Wallace looks down to the ground and shakes his head. The girls cannot see, but presumably the body of Sir John is at his feet.
“Brave friend,” he continues, but now he sounds very personal, addressing not the crowd, but his dead comrade. “Best of brothers, you would not flee. My faithful friend when I was hardest pressed, my hope, my health; you were highest in honour, my faith, my help, my strongest foundation:
In thee was wit, freedom and hardiness
In thee was truth, manhood and nobleness
In thee was rule, in thee was governing,
In thee virtue without varying;
In thee was loyalty, in thee was largesse,
In thee Gentility, in thee was steadfastness….”
Wallace falters now, and his voice falls silent. The tears wash rivulets in the dirt of his face and, with head down, they drip like solemn rain to the ground…”
…“GIRLS!”
Oh!
Disorientation.
Overwhelmed.
These sudden changes were always hard to handle, but in a moment when they had been so engrossed the shift was even more traumatic.
“Sorry girls,” Dad was apologising but in a bit of a hiss. “Someone is coming. And,” he added, “you’ve been ages! What did you see?”
The girls were looking around blinking, as if they had been abruptly woken from a deep sleep. Before they had time to adjust Dad was pestering them.
“Well, come on, tell me! Did you see him?”
“Fair go Dad!” Danae objected. “And you interrupted the funeral!”
Dad paused at this point, probably realising that he was being a little unreasonable, then offered them all a hot chocolate at a nearby café. It was not quite gelato, but the next best thing for a bribe. So off they traipsed and, sipping away, relayed to Dad the entire thing in as much detail as they could remember. He was so envious.
“William Wallace!” he kept saying, over and again. “You saw William Wallace! That’s just incredible.” Finally, after more than half an hour, Dad had finished with all of his questions, having asked about every detail – from the clothing to the landscape to what the church looked like to how they spoke. He sat there looking at them, sighed and shook his head in disbelief.
Then all three girls noticed a little sparkle appear in his eyes.
“Girls, I’ve got another idea!” They just looked at him, silently. “Let’s go to Bannockburn and see if you can see Robert the Bruce!”
“Oh Dad!!!”
There were not too many amazing experiences using The Sight in Scotland though – Falkirk had been the exception. It worked on most types of sculpture and frieze work, but also on most stone and solid objects made by hand – shaped building blocks or bricks, pieces of hand-made pottery and ancient coins etc. But the strength of the experience seemed to depend upon the quality of the work as well – fine decorative stonework and sculpture worked very well, for example, whereas worn building blocks could offer very vague and confusing experiences a lot of the time. And it did not work on shaped concrete at all, so a lot of the building of the last century was lifeless in this regard. In the Mediterranean the better quality and better-preserved art and architecture was ubiquitous, whereas in Scotland it was much more limited. For the older works, pre-Georgian for example, the majority of what remained was fairly crude stonework, and often of unshaped or minimally worked stone. This did not offer much at all. Sometimes they would find nice stonework around the door of an important building, but then the experiences might still be vague – shadowy figures in unusual dress going about unknown business. This could actually be a little spooky. If they concentrated, they could often enhance the experience, make it clearer and more solid, but in the same respect they could also shut it out completely. It was this latter state of mind that they maintained most of the time, because it simply was not practical to be distracted on a daily basis around the school yard or home.
The magical brick, that was gifted by Apollo and would allow them to meet him, remained unused throughout the intervening year, as Apollo had said it should only be used in urgent need, and nothing came up that they felt quite qualified. What the Olympians had planned for them in the long term they were not certain, but for the moment there was little disruption to their normal lives. If it were not for the previous summer’s experiences, they would not have been aware that they lived under a curse at all.
Their other gifts, the individual ones, these integrated into their daily lives almost unnoticed. Ilia’s wisdom – to her great disappointment – did not help her prepare for exams in any way and, as there were no life-changing decisions that faced her during the year, her capacity to handle them was not obvious.
Leda’s charm was noticeable, but not overtly so. She was generally a well-behaved girl, so there were few situations in which she needed to use her appeal to help extricate herself. And when she was in serious trouble with mum, her charm seemed to have no effect. She was generally very popular at school, but whether that was due to her gift, or just her, was not clear.
Danae was the only one who needed to both work on her special skill, and to be careful of it. The ability of a teenage girl to lift and throw a boulder does not go unnoticed, nor does flattening the largest boy in the school. Fortunately she needed to seriously focus in order to summon this strength, otherwise she would never have kept it concealed. At first, when she wanted to generate it, she needed to go into an almost trance-like state, and then it would come. She had practised intermittently over several days before she finally got the knack. The day she achieved this, she had immediately alerted her sisters.
“Come see! Come and see!” she had cried excitedly from the front door. She kept shouting until finally Ilia and Leda – rather grumpily – had come downstairs to see what was going on.
“What?” asked Ilia. “I’m studying you know, Danae?”
“Studying – rubbish!” she responded dismissively. “Watching a movie on your laptop more likely. But anyway – come check this out!”
They followed her outside into the street. Danae had a quick look up and down the street and, content that there was no one unwanted to see, went immediately over to the rear end of a Land Rover that was parked out front. She crouched down a little and grasped the tow bar.
“Danae, what are you doing?” Ilia remained irritated.
“Shush! I’ve got to concentrate.” Danae closed her eyes, took a couple of steady breaths, then she stood up straight.
Her sisters gasped. Danae was standing upright, sure enough, but she still had hold of the Land Rover. She grunted a little and lifted just a little more, until the rear wheels came clear of the ground. Then she lowered it back down, before repeating the incredible feat.
“Oh my God Danae!” Both Leda and Ilia were so amazed that they forgot for a moment to resent their sister.
Danae put the Land Rover down and turned to her sisters, grinning from ear to ear.
“Pretty cool, hey?”
“Yes,” agreed Leda. “Very useful if we ever need to lift a car!” She was only half-joking, but fully impressed.
As the year passed by the girls’ anxiety increased, because the feeling was growing in all three of them that they needed to get on with their quest. Nothing disastrous had as yet occurred, but they knew it was only a matter of time. The adventures of the last summer had certainly grown fainter, but the girls did have almost daily reminders that it had all been real and, as they progressed to Spring, their urgency started to grow.
They were all a year older, of course, Ilia having turned 16 in September, Leda 12 in November, and Danae 15 in the following February. They had managed to focus on their busy lives with school and exams and sports, but they felt they needed to make some progress. They had discussed it with Dad endlessly and they all hoped that they could not only get the Wings of Daedalus this summer, but perhaps get the Golden Apple as well.
But whereas the girls – with their youthful sense of immortali
ty – were feeling anxious to complete their task, Dad’s anxiety was increasing for a very different reason. He had no doubt that this quest should not be taken lightly, and was experiencing a growing terror that one of his daughters might come to real harm and that he would be helpless to prevent it. He read through everything he could find on Greek and Roman mythology, whether he had read it before or not, and pondered endlessly over what he could do to prepare. If they found the Labyrinth, what were the dangers? Escaping, clearly. But what else might they encounter within it? And afterwards, a journey to the Garden of the Hesperides – what might they encounter there? The mention of a dragon was disconcerting to say the least.
Knowing it would be dangerous, he toyed with the idea of purchasing a handgun. But in Germany this was no easy thing and, besides, he had a feeling it would be neither appropriate nor necessarily effective. This was no American TV drama – it was a curse of the Ancient world, a world in which guns had no place. Also, they would be travelling and there was no way of getting guns through airports and across borders. Other solutions would be required. He had a gladius at home, that seemed more culturally appropriate, but he did not know how to use one and would most likely, in any serious situation, just get injured himself. And likewise, you could not travel with one. So he decided they would go unarmed and trust that the Fates had a favourable outcome in store for them.
But may the Gods forbid that his three princesses should come to harm.
Not while he yet breathed…
Stirling Bridge with the William Wallace Monument in the distance
Chapter II
The House of Minos
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandius, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
– P.B. Shelley, Ozymandius
…At last…
It was with a great deal of excitement and trepidation that the three girls finally landed with their Dad at Heraklion airport in Crete. The mixed experience of – in the first instance – touching down for the first day of holidays in an exotic location with blue skies and turquoise beaches and – in the second – embarking on a perilous adventure that may well result in a horrible death, left the girls not quite knowing what to feel. Their emotions were oscillating between the sort of rapture that imprints on your face a permanent grin that you simply cannot control, and the degree of fear that has your hands shaking so much that you cannot get your key in the front door. It had been a year now since they had made any progress with their quest and, for the young, a year of anticipation seems to take a lifetime to pass. But, finally, it had.
They still recalled every detail of the previous summer, however, those events seemed so long ago and in such alien circumstances that it was as if they were preserved eternally in glass or crystal. They could only look back to them from a completely different era – like looking back on the ancient world from the 21st century. And in many respects that was precisely what they were doing except, of course, they had actually been in that distant story and experienced those distant events first-hand. But at last the adventure was to begin again and the excitement had them so animated that they had each fallen into a characteristic behaviour; a behaviour it is fair to say that was causing some friction.
Leda, when excited, talks like a sewing machine with the foot down; she just does not stop. It is all perfectly harmless of course – indeed at first quite charming – but when it continues for the entire duration of a two hour car journey to the airport, another two hours waiting to board, then a three and a half hour flight, all in extremely close proximity, the end result includes the very real risk of bleeding to death through your ear drums. Dad – who was the recipient of this endless chatter – endured it with an equal mix of pleasure, admirable patience and stress-relieving meditation exercises he had learned whilst working on the psychiatric ward.
Danae, when agitated, takes a different approach entirely; in those moments her life’s mission becomes a test as to how much irritation another human being can endure before developing an irresistible homicidal intent. It is a relentless mix of verbal provocation and backchat, with physical aggravation in the form of prodding and elbowing, bumping and pushing. This is all topped off by the swiftest fingers that, should you try to ignore her and distract yourself in a book or smart device or something else, can snatch any such item from your hands in a clean sweep of air that allows no chance of evasion. Those same fingers will then lock the now-irretrievable item in a vice-like grip whilst she either disparages it or innocently feigns interest. Finally – when forced – she will finish that particular round of irritation with an inflammatory accusation such as – Don’t over-react Leda! Jeez! You’re so immature! Then of course Danae will start again with her other sister. It is a remarkable skill that has reaped dividends of personal satisfaction for her time after time, and is of such magnitude that it should probably be considered on a par with her divinely-bestowed superhuman strength.
Ilia has no such special skill; hers is reactive. She tries to remain calm. She tries to be sensible. She tries to be mature and adult. She tries to be impervious to the escalating stimuli around her. But she utterly fails. Very soon every fibre in her body strains with fury and outrage, and the calm exterior starts to crack. Her gentle face sets in a steely expression; her jaw muscles start to swell with over-activity; her nostrils flare with every intake of breath. Then, finally, she erupts:
Stop it Danae!
Get out Leda!
Give it back Danae!
Leave me alone!
Give it to me!
That’s mine Danae!
Don’t!
Oh you’re so immature!
Knowing her own limitations well, her strategy is usually to lock herself away in a haven of sister-free peace and quiet, accompanied by a book and some sweets. It is only a matter of time, of course, before either one of them finds an excuse to invade and destroy that peace, whilst pretending their motives are completely innocuous. The goading, in combination with this invasion of privacy, then sends sweet Ilia to new levels of indignant wrath.
But in the car of course, and at the airport, and on the aeroplane, there was nowhere for any of them to escape to and it was Dad who was at the eye of the storm. This hurricane of sororal discord enclosed him with ever escalating intensity. For him it is a great paradox, to be so ecstatic to see his girls, only to be twisted and contorted like a wrung dishcloth by their choreographed dance of inter-dependant provocation.
He had a remedy in mind, however, which involved a terrace, a cool sea breeze, a glass of chilled white wine, lights twinkling on the dark sea and the sound of water lapping languidly on a pebble beach, while his three princesses slept peacefully inside. There are not too many stresses in the world that cannot be resolved by that particular combination.
The last hour of the flight had not been without some distraction; a clear sky of deep blue over the almost luminous aqua of the Mediterranean – these hold such promise in a holiday that they eternally captivate the imagination and stimulate excitement. They flew over rugged islands and foam-rimmed reefs enclosing lagoons of palest emerald, over snow white sand bars glazed with glistening crystal that fell away to deep waters of mesmerising midnight; the varying blues and greens shared one thing in common – they were all equally hypnotising. Slowly this entrancing quality soothed the requirement for the girls’ interpersonal venting and they quietened down, instead enraptured by beauty of the world’s primary swathe. Even Danae’s commitment to antagonism was compromised.
Finally, as they flew over Heraklion itself, they were completely enthralled. It is a city that cannot be fully appreciated from the ground, mainly because the twin harbours from above make such a striking spectacle. There is an outer harbour and then an inner, with narrow openings in both enclosing rings, and the clear waters create an infinitely enticing contrast, lapping lazily against the encircling medieval ramparts and walls. The old city clim
bs up the slopes above the harbour, a higgledy-piggledy tumble of stone walls and terracotta rooves and narrow cobbled streets that ascend like irregular steps up to the stunning fortified acropolis that seems to own it all. There is something about the combination of ancient, uncompromising fortifications guarding an inviting marine paradise that makes sense; it says that this place of Nature has always been so special that the hulking and brutish defences are entirely justified – for who would not want to enclose and claim such an utopia?
When the plane touched down on the runway at Heraklion, the passengers burst into applause. Whether this was in relief that they had survived a journey in a metal, highly-flammable fuel-filled projectile travelling at 600mph and suspended at 30 000 feet above the earth, or whether they were simply happy to be touching the soil of their favoured home or holiday destination, neither the girls nor Dad were certain. However, they were so excited to be there also that they joined in the applause with almost incomparable vigour; they had landed in Crete. Now they just had to navigate the arrival procedures at the airport and their holiday adventure could really begin.
The Progeny of Daedalus Page 3
