Labyrinth by Alex Beecroft

Author:Alex Beecroft [Beecroft, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Riptide Publishing
Published: 2016-08-30T04:00:00+00:00

Again, Rusa’s overwhelming thought was, They can’t do this. Surely someone in the Achaean camp must see that forcing unwilling women to marry you was wrong? How could anyone not see that? How could divine justice and this kind of human behaviour possibly coexist?

Maja and Tarina were busy at their respective altars, pouring out libations of wine and honey to set the seal on their curses. Both of them had the serene faces of women who knew for a certainty their power was greater than anything that could oppose them. Which was nice for them, but didn’t help him.

He jostled through the onlooking crowd until he came to a hunter of wild birds, with a net draped over one bare shoulder and a bow on the other.

“May I borrow it?” he said, touching the bow’s horn tip. “And an arrow? I need to send a signal to my ship.”

Kikeru gasped by his side. “You can’t really mean to do that,” he said urgently. “You can’t firebomb a town and start a war no matter what’s happened to your daughter.”

“Watch me,” Rusa said, holding out his hands for the bow, though a part of him admired Kikeru for his political acumen, his broader human compassion. He might even have agreed, if it weren’t Jadikira in there.

“They’re holding a Cretan girl hostage?” The duck-hunter bent his bow against his heel and slipped the string into place. “Is that what this is about?”

“My daughter,” Rusa agreed, looking at the hunter with fraternal approval. He’d seen the man before, in the market, with the bedraggled birds hanging by their necks on sticks around him. He’d never paid him much attention before, but now the man felt like kin. It threw everyone back to the earliest days, when they were all clan, to have an outsider take one of their own.

“You’re not a father, miss, or a mother,” the duck hunter told Kikeru. “You don’t understand.” He handed bow and quiver to Rusa with a dark, conspiratorial look. “You burn it all to the ground, mate. They’ve got it coming.”

He wished he had one of Kikeru’s flares, but a length of material torn from his kilt and lit from one of the oil-soaked torches would do. It had taken the procession long enough to walk all this way from Knossos. By now, his steersman on Lark would have got the oarsmen on board, rowed up the curve of the bay, and be holding position on the sea directly out from the Greek compound. If they’d been efficient about it, then the first bales of wool soaked in naphtha would already be dripping in the cups of the catapults, ready to be launched.

“I’m not going to start a war,” he admitted, watching Kikeru’s worried face. Kikeru seemed tired and distraught, and frankly the Achaeans deserved their roofs burned for that alone. “It’s not like firepots. They’re not going to burst and splatter everything in sight in burning oil. I’ve soaked bales of wool in the naphtha.

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