THERE, BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD, GO I.
Chapter Four: Taming Fragility
"My prince?"
Dizzy with sorrow and gulping down air around his sobs, Paris/Alexandros lowered his damp lashes, thinking his heartache and suffering was at last complete. Visions and voices now, he mourned, his insanity was indeed complete. In a swell of misery, the young beauty drew himself to his feet, swaying there between the sea and his imagined friend, Paris/Alexandros laughed with the gulls circling overhead, cawing and crying.
The sun, hot and steeped in floral colors, shadowed his high cheekbones and reddened his eyes and swollen lips. Looking reluctantly to the tall, dark, ever loyal watchman standing poised and wary before the backdrop of the billowing red curtain, the former Shepard moved out his tremulous hand. "I know you, shade; I know the form you steal. Leave me to my hell and torment me no longer!"
When the man stepped forward instead of back, Paris/Alexandros rushed him, slamming his fists against the scuffed black leather armor and the roped upper-arm muscles nicked with scars and mottled bruises. Furious little sounds mewled from the prince as he fought and struggled against the firm, gentle arms that bound him loosely.
"Peace Alexandros, peace I say!"
The boy stilled.
"Ale-Alexandros? You call me Alexandros?"
The man nodded, his thin dark hair falling across his brow. "Aye, I call you Alexandros, beloved of my lord. I tell you I come baring his words."
Shuddering thoroughly, Paris/Alexandros bit his lower lip till it bled as he gazed distantly at the armored chest level with his misty eyes. Minutes passed, the waves rushed, crashed, and receded, the ruckus party continued beyond the curtain, and slowly, ever so slowly, the seraphic boy began to calm. Lifting his hand, the prince ignored the thick trail of warm red that trickled down his chin from his torn lip, intent on seeking his proof.
As his slender fingers molded to the large nose, broad forehead, rounded eyes, and pointed chin beneath a wiry black beard, the man carefully lifted his own large hands to the narrower shoulders of the prince.
A dreamy smile smoothed the youthful features until a mantle of peace descended. "Eudorus," Alexandros murmured softly. His eyes fluttered open with a radiant, beaming smile of remembering.
"Eudorus." He said more firmly. Eudorus smiled back.
Blushing furiously, Alexandros ducked his head, peaking up into the blue eyes regarding him closely.
Of a sudden, the big man began to chuckle, then laugh, then whoop as he bent double, his amusement growing by the minute. Confused, Alexandros frowned. "What sickness has taken you, Eudorus?"
The man just laughed harder, clutching his belly and closing his eyes.
"What is so amusing? Eudorus?" Alexandros looked at the guffawing Myrmidon and smiled as if willing to join in if he would only explain the joke. After a minute, Alexandros straightened, smoothed down his robes with the quiet pride and dignity of a little prince, balled up his fist and promptly punched the burly soldier as hard as he could in the mans bicep. That bit of spirit sobered Eudorus in the slightest.
Rubbing a hand over his face and grinning, he reached out to squeeze Alexandros's shoulder with one hand and wipe the dibbling blood from his chin with the other. "There now, that is the man who has tamed Achilles!"
Dripping with grease from the shredded fowl on his plate, his lips and neck damp and sticky with sloshed wine, King Menelaus leaned over on his arm to speak around the bosom slut on his lap.
"Hector! Hector!" the king rumbled, "Why so virtuous, tonight, lad? Drink, drink, drink! Find a pretty girl, take a pretty boy, have your fun while you may and never regret it!" Shoving his hand beneath the slave girls skirt, Menelaus roared with laughter as she wriggled on his lap, hiding her face that was red with shame and indignity behind a tumble of oiled hair.
Cheering loudly, Menelaus proclaimed with a tip of his cup, "For the Gods!"
Saluting with his cup, Hector followed suit, "For the Gods!"
Separating him self with a few diplomatic turns of phrase, the eldest prince of Troy found an empty seat from which he could watch the entire room. He found himself caught up in study of a serpent-like beauty with dark eyes and dark skin, her arms, legs, and belly painted with thick red lines and symbols spelling enchantments for pleasure and release. The bells and charms woven through her black hair tinkered and jingled as she shimmied and paraded herself before lords and kings as though she were Aphrodite herself come to grace them.
This entire affair, the words of peace and praise, were lies, pretty lies, true, but lies all the same. Agamemnon desired war with a will that rivaled Ares own. War with everyone and anyone so long as the conquest would deliver to him some sort of booty, be it glory, gold, or slaves. It was a simple matter of deduction in the matter of who was next to weather the wrath of the King of Kings. Across the Aegean Sea in Troy, his home and inheritance, his curse and his blessing, his life and his duty, the seat of his family, Hector had already sent word to prepare for war. When Agamemnon's greedy eye finally turned across the waters, Hector was steadfast that his city would not fall, not even should Apollo avert his All Seeing Eyes, or Zeus himself curse the very walls to crumble. Agamemnon yearned in his twisted dreams for the keys to Troy, and his Menelaus would be on his heels, ready to deploy troops and ships at his call, treaties be damned. A man without honor cannot give his word and so, any contracts refined here in these halls of debauchery were void in the eyes of man and the Gods.
The dances of politics, Hector had tried to explain to Paris during their voyage to Sparta when the inquisitive youth had asked why their enemy would honor them in his house on the eve of war, follow a music of mood rather than music. Paris had shaken his head and leaned against the rail, sighing heavily. "I will never understand this," he'd whispered. Hector had petted his curls but hadn't answered.
As a golden tray passed, balanced on the arm of a young servant girl, fifteen summers and not a day older, Hector unburdened himself of his cup while it was still half full with a last lip-wetting sip, feeling safer observing the adage 'Finer safe than sorry the day after'. In all his years the call of some inner sense more real and true to him than what some might call 'common sense', had never failed him and, since the beginning of the evening, it had been screaming at him that something was wrong beyond him, not well.
Deciding that it was time to retire, Hector scoured the many drunken lords and court whores, the incense and the stifling heat, for a mop of coy brown curls. After several circuits of the room yielded not a hint of his brother's innocent face, Hector stopped a passing servant shortly and asked if the girl had seen him. She directed him down a wide hall but beyond that she could not say. Nodding his thanks, Hector excused himself to find his wayward brother. As he stalked the halls, halting several maidservants for questioning along the way, Hector stood before a wind teased red curtain that an old nursemaid had seen Paris enter sometime before, shortly followed thereafter by another man the old mother had described as a "ruffian".
Of all the cruelty he'd witnessed and provoked, the blood he'd shed and the lives he'd ended, Hector the Tamer of Horses had never been as consumed by guilt nor harbored it for longer, than he had when he woke up one comfortably warm, clear day to the black news that in the new baby brother he'd just met and already adored like no other had been take in the night to a hillside and to his death.
Turning a corner, Hector growled at a servant for word of Paris, his natural serenity bled away to the dark memories he relived far too often as was.
For the seven days Paris knew mother, father, home, and safety, Cassandra had raved and ranted, demanded and screamed that the swaddled infant in the arms of the wet nurse was a curse, a demon, the very bane of Troy come to visit upon them war and death! Paris's birth was the beginning of Troy's end if they did not kill him immediately! That Paris, a tiny, peach-skinned, exceptionally beautiful baby with a sweet, quiet disposition so unlike the three rowdy brothers come before him, could possibly topple the greatest city this side of the Aegean… The youth that Hector had been, all of his eleven years wise, could hardly reconcile such a terrible and foreboding prophecy with the sleepy, cooing infant Ganymede his mother had allowed him to hold on his own late that same evening.
The fraternal, almost paternal, bond Hector had cemented with his youngest brother in those seven days had wound back to strangle his heart when the news of Paris's abandonment on Mount Ida had finally been broken to the gathered family. Hecabe had not been present for the revelation. Locked in her rooms to mourn in private, the Queen did not resurface for many months, frailer and with more shadows in her eyes than there had been, but she resumed her duties quietly. In the years to follow, Hector knew that he had shunned Cassandra to the point of leaving a room if she entered and refraining from speaking to her for months at a time. It wasn't that he blamed her but her very presence was a living reminder of his own weakness…
Until the day of the games when a certain Shepard had come before the royal family demanding his families prized bull be returned to him, Hector had never known such a burst of pride for another.
Ruffian, was it, that stalked his brothers steps like a shadow in the night. The prince of Troy had killed men for less.
Hand on his sword, flexing until his knuckles were white with the strain, Hector threw back the curtain.
TBC…
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