Sighing, and leaning back in the comfortable chair, his heavy browed, simian-like face relaxing into serenity, Elgin started by closing his eyes, cleared his throat with a wet, basso rumble and sat for a moment as all light around those seated at the table bled away slowly. In a deep and sobering voice he began to weave words around them. Elgin became, oddly, the only thing in the well lit little conference room that any one of them could see, as if he had forced each person to focus solely upon the petite, well dressed, if unkempt, shaggy man.

“On a Small Island, Long Ago.” With these words, each listener in the room could see, as if they had been there, that small, Aegean island of those times long passed by, and now gone forever.

A parchment was held up, without enthusiasm, by a wide, rough skinned hand of a man who did very difficult work with those hands daily. The crisp, well made sheet, probably imported from some far off city to the south, possibly even from one of those sitting along the Nile, made popping, creaking noises when the reader began.

“The first hero was a tower of a man, striding above his fellows when the world was young. He walked boldly before each foe he met, and with bulging arms and straining thews, he broke the chains of evil set down on this Earth by the enemies of peace and order. He slew the first great beast, the dragon of chaos’ skin he wore as his mantle, and from its sinews and jaw he made the first harp. Lo and how the music from this fabled …

“Ooooh, this is bad.” He laughed as he shook the partially rolled lambskin and tried to find where he had left off. Failing that just started again in a new spot. One eye twitching in pain from the headache building behind.

“His every footstep, thundering terror to those who stood against his mighty Will, brought his great frame quickly from one village to the next as each stride could be measured in leagues. It was on such a journey that the Cailliagh came on silent, stripe feathered wings to tell him of the proclamation of the Gods. “All who live must one day die!” She said in her hollow, hooting voice. “Each shall have a short span of years to be measured by the three who are one.”

“Ooooooh-ho, now... Really, I just don’t remember this bit at all.” The little man sat on a stool in the doorway to his shop while another slumped in a fumy doze in a corner of the yard. Shabby and in need of a whitewashing, the enclosed yard in which the two attempted to recover their wits after too long a night with too many a drink was known by all to be the home of a great goldsmith, a craftsman of unmatched skill; which was a good thing indeed, else the look of the house and yard would have driven away any and all business. As the older man read, bleary eyed, from a new scroll delivered the previous day from Athens, he snickered half in amusement and half in drunken righteousness.

“Come ON, uncle Yriakos!” the drunken boy slurred from where he lay sprawled in the one lush spot in an otherwise sparse, hard packed earthen enclosure. Vines, broad leafed and spiral tendriled, grew from the soil beneath and beside the youth, and had worked their way around his left arm, sporting flowers that were just opening in the apricot light of the newly risen sun. “They didn’t make you your own sidekick and call you ‘Inky-dinky-doo’ or some shit this time, did they?”

“I’m sorry…I just can’t take this seriously. And it was ‘Enkidu.’ I mean really. When did this happen? And yet only now is the author writing about something that happened soooo…" Here, the older man, Yriakos, stressed the word to ridiculous lengths. Running out of alcohol laden air he was forced to stop and breathe. “So, so, so…Long ago that there is no way he could have any clue about what he is driveling on about. ‘Striding in leagues’ he writes…my ass; I can barely stride ‘a pace.’” Yriakos had straight, dark hair liberally sprinkled with gray, and a wide nose that stood out sheepishly beneath an outcropping of stony brow.

“He could have written about the threat of the Roman states, he could have written about the Spartans’ bold lineage, he could have…” The bile rocketing to the back of his throat caused another break in the giggling tirade.

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“Blah…he could have written about anything, but he wrote about things he doesn’t have a clue about because neither does anybody else.” The youth finished his elder’s sentence as if

speaking from a dull and oft repeated lesson on farming, or animal husbandry.

Never opening his eyes, Di began to hum in a deep baritone that would have shocked anyone who saw his beautiful, delicately sculpted face, and large almost feminine eyes. The long ringlets of his auburn hair looked perfectly styled even in his drunken sprawl on the one

verdant spot in this otherwise spare yard. Some small animals had taken to slumbering

near the younger man, making the tableaux look like it had been posed by someone

working on a particularly sweet mosaic.

Yriakos snorted loudly, and then flinched in pain with the dregs of previous night’s excesses.

“Why do these idiots insist that something is ABSOLUTE FACT just because they spoke with some addled sailor drunkenly rambling after returning from the west?” Another belch was thrown to the winds along with a hiss of escaping air from between clenched teeth; it was an old habit, and as such had no interest in being broken. His eyes traveled the length of his heavily muscled and hairy arm, noting the direction of the traitorous limb. “Er… the east…” Another squint. “The North.”

Closing his eyes, he dropped his head to the meet his shoulder where it rested at

the edge of the thick oak door. His breathing began to even out as he listened to the

humming drone of his nephew lying by the once white stone wall. He saw that the grass

was greener beneath the younger man than anywhere else in the yard, but then wasn’t it

always?

At the far edge of Yriakos’ hearing there was just enough out of place to keep him from drifting off completely. A faint clicking, accompanied by regular brassy chimes, and at even intervals the sound of many things striking the ground in unison. As one moment shifted the blame to the next moment, the chimes became louder and less musical while the rhythmic tapping became a noisier boom set off by the sounds of hobnailed sandals walking in step. Fizzing drafts of thought bumped against one another in Yriakos’ brain until some of them recognized each other and began to reminisce.

“…Crap…”

The metal clad clanking of men walking in lockstep made a game effort at sobering him back to wakefulness, almost making him tip over the back of the rickety little stool on which he sat, armed men never just came by for a cup or two of tsipouro, the anise flavored wine that was popular on the island.

Heart pounding away in the veins of his temples, the brawny little man watched as a small file of soldiers in gleaming, if generally ill-fitting hot bronze, marched into the enclosed yard and smartly separated into two lines on either side of the little, vine strewn archway.

Then, as if it had been practiced, a fat, opulently dressed man, balding and with a pained expression in his piggy little eyes was carried on a litter by two oiled and gleaming slaves into the yard with the Captain of the King’s guard walking beside the gilt framework as if a buoy towed by a fishing boat.

Though his clothing was of the finest make, with the most expensive cloth he could import, the king’s appetites were displayed as grease smudges and wine spots on his otherwise fancy mode of too little dress straining to encompass too much excess.

As he slowly, shakily, stood up before this king, Yriakos began to dust off the worst spots on his own labor worn clothes, then remembered the stains on the man before him and decided not to bother. He knew his homespun was in better shape than were the togs which this fat, dumpling of sovereignty wore.

Ignoring the world around him, King Mydius waved an airy gesture, saying “You may rise, my humble servant.” His high, squeaky voice ruined the kingly pronouncement almost as much as the fact that Di drunkenly took no notice of their arrival, and Yriakos, himself, hadn’t actually bowed to the man. The king then finished eating the wing he had clasped in his other hand, and negligently flipped it toward the yard’s stone wall, where it failed to cross over into the weeds outside, landing with a little thump within the weeds inside.

“Er…thank you …Sire?” He wasn’t used to kowtowing to anyone, and this poor monarch didn’t inspire much in Yriakos but a want to wipe the last bit of the man's lunch from where it hung on the side of his round little chin.

“How may I help you today?”