Читать книгу Knight In Blue Jeans - Evelyn Vaughn, Linda Winstead Jones - Страница 12

Long explanations later, Smith still felt lost. Trace would arrive soon with the alarm supplies, probably with Mitch driving. And Smith didn’t want that extra complication just yet.

“Wait, wait,” he protested as Greta drew breath for yet another recitation. “How about I tell it, and you just see if I’ve got it right?”

The older woman sat neatly back in her kitchen chair, clasped her frail hands and waited. The sword lay on the table between them, the odd, not-quite-glowing patina of its blade tempting him to touch it.

It tempted him enough to make him seriously wary of it, of anything he could want that badly.

“This warrior, Aeneas. He’s the guy from the Roman epic I slogged through in World Lit.”

“Virgil’s Aeneid,” she clarified, as if he hadn’t actually passed the class.

“You’re saying this guy was real.”

She smiled, looking not at all insane. “Yes.”

“Wasn’t his mother a goddess?”

“Much of his story was probably mythologized.”

“You don’t say.” Okay, so that was rude. But Greta was apparently crazy. Fair trade.

“Historical details in the story also confuse the timing. Aeneas couldn’t have left Troy after its walls fell and still founded Lavinium—Rome—within the same generation. And while Dido of Carthage did exist—”

The dog Dido scampered to her feet, sure they meant her.

“The queen that Aeneas dumped,” Smith clarified. “The one who killed herself.”

“Yes, the true Dido was a Phoenician exile. However, had she met Aeneas before he founded Rome, he would have been centuries old.”

“That’s some age difference.” Smith took a deep breath. “So, not really from Troy. Not really Dido’s lover. And this sword probably wasn’t forged by the blacksmith god Vulcan—”

“Greek name Hephaestus.”

“—for the invincible warrior Achilles.”

Greta smiled a small, mysterious smile, kind of like the one Smith used to see on Arden. He hated—well, loved—no, hated that wise, womanly smile. “I like to think it could somehow be true,” she said, “but external logic would imply not.”

“But this is his sword.” Ancient. Precious.

Amazingly powerful.

He fisted his hand, resisting the urge to slide a finger down its fuller, the groove that divided the flat of the blade. Don’t touch it. If you do, you’ll be lost….

“So says my family legend.”

Smith’s own family hadn’t been that big on legends. Sure, they traced back to investors of the Peters Colony, some of the earliest white settlers of central Texas. Before that, they went all the way to Jamestown.

But Troy? Not so much.

“Your family the Hapsburgs. Of the Holy Roman Empire Hapsburgs. Aren’t some of them still running around, heading the family in Austria?”

Dido flopped back onto her tummy, watching them through spaniel eyes.

“In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many of the royal families of Europe experienced schisms, even complete exile, as did the Stuarts of England. The Stuarts who even now head the Comitatus, yes?”