Banished Sons Of Poseidon Read online

  Table of Contents

  Synopsis

  By the Author

  Acknowledgments

  PART ONE Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  PART TWO Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  PART THREE Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  PART FOUR Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  PART FIVE Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  About the Author

  Soliloquy Titles From Bold Strokes Books

  Synopsis

  After escaping from a flood that buried the aboveground in seawater, a fractured group of boys from Atlantis squabble over the way ahead and their trust of an underground race of men who give them shelter. For sixteen-year-old Dam, whose world was toppling before the tragedy, it’s a strange, new second chance. There are wonders in the underworld and a foreign warrior Hanhau who is eager for friendship despite Dam’s dishonorable past.

  But a rift among his countrymen threatens to send their settlement into chaos. Peace between the evacuees and Hanhau’s tribe depends on the sharing of a precious relic that glows with arcane energy. When danger emerges from the shadowed backcountry, Dam must undertake a desperate mission. It’s the only hope for the Atlanteans to make it home to the surface. It’s the only way to save Hanhau and his people.

  Banished Sons of Poseidon

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  eBooks from Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

  http://www.boldstrokesbooks.com

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  Banished Sons of Poseidon

  © 2015 By Andrew J. Peters. All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN 13: 978-1-62639-462-9

  This Electronic Book is published by

  Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 249

  Valley Falls, New York 12185

  First Edition: October 2015

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Credits

  Editor: Jerry L. Wheeler

  Production Design: Stacia Seaman

  Cover Design By Jeanine Henning

  By the Author

  The Seventh Pleiade

  Banished Sons of Poseidon

  Acknowledgments

  When the kind folks at Bold Strokes Books gave me the opportunity to pitch a sequel to The Seventh Pleiade, I have to admit that I dragged my feet.

  The first book was a six-year writing odyssey—another humble confession—that left me feeling shipwrecked from the squalling sea of monomyth and Greek pre-history that I had endeavored to traverse. Though imperfect, that hero’s story felt finished to me, and I was quite content to leave Aerander living in asylum, with a suggestion hovering that returning to Atlantis just might be possible, however distantly in the future.

  With The Seventh Pleiade complete and in press, my hiatus from writing about Atlantis was part celebratory, part self-pitying, and in the end short-lived. The notion of creating a follow-up story from a different character’s point of view started to appeal to me. Stripped away from Aerander’s adventure in the first book, his relationship with his cousin Dam had always felt to me like the heart the story. And that story was incomplete. I realized that it was important to me for Dam to have a chance to be better understood, and for him to have an adventure in his own right.

  Happily, writing Dam’s story was a much shorter journey. Perhaps I learned a bit about the craft of storytelling since my last novel. Maybe writing Dam came more naturally to me. Will this book be my last story about gay boys living in Atlantis? Once again, it feels that way, but I’m cautious about saying never.

  I want to acknowledge and thank the Bold Strokes team: Len Barot, Sandy Lowe, Cindy Cresap, Sheri Lewis Wohl, Stacia Seaman, and especially my editor, Jerry L. Wheeler.

  Perennially deserving of my gratitude, my appreciation, and my apologies is my husband Genaro Cruz who allows me to disappear into imaginary worlds far more often than I should. I love you.

  For Genaro

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  The boys liked to bathe in the hot water lake not far beyond the Old Ones’ underground city. The lake was embanked in black rock, and in the cast of torchlight, its waters glowed as blue and bright as a summer sky.

  Dam pitted his metal torch in a cleft in the bank. It cast an aura of light a few yards onto the water and up the black shore. Beyond that stunted perimeter, everything was smothered in darkness. Dam had heard that the barren country around the lake had once been trenched with lava streams, but that was in ages past. All that was left was scarred troughs through rolling fields of bedrock, and none of that could be seen at the time when Dam was out.

  The Old Ones had shuttered the watchtower where they kept their brilliant Oomphalos that washed a thrumming, red crystalline tide over the underworld. The charioteer of the sun didn’t make his rounds to Agartha, the continent below the earth, so the Old Ones uncovered and eclipsed their magical relic at intervals to give the aboveground refugees some routine of day and night.

  The underground peoples said no gods were in their realm. They certainly didn’t have any Titans to hold up the sky or to heave the sun or the moon over the land. Some of the refugees said the underworld had been abandoned by the gods, though Dam knew well that it was a place of powerful magic, more ancient than anywhere in the above-world. Whether that came from the gods of his country who had once traveled there or from underworld spirits whose natures he had yet to comprehend, Dam couldn’t say.

  The boys weren’t supposed to venture outside of the city unless they were in threes or fours. Two nights ago, a stranger had been sighted stalking around the deep canyon beyond the city drawbridge. Dam wouldn’t have trekked out that way on his own, but the backcountry of dead lava fields seemed like safe territory. He came and went as he wanted to. Aboveground in Atlantis, where he had been a novice priest, he had snuck out of the walled priest’s precinct all the time just to walk the city streets at night and claim some freedom.

  If his cousin Aerander found out that he had gone to the bathing lake by himself, he would get a scolding. Those lectures never rooted themselves in Dam’s head as much as they grasped for purchase. Dam was sixteen years old. He had been minding his own way long before everyone had come underground. Aerander was sixteen too, so he had no right telling Dam this or that anyway. Dam thought they had sorted this out a while ago, but since Aerander had taken on leading the refugees, he fell back on his boss
y ways sometimes.

  Dam stripped off his sandals and his tunic, laid them on the bank, and delicately made his way into the water. The lake was plenty warm. The whole region around the city stayed comfortably mild like high season back in Atlantis due to heat that rose from lava pits deep beneath the city shelf. The initial sensation of entering the lake was always strange, going from dry to wet. Since Dam had been living in the underworld, his skin had become more sensitive while his eyes had grown lazy from lack of use.

  Dam imagined his muscles soaking up the minerals of the lake, making him strong like iron. That was what happened when the Old Ones’ warriors bathed there, so they said. He plunged his head beneath the water, disappearing into the mumble of the pool. Afterward, his skin would feel as smooth as a stone washed by the sea.

  There was only one detriment to bathing in the mineral lake. Since Dam had given up the habits of the priesthood and stopped shaving his head, the hard water made his thick black hair coarse and unruly when it dried. Whenever he caught his reflection in the silver-plated walls of the refugees’ bathing yard, he was startled and amused by what he had become. He looked like the child of savages raised in the depths of a jungle. The Old Ones didn’t have the grooming oils that people used aboveground.

  That didn’t bother Dam much. It suited him fine to look a bit wild, especially considering the strange new country where he was living.

  He swam out farther from the bank, beyond the harbor of torchlight. Dam didn’t know how extensive the lake was or if it ever got deep. As far as he had ever swum, he could touch down on the rocky floor. The water only reached his clavicle. He dove for the bottom, did a handstand, and kicked out with his feet. That made a noisy splash. Dam crested the water and gathered some sense. If he was going to sneak out on his own, he had to remember to be quiet about it.

  His ears pricked up from a distant sound. He looked across the shrouded lava field. Four, then five, then six fuzzy globes of light approached the bank of the lake, with bantering, howling voices.

  Dam crawled quietly through the water toward his torch and his clothes. They were boys and likely no one he would relish crossing paths with. They had probably come to practice wrestling in the lake and would harass whomever they came across.

  Woefully, Dam had swum out too far to make it to the bank before the noisy group pitted their torches in the ground. Dam drifted back to the shadowed side of the lake. He didn’t want to look like a coward scurrying out of the water from the sight of them. It was best to go unnoticed and wait for them to leave. But his torch, sandals, and tunic back on the shore announced a bather in the lake.

  From his distance, Dam watched a tall member of the crew step to the edge of the bank. He looked like he was peering out in Dam’s direction. The boy uttered something to the others, and then they all shucked their clothes and went bounding into the water.

  So much for a peaceful getaway.

  Dam kept an eye and an ear on the boys’ movements while he idled in the water. Sure enough, they started wrestling and hollering like lunatics and throwing each other down with big splashes. He heard the voices of Leo and Koz, two boys with whom Dam had a not-so-friendly history. Dam recognized Perdikkas, Boros, and Mesokantes. Those three had never paid him much mind, arrogant as they were. They were all Poseidonidae, descendants of the god’s ten royal houses. Before they had come below to escape the flood, they had held claim to a share of Atlantis’ ten kingdoms. It hadn’t occurred to them yet that there was no more Atlantis to inherit.

  The tall boy was Calyiches, prince of House Mneseus. Since the evacuation, he had cropped up as the favorite of the highborn survivors. On the night that the sea had burst through the island-city’s breakwaters, they had all been gathered at the Citadel for the kingdom’s sacred festival, the Panegyris. Being on the city’s highest ground had been a stroke of luck and bought precious time for Aerander to lead them through the hidden gateway to Agartha. Some eight dozen highborn boys had been rescued while nearly everyone else in the city had perished.

  Calyiches emerged from the noisy grapple. He wandered near, homing in on the spot where Dam was idling in the water. “Who’s there?”

  Dam wasn’t going to hide in the shadows. He drifted toward the torch-lit side of the lake, revealing a greater portion of himself in the wallowing shallows. Calyiches’ high, broad shoulders towered above the water. He was only covered up to his hair-dusted navel.

  The older boy held Dam with his gaze. Calyiches had been the top wrestling and boxing competitor at the Panegyris and had been headed to a career as a military general. He had also been Aerander’s sweetheart for a time, though Aerander didn’t like talking about that, especially now that Aerander had Lys.

  “You’re not supposed to be out here alone.”

  Dam wasn’t sure how to answer that, so he didn’t. Calyiches’ grin was a mesmerizing terror. Calyiches splashed some water on his arms. He nudged his eyes in the direction of his friends. “You want to join us?”

  Beyond them, the wrestling commotion squelched. Dam heard muffled side-talk.

  “No,” Dam answered.

  “Suit yourself.”

  Dam shrugged and started toward the shore. Calyiches tried to block his way. Dam shifted to pass him. Calyiches overtook Dam again, stretching out his arms as though he was gauging a tackle. They kept at that stupid game until they were an arm’s reach from each other.

  Dam halted. Calyiches laughed. Was Calyiches playing around for fun, or did he have a crueler punishment in mind? The other boys had fixed on the standoff, and they were laughing as well.

  “Where are you going in such a hurry?”

  “Minding my own business,” Dam said.

  “Why do you have to leave so soon?”

  Calyiches had a way of flipping from threatening to flirtatious. That had been awfully confusing to Dam in the past and disastrous for his cousin. Now Dam saw Calyiches for what he was: a pompous prick. Dam told him, flatly, “Because I want to.”

  Calyiches glanced at his friends. Then he looked back to Dam with a spark of humor. “I know you.”

  Dam stared back at him.

  “You’re Aerander’s cousin. You renounced House Atlas to work for the High Priest.” Calyiches glanced lewdly at Dam’s body. “Do you miss selling favors to temple patrons?”

  The muscles in Dam’s neck strung up tight. He had never been that kind of priest. That was the ugly rumor Leo and Koz had started before the evacuation. That was the stupid opinion highborn boys had about all the novice priests even though they knew nothing about them.

  “Is that what you’re doing out here?” Calyiches peered around as though there could be others on the dark side of the lake. “I don’t mind. I think you’re pretty.” He reached for Dam’s neck.

  Dam shirked away from his grasp. He could show Calyiches he ought to shut his lying mouth, but that required time and opportunity. Calyiches could easily wrestle him down and hold his head beneath the water just for sport, and he had his friends to join in on the abuse if they cared to. Dam trudged past him and the others, climbing up to the bank where he pulled his tunic over his wet head and body. All along the way, the idiots had laughed at him. Seeing that they weren’t going to get a rise out of him, they had gone back to their games in the lake.

  Dam stepped into his sandals. He would have left straightaway, but he caught a whiff of something odd. Peppery, flinty. Dam placed it: niterbats. The flying little devils lived in caverns above the lava fields. You tended not to smell them until it was too late and they had swarmed right into you, leaving you covered head to toe in soot. They also shied away from the sound of people.

  Dam shifted around, listening keenly, but he didn’t hear their flapping wings. The boys must have brought that smell with them. Traces of it had to be on the clothes they had left on the bank. If you trapped niterbats, ground them up, and prepared the powdery remains right, you could use them to blow holes through rock with a flame. Dam wondered if Calyiches and his f
riends had been messing around with that. If they weren’t careful, they could blast out one of their eyes or a finger.

  Dam smirked. Then again, maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.

  He grabbed his torch, stepped around the litter of the boys’ clothes, and started down the craggy trail back to the city. The lights and the boisterous voices from the lake faded behind him. That ought to have made Dam relax, but the encounter left him feeling like he needed to keep looking over his shoulder.

  Darkness swallowed both sides of the trail. Shortly along the way, Dam heard a phantom sound. Someone or something rustling beyond his sight? He stopped and peered in the direction of the noise. He couldn’t make anything out, and he wasn’t about to go scouting with just his torch. It couldn’t have been one of the boys. He still heard their racket at the lake.

  A stranger had been staking out the city. Was that person in the backcountry now, come back to spy? Dam quickened his pace down the trail. He couldn’t explain it, but he felt certain that someone was watching him all the way home.

  Chapter Two

  The city of the Old Ones was built and walled on a high plateau of basalt, with only two ways into town: the drawbridge on the canyon-side and the tunnel from the dead lava fields. Otherwise you would have to ford a trench that guttered around the plateau. The trench was twenty yards across, twice as deep, and smoldering with lava at the bottom.

  The watchmen at the tunnel gate showed Dam the way as he approached. Their race could make light from their bodies. It spread across their skin like the warm glow of a lantern behind a thin leaf of paper. They also grew their own armor—leathery scales that covered their chests like a hero’s cuirass. They only needed helmets and chain mail skirting to be prepared for battle.