by LYDIA STORM
Germanicus’s expression was grim, but Antony gave him a look of such violence, for once he managed to silence the legionary commander.
CHAPTER TWO
The golden bowl of the sun poured late afternoon light through the tall pines on the Greek island of Tarsus, where Antony had come to celebrate his initiation into the Mysteries of Dionysus. He reclined on a low couch in the center of the town square, which was decked with garlands of pine boughs and heavy purple grapes in preparation for the rites.
He cast a fine figure today, his strong masculine body almost bare, but for the fawn-skin wrapped around his waist and a wreath of ivy leaves to crown his dark hair in honor of the God. Antony held up his goblet to a pretty maiden, her flaxen locks unbound and falling around her hips, carrying a clay jar overflowing with wine. She replenished his cup and through veiled lashes favored him with a seductive smile before turning away.
Eyes as blue as the Aegean, he thought, as he watched her go, but then a pair of jade green eyes, brimming with light, shifting shadows and unfathomable depths rose up in his brain, blocking out everything else like ocean tides sweeping clean shallow lines in the sand.
Frustrated, he took a deep drink from his goblet and willed the siren temptress from his mind. He prayed that here in Tarsus he would forget, and if Dionysus truly possessed his spirit tonight, as the priestess had promised, perhaps He would burn away the shame of his disloyalty, leaving Antony as he was before he ever laid eyes on the Egyptian Queen. Pouring a generous libation to the ground, he vowed, for tonight, he would be merry and brood on Caesar and Cleopatra no more.
The last of the sun's golden-red beams faded over the square and the village maidens lit translucent oil and salt lanterns which glowed cheerfully in the twilight. Barefoot women decked in festive robes, grape leaves wound through their loose hair, poured wine for the men, who donned leering Pan masks, transforming themselves into satyrs. The musicians brought forth their reed pipes and flutes, and began to play cheerful tunes, the sweet notes of their music mingling with the laughter and song which filled the square. Antony tapped his hand in time with the musicians, who added lutes, tambourines and tightly bound animal skin drums to the chorus of song that swayed the first of the dancers to their feet.
The Priestess of Dionysus, a handsome woman with gray streaks running through her copper hair, approached Antony, followed by several women dressed as Bacchantes. Bowing, she presented him with the thyrsus wand of Dionysus. He accepted the gift with a gracious smile and opened his mouth to catch the purple wine which the maidens poured down his throat. They petted him and he sucked honey from their soft fingers in remembrance that Dionysus, as a boy, had been raised on this sweet sustenance.
A laughing dark-haired beauty with wild dilated eyes threw herself onto his lap. She squeezed purple-black deadly nightshade berries between her stained fingers, expelling the hallucinogenic poison into the goblet of wine she grasped provocatively between her thighs. Reaching down, she raised the cup and held it to Antony’s lips. He drank deeply before passing the brew to the priestess as a feeling of lightheaded unreality began to take hold of him.
Antony noticed, through his distorted vision, similar goblets were circulating throughout the square to the wild dancing women, whose skirts swirled round and round to the increasing tempo of the panpipes. The scene made him dizzy, but the young Bacchante still bouncing on his lap pulled him from his place of honor and led him into the center of the festival, where he was absorbed into the dance.
As he moved, his head cleared a bit and he noticed he was the only man dancing. All the others stood to the side in their wild Pan masks, clapping and stamping their feet, calling out to the women who spun faster and faster, some reaching for tambourines or drums to beat time with their unrestrained movements.
He was caught in a swirl of bare legs and loose hair, red cheeks and bright inebriated eyes. All around him the Bacchantes took his hands and pulled him this way and that, blowing him kisses as they rushed by, twining their slender arms around his waist to the screams of the crowd and spinning him around, confused and disoriented, but laughing in delight as he held one woman in his arms, only to find her sister's hands over his eyes, until, whipping around, he found another there to playfully kiss his lips and skip out of his grasp.
The crescent moon had made her pale ascent and the stars shone bright in the country sky. Antony could feel the music in his blood, the beating of the drums dictating the throb of his heart, and a strange disorientation struck him as his vision began to blur and then clear again. He heard, as if it were another person, his own voice echoing up into the night with wild exultant cries.
He barely noticed as the women lured him, chased him, somehow willed him to follow them out of the square, through the narrow streets of the village. They passed small houses decked with wreaths of ivy and hung with colored lanterns. They were maddening these women, who more boldly now pressed their bodies up against him, holding him for a moment in a hot kiss, before slipping from his arms to lead him stumbling after them farther down the road.
As they left the town behind, the musicians were gone, and the only music came from the primitive drums and tambourines which the Bacchantes banged wildly in a cacophony of sound ringing out through the solitary hillside. And now they were running, swift as deer, through the moonlit forest. He was with them, his bare feet unfeeling of the stones and sharp twigs on the wood's floor. The women tugged at their clothing, ripping it from their bodies to expose the supple skin of rounded breasts and sleek bellies.
He was after them, tearing the cloth from their backs, hungry for their warm flesh. A half-naked girl, with a tangle of wheat-colored curls, threw her arms around him and pressed her body against his. Her head fell back, her cheeks flushed, soft lips parted. Erotic longing burned in her dark dilated eyes and revealed itself in the way her rosy nipples stiffened, crying out for his touch, his tongue, to be taken.
He slid his hand around the exposed flesh of her thighs and felt warm silky wetness under his fingers. He throbbed to be inside her, devour her whole, but with an impish grin she wriggled out of his embrace and darted into the dark forest.
The other women followed, shamelessly teasing and provoking him, one moment seeming only a breath away, the next farther than he possibly could imagine as his distorted vision played tricks on him. The trees and grass began to glow in the moonlight, and he could smell the deep rich scent of the earth along with the sweat of the Bacchantes as they ran, dancing, skipping and crying out in feral screams of bliss to the nighttime countryside.
Antony stumbled as he tore across a dried creek bed. He looked up and was overwhelmed by the sight of the heavens. The stars pressed down on him, their shimmering light fragmenting and swimming in a strange dance of their own, his brain intoxicated with their celestial light.
The low hum of chanting made Antony tear his eyes from the stars. The women had clasped hands in a circle. He was at its center. Slowly the circle began to move as the chanting accelerated.
The earth was firm and fertile beneath his feet, he felt its strength rising up in him, filling his body with the life force of nature. Everything was spinning, his soul melting away into the darkness of the pines and midnight breeze which carried the taste of the sea to his lips.
With a surge of explosive light the God entered him. Antony was wild with the power, brimming over with a joy beyond joy. The animation of all living things rushed through his veins, the power of the earth and heavens coursing through him, and again he was running hard, running in a blur of ecstasy, free and untamed as the wind. There were no longer any divisions between himself, or the raving Bacchantes who dashed alongside him, or the earth, or moon filtering through the whispering pines.
Suddenly he was alive to something else too. Fear mingled with his adrenaline and sent him charging swiftly ahead of the women, sprinting on four legs. Easily, he bounded over the woodland bracken. Dionysus, God of Animals, had joined him with the soul of a deer
and left his own body behind somewhere in the forest.
The cries of the Bacchantes at his heels drove him faster. His heart raced as he darted through the trees as naturally as if he had never lived anywhere other than these woods. He was pure instinct, but he was growing tired. He could not escape the women who rabidly pursued him.
He reached a grove surrounded by tall pine trees, the crescent moon shedding her pale light throughout the clearing. Collapsing on his front legs, he felt the cool earth beneath him. He was the earth, was the collective spirit that drove the maddened women to throw themselves on the exhausted deer and rip it apart with their hands and teeth in a euphoric frenzy, smearing the animal’s rich blood across their breasts and faces, bathing in its life force, drinking in the hot liquid from its dying body.
He felt the ripping of his flesh. The mind-numbing pain and draining of his energies mixed with the renewal which the flesh and blood brought the Bacchantes.
Somewhere out of the deep well of his mind he heard: All of this has taken place before and all of it will take place again, into eternity, into eternity, into eternity….
He came to in his own body. He was freezing and his limbs tingled, still half asleep. The savage scene of the Bacchantes blurred with the gently swaying trees and the song of the cicadas. He barely noticed as the blood-spattered women raised him up in their moon-pale arms. They chanted a discordant hymn as they wound their way through the pine groves, past the village, to the harbor at the bottom of the hill.
Raising his head, he saw more women dressed in shimmering translucent gowns of silver tissue. They reminded him of naiads and sea nymphs, Priestesses of Isis.
They were here for him.
A fabulous golden barge bearing silken lilac sails rose up from the water, the gold's hue reflected by the tranquil sea. From inside, he could hear the lulling sound of harps. The heavy smell of incense wafted up from the vessel, swirling around his head, and he inhaled the musky odor of lotus blossoms.
Surely this was a vision of the Gods.
The naiads and sea nymphs bowed.
The Priestess of Dionysus returned their reverence. “Dionysus brings you greetings from his sacred groves on the hills of Tarsus.”
A girl with a wreath of white roses crowning her pale locks came forward. “The Great God is welcomed here to the womb of Isis––to the Mystery of Love.”
The girl leaned forward and pressed a chaste kiss to his lips, then removing her crown of roses, placed it solemnly over Antony’s dark hair.
Like a bewitched sleepwalker, he found himself on his feet again as he made his way up the gangplank into the golden barge.
CHAPTER THREE
The scent of Syrian incense and moonflowers mingled with the sea air to create an intoxicating perfume which lulled Antony’s senses as he stepped into the banquet hall of Cleopatra’s barge. Candles lit the chamber with a warm glow, the light sparkling off the precious gems of the elegantly dressed courtiers.
Still half-hallucinatory with the power of the God, he took in the wall paintings. Every inch was covered in the spare Egyptian style depicting the erotic joining of one soul with another, but before Antony had a chance to examine the scene closely, the nymph-like creatures who had welcomed him aboard this floating temple of love silently took his hands and led him to a couch at the head of a large banquet table.
The solemn beating of drums sounded as a mummy, carried by two priests wearing masks of the dark Jackal God, Anubis, appeared.
“Anubis, Guide of the Dead and Opener of the Way!” called out one of the priests in a gloomy voice. “Drink and be merry, for someday you will die!”
For a moment the stillness of death hung over the room. Antony sat in the quiet of its powerful grip, but the spell was broken by the delighted laughter of one of the young naiads, like tinkling bells pealing through the banquet hall.
Antony realized he was surrounded by the Bacchantes who had been with him in the hills, and judging by their dress, the priests and priestesses of Isis. There was goodwill and merriment throughout the hall as the people feasted. He looked down at the delicacies before him on the table but his lips had gone numb and his head seemed to float, making him too disoriented to eat.
Two attendants, dressed in gowns light as sea foam, placed a goblet of wine in his hands. Their words echoed vaguely through his hazy consciousness.
“Drink this, my lord, which comes from the Temple of Isis at Alexandria. It was prepared that you may enjoy the rites of the Sacred Marriage.”
In his dream state, he put the wine to his numb lips. Its fire burned down his throat and rushed through his veins, restoring energy and vigor to him.
As he became more alert, and some clarity of thought returned, a part of his brain rebelled. This was Cleopatra’s ship. All of it was an elaborate charade, with Antony serving as a pawn, in a game orchestrated by the Egyptian Queen. He wanted her and her gold, but not if meant falling like a fool into her snare. An urge to march off the vessel and never look back brought him to his feet.
Where was she, anyway?
He searched the crowd of revelers, but Cleopatra was nowhere in sight. Yet surely this was her ship? Her game?
A tray of fragrant saffron-infuse oysters was placed before him and he found himself seated again. The wine had restored his hunger and he attacked the dish, washing it down with more of the vital libations.
As the feast continued, the fair-haired girl who had greeted him earlier took up a lyre and began to sing. Her fingers danced along the strings, plucking magic from the air and a hush fell over the crowd. She incanted the song of the dead God, Osiris, his body torn to pieces by his jealous brother, and at last discovered by his mourning wife, Isis. For a moment the barge, and all its revelers, fell away as the music carried Antony to the Land of the Gods. He saw, in his mind’s eye, the Goddess kneeling in the Nile mud weeping over her dead lover.
A shudder ran up his spine. He was this God who had been ripped apart, torn sinew from sinew in a fury of exquisite pain.
His head spun.
The swirl of obscuring mist hid the path of the murky Nile but Antony could make out a slender rowboat gliding silently through wispy tufts of fog. The dark Jackal God was its oarsman. Anubis turned his bottomless black eyes on Antony and a jolt of fear surged through him, but he found himself powerless to turn away from the Jackal’s hypnotic gaze which drew him deeper and deeper, into the darkness of the blackest void….
But as the last strum of the lyre vibrated through the hall, his mind snapped back to his present surroundings. The room seemed overflowing with revelers, more lively and full of laughter then before, yet the most important guest at the banquet had yet to appear.
Where was Cleopatra?
He stood again, determined to search the vessel top to bottom until he found her, when the music changed. The drone of a horn and the slow erotic beat of a single drum filled the room.
A fever crept into his blood at the sound of the music. The crimson curtains separating the hall from the deeper recesses of the floating temple slowly parted to reveal Cleopatra in all her glory, shining with the light of the Goddess from every pore of her body. Her magnetism radiated across the room. For a moment Antony forgot to breathe.
Her distant eyes, so bright and clear in the darkness of her face, sizzled with intensity beneath the veil of her trance. Slowly, with the grace of an uncoiling serpent, she danced to the low droning music, her body swaying with the tide of notes. Moved by the call of the Goddess, she began to turn, gyrating her full hips in a sensuous rhythm, her golden veils one moment hiding, the next revealing the luscious curve of her bare belly, a gleaming pearl adorning her navel, her inviting round arms and thighs, the circle of her taut nipples pushing against the fabric of her shimmering tunic.
The music grew faster and more violent as she danced in time with the increasing beat, bowing and arching, twirling and skipping to fan the blaze that had erupted in Antony. The room began to sway with her movements, wi
th each twist of her hips, each flash of her burning eyes, but he did not feel weak. Desire forced him to take a few halting steps forward as the tempting Goddess drew closer, her hips grinding, her hands grasping swollen, flushed breasts.
He reached out to her, but she moved with the quickness of a playful cat from his grasp. The drums beat more frantically and the other men and women began to take up the amatory dance, twisting their bodies around each other as the Goddess of Desire inflamed them. Antony pushed his way through the sensual masses like a charging bull.
He would have this woman.
After the endless teasing and frustration he had endured at the hands of the Bacchantes, he could stand no more. He caught a glimpse of her, moving in a trance to the sound of the pounding drums, her honey skin gleamed with sweat. She was caught in the primitive urges of the dance, giving herself up to it completely, her head thrown back, black hair streaming to her hips.
She saw him approaching through the sea of people, his eyes blazing with sexual hunger. She darted through the red curtains, casting a quick feverish glance behind her. Their eyes locked for one moment before she disappeared down a shadowy stairway into the belly of the ship.
Antony tore through the curtains and down the stairs after her. He paused for a moment at the bottom, his eyes adjusting to the dim light. The chamber was a small torchlit temple. Amber incense, smoldering in a brazier, cast a heavy narcotic haze at the foot of Isis’s golden statue. Beneath the Goddess, Cleopatra lay draped across a silken pallet sprinkled with crushed night-blooming jasmine. Her jade eyes were glazed over in a heated trance of desire, her head thrown back in surrender, unbound hair falling in loose waves to the floor. Her full breasts strained against the fabric of her tunic with every panting breath of need that escaped her parted lips. She rested before him in all her sensual glory, her inviting ripe body an offering on the altar of the God.
