‘So you were right,’ she said, with an easy smile. ‘Men can bathe themselves.’
He grinned and gave a shrug.
‘You look as beautiful as ever,’ he said, sparing her a longer look. ‘More so.’
While the broth had simmered, she had slipped up to her room to change into a clean white dress. She had also tied her hair in a tail behind her head, painted her lips and drawn black lines around her eyes. Despite her haste, the reflection in her polished bronze mirror had been pleasing.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I thought perhaps we might eat outside tonight. It’s a warm evening and I’ve lit some lamps.’
He nodded and took a bowl from the table, filling it with broth from the cauldron and handing it to her. Pouring another bowl for himself, he picked up a basket of bread and went outside. She followed him to the large table where she had already put a bowl of wine and a pair of cups. Two clay lamps had been lit at either end and gave off a warm, flickering glow. Iolaus lowered himself into one of the chairs and looked up at the stars, which were clustered thickly overhead.
‘Do you forgive me for earlier?’ she asked, sitting beside him.
The wine had relaxed her nerves, and she laid her hand on his.
‘I’m the one who should be asking for forgiveness,’ he replied. ‘You offered me a kindness and I rejected it, all because I was afraid—’
He hesitated.
‘Afraid of what?’ she urged.
He shook his head and dipped a cup in the bowl of wine, placing it on the table before her. He filled another and took a long draught.
‘Afraid of what, Iolaus? We’re still friends, aren’t we?’
‘Eat some broth,’ he said.
His voice was colder, sparking her anger.
‘I don’t want the broth!’
‘I was afraid of what I might do!’ he snapped back, rising from his chair. There was a passion in his eyes that seemed to bore into her. ‘You’re a beautiful woman, Megara. You were beautiful the first moment I laid eyes on you. I was just a boy then, but I’m not any more. I’m a man, with a man’s duties, and a man’s desires. These weeks I’ve spent with you have been wonderful and terrible. Just to be alone with you, to look at you and speak with you, to have you all to myself – and yet unable to look at you like I want to, or say the things that are in my heart, or do the things I want to do. Do you know how hard it is for me to forget that night in Themiscyra, or how difficult it was to resist earlier, when you offered to bathe me? I want to indulge every desire, every feeling, but I can’t. Heracles is your husband, not me. All I am is his nephew and his squire, and I love him with all my heart. But… but I love you more.’
She stood and looked at him. Her heart was beating fast and her thoughts were confused. But the wine had stirred the passion in her veins. She reached out and ran her fingers through the back of his hair. Then she drew his face to hers.
His lips were warm and his beard soft. She felt the hard muscles of his chest against her breasts as he laid his hand in the small of her back and pulled her body gently into his. The smell of his skin and hair filled her senses and she could taste the wine on his tongue as their mouths opened.
She put her hand on his arm and pushed him away. His face was pale and handsome in the starlight and she knew she wanted him. But he was right – for all that had happened between them, Heracles was still her husband. She could not yield to her desire for Iolaus. Tears flooded into her eyes.
‘You should go,’ she said. ‘Heracles charged you with keeping me safe, but this isn’t protecting me. It’s destroying me.’
‘And it’ll destroy us both if we ignore it. I never meant to betray him – the gods know how hard I’ve fought against this. But I love you, Megara, and you love me. I can see it in your eyes as you look at me now.’
‘No!’ she said. ‘You’re wrong. I don’t love you. It’s… it’s all a mistake. You can’t stay here any more. You must go back to Thebes – I’ll be safe here with Aithre and Lampos. Or I can find somewhere else. But I can’t let this happen, Iolaus. Don’t you understand? He’ll kill you. I can’t bear to lose anyone else.’
Iolaus reached a hand towards her, but she pulled herself away.
‘Go!’ she said.
Then she turned and ran back into the house, stumbling through the dark corridors and up the stairs to throw herself on her bed.
Chapter Six
GERYON
A day and a night after passing between the headlands that marked the ends of the earth, the helmsman sighted land. Heracles leaned against the prow and squinted against the incessant rain that had marked this final stretch of the voyage. After a while, he thought he saw a sliver of black sandwiched between the restless, white-capped seas and the dark-grey clouds above. With the wind full behind the straining sail, the sliver soon became an island of low mountains and rolling green swards, hemmed around by high cliffs and jagged rocks, against which the waves expended themselves in soaring plumes of white spray.
The galley had to beat its way around half the circumference of Erytheia before a safe enough harbour could be found. Manning the oars, the crew rowed the ship into a shallow bay nestled between two horns of black rock. The wind here was not as fierce, though the rain was no less heavy or depressing. After the anchor stones were thrown overboard, Heracles ordered the small boat to be lowered into the water. Two sailors ferried him to the beach, where he jumped out and made his way up the shingle.
A path led to a fold between two cliffs. Reaching the top, he glanced back at the small figures on the galley below, then followed the trail westwards through meadows of thick grass. Evening was descending rapidly now, and what little sunlight had penetrated the thick ceiling of cloud began to fade rapidly. Levelling his hand over his eyes to protect from the lashing rain, he saw a landscape of open plains leading up to the bare skirts of a ridge of mountains. There were no woods to break the monotony of the view, and what few trees there were were wind-bowed and twisted. Of man’s presence, the only sign was the path that he was on, though who had made it or where it led, he did not know.
He followed it towards the mountains, straining his ears against the wind for the sound of cattle lowing in the distance. But he heard nothing. Then, as the last of the light was disappearing and he was at risk of losing the track, a flash of lightning lit up the darkness ahead of him. Jagged fingers of white stabbed at the horizon and were gone. Moments later, thunder rumbled from the black clouds, low at first but building rapidly to end with an enormous crash that exploded across the skies. Even Heracles felt an instinctive flicker of fear. Seeing the mountain peaks to his left, he decided to leave the track and look for shelter.
The grass was thick and boggy, and proved treacherous in the dark. The flashes of lightning ripped through the darkness with growing rapidity, the booms of thunder following ever quicker on their heels. Then he saw a wall of stone in a ridge ahead of him, and half hidden among its gleaming crags, the deeper blackness of a cave. He headed towards it, almost falling into a stream that opened up before him, though the water barely reached to his shins as he waded through it. Moments later, he stumbled into the cave, his every garment drenched, just as another blaze of lightning lit up the darkness. It was followed by a piercing crack and a rolling bang. The deafening report echoed through the clouds above, and Heracles leaned back against the wall of the cave, his fingers gripping the stone with an involuntary desire to ground himself against something solid.
The lightning had shown the cave to be wide at the entrance, but narrowing rapidly to a point several paces in. A second flash revealed nothing but stone. Taking off his bow and quiver, Heracles wrapped his wet lion skin about himself and curled up on the floor to sleep.
He awoke to a dull light on his eyelids and the fizzle of rain in his ears. The smell of damp earth and wet stone lifted his nostrils, and a moment later his eyes flickered open. The cave was in shadow, though a pale gleam filtered in from the low arch of the entrance
. His limbs were cold and stiff, and it was an effort to push himself up onto his elbow. The lion skin and his tunic were still damp, despite the heat his body had generated through the night. Reaching into his satchel, he pulled out a piece of soggy bread and a length of dried pork that had softened with the wet. The bread crumbled in his fingers, forcing him to catch the pieces and lower his mouth to his cupped hands to eat them. The pork added taste to an otherwise flavourless breakfast.
He stood and walked to the end of the cave, where he pulled up his tunic and urinated. Then he heard a noise. Finishing quickly, he moved to the entrance and listened. For a while, he could hear nothing beyond the unremitting downpour. And then he heard it again. The distant sound of barking.
Strapping his quiver over his shoulder and picking up his bow, he returned to the mouth of the cave and looked out. Rain fell in grey billows from the dense clouds above, obscuring a landscape of rolling grassland, with green-sided mountains in the distance and low hillocks between. The stream he had crossed the evening before was a spear’s throw away, cutting a channel through the coarse, pale-green grass as it followed the slope towards the coast. He could just make out the slate-coloured sea in the distance to his left.
This was the direction the barking was coming from, but as he squinted against the rain, he could see nothing of the dog or its owner. He recalled Charis’s words, that the cattle of Geryon were shepherded by a son of Ares, whose hound came from the same litter as Cerberus, the three-headed guardian of the Underworld. Selecting one of the arrows tipped with the poisonous blood of the Hydra, he fitted it to his bow and moved out from the cover of the cave.
He reached the stream – nothing more than an ankle-deep trickle of rusty brown water – and followed it towards the coast. Though shallow, it had cut a deep enough channel for him to move virtually unseen across the plain, the tussocks of tall grass on either side and his black lion skin camouflaging him from unwelcome eyes. The rain hissing in the water and the surrounding grass made it difficult for him to hear any other sounds, but the barking of the dog remained clear, and was growing in volume.
A second beck joined the first, widening its course. Raising his head, he saw a rocky hillock and a few hunched trees a little way ahead of him. And then he heard the lowing of cattle, still some distance away. Gripping his bow more tightly, he continued cautiously along the bed of the stream.
The lowing became louder and more constant, mingling with the rush of falling water. Then he heard voices. One belonged to a child; the other was only a little deeper in tone, reminding him of Iolaus. He paused, wishing his nephew were there with him in that drab and lonely place. Strange, he thought, how he had come to rely on the encouragement of Iolaus’s comradeship. He regretted not sending for him before he had left for Erytheia. With Copreus dead, Megara would have been safe enough in her father’s palace. But something had deterred him.
He crept forward, placing one foot carefully before the other and raising his head occasionally to look for the cattle. Then the stream bent to the right and flowed over a shelf of rock a little way ahead. The rush of water was louder now, and he heard the dog bark again, the sound echoing off the walls of the unseen gorge below.
Leaving the stream, he ran at a stoop across the grass, throwing himself down before he reached the edge and crawling the last stretch. Peering over the lip, he saw a narrow, steep-sided channel running in a meandering line from the mountains to the sea. The stream he had been following gushed over a jutting verge to land in a circular pool below, itself sloshing down into the wider river that had created the gorge. The river was not deep, and was edged by stony banks that were overgrown with thick vegetation. A large herd of fat, red-coated cattle – thirty or forty strong – stood along the banks or hock-deep in the water, mooing forlornly in the pouring rain. They had long, straight horns that thrust out sideways from the tops of their skulls. Each was longer than Heracles’s arm, though the animals seemed docile enough as they drank from the water or chewed at the thick grass.
The dog was nowhere to be seen, but sheltering from the rain beneath a large overhang of rock were two youths. One was a boy of around ten, the other a young man. Both wore plain woollen tunics with fleece jerkins and fur boots. While the younger of the two carried a long stick, the older had a short sword in his belt and two spears propped against the rock wall beside him. Both had ponies, which were chewing at the grass alongside the cattle. There was no sign of the giant, Geryon, and Heracles realized he would only need to disarm the two cowherds to be able to take the cattle from them and drive them to the waiting galley.
He crawled away from the edge, then stood and followed the course of the gorge back towards the mountains. A little further on, it bent to the left. Kneeling, he glanced down at the drop – sheer enough for him to break his neck if he fell – then eased himself over and began to descend. The stone was treacherously wet and in the driving rain it was difficult to see where he was putting his hands or feet, having to judge most of the holds by feel alone. Halfway down, his foot slipped, gashing his shin on an outcrop of rock. With the shock of the pain, his other leg lost its grip also, and for a precarious moment he hung by a single handhold over the ravine. Throwing up his other arm, he groped blindly until he found a nook for his fingers to seize hold of. With the wind howling between the rocky crags and the rain still lashing the side of his face, he held on desperately until first one foot, then the other, found toeholds to take his weight. Then he continued downwards as carefully as his need for haste would allow, hugging the rock face until he saw the floor of the gorge a short drop beneath him.
He jumped down onto it, then sprang to his feet and ran to the bend in the ravine. Glancing around it, he saw the cattle crowded along the edges a little way off. To the left was the overhang of rock that the two youths were sheltering under. Readying an arrow in his bow, he crossed the river – the water rising almost to his waist – and climbed the opposite bank.
He approached the overhang, staying close to the cliff face and walking slowly to avoid startling the animals. But as he came closer to the rearmost of the herd, they turned their heads towards him and began a loud, frightened lowing. The nearest started at his presence and began to move away from him, jostling the others into the river. Within moments, a number of the herd were running from him in a panic. The boy ran out from beneath the overhang, waving his hands over his head and trying to stop the dull beasts from stampeding. Then he caught sight of Heracles out of the corner of his eye. Dropping his arms, he stared at him with a look of dumbfounded surprise on his face. Then his confusion left him.
‘Eurytion!’ he shouted. ‘Eurytion, there’s a man in the gorge. He’s armed.’
The young man appeared a moment later, his spears clutched in his hand. Putting two fingers into the corners of his mouth, he let out a piercing whistle that echoed from the walls of the gorge.
‘Menoetes, ride back to Geryon and bring him here,’ he ordered the boy. ‘Quickly!’
Heracles raised his bow and took aim at the herdsman.
‘Stay where you are, both of you. The gods have ordered me to take your master’s cattle, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me. Stand aside and don’t oblige me to kill you.’
Eurytion whistled again, and this time there was a corresponding bark from the gorge behind them. At the same time, Menoetes sprang onto his pony’s back, digging his bare heels into its flanks. The animal whinnied and leaped forward with a start. Heracles aimed at the boy’s back, and immediately thought of his own sons. With a loud curse, he lowered the arrow at the hindquarters of his mount as it pushed its way into the crowd of startled cattle. In his moment of indecision, Eurytion raised a spear above his shoulder and launched it with a shout. Heracles’s arrow flew from the string and in the same moment he tried to twist away from the path of the spear. He heard the bellow of an animal, followed by a loud splash, and then Eurytion’s javelin thumped into his hip with the force of a blacksmith’s hammer, springing ba
ck from the impenetrable hide of the Nemean Lion but knocking him into the river.
He was sucked down by his great bulk. As he sank, holding on to what little breath was left in his lungs, he could see the surface of the river churning above him. Then he hit the stony bed below, and, scrambling for a grip on the slimy rocks, pushed himself back up. He burst free from the icy water, gasping for air and wiping the water from his eyes. The cattle were bellowing with fear as they stampeded away from the body of one of the herd, which lay in the river with Heracles’s arrow protruding from its hind leg.
Eurytion whistled a third time, and was answered by a loud bark. Heracles looked for his bow below the surface of the river, but it was too late. A monstrous white dog appeared on the bank opposite its master. It was as large as the herdsman’s pony, with two oversized heads that regarded Heracles with furious hatred. It gave a growl and ran along the bank, plunging into the river as it came level with him. Slipping the knot on his club, he tore it from his belt and turned to face the creature.
The dog was upon him before he could land a blow. He raised his left arm across his face and it sank a set of jaws into his forearm, causing him to cry out with the shock of the pain. The other head drove at his face, its teeth snapping just short as he instinctively pulled away. The weight of its attack threw him back into the river, pulling the dog on top of him. His spine and ribs jarred against the rocks below, forcing the air from his lungs in a line of bubbles that swirled among the trails of blood from his wounded arm.
Releasing his club, he seized hold of the dog’s other head, gripping the folds of loose fur around its throat and pushing it back. Its strength was incredible, and all the time its teeth were driving deeper into the dense muscle of his forearm, sending barbs of intense pain through his body. Gritting his teeth, he summoned his own great strength and twisted to one side, forcing the monster onto its back. He lifted his head above the churning surface of the river to swallow a lungful of air, then plunged back under.
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