Free Island of Fire (The Age of Bronze) by Diana Gainer

withdrew. The slave was still shaking, still crying out. He howled still more loudly when a man’s burly arms dragged him to his feet and clasped him in an embrace as powerful as a bear’s. “Diwoméde!” the man’s gravelly voice shouted in his ear. “It is you, after all! Look at me, boy, it is your old Uncle T’érsite!”
    The slave blinked, silent but with his mouth still hanging open, not believing what he seemed to see. The round, sweaty face before his eyes did indeed resemble T’érsite’s. There were fewer teeth than he remembered. The curly beard had more white in it. But the apparition looked so much like T’érsite that a pang pierced Diwoméde to the very heart to gaze on him. And the woman, though he was still sure that she had to be a mainád , looked for all the world like his own concubine, Dáuniya. But none of this could be real, he told himself. That little, blue-eyed thing crying so loudly had no place in his memories, or in his dreams of coming home. Was that not what the maináds were most feared for, catching a man’s soul so that he went mad? Would the tree spirits now dance him to his death? His voice had trailed away and now the sickness once more rose in his throat. There was nothing left in his stomach to throw back, but his body convulsed anyway, in dry heaves. Brightly colored lights danced before his eyes and the roaring of an unseen river filled his ears. The world went black.

CHAPTER THREE
    ‘ELLENIYA
 
    When Diwoméde came to, he was in the smoky shade of a little hut. Through the open doorway, he thought he saw Ainyáh’s unmistakable profile. The mercenary was squatting on his heels, talking to someone who was just out of sight, scratching in the dusty ground with a stick. “I have fulfilled my part of the bargain,” the Kanaqániyan was saying, waving a cloud of gnats from his ears. “Now it is your turn. I want to set sail at dawn tomorrow. I have no intention of becoming the next victim of Kep’túr’s infamous plague.”
    “ Ai gar,” came the voice that was so remarkably like T’érsite’s. “We have been here for nearly four months and we have not had a single illness.”
    “Thanks to Apulúno,” a third voice piped up quickly, a higher-pitched and youthful voice that Diwoméde did not recognize.
    “Yes, my son, thanks to Apulúno,” Ainyáh repeated, with a nod. The harsh lines of his face actually softened as he spoke, something Diwoméde had rarely seen on that visage in the many years the two men had known one another. “But the Divine Archer is notoriously fickle, my boy. We cannot count on his favor for long. Our Lord Storm is a better guide.”
    “Yes, Apulúno is especially unreliable when we have no sheep or goats to sacrifice in his honor,” agreed the young speaker. Then he came into view, a boy of perhaps sixteen, nearly grown, but still slight in build, with only light down sprouting on his cheeks and chin. He squatted beside Ainyáh and asked, “Are we going to Libúwa then? Have you decided, Father?”
    Ainyáh shook his head and looked down at the earth. “It is not my decision alone, Askán,” he responded, his voice so low that Diwoméde could barely hear him. “Peirít’owo is against it, as well as several of my best oarsmen. But we can certainly find a better haven than this to shelter us while we make plans for a permanent home.”
    Suddenly T’érsite appeared, standing in the doorway. Silhouetted by the bright sun outside, his features were not visible to the slave in the hut. But that broad body, the slightly bandy legs, that stance so like a bear’s – all were unmistakable. “ Ai , you two will never agree on anything,” the low-born Argive snorted. “The one talks of nothing but desert lands in the south and the other, the coast of the Hostile Sea in the north! But we have refugees from nearly the whole world in between right here on Kep’túr! Idé , the lot of us will probably die of hunger before the two of