by Marie Savage
“That’s Melanippe’s successor, the new priestess of Dodona.”
“Then we should all get down on our knees and pray for Melanippe’s immediate resurrection.”
Chapter Forty-seven
“Enough. I can’t stay here any longer.” Althaia pulled on her boots and stood up, hands on her hips in frustration.
“My dear,” Menandros said, lowering himself back to the ground. “Just now, when I went to take a piss, I saw them, arguing, up by the mouth of the cave. Your Nikos did not look very happy.”
“Zeus, I hate that cave,” Althaia growled, stepping over empty baskets of food and half-empty bladders of wine.
“Take a torch,” Menandros called. “And promise to tell me everything that happens as soon you get back.”
Althaia yanked a torch out of its stand and climbed up toward the cave. She pushed her way through the crowd toward the dark mouth that cut into the mountainside like a stab wound. Neither Kalliope nor Nikos were anywhere to be seen. She marched over to a group of boys and girls sitting in a circle playing a version of knucklebones that obviously included removing articles of clothing. “Have you seen Kalliope or Nikomachos , son of Melanippe?”
“Which one you want?” a boy about Zenon’s age slurred. “’Cause I just saw Kalliope run thataway and Nikos go thataway.” He pointed in two directions at once and the whole group burst into giggles.
“Nikos. Which way did he go?”
“Into the dark.”
“What?”
“Into the dark,” he turned and pointed at the mouth of the cave.
That’s just great, she thought. She took a deep breath, gripped the torch, dipped her head and entered the womb of Gaia. The flickering light from a dozen lamps danced on the dome and walls of the cave. Groups of two or three, or even more, lay together on blankets spread on the cold floor. Whispered moans and muffled laughter hung in the damp air.
She held the torch low, near the steep slope and carefully made her way to the bottom. She peered around the great hall, but there was no one sitting alone. She thought of the day she and Theron had attended the priestess’ meeting. When Nikos—she was sure it had been him—had hidden in the shadows. He had probably been in the cave dozens of times and would know all its nooks and crannies. He could be hidden in the shadows now, or he could be, oh, please Gaia, no.
She turned toward the gaping, toothy maw of the inner chamber. Please don’t let him be in there, she prayed. She looked longingly up toward where she knew the mouth of the cave waited to release her back to the celebration waiting beyond. Then, again, back to the jagged opening leading into the unknown. Stalactites hung like dripping fangs while their mates, serrated stalagmites, rose from the monster’s misshapen jaw, ready to shred anyone who dared cross the lip into the yawning emptiness beyond. She shuddered. She thought of her dream. The man from the shadows who led her into the dark. The last place she wanted to go.
Perhaps Nikos wasn’t even in there. The boy playing knucklebones had been half-drunk. Perhaps Nikos had gone back to the blanket, maybe he was even waiting for her there now. Wondering where she was. Maybe Menandros was wrong and Nikos and Kalliope weren’t arguing. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Maybe she’d just go a little further and take a quick look. She didn’t have to step over the threshold. She had a torch and if Nikos was in that eerie cavern, he’d surely see her.
She tucked her skirt in her belt with one hand and held the torch high in the other. The rocks were green with moss, and slick with age and she slipped more than once as she felt her way up toward the monster’s mouth. Finally, she stood at the lip and peered in. In the distance, one lamp, wick low, fluttered its way towards oblivion.
“Nikos?”
“Althaia.” His voice hung in the air, heavy, like the weight of the mountain surrounding them.
“I waited, but you never came back.” Without thinking, she stepped over the mossy lip with a full body shudder. She lowered the torch to illuminate the uneven ground, and made her way toward the lamp.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said even as he reached up to take her hand and pull her down to him.
“You look terrible,” she knelt before him, ran her thumb across his cheek. The tension and awkwardness that had marked their conversation before dissolved like wisps of smoke from a candle flame, as if stepping into the dark had stripped away all the pretense of the outside world.
“I’ve ruined everything.” The last glow of the lamp’s wick faded to nothing more than a few scattered pinpricks of orange and yellow, like cat’s eyes winking at them.
“What have you ruined?”
“Us. This. You should go now, before it’s too late.”
“It’s already too late,” she whispered as she lowered her lips to his. She dropped the torch and it rolled away, sizzling against the damp floor until it came to rest in a puddle and disappeared, like the world around them.
The hazy glow of lamplight, barely visible through the chamber’s misshapen mouth, was their only connection to the people and places beyond. In the deep of Gaia’s womb, there was nothing left but the two of them, folded into each other by the weight of desire and expectation. The envelope of black rendered them nearly blind, but it didn’t matter.
Nikos traced the frame of her face and then down her neck, his lips following the trail his fingers blazed. His heart pounded in his ears, a war drum driving the engine of his desire forward. His fingers fumbled in the dark as he unwrapped her himation, loosened her belt, and lifted her chiton over her head. He was afraid to touch her, afraid of what his need might unleash.
She knelt before him, naked, ready to give herself to him, to take him into her deepest recesses, body and soul. But he didn’t touch her. Then she heard movement, the rustle of fabric, and reached out to find only Nikos. She ran her fingers across his chest, up over his shoulders, and pulled him to her.
“Wait,” he groaned. “Your boots.” She felt his fingers crawl their way down her legs until they found the lacings of her boots. One by one he untied the leather thongs and slipped the invisible boots from her invisible feet. Then, his fingers, followed closely by his warm, moist lips, twirled and danced back up, like maenads or nymphs or acrobats teasing their way up the inside of her thighs, toward her center. He trailed his fingertips across her, dipping ever so slighting into the wet heat as she arched toward him. Then he pushed her back gently, laying her down onto her cloak which he had spread out below them.
She felt him, all sinew and muscle, stretch out beside her. His mouth found hers and he kissed her deeply, their tongues wrestling like two hoplites in hand-to-hand combat. She wrapped her arms around him, pressed her hands into the muscles of his back. She kneaded his flesh and scraped her nails lightly down to the small of his back and across the hard mounds of his buttocks while he explored the wonders of her geography—the rounded hills of her hips, the sloping valley of her waist, the flat plain of her belly. His fingers flirted up her stomach until his hand flattened against her ribcage, fingertips brushing against the swell of her breasts.
Then he stopped. His hand was still, nothing moved. She could hear him breathing, feel his heart thudding against her chest. A slow, steady drip, the cave’s pulse, echoed from somewhere deeper in the darkness. Althaia held her breath, waited. Then he slid up and gathered her breast in his hand as his tongue circled the point of her nipple. She shuddered as a bolt of desire, hot as lightning, ricocheted through her body. She moaned and pulled his head to her, eager to have him taste her more deeply. He answered her need with his own, pulling her nipple into his mouth, sucking, biting, torturing her with the urgency for even more. She clung to him, diving with him into the depths of longing even as he delivered her from the death of loneliness, a death she hadn’t even known she dreaded so completely.
But then he pulled back. She felt him sit up, heard him move away. She waited, not breathing.
“Althaia, I can’t do this, I—” His voice was ragged and he trailed off. The taste of
her, all wine and desire, threatened to choke him, the smell of her, jasmine and campfire, threatened to suffocate him. He knew he could reach out and take her. That she was willing. It wouldn’t be like Charis. But it was Charis he couldn’t stop thinking about, her taunts, her threats, her boasts, her laughter when her brother’s blade found his throat, her face as he, as she …. He couldn’t get it out of his mind, what had happened, how his anger and resentment, how his need to prove himself, prove he was a man to that old crone who was now nothing more than a heap of ashes, how his weakness had ruined everything. How he was caught, now, like a fly in a poison web of deception, how he was here, cut off from the world, and how Althaia was here too, offering herself to him freely, lovingly. How his need for her would ruin her, too. The ache of it all tore at him, unmoored him, and he felt like a ship foundering against a hostile shore.
She propped herself up on an elbow and reached out to him, finding only nothingness.
“I can’t … you don’t know ….” His voice sounded as if it were ripped from his throat. “We can’t do this.”
“This is not wrong, Nikos. I don’t know what’s happened, but I do know that whatever else is going on in our lives—your mother, Kalliope, my husband, whatever—I know this is right. This. Here. Now.” She leaned into the black, reached farther, and this time her fingers found flesh. She crawled to her knees and pressed her palms against the broad warmth of his back. He flinched—would she feel the scars Charis’s nails had left in his skin?—but did not move away. She eased her hands under his arms to embrace him, her palms framed the muscles of his chest, felt the rapid hammering of his heart. She buried her face in his neck, pressed herself into his back and held him against her. She could feel the catch in his breathing, a sob captured, swallowed, before it escaped. Then another. And another. She tightened her grip, clasped him to her as if she were the ship’s mast and he Odysseus, bound to her for safety.
He wanted to turn to her, hold her, posses her just once before it was all over. So he would have that one memory to hold on to. But that wasn’t fair. He should tell her everything. That would make it easier for both of them. Then she would turn around and leave, and he wouldn’t have the chance to hurt her. Then he would accept his fate like a man and go back to Dodona with Kalliope. After that, only the gods knew.
In her blindness, she didn’t know how long she held him, but gradually his breathing settled, and she loosened her grip and felt him lean back into her. In turn, she bent forward and breathed lightly into his ear. “I’m still here.” A shudder racked his body and she could feel the chill bumps on his neck.
“I have to tell you everything.”
“Not now.”
“Listen, to me, Althaia. You need to know what’s happened, now, before—”
She clasped him tight again and breathed into his ear. “There is only one thing I need now.”
All his resolve disappeared into the black. “Are you sure?” he whispered, his voice barely audible.
In answer, she nipped at his lobe, ran her tongue along the inside of his ear and lightly rubbed his nipples. She slipped her hand down his chest, down the firmness of his belly, until she heard the sharp intake of breath. Teasing him the way he had teased her, she felt him grow hard beneath her touch. She trailed her fingers down his shaft and rounded the tip. He gripped her wrist and held it firm. “Answer, me. Are you sure? Because once we start, there’s no stopping.”
“Thank the gods,” she rasped as she closed her hand around him.
Chapter Forty-eight
“Anything interesting to report?” Diokles asked. He lifted the blankets and pulled Aphro under them.
“My source, a very drunk, half-naked young man playing games up near the mouth of the cave said Nikos and Kalliope argued, that they were fighting about a piece of jewelry—a necklace or something—and that they very nearly came to blows. He said Nikos had to be pulled off her and that she ran off into the crowd. After she left, Nikos disappeared into the cave.”
“Hmm. A necklace. Did he describe it?”
“Only that it was silver. He also said another woman—as beautiful as Aphrodite herself, he claimed—asked about them both and then went in after Nikos.”
“You think it was the Athenian?” Diokles asked.
“Who else? And I think she must have found him because we haven’t seen him come back out.”
“Okay, now the question is who did Kalliope run off to meet?”
“That’s a very good question and I—hey, scoot over. I’m cold—”
“Here,” he said rearranging the blankets and wrapping his arm around her shoulder. “Better?”
“Much.”
“Alright, go on.”
“After I talked to the boy, I went back into the scrub to pee and who do you think walked by?”
“Wait, let me guess. Kalliope?”
“You’re a good guesser,” she smiled as her hand began to dance its way down his belly.
“And? Can you get on with it? I’m beginning to lose my focus.”
“And I followed her. I had to keep my distance, but I saw her meet with a man. Unfortunately he had a hood drawn down over his face. They looked intimate, though. They were standing close, heads together. So I waited. And then when they were done, I followed him.”
“Did they see you?”
“Not at first. So, you want to know where he went?”
“No, I’m sleepy all the sudden.” The point of Aphro’s elbow dug into his rib cage. “Ouch! Okay, of course, I want to know. Where did he go?”
“To the priests’ encampment.”
Diokles sat up, pulling the blankets up with him.
“Hey!” Aphro hissed. She pulled him down and pulled the blankets back up over them.
“By the gods, what would Kalliope be doing with someone who works for Apollon’s priests?”
“I don’t know. He must be a temple slave or one of their personal attendants. He was talking to one of the bodyguards when I think they saw me watching them. They turned toward me and that’s when I acted like I was drunk. I stumbled, pretended I was going to fall and then tripped my way back here.”
“Who knew taking a piss could be so productive? You should be a spy, my dear.”
“I’ll spy day and night, if you pay me more.”
“I pay you plenty, already,” Diokles said. His hand closed over her breast and squeezed. “You know better than to mistake me for a soft touch like Nikos. I’m not the son of a wealthy priestess with silver to throw around like rain from heaven. I have to work for a living and you are part of my bottom line.” He ran his hand down the contours of her side and clutched her bottom in his hand. “A delicious part, but bottom line nonetheless.”
She sighed the sigh of a woman whose options were nonexistent. Diokles gave her protection. He gave her the freedom to choose other lovers, as long as she was there when he wanted her. Besides, he trusted her—no, relied on her. Talk about bottom line. She was the one who ran the Dolphin’s Cove while he attended to his other business interests. Diokles allowed her to work independently as few other women could ever dream of doing without being a heterai. Nikos was sweet, always an attentive lover, but it was Diokles who would be there at the end of the day. And, for a woman like Aphro, that had to be enough.
“So, should we try to stay awake and watch the mouth of that cave in case Nikos emerges?”
“Our friend can take care of himself. I imagine he’s much better off down there in the dark with the Athenian then up here near Kalliope. The few times I’ve had a good look at that one, I didn’t like what I saw.”
“Poor Nikos. I hope the Athenian is good to him.”
Diokles smiled in the darkness and pulled Aphro over on top of him. “Me, too. But now it’s time for you to be good to me.”
Chapter Forty-nine
Althaia woke and sat upright, breathing heavy. Nikos sat up beside her and wrapped his arms around her. “What’s wrong?”
“I had
a dream.” Her face was peppered with sweat despite the cool damp of the cave.
Nikos drew his cloak back around them like a blanket. “Do you want to talk about it?” he whispered.
“My dreams … I’ve had them, crazy ones, nightmares, since I was a child. Since my mother died. They come and go, but before we left Athens, I started having them again. Someone’s always in trouble, about to get hurt, and I try to help, but I can never get to them in time. Theron says I haven’t forgiven myself for the day my mother died—it’s a long story—and that’s why I keep having them, why I keep reliving the same sort of dream. Anyway, a few nights ago I had a bad one, and now I just had the same dream. The same, but different. Do you know what I mean?”
“You don’t have to talk about if if you don’t want to.”
“No, I want to because,” she turned to him in the dark, “you’re in it.”
“Me?”
“There’s a man, leaning over something, doing something. In the first dream—the one I had before—I couldn’t see what he was doing, but tonight I could see everything. There is a woman lying at his feet and he is undressing her. But not like a lover. And not like he is assaulting her. He’s just undressing her. Like a little girl might undress a doll. It’s very strange. He keeps looking over his shoulder, and I keep trying to get closer, to see what he’s doing. I’m suddenly very afraid, and I turn and try to run, but I can’t move. He grabs me, and I see the glint of a knife, and I know he’s going to hurt me. But then something changes, and I’m not afraid anymore. I’m not afraid because it’s not that man anymore. It’s someone else.” She held her hand against his face. “It’s you, Nikos. I remember. The feel of you. The smell of you. Your breath in my hair, against my neck. It’s like my daimon knew I would meet you. That you would save me, like you did at the ravine.”
“What night did you say you had the first dream?”