Pandora Gets Lazy (15 page)

“Uhhhh,” Amri started up.

“No!” Pandy whispered. “Just wait.”

The next instant, they felt a soft, warm weight completely covering the cloak. Pandy slowly poked her head out from underneath. In the light of the distant fire, she saw hundreds of small squirrels, curled into little balls, each one holding tight to another's tail, creating a thick fur blanket. And standing on top was the attack squirrel, blinking rather forcefully, as if telling her to go to sleep.

She managed a smile, snug and warm, and let herself drift off like the boys, who were already snoring softly.

The next morning, awakened by the thwack of a sword on her leg, Pandy flung off her cloak, which jolted the boys, and quickly got to her feet. The rest of the prisoners had already finished their morning scraps and were ready to march. Eating quickly and lining up, Pandy had no idea whether to expect the squirrels' help or not. But as the line moved back onto the path and her feet were solidly hitting the ground, she knew it had been a one-time-only occurrence. She looked at the boys. Their strides seemed strong and confident.

“Thank you, Dionysus,” she said softly.

Slowly, the line made its way steadily up the mountain. In the early afternoon, they hit the first scattered patches of snow, and Pandy covered Amri with her cloak as best she could. The air was much thinner now; everyone was breathing in great heaving gulps. Soon there was nothing but a steep drop to one side and a solid wall of ice and snow to the other.

As night fell again, the path began to wind around the far, dark side of the mountain, snaking its way back and forth. The warm orange glow was not only lighting the path but also causing the snow to melt, making the last fifty meters slushy and desperately cold. With the bottom of the heavens once again fairly close above their heads, the line of freezing prisoners crested the final ridge and gazed down into what appeared to be a village or city of some sort nestled in a shallow crater on top of the mountain. The orange glow came from many fires burning bright, illuminating various structures and people bustling about.

At first glance, Pandy thought the village was rather ordinary. But the longer she looked, the faster she realized that there was nothing ordinary about it.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
On Top

The narrow path that had sloped upward for the past two days now descended, gently but quickly, along the inside rim of the mountaintop crater. The line was heading down.

All except one person.

“Go, Pandy! Go,” Amri pleaded.

The rear guard was almost upon them and Amri was pushing on her arm while Ismailil was yanking the chain that held them together. But Pandy was nearly paralyzed.

There was so much activity Pandy didn't know what to focus on first. She saw women and children rushing about, dragging heavy sacks of . . . something, or packing what looked like mud into circular shapes, or carrying huge jars of water. Other women were huddled around strange glowing domes. There were old men tending fires. There was smoke everywhere. She noticed dozens of guards and hundreds of reddish creatures posted around the entire circumference of the top ridge— as much as she could see of it in the darkness and smoke. Then she saw two enormous huts built on low platforms. Outside of one hut, a long line of prisoners waited to enter through a cloth-covered opening.

These sights made some sense to Pandy, as she was now being shoved down along the path.

What she could not comprehend, what she had willed herself to mentally ignore . . .

. . . were the columns.

Hundreds and hundreds of them everywhere—thick and brown, rising up at least twenty meters into the air, well above the highest point on the surrounding ridge.

And on top of each column was a man.

“No,” Pandy thought. “No, that isn't quite right.”

It was, to be precise, half a man.

Only the upper torso of each was visible, sticking out of the top, arms raised high, back muscles straining. Some of the men were yelling in short bursts at the top of their lungs, others were silent and red faced. Still others were hunched over, their arms hanging limply at their sides, backs crunched and misshapen. But all of them together were really doing only one thing.

Each of these men was holding up the heavens.

Pandy suddenly thought she might be quite sick.

She tried to turn away, but her curiosity got the better of her. She and the boys had been sucked through the bottom of the heavens and into the void—why weren't these men being sucked through as well? There
was
an answer, and she knew she'd find it . . . eventually.

Her group moved into the village. Pandy saw there were more columns under construction; column sections were strewn all over as groups of boys and girls, attached to ropes and pulleys, lifted ridiculously heavy column pieces onto one another. Snaking their way through the commotion, the captives passed by huge mixing pits where women stirred mud with long wooden poles while others skirted wide wells that went straight into the heart of the mountain. They crisscrossed paths with men, weeping or begging or cursing, being led in chains. They passed the strange domes, which, Pandy now saw, were actually crude ovens, slowly baking column sections over low fires. And they passed by columns everywhere. Pandy forced herself not to look up.

As their group joined the end of the long line of other prisoners, they stopped just to the side of one of the two low platforms. Although the building on it was obviously very makeshift, stones and mortar hastily slapped together, the smell gave its purpose away. This building housed the food cupboards, drainage boards, and cooking area for the village.

“Lemon rinds!”
a young female voice yelled in Greek, and Pandy's heart flipped over.

“Gods!” she muttered softly. Alcie? Was Alcie alive, here, just a single stone wall away?

She was about to call out when the speaker, a brown-skinned girl, perhaps twenty years old, left the preparation hut and hurried to a nearby well.

“He wants lemon rinds in his water!” she called back over her shoulder. “Find them!” She saw Pandy gaping at her.

“What are you looking at?” the girl asked.

Pandy quickly looked down as the girl went on her way.

No, not Alcie . . . of course not. Pandy cursed her own stupidity: they were dead, all of them . . . her two best friends, her beloved dog, and the youth who was only meant to be their guard on a short voyage. Apollo's chariot had crashed, she was certain. How lame to think she would ever see them again.

As she began to sob, biting hard on her lip to keep the boys from seeing, the line moved forward a few meters, and another group was herded into the hut on the second platform and whatever lay beyond the cloth-covered door.

The sunlight had vanished hours before: it was easily after the middle of the night. There was no letup, however, in the noise and pace of the work around them. While some workers slept in clusters on the open ground, others took their place until yet another shift change. There was never a quiet moment, Pandy saw.

None of the captives were allowed to sit down; everyone stood in place until the line moved again. The scent wafting from the food preparation hut, while not the most appetizing thing Pandy had smelled, still reminded them all how hungry they were. Soon two gray-haired women emerged from the food hut, one carrying a large wooden tray from which she tossed the prisoners scraps of meat, the other passing a water-skin down the line. Biting into her meat, Pandy realized it was mainly gristle, fat, and joint. She secretly spit it out and motioned to Amri and Ismailil to do the same (although Ismailil refused until he almost cracked a tooth on a piece of bone). Then she slyly snuck the boys handfuls of dried fruit.

Slowly the line inched forward.

An hour later, they were within three meters of the covered door and Pandy was trying to see if she could sleep standing up.

“Morpheus?” she called inside her mind. “Morpheus . . . are you there?”

“No,” came the reply.

“Oh, good. Hi. Can I just have a little dream?”

“Stop it.”

“What?”

“Stop asking. I'm not coming. Hermes told me not to help you right now,” Morpheus answered.

“Why not?”

“Because you're not supposed to be sleeping now, Pandora. You've got to be alert.”

“Just a nap?”

“No.”

“A tiny one? I'm so tired. Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease!”

“No. Can't hear you. Not listening. Lalalalalalalalala,” Morpheus began to sing.

Ismailil, who'd been slapping himself on his arms to keep from sleeping, gave Pandy a swat. Her eyes flew wide open.

“Please stay awake!” he whispered.

“Good boy!” said Morpheus, his laughter fading in Pandy's mind.

“I'm awake. I'm awake,” she said.

Amri, however, had finally given up and was out cold, propped against Pandy's hip. Throwing her arm about his little shoulder, she slumped back and found herself leaning against two huge, pinkish, fuzzy logs stacked on top of each other. She had no idea what they were and didn't much care; all she felt was soft. Even the strands of thin black fuzz protruding from all over the log, like black strings, were kinda soft.

It was the most comfortable
anything
she'd felt in weeks. She nestled in and was just letting her eyelids sag again as her fingers wound in and out of the black strings. Without thinking, she tugged on one, noticing how the substance around it moved outward as she pulled. Suddenly, she tugged the black string right out of the log.

Immediately, the log jerked back and a small red blotch appeared where the string had been.

With a muffled shriek, Pandy sprang away, still holding the string but now staring at it . . . realizing that it was a big hair and she'd been leaning against a ginormous pair of legs.

The incredibly oversized legs (and the wide hem of a man's toga) were sticking horizontally out of an opening in the hut. She'd missed seeing it at first because this larger opening was hidden by some broken and discarded sections of column. Suddenly the legs (whoever they belonged to had obviously been reclining) were drawn up and into the opening and then Pandy saw a seated figure many meters tall—too tall to really see the face, but she could easily make out the bottom of a long, swishy black beard.

She was thrown off balance as Amri was roughly shoved forward. Another group of prisoners had joined the end of the line. This time, however, there was an immediate commotion back in the food hut.

“Just let me finish this . . . soup, stew . . . whatever it is!” A woman's voice rose above the din.

“It's your turn,” called another, angrier than the first. “Water the line!”

In the distance, the side door to the hut flew open, and two women emerged: a redheaded woman with a plate of meat and a woman with a water-skin, black hair falling around her face. Beginning at the new end of the line, the woman with the meat took only minutes to reach the man now standing behind Amri. The water-skin was passed more slowly. The dark-haired woman wasn't looking at anyone, and her impatience was clear.

“Excuse me,” Pandy called as the man behind Amri finished a giant swig. “Could these boys get just a little more water?”

The woman, her back to Pandy, jutted her hip out as she slouched on one leg and shook her head.

“If I give it to them,” she said, turning to look Pandy in the eye, “then I have to give . . . oh . . . oh! Ahhhh! Amri!”

Dropping the skin, she took a giant step and scooped the little boy up in her arms.

Amri, who had been sleeping peacefully against Pandy, woke up and, at first, feeling a fresh set of arms upon him, struggled with his new captor. Then he looked the woman in the face.

“Mother!”

“Mother!” yelled Ismailil.

“My sons!” she cried, rushing to Ismailil, the three of them holding on to one another in a tight huddle, which naturally included Pandy. There was so much clamor that several of the women in the food hut gathered at the door, and prisoners in line, strangers to each other, strained for a glimpse of the commotion. Suddenly, people who didn't know the person next to them were clasping hands and smiling to one another.

After many tears and many kisses, the boys introduced Pandy.

“She saved us, Mother!” Ismailil said.

“She saved my leg!” cried Amri. “She thinks she's a snake. And she can talk to squirrels!”

Looking at the food hut, Pandy saw that the redheaded woman was moving back toward the boys' mother. Suddenly, one of the gray-haired women called out of the doorway.

“Let her be!”

“She's slacking!” the redhead spat.

“I said, let her
be
! She's found her children. That's cause enough to rejoice.”

The boys' mother stood to face Pandy.

“I'm Ghida,” she said. Then she paused, shaking slightly. “I . . . I don't know what to say.”

“It's okay. You don't have to say anything. We had fun, right guys?”

“We were in the heavens!” Ismailil said.

“We touched the stars.” Amri nodded.

“What?”
Ghida cried.

“Uh, there was, like, an accident,” Pandy said quickly. “A woman tried to escape, but believe me, your boys are fine.”

“We did something that even her gods never do!” said Amri.

“Knowing you two,” Ghida said, tenderly touching Amri's face, “I don't doubt it.”

The next instant, Pandy and the boys were yanked forward.

“Oh, no,” Ghida said. “You're going in.”

“Mother!” shouted the boys at once.

“It's all right.” Ghida kept pace with the line as it moved toward the second hut. “There's nothing to be afraid of. And I will find you . . . both of you. All right? Amri, look at me! I will come to you!”

Ghida stopped short as a guard brandished his sword in her face.