Banished Sons Of Poseidon

by Andrew J. Peters

  Aerander drew a breath, and his diplomatic airs came back to him, albeit strained. “Do what you want,” he said. “There’ll be a seat at the table if you change your mind.”

  He glanced at the chiton on Dam’s bed, and then he stepped out of the room.

  Chapter Six

  Dam couldn’t help feeling like a traitor after his cousin walked out of the room. The fancy outfit he had commissioned lay on Dam’s bed as though it was the funerary clothes stripped from Aerander’s own father. Dam supposed he could live with his cousin thinking he was selfish and disloyal. He had lived with worse things said about him.

  But it wasn’t fair.

  Aerander acted like Dam naturally had a place at a statesman’s table, but did he care to acknowledge that Dam spent the last three years as a penniless servant of the priests, far beyond the grandeur of the Citadel? Dam wondered why sitting together at the feast was so important to his cousin. Did he truly want him there, or did he need him as a prop for the House of Atlas? If Aerander thought he was worthy of the Atlas name, why did he treat him like a wayward child who needed constant minding?

  But Aerander was the leader of their countrymen and a far better leader than any of the other men. He had risked his life clearing the way for their evacuation. He had made friends with the Old Ones for everyone’s benefit, and he believed in putting country first rather than the self-serving interests of his fellow Poseidonidae. He had rallied Dam to join his mission to retrieve the Oomphalos against impossible odds. That was why, when Aerander had been lost in grief after the flood, Dam had begged him to break out of his seclusion and show himself standing strong in order to pull the survivors together. Dam knew he ought to take Aerander’s side on that principle alone.

  But it was so hard to do.

  Dam wished he could skulk off to some remote spot to sort things out, or maybe just to let those things settle and sink away to some forgotten place. But the feast awaited him. He dressed in clean trousers, a tunic, and his sandals, and he washed his mouth and teeth in the basin in the corner of the room.

  Just as he was wiping off his face with a cloth, Hanhau arrived at the house. That normally would have lifted Dam’s spirits, but he was in such a fog, he just managed a glance at Hanhau and headed to the door so they could make their way to the hall.

  Hanhau held his place. Dam noticed he had darkened his eyes with kohl. He was dressed in formal trousers tailored snugly to his long, powerful legs and studded like armor at the seams. His body armor was robust and shiny like oiled leather. He wore metal armlets and anklets, and his silky black hair had been braided on the sides in a martial fashion.

  He hid his hands behind his back, then brought one out, showing Dam the metal bracelet in his palm. “For you,” he said.

  Dam took the bracelet. It was a simple wrought iron loop that fit perfectly around his wrist.

  “There’s writing on it,” Hanhau said. The room was dim with just the glow of hanging gas lamps at the corners of the walls. He brought over an oil lantern that Hephad kept by his bed so Dam could see the bracelet better.

  Dam wiggled it off his wrist. The outside was engraved in an arcane script. Hanhau’s people didn’t have books like they did in Atlantis, but Dam had seen their strange, cuneiform markings etched on the sides of caves and around town on totem guideposts pointing out the byways to this or that section of the city. On the inside of the bracelet, he saw a single word in Atlantean letters: “Dam.”

  “Now you know how your name is written in our language,” Hanhau said. “There’s no precise translation. Since you came down here with your cousin, you have been known as ‘the second son.’ And ‘One of three who banished Ouroborus.’”

  Dam studied the scripted characters. Ouroborus had been the Snake Queen, the leader of the New Ones who Aerander had killed with Lys and Dam’s help. Silenos had called Dam “second prince.” The similarity was eerie.

  “Do you like it?” Hanhau said. “I was never good at metalcraft, but one of the smithies gave me a hand.”

  Dam slipped the bracelet back on his wrist. “Yes.” He felt idiotically empty-handed. He had nothing for Hanhau. Hanhau must have forged the bracelet in the early hours of the day, while Dam had slept and thought nothing about a gift for the occasion. So he gave Hanhau the only thing he could think of giving. He stepped up close, stooped to Hanhau’s height, and pressed his lips against Hanhau’s. Hanhau reached around Dam’s shoulders and held him.

  Telling Hanhau about his past was not going to be easy.

  “I didn’t know what to wear,” Dam said.

  “You look fine.”

  Dam wasn’t so sure. Hanhau was dressed for ceremony. He had thrown on rationed garments like a peasant.

  “It’s a celebration for the people,” Hanhau said. “You wear whatever suits you.” His face darkened shyly. “You’re handsome to me no matter what you wear.”

  That made Dam feel a little better. For a moment. Dam looked at the chiton that Aerander had left for him on the bed. A blink of light from Hanhau’s face showed that he noticed it as well.

  Dam told Hanhau about his visit with his cousin. He shared how terrible he felt about disappointing Aerander, and equally how terrible he felt about having to act like Aerander’s noble brother when that wasn’t the case. It was easy and natural telling Hanhau these things. In fact, Dam would have been plenty happy to stay at his house with Hanhau while the feast went on without them.

  “You should sit at the table with your cousin,” Hanhau said.

  “It’s just a feast,” Dam grumbled.

  Hanhau wiggled his eyebrows. “That’s true. It’s just a feast.”

  Dam dropped his head. He understood what Hanhau was getting at. He was being stubborn. It was just a feast that meant a lot to Aerander.

  “You won’t be mad?” Dam said.

  Hanhau gently lifted Dam’s chin and kissed him full and deep again. He broke away and held the side of Dam’s cheek. “We’ll just have to plan to do something else together.”

  A huge smile sprang up on Dam’s face. “When?”

  “We’ll have our own feast, after the feast.”

  “Tomorrow night?”

  “Whenever you want. Wherever you want.”

  A thought popped into Dam’s head. “The Fire Canyon?” Hanhau had told him about a place with lava channels and geysers that burst up from crater islands.

  Hanhau interlaced his hand with Dam’s. “The Fire Canyon,” he said.

  Dam would have liked another kiss, but he noticed the commotion outside had disappeared like a receding tide. Everyone had moved on to the hall. He looked to the chiton on his bed.

  “I can’t wear that. It’s too fancy.”

  Hanhau gave him a reproachful smirk. A woeful weight descended on Dam. He supposed he had no choice. Dam stepped over to his pallet to try on the chiton. Just then, one of the kittens trotted in and her sisters bounded after her.

  That first cat had something in her mouth. Dam stared at her closely. She had caught some sort of lizard that was two-thirds her size. Dam had seen animals of that sort in the underworld. They were tough-skinned and quick-moving, and they hung around the rubbish bins outside the city’s dining hall. The cat dropped the lizard’s lifeless body in front of her and sat up proudly.

  Dam could swear the kittens had started to look more like cubs than cats. Their bodies were stout and thick with downy fur. Their paws were nearly as big as fists. Dam glanced at Hanhau. He appeared to be adding things up too.

  Chapter Seven

  They walked through town together to the core of the city where an expansive yard had been cleared for Ysalane’s Great Hall. It was the first time that the building had been seen. At night, pipe scaffolding and tarpaulins had been draped around the construction site. For a fortnight or more, it had just been a dusty, fenced-in worksite on a plot of rock adjacent to the Oomphalos Tower.

  Passing through the totem gateway to the yard, Dam halted in awe of what the Old Ones
had created. It was now one monumental square—the hall and the tower together—surrounded by the terraced stages of the city like an arena for men the size of giants.

  Between the two grand buildings was a rectangular reflecting pool with the biggest fountain Dam had ever seen. It was an otherworldly marvel. Beneath the pool, beams of light shone up from the water, and a rainbow arc stretched across the cascading spouts. Dam gathered the Old Ones had devised some invention of gas and gaslight, like a lighthouse beam, under the pool. The fountain chutes reached halfway up the height of the tower.

  Across the water, the hall stood majestic in black, shiny onyx. Spires on its massive roof surged with higher peaks of gas-fueled flames. Like most of the underground people’s buildings, the hall’s ornamentation was spare. They didn’t decorate walls with friezes or erect sculpted plinths in public squares to please the gods like they did in Atlantis.

  Dam and Hanhau crossed the square to the hall’s grand portico, where stairs led up to an archway nearly the staggering height of the building. The double doors of studded bronze were open and posted at the sides. The entryway could accommodate a whale. A sea of voices from inside echoed as one indecipherable commotion.

  Beyond the hall’s vestibule, Dam saw a single, dizzying room with infinite gas-lit candelabrums hanging from the ceiling. Dam knew it was an illusion, “a trick of the Master of Light,” as the Old Ones said. The bordering walls were plated with shiny, reflecting silver. The room was built from looking glass, giving it even greater dimensions. A broad promenade extended between two banks of benched slate tables, and two head tables stood at the far end, as Aerander had said there would be.

  The façade beyond the head tables shone with many lanterns, and it bore the room’s only art. It was a sweeping mural Dam gradually recognized as the creation story of the Old Ones. Their Creator God had made three races of men: the ones who lived above the earth, the ones who lived on the earth, and the ones who lived below the earth. In shades of red ochre and cobalt blue, the mural showed the sky world, the earth world, and the underworld, representing all of the races welcome in Ysalane’s hall.

  Between the head tables, a tall fount presided over the room like a ceremonial torch. The Old Ones had filled it with red, glowing mori-mori, the most precious substance in Agartha. They mined it from a lode in the hills near the city. They called mori-mori “the blood of the earth.” Its nature was mysterious, and it was said that the Oomphalos had been forged from mori-mori during the olden age of peace.

  Dam’s pace dragged at the end of the promenade. It was time for him and Hanhau to part ways. Ysalane sat at one long head table. Her long black hair was braided and pinned up high on her head like a crown, and she wore the bronze collar and crimson cape of tribal chief. The warriors sat at that table, men and women all dressed the same as Hanhau. Their eyes were all darkened with kohl, and only the broadness of the women’s scale-covered breasts distinguished them from the men.

  At the other table, Aerander was in his indigo House Atlas chiton, Lys in his garnet chiton representing House Eudemon, and Dardy, Evandros, and a half dozen of their cousins, uncles, and nephews in the emerald robes of House Gadir. They hadn’t looked so noble since the days of the Panegyris. Dam felt strange about joining them. The royal chiton he was wearing felt like it belonged on someone else.

  Aerander looked at Dam and the space on the bench beside him. Hanhau squeezed Dam’s hand, gave him an encouraging grin, and stepped over to Ysalane’s table. Dam made his way next to Aerander.

  The other boys greeted Dam warmly, and Lys collared him and patted his back in a brotherly way. Aerander’s friends were all decent people. Dam had no gripe with them as he did with Calyiches and his pack of goons. But the formal occasion reminded him of the Panegyris, which he had been trying to forget.

  When he sat down on the bench, a chortle broke out in the room, and Dam could see it had arisen from Calyiches’ table where he and his friends were smirking at him. The highborn boys had taken seats at the front of the hall directly across from his table. They counted about seven dozen in total and were a fairly even distribution of boys from the royal houses: the boys from House Mneseus in purple chitons, Elassipos in amber, Azaes in gold, Diaprepos in persimmon, Autochthonos in copper, Mestor in silver, and Amphisos in aquamarine.

  Farther back was a table for the common boys and the surviving women where Hephad and Attalos were seated. The freed prisoners sat at tables stretching all the way to the back of the hall.

  Dam searched for Silenos, hoping the frail man had made it to the feast, but there were too many people and they were too indistinguishable from his distance. The prisoners outnumbered even the highborn boys, and they were all old men with white or gray hair wearing the same common man’s apron.

  Scullery workers in bibs and trousers wheeled metal carts into the hall with the first course of the feast. They fanned out through the room, bringing each table a steaming trencher of soup, a ladle, and a stack of bowls.

  The highborn boys nudged one another and snickered about the martial style service. They were so unfathomably rude. The Old Ones didn’t make men slaves so they could stand at tables and fill other people’s soup bowls. Those boys ought to have been grateful that they were getting fed at all, but naturally, they clanged about sloppily with their ladles and sniffed at the soup as though it might be foul and poisonous. Dam served himself and drank his soup, a rich, tasty broth with smoky clams and snails.

  Afterward, they ate from platters with many kinds of fish and mushroom steaks and a ribbony, undersea vegetable like black seaweed. Other sorts of foods were too exotic for most of the boys’ tastes: slimy jellyfish and brazier-charred lizards whose bellies needed to be picked open. Each table had a pitcher of chilled water.

  Dardy, a stalky, straw-haired boy who had the curse of pimples, brought up how much he missed eating meat. Everyone around the table joined in to reminisce about the banquets from the old days. They missed wine. They missed bread from the oven and honeyed cakes. They even missed the bland porridge in winter.

  Dam missed those things too, though he had lived with a lot less than Aerander’s friends. In the early days of their asylum, a few of the boys had stopped eating completely. They were sick with grief, and they couldn’t stomach the foods they had underground. The highborn boys had been raised to be statesmen and military strategoi, but beyond their lush palaces, they could be remarkably frail.

  “I miss girls too,” Dardy announced. That brought grins to his companions’ faces. Everyone had heard Dardy’s story about Palmdyra, the pretty girl he had been courting, but he told it again and no one complained. Dam noticed some boys looking at the women who were far aloft in the middle of the hall. They were common folk who Dam and Attalos had rounded up from the Temple of Poseidon on that awful night when the sea had overtaken the city. The women had been kneeling at the foot of the grand cella of Poseidon with budded boughs from the sacred cypress tree, making prayers to the god to spare the city.

  Those women kept to themselves. Dam supposed it must be even harder for them to adjust to living underground than it was for the boys. While Aerander’s friends gazed at the group, Dam wondered how long the traditions of segregation by class and gender would hold the boys back from the stirrings of nature.

  The conversation brought up another private thought. Hanhau had said that Dam would see for himself what happened when his people went through “courtship season.” Glancing around at the men at tables on Ysalane’s side of the hall, Dam noticed a few men whose scales had molted off their back or chest, revealing patches of fresh, tawny skin. And some of the women had bound their breasts with bolts of silk, which was entirely unusual.

  Dam bowed his head and grinned. What must it be like to have one’s private business open to be seen by everybody else! He glanced at Hanhau at the head table across the aisle. Sultry thoughts overwhelmed Dam’s brain. Aerander gave him a strange look, and Dam shook those thoughts out of his head.

&n
bsp; Ysalane stood. The chatter and the clang of cups and utensils throughout the hall receded into silence. The chieftain of the Old Ones spoke some words of welcome, first addressing her people in her own language, then in Atlantean to the other half of the hall.

  Two warriors marched down the central aisle, carrying a metal box on chains and hooks between them. They halted in front of Ysalane. Their Chieftain called Aerander to stand beside her. He came over, and Ysalane opened the lid of the box, bringing out a gilded gauntlet. It was simple in craftsmanship but splendid. Ysalane presented the gift to Aerander and spoke out to her people first, then to Aerander’s.

  “To the one who slayed Ouroborus and brought peace to our kingdom. May this armor forever remind us of his strength and bravery.”

  Aerander took the gauntlet. The Old Ones stomped their feet as was their custom, and the old men in the back of the room cried out: “Hear, hear!” as was theirs. Aerander raised the prize above his head. Dam and Aerander’s friends cheered and beat their fists on the table. The response from the front tables was timid.

  The fracas died down, allowing Aerander to speak. “This gauntlet shall be tribute not only to our victory over Ouroborus but also to the men and women who gave their lives for our freedom.” He looked to Ysalane’s side of the Hall. “To our new friends I say, we shall always remember the losses of your warriors. May they live on in our hearts and in the sagas of your people. You have taken us in as your own. For your generosity, we are forever grateful.”

  The stomping of feet erupted again. Dam had to admit that his cousin had become a good speaker and a politician in short time. Gradually, the stomping trailed off, and Aerander turned to the other side of the Hall.

  “To my countrymen I say, this gauntlet is dedicated to our fathers and all our kin who cannot be with us today. We have lost much. At times, that sorrow carves us empty as shells, and it feels as though it is too much to go on. But our promise to the ones who came before us, the ones who built a mighty kingdom across lands and seas, that promise is as unbreakable as the ore from which this armor was forged. We will return. We will restore Atlantis to its glory. In remembrance of our loved ones. To show the world that Poseidon’s legacy lives on. As leader of our people, this I vow to you. Every man and woman born of our country will have a place in that new world. Every one of you in this Great Hall will have land and freedom.”