I raised my hands to my face and
moaned
loudly, bending over as though sick. As the queen turned to look, I hurled
myself as hard as I could at the legs of the nearest litter-bearer.

Taken by surprise, he staggered, trying to keep his balance. A pale shin loomed
in front of my face, and I grabbed it with both hands and bit hard. Pain shot
through my jaw as my teeth struck bone. The litter-bearer screamed, bending to
clutch his leg as I spat out a flap of bloody skin. Above me, the other bearers
struggled to keep the litter level, but without their corner man, the queen’s
weight was slowly tipping it, dumping her huge carcass onto the packed dirt
floor.

I rolled frantically out of the way as the queen landed almost on top of me,
her mouth opening in an ear-cleaving shriek. The entire palace began humming
like a plucked harp. Clucking attendants were suddenly running to her side from
doorways all around. Soldiers rushed to form a ring around her, their swords
waving in all directions like antennae, alert for threats. Workers spilled into
the room, darting in to bundle her huge bulk back onto the litter, filling the
entire room with their agitated clicks.