Chapter 10

 

 

Posidonius didn’t believe in poetic legends or gods who directly intervened in the common affairs of men. True there had been an Odysseus, and a voyage back to Ithaca stupendously epic in human terms. Tied to the king Odysseus by virtue of a brother of Penelope, whose bloodline he shared, talk of the exalted hero was voluminous in his family over many generations. But it wasn’t Homer’s verses they discussed. It was said Odysseus had been an immodest boaster, a gourmand in his dotage, given to wildly embellishing his reminiscences about his ten-year-long journey with an Olympian vigour.

Whatever had been the truth, that glorious time was long past. Rummaging through the ark in the palace’s sanctum, Posidonius examined each parchment carefully, fearful a sudden twitch of the hand would turn what he reverently held into dust. In a few years that would be all that remained of some of the treasured scrolls. Then remarkably he found what he’d dearly wished for; his hands all atremble he asked for the intervention of Athena to soothe him before his sister’s seemingly fragile salvation disintegrated before his eyes. In front of his awestruck visage a course to the Underworld charted in King Odysseus’ own hand.

In haste Posidonius’ voyage began. More than one year and a half passed before the grand ship sailed into the billowing waters of the river Ocean. The time Posidonius profitably spent envisaging the battle he must wage to defeat the monster, the hideous Empusa. He gazed wistfully at the dark and misty sky, at the eternal night enveloping their vessel; as the ship approached their destination he promised himself his sister Polyxena would soon be free. Striding on desk he ordered his men to take out the sheep on to the black poplar-lined shore.

Slitting the two beasts’ throats at a spot deemed holy, Posidonius offered invocations and called forth a dead champion, a spirit able to continue the fight against Empusa he had lost when in his corporal form. He sat down and waited, observing his men skin the dead sheep and add them to the pyre. Joined them in mouthing a prayer to Hades and Persephone.

A soul appeared in ethereal form. Beginning by establishing his lineage and how he’d come to end up in the house of Hades he asked why he had been called. Posidonius sprang up, greeted the soul with graceful greetings and declaimed the authority he held by virtue of the kingdom of Ithaca. After putting forth his purpose he asked for guidance to the abode of the dreaded Empusa.

Following the road in the direction Posidonius was given by the ghost, the men turned away from the huge palace in Hades’ dominions and came through a grove shaded by white poplars. Ghosts swarmed around them, rushing to drink from the waters of a deep bottomless pool. The Ithacans were heading away from the land of the virtuous, from the orchards of Elysium, the light of day quickly changing into the darkest black as they neared ever closer to Empusa’s cavern.

Finding the doorway in a cave wall hidden behind a vast bush the men passed inside the monster’s lair. Torches were lit and Posidonius led his men upwards along a pathway cut into the black rock. He followed the sound of the screams. The nearer they got to the source it was clear the screams were of living men and women. Posidonius was convinced Empusa wasn’t a goddess. She was a crone with great power, said to be a daughter of Hecate, but many mortals claimed their strength came from lineage to a god. If Empusa was akin to Persephone and Hecate her slaves would be souls, not the living victims she captured and held in bondage. Thoughts like these made Posidonius hopeful his sister was still alive, and if that dear life had been taken Empusa would pay for her outrage with her head.

Creeping to a precipice the Ithacans looked down. The cavern floor was huge, scores of bound men and women as numerous as grass blades in a meadow. Everywhere they looked a vile crime was being enacted. Naked slaves chained to posts as far as the eye could see out into the murky distance. Fires burned on the ground illuminating the scene. Near naked guards of both sexes – and creatures resembling not one or the other – stomped through the chained throngs, wielding varying cruel instruments. They were distinguished in a uniform of garland and loin-cloth – most open at the crotch – and leather straps binding around the breast, shoulders and waist.

In one place a young woman with the wondrous body of an Aphrodite, bearing the precious jewels of a voluptuous ass, whipped the bodies of two young girls and a portly man using a long instrument, the tail of which spanned across each back as a blow struck them all. Her long chestnut hair swished across her shoulders and swept over the base of her spine. She smiled appreciatively, her plump fleshy bosoms swinging as the long whip cracked on the victims’ behinds. Their cries of pain mingled with so many others it was impossible to set them apart.

Elsewhere a youthful female slave, hands tied behind her back, was bent low with her tongue in the begrimed asshole of a female guard. Behind the slave a guard with an enormous manhood, thick and long, which he rammed in and out of the girl’s asshole. The tongue matched the speed and frequently of the insertions in her own hole. The girl pressed in deep in time with the guard’s member.

Within a field of slaves strapped to poles, being attended to by many guards flinging their whips in all directions, an emaciated crone of some seventy years crouched over the face of a young male nude. He was nailed to the ground through his wrists and slender ankles, spread-eagled. The urine flowing out from between an old woman’s shapeless, shrivelled thighs was endless, like a waterfall. Another guard, equally sallow and what flesh she had hanging low and flapping whenever she moved, squatted further down the youth’s handsome body. She berated him not to lose a single drop from his mouth, and in her bony hand she clasped an iron rod in the loop of a thin rope. Her sunken, toothless mouth curled into an ugly grin; she twisted the rod a full turn, tautening the cord around the slave’s member and scrotum. It dug into his skin and made him cry out as lukewarm piss flew to the back of his throat. The old women cackled, enjoying the sight of the youth’s balls getting crushed.

In any one’s point of view horrors continued. A swarthy man with the physiognomy of a Spartan warrior, manacled to the floor by his feet and wrists, was forced to eat excrement; a pretty maiden eagerly worked a colossal iron phallus within his backside. An equally beautiful young lady, stripped naked, wailed piteously as a burly man tore all the skin off her back, from slender nape to her calves, using a bundle of birches. Blood poured like the flow of a river from her ripped open body. From a coke-burning fire a horrific creature took a hot iron rod, its thick spiked tip a bright orange. This particular guard looked as a true daughter of Hecate, of the species Lamiae and Mormolyceia, from the same brood as the Empusae. Snakes for her hair, they entangled and toiled, snapping indomitably close to the thickset countenance of a monstrous beast. The creature walked along a line of bare victims, some on their front others on their back, limbs spread out and bound to a rack. A briefest moment of contemplation was given substance in the abomination’s features and swept over her permanent scowl. She chose a boy for her immediate attention – no finer specimen of youth would she find from Corcyra to Mysia, as if from the loins of Zeus had he come. The handsome youth facedown the creature stuffed the hot end of the rod in his small asshole, searing the skin and making a bigger vent. The boy was still screaming as she turned her snaked head and called for a well-hung pederast to attend to the task now made considerably easier for him.

Another vile creature with beastly claws, stalked from man to man. Stopping at a specimen secured to post, cross or floor, she ripped off members and testicles. She tossed these gory trophies into vessels containing other extremities and limbs. A malformed guard walked around hacking off arms and legs. A hag slobbered over a handsome man strapped to a board, and caressed his one remaining limb. Got it hard in her rough grip. Showed him her hideous smile before stepping back and lopping off his manhood with a knife. Swapping one instrument for another while the man screamed, she returned with a burning hot iron and thrust it into his bleeding crotch. She pushed it hard, creating a vagina as his skin broiled. Stopping awhile to examine her work with pride, she waited till a hardy male guard came into sight and called him over to take the virginity of the new woman. And while prodding his manly head in and out of the shallow cauterised hole the guard took a knife and gouged out an eye. The pitiful victim awoke from unconsciousness with a terrifying scream.

Slaves were impaled sexually, front and rear on hot iron pikes, guards scourging them across face, breasts and genitalia, using bundles of switches or whips. Her snakes writhing angrily, many nipping the beast at her neck, shoulders and face, an ugly creature sat upon a hard-muscled man. Unemotionally, she ground on his member. The man whinnied almost continually, loud and fitful, as though in a great rapture beyond all others. Another female creature was observed leaning over a youthful man and woman, with matching pretty features that suggested they were siblings. Tied down, one on her back, the male on his front, both were missing all their limbs. The creature allowed her vile serpents to slip back and forth in the young vagina and the boy’s tender asshole. A guard massive in stature, in manhood matching a horse, bemoaned his fate and pulled prematurely from a naked woman, a beautiful slave bound to the cavern floor. He called for a hot poker, watched as the woman screamed and then fainted, the red hot iron making her a bigger front hole. Other similar horrors were being enacted with little variation in scores of other places throughout.

And overseeing such atrocities what Posidonius recognised as the beast Empusa. She had taken the form she favoured over her natural state of the horrendous crone. All her considerable charms were roundly shaped, with plenitude of breast, ass, hips and thighs, and her teats were especially huge – abnormally so - Posidonius had never sighted such plumpness that stayed firm high on her chest. Her round stomach was like a mound, and with skin the hue of a Phoenician princess, there was the smallest hint of darkness but without the dusk of an African. Long hair swept away from her face and reached to her waist, the darkest of black fulgent from the wood-burning fires close at hand.

On stout legs Empusa strutted through the hordes, giving orders to her guards, inciting them to apply themselves with more cruelty. Prolific jets of her discharge shot out from the slit of her sex as she walked. In the course of her long strides her huge bosoms hardly moved, no more than the slightest bounce. From her pleasured visage Posidonius read her as a depraved demon relishing the prospect of the slaves’ tortures.

Profligates of a depraved inclination were drawn to this part of the Underworld by their own volition, others snatched, kidnapped like Posidonius’ tender sister. Posidonius wondered if the willing victims still believed it worth dying for such deranged lust? Their leader giving the command, the Ithacans quickly descended by the rock declivity to the floor. The tautophony of horrifying screams brought a shudder to Posidonius’ body. He doubted his tender sister could have survived the hell evident all around him; he strode purposefully toward the cause of his sharp distress, the vile one he imprecated evil upon in his soul, knocking guards off their feet, determined to state his anger with the head of the great fornicatress.

Heat from the fires and the smell of seared flesh wafted around him; sweat broke on his skin. Each breath he took was heavy, the coppery smell of blood cogged up his nostrils, and he choked. Passing a woman being roasted alive on a spit – her horrific screams sickening him Posidonius mercifully chopped off the slave’s head with one stroke of his sword. One of his men charged in, swiftly dispatching the fourhanded guard who had been attending to the spit. His sword raised, expecting Empusa before him Posidonius saw the mournful visage of his sister. Tears in her eyes she cried for joy seeing her brother had come to save her. He lowered his arms and then caught the flash of a beautiful imperious face – a face not delicate and holding none of the immaculate beauty of his sister, but its value considerably increased by a countenance of prurience contained therein - long black hair draped on her shoulders, huge rigid breasts. The sword swinging in from the right chopped off his legs at the thighs.

He slumped to the ground on his back, blood spraying the rock all around him. His men were taken out as swiftly, laminae and sister empusai springing out from where the Ithacans could comprehend as from nowhere, so quickly did they swords come down. Empusa lopped off Posidonius’ arms, grinned at the felled Ithacans, and called for a lusty sodomite. Watched the burly guard turn the still living Posidonius on to his front, who proceeded to bugger the ass of the stump that had been the man.

Empusa stared down, dark eyes aflame roused by the act of sodomy which signalled Posidonius’ defeat. “Dear prince of the Ithacans, do not despair,” she declared, the stentorian voice imposing and dignified. “Once we have had our sport with you, there is but a little way to go to meet with Aeacus. The fair judge will surely send you on the right road, where upon you will find your dear sister in the meadows for such as thee.”

Empusa grasped the seared off limb by the knee with ease; holding it upside down she tilted her head back and let the dripping blood drop into her mouth. Licking her lips she picked up the other leg by the ankle and strolled away.