Hero for Hire (25 page)

A shudder passed through her, caused by pure pleasure flooding her body at the thought of dead men. She laid her head on my shoulder. I loathed the touch of her coiling hair on my cheek with all my heart.

“And though this is very delightful....” the wench wiggled her bottom against my thighs! But there was no desire in me to be aroused by the likes of her. “Hekate grows impatient.”

“Very well.”

I suppose she expected me to take a running jump. But I only needed to take two steps forward and then there was nothing but emptiness under my feet.

* * *

Well, I died.

* * *

Whatever part of me does the thinking had decided to leave off for a while, leaving the husk behind. How long I’d been walking without being aware of it was a question I never would be able to answer. But there I was and so was she. She had my sword in her hand.

That didn’t seem right.

I stopped and slipped it from her loose hold. I looked into her face. It was slack and tired, every day of her age showing. She blinked twice, very slowly, like a sleepy cat. Then, like the snap of fingers, she was back in her own head, eyes sharpening, features firming with arrogance and self-will.

“There, you see,” Zosime proclaimed. “I was right. You are not dead.”

“You’ll pardon me if I don’t take your word for it just yet.” I drew a deep breath and held it, testing. I touched the underside of my jaw. Reassured by the faint beat, I nodded. “Seems to be in working order. So...where is this?”

“I don’t know. If we keep walking, we’ll arrive.”

“Arrive where?”

“Where we are going. There will be nothing until I require it to be called into existence. That is Hades' curse. Emptiness and infinity.”

“But you said you’d done this before.”

“I was shown the trick of it, long ago. I have gone back and forth, many times. No one except Hades’ sad queen has ever done that.” Her pride was as thick as a sea-hardened ship's timber and as hard to make an impact on.

“And Orpheus. And Hercules. And Theseus....”

She tossed her head and kept on walking. After what seemed a moment but might have been an eternity or two, she tossed her head again, more coquettishly, giving me a sidelong glance. “Your sword is most unusual. I admire those clouds on the hilt. I have never seen work like that before.”

“It’s different all right.”

“When you are dead, I will make it into hair-pins and a crown. I will think of you whenever I wear it.”

“I’ll hang on to it the meantime, if you don't mind.”

I didn’t feel hungry or thirsty or tired. I had lost any sense of the passage of time. The darkness was as deep as a dayless cave, concealed and lost beneath miles of earth. Yet around Zosime and me, there was light, a silvery lambency sharp and clear like the brightest full moon on a cloudless winter’s night in my native mountains. I could see her and her shadow clearly. The shadow pointed away from me.

“Let’s go back the way we came, or make a turn or something.”

“It makes no difference. All ways are one.”

“Then humor me.”

She sighed in exaggerated affront and turned her face and body. Yet again, I had a feeling her movements were slightly out of phase, as though something I couldn't make out blurred with movement. “Very well.”

I walked in a wide semi-circle around her. There was no fixed point anywhere, only black sand beneath our feet, but I noticed that if I used her as a pivot, the shadow at her feet always pointed away from me.

It wasn’t until I put up a hand to rub away a headache and the light winked out, that I got it. I took my hand down and the light came on. The light went out when I touched my brow again. “Now that’s useful. I was afraid it was out for good.”

Zosime sneered. “The Kiss of Aphrodite won’t help you here. This is not her domain. Love and all that absurd nonsense is forgotten here. Lovers forget, brothers forget, even mothers forget their children. They drink of the River Lethe and their mortal memories leave them. How else could Hades keep control? The dead would riot if they remembered where they came from and all that they had lost.”

The measuring look in her eyes told me that she'd suddenly remembered that I too had drunk of these waters. "Why...." she began to ask.

Suddenly, a river appeared, cutting through the black sand, its twisting banks crowded with the souls of the dead, misty phantoms who knelt to drink.

“There are other rivers as well, aren’t there? Pyriphlegethon. Acheron. Styx. Cocytus.”

As I said their names, they appeared, snaking among the black sand that fountained up to form banks. Each kept to its own course. Pyriphlegeton swarmed with keening men and women burning in its lava-like stream while the other river of punishment, Cocytus, spread amid the sounds of lamentations into a vast swamp. Bodies floundered in it as well, sucked down by the weight of the hot, sticky mud. Flies afflicted them, buzzing and biting.

Both waters poured ceaselessly into a lake the size of a sea and both poured away at the farthest end, which I could see and hear as clearly as the nearer side.

This lake, Acheron, had many spirits standing on an island in the center, with cool, willow-shrouded banks. I could not see how large it was but there seemed to be gardens there and beautiful houses. It too thronged with people and, faintly beneath the lamentations and entreaties, I heard a drinking song and laughter.

But around the edge of the island stood many with their backs turned on the sufferers swirling around them. The ones in the waters have wronged those on the bank and they can never escape punishment until they are forgiven. Murderers and betrayers and those who lift their hands against their parents, all swirl together in an endless whirlpool of misery and grief. Those who are forgiven arise from the lake and are judged anew. The others go pouring away back to Tartaros to pass another year before they are again permitted to offer their pleas for forgiveness.

It was fascinating to look upon and made me want to live a blameless life forever more so I could join the ones on the island Elysium, taking a boat across the Styx, not swimming. I didn’t want to get in any body of water bigger than a gymnasium bath for years to come.

Zosime made some passes with her hands and all these visions faded away. “Why did you do that? These things aren’t for you to see.”

“You started it.” We walked on, still timelessly tireless. “Isn’t it about time for your great mistress to make an appearance?”

“She will appear when it is her pleasure to do so. Unlike your foolish gods, she is not subject to the whims and sentiments of mortals.”

“Sounds like a great one to serve. Why do you?”

Zosime made no answer.

"You told me her name already. Shall I say it?"

"Silence!"

"Let me think now. Was it...Persephone?”

I had considered calling on one of the more powerful gods, hoping the magic of the Underworld would hold and bring Ares or Apollo in armor to me. But this realm was not theirs. Calling upon Hades would do no good; how could he distinguish my need from the thousands of shades who called upon him every moment. But Hades' wife...if she came, wouldn't she summon her husband? I could only say her name to the darkness and hope.

“Silence! Oh, you fool, you fool!”

A trembling against the blackness that hung around us. Then, as if it were a curtain, it parted and a slender woman, looking not older than sixteen, came through. Her hair was bound low on her forehead and she wore a shining gown of soft red like the deep blush on a peach. Her eyes were beautiful despite the black under-eye circles of one who never slept. “What shade calls upon the daughter of the Fruit-bringer?”

I bowed. “Greeting, Queen of the Underworld. Nice day, isn't it?”

“You’re not dead,” she gasped, and stepped back, biting her forefinger with indecision. She eyed me with shy curiosity, lit ever so slightly with feminine interest. Her hand rose to toy with her golden hair. Then she saw Zosime and recoiled. "You! What do you want here?"

"Go tell your husband there's a danger in the heart of his kingdom, my lady," I said with a bow.

“Now you’ve done it,” Zosime cried. She made a grab at the unwilling Queen of Hell but Persephone fled back into the nothing.

“That idiot girl; she never could keep her big mouth shut, always whining to someone. Now we must hurry." Zosime ran away from me, flinging her arms up in fanatical abandon. She whirled, stamped her feet, and sang in that inhuman language. Shades began to gather, the misty representations of Olympus-knew who. Some resembled warriors fallen in their prime, others creatures from nightmares too appalling to vanish with dawn.

Their mutterings grew louder until I could understand them. “Goddess of the cross-roads, keeper of the three-fold Ways, come for your prey, Mother of Darkness. Crush this foolish mortal beneath your heel!”

Zosime shuddered and threw back her head. She began to swell and grow. I could hear the cracking of her bones as they broke only to knit themselves anew and the screeching as her skin stretched over the new frame. Her head lolled on a broken neck. One moment there was only a single face. A moment later, she was gazing down on me, her face turned so that she could look with two out of three sides.

“I am here.”

If a basilisk could kill with a voice instead of a gaze, if a Gorgon needed nothing but her voice to turn brave men to stone, they would have borrowed hers.

Her three faces revolved, eyes glittered down on me with ever-changing expressions of disdain, loathing and gloating evil. I had destroyed a cheap imitation of this in the Temple at Leros. Now the genuine goddess stood before me. Six times my height at the least, she appeared as an Amazon, armored and armed, bearing a flaming torch in each hand.

I bowed even more deeply than I had to Hades’ Queen. I am always careful to mind my manners around loathsome goddesses. They take offense so easily. Considering the last time we’d met I’d chopped her head off, our relationship had nowhere to go but, literally, up.

“Greetings, Hekate,” I said.

She lingers on the borders of all tales, unnamed perhaps, always a presence looming over the tasks of the hero. Those I had named to Zosime - Orpheus, Hercules, Theseus - had all faced her.

She’d been a Titan, one of the children of Perses the Destroyer and Asteria, Prophetess, sister and brother, two of the many children of the Earth and the Sky, Ouranos. He had been brutally attacked by Kronos, youngest of his sons and eventual father of Zeus, of Hera, of Posideon, of Hades, of nearly all the elder Olympian Gods. Of one was he the progenitor, perhaps, but not the father.

Kronos, having emasculated Ouranos, his father the Sky, threw the pieces into the sea-foam. There they floated and, in the fullness of time, Aphrodite, Sea-Born, walked from the water, fully grown and greatly wise.

Ouranos in his torment made a prophecy that Kronos too would be overthrown by his own child. In an agony of mind, Kronos began eating the children his sister Rhea bore him. Grieving, Rhea hid herself when pregnant with Zeus, emerging only when delivered. She gave to her monstrous husband a stone swaddled like an infant and the unsuspicious Kronos swallowed it whole as he had all his other children.

At Zeus’ maturity, he came forth from concealment and led his brothers and sisters, vomited forth from their father's swollen gut by their mother’s poisons. Zeus did indeed overthrow Kronos, Chaos himself, imprisoning him deep under Tartarus. The Titans chose to support Kronos, finding themselves on the losing side and locked up themselves.

Maybe I’d skipped school that day but I could not quite recall how Hekate had come to be Keeper of the Crossroads. Three roads met in Hades and it was there that the newly dead were first sorted.

It was for Hekate to choose whether the dead went to Elysium, Tartarus or to enter the Avernian Gate. Only those who were not immediately seen to be good or evil were sent on to the Gate for final judgment by the Lord of the Underworld himself and his two fellow judges, Rhadamanthus, always pleading to alleviate Hades’ stern judgments, and Minos, always urging greater severity yet. I had a feeling that when my time came to meet Hekate again, she’d make me wait a few hundred eternities before deciding my fate.

"Are you not surprised to see me?" she asked, as feminine and sweet as a new-married bride.

"Well, frankly, I am. Are you really Zosime? Is Zosime really you?"

Her smile was the queen's. "Both and neither. I took her form for my own purposes but she was always my creature to do with as I will. Soon all shall worship me as she has done. From the heights of heaven to the depths of Hades itself, I alone shall rule."

"You know...I'm going to have to stop you."

"Stop me?" Her laughter scraped my ears like sharp shells.

She raised her torches high, the flames leaping upward. They illuminated the throngs of spirits crowding near to her skirts. Pale shades of men and women shuffled their feet and wandered amongst one another, even passing through each other. Though the crowd was numberless, each seemed to believe he or she were all alone. They murmured ceaselessly, words of excuse, of extenuation.

“I didn’t mean it.”

“It wasn’t my fault, not really.”

“He made me so angry.”

“I had no choice.”

“I had to do it.”

Lost in their own misery, they made no move toward me. Then there was a stirring among them and two emerged, a man and a woman, their eyes reflecting Hekate’s torches as though burnished within. “Hear us, great Goddess!” they called as they pushed through the swarming dead.

Nausicaa, haughtily humble even now, with the bruises from the priestess’s lifeless hands still showing upon her throat, gazed at me with undying hatred. Eurytos stepped beside her, returned to his fully human form. The great wound I’d sliced in his chest gaped wide, as if I’d inflicted it while he was in this body, not his crab form.

“Hear us, great Goddess,” they repeated. “This man killed us. Let us take our vengeance. Make us mortal again!”

I lifted my sword, though they were dead already and presumably now impervious to sharp objects.

None of the faces of Hekate seemed pleased to see her servants again, though they had perished on her behalf. “You are useless,” she stormed. “Now you want your lives back. You, Eurytos, have already had one life restored to you. And what did you do with it? This single mortal defeated you and all your mongrel rabble. Tartarus for you!”

She threw a torch at him, even as he raised his hands in supplication. It passed over his head, spinning end over end. I watched it subscribe a turn and fly back to Hekate’s outstretched hand. When I looked to where Eurytos had stood, he was gone, banished to some farther corner of Hades.

Nausicaa instantly sank to her knees. “I had no orders, Great Mother!”

“No, but any but a fool would have seen this man is dangerous to my plans. And instead of poisoning him quietly, sending him to me to be my servant, you let him fight the dead...my dead...and win. And win!”

“Let her try again,” I said boldly. “She didn’t have a fair go the first time.”

Nausicaa’s shining eyes seemed now to have small fires of their own burning in their depths. Her fingers crooked into claws and I knew she was measuring the distance to my face. “You won’t be so cocky at the back of the line.”

“Seems to me that’s in the future for me and more of an immediate problem for you. Long line, and more joining in all the time.”

Persephone must have had time to rouse a dozen husbands by now, I would have thought. I didn’t know how much longer I could stall. What weaknesses did a Goddess have, let alone a dead woman who hated my guts?

“Come on, then,” I said, wanting to know her best angle of attack. “Or are you scared?”

“I’m dead, Eno. What can frighten me now?”

“Ask your boss.”

Nausicaa flew at me with a screech. She didn’t jump up or anything, she just propelled up and forwards, claws headed for my face. I misjudged my timing for I’d been anticipating some kind of preliminary movement. She sailed into me and right on through.

If you’ve ever eaten thick cold fat congealed on a pot of greasy soup for breakfast because you let the fire go out in the night, you know what it felt like. The way the fat sticks and clogs in your throat is the way Nausicaa passed through my chest and out my lower back. I gagged with my whole body.

Far above me, the triple-goddess laughed, harmonizing with herself. “Doomed, doomed, doomed! You are no general, Eno! I will keep you as my jester when I am Queen on Olympus, laughing as you preen yourself on your empty courage!”

“Since when,” I shouted back, “do they let hideous monsters into Olympus? With or without a jester.”

Hekate’s torches exploded into furnaces that burned not with heat but with the frigidity of her rage. “Strike again, my daughter! Squeeze his heart ‘til it bursts in your cold hands.”

Cackling with laughter like an insane pigeon, Nausicaa soared around and started toward me. As she dove, I did a snap barrel-roll forward. Nausicaa’s clammy, insubstantial skirts brushed my cheek as she passed by my head.

“Clever, clever Eno!” Hekate said, applauding. The third face chimed in late, soberly. “Not clever enough. Mortals. So weak. So brittle. What good are tools like these?” A faint shade of disgust lifted one of her lips. “Fight it out amongst yourselves. I will make use of whichever one survives.”

"Choose me, Great Goddess!" Nausicaa screamed. "I will turn all the cities of the world into temples for you. You will stand over the world with flail and whip....”

"Give it up," I told her, crouching low to prepare for her next attack. "She doesn't care about you or your promises. Pray for mercy from another God."

Nausicaa laughed bitterly. “I have blasphemed, I have been cruel when I should have been kind. I have traded love for power and now have neither. I have served one who plots to overthrow Heaven itself. To which of the Gods can I look for redemption now?”

“Nowhere,” Hekate proclaimed. “Nowhere at all.”

I’d had enough. I let the hatred and loathing I'd felt for all these works leave my heart and mind with hardly a struggle. I thought about what Phandros would do.

“Here. She can find it here. I forgive you, Nausicaa. I forgive you.”

With that word, I ran her through. Blood had not been spilled in this black land since Time was born to slay us all. Though she was a spirit, red life dripped from the end of my sword. The black sand fled from it, leaving us standing on a nothingness as deep and as limitless as that which surrounded us. The Light of Aphrodite showed me something, immeasurably far below us, that gleamed white as it moved in the depths.

Nausicaa pressed her hands tightly against the wound in her belly. “What have you done to me?” Then she was gone, even her spirit now beyond the touch of any god or goddess. I wasn't sure I'd done the right thing, but it had seemed right at the time and that's the best any mortal can do.

"Eno the Victorious!" Hekate shouted, and would have softened her voice if she could. "I'm glad you won. From the first moment we met, I had high hopes of you. You are the kind of man I need. Women are powerful but to lead an army one needs the right sort."

"Don't you get it?" I asked tiredly. "I'm never going to be working for you."

"Work for me? Am I some butcher looking for the one who stole a few sausages? Or a fool menaced by some witless beast?" She laughed and it was like a bitter roar of a volcanic avalanche. "You will join me willingly. My wishes will be yours. You who have attempted to match your puny will against mine will embrace me as consort and serve me all the days of your life...and even after."

"You know I can't do that."

"But it is foretold. You will serve the greatest goddess of them all, the one whom even the Gods themselves must serve. I am that goddess."

"Foretold? By who?"

"You know of the Gracae?"

"Sure. Three women, one eye, prophecies while you wait."

She sneered at me. "That humor of yours...they swore you would be serve the greatest Goddess who ever lived, she who rules all. So you must belong to me for that is who I am."

I felt the crushing weight of her inexorable will bearing down on me. It increased yet I still stood just as before on the black sand in the middle of nothingness. “Is something supposed to happen?” I asked after a bit.

It was morning and I opened my eyes in a bed of softest down, covered with blankets so smooth and fine I could hardly believe they were made of wool. A stirring beside me and a sweet-faced girl sat up, throwing her arms above her head with a giggle of glee. It was Minthe as I'd seen her in the marketplace, only with heavy gold ornaments around her throat and in her ears. She wore nothing else.

Then I was riding a splendid bay horse as glossy as rocks in a riverbed. My sons, five of them, rode along with me, young men so ideal as to make Skander's boys look like gammy-handed numbskulls. The eldest rode with his spear at the ready and I realized that, of course, we were going boar-hunting. I rose in my saddle to look back at the sweep of my lands below, green and fertile as the Nile valley. My white, columned house sat on a promontory, overlooking the seas, calm and blue.

Soon came the wedding and the dancing. Orange firelight flickered on rejoicing, laughing faces as my guests wove in an out in patterns half-as-old as time. The wine flowed fast. Everywhere I looked, I saw flowing bowls in one hand and handfuls of food in the other. My wife came up with a golden bowl for me. I raised it to my lips to toss off the wine, but orange things tumbled out and down the front of my best robe.

"What are these?" I demanded, hearing them crunch beneath my sandals.

"The new cook made them; aren't they delicious!" Then she was off, caught up by two of my sons into the dancing. Other women were there too, sly faces looking away as soon as I glanced at them. One wore a black veil over her head, an insult at a wedding. Something about her head was the wrong shape...or was it the firelight, the same firelight that seemed to show lips and fingers stained with that peculiarly bright shade of orange, unlike any I'd ever seen. Who had warned me against this strange food?

I set off in pursuit but the music was getting louder, the dancers more raucous, and I lost her. I stood among them as they spun around me like the heavens around the Unmoving Star. I heard a voice in my ear or did it come from within? "All this can I give you...and all this can I take from you."

I grew dizzier and dizzier until I fell down to the laughing cheers of my friends. I hit my head on a stone and heard nothing more.

When I awoke, my sword gleamed red in my hand, I felt the stickiness of dried blood upon my face and chest. My sons and all my guests were slain and I knew, beyond any doubt or question, that I myself had done all this. Like Hercules, I had murdered all those I loved in my madness. I saw Minthe standing the doorway of my shattered house, a firestorm turning the sky to red as it consumed everything I possessed. Her eyes grew huge and she fled from me, choosing to burn alive rather than die at my bloody hands.

I found myself upon my knees before Hekate, the torches she held too bright for my streaming eyes. Bowing my head to the black sand of Hades, I groveled, knowing that I had no choice but to worship Hekate as my only goddess. My defeat was absolute and I sent a prayer away begging for Aphrodite's forgiveness, though without hope that it would ever reach beyond the Pit.