Tale of Agamemnon - Part 1
With a wave of his hand, the earth trembled. Thousands of feet marched in unision as the Spartan footmen turned to face the mountains behind them in the latest drill formation. It was quite an impressive site, the armor of three thousand men glistening in the sun as they all moved in unision, as if their army was a single beast. Whereas the hydra was a single beast with many minds, the Spartan army was many men as a single beast, drilled to precision and excellence on the battlefield. Agamemnon's sword reflected the sunlight particularly well, as did the rest of his general armor. Sweating he took off his helm and admired the site below him as he wiped his brow. He was without a doubt the most powerful man in magna grecia. But his current level of succes was surprising... shocking really considering the humble beginnings from which he came.
Unlike the distant nobles of Byzantium and Rome, Agamemnon wasn't born into his position. The wonders of the spartan warrior society allowed him to rise quickly despite his questionable background. His father was a merchant in Athens back in the glory days of Greece. He died relatively young in Agamemnon's life, but Agamemnon had gotten the general idea regarding him. His father was named Hoiples and born in a tiny fishing village not far from Athens. As the elder child, his parent spent years saving up money so that the youth could enter the Athenian academy and be schooled as an educated man, but Hoiples had different ideas. He turned to gambling and the black market. With his good knowledge of the sea he gained from his fishing exploits as a child, young Hoiples regularly captained vessels to Judea and Portugal, taking what he could get from fellow shadowmen as he tried to swindle and chisel the trade routes of the world. As he grew richer and richer, his life became more and more luxurious. By the time he neared the third decade of his life, Hoiples owned a large manor in Athens overlooking the sea, and only a short walk from the port where he made most of his money. It was on one of his visits to the markets that Hoiples met Agamemnon's mother.
Simla was a servant to the Srisai family on the outskirts of Bangkok. With the financial downfall of the Mongkut dynasty, the Srisai fled their ancestral lands and bought houses within Bangkok itself, far away from the warfare in the outlying buddhist regions. To pay for their new house, which was just as luxurious as their last, they sold numerous servants. Simla being one of the youngest was sold as a slave to a Somalian merchantman by the name of Dalmar. For weeks she traveled on the Rama route from Lakong to Mogadishu before arriving in the infamous Mogadishu slave market.
Once the Mogadishu slave market was full of thousands of depressed captives of war from the Southern lands, but thanks to the recent drought and war the slave houses were nearly empty. Simla lived with some other Siamese of similar fate for a month, before being sold with a few of her companions to an Ethiopian merchant, Owara of Egypt. She worked chores for him in his Cyrenican manor, and quickly grew to be one of his favorite servants. Owara, who himself had no children grew fond of the little girl and regarded her as his daughter. There he released Simla and brought her up like his own, giving her an education and many splendors and happy memories. Then came the Portuguese.
Cyrennica was attacked by thousands of soldiers, and being a wealthy man Owara had to field his own division of 50 men. This money was good for luxuries, but not for arms, which were scarce as it was. The armor was cheap and the blades blunt as Owara left to battle the oncoming Portuguese. Simla wept throughout the night as sounds of battle came from the beaches where she used to play only days earlier. By the morning her tears had gone to waste. The Portuguese had captured Cyrennica and Owara was slaughtered in the fighting. Simla's life came full circle once again. Portuguese soldiers took her as a captive and sold her to the first merchant ships that came to the newly captured land. With that Simla headed to Greece, a land she had heard about only once, and never seen.
That faithful day Hoiples was looking for a newest servant. He hoped for a young woman, as they were typically best at household chores and had other benefits as well. But instead of hot kinky sex slave, Hoiples did something unexcpected. He fell in love, with a mere commoner from a far away land that he had heard of once and never seen. He bought Simla from the Portuguese merchants, and brought her to his manor among the other slaves. But he never held her on the same level as the rest... he held her much higher. Within three years of keeping such a socially damaging relationship secret, Simla and Hoiples married. The consequences were as excpected. The upper levels of Athenian society were disgusted that he chose a Siamese woman instead of a Greek one, and frowning on him excluded him from their inner circle. But deeply in love, the two didn't care. Hoiples used what money he had left to buy a cottage in Corinth. There they had a child, who they named Owara after Simla's adopted father. The youth was young healthy and robust, and the two cared for him deeply as he brought out the best in them both. For four years they lived together like that, with a small assortment of paid servants doing the chores in the comfortable house and around the field. Then events neither of them could control occured, changing forever the course of world history.