Slashed and Mashed: Seven Gayly Subverted Stories

Praise for Slashed and Mashed

"From a love affair with a minotaur to a heavenly orphan bestowed on a gay Japanese couple to a unique mashup of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn with the Uncle Remus mythos, Peters' multicultural extravaganza of tales crosses boundaries as well as borders, mixing and matching from a variety of source material to come up with singularly Petersian stories as queer as the day is long and twice as exotic."

Jerry L. Wheeler, Out in Print: Queer Book Reviews

In this necessary collection, Andrew J. Peters not only refashions tales both famous or nearly forgotten, but in doing so he adds to the mosaic of myth, expanding the power of stories to reflect the reader’s desires and emerging truths.

Tom Cardamone, Lambda award-winning editor of Night Sweats: Tales of Homosexual Wonder and Woe

A NineStar Press Publication

www.ninestarpress.com

Slashed and Mashed: Seven Gayly Subverted Stories

ISBN: 978-1-951057-24-4

Copyright © 2019 by Andrew J. Peters

Cover Art by Natasha Snow Copyright © 2019

Edited by Elizabetta McKay

Published in November, 2019 by NineStar Press, New Mexico, USA.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact NineStar Press at [email protected].

Also available in Print, ISBN: 978-1-951057-25-1

Warning: This book contains sexually explicit content, which is only suitable for mature readers. Some scenes of graphic violence, unprotected sex, explicit sex, some racist language by a minor character, some reference to alcohol/drug use, some reference to suicidal ideation.

Slashed and Mashed

Seven Gayly Subverted Stories

Andrew J. Peters

Table of Contents

Theseus and the Minotaur

Károly, Who Kept a Secret

The Peach Boy

The Vain Prince

The Jaguar of the Backward Glance

Ma’aruf the Street Vendor

A Rabbit Grows in Brooklyn

Author's Note

About the Author

Theseus and the Minotaur

THE GREAT HALL of the king’s palace was vast enough to house a fleet of double-sailed galleys, and its gray, fluted columns, as thick as ancient oaks, seemed to tower impossibly beyond a man’s ken. Prince Theseus had been told, he had been warned of the grandeur of the Cretans, how it was said they were so vain they forged houses to rival the palace of Mount Olympus. Yet to see was to believe. For a spell, the sight of the great hall stole the breath from his lungs and slowed his feet to a stagger. Should not he, a mere mortal, prostrate himself on his knees in a place of such divine might, such miraculous invention? It felt as though he had entered the mouth of a giant who could swallow the world.

No, he reminded himself: this was all pretend, a trick to frighten him and his countrymen, though he only half believed that. Silenos, an aged tutor who Theseus’s father had hired to teach him all things befitting a young man of the learned class, had cautioned him not to trust his eyes, that these pirates of Crete used their riches to build a city of illusions so any navy that endeavored to alight at its shores would be hopelessly confounded and turn back to sea in terror.

Theseus forced a swallow down his bone-dry throat and retook his steps to keep pace with the soldiers who escorted his party into the hall. He had brought his father’s highest-ranking admirals to accompany him, Padmos and Oxartes, and the king had sent three men for each one of them to meet them at the beach where they had rowed ashore. From there, they had been conveyed up a steep, zigzagging roadway to the palace. The armored team looked like an executioner’s brigade rather than a diplomatic corps. They were hard-faced warriors clad in bronze-plated aprons and fringed, blood-red kilts, and they carried spears that could harpoon a monster of the ocean.

He tried to look beyond the many wonders and train his gaze on the distant dais where the king and his court awaited him. Yet curiosity bit at Theseus. Oil-burning chandeliers seemed to hover in the air, hung from chains girded to a sightless ceiling. No terraces had been built to bring in daylight, nor doorways to other precincts of the statehouse, unless they were hidden. Theseus would say it smelled of nothing but damp stone and clay, the cool, cloistered air too sacred to be disturbed by perfumes. The walls shimmered with a metallic reflection of the room’s massive columns, affecting the appearance that the hall went on to infinity. The diamond-patterned carpet on which he trod was one continuous design stretching from the vaulted doorway where he had entered all the way to the other end. Such a carpet was surely large enough to cover the floors of every house in Athens!

As he neared the stately dais, he beheld the king’s high-backed throne of ebony and glimpsed the man himself along with the shadowy members of his court. Theseus lowered his gaze to disguise his impressions. He supposed it also counted as a gesture of respect. He followed the soldiers into a lake of light that glowed from thick-trunked braziers on either side of the hall’s carpeted, shallow stage.

Their steps ended some ten paces in front of the room’s dignitaries, including, of course, the king himself. The armored men knelt on one knee, drummed down the handles of their spears on the floor, and bowed their helmet-capped heads as one company.

That left Theseus and his consorts standing and wondering what to do with themselves for a worrisome moment. To kneel to the king was to surrender Athens’ sovereignty, and that had not been his father’s bargain. Though his princely leather cuirass and his laurel crown felt peasant-like, almost absurd while he stood before the king, Theseus did not break. He glanced to Padmos and Oxartes so they would know they should neither kneel nor bow.

Righteousness grew inside Theseus, arisen from the unsurpassed conviction of a youth of eighteen years who felt well-acquainted with the indignities of the world, though in truth had rarely been cut down to size. As an infant, he had been sent to live in his mother’s village, which was countries apart from the hubbub and political fray of Athens. This, no excess of fatherly protection, but a testament to his father’s severity. People later spoke of his banishment in the ennobling light of superstition, an augury of the night sky or some such according to his father. In any case, Aegeus had decreed: if his son was worthy to succeed him, he must earn the right on his own terms.

For most of his life, Theseus had not known his father. He had not even known of his paternity, though he had lived quite well as a handsome, rugged lad among countryfolk who required no more than that to smile upon him, fetch him apples, give him a rustle on the head when he passed by, a proud acknowledgment he was one of their own. Then came his mother’s confession, and his storied trek to present himself at his father’s court, which he had made on foot across Arcadia, an ungoverned, forested land that had been said to be rampant with all manner of bandits, ogres, and mythical beasts.

In Athens, he was a newcomer, an adventurer, and a fawn-haired swain, all of which earned him magnanimous gossip. Men made way for him, and women smiled and idled when he passed by.

Naturally, young Theseus was aware of none of this, as a favored flower does not question why it thrives in sunlight and has a gardener always at the ready for its succor, while others of its kind turn spiny and dull from negligence. Or, it should be said, a glimpse of his place in the world, past and present, was only just then taking form while he stood in King Minos’s great hall. He did not like how it made him feel.

He shook off the sinking sensation. He would be bold, for he alone stood for Athens in this house of tyranny. As he had heard, these foreigners had butchered his countrymen, raped their women, taken their daughters and sons as slaves, and burned their fields. He would end the war, and it did not matter if he returned to Athens on a white-sailed galley to herald a hero’s return or if a black-sailed ship should come back to his father, signaling that Crete had been his final resting place. So had he decided. He looked to King Minos to begin.

The Cretan king returned his gaze, appraising, taunting, and then he perched in his seat and craned his neck to see beyond the prince, to turn a querulous eye at the headmen of his squadron.

Where is Athens’ tribute? he spoke.

He appeared to be no more advanced in years than the prince’s father, a sturdy, dispassionate age. The similarity wore through at that. The king’s chestnut-brown beards were plaited and shone with oil, and he wore a miter banded with red-gold. He was clad in deep cerulean raiment of the finest dye and a draped, red stole, all adorned with fine embroidery and fringe. Theseus had never seen a man so richly clothed and groomed. His father, the wealthiest man in all of Attica, had only a sheep’s fleece and a laurel crown to say he was king.

King Aegeus has sent me, his son, Theseus of Attica, to answer your request, Theseus spoke.

Minos pursed his lips, sucked his teeth. I asked for children.

That was the compact signed by Theseus’s father to end the war—seven boys and seven girls surrendered to Minos in return for nine years of peace, during which the Cretan king had pledged he would call back his warships.

It was a war begun while Theseus still lived with his mother in the countryside, years before she had taken him to an unfarmed field outside the village and shown him his father’s buried sword, from which he came to know his origins. Theseus had only arrived in Athens one season past and been apprised of the history. This heartless war borne from a tragic misunderstanding.

Two years ago, Minos sent his son Androgeus to Athens on a friendly embassy, and when Theseus’s father took the youth on a hunt to see something of his country’s pastimes, Androgeus was thrown from his horse and landed headfirst on a rock. No physician nor priest could restore him. His spark of life had been extinguished all at once.

Aegeus returned the prince’s body to Crete with all due sacraments and respects. He had been washed to prepare him for his passage to the afterworld, and the king sent him across the sea on a bier of sacred cypress, ferried on his finest ship, oared by his best sailors, and with a bounty of funereal offerings, gold and silver, many times more than his kingdom could afford. Yet Minos declared treachery and turned fire and fury against Athens.

Three seasons the war had raged, and after a decisive battle on the Saronic Gulf, Minos claimed the vital sea passage and installed a naval blockade, robbing Athens of her trade routes and slowly starving her. Aegeus appealed to the Cretan king for an armistice. An emissary from Crete returned with the tyrant’s reply: fourteen innocent lives for the price of his son. This, after Crete had already extracted the lives of thousands of fighting men in payment for Androgeus, whose death could only be blamed on the mysterious Fates.

Aegeus decided he had no choice but to agree to the king’s terms, and his council supported him. The Athenian navy was no match for the foreigners neither by the numbers nor by the craftsmanship of their vessels. The Cretans flung barrels of fire from catapults. Their triremes were faster and their battering rams were more potent, carving apart a galley on a single run. The Athenian fleet had dwindled to a dozen vessels. Their forests were stripped of lumber, and even if they had the resources, their shipbuilders could not assemble new warships fast enough. Food shortages had depleted their force of able-bodied men to defend the city. Without a reprieve from war, the next attack on Athens would be the last. Who could stop an army empowered by the God of the Sea?

But after the lottery had been held, and weeping fathers from all parts of the country brought their sons and daughters to the naval pier where they would be ferried to Crete, Theseus could not bear it. He looked upon the children, stunned as lambs without their mothers, and wept for them, and wept for his country, and wept for the shame of being part of this abomination.

Then, in a rush of rage, Theseus attacked the sailors who would lead the children to the ship. He had come to know them as friends, yet all he saw were blank-faced monsters. By grace, he had only had his fists, and no man raised a blade to stop him. Theseus shoved, struck, and menaced perhaps a dozen before they overtook him and held him fast by his neck and arms. A terrible blackness ate up his vision, and, inspirited with a daemon’s strength, Theseus threw off his captors. He turned his fury at his father who stood at the landside end of the quay with his councilors.

Theseus shouted at them vicious oaths he had not known were in his vocabulary, and he spat at them. Did they not know what they were doing was an offense to the goddess? It was a betrayal of every free man of Attica. His throat was scorched from shouting, his voice hoarse, and he fell to his knees, dropping his bonnet, weeping and pulling at his thick, curled hair.

He looked up at his father. Please, send me.

Now Theseus faced King Minos intrepidly. I have been chosen to stand for the children. I have only eighteen years, turned just this past season, and I am my father’s only son. I will face your contest.

He realized only then he had forgotten the honorifics, which Silenos had taught him. In Athens, men spoke to their king as freely as they spoke to their own fathers, and for the prince, that person was one and the same. No matter. It was never a mistake to put one’s enemy off balance. The king’s cruel eyes widened, as though his lack of manners had been intentional.

Theseus continued, Accordingly, should I fail, you shall grant Athens nine years without hostility so that my country may grieve my death. And, should I succeed, no man of Crete shall sail upon Athens’ seas within the same period of time. This has been sworn to in your covenant with my father. This is what I have come to do.

The hall fell as silent as a winter forest. Only the king’s courtiers shifted a bit like the stiff branches of February trees. They were wondering no doubt what reckoning the king would make of this prince, offering himself in defiance of the terms of the compact.

It had to make for a tempting proposal. How better for Minos to show off his might and humiliate Aegeus? He could say he had coerced the great king of Athens to sacrifice his only son, and kings from around the world would rush to pay him tribute lest he demand the same of them. Theseus needed it to be so. Nothing from the man’s history suggested he would be persuaded by mercy. It was said that when he had sacked the wealthy trade city of Khirokitia on Cyprus, he had ordered his sailors to rape every one of the Cypriot king’s eleven daughters and then to bind them to the hull of their ship so the girls would drown on the voyage back to Crete.

The king’s calculating gaze weighed upon Theseus, eyeing the sword holstered from the prince’s belt, the broadness of his shoulders, the musculature of his arms and legs, which showed outside his short-sleeved, thigh-length chiton. The prince was still a thin-hipped youth, though his limbs had hardened from martial training. The whiskers of his cheeks and chin remained downy, and his face had not yet fully shed the glow, the plumpness of boyhood.

"You will face my stepson in his lair? Minos spoke, a glint of humor in his eyes. With only a blade to defend yourself?"

The prince nodded. The Minotaur. Sired by the snow-white bull that pulled the god Poseidon’s chariot, and borne from the king’s mad wife Pasiphaë. The legend held that Minos kept the creature in a subterranean labyrinth, and it only fed on the flesh of men.

Theseus noticed a strange man who stood beside the king’s throne taking account of him. The gruesome fellow was nearly naked and glistening with oils. His gray skin hung from the bone and was creased with age. He wore a feathered headdress, a swath of fabric as a pagne, and a heavy necklace of horns draped on his flat chest in tribute to the fearsome god he worshipped: Poseidon, Roiler of the Sea.

On the other side of the king sat a woman dressed in a layered gown of widow black and with a veil covering her face. The king’s queen, Theseus guessed. Still in mourning for the death of Androgeus.

Theseus turned to a fair girl on the stage who stood beside the queen. She had vigorous locks of black hair heaped upon her head, and her face had been painted in ochre and rouge in an Asiatic style. Her clothes were colorful and immaculate, entirely foreign to the young prince. She wore an elegant corselet that pushed up her modest breasts, and bell-shaped skirts, which widened her hips, affecting the proportions of a fowl though he could see she was slimly built.

Their eyes met, and the girl’s expression was restrained, perhaps even sympathetic. Theseus had only hatred in his heart for any man or woman of Crete, but his sympathies veered toward her for a moment. She looked to be his contemporary. Minos’s daughter Ariadne, whose beauty was hailed around the world?

The king glanced at his priest, a silent exchange, and the horrible savage made an arcane gesture with his bony hands, grinned thirstily at Theseus, and bowed.

Minos declared, If this is King Aegeus’s will, so shall it be done. He gazed at Theseus like a lion with its prey beneath its paw. But the terms of our agreement shall stand. You are but one son. Tomorrow, should you not emerge from the labyrinth with the beast’s collar by nightfall, it shall be sealed, and your father shall owe me six sons and seven daughters of Attica to try the contest. I will not be denied what was promised to me. Or else I will turn my armada against Aegeus once again.

In truth, the possibility of not surviving the contest had never lingered in Theseus’s head. His cause was just, and that was all. But now he pictured a black-sailed ship wallowing through fog-banked waters toward harbor. Fathers huddled with their children on the pier, turning their heads away from the sight. His own father taking in the knowledge his son had failed and sentenced innocent children to certain deaths. His claim to save Athens no more than a foolish boast.

Theseus grasped for some counteroffer to the king. He could think of nothing.

The greedy king looked like he might break out in laughter. He knew Theseus had no leverage to negotiate further, and now that he had the king of Athens’ son in his clutch, he would likely devise more treachery to ensure the prince would not survive the contest.

THAT NIGHT, A troop of slaves brought a feast on railed beds down to the beach where the Athenians had decamped. A man in officious robes preceded them to say the meal was courtesy of the king.

The prince’s countrymen sneered at first as they looked upon the many platters of foods that had been carted down from the palace. Theseus beseeched them to forsake their doubts and prejudices, to enjoy the king’s bounty. Minos had no reason to poison him. If he did, he would not be able to enjoy the spectacle of sending Theseus to his labyrinth of death. Besides, he told them, there was no dishonor in helping themselves to what the king had provided. True, it was a false gesture of friendship designed to rub their noses in his wealth. But never had a poor man avenged a richer enemy by starving himself.

Theseus said it in a jolly way. It was not in his nature to play the cynic, but his dilemma was peeling open layers of himself, or perhaps forcing a rapid maturation of his sensibilities. The sailors, who looked to the prince with perhaps more deference than was his due, shrugged and peeked at the meal. The truth was: they would otherwise be dining on ropes of salted meat and stale bread.

The sailors brought the foods to their bonfire and gathered round, reaching over one another to grab at dishes of fish in sauce, roasted lamb, ears of fried breads, pickled vegetables, olives, nuts, and candied dates. There were even urns of a light red wine, which they all agreed was inferior to that of their homeland, but they drank it anyway.

The mood turned merry in the manner of bested men who could do no more than laugh at their misfortune. They joked about the pompous king, his tiresomely grand reception, and his queen who favored sharing her bed with a bull rather than her dull, bombastic husband! They even laughed about the king’s feast being a ploy to fatten up Theseus for the Minotaur’s dinner, and then they jested over which parts of Theseus the monster might prefer to devour first and which parts they might bring back to Athens. (His cock and balls were the most popular guesses in both cases.) Some wondered aloud if they all might be sent back to their country as charred corpses or odds and ends from a butcher’s table. Who could trust a man who hurled firebombs at fishing villages for fun?

Theseus chuckled along with his shipmates while the sand crusted cold, the night air turned crisp, and a universe of stars twinkled overhead. He would never have imagined he would feel so loose and gay the night before he was to be thrown into a pit to fight a man-bull to the death. Yet why should it not be so? He gained nothing by sulking or pacing about with worries.

In somber moments, his companions suggested strategies—dodging his opponent until it tired out, aiming his blade for the brisket, which was known to contain the bovine heart—but no man among them had ever fought such a beast. Would it charge at him on all fours or would it stand as a man in hand-to-hand combat? They could only speculate. No man who had faced the Minotaur had lived to speak of its nature, its tendencies, its weaknesses.

Theseus figured he would use his speed and his dexterity as he did with any martial challenge. In his brief time in Athens, he had outfought most of his contemporaries in skirmishes, and around the gymnasium, he was praised as a fine boxer and a wrestler. Though he had never seen battle. He did not know how it felt to be face-to-face with a man who sought to kill him, nor how to harden his heart to strike out for death. It was said that instinct was borne in every man, that it would come to him when he needed it. Theseus surely hoped it would be so. He knew of hunting and had not hesitated to slash the neck of an arrow-struck stag, at least after the first time his father had urged him forward to do so. But that was hardly the challenge he could expect with the Minotaur.

Yes, he would need to be quick and clever and merciless; otherwise, he imagined he would need some luck, which only the goddess could provide.

The men called out for him to challenge Kallinos, a veteran in their company and the tallest and most thickly built among them. Theseus had spent day and night in practice bouts ever since he had declared himself to face the Minotaur. Only a fool would not. One last exercise to sharpen his skills certainly seemed advisable.

The two men gathered wooden swords and walked up the beach into a pool of shadow, which might in some respect simulate the contest the prince must win in the darkened passages of King Minos’s battleground.

Theseus tried to hone his vision, hold back the bigger man’s attack, and Kallinos did not spare the prince any pity, quickly bullying him farther down the beach, forcing him to exert all of his strength. It was not enough. A series of clashes enfeebled Theseus’s wrists and had his legs wobbly from absorbing the assault. He tried to back away and lost his balance, toppling on his bottom. Kallinos pounced upon him, socking the breath from his lungs, pressing the length of his blade into his neck.

Kallinos helped him to his feet, and they sparred a second and then a third and a fourth time. The results were the same by and large. Theseus could not find a way out of a defensive posture, batting back the bigger man’s thrusts and swipes, ceding ground, wearing through his limbs’ endurance. If there was a lesson to be learned, he would have to avoid challenging the beast directly. His only chance would be to use the creature’s habitat to his advantage—find hiding places, stalk the predator and ambush him. Yet how to do it when the beast knew those hiding spots much better than he?

He would need every gift the goddess could grant him.

They returned to the center of the camp, and Theseus called everyone together. He led his company in lifting their goblets of wine and spilling a bit onto the earth before they drank in tribute to wise Athena. Afterward, they tossed branches of her sacred olive tree into the fire and sang the anthem of their country with hearty voices to be heard far inland, hopefully as far as the king’s bedchamber.

The hour was late. Theseus told the men he needed sleep lest he be crawling to the labyrinth in the morning, though truly he was not tired. Each man came around to grip arms with him, look him grimly, firmly in the eye, share words of encouragement. Then Theseus went to bed himself in his captain’s tent.

HE HAD JUST stripped off his cuirass and shoes when he hearkened to a curious commotion around the camp. Voices traveled in a mixture of tones, some defensive, some ribald and taunting, too indistinct to decipher the words. Theseus drew up to the flap of his tent, endeavoring to overhear what drunken intrigue had broken out.

It sounded mild and light-hearted at first. Then the voices, the heckling fell away, and he heard instead a scuffle of footsteps in the sand. Hairs stood up on his neck. Unless he was mistaken, that footfall was gaining up on his tent, one steady plod through the sand and then a lighter patter. Some of his sailors trying to catch him by surprise, to play a prank? Though they could see he had not yet extinguished his lamp for the night. An enemy instead?

Theseus thought about retrieving his blade from the floor, but before he could do so, the voice of Padmos, first admiral in the company, called out to him just beyond the lip of his tent.

You’ve a visitor.

The man sounded sober. Resigned? Who would visit him? He was a stranger in a foreign country.

Theseus shook out his tunic, tried smoothing it. Grit clung to the garment from his spar with Kallinos on the beach, and sweat soaked through the collar and armholes. No method would amend that. He wiped his hands, drew open the flap of the tent, and peered into the night.

He perceived the silhouette, the dutifully bowed head of the admiral and two others, each one scarcely decipherable, shorter than the admiral, and covered from head to toe in hooded cloaks.

Padmos gestured to one of the hooded strangers. The Princess Ariadne.

Theseus was deeply astounded. He was astounded even more to see the foreign princess curtsey and to