Free Bred by the Spartans by Emily Tilton Page A

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