Pandora Gets Lazy (2 page)
The throb of the pulse now far behind them, the stallions were racing noses down, parallel with the black wall, on a collision course with the ground. Their legs moving so fast that the wind they created snapped the reins right out of Homer's hands, causing them to lash and flick wildly in the airâdeadly whips, one of which grazed him on the forehead.
“Get down!” cried Homer.
Iole was already tangled on top of Alcie when she felt Homer's cloak cover the both of them, blocking out the light as he crouched over them. Sparks from the sun were somehow finding their way into the chariot and were starting to burn little holes in the fabric of the cloak. Iole caught a glimpse of Alcie's face in the darkness, under her curly hair. She was staring straight at Iole, eyes wide, her face perfectly still.
All of a sudden, they were shoved farther back toward the opening, as if they were being forced to make room for something new in the chariot. Homer gave a loud groan as he was squeezed between Alcie, Iole, and what felt like two large pillars that had materialized out of thin air.
Lifting the cloak from his eyes, Homer's gaze traveled up two immense legs, over the torso, and right up into the eyes of Apollo.
“Whistle?” the god asked calmly.
Homer, realizing the tiny silver whistle was still clutched in his hand, slowly extended his arm. Alcie and Iole pulled the cloak away from their faces and peered up at the Sun God.
“Thank you so much,” Apollo said. “And now . . .”
He instantaneously caught both reins and blew the whistle. Immediately the horses slowed and leveled off, maintaining a calmer pace.
For a few seconds, Homer, Alcie, and Iole just looked at one another.
“Oh, come now,” Apollo's voice bellowed above them, “stand if you will. There is nothing more to fear.”
Cautiously, the three got to their feet. Alcie saw it first.
“Tangerines!”
The ground was so close that Iole could have leaned out the back of the chariot and touched it with her fingers. If Apollo had delayed one second more, they would have been dashed to smithereens!
“Cutting it pretty close!” Alcie snapped. Then she immediately slapped her hand over her mouth. “I meanâthank you so, so much!”
“Did you really think I would let anything happen?” Apollo asked. “Not that anything could actually damage the chariot. It's impervious to bumps, scratches, and crashing from great heights.”
“Well, that's reassuringâ,” Iole began.
“Of course, you three would have died a horrible death,” Apollo went on, “but the chariot would have been fine. Just wasn't so certain about the horses.”
“As Alcie said, O God of Truth, we thank you so much,” Iole answered.
“As for you, my fine youth”âApollo turned to Homerâ“nicely done, if I do say so myself. Except for this last little bit where you let them get completely away from youâ”
“
Let
them?” Alcie yelped.
Iole kicked her.
Apollo ignored them both, continuing, “âI'd say it was a first-rate job. A thrill, yes? One for the books?”
“Yes, great Apollo,” Homer said.
“Here, you took them up, you bring them down,” Apollo said, offering the reins back to Homer.
“Uh . . .” Homer balked.
“There's nothing like it, my boy. Feeling the touchdown of the wheels upon the earth, feeling the steeds come to rest. And this chance will not pass your way again.”
Homer took the reins and the whistle and, pulling back ever so slightly, brought the mighty chariot down with not a bump, skip, or jostle, on a small stretch of beach between the filmy black wall running far away to the west and the Mediterranean Sea to the northeast. Off in the distance, perhaps twenty or so kilometers, they could see another landmass rising out of the water.
“Bravo!” Apollo cried. “Worthy of me. Almost. All right, everyone out!”
At once, they heard the sizzle and crackle as the sun, now on the ground, began turning the earth around it to molten lava.
Homer practically threw Alcie out of the chariot and clear of the lava pool and he was just about to toss Iole when she hesitated and turned to Apollo.
“Please, sir. You are the God of Truth. I'm begging you . . . Where is PandyâPandora?”
“I'd hurry, if I were you,” Apollo said with a smile.
Leaping out of the chariot after Iole, Homer raced with the others toward the ocean as the lava pool began to widen. Alcie turned back to Apollo just as he was about to blow his whistle.
“Pleaseâplease! What happened to Pandy? Did she survive the . . . ?”
“I wouldn't worry about that at the moment. In about three minutes, you'll have a more immediate and serious problem to deal with. You might want to prepare. Run away, or something. I don't know what you humans do in a case like this. Farewell!”
With that, he snapped the reins and blew the whistle and the golden chariot lifted effortlessly into the air, carrying the sun back into the heavens. The circle of molten earth quickly began to slow its widening, the outer edges turning from glowing red to a toasted dark brown.
“They just leave us!” Alcie said, rushing back to the others. “Dolphins. Gods. They just toss off mysterious things that make us go âHuh?' and âWhat?' and then they're gone! We don't even know where we are. What's coming in three minutes?”
“Two and a half now,” said Iole.
“Iole, we've got to find Pandy!” Alcie's voice was rising into a shriek.
“I know and we will, but Apollo himself just gave us a warning. We've got to pay attention! We can't do anything without her, and we'll be no good to her if we're dead. Just calm down a little.”
“
You
be calm when
your
best friend is probablyâ”
“I don't know what happened to
my
best friendâ”
“Both of you stop. Gods, is this what girls do? You're, like,
all
best friends, so knock it off, okay? Let's go,” said Homer, moving away to the west.
“Why that way?” Iole asked defiantly.
“Because I'm guessing we're on the African continent, probably Mauretania, and those four or five peaks to our left are part of the Pillars of Hercules. It's one big rock Hercules supposedly split into two. There's one pillar across the strait in Espania and one here, and even if I could climb them, you two probably couldn't. There are smaller hills and dunes this way where we can hide from whatever or whoever. There's a huge black wall in front of us and there's, like, the biggest ship I've ever seen about two hundred meters out in the water.”
“Oh,” Iole said, looking out to sea, “that's why.”
“Nice job, Homie,” Alcie said, very matter-of-factly, as she and Iole hurried to keep pace as the three of them skirted the huge lava pool.
“Homie?”
Iole's voice was up about an octave. “Who's
Homie
?”
“Shhhhh!” Homer whispered as he started up the side of a large dune. Suddenly he stopped and looked back at them.
“Iole, spread your cloak out to your sides.”
Iole cocked her head to one side, looked at her cloak, looked at the groundâthen flung her arms wide.
Alcie clenched her hands.
“I so hate it when I don't know what's going on!”
“My cloak is the closest to the color of the sand. If they're looking from the ship, they'll have a harder time seeing us if we hide under it. Come on!”
The three moved slowly up the dune, with Alcie clinging tightly to Iole so most of Iole's cloak could be used to shield Homer's substantial mass. They were almost to the crest, their heads bent low, their eyes on the ground, and their voices stilled.
Alcie dared to break the silence.
“Well,” she whispered, “it's been over three minutes and nothing. I think we're probably safeâ”
An enormous array of spearheads, some black with dried blood, some still red and shiny, were suddenly thrust under their noses, the tips pointing directly toward their hearts.
The first thing Pandy thought, even though she was still in that first dozy stage of waking up, was that she'd had quite enough of falling from great heights for the time being, thank you very much. Dropping through the desert floor into the Chamber of Despair in Egypt, terrified into thinking she was plummeting to her death when she woke on Olympus . . . it was all just too much. And now this: flung out of Apollo's chariot thousands of kilometers above the earth, her friends screaming after her. At least, she now thought, she'd had the good sense to pass out before she'd been smashed to pieces.
But if she'd been broken into five million bits, why was she able to wiggle her toes? And her fingers? And why was she able to feel prickles all over her body?
Opening her eyes, she saw dark, feathery objects directly overhead, and beyond that, the clear, deep blue sky. She slowly realized she was staring at the topmost branches of an enormous pine tree and she was lying, cradled actually, in one of its larger boughs. Pandy turned her head slightly and peered through the clusters of pine needles and cones. The ground was at least one hundred meters below.
“Oh, great,” she thought, “another fall.”
But before she had a chance to see if there might be a way to climb down, the branch began rolling slowly to her left. Panic took over . . . as the branch was obviously dumping her . . . and Pandy began clawing frantically at needles, pinecones, and short twigsâanything! Everything she grabbed at moved itself swiftly out of her reach except for two new shoots of tiny needles. Desperately, Pandy grasped these with all her strength so that when the branch was almost completely overturned, she was simply hanging in midair underneath. Suddenly the branch lifted up and gave a gentle shake, weakening Pandy's grip and jiggling her loose. With a shriek she dropped off of the branch . . .
And onto the branch below.
The new branch bounced for a bit with her added weight, settled for a moment, and then rolled slowly to the left. Instinctively, Pandy grabbed at anything within reach, but this time, the needles pricked her fingers and the larger twigs rapped her knuckles, batting her hand away. Astonished, she slid awkwardly off the new branch and onto the one below that.
Rolling branch after branch in a descending spiral, the giant tree lowered her to the ground. Toward the end Pandy, who had completely subdued her instinct to grab hold of anything, was experimenting with different sliding and dropping positions: curled up like a ball (her water-skin and carrying pouch in her arms), lying flat with her arms folded in front like a mummy, or holding her arms to her sides and rolling like the chicken legs Sabina would fry in olive oil back home. She had almost perfected the best move (lying on her side, legs tucked, arms folded, which meant she was getting almost no needles sticking to her) when she was deposited, very delicately, on the ground. She stood immediately and faced the pine, aware that, although she was in a part of the world she knew nothing about, it could easily be inhabited by dryads or that the tree could be a conscious or enchanted thing.
“Thank you,” she said loudly.
There was only the rustling of the wind in the branches for an answer.
Pandy turned to survey her surroundings. She was on top of a large, rocky rise ringed by mountains and hills on all sides; she could see a single road winding its way around the base of the hills off in the distance. Although she was standing in the middle of a flat, barren clearing between several trees, when she inched her way over to the edge she was stunned to see a sharp drop of nearly two hundred meters. It wasn't quite straight down, but it was severe enough that Pandy knew she could never attempt the descent. Walking around the edge of what was, apparently, a large flat spire of rock, she could see only scrubby, uninviting brush dotted with an occasional olive tree clinging desperately to the side. There was no road or walking path off the spire: no way down . . . period. And there were no signs of life in any direction: no smoke from a cooking fire, no dust from a chariot on the road winding through the mountains, no temple pillar rising into the sky. What she did notice, however, to her left, was a darkening of the sky, and it became darker the farther west she looked. She realized it was the same filmy black wall they'd seen while riding the Sun Chariot. But other than that, she saw nothing to get to and, more importantly, no way to get there.
Where were Alcie, Iole, and Homer? Had they survived the chariot ride? Were they hurt? Alive? If so, they were probably frantic with worry.
Without warning, something hit her on top of her head. Instinctively she reached up, but whatever it was had fallen to the ground. She continued to scan the hill for a way down to the road. Something else hit her head, this time with a little more force. She looked into the sky. Nothing. Staring at the ground she saw two little pine nuts lying side by side in the dark brown earth. Another hit her on top of her head and fell alongside the other two.
“I
said
thank you!” she cried to the pine tree. “Was I supposed to do something . . . ?”
Before she'd even finished her question, she watched in amazement as every branch on the tree began to quiver. Suddenly, Pandy was caught in a downpour of fresh white pine nuts. They rained so hard and so fast that Pandy could only throw her arms over her head for protection. A few seconds later, when the deluge stopped, she was rooted where she stood, knee-deep in a huge mound of nuts. As she tried to step out, every nut on the ground instantly scurried away to form another large pile.
Pandy, unsure of what to do, kept looking from the tree to the pile and back again.
“Okaaay,” she finally said.
Immediately, the pile began to re-form itself. Nuts moving alone or in little groups, left, right, up, and down, stacking themselves on top of each other, forming little shapes that would unite with other little shapes, some balancing precariously on others, until they formed a single recognizable word: