Echoes of Olympus (The Atheniad Book 1)

by Darrin Drader

  “Two blades to the back,” Heliodas replied. “I nearly died. I’m not sure how I managed to survive.”

  “Well, you know what your mother always said about you. It’s possible that she was right,” Demosthenes said.

  “Is it not possible that I healed on my own, without any additional help from the gods?” Heliodas asked.

  “Of course it’s possible,” said Demosthenes. “I’ve seen some soldiers recover from wounds that should have killed them. Bear in mind, though, that most were not so lucky.”

  “Then I’m happy to count myself among the lucky,” Heliodas said. “So tell me, how are things in Athens?”

  A distressed look came over Demosthenes’ face. “Not well,” he replied.

  “What is happening?”

  “The alliance I arranged with Macedonia has proven to be unpopular among many people. This has emboldened my rival, Diophrastus, and he’s been riling up my opposition. And then a couple weeks ago, my good friend Leotas and his entire household were senselessly slaughtered.”

  Heliodas had known Leotas. He had never been as close to the orator as Demosthenes, but he knew him to be a good man. “I’m sorry to hear that. Was his murder political?”

  “I believe Diophrastus was behind it,” Demosthenes said, “yet he has somehow managed to remain above suspicion.”

  “That’s horrible,” Heliodas said.

  “I fear that he is close to working up the support needed to unseat me from my position as General.”

  “Well, perhaps my news will turn the tide of politics back in your favor,” Heliodas said.

  “Perhaps,” Demosthenes said, though Heliodas noticed that the General did not have a smile on his face.

  With Heliodas gone, Thermiandra walked quickly to the herbalist’s stall.

  “Greetings,” said an old woman at the stall. “What sorts of herbal remedies can I get you today?”

  “I’m in need of something other than a remedy,” Thermiandra said.

  “Oh?” asked the woman, raising her eyebrows inquisitively.

  “I have a difficult situation I need some help with. There’s a man who has fallen in love with me, and he’s getting a bit… overbearing. I don’t want to hurt him, but if he should come after me, I want to be able to escape. Perhaps you have something that will put him to sleep.”

  “Ah, I understand completely! I was once a beautiful young woman myself.” Thermiandra doubted that last statement. The woman was a hag.

  “So do you have anything?” Thermiandra asked.

  “Why, I have several things. You want something that works fast, yes?”

  “The faster the better,” Thermiandra said.

  “Then what you want is this powder,” the woman said. She lifted a small clay pot and showed her a tiny amount of beige powder. “This is made from concentrated Valarian root, as well as five other herbs that will cause sleep. I’ve seen it work, and it is truly astounding. I’ve even tried it myself when I had trouble sleeping. Blow a cloud of it in his face, and he’ll be to sleep by the count of ten. Take care that you don’t breathe any of it yourself, lest you wake up next to him a few hours later.”

  “I’ll take it,” Thermiandra said. She exchanged the coin for a pouch containing the powder. “Oh, one more question,” she said before she left.

  “Yes?” asked the woman.

  “I’m actually new to Athens, but I’ve always wanted to see the old Labyrinth of Irus?”

  The old woman scowled. “Are you planning to put him to sleep, or leave him to die?”

  “I only need to delay him. Could you tell me where to find the place?”

  “Leave the polis and take the main road to the west. Walk about half a mile, then take Ambus road to the north. You’ll see it on the left. But I warn you that if you leave your unwanted suitor there, he may never be able to find his way out.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind. Thank you for everything,” said Thermiandra.

  She then walked to a clothing vendor where she spent most of her remaining coin on three new peploi, two chitons, and a new pair of sandals.

  Heliodas followed Thermiandra through the stone labyrinth. The place had existed since the Bronze Age. Despite the fact that it had stood for over a thousand years, the fifteen-foot-tall stone walls remained intact. The labyrinth formed a circular pattern around a central courtyard, or it was assumed to be central since nobody had successfully managed to map the endless twisting corridors. “Was it necessary to drag me out here?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she replied quietly. “After this there will no longer be secrets between us. I trust that we’ll be able to find our way out after we finish our conversation.” She stopped as they came upon a bench and sat down.

  Heliodas couldn’t help but feel uneasy. Ever since the night before, aboard the ship, Thermiandra had seemed distant. “So what is it?” he asked.

  “This is not easy to talk about,” she started. “I know that you guessed as much, but the truth of the matter is that I’ve deceived you.”

  With those words, Heliodas began to feel his stomach sink. “Go on,” he said.

  “I’m a monster,” she said.

  “I seriously doubt that’s true,” Heliodas said. “Why don’t you just start at the beginning?”

  “I intend to,” she said. “But let me start by saying that you are not the only one with a god’s blood in your veins.”

  Mild irritation rose in Heliodas, and he immediately thought to deny his connection to Zeus, but decided to remain silent.

  “In ancient times, right here in Athens, there was a beautiful priestess of Athena. She was dutiful, and remained chaste, rebuffing all of the advances from potential suitors. But there was one, who was no ordinary man. It was Poseidon, brother of Zeus.

  “One day, while she was praying at the Parthenon, Poseidon took the form of a man, entered Athena’s temple, and raped her. Once he had finished defiling her and left, she decried the violation and begged Athena for mercy.

  “But Athena was angry. Although a woman, she shared many of the sensibilities of the men. She sided against her priestess and placed her under a great curse. Her skin became scaly, her hair was replaced by snakes, and her body was no longer beautiful, but was transformed into that of a great serpent. Her gaze turned all who looked upon it to stone.”

  “The Medusa,” said Heliodas. He remembered Thermiandra’s battle against Khejani at the ruined temple of Apollo. It had ended with the Persian wizard being turned to stone.

  “Athena imprisoned Medusa on the island of Cisthene, where she remained for the rest of her life. However, shortly after her arrival, she gave birth to a girl, whom she named Rana. To protect her from being turned to stone, Medusa fit the child with a blindfold. By all appearances, Rana was a normal child. She was not scaly, nor did she have the hair and body of a snake. Medusa loved the child, but she knew that she could never raise her without inadvertently turning her to stone. So she crafted for her a boat, penned her tale upon a scroll, and entrusted her fate to her father Poseidon, god of the sea, and cast the child into the ocean.

  “Eventually Perseus, son of Zeus… your half-brother,” she said, looking at Heliodas, “sought Medusa out and murdered her. He took her head and used it against his mother’s unwanted suitor, who was trying to force her into a marriage she didn’t want. He turned the man to stone, freeing his mother from her engagement, and legend tells that he eventually went on to found the once great polis of Mycenae, which dominated the known world during the Bronze Age.

  “Long before Medusa met her fate, Rana drifted on the ocean and was picked up by a fishing boat. The fisherman couldn’t read the note, but he decided to take the child in and raise her as his own. He gave her the best upbringing that he could, and eventually married her to the son of another fisherman when she came of age.

  “They made love that night, and when she woke up in the morning, she found only a statue that matched his appearance. She was terrified, for though she sti
ll possessed the scroll originally penned by Medusa, she had not read it and did not know what she was. The villagers accused her of being a monster and drove her away. Months later, she gave birth to a daughter.

  “So the cycle continued for ages, generation after generation. The scroll was eventually read, so they knew what was going to happen before they met the right man, but the overwhelming urge to fall in love and have children always won out, at the expense of their man’s life.

  “This cycle has remained unbroken, until now… until me,” Thermiandra said. “Athena appeared to me in the dream I told you about. But there was more, which came to me slowly after I had left my father’s palace. I would hear her voice from time to time, offering guidance. She has offered to lift my curse.”

  “But that’s great news!” Heliodas said.

  “So you believe me?” Thermiandra asked.

  Heliodas laughed. “I’ve been living my entire life with people telling me that I’m the son of Zeus. I’ve witnessed you turn a man to stone. How could I possibly disbelieve your story?”

  “I’m relieved to hear that,” said Thermiandra. “And I want you to know that against my better judgment, I have fallen very much in love with you.”

  Heliodas’ heart lifted immediately. He reached out and touched her cheek, then drew in for a kiss. Despite his acceptance, Thermiandra pulled back.

  “There’s more, isn’t there?” Heliodas asked.

  Thermiandra nodded. “Athena is angry with Athens. I don’t know why, but she made it clear to me that she wants this polis to suffer.”

  “So what does she want you to do?” Heliodas asked.

  “She was right to have me seek you out, because you were able to get me here. I must to go to the procession to the Parthenon tomorrow morning. She will cause me to take on the appearance of Medusa one last time while I face the temple and the top orators of the polis,” she said.

  Panic suddenly welled up inside Heliodas. “Demosthenes will be at the procession. You can’t do this!”

  “I don’t have a choice. I have to end Athena’s curse!”

  “You could refuse,” Heliodas said.

  “I could, but then I’d never be free to love a man… to love you.”

  “If you do this, I will never be able to return your love,” Heliodas said.

  “I know,” Thermiandra said sadly. “I’m not worthy of your love.”

  “There has to be another way,” Heliodas said.

  “I wish there were,” Thermiandra said, her voice overcome with emotion. She turned from him and pulled something out from beneath her peplos.

  “Do you know what Athens has done to anger Athena?” Heliodas asked.

  “She didn’t tell me.”

  “So I should just accept that Athens somehow deserves this fate and allow it to happen,” Heliodas said.

  “No, you don’t have to. I’ve spared you from that responsibility.”

  Heliodas looked at her in confusion.

  Thermiandra turned to him, and he noticed that there was a small pile of powder in her hand. “I am truly sorry,” she said. As he inhaled, she blew the pile of dust in his face.

  Heliodas stopped breathing when she did that, but he could already feel the powder in his nose, his mouth, and his lungs. It itched, and he coughed a couple times. He looked up, only to find that his vision was suddenly swimming and unsteady. “What have you done?” he asked. To him, his own voice sounded somehow hollow, as though it echoed. He was having a hard time keeping his eyes open.

  Heliodas blinked, a couple times, trying to keep sleep from taking him. He could swear that she just called him her love. That felt right to him. With that thought, he fell forward. Thermiandra caught him, stopping him from injuring himself in the fall, and gently lowered him to the ground.

  “Sleep well, my love. I’m so sorry.”

  Chapter 20

  The Procession

  Thermiandra ran through the labyrinth. She understood that the great flaw of her plan was that in order to trap Heliodas in this place, she would have to find her way out herself. She had hoped to find a map, but she’d lacked the time, and she wasn’t certain that the place had ever been properly mapped anyway. What she did know was that despite its age, it was known to be one of the most difficult labyrinths to navigate in all of Greece, and that if she could manage to escape in time, the odds were against Heliodas doing the same, at least for a few days.

  She had already wandered from dead end to dead end. The night had long since fallen and she was becoming uncertain. Perhaps this was not the best plan. The problem was that she could think of no other one that didn’t involve harming Heliodas, and that was not something she could bring herself to do, regardless of the stakes.

  She stopped for a moment and looked up. There were a few clouds in the sky above, but the moon shone down on her, bathing the entire area in pale light. It was just barely enough to see by. Perhaps if she climbed the wall, she might be able to see the layout and find a route that would lead out of this place.

  The wall was constructed of large stones that were held together with mortar. Given this method of construction, she wondered why the wall still stood at all. Perhaps it had to do with the dry climate of Athens, she mused. In any case, she had taught herself how to climb sheer rocks many years ago, and there were abundant hand and footholds on this wall.

  She reached up and found a pair of fairly large stones protruding from the wall – enough to give her something to hold on to. She grabbed on and lifted herself until her toes found a foothold below. She cautiously raised a hand up the wall by about a foot, found another handhold, and pulled herself up a little more. She repeated the process, nearly losing a foothold when the mortar holding one of the rocks in place crumbled beneath her. After recovering from that misstep, she continued on until she reached the top.

  It was there that she realized that this was not going to be as easy as she’d imagined. The wall was about a foot wide, which was plenty of room for her. Unfortunately, what looked like a flat surface from below was really a steeply angled peak, making it impossible to simply walk along the top. Instead, she needed to match the angle with her feet while applying pressure on them with her legs, and then creep ahead.

  As she found her balance, she looked out over the acres of stone labyrinth… and began to despair. Based on the broken shadowy plane she saw laid out before her, she still had a couple hundred feet to go before she would make it to the nearest edge. The angled top of the walls prevented her from gaining enough momentum to jump over the walkways between the walls to reach the nearest edge.

  She realized that she had two options. The first was to continue trying to find the way out by walking through the corridors. The second was to climb the walls, one at a time toward the nearest edge of the labyrinth. Both would be time consuming, but she realized that climbing over the walls was the only sure way of escape.

  Sunlight and the morning dew woke Heliodas. He looked up at a cloudless blue sky. Already, he could tell that this was going to be a hot day. He had not changed from the day before, so he still wore his bronze cuirass and carried his sword – not that they would do him a lot of good in his current predicament.

  Memories of the day before flooded back to him… the walk through the labyrinth, Thermiandra’s story, the threat that she posed to the polis, and ultimately her betrayal. It was the last bit that felt like a kick to the gut.

  The one bright side to this all was that despite the fact that he’d spent the night in his armor on the hard ground, Heliodas had slept well and now felt oddly refreshed. Unlike his time aboard Hermes’ Arrow, he had slept for more than a couple of hours at a time, and he had not been forced to row for hours on end. He felt good with rest.

  Despite that, his current situation was causing him some unease. He had never been to the Labyrinth of Irus. Growing up, he’d heard of it as a place best avoided. Sometimes lovers would come here and wander around lost for days. He’d also heard stories of peo
ple coming in and being stalked by large predators with a taste for human flesh, such as pumas, and wolves.

  Heliodas hadn’t questioned Thermiandra’s motivations when she’d led him in here, he realized. So intent had he been on finally learning her secret that he hadn’t given a thought about his own safety. That had been an obvious mistake. No doubt she knew something he didn’t about finding her way out, which left him in a difficult position.

  Heliodas climbed to his feet and set about the task of navigating out of this immense maze. It would not be an easy task, to be sure. Even all of these centuries after it had been constructed, the walkways still looked so similar, and so uniform, that it was impossible to tell one from the next. Each was gently curving, with breaks in the walls that connected parallel passages, and a few open rest points and dead ends.

  Time seemed to pass quickly. No doubt the Procession at the Parthenon had already begun. He hoped that there was some way that he could leave this place in time to stop what was sure to be a tragedy on a grand scale.

  Thermiandra carried the small clay plate filled with grains and herbs. Her feet were bare. Despite the fact that she had finally managed to escape the labyrinth just before dawn, she still found herself far back in the line. The priests were already at the Parthenon accepting people’s offerings to Athena, but the line was moving slowly. She stood on the road at the base of the Acropolis along with so many others. The trail of people led up the massive rocky hill near the center of Athens, atop which the Parthenon stood.

  The people in front of and behind her engaged in little conversation. Instead, they intoned prayers to the goddess. Thermiandra kept her mouth closed and her eyes cast down. She did not share their devotion to the goddess who had taken so much from her and left her with so little. The god she prayed to was Hermes, the god of the road, hospitality, thievery, and other things.

  Thermiandra knew that Athena was known as the goddess of wisdom and war, but neither she nor her ancestors had been shown any measure of kindness from her. Athena could have ended the curse that affected her family generations ago rather than making her pay for the perceived slight of Medusa. Or, more appropriately, she could have realized that Medusa had been no match for Poseidon, and not unjustly punished her in the first place. She’d heard speculation that the reason for her extreme punishment was that Medusa had been more beautiful than Athena, and that the goddess had cursed her out of jealousy.