Instead, in defiance of all custom, all good sense and tradition, he looked likely to take the woman here, on the feasting table, and set a new fire of rumor running down the mountain into the city. Perhaps it no longer mattered. Not anymore, not when the name of this house had already become a scandal on its own.
Dimly, through the gray mist of time that separated him from the past, Nyctimus remembered the childhood he had spent learning how a man should live. The earliest days in his experience, in which his father had been his father.Laughter had strangled the crush of licentiousness, and there had been, at least on the surface, something of the law-abiding life that should exist in a king’s palace.
But now…
He could neither eat the meats set before him nor drink the wine, mixed so carefully in his golden cup. Could only stare, rigid with disbelief and revulsion, at the sight of Phineas hefting his new bride onto the table, spilled food and drink under the parted lushness of her thighs. The brute exposed one of her breasts and took the tip of the other in his mouth, through the thin-woven fabric of her torn gown.
The woman laughed, revealing herself a harlot, no fit wife for a prince. It was her wedding day, not even her wedding night, and already her husband’s brothers and all the servants and slaves had seen as much of her as her husband.
“Is it not enough? Is it, truly, not enough?”Nyctimus did not speak loudly, but the words went up the table anyway. They came to his father Lycaon in the midst of his amusement and cut the King’s laughter off at the knees.
“Something troubles you, my son? Something, perhaps, that you wish to say?”
A moment of silence expanded between them. Nyctimus wondered if he dared crash through it, dared speak the words brimming on his lips, and could no longer find it within himself to sit restrained.“Is this the way we celebrate a prince’s wedding? The way we acknowledge the addition of a new royal woman into our household? This is the way we honor the gods, the future of our endeavors? The wine spilled. This rich feast put aside for my brother, for his animal lust. For the way he chose to feast, instead, on his wife!”
Furious, he knocked his cup from the table, added its golden glint to the spilled and broken cutlery on the ground. There was grumbling around the table. Here and there a hint of laughter. Phineas stared at Nyctimus with a snarl on his face. As if he were truly a beast, displeased to be interrupted in his pleasure.
“This is the sum, then, the truth of the princes of Pelasgia and her King. Forty-nine brothers, and our father too, but I am the only one who sees something wrong here? The sons of Lycaon are not men but animals, ravaging this kingdom with their gluttony, their lechery, as they ravage the feasting table here, that poor woman—”
But the poor woman let out a sound somewhere between laughter and a noise of lust. Phineas looked back at Nyctimus over her shoulder, down the long table to where he was standing. There was no shame in his elder brother, nothing except a rash, raw irritation, not even anger.
“Perhaps you are just unhappy to see someone doing what you cannot, brother. Pleasing a woman.”He lifted his new bride, turned her and spread the wet folds of her sex open to the watching eyes of the rest of the table.“Watch closely. Or perhaps you would rather go bring your little wife back with you. Share her with us, let us see how well you take care of her.”
Low laughter came from many places around the table, even from his father. The King, his father, encouraging this behavior among his sons. But Nyctimus refused to look at his brother’s new bride, shook his head and stood back from the table.
“You would like that, wouldn’t you? To see my exquisite Arcadia stripped down to shining skin. But I will keep my wife mywife, not make a whore of her.”They gulped, all of them outraged. He kept his smile to himself as he went away from the feast with only loathing in his heart.
If only the gods would strike them down. If only he might be part of the doing of it! Pelasgia needed cleansing, even if that meant burning the palace to the ground. But one man against fifty, one his own father, the rest his brothers, all older and stronger men…What could Nyctimus do?
He made his way to the tall house at the edge of the wood, his thoughts racing without purpose. A faint glow of torchlight to guide him to the rich, dark chamber he had built for his bed and his wife, but there would be no sleep for him tonight. He would stay awake, sword in hand, after that feast and the words that had sent him away from it.
Arcadia was waiting for him, dressed for bed; had heard the new rumor already. He was not surprised that word of the confrontation had spread before him.“What do we do, husband? What canwe do?”
He shook his head, sent her in to sleep and sat by the window, his sword reflecting the moonlight, naked in his hand.
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