Cursed by the Sea God (11 page)

I laid him in a depression in the hard soil and began to hunt for rocks to
build a cairn over him when I realized I wasn’t alone. I leapt to my feet,
afraid that Ury had followed me after all, but I was wrong. It was Lopex.

I grunted, annoyed. If he didn’t like what I was doing, he could do it himself.
To my surprise, he said nothing, watching in silence as I covered Pen’s body
with stones to keep out the animals. As I completed the cairn, Lopex stepped up
beside me with a broken oar from the scrap pile. He wedged it, paddle upward, in
the stones as a grave marker. We stood side by side for a little while, looking
at the grave in silence. “You’ve done right by him, boy,” Lopex said at last.
“None of my own men thought to.” Confused, I said nothing. He turned and
left.

I stood for a little while longer, looking at Pen’s grave in
the cool night air, but my calm had been broken. Why did he keep doing that?
Ever since Aeolia, I had hated him. He had given me away to Ury. He had used me,
when we first landed on Circe’s island, to make the men eat. He wouldn’t let me
speak to him, and when he spoke to me it was only to give orders. And I couldn’t
forget that he was one of the Greek commanders who had destroyed Troy. He made
it easy to hate him. So why did I find it so hard?

We spent another month on Circe’s island, refitting the damage done during our
escape from Hades, but Lopex didn’t speak to me again. For this refitting,
although it looked bad, the damage was almost all minor, mostly railings, oars,
and a few stove-in hull planks. I had no carpentry skills, something that became
clear when Arturos pressed me into service turning new oars. After examining the
misshapen result, he’d looked at me sourly and told me he didn’t need me any
longer.

Following breakfast one day, I crept off to hide in the shade of the
Pelagios
. The Greeks had propped her up on the beach with two rows of
ashwood stay poles, forming a kind of triangular tunnel against each side of the
hull. The side away from camp was almost out of sight, so I was a bit surprised,
as I settled into place with my back against the hull, to look up and see
Thersites standing there.

“You’re the son of that healer, right?” he began. I nodded.

“I don’t much have dealings with healers, you understand,” he went on
awkwardly. “Not slaves, neither. But Pharos, he says
you’re
okay. And they say you saved some men at the ship break island. Is that the way
of it?”

I nodded again, wondering where this was going.

He glanced over his shoulder before squatting in front of me. “See, it’s like
this,” he began, his voice low. “I’ve gone and got myself a rash.”

“A rash?” I repeated, surprised.

He turned his back to me and flipped his tunic up. His buttocks and the backs
of his thighs were speckled bright red. He let his tunic drop and turned back.
“Thing is,” he added, “I’d just as soon you didn’t let on to the others, see?
Only they’d pin my ears pretty fierce for falling asleep in a patch of foolsnare
like that.” He stood up again.

“Word is, you’ve got a healer’s box. If it’s got something to keep the itch
down, well, I’d count it as a good turn.” He grimaced and whipped a hand around
to scratch urgently at his buttock. “Only hurry,” he hissed. “This itch, it’s
growing to eat me whole.”

The healer’s box! Binding wounds and splinting bones didn’t need a healer’s
elixirs, and I’d long since forgotten the box I had last seen on the island of
the Cyclops. It took a while to find it, buried in the hold where some soldier
had heaved it.

A wave of nostalgia wafted over me as I threw open the lid. The neat rows of
stoppered clay vials, the mortar, pestle and other tools in the bottom, and
above all the scent of herbs, liniments and tinctures rising from the box
carried me back
to the days when I used to help my father in the
xenion
where he treated his patients.

The vials were marked with neatly scratched labels, but I’d never learned to
read, so I started opening them at random. Some contained oil with chopped
leaves in them, others powder or balms. One had a piercing smell that darted up
my nostrils like a wasp. I put the stopper back hastily.

Finally I found a vial full of a thick oil with a flowery scent that I
half-recalled my father smearing on someone’s burnt arm. Could it help? Did
ointments go bad, like food? I didn’t know. I poured some into a smaller vial
and brought it out to Thersites. “Spread this on twice a day. It may help, if it
hasn’t stopped working.”

I didn’t hear back from Thersites, but a day later another Greek soldier came
to me, a younger man named Prylis. “Listen,” he began. “I hear you’ve got
something for an itch.” He held up his forearms, which were red with signs of
vigorous scratching. “Can you give me a little? I can’t even sleep these last
two nights.”

Word must have gotten around, because after that, the men began coming to me
with a stream of burns and minor injuries, giving me an opportunity to
experiment with the other salves and tinctures in the healer’s box. Through
trial and error, I began to identify what some of the ointments and powders were
good for. By the time we set sail from Circe’s island again after a month, I
understood what at least a third of the vials in the healer’s chest were for.
From the men’s
grudging comments, that made me at least as good
as the Greek healer I had replaced, the late and unlamented Kalli-krates.

PROCOROS HAD A CONFUSED frown. “
Toward
it? Don’t you mean
around
it?”

Standing beside him at the bow rail, Lopex was studying his sheepskin chart. He
glanced up at the late morning sun, now emerging from behind a scrap of cloud.
“Hold this course,” he repeated. “The island will come into view within two
hands. Bring the ship close by, keeping the island two oar-lengths to starboard.
Under
no
circumstances are you to land us.”

The navigator muttered into his beard. At the water halt a little while later,
Lopex ordered me to hand out a thumb-sized piece of beeswax to every man on
board. I’d wondered
about it the day before when I saw it in the
hold as we prepared to leave Circe’s island. Whatever we were about to meet,
Lopex already knew about it.

He hadn’t mentioned the slaves, but I dropped a lump down the forward ladder
into the hold anyway. Zosimea, I had learned after we sailed, had been left with
Circe as a gift. The half-dozen other slaves we had set out with had been
reassigned to other ships after the Cyclops island and lost at the ship
breakers, leaving only me and Kassander aboard the
Pelagios
. As I worked
my way down the benches, handing out lumps of wax to the rowers, Lopex spoke up
from the stern.

“Men of Ithaca!” he called, holding up a lump of beeswax. “You are being given
a piece of wax. Roll it in your hands to soften it and fashion yourself two
plugs, like this.” He demonstrated. “On my command, push them into your ears. As
you value your lives, make sure they are tight, and do not remove them until
Phidios gestures to you. Ury, bring up the mast from below. Leave off the sail
and spars.”

Unimaginative as always, Ury stepped up from the forward rowing bench where
Lopex had relocated him after Circe’s island, and gruffly ordered four men to
the task. They wrestled the mast from the hold and struggled with its stay ropes
to mount it through a collar hole in the bench. I finished distributing the wax
and reached the stern deck just as Lopex was telling Phidios to tie him
up.

I blinked. Had I heard that wrong? From the look on his face, Phidios was
wondering the same thing, but Lopex was
thrusting a coil of
ox-hide rope at him. Phidios uncoiled the rope gingerly and reached for Lopex’s
arms.

“Not here, idiot. To the mast!” At least that explained why he had asked Ury to
raise it. The men watched with interest as Lopex was bound to the mast, facing
to starboard, his feet on the reinforced bench that housed the mast hole. He
raised his voice. “Fellow Achaeans, I charge you all: no matter what you see or
hear, and in particular no matter what I say, do not untie me until we are
safely past the island.” He turned to Phidios. “Tighter! There must be no chance
for me to escape.”

I thought about this as the men began rowing again. What sort of danger was
best met tied up? And why weren’t the rest of us being bound too? I shrugged and
hopped across the benches to my standard spot in the bow. Lopex ignored me as I
passed.

A shout came from Procoros. “There it is! Steersman, alter your course to my
mark!” He pointed a steady arm toward a spot on the horizon as the ship
gradually swung around.

I watched from the bow rail as the island crept closer. Could I hear something?
I strained to catch the sound, a low, sweet throbbing. Lopex’s voice boomed out
again. “Plugs! Now!” I stuffed the wax plugs into my ears and the world became
nearly silent, the creaking of the ship and the waves against the hull
muffled.

The men resumed rowing at an arms-out gesture from Phidios. As we drew nearer
to the island, I began to make out details. Thrust jaggedly up from the waves,
it was more of an
outcropping than a real island. Sharp-edged
rocks lined the base of the sheer cliffs that protected it on all sides, and
scattered among notches in the cliffs were some half-dozen . . .
creatures.

Now I could make them out. Women! Beautiful women with long, dark green hair
that shone like seaweed draped over their shoulders to run like rivers down
smooth, silvery skin. Their mouths were open as though they were calling. No,
singing. With my ears plugged I couldn’t hear their voices, but their
open-armed, graceful gestures were clear.

“Come! Visit with us!” Facing backward, the rowers couldn’t see them yet, but
our course would take us directly past them, a stone’s throw to starboard. I
glanced back at the men, wondering how they would react, and was transfixed as I
caught sight of Lopex.

His head was turned toward the island, and his face bore an intense expression
that might have been rapture or agony. His lips were moving as he muttered
something, his face working, sweat beginning on his forehead. His mouth opened
and I realized that the voices must be growing louder. I crept down the benches
until I could make out his words through the earplugs.

“. . . music . . . wrong . . . let me go . . . voices of gods . . .”

Suddenly his eye fell upon me and his voice raised to a shout. “You! Come here!
Yes, you!”

I hesitated and his shout came again. “Boy! Now, may the gods damn you!”

I bench-hopped over uncertainly as Lopex continued to
curse.

“Untie me, slave. Now!”

I stared at him in amazement. “But you ordered us not to!”

Lopex glared at me, panting, sweat running freely off his face. “I said untie
me!”

I looked at him innocently. “I’d love to, but you’re not my master anymore.
Remember?”

His face twitched as he fought to control himself. Suddenly his expression
changed, a cunning look stealing over his writhing brow. “Oh, yes. Ury.” He was
struggling not to shout. “Not much of a . . . master, is he? Tell you what,
Alexi. Let me go and I’ll make him give you back to me. How’d you like
that?”

The singing must have grown louder, for I could suddenly hear it too, a faint
humming. Even through the wax, it was beautiful. What would he do if I released
him? A brief spasm crossed his face.

“What do you say, Alexi? Ury reports to me. I can order him to. The gods know
there’s . . . precedent.”

I glanced anxiously toward the island, now directly to starboard as we rowed
past. This close, I could see broken shapes among the sharp-toothed rocks at the
base of the cliff. A momentary breeze blew a carrion smell past my nostrils, and
I knew what those shapes had to be.

Lopex was speaking again. “Better still—” a conspiratorial look crossed his
face as he leaned toward me, straining against
the ropes, “I’ll
make him set you free! Think of that. Free again!” The crumpled shapes were men,
the broken bodies of sailors who had been driven to scale those impossible
cliffs by these creatures’ music. Now I knew what he would do if I let him
go.

Lopex’s voice rose as the last of his self-control vanished. “Do it now, boy!”
he shouted, straining at the cords, his eyes bulging. “Or I’ll make your final
days short and full of pain!” His face contorted further as I fidgeted. “You
stinking Trojan scum! Do it! Now! I should have let Ury cut out your heart back
in Troy, you little filth!”

So that was how he really felt. Could anyone blame me now if I cut him loose?
My hand was reaching on its own for Melantha’s knife. Lopex watched me hungrily.
“That’s right, boy. Do it. Do it now,” he said, his voice cracking.

I shielded my eyes against the sun as I looked for the main rope strand to cut
that would free him. Wait—the sun? It shouldn’t be in my eyes. I glanced toward
the bow. We were turning directly into the island! I spun and looked backward,
ignoring Lopex’s angry cry. Zanthos, the steersman, was pulling the starboard
steering oar hard in toward the island, a manic smile on his face. Phidios,
keeping the rower’s pace on his pipes, hadn’t noticed yet.

I dashed over the benches toward the stern, kicking the oars to foul them as I
passed, but the sailors cursed and recovered their stroke. At the stern deck I
leapt to grab Zanthos’s arm, but his wiry body was stronger than it looked. As I
wrestled
with him I spotted the problem: a wax plug had fallen
from his ear! I gulped—there was only one solution. I pulled a wax plug from my
ear and reached up to thrust it into his.

An immediate change came over his face. He looked up as though waking from a
dream, shook his head and hurriedly twisted his steering oar for a sharp turn to
port. Nearby, Phidios had dropped his flute and was frantically signalling for
the men to reverse direction, but I didn’t notice.

I could hear the music now.

Powerful and pure, it flooded through me like sweet wine, setting my entire
body thrumming like a lyre string. I had to get closer. I had no more choice
than a raindrop has to fall. I was already halfway over the railing when an arm
caught me. A voice spoke in my ear. “Easy, boy. They’re not worth dying
for.”

Some part of me recognized the speaker as Zanthos, but I didn’t care. If I had
been capable of forming any sort of thought I could easily have stabbed him just
to get him out of my way, but at that moment my mind could hold no intent but
the driving need to reach the source of that sweet sound filling my head.

As I flailed to get free, a lucky scratch caught him below the eye and he
cursed, letting go of me to clap a hand to his face. I scrambled back over the
rail and was about to jump when his arm caught me again. “Determined little
thing, aren’t you?” came his voice. “Well, I can’t say that I blame you, having
heard it myself. But it’s no use struggling. I’m not letting
you
go, no, not till we’re well past those creatures.”

I continued fighting, but the earlier throbbing desperation was ebbing, flowing
back out like a receding wave. The music was fading, the insistent song growing
quieter behind us as we pulled away from the island.

I looked down to find myself kneeling on the rail. What was I doing up here?
Behind me, Zanthos was holding the steering oar with one hand, his other wrapped
tightly around me. Blood trickled down his cheek from a deep scratch.

“Zanthos?” I began uncertainly, memory coming back.

He shook his head, taking his earplugs out at a signal from Phidios. “Don’t
worry about it, boy,” he said. “If you hadn’t given me your wax we’d all be
feeding the eels now.”

I glanced toward the stern. The island was still visible, but the music was
almost inaudible, now nothing more than a pleasant hum, an echo of the bliss
that had filled me. I shook my head, trying to clear the sweet longing from it,
when I realized where I had felt this once before. It was as we left the island
of the lotos-eaters, watching it recede behind us, that I had felt the same
desperate sense of loss, knowing that a part of me would forever long to
return.

That evening we pulled up onto a pebbled black beach, a round-shouldered
mountain just visible inland in the dusk. I sat alone for supper that night,
hoping to avoid Lopex, but he found me anyway, sitting in a dry creek bed up the
beach and gnawing on a slice of dried pork.

“Boy.”

I twisted around to see him standing behind me at the edge of the wash, hands
on his hips. “Yes, sir?”

“I gave you an order today. You didn’t obey.”

“Well, no, I—”

“Do you know what would have happened if you had?”

I nodded. “I heard the music too.”

His eyebrows raised for an instant and I added, “Zanthos— he stopped me.”

“Ury would have become the new commander.” Lopex’s voice was dry.

Gods! I hadn’t thought of that. Ury in command? I wouldn’t have lasted a day.
Or worse, he might have kept me alive. I stared at Lopex, speechless.

Lopex looked me directly in the eye. “It’s a good thing for us both that you
disobeyed, then.”