The Oracles of Troy (The Adventures of Odysseus)

No answer. The two men pulled away his bonds and lifted him bodily from the chair, pulling his arms roughly about their shoulders. As they made themselves comfortable with his weight, he placed his feet on the ground and tried to stand. A bolt of pain shot up from his wounded leg. If he had not been supported he would have collapsed to the floor. Then the first man opened the door to reveal two more guards waiting outside, who followed behind the others as they carried Eperitus through a confusion of half-lit corridors, up steps, through more corridors and into the great hall of his father’s house, which he recognised from when Astynome had been tending his wound. He looked for her in the shadows cast by the flaming hearth, but saw no-one in the fleeting moments before he was dragged to another door and out into bright, blinding sunlight. His eyes had become accustomed to darkness and he was forced to squeeze them shut while he was taken through what smelled like a garden filled with shrubs and strongly scented flowers. He tried blinking, but caught only confused snatches of his surroundings. More baffling was the faint hissing he could hear in the background. Then he felt himself dumped into another chair, while his arms were pinned painfully behind its hard wooden back and bound tightly with more flax cords.

‘Stay close and keep your weapons to hand,’ a familiar voice ordered the guards.

Eperitus’s eyes stuttered open again. The dark, blurry form before him quickly gained focus and became his father, who had planted himself legs apart before his son’s chair. Eperitus tested his arms against the ropes, but was unable to move them.

‘Where am I?’

‘In my garden,’ Apheidas answered with a sweep of his hand, indicating the bushes and fruit trees that provided a cheerful green backdrop in the morning sunshine. He spoke in Greek to prevent the guards from understanding their conversation. ‘You were locked up in one of my storerooms – your wound’s healing fast and I didn’t want to risk leaving you in the great hall – but I thought this would be a much more pleasant place to talk.’

‘I have nothing to say to you. You should’ve just killed me on the battlefield and have been done with it.’

‘That was my first thought,’ Apheidas admitted, his voice hardening. ‘After all, you’ve made your desire to kill me very clear. But I don’t suffer from the same crippling lust for vengeance that you do. Revenge is a meaningless, empty passion that achieves nothing – you of all people should know that. No; when I saw you lying in the dust it struck me the gods had delivered you into my hands for a reason. So, not for the first time, I decided to spare your life.’

‘What do you want?’ Eperitus sneered. ‘My gratitude?’

‘Don’t be obtuse. I want … I expect your help.’

‘After what happened at the temple of Thymbrean Apollo? After you murdered Arceisius? After you used Astynome to fool me into thinking you’d changed?’

He spat at his father’s feet, who replied by striking him hard across the cheek, almost toppling him from the chair. A silence followed, filled only by the sinister hissing that seemed to be coming not from the garden, but from beneath it. Eperitus sniffed at the blood trickling down the inside of his nostril.

‘Nevertheless, you are going to help me,’ Apheidas assured him. ‘If not, then I will kill you in the worst way you could imagine.’

He knelt down beside a wooden box, on top of which was a pair of heavy gauntlets. He forced his hands into the stiff leather, then lifted the lid. A low sibilating put Eperitus on edge, and as Apheidas pulled out a thin brown snake from the box he felt every muscle in his body stiffen. He strained against the ropes that held him, but was unable to move.

‘Still have the old fear then?’ his father mocked, stepping closer and holding the snake level with his son’s face.

Eperitus felt his hands shaking as he stared at the scaled, lipless creature with its thin tongue slipping in and out of its mouth. He pressed his head as far back as it would go into the hard, unyielding wood of the chair.

‘Take the damned thing away! Take it away!’

‘As you wish.’ Apheidas stood up straight and held the snake to his own cheek, so that its forked tongue flickered against his jaw. ‘You never did master your fear of my pets, did you? I’ve been keeping them again, you know, since I left Greece.’

‘That hissing sound I can hear –’

‘You don’t even want to think about that,’ Apheidas told him with a knowing grin. ‘But I wonder if your tortured mind has regained any memory of why you fear snakes so much.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You don’t fear them for nothing, Son. It happened when you were very young, perhaps three years old. I’d bred snakes since before you were born, to provide sacrifices for worshippers at Apollo’s temple in Alybas. I kept them in a pit in our courtyard, a courtyard much like this.’

‘I remember it.’