Sacred Bride Read online

  Sacred Bride

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedications

  Map - Achaea, the Aegean and Asia Minor

  Part One: Tears of a Seeress

  1 – The Caverns of Dodona

  2 – Wraiths of the Oracle

  3 – Conflicting Loyalties

  4 – Mercy

  5 – The Avatar of Corinth

  Part Two: Tantalus & Clytemnestra

  6 – The High King

  7 – Arcadia

  8 – The Herald of Zeus

  9 – The Rites of Ploistos

  10 – Tantalus

  11 – A Child’s Life

  Part Three: The Winning of Helen

  12 – All roads lead to Sparta

  13 – Gifts and Gambles

  14 – The Games

  15 – Wrestling for Leverage

  16 – Alcmaeon

  17 – A Secret Olympus

  18 – In the Eyes of the Gods

  19 – The Oath

  Acknowledgements

  Glossary

  The Olympus Series

  Copyright

  David: I dedicate this book to my writing partner in this series, Cath Mayo. It takes a special person to accept having someone else blundering into your vision of your favourite hero and mythos, as well as the ability to share one’s talents and knowledge so freely and brilliantly. It’s been an absolute pleasure and a fun ride.

  Cath: And to David, a tower of inspiration and skill, bringing drive and a deep understanding of the genre to all our books. One plus one is far more than two.

  Part One: Tears of a Seeress

  1 – The Caverns of Dodona

  ‘There’s a place, Hellopia … And Dodona was founded there, on its furthest border, and Zeus loved it and made it his oracle, one revered by men.

  And from this place mortal men bring back all oracles. Whoever comes there questions the immortal god and brings gifts and returns with good auguries.’

  — Hesiod, Catalogues of Women

  Epirus

  7th year of the reign of Agamemnon of Mycenae (1287BC)

  Sheer cliffs rise around us, bleak and barren under sullen winter skies, the rock grey and forbidding as we edge through a narrow ravine, with icy water surging past us just a few feet below. It’s teeming with rain and treacherous underfoot, so we’re roped together – though by now I’m worried we’re doubling the risk, not halving it: if one of us goes, we probably both will, and Ithaca will lose her prince – and my sister’s worthless husband will be king when Laertes dies.

  I refuse to let that happen.

  Bria’s leading the way, a lean form blurred by the torrential rain, and the river’s rising by the moment. We need to get through this section of the ravine before we’re engulfed. It’s madness to be traveling in such conditions – which is why we’re doing it: no one will dream we’re here. The plan seemed audacious, brilliant even, with a real chance of disrupting our enemies’ schemes – but right now I’m thinking it’s my worst idea ever.

  ‘You… all right?’ Bria’s high-pitched shout reaches me in broken snatches. I nod back as I grip the rock wall with bloodless, frozen fingers, clinging to water-polished crevices and ledges, hunched over against a fierce headwind as we round a spur. And there the ledge ends, the floodwaters boiling at our feet and the rock face upriver undercut and smooth as polished bronze. With no other choice, we’re forced to climb. We struggle upwards, lugging our packs, muscles straining and skin numbed by cold. After what seems an eternity we reach the top of the cliff, and exchange weary looks before slogging on.

  From here the going is easier, if clambering steeply uphill through dense undergrowth choked with fallen tree trunks and hidden boulders counts as an improvement. Above us, gaunt pines sway and moan in the howling wind. Eventually the forest gives way to deep, mushy snow, through which we plough, soaked and bone-weary, until we crest a barren rise blasted by driving sleet. Even now there’s no time to rest. Belting our thick winter cloaks more tightly around us, we descend into the valley. It’s dusk by the time the snow-covered scree yields to tangled scrub and forest, and dark when the pines give way to gnarled oaks girded with drifts of rain-pocked snow and icy mud. The occasional wink of light ahead tells us we’re getting close.

  We’re moving slowly now, every nerve at screaming point – we’ve risked much to reach this place undetected and it would be a bitter reward for our labours to be discovered.

  Suddenly, halfway up a shallow incline, the ground drops away into a hollow almost hidden by branches and we find ourselves at the mouth of a natural cave, where someone once carved an icon to Hera, the Mother Goddess, on a boulder. Someone else has defaced the icon and kicked the withered offerings aside, but the cave’s dry.

  ‘Thank the Goddess,’ Bria exclaims – and she doesn’t mean Hera. She and I are both sworn to Athena, who isn’t exactly a bosom friend of Hera’s, right now. ‘Odysseus, where’s that flask?’ she adds, draping a rain-soaked arm around my shoulder.

  I give the daemon – Bria’s a body-jumping spirit – a grumpy look and remove the arm: I’m having difficulty dealing with ‘her’ just now. It’s not that we’ve had a new falling out; being pissed off with each other is our natural relationship. It’s just that, right now, in this body, Bria isn’t a woman.

  She’s warned me that sometimes she inhabits men, usually if she’s going to war. But she’s never done so in my presence before. Whatever body she’s in, though, Bria’s still Bria: she swears, she’s bitchy, she’s irritating, and she chases men like an insolvent hooker. That’s annoying enough in a woman’s body, but in a male body, it’s profoundly unsettling.

  I’m aware of some men who wouldn’t mind the advances of a slim, late-adolescent boy, and though I’m not one, I accept such desires in others. But our Achaean society, with its ancient, rigid traditions of manly honour, isn’t so forgiving – and right now this is a distraction I don’t need.

  I shrug off my cloak to rummage in my pack and pull out a flask of potent liquor to buttress us against the cold. ‘Not too much,’ I tell… her… him… Bria. ‘That body you’re in mightn’t be used to drink.’

  Bria puts hand to hip, downing her mouthful in one gulp and smacking her lips. ‘Darling, thanks for the concern, but he’s got more body mass than most of my female hosts, even though he’s only sixteen. I bet he and I could drink you under the table, any night.’

  Perhaps that’s true: despite his youth, Bria’s new host, Damastor, is taller than me. That’s not a high hurdle, though it doesn’t bother me overly – I have other qualities. In addition, he’s well-muscled, with a frame that promises genuine physical power in the future. A warrior in the making – if he survives Bria’s inhabitation: not all her hosts do.

  ‘How much further?’ I ask, getting us back to the matter at hand.

  Bria flickers her fingers and kindles a torch in a stone receptacle behind the icon, lighting the stark cave in flickering orange light. ‘Rejoice, O Prince of Ithaca,’ he-she drawls. ‘We’ve arrived.’

  My skin prickles, and not just at the chill lodged in my bones. ‘This is Dodona?’

  Dodona is an oracular site deep in the north-western mountains of Achaea, and such sites can render extraordinarily valuable prophecies. There’s a new crisis looming over Achaea, and we have pressing questions for the oracle. However, its priests are likely to be hostile to us, so we’re not going in through the front door.

  ‘Told you I’d get you here,’ Bria says smugly. ‘The shrine is on the top of this hill – and this cave leads to the chamber beneath.’

  The haunted chamber. I give a little shiver, then pretend it’s the cold.

  ‘Good p
oint,’ Bria chuckles. ‘We should put on dry tunics before we go in. I feel like a used mop.’ Instantly, he-she strips naked, bar leather leg greaves and boots, brazenly displaying a bronzed body sculpted from muscle. ‘Oh look, one of those!’ Bria mock-exclaims, peering at Damastor’s penis. ‘Hey Odysseus, have you ever wanted to—’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re no fun, Ithaca.’

  ‘You’ve finally worked that out? Took your time.’ I wring out my long red hair, pouring a cascade of water onto the cave floor and disrobe under her over-solicitous gaze. By now I’m freezing, my bare skin bristling with goose bumps – Epirus in winter is not for the faint-hearted – and bundle myself into my spare clothes, testing the blade of my xiphos before slinging the scabbard strap over my shoulder. Bria does the same, after fiddling with her newfound cock like – well – a teenage boy. ‘I can never get the thing to sit comfortably,’ she mutters. ‘Bloody annoying, but brilliant for pissing on the run.’

  ‘How deep does this cave run?’ I ask, my exhaustion making my bones ache. This journey has only lasted three days, but we’ve barely stopped, even to sleep, and it feels like forever.

  ‘It’s over a hundred paces to the inner chamber,’ Bria replies. ‘It’s blocked off, of course, but that’s nothing we can’t handle.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because I scouted it six months ago, after the Theban war, idiot.’

  Fair enough. ‘The big question is, have we beaten the Trojans here?’

  That wipes the smirk off Bria’s face. ‘I bloody hope so,’ is the growled response.

  We were coming here anyway, but just as we were about to beach our ship we saw another group land and set off inland. Their warship was Trojan, and they landed some thirty warriors. We’re not openly at war with our eastern neighbours across the Aegean, but we know too much about their ambitions to call them friends.

  Immediately, I changed our plans, deciding to not only gain the prophecies we so desperately need, but also make sure the Trojans get nothing. So we have to be here first. Not such an easy task as it might sound: they took the main road, and our route, though more direct, forced us to navigate rugged mountain country and deep canyons, the last of which almost undid us when the rain began.

  ‘You know what really pisses me off,’ Bria goes on. ‘We, good loyal Achaeans, are having to sneak into this fucking hole, while those eastern bastards will be welcomed by the priests with open arms.’

  ‘That’s how things are,’ I reply grimly, no happier about it than her. ‘This shrine belongs to Zeus now, and the Skyfather prefers Trojans to Achaeans these days.’ I can’t keep the betrayal from my voice as I speak. ‘And you and I will be top of Zeus’s shit-list for what we did in Thebes last year. Come on: if we have made it here before the Trojans, it won’t be by much.’

  For years now, the oracles have claimed that war between Achaea and Troy is inevitable, and that Troy will be victorious and crush Achaea into the dust of history. To see whether that is still foreseen was my original reason for coming here.

  What I don’t voice is the question that’s been haunting me from the moment we first saw that alien ship dragged up on the beach three days ago. Is she with them? My Kyshanda. How could she not be, if it’s prophecy they seek? My heart twists in my chest as memories of her face, her scent, fill my imagination. And yet… is she still my friend, my lover? Or my most deadly enemy?

  I thrust such thoughts aside while I check I have everything I need – a weapon and my little pouch of useful things. ‘Are you ready?’ I ask.

  ‘I’m always ready, honey,’ Bria says, doing her female sashay-thing. It looks very odd in Damastor’s male body. ‘The real question is, are you?’

  She’s right. This oracular site is one of the most potent in Achaea, and it’s not a place for the unready. I have some advantages though, and I remind myself of them now: I’m a theios, one of the god-touched who are blessed with divine blood and therefore I possess an extra edge. My divine sire is my secret great-great-grandfather, Prometheus – his great-grandson Sisyphus seduced Anticleia, my mother. It’s a heritage that is both my greatest treasure and my deepest shame.

  But through it, I’ve gained much. Theioi can be one of four kinds: champions, blessed with extra speed, strength and stamina; sorcerers, able to warp the laws of nature; seers, able to divine the future; and even avatars, who’re able to channel the spirit of their patron deity. From Athena and Prometheus, my patron and my sire, I have a touch of all four of these gifts, though I’m still learning the laws and the limits, under Bria’s acerbic guidance.

  If anyone can walk the secret hollows beneath Dodona, I tell myself, it’s me.

  It’s a good thought to cling to, as Bria hefts the torch and leads the way into the depths.

  Once we’ve passed the cave entrance, it’s clear that this isn’t a natural passage, carved through the surrounding limestone by water alone –it’s been tooled and cut. As Bria warned, we’re only a hundred yards or so in when we come to a blockage. The roof hasn’t collapsed, though: it’s a man-made wall of boulders that with great labour have been lugged here, stacked up and roughly plastered over. The outside face is covered with inscriptions, etched by the priests that tend the shrine; pleas to their patron, Zeus, to keep the dead within.

  ‘I’ll never forgive this,’ Bria growls. ‘Even though they were priestesses of that cow-faced bitch Hera.’

  We both know what happened. Two years ago Zeus, seized control from the priestesses of Hera, the Earth and Mother Goddess who is also patron of Mycenae, seat of the High Kingship of Achaea, claiming that the oracle at Dodona was losing its prophetic voice. Zeus’s priests, supported by armed men, overran the shrine, then walled up the priestesses in the caverns below, to ‘refresh’ the oracular spirits that linger there, and renew the potency of the prophecies for which Dodona is famed.

  ‘Are Zeus’s priests still putting their ears to the ground to listen to the voices, as Hera’s followers did?’ I ask.

  ‘So I’ve heard,’ Bria answers. ‘Though they’ve been getting mixed results – the spirits are still not as potent or reliable as Pytho. But Zeus’s people brag that they’re improving.’ She sniffs. ‘We’ll soon see if they’re right.’

  I remember Pytho with a shudder – my secret parentage was revealed there, almost destroying my family. ‘How do we get past this wall?’ I ask.

  ‘Through spells,’ Bria replies, then grins even wider. ‘And hard manual labour. That’s why I brought Damastor as my host.’ She-he flexes his-her biceps with a certain relish.

  I find this statement a little unconvincing – Bria usually borrows the muscular bodies of Hamazan women, any one of whom could heft a boulder as well or better than Damastor, athletic physique or no. But maybe she’s running out of likely candidates – two of her recent Hamazan hosts met grisly deaths, and the third was impregnated not so many months ago by the Smith God Hephaestus. Genia, her name was. She must be nearing her time…

  We get to work, which is no small challenge: once we’ve scraped off enough plaster to gauge what we’re up against, we estimate the blockage to be several boulders deep, hard-packed with smaller rocks, and we can’t afford to use tools. It’s crucial that we make no noise, for the shrine must be almost directly above us.

  But we are at an oracular site, one of those places where the walls of the natural world are thin, and this gives people like Bria and me some advantages. Since I was awakened as a theios, I’ve gradually widened my repertoire as a sorcerer, and now that I’m somewhere that’s receptive to magic, I can do things I can’t elsewhere: like mutter spells that loosen stone.

  What can be made with magic, as this wall was, can be unmade the same way. ‘Spirits of earth, unbind this stone,’ I murmur, and those spirits hearken.

  It’s still damned hard work – we break fingernails and bruise toes, and our whole bodies are screaming by the time we’ve created a crawl-space at the top of the blockage, just a couple of f
eet high and twice as wide. We take turns working at the face, the other person clearing what’s been loosened, while the air grows muggy and stale from our breath. I find myself doing the bulk of the heavy labour while Bria chivvies me on – it turns out she’s as lazy as ever, no matter the body. So it’s me with my skin chaffed and bleeding, headfirst and face down in the grit and stone of the crawl-space, and dizzy from lack of fresh air, when we come to a place that makes my flesh crawl.

  It’s the temperature that changes first, becoming much colder. I’m finding I’m struggling to breathe, the atmosphere drier and tighter, like the aftermath of a lightning bolt. If I were an ordinary man, I wouldn’t have been able to go any further. It’s not just the weight and bulk of stone, which would be impenetrable to most. Now the rock seems to resist the commonplace spells I’ve been summoning up, as though they are being frozen into place by a force that is actively resisting me.

  I reach deep inside myself, finding fresher, stronger spell words and slowly the solid rock crumbles as I prod and push. Soon I’ve loosened the last boulder and rolled it back past me for Bria to remove, before wriggling snake-like through the gap and down into an empty space. ‘I’m through,’ I call softly back through the gap.

  Crouching on the stone floor below, my sweat icy-cold on my skin and fear mounting in my heart, I raise my right hand. ‘Great Sire, Champion of Fire, be with me,’ I murmur. In answer, a tongue of flame kindles, warm but not searing, on the tip of my forefinger as I look around.

  The chamber walls are rough-hewn, as if a natural cave has been enlarged. Pungent-smelling fumes seep in thin tendrils from cracks in the floor. There are cracks in the roof too, allowing the fumes to escape, and letting a little clean air creep in. Words in a script I don’t know are etched into the stone walls, some carved with tools, but others more lightly scored. Random scratches surround the inscriptions, wild marks as if incised in a frenzy of anger or desperation.

  A dozen bodies, desiccated flesh clinging to bones and clad in crumbling fabric, are lying huddled on the ground, together or singly, about the edges of the chamber. I can almost deduce the order in which they died, from posture and position. The eldest and weakest died first and were laid in a row there. Later the surviving women were too weak and despairing to care about arranging the bodies, and sought comfort in their goddess or each other haphazardly.