Warriors of Poseidon 05 - Atlantis Redeemed

Prologue
    Rome, 202 B.C.
    Brennan fell against the stone wall of the tavern, his wild laughter tinged with madness.
    “Another round for the house!” He fumbled in his pouch for a fistful of silver denarii and tossed them on the woman’s tray. Her dark eyes widened until he could see white all the way around her irises.
    “But this is far too much,” she protested, her gaze darting furtively toward her father, the fat innkeeper in his stained toga that proclaimed him a free citizen of Rome, albeit a dirty one. “He will cheat you, you know,” she whispered.
    He took the tray out of her hands and dropped it on a table, uncaring that the cups and coins flew in all directions, and pulled her close in a drunken embrace. The generosity of ample breasts, overflowing the low-cut bodice of her stolla, distracted him for a moment from his pursuit of ale. Her right nipple was barely covered by the dingy fabric of her palla, and he experimented with tightening his embrace to see if it would pop all the way out of the blue cloth.
    Sadly, his brilliant ploy didn’t work. He inhaled a deep breath of the roasted meat and wine scent of the tavern and immediately wished he hadn’t, as his head started spinning.
    “So, my beauty, is there someplace more private we might go and I will give you a chance to earn even more of that silver?” He grabbed a fistful of her lovely round ass and squeezed, grinning. She was no slave girl, who would have no choice in the matter, but a free woman, his wine-soaked conscience reassured him.
    But her face wore an expression of utter confusion. “I’m sorry, I don’t know any foreign language,” she said, almost cringing, as if he would beat her for her failure. She sidled away from him and scrambled for the scattered coins, slapping the hands of greedy bar patrons trying to help themselves to either coins or free cups of wine.
    Brennan blinked, momentarily bewildered, but then he realized he must have been speaking in Atlantean, which had nothing in common with Latin, unfortunately. He had a tendency to fall back on his native tongue in the heat of battle or the lax-brained befuddlement of extreme drunkenness.
    He spoke Atlantean a lot these days.
    He felt the rumble coming up from his belly and managed to considerately turn his head to avoid belching in her face. “An-another place? Private?” he managed, this time in her language instead of his.
    “Oh!” Her face cleared as she understood instantly. He probably was not the first, or even the Atlantis Redeemed – Warriors of Poseidon 05
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    tenth, of her father’s customers to seek out a dark and private place with the buxom wench during the past several days. The thought momentarily sent a shudder of distaste through him, but as he released her and downed the bottom half of his cup, any misgivings vanished in a sea of effervescent intoxication.
    Catching his hand, she dragged him through the cheering crowd of revelers, all raising a toast to their benefactor. He bowed sloppily, nearly tripping over the unfamiliar sandals, but the determined woman, almost certainly more enchanted with the contents of his pouch than with him, righted him with a steadying arm and herded him toward a doorway in the back of the tavern.
    “Give her a good one, Brennan,” one of his most regular drinking buddies, a centurion called Sergius, called. “She likes it if you squeeze her tits while you tup her.”
    Brennan stumbled again, a disquieting sense of wrongness pervading his sodden mind. Why was he here? He was one of Poseidon’s finest, finally called to service in the sea god’s chosen elite, and he was rotting out his brains and his gut with second-rate women and third-rate wine.
    The wench shoved the wooden door shut behind him and grabbed his cock through the heavy folds of his toga, and his doubts disappeared in a spike of lust.
    “Now let’s be seeing what coin you have for a poor innocent girl,” she cooed, leering at him with pursed lips and narrowed eyes that had not been innocent in years. Then she squeezed his cock again, harder.
    He roared out a great whooping noise and grasped her melon-sized tits with both hands.
    “That’s the idea,” he said. “Why don’t you lift that skirt and let me see what you’ve got under there?”
    As he bent his head to hers, the woman’s eyes widened again and then went blank, almost fish-eyed, as they glazed over and then closed. Her head fell back and her plump body went limp,