That seemed to placate her. "So what does ta'hu'la mean?"
"Little one."
Kateri felt heat rush over her face at his endearment. She wasn't the kind of woman who normally brought that out in a man. And definitely not in one who looked like Ren. Heck, her own lab assistant, who wasn't that much younger than her, couldn't even call her by her nickname. Wanting to cover her embarrassment, she returned to their former conversation. "I interrupted your story. You were telling me about the Pleiades. I take it Merope rallied her troops?"
"Sterope," he corrected. "Merope is actually her sister, who married Sisyphus."
"And people wondered why I had a C average in the one Classical Studies class I took in college. Who can keep all these names straight?"
"There are many who would argue that the Greek is easier to pronounce and remember than our names."
"Yeah, well, those are people who weren't raised with our writing system ... which is different than yours, isn't it?"
"It is. Ours was more like the Maya. Glyph based."
Kateri's mind reeled at that. "Wait ... the stone that was sent to me." The one that was fourteen thousand years old. "It had strange writing on it with something that appeared to be Greek."
"Not Greek. And not Mayan. Keetoowah. But you're getting ahead of the story."
"Sorry. Back to the Greek confusion. I take it our ... Ope woman rallied her troops to help the Keetoowah fight off their attackers."
He wiped the sweat off his forehead with his arm. "Not until after she made a bargain with the chief's son."
Ooo, this was getting good. "Which was?"
"She would save his people if he would agree to spend a week with her once the battle was won."
"Horny little booger, wasn't she?"
Ren cast her a glare so malevolent that she actually took a step back from it. "She loved him."
Okay, she'd struck a nerve there. She'd ask him more about Sterope, but decided it might not be the wisest course of action. Better to get the scary immortal man off his sensitive topic, especially while he held a war club that still had the blood of demons on it.
Kateri cleared her throat. "So she made her bargain and he agreed to it?"
Ren returned to his hacking, which made her feel a whole lot better.
Yeah, kill the bushes. They didn't care about living.
She did.
"After the agreement was made," he said, "she convinced her sisters to help her save his people. Because they were family and they loved her, they agreed. The seven goddesses came down together and chose the seven strongest warrior-priests among the Keetoowah to fight with them. They were the ones who drove the seventy tribes back and then divided them up so that they couldn't attack the Keetoowah ever again. When the fighting was finished, Sterope claimed her fee, not knowing that the chief's son was already married to a woman he loved dearly."
Kateri gaped. "Are you serious?"
"Very much so."
"That dog. How could he do that?"
Ren shrugged. "In his mind, he was making a sacrifice for his people. One week of servitude seemed like a small price to pay for everyone's life."
Okay, so when put in those terms, it made sense. Still ...
What a two-timing bastard.
"For the record, I'd absolutely kill my husband if he did that to me."
"Believe me, his wife wasn't happy about it. Especially since her husband impregnated Sterope during that same week."