My100: One-Paragraph Story Hooks Twenty-Six and Twenty-Seven

The challenge: 100 first-paragraph hooks in sixty days. Just one paragraph(-ish), and it has to hook the reader to want more.
Raise the difficulty: numbers eighteen through thirty-seven have to be pulp noir (the Raymond Chandler/Humphrey Bogart kind of story)
Make it excruciating: start with the oldest human civilizations and work forward.

So today we're in Alexander's Macedon, and post-Alexander Babylon.

Twenty-Six:
Kouros forked another dung-straw mass over the stable wall and into the creek. The labors of Hercules, except Kouros wasn't strong enough to divert the river to wash out the stables. Even as he laid the butt end of the pitchfork into the soggy ground and braced himself the leg threatened to give way. He rubbed at it, the thick scar running from perilously close to the groin down to the knee. Damned Malian. And damn Alexander, too, and his theatrics, though never out loud. Kleita watched him, leaning on the door post with a wineskin draped over her bare shoulder, dark locks falling to her waist, and that crooked smile that drove him mad. But he grinned back and stabbed the fork into the pile again, where it stuck fast as if it had been grabbed. "That didn't sound like shit," she said, taking a step forward, eyes narrowed. And it wasn't. At least not the kind that comes out of a horse.

Twenty-Seven:

The shrieking was the worst part of it all, the day-and-night howl from the women's quarters. Probably paid them to make a racket, too, not that every Hellene heart wasn't ripped it two anyway. The women gave voice to it, but they would probably have reason enough to howl on their own. Garshasp rolled over on his pallet and tried to cover his ears with his arm, when his pallet bucked and he crashed to the floor. "Get up," a harsh voice said, and a sandal-shod foot kicked him in the midriff. "There's a fire."

"I don't put out fires," Garshasp said, rubbing his ribs. The foot belonged to Kleitas, one of the King's Own, assuming there was still a king. There had to be, somewhere, though the king was gone to Elysium. Or taken up to the stars, if he had made himself Egyptian enough.

"We put it out," Kleitas said. "But someone started it. If you find him by tomorrow, we won't start a new one underneath you."

Seventy-three to go.

~Cristof

P.S. This series is the brainchild of The New Creatives, which challenged us to create 100 of something as a way of attaining mastery of a particular art form (or beginning the process, more like). This is my attempt. #TNCmy100

P.P.S. I'll have no Internet access until Friday night, so I'll be doing these the old-fashioned way until then, and we'll have a festival of eight at once.