Bred by the Spartans (8 page)

Thaleia wanted to tell Argeia that everything had come out well, and not to hold sorrow in her heart for her. The thought of sweet Argeia, whom Thaleia would never see again, brought tears to her eyes as they led her to the wagon. If only there were some way she could see Argeia one more time, to show her that even the breaking had not truly broken Thaleia. Pictures of the many hours she had spent playing girlish games with her sister filled her mind, but, strangely, those pictures made the ache easier to bear, for they brought her thoughts back to the new, exciting world of the lands of men. Again she became conscious, as she watched the way the attendants treated her, of her own power, which she had gained when she had lost her immortality.

They were strange thoughts to have, she could not help but realize, as the two attendants who were not driving made her kneel in the back of the wagon and suck their cocks as the wagon passed up the road from Olympia to Delphi, while curious onlookers shouted encouragement and suggestions. Though she understood so much else now, Thaleia could not yet comprehend how hearing those bawdy shouts about her own body, “Look at that sweet little cunt!” and “They’re going to love that bottom in Corinth!” and “Oho! Little miss got whipped, did she?” somehow drove her wild with the fire of Eros, and made her wantonly thrust her hand between her legs, to rub her furrow and put on an even naughtier show for the men they passed on the road.

When they changed drivers, and the attendant who had not yet had his turn put her face-down over the passenger bench in the wagon and had her with his cock that way, while the third waited for another turn, Thaleia could not keep herself from crying out with the pleasure, both inside her secret grotto and inside her mind, at the thought that they were making her do the deeds of Eros in a wagon, on a road, going to Corinth where she would be sold into slavery and a life of just such humiliating service to the lusts of men.

When they stopped to water the oxen, the attendants, themselves exhausted, gave in to the pleas of a little group of shepherds, charging them a drachma to take Thaleia off the wagon and have her by the fountain. The shepherds, five in all, put her on her knees and took turns thrusting into her mouth, for the attendants had driven a hard bargain and the shepherds had not been able to afford the extra drachma to use Thaleia’s secret furrow.

Thaleia’s eyes watered as the oldest of the shepherds, who clearly had the most experience, took her hair in his hand and held her mouth still while he thrust himself rapidly in and out, saying “See, lads, do it like this. Hold the hair and thrust as deep as you like. It’s even better than plowing her furrow.” There was quiet then except for the wet sounds of the shepherd’s cock going in and out, and Thaleia felt again the floating feeling of strange contentment at being used and humiliated. The shepherd tasted of the dust of the road, and that made Thaleia feel dirty herself—but somehow, too, she wanted to be dirty, filthy, base.

The shepherd said, “Then when you’re ready, you pull out and…” He did just that. Thaleia’s eyes had been closed, but she opened them, and saw the shepherd pumping his cock in his hand, and then his white seed jetted out and onto her face, and now she was as filthy as she had craved to be.

One by one the other four shepherds took his place, and, as the leader gave them little lessons in how to use a slut like Thaleia, they filled her mouth with their cocks, and spilled their seed on her face and breasts, praising one another’s efforts and telling Thaleia that she was a good cocksucker.

It was noon, then, and that was when the Spartans arrived.

Thaleia heard one deep voice say “It is she!” and another answer “Indeed.” The voices came from down the road that led to the cities of the middle Peloponnese, Pylos and Argos and Sparta. Thaleia was still on her knees before the shepherds at the fountain that stood by the crossroads, and the attendants of the temple of Zeus at Olympia were beyond them, with the wagon.

Thaleia, the only woman present, knew that somehow they must be referring to her, and she felt, in a way beyond her comprehension, that they had come to rescue her and that Argeia, somehow, had sent them. She turned her semen-covered face to see them coming up the road at an easy jog.

They were gods. They must be gods. By noon on her first day in the lands of men, she had already seen more mortal men than she thought she could count, from the swineherd, to the priests of Zeus and their attendants, to the shepherds, to the many men who had watched enviously from the road as the attendants had used her upon the wagon. Some had been ugly, others had been more pleasant to look upon, but none had looked the slightest bit like the warriors trotting toward her, clad in their bronze breastplates over red chitons, with shield and spear upon their backs, their dark hair flowing in a single braid down their backs.

“Lord Apollo!” said the one on the left, as they both took their stand a few paces away from where Thaleia knelt. His eyes were blue while his companion’s were brown—and at first sight that seemed the only way to tell them apart. “She is as comely as she appeared in my dream. Was she so lovely in yours, Theoleon?”

“Indeed she was, my brother,” the brown-eyed warrior replied. He seemed more reluctant to speak than the blue-eyed man, though the blue-eyed man seemed himself hardly a man of many words.

Now the blue-eyed warrior said, “But… brother?”

“Yes, Leontes?”

“Should the seed these low-born have spilled upon her not make her seem less fair? For strange to say I find her face, thus besmirched, even more winning than I found it in my dream.”

The brow of brown-eyed Theoleon creased. “I, as well,” he said after taking a moment in which he seemed to choose his words carefully.

The blue-eyed Leontes said, “Truly I think this nymph gains in comeliness the more men humiliate her, Theoleon.” Then he said to the shepherds, who, Thaleia saw when she turned back to look at them and the attendants of Zeus, had fallen back several paces already, “You base-born had better go your way.”

The leader of the shepherds said, “We paid those men, you know.” He pointed at the attendants. “We did nothing wrong, you understand?” He seemed to be trying hard to keep the fear out of his voice.

“We do understand,” said Leontes, “and we know from a dream sent by Lord Apollo that you could not help yourselves, and so we will allow you to depart in peace.”

The shepherds needed no further encouragement, but fled up the road toward Corinth with the look of men who have just escaped a death sentence.

Thaleia turned back again to the warriors. Leontes said, “Sweet Thaleia, beloved of Apollo, we have come to protect you. I am Leontes, and this is my brother-in-arms Theoleon. We are Spartiate.” Leontes spoke the last three words as if he were saying “We are the greatest men in the cosmos,” and as if Thaleia would know immediately that was what it meant to be Spartiate.

Indeed, up on Olympus Thaleia had heard of the Spartans, but she had heard simply that they had become great warriors in the days since the fall of Troy and the passing of the Atreids. Leontes’ tone suggested that the Spartans themselves thought there was something more to it than that: the word Spartiate seemed to mean to him that Thaleia should understand herself to be safe now and forever, so long as Theoleon and Leontes were there. The very sight of these Spartans seemed to her to be better than the sight of all the Olympians, and Thaleia found that she began to yearn for something entirely new: she wanted to be ravished by these brothers now, this instant, together, but she also wanted them to hold her in their arms and stroke her hair and whisper to her that they loved her.

Thaleia began to think that she would never be able to take her eyes off their handsome faces and their rippling muscles, but Theoleon called out, “You there,” and Thaleia did turn around, to find that the yellow-clad attendants were advancing warily. They carried the long clubs that they had used on the road to beat away a man who had unwisely tried to climb onto the wagon, so overcome with the sight of the attendants using Thaleia that he had demanded a turn for himself.

“This girl has come now under our protection. You may return thither whence you came.”

“She belongs to Zeus,” said the lead attendant. “Would you profane the father of gods and men and call down his wrath upon you?”

“No, good man,” said Leontes, “but Zeus’ son Apollo has given this girl to us to protect.”

“We were to come back with money from selling her in Corinth,” said the attendant.

“Man,” said Leontes, “if we Spartans used money, we would give you it, but I fear you must be content with keeping your life.”

The attendant’s face grew dark with rage. “If there is power on Olympus, you Spartans will not escape the lightning of the thunderer.”

“If that fate should befall us,” replied Theoleon. “I hope we die well.”

“Curse you!” said another attendant. “We shall be beaten for this!”

“That I hope you are not,” Leontes said with true sympathy. He reached into a pouch at his side, and withdrew an object made of a dark metal that Thaleia did not recognize. It was about a half-cubit long, and quite thin. With a flick of his wrist, Leontes sent it flying toward the attendants. It landed at their feet. “Show that to your high priest. It is a Spartan obol, and your high priest will not, I think, beat you when he hears you tell true that the girl was taken by Spartiates.”

Leontes said, “Perhaps there will indeed be a quarrel on Olympus over the matter, but your part in it is at an end. Now go hence, or our swords will show our worth and our resolve, and you will never again behold Olympia.”

The two lesser attendants’ eyes grew wide with fear, and, without another word, they began to hitch the wagon up again. Their leader picked up the obol and looked at it. He nodded to the Spartans and joined his fellows at the wagon.

Thaleia turned back to her saviors. The urge to crawl forward toward them, and beg them to let her suck their cocks nearly overwhelmed her, but at the same time, before this majestic pair of Spartans she felt her shame grow again as well, and she wanted to cover her nakedness. She put her right hand over the place where her furrow peeped out between her thighs, and her other over her little breasts. She felt the seed of the shepherds drying on her face now, and she wondered desperately what Theoleon and Leontes, her new masters, were seeing as they looked at her.

“Sweet Thaleia,” said Leontes, “arise. We have come to protect you.”

Thaleia obeyed, still covering herself with her hands. “Thank you,” she said.

Then Theoleon said, with a strange kind of strain in his voice, “Leontes, do you feel that thing that Apollo warned us of?”

Leontes replied, “I do, brother. I do not think… I do not think I can keep from ravishing this sweet creature. The force of Aphrodite is too strong in me, and my cock is too hard. Apollo said that even the Spartiates would not be able to hold themselves back.”

He turned to Thaleia, a grave, almost troubled look in his eyes that somehow also told of an insatiable hunger for her body that made her wetness flow so that she felt it on the inside of her thighs. “Thaleia,” he said, “you will kneel before us and suck our cocks now, as you did for the shepherds.”

Chapter Nine

Leontes could not believe, or understand, the force of his lust for this girl. He did not think his cock had ever pressed so uncomfortably against the supple leather codpiece he, like all the Spartans, wore to keep himself in comfort as he fought or marched or ran.

He glanced at Theoleon, and saw that his brother-in-arms wore almost the same expression Leontes was sure sat upon his own face: a hunger to enjoy Thaleia, their new ward and, if the fancy in Leontes’ head found realization, their new possession. Theoleon looked back at him; as usual, their thoughts seemed to travel in a mere glance. Sometimes when they had a girl together, as happened with enjoyable frequency now that they had reached the first rank of Spartan warriors, they knew that they had less time than they would truly like, and they needed to be quick. Leontes could tell from the look in Theoleon’s eye that the two were in agreement: they would use Thaleia’s mouth and let her taste their seed now.

“Then we can take her somewhere safe,” said Leontes, finishing a sentence in words that had begun with only the single glance.

They both turned back toward Thaleia, and Leontes, mighty Spartiate, found that he could scarcely breathe at the sight of her, with her lovely red hair falling disheveled down her back and her green eyes betraying emotions that he could not read, but wanted desperately to know everything about, crawling toward her new protectors and—there was that thought again—masters.

For Leontes wanted her not just to protect but to have; the idea seemed to grow and grow, just as his cock grew under her fingers as she began to obey him and seek him out under his chiton. When the dream had come to him, as it had come at the very same time to Theoleon, the sure sign that a dream from the gods gave a true vision, Apollo had told only of guarding Thaleia, and of the curse that would make it impossible to hold back from her. The god had said nothing of this feeling that he wanted to keep her with him and Theoleon forever, and fill her with their seed until she bore a tribe of strong Spartiate sons and fair Spartan daughters.

“It is tied at the front,” he murmured to Thaleia, as she showed surprise at encountering not Leontes’ cock, but its leather covering. He looked down at her, kneeling before him with a look of charming innocence on her face that seemed impossible to reconcile with the remnants of the shepherds’ seed drying on it, and on her lovely shoulders and perfect small breasts. To Leontes’ right, Theoleon, patiently waiting his turn, reached out his right hand to stroke the girl’s cheek gently with the back of his fingers and reassure her that although he knew that he and Leontes, like all the Spartiate, were of enormous size, this first time they would not be demanding, great though the need came upon them, of the pleasures to be had in Thaleia’s body.