Hero of Olympus

by Hero of Olympus (retail) (epub)

  Tydeus was beside them.

  ‘Charis said you would return today,’ he said, striding out to face Heracles. ‘She saw it in one of her dreams. Not that I’m surprised. The gods are with you – no man could enjoy the success you have without their favour.’

  ‘If you believe that, Tydeus, you’re an even bigger fool than I thought,’ Heracles growled. ‘Who do you think sets me these labours, if not the gods? If not Hera herself, who hates all her husband’s bastards, and me most of all. What success I’ve had hasn’t come from the gods, but from my own sweat and blood – and it’s by my efforts alone that I’m able to come back with these.’

  He held up the reed bag. The fruit gleamed in the sunshine, and there was an awed murmur among the ranks of archers and spearmen.

  ‘Now, where’s Eurystheus?’ he demanded. ‘He ordered me to fetch the apples; the least he can do is claim them from me himself.’

  For most of his return journey from Mount Atlas, he had thought of facing the man who had sanctioned the destruction of his family. Yet even now, he could not be certain of his reaction – of whether he would hold to his sacred oath and control his rage, or succumb to his hatred and give it reign. A powerful part of him wanted to take his cousin by the throat and squeeze the life out of him, and his fingers flexed impulsively at the prospect. Tydeus and all his guards would not be quick enough to stop him, though he knew he would not escape with his life. And as an oath-breaker, his punishment in Hades would be unspeakable. But there was another way to avenge himself without breaking his vow, and that alone would keep him from yielding to the anger he felt.

  ‘The king is away, in Mycenae,’ Tydeus answered.

  ‘You mean he’s too much of a coward to face me.’

  ‘Give the apples to me. I will make sure your master receives them.’

  ‘And the final labour? When will I be told what it is?’

  A faint smile crossed Tydeus’s features.

  ‘All in due course. Now, the apples?’

  He reached for the reed bag, but Heracles pulled it aside. The captain of the guard stepped up to him angrily, and they stood chest to chest, staring hard at each other. The mercenaries quickly readied their weapons, while the ranks of archers pulled arrows from their quivers and notched them against their bowstrings. Then Tydeus’s fierce expression eased with a mocking smile. He stepped back and signalled for his men to stand easy.

  ‘What’s the matter, Heracles – don’t trust me?’

  ‘I will give them to Eurystheus, or no one at all. And if he’s in Mycenae, then I will go find him there.’

  He turned on his heel and walked towards the gates, angered at the delay and frustrated that he could not look Eurystheus in the eye, knowing what he now knew about him.

  ‘Wait!’

  He stopped and looked up at the battlements, where the voice had come from. His cousin stood alone upon the ramparts, his cloak flapping in the breeze.

  ‘Why did you kill Copreus?’ the king demanded, though there was little force in his voice.

  ‘You know why. Because he gave my housekeeper the mushrooms that sent me mad. That was your plan, wasn’t it? To have me kill my family in a bout of insanity, so I’d take my own life afterwards without incriminating you or your precious goddess. A perfect murder, I think you called it.’

  Eurystheus blanched. Tydeus and many of the other soldiers looked up at him.

  ‘That’s a lie,’ he shouted. ‘Now, give the apples to Tydeus and I will count the labour completed.’

  Heracles thought of the bow on his shoulder. He could fit one of his black-feathered arrows to the bowstring in a single, practised movement and loose it at the king, avenging the deaths of his sons in an instant. Or would he have avenged them? Eurystheus had been acting on the orders of Hera, and as far as the gods were concerned, there could be no retribution. His best revenge was to survive, complete the final labour and earn his father’s promise of immortality. To thwart Hera’s jealous rage and establish himself as her equal would be punishment enough. But to kill Eurystheus now and be shot down by a hundred of his archers would give her the victory she sought. He would not be so foolish. Yet Eurystheus would still die – he would see to that, even if it was not his hand that would deliver the killing blow.

  He tossed the bag of golden fruit onto the street, and with a final, murderous glance at Eurystheus, turned and walked out through the gates. On reaching the lower city, he made his way through the narrow, filthy streets towards the simple hut that had served him as a home during his short stays in Tiryns. Here, beyond the sight of the guards on the walls, people nodded to him as he passed, or reached out to lay hands on his lion-skin cloak. A few whispered My lord, their spirits dimmed but not extinguished.

  He reached his hut and paused. The door was slightly open. Then the rag across one of his neighbours’ windows twitched aside.

  ‘There’s a woman waiting for you,’ a low voice told him.

  ‘What does she look like?’

  ‘I don’t know – she wore a hooded cloak. But she was high-born. No doubt about that.’

  Megara, he thought, his heart racing madly. He almost ran to the door, then stopped, remembering her infidelity. Infidelity? He scoffed at the thought – what right did he have to accuse her of that? He had lost any claim on his wife long ago.

  Cautiously, he pushed open the door. A cloaked figure was seated in his only chair, her head bowed in thought. As the hinges creaked, she looked up sharply.

  ‘Heracles,’ she said.

  It was Charis. The disappointment was galling, and he quickly realized how stupid he had been to expect Megara to come to him again. Her first visit had been a miracle. A second would never happen now.

  ‘What do you want?’ he asked.

  ‘To talk.’

  ‘Is it the final labour?’

  ‘Yes.’ She sounded troubled. ‘It won’t be easy for you to hear, and we have much to discuss.’

  ‘Discuss? I’m still a slave. The king’s orders are given and I have to obey. What’s to discuss?’

  ‘I am not your enemy, Heracles,’ she said, ‘though I must have seemed so in the past. The truth is, I am indebted to you.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I will show you, but not yet. First, the labour. You must capture a monster, another of the spawn of Echidna and Python, and bring it back to Tiryns.’

  His thoughts were instantly thrown back to the dread Nemean Lion, which he had killed using his bare hands, and of his bitter struggle against the immortal Hydra, with its many heads and its poisonous breath. His body still bore the scars left him by Orthrus, the two-headed dog he had slain while stealing the cattle of Geryon; and even the peaceable Ladon had left her mark, by the awful truths she had revealed to him. But, one way or another, he had defeated them all, and so the thought of facing another of their siblings, though terrifying, did not dismay him. Indeed, he had spent much time worrying over what the final labour might be, and fearing something truly impossible. But now it was coming into focus before him, his fears began to fade.

  ‘What is this creature?’

  There was a pitying look in Charis’s eyes.

  ‘Some call him a dog, but they speak out of ignorance. They have not seen him.’ There was a tremor in Charis’s voice that made Heracles realize she had, if only in her tortured dreams. ‘He has three heads – each maned with snakes – and a serpent for a tail. You have heard his name. All mortals have.’

  ‘Cerberus,’ Heracles said, his voice barely a breath.

  ‘The Hound of Hades,’ Charis confirmed.

  Heracles felt dark despair clouding his thoughts.

  ‘Are you sure? Charis, are you sure you interpreted the dream…?’

  ‘Yes,’ she insisted, gently, blanching slightly at the memory. ‘I know what I saw. I know the will of Hera.’

  ‘But it’s impossible.’

  ‘All the labours have been impossible, but you completed them nonetheless.’

&n
bsp; ‘This is different,’ he snapped. He turned and leaned against a wall, resting his head on his forearm. ‘This truly is impossible. Cerberus guards the Underworld! Listen, Charis, I’ve travelled to the ends of the earth to fulfil these labours, farther each time, it seems. But this just isn’t possible. The living can’t enter Hades’s kingdom. Only the dead can do that.’

  He sat on the dirt floor and lowered his head into his hands. For a while neither spoke. Then Charis rose from the chair and knelt beside him, running her fingers through his hair.

  ‘I’ve heard there is another entrance to the Underworld,’ he said, still staring at the dirt. ‘A secret way in, through a grove of trees and a cave, where a mortal might enter without surrendering his life. I’ve never sneaked into any fight before, but maybe—’

  ‘No, Heracles,’ Charis said. ‘The place you talk about exists, but it only provides a window on the Underworld. To find Cerberus, you must cross the River Styx. Only those who have given up their mortality are permitted to take the ferry across those black waters. But even if you find a way over and are able to subdue Cerberus, Hades will never permit you to take his hound. You see, Cerberus is not there to keep the living out, but to keep the dead in.’

  Heracles lifted his head and looked at the priestess.

  ‘Yet I must try. I know I didn’t kill my children out of any dark fault in my character, but the guilt is no less unbearable. And it will only be lifted if I complete the labours – that was the oracle’s promise. Now I see the price I must pay, the price I should always have paid: blood for blood. I will take my own life and enter the Underworld. There, I will plead with Hades to let me take Cerberus to Tiryns for a single day, just enough to complete the labour. Afterwards, I will bring the hound back and take my place among the legions of the dead. The forgetfulness of the Underworld will remove the burden of my sons’ deaths from my shoulders. Maybe that was what the oracle meant all along.’

  ‘Then will you give Hera what she wants?’

  ‘What do you care? You’re her priestess; you should want what she wants.’

  ‘I don’t want to see you die, Heracles. And you don’t have to.’

  ‘Of course I do. You said yourself, only those who give up their mortality can go there.’

  ‘But death isn’t always permanent,’ she said. ‘There is a way to die and come back again.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘A witches’ brew that can kill a man for a day, releasing his soul from sunset until sunrise.’

  ‘I’ve had enough of witches and their brews,’ Heracles said, with a dismissive wave of his hand.

  The last time he had consumed anything of that kind it had destroyed his life. He stood and walked to the wall, where a water skin was hanging from a peg. Uncorking it, he sniffed at the contents and frowned at the stale smell. The water skin hanging at his belt had been empty since that morning, and he found himself suddenly desperate for a drink.

  ‘Do you have a choice?’ Charis asked, following him. ‘Other than killing yourself?’

  ‘No!’ he snapped. ‘Of course I don’t. I haven’t had a choice in anything since the night I ate those mushrooms. I’ve been a slave to my crime, a slave to Eurystheus, and a slave to the whims of the gods.’

  ‘Then free yourself!’ Charis snapped back.

  He looked at her, surprised by her sudden show of temper. The thought of entering the Underworld had filled him with fear, and he had taken his irritation out on her when she had only been trying to help him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, frowning. ‘Will this witches’ brew work?’

  ‘Yes, though it is dangerous. First you will have to go to the entrance to Hades. It is found in a cave at Taenarum in Laconia. When you are there, take the brew at sunset. It will free your spirit from your body and allow it to enter the realm of the dead.’

  ‘Can a spirit fight a monster?’

  ‘I don’t know. Whatever you do, though, you must complete the labour before the sun rises. If your body wakes while your spirit is still in the Underworld, then your soul must remain among the dead for eternity, while your body will be a soulless husk – living and breathing, but without a mind to direct it.’

  Heracles’s eyes narrowed briefly, the only sign of his doubt.

  ‘As you say, what choice do I have? Where can I find a witch to make me this brew?’

  ‘I know of only three, and I have already sent word to the nearest. Someone will bring it to you, at the crossroads outside of Tiryns. You must wait there until he arrives. And now I will show you why I am helping you. Come with me.’

  She ducked beneath the jamb of the door and stepped outside. Heracles followed, blinking against the afternoon light. Faces watched them from the windows and doors on either side of the alley as they followed it down the slope. Expecting that she would turn right at the bottom and find her way to the street leading up to the city gates, he was surprised when she turned left into a crooked and shadowy thoroughfare, squeezed between the walls of more tightly packed slums. Heracles knew the passage well, a dangerous place even by the standards of the outer city. But Charis also seemed familiar with it, leading him without pause down alleys to the left and to the right, until she reached a row of small but sturdy huts on the outskirts of the otherwise squalid rookery. Heracles knew them well, for he had made them himself using stones he had cleared from farmers’ fields.

  Slumped black shapes sat in the mud outside several of the doors, their wizened limbs curled up in tattered cloaks. As Charis approached, bony hands emerged from the rags, hoping for scraps of food. On seeing Heracles, several reached out to touch him as he passed, mumbling blessings in the names of the gods.

  The priestess walked past them all until she reached a hut close to the end of the terrace. Here, a figure in a black shawl sat close against the wall. Her hand was out, like those of the others, but hung like a wilting branch, as if it had been left there for some time. A piece of broken pottery lay beside her, containing a corner of stale bread. Clutched in the old woman’s lap was a skin of what Heracles assumed to be wine. He could smell it on her slow, wheezing breaths as she slumped against the wall with her eyes closed in sleep.

  ‘Do you recognize her?’ Charis asked.

  ‘She’s an old drunk, just like the rest of them. I built her this hut because she wouldn’t survive another winter living in the gutters as she was.’

  ‘She’s my mother,’ Charis said. She stared down at the old crone with eyes that were empty of emotion. ‘She sold me to the temple when I was a little child, for a bowl of soup and a skin of wine. I thought she had died long ago, until one day I saw her lying in the mouth of an alley. Somehow, I just knew it was her. That was a short while before you arrived in Tiryns, Heracles.’

  ‘Do you despise her?’

  ‘Yes, of course. I wasn’t worth the price of a meal to her. But I pity her more. She’s the only family I have. I can’t explain why, but it’s important to me. You know, all the times I’ve sought her out to bring her some food or a cloak, she has never recognized me or asked why I come to her. Yet, as long as she lives, I have somebody. Sounds foolish, doesn’t it?’

  ‘No. Not to me.’

  The priestess’s eyes glistened with tears that refused to fall.

  ‘She never asked who I am, but in her mad ramblings she says your name. You’ve saved her from death more than once, I think. The cloaks I bring her are good and thick, but she refuses to get rid of this old rag she wears. Says you gave it to her.’

  ‘I might have done,’ he said.

  ‘Mine she exchanged for wine, or they were just stolen. Not that it matters. The point is you helped her, an old drunk who nobody has ever helped. And that’s why I wanted to help you.’

  She took some oatcakes from a leather purse under her black cloak and put them onto the shard of pottery, tossing the piece of old crust to an old man sitting at the next doorway. One of the cakes she placed into her mother’s wrinkled hand. The yellow fi
ngers closed around it, but her eyes remained closed. Then Charis raised herself to her full height, gave a small, pitying shake of her head, and pushed past Heracles to return the way they had come.

  A few additional turns led them onto the main thoroughfare, with the city gates looming further up the slope. She turned to face Heracles, her eyes dry and sombre again.

  ‘Hera’s terrified that you’ll complete the final labour. That’s why she wants you to go to the Underworld, to surrender your mortality before your father can confer immortality on you. But if you do what I’ve told you, you shouldn’t need to die fully. Remember, Heracles, wait at the crossroads until the witches’ drug is brought to you. Farewell.’

  She turned to head up to the gates, but he put his hand on her arm.

  ‘I will succeed, Charis, thanks to you. And when I get back, things will change in Tiryns. I’ll make sure of it.’

  ‘I know they will,’ she said. ‘But not for me.’

  She pulled her hood over her golden hair and walked calmly towards the gates. He watched her go, wondering what she meant, then returned to the shadows of the alley. He wandered between the ramshackle homes, barely aware of the people he passed, his thoughts crushed beneath the magnitude of the twelfth labour and the hopelessness of what he had been ordered to do. No mortal had ever entered the Underworld. Though Charis had done all she could to help him, her plan was a hasty one at best. Even if it succeeded in getting him across the River Styx, there seemed little chance that he would be able to persuade Hades to release Cerberus to him.

  He thought, too, of the horrors of that place, where the spirits of the dead dwelled for eternity, forgetful of who they were and the life they had enjoyed on earth, but ever longing for the body of flesh that had been taken from them. What terrible things would he see there? And if he ever left again, what unendurable memories would he bring back with him to the world of the living?

  But he had to go. He would not turn back now that he was one final labour away from absolution. However dark the prospect of the task that had been laid before him, he forced himself to look beyond it – to a world where he was free from his bondage, and free from the guilt that haunted him. How that would come about, he could not imagine, but he trusted in the promise of the oracle. But before he set off for the crossroads to wait for the potion that would release his spirit from his body, he had one more thing to do.