Read Online Song of Princes (Homeric Chronicles #1) by Janell Rhiannon - Free Book Online Page A

only for rest, his wife still rushed around with wind in her sails. Her vigor amazed him. He hoped she wouldn’t keel over from exhaustion one day leaving him to raise the two, now three, children alone. 
     
     
    LEXIAS SQUATTED NEXT to a goat for its evening milking. “Come girl. Let’s get it done with.” Lexias placed the pottery jar under the low hanging milk gland. She pushed the backs of her hands firmly into the engorged udder. Fresh warm milk whizzed into the jar. “There’s a good girl.” She repeated the process on the opposite side. “You give the best milk for cheese of all the goats.” She scruffed the goat behind the ears before slapping its hind quarters. The goat skittered off into the herd of nannies. One down, four to go .
    She stood up wiping the sweat from her face. She scanned the horizon for the fifth time that morning. Low and behold, in the distance, she caught sight of her husband. He trudged along at a steady pace. She wondered if he’d found the remains of the child or not. She hoped that whatever he came across wasn’t too gruesome.
    “Hello, husband!” She waved with one hand, the other knuckled at her hip. Agelaus waved back. His paced quickened at the sight of her. Milking the goats didn’t feel so pressing with the anticipation throbbing in her temples. Hurry up old man. The wait keeps me from my chores and my stomach in knots. My head! She couldn’t make out whether he carried a small bundle or was slumped over with exhaustion. “Hurry old man!” she hollered.
    “Wife! I bring you a miracle!” he shouted as Lexias came within earshot.
    “Oh, Zeus. What a greeting! How are bleached and pillaged bones miraculous?” Lexias mumbled to the goats. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched him hike the last stretch of dirt path.
    As Agelaus came nearer, his smile broadened. “Look! Lexias! Look, what I have brought home.” He turned showing Lexias the rounded bump wrapped across his back.
    Lexias frowned. “What are you doing? Why so—” A muffled cry sounded from the backpack sling.
    He faced his wife and grabbed her by the shoulders. “He’s alive, Lexias.”
    “But how can that be?! Are you certain it is the same child?”
    “Of course! The same cloth binding I was given by…well…it is the same.” He pulled the dirty purple linen threaded with gold from his pack. The sun glinted off the metallic threads shining the truth of her husband’s words.
    She ripped the cloth from his grasp and stuffed it into her waist band. “By the balls of Zeus put that away! Let’s see the child. Hurry up. Surely, he’s in need of attention.” She helped unknot the backpack sling. The rounded bundle of child lay securely in her arms as the sling fell away. Clouded blue eyes squinted in the sun and he began to cry.
    “Come to the house my dear,” Agelaus encouraged.
    Lexias stood unmoved checking his little body for injury. She looked up at Agelaus, her eyes rounded by surprise. “Not a mark on him. Not a scratch. And he’s fat!”
    Agelaus smiled back and shrugged his shoulders. “The gods, Lexias. They intervened.”
    “We must never tell anyone, Agelaus. No one!”
    “I’ll not speak a word. You believe I wish myself dead?”
    “I believe I wish all of us a long life. What will we call him?”
    Agelaus took him from the cradle of his wife’s arms. He tucked the sling around him. “I’ve named him Paris.”
    “Your sense of humor astounds.” Lexias shook her head. “I’m to raise a son named after the sling he arrived in?”
    “There now, Paris, mind not your mother’s saucy tongue.”
    “I’ll give you saucy tongue if you speak of me in such a manner again, you old man.”
    “I jest, Lexias. Come, let’s get inside.”
    “What do we tell everyone?”
    “That my long lost cousin died, leaving us caretakers of the infant.”
    “You have thought this out. Well done, old man.”
    Agelaus grinned. “Old woman.”
    Lexias playfully slapped his arm. They