Dam had been spared from that humiliation. He wasn’t a temple whore. Aerander’s father had used his influence to assign Dam as an attendant of the High Priest Zazamoukh. If Calyiches had half a brain, he would have known Dam had been confined to the priesthood’s mainstay, the Temple of Poseidon.
But the threat of being sent to the city’s seedy shrines used to give Dam night terrors. And being under the charge of the High Priest hadn’t been much of a privilege. Zazamoukh was a miserable old cur who delighted in suffering. Dam had never known true evil until he had met that man.
Dam’s privileged position had been a double-edged sword. Outwardly, the other novices had to respect him, but no one had wanted to be his friend beside Hephad. When their superiors weren’t around, Dam used to get tripped and shoved. Bedtime at the dormitory had been the worst. Dam had kept a pocket knife in his pallet, and he had gouged one of his roommates in the ribs pretty bad when the boy had wrestled on top of him one night. He felt like no one in the world cared about him. Certainly no one had cared that he needed his earnings to claim his father’s stables. So Dam had started doing immoral things.
He didn’t regret stealing from the temple oblations. People left coin at the altars, hoping it would speed their prayers to this or that patron god. But it all got scooped up and wheelbarrowed to the High Priest’s treasury so he could build more temples and collect more coin while no one got paid for their labor. Maybe pocketing the spoils of a thief made him no better than the thief himself, but Dam hadn’t gotten rich from taking a galleon away from the priest every now and then. If he had been smart about it, he would have stowed away enough to break out on his own. But he hadn’t had the pluck to do that. Where would he have gone? What would he have done?
Nor did Dam regret sneaking out of the precinct at night. The priests preached segregation from the commoners, but getting out of the precinct had been Dam’s only freedom. Sometimes he would stake out a spot on the street across from an inn house, hoping that a kind and decent man would take an interest in him. That was the only way he could figure that he would get out of the priesthood. Men had stopped to talk to him, but they were scoundrels and drunkards who had just wanted a sloppy romp in an alleyway. That went against his vow of purity of body besides being dangerous as heck. But Dam had been like a falcon diving from a cliff. He had figured that it didn’t matter much if the wind caught his wings or he was pounded into pulp on the rocky shore.
All of that was plenty bad enough for Hanhau to find out about, and still the worst part was how Dam had ended up hurting other people. Could the story get back to Hanhau? Should he tell him before he heard it from someone else?
*
It had happened at the Panegyris during the strange blur of days before everyone had come below. The island city was overfilled with people from the country’s ten kingdoms. Everyone was wild with national pride. No one anticipated the disaster that was coming, though people spoke of omens.
The seaborne wind was unnaturally blustery and cold, and the heavens poured down drenching rains. A military crisis had broken out overseas. In the frozen wilds of the north, a barbarian army with warriors mounted on battle-trained mammoths had trampled the Azilian front and pressed into the country’s borders. The Governors Council had scrounged together nearly every able-bodied man to sail across the North Atlantic Sea and hold back the barbarians.
Still, that hadn’t done much to dampen people’s spirits. No one believed that any misfortune could touch the island of Atlantis. It had been the seat of the world’s greatest empire for a millennium.
Games and fancy feasts took place on the walled Citadel Hill. Dam had received an invitation from Aerander’s father. Over the years since Dam had left the palace, he and his cousin had grown apart. It had mostly been Dam’s doing. Dam had avoided his cousin’s letters and visits to the priest’s precinct. Aerander just got tired of trying to see him, Dam supposed. Dam had had a foolish idea that he would return to the palace one day when he had made something of himself. In the meantime, the priesthood had made him decrepit. Even if he had washed up and dressed in fancy clothes, Dam imagined his cousin could see and smell that awful change in him.
When the invitation to the Panegyris arrived, Dam shook off the fading embers of his pride. After three years of living with the priests, he would have taken up an invitation to attend the pitching of the stalls at the circus to get out of the precinct for a while. Besides, his uncle’s invitation gave him a fistful of salt to grind in the High Priest Zazamoukh’s face. The sadistic old man couldn’t stop Dam from going. Aerander’s father was the governor of House Atlas. Dam cleaned himself up, went down to the agora to buy a wooden figurine of a soldier as a gift for his cousin, and traveled to the Citadel for the first day of the festival.
That was where Dam had met Leo.
Of everything that Dam regretted, it was the simplest of things that he wished to the gods he could erase from history. It would have been so easy for him to continue on his way to the backhouse benches of the dining pavilion, dismissing a lingering gaze from a highborn boy as a curious compliment and nothing more. Then nothing bad would have happened. But Dam returned that gaze. Leo had invited him with a wave, and Dam meandered over to Leo. sitting at a table decked with silver trenchers and the garnet standard of House Eudemon.
Leo was a lesser legacy from the clan that held sway in the kingdom’s Fortunate Isles. His cousin Lys, now Aerander’s sweetheart, was Governor Eulian’s son. Leo wasn’t the most handsome boy Dam had ever met, but he grabbed Dam’s fascination fast. He wore the costume of nobility with a bit of sloppy irreverence, his cape askew and his chiton thrown on casually. He had a crown of perpetually sleep-tossed hair, which was as red as a blood orange. His lopsided smile announced his cynical view of the world.
To anyone who would listen, Leo trumpeted that he was an actor bound for a storied career in House Eudemon’s court of players. Dam had thought that was rather brilliant. Traditionally, boys of noble birth became politicians or military officers. They looked down their noses at the common men who entertained a House Governor’s court. No one bothered Leo about it. If they tried, he cut them to the quick with a few biting words.
Leo wasn’t much for the traditions of the Panegyris: the lawn hockey games, the martial practices, and all the parties where boys showed off for girls. Instead, he had an entourage of admirers and aspiring players. His younger brother Koz counted as both. The two put on parodies of their athletic trainers and the granite-muscled and granite-brained champions of the games. In front of a crowd, Leo shone like the sun itself.
At night, he led his friends to stake out a darkened corner of the palace courtyard. The jumble of boys would splay out on blankets. No one treated Dam any different because he was a priest and only marginally affiliated with the Poseidonidae. Sometimes Leo would draw Dam near so they were shoulder to shoulder and leg to leg while they joked around, drank the finest wine in the kingdom, and made up bawdy verses for the patriotic anthems that the boys had been taught to sing.
Leo had lots of questions about the priesthood. He said he was working on a play where one of the characters was a priest, and he needed to know their habits and their rituals. Dam had been skittish about that at first. It had been drummed into his head not to speak about those sacred things. Leo had been relentless. He even offered Dam gold coins if he would take him into the priests’ precinct. That was barter Dam could use. More so, Dam had wanted Leo to like him. He was no longer an abandoned duckling waddling after boys, but a place in his heart longed for someone to love him. Leo could be that special person. In his head, Dam had imagined the two of them would be together for a lifetime.
There were secrets Dam had discovered while wandering around on his own at night. He knew he should keep them to himself, but he wanted to impress Leo since Leo had brought him into his group of friends. Dam didn’t have much of anything that could impress a House Governor’s nephew. So Dam told Leo a big secret.
; He had found an underground passage in the ossuary beneath the Temple of Poseidon. It led deep beneath the earth, and if you followed it to the end, you found a hidden gateway to the Citadel wood that opened and closed through some kind of enchantment. Dam hadn’t been able to explain how it worked at the time. He just said it was an old tunnel that must have been dug out as an escape route when the Citadel had first been built. He understood things now. The New Ones had used the magic of the Oomphalos to create portals to the surface so they could kidnap men as slaves.
Dam could use the passage to sneak Leo into the priests’ precinct without anyone knowing. They made plans to meet up at a spot in the woods at moontide. Though Dam told him not to tell anyone about it, Leo brought his brother Koz.
Dam led the two through the passage and showed them the temple’s crypt. Leo and Koz thought the creepy place was the best discovery in the world. They chased each other around the bone-walled passageways, pretending to be corpses risen from the dead. It was a risky game with the High Priest and all the heads of the precinct bureaus just above them in the temple quarantine. Dam tried to get the boys to keep their voices down, but he was happy to have shown Leo something that he really liked.
Later, Leo and Koz caught up with Dam in a dead end of one of the crypt’s narrow veins. It was a dark alley barely traced by torchlight. Leo had a strange, grim look on his face that made Dam suddenly aware of their proximity. Leo drew up flush to Dam, nuzzled against his neck, and asked Dam for a special favor.
Dam felt funny about Leo’s brother hanging around. But he did like doing that with boys, and he wanted to do it with Leo. He stooped down and gathered Leo’s tunic above his waist to give him that special kind of kiss boyfriends gave each other. When he was done, Leo pressed two gold pieces into Dam’s hand and asked him to do the same thing to Koz.
That hadn’t been right. But Dam’s head had been jumbled at the time. Maybe it was normal in the place Leo was from. He even thought, idiotically, maybe it meant both Leo and Koz wanted to be sweethearts with him.
Afterward, he had shown the boys back to the Citadel, and the shame of what he had done crushed down on him with the weight of the sky. They were silent all the way, and Dam could feel something had changed. Dam had not foreseen just how terrible it would be.
The next day, Dam came round the dining pavilion for the afternoon feast just like any other day. When he approached House Eudemon’s table, Leo and his friends nudged each other and laughed at him. Dam didn’t have to ask why. It poured over him like tar. Leo and Koz had told everyone what he had done the night before. They all thought he was dirty and a fool.
Looking back, Dam should have let things be, especially after Lys cornered him in a stairwell threatening to crack open his skull if he didn’t stay away from Leo. But that flipped something inside Dam. If people were going to treat him like a derelict, he decided he would show them just how derelict he could be.
Dam started pocketing little things around the palace: fancy bronze clasps left unattended while the boys changed outfits for their athletic practices, silverware sitting idle on the dining hall tables. Dam even stole a jewelry box from Aerander’s younger sister while passing by the ladies’ parlor. He couldn’t rationally explain why he had done it. It just felt good to hold something over the people who thought he was nothing special. Taking the jewelry box had been a really rotten thing, but it seemed to Dam Aerander’s family was part of the high society that laughed at him.
A few days later, Leo caught up with him in the palace while he was minding his own business on a deserted breezeway. Leo said he had to pretend they weren’t friends because his family had found out he had broken curfew with Dam the other night. Leo told Dam he really liked him. He said he would make things up in coins, and he promised he wanted just the two of them to be sweethearts. Leo asked to go back to the priests’ precinct. He told Dam he had to bring his brother Koz along, but it wouldn’t be like the last time. Dam just needed to find one of his priest friends for Koz.
Like the biggest idiot who had ever lived, Dam agreed to meet Leo and his brother after dark in the woods again. He wanted to believe Leo really meant what he had said. Besides, his reputation had been so blackened from the last time, he figured it didn’t matter what happened anyway. Dam had learned that night the gods could always come up with even worse ways for mortals to suffer.
He persuaded Hephad to meet them at the ossuary, thinking he and Koz might like each other. But after traveling through the underground tunnel, Leo announced he was interested in something different. He wanted Dam and Hephad to show him and his brother Zazamoukh’s quarters. Like many of the boys in the Panegyris, they thought it would be brilliant to get one over on the gory old priest who was always telling them they were a sorry show as legacies of the Great Poseidon.
That was really gutsy. Hephad got cold feet and went back to his room. It was crazy to try to smuggle two strangers into the High Priest’s chamber. If Dam was caught, he would get one hell of a beating or possibly get thrown out of the priesthood to fend for himself on the streets. But danger dangled in front of Dam like a gem. It was a chance to show Leo how bold he could be.
He stealthily led the boys on a route through the priests’ quarantine. Dam had a key to the High Priest’s room, but he figured that it would be barred from the inside being so late at night. With some luck, he would sneak the boys back down to the ossuary unseen. They could say they had broken into the forbidden quarantine of the priests, and they would be done with their adventure for the night.
When they arrived at the threshold to the High Priest’s room, Dam opened up the pin lock on its outer latches with his key, and he felt give on the other side. His heart lurched up to his throat. Zazamoukh must have stepped out for some sort of business. Leo and Koz pushed open the door and traipsed inside.
Dam stood at the door, stricken to stone, while they went through the High Priest’s robes, his collars of bone, and his gory fetishes: snippets of hair, bloodstained figurines, and his putrid collection of animal parts. They found Zazamoukh’s bull’s horn, which he wore around his neck and used to anoint boys who had come of age with blood from the sacrifice. Moments after Leo and Koz had stuck their fingers into the horn and smeared their foreheads, enacting a parody of temple service, they fell to the floor drained of life.
Dam couldn’t reason what from what. He wasn’t sure how long he stood there, debrained by the dimensions of his predicament. He heard a sly, quick footfall behind him. It was Zazamoukh. He snarled at the discovery of Dam trespassing in his room, took account of things, and shut and bolted the door behind him.
He clamped Dam’s ear with his cold, bony hand and bullied him down to the floor where the boys’ bodies lay. He told Dam he was an abomination. He said Dam had betrayed his trust, dishonored Poseidon by bringing laypeople into the sacred quarantine, and the boys had been struck dead in retribution. The Governors would hang him for treason. The only way for him to hold on to his life was to help Zazamoukh bring the bodies to a sacred place underground.
What could Dam do? He followed the High Priest’s orders and raced to the storehouse to empty two sacks of grain. He brought the empty sacks to Zazamoukh’s chamber, and they stowed Leo and Koz inside, dragging them down to the ossuary and through the secret passage. In a vault below, Zazamoukh went through a strange ritual preparation with a salve and strips of cloth that he wrapped around the boys’ bodies from head to toe. He said it was to purify them for burial.
Seeing how deliberately Zazamoukh handled the bodies, Dam had an eerie premonition. He broke away from the priest and hid from him in a shadowy alcove of the passageway. If Zazamoukh found him, Dam was certain he would be killed and bound in cloth as well. Thankfully, Zazamoukh didn’t have much time to search for him. He couldn’t be absent from the temple in the morning.
Meanwhile, Dam discovered a well that throbbed with an otherworldly glow. A magical source of light came from deep below the passage. He returned to the
vault to gather Leo’s and Koz’ bodies, and he witnessed the greatest terror of his life. Two giant serpents trundled into the vault and swallowed Leo and Koz whole.
Gradually, Dam made sense of the bizarre mystery. The boys had been poisoned by some vile concoction in Zazamoukh’s bull’s horn, but they weren’t dead. Zazamoukh was using a paralyzing venom to kidnap boys and barter them to the New Ones as slaves. His payment was basking in the magical power of the Oomphalos. Its brilliant, hypnotic energy had kept the priest alive for centuries.
Even after Dam had helped to break them out of the prisoner camp and worked with Aerander and Lys to clear the way for people to take refuge underground, boys still thought Dam was a thief and a whore. And Leo and Koz blamed him for being sold to the snakes. While Dam had run away, Zazamoukh had interrogated Hephad and maimed him so he couldn’t speak of Leo and Koz having come to the temple. That was Dam’s fault. He had brought Hephad into their late night scheme. He had made Hephad a mute.
*
Dam tucked his legs up to his chest. That history had stained him ugly. When Hanhau found out about it, what would he think of Dam? Dam couldn’t imagine that Hanhau had ever done anything so dishonorable.
One of the cats pounced on his foot and climbed up to Dam’s hip, stepping gingerly across the side of his ribs on clawed and padded feet. By the cat’s weight, Dam figured it had to be Pleione. She came purring up to his shoulder, looking to horn in for a cuddle. It was good timing for some comforting. Dam stretched his arm and brought her close to his chest.
Banished Sons Of Poseidon Page 4