Bred by the Spartans by Emily Tilton Read Free Book Online Page A

had designs on little Argeia, but he was a generous god, especially after a delightful night like the one he had just had. Yes, Apollo could have Argeia, and Thaleia’s mortal life would become even more interesting than he had thought it might be.

Chapter Six
     
     
    Thaleia had never felt so disoriented in her nineteen turnings of the seasons. Where she was, who she was, and even what she was—none of it seemed available to her searching mind. Indeed, it took long minutes before she could even say to herself, “I am disoriented.” Before then, her soul simply held strange pictures of things that might have happened to anyone, although they focused on a young woman with red hair made to undergo shameful things of which she had never dreamed.
    Floating somewhere else, she felt the cock of the sky god enter her backside, heard herself scream. She felt the pleasure of his rough hand on her cunt (she called it that, for he called it that). At last, she felt him turning her over for his final, bestial ride there, and she felt a bliss that seemed made entirely of pain transformed into a transcendence, an unimaginable scaling of the heights of some cosmos beyond the cosmos.
    Thaleia knew power, in that moment, for it had been her backside, punished and prepared, that the father of gods and men had been unable to keep himself from riding all night. The words of Aphrodite began to make sense: the power of Eros dwelt inside Thaleia, and she could, if she learned how, make use of it to lead the kind of life she chose.
    As she remembered Aphrodite speaking to her, she remembered that she was Thaleia, broken goddess, former minor Nereid. She thought of the little lakes that her mother had been teaching her to take care of, and with a little tear she realized that those little lakes would be Argeia’s now.
    But at the same time there rose inside her a joy she had not expected. It was all different now. She looked about her at last, and saw that she was lying in the pronaos—the entry-way—of an enormous temple. Slowly she sat up, and realized that her bottom was sore, but not, apparently, ripped asunder as her memories seemed to indicate it might be. Beyond the columns she could see what looked like a wooded sanctuary. It was daybreak, and there seemed no one about.
    Thaleia turned her head and looked into the central chamber of the temple. She blushed, and cursed herself for blushing, when she saw a wonderful likeness of Zeus, seated in state, as the cult statue of this temple, brightly painted as were all the statues offered by mortals to the gods. Without thinking about it, she moved her hand to her bottom, remembering when she had received the father of gods and men there for the first time, trussed and ready for him upon the sleeping couch atop the dais of Aphrodite.
    Where was she? Truly it did not matter, for she had never been in the lands of men before, and the only reason she might need to know where she was would be so that she could return to Olympus, which she could now never do, and, frankly, feeling as she did now, free and ready for whatever would happen next, never wanted to.
    Thaleia stood up, wincing slightly, and stepped forward so that she could touch one of the massive columns of this temple of Zeus. She was naked, but had she not heard that in some of the cities of men the girls were naked frequently? That city called Sparta—didn’t the girls, like the boys, train naked there?
    That was when she saw the swineherd.
     
    * * *
     
    Clemaeus had not had a good morning. His mother had grumbled him awake before the sun, to take the fattened swine to the priests at Olympia. The priests had given him less than half of what the swine were worth. Now he faced the prospect of returning to his mother with a sum that would make her grumble all the rest of the day.
    When he saw the naked girl, though, the new sun seemed to brighten around him, with his mood. Leaning against the column like a return gift from Zeus