Alcie grabbed Iole’s hand and tried to speak calmly.
“Okay. What’s the square root of … of … six thousand and eighty-four?”
Iole raised her head and shoulders to shoot Alcie an incredulous glare, then with a sigh she lay back down.
“Well, Alcie, you happen to have actually chosen a real number; real being one that may be thought of as a point along an infinitely long line. By definition, every real number has two square roots, a positive and a negative. However the principal square root of a real number is its nonnegative square root. So for simplicity’s sake and because I am absolutely flummoxed as to why you would be asking me such a question when I am lying on the ground and something has, quite obviously, happened to me, I’ll just say seventy-eight.”
“Right-o!” cried Alcie—who then started crying again.
“You knew the answer, Alce?” asked Homer.
“Oh Homie, I didn’t even know the question!”
“May I get up now?” Iole said, sitting slowly.
Pandy helped Iole to her feet, while Homer held Alcie as she wept for joy. Then, after making certain that Iole was steady, Pandy threw her arms around Persephone. Alcie broke free from Homer’s arms and ran to embrace them both. Then Homer hugged all three of them.
“Sometimes I surprise myself.” Persephone giggled.
“I love you,” said Pandy, burying her face in the goddess’s gown.
“Who doesn’t!” cried Persephone.
“So I’ll just stand here until someone tells me—” Iole began.
“Oh, Iole. I’m so glad you’re you!” Pandy interrupted as she grabbed Iole and hugged her so hard, Iole thought her ribs would crack.
“Gaaaack. What do you mean … umpffff! Gods, what’s on your skin?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute. What do you remember?”
Pandy finally loosened her grasp and Iole looked at everyone.
“I … I … remember being in the middle of the Styx. And then I was … someplace very dark. I was lost. And alone. And I could hear you but you couldn’t hear me. And then … there were these little bits of …”
Iole began to vomit violently. Instead of bile, however, hundreds of lead chips came pouring out of her mouth. It came upon her so fast that Alcie and Homer were frozen where they stood, horrified; Dido was whimpering, his paws covering his head. Pandy held Iole as she wretched, doubled over, until she spit out the last few bits. Then Iole stood up abruptly and looked around as if she’d never felt better in her life.
“Well, that was unexpected,” Persephone said flatly.
“You okay?” asked Pandy
“I’m … I’m fine, actually. Wow, that happened fast. But, Gods, what have I been eating?”
Without a word, Persephone waved her hand over the pile of chips, forming them into a small shield emblazoned with the aegis of a cerebellum.
“That’s for you,” she said to Iole, who picked up the shield and found it to be lighter than she expected. “The lead that coated your brain will now protect your body.”
“What? The lead that coated my brain?” Iole said to Pandy.
“It happened when we crossed the Styx,” Pandy began. “Your head went under for a sec. We all have an outer coating of metal, but it got inside you.”
“Hey!” Alcie exclaimed. “My head went under too … but it didn’t affect my brain!”
No one said a word for a long moment.
“I think I’m restored enough to know that I’m not gonna touch that,” said Iole.
“You can talk while you walk,” Persephone cautioned. “I don’t need to remind you that, while time means almost nothing here, your days are numbered topside, where it counts.”
“Do you know how many days we have left?” Pandy asked quickly.
“Yep. Can’t tell you. Have to …”
“… kill us, I know,” said Pandy.
“I know!” Persephone laughed.
“We’ll tell you everything, Iole. Everything that’s happened since the Styx, that is,” Pandy said. “But we gotta keep moving.”
At that moment, a giant flaming wheel at least three meters in diameter went rolling past Mnemosyne, startling everyone. It crossed the main road and flew past Lethe, showering those waiting at the front of the long line with sparks before disappearing into the dimness of Erebus. That was incredible in itself, but even more so was the man on top of the wheel, rolling and steering it with his legs and laughing madly as he went by.
“Ixion?” murmured Iole.
“Oh, Zeus’s fingernails!” Persephone said, throwing her hands up. “He’s supposed to be in torment, not having the time of his life! Yet something else I have to deal with. All right, I think you’re good to go from here. Just follow the main road though Erebus to the palace. Try not to get lost.”
With that, Persephone kissed Pandy, Alcie, and Homer on their foreheads. Then she bent down to Iole.
“Welcome back, genius.” She smiled. Then she turned to the priestesses. “Ladies, thanks for the drink. It’s all yours.”
Then she hiked up the hem of her gown and took off at a tear after the giant wheel.
Chapter Eight
Tantalized
“Who is Ixion? Besides a guy who can balance on a wheel,” asked Alcie when they all got back onto the main road. They were no longer jogging—the necessity for hyper-speed was gone—but walking briskly. “And why do I feel like I never paid attention to anything in school?”
“First of all, you didn’t,” answered Iole. “And second, Master Epeus covered Ixion last term. You were staring out into the olive groves and Pandy was staring at Tiresias the Younger. I was staring at both of you trying to make you listen, because it’s so gruesomely grand. Ixion was an ancient king who was one of the very few mortals to be invited to a feast on Mount Olympus. He fell in love with Hera over the soup.”
“That’s just wrong on so many levels,” Pandy said.
“Astounding, I know, but he did. He started flirting with her in front of Zeus. Zeus not only struck him with a thunderbolt, but he also bound him to a giant flaming wheel that revolves forever. Only it’s not supposed to be rolling across the underworld. Okay, now that that’s explained, would someone tell me what’s been going on?”
Pandy, Alcie, and Homer told Iole of her emergence from the Styx and how much it altered her. As Persephone’s bright idea, they walked farther into the dimness of Erebus. Pandy noticed that the short, grassy terrain was giving way on either side of the road to stubby bushes and stunted, leafless trees. A little farther on, the trees were taller, more leafy, and covered the hills that had sprung up a short distance away. Over Alcie’s chatter—
“And then I practically had to grab the oatie cake out of your hands to give to that three-headed beast …”
—Pandy heard muffled sounds—someone breathing hard and snuffling, snorting, and chewing. Loud chewing.
“Stop it, Alce,” Pandy cut in, her head turned toward a grove of tall, mature trees and a light flickering through the branches. “Iole, it was all your idea. We just gave you a nudge, that’s all. Guys, quiet. Quiet. Do you hear that?”
“Someone’s … eating?” Alcie said after a moment.
Then the slurping and munching was peppered with several plops that sounded as if things had dropped or been dropped from a great height into liquid. Suddenly, a scream pierced the eternal dusk and plunged right into Pandy’s heart, nearly stopping it. It was a man’s voice and he’d screamed as if he’d been scared out of his wits. Pandy took off at a run toward the sounds, thinking only that they may have stumbled, purely by accident, on the seventh and final Evil. As she ran flat out, though, her reason took over; there was no way in Hades that finding Fear would have been this simple. And it might even be a trap, set by Hera. The man screaming might not have been the thing eating. In fact the thing eating might be eating the man screaming, which is why he’d be … screaming.
She slowed down, causing Alcie, Iole, and Homer
to crash into her and each other. She gave a hand signal to be very quiet. They picked their way around tree trunks, low branches, and shrubs, always keeping the light ahead of them. The trees finally thinned out, and Pandy emerged onto a very small patch of fresh green grass nearly surrounded by beautiful, leafy trees of every type. The largest of these had low, long branches, which had been hung with many lamps so that the small clearing was nearly as bright as day. And this tree, far from being only green, seemed multicolored—covered from bottom to top with so many different types of fruit that Pandy instantly remembered the Garden of the Jinn in ancient Persia, with its trees bearing jeweled oranges, apples, pears, and so on.
“This looks weirdly familiar,” Alcie said. “Reminds me of the cherry tree I got stuck in.”
“Except in that garden, not all the fruit was on one tree,” Iole whispered.
As the group moved closer, they saw that the heavily laden branches of the enormous tree hung over a large pool with a stone pillar rising up in the middle of the water. On this pillar were two rings linked by chains to two open manacles.
“Uh-oh,” said Homer, looking at the rings. “This is bad.”
“Why, why?” Alcie clamored.
There was a rustling in the large tree, and a peach pit fell from some higher branch and splashed into the pool. It bobbed for a moment on the surface before sinking. They heard a cackling overhead, then a few grunts as something made its way down the tree, shaking the branches hard as it leapt from one to the next. A figure came into view standing on a thick branch perhaps five meters off the ground. It was a man with shaggy graying hair and a chin full of stubble. One hand was clutching at some twigs higher up to steady himself; the other was wrapped around a half-eaten pomegranate. His toga was stained and damp with fruit juice and spittle. He grinned at the group, then threw his head back and laughed like a child being tickled, pomegranate seeds dribbling out of his mouth. He was so histrionic that he began to choke and, forced to beat his chest, dropped the pomegranate from his fingers. Watching the remainder of the delicious fruit plummet downward and land in the pool, the man screamed so loudly and with such agony that everyone hit the ground. Homer instinctively tried to throw himself over them all. The screaming continued, one long breath, until it suddenly stopped. Looking up, Pandy and the rest saw that the man had simply grabbed the nearest piece of fruit—a tangerine—and was shoving it into his mouth, rind and all.
“Is that who I think it is?” Pandy asked of no one in particular.
“Fruit. Pond. Chains,” Alcie said softly. “Even I know this one.”
“Greetings!” the man called out, spitting seeds with every syllable. “My name is Tantalus and I bid you welcome to my home. It’s just my pond and my tree, really, but I call it home.”
“Greetings,” Homer said, stepping forward. Clearly the man was mad, but more importantly, he was free when he shouldn’t have been. He should have been, Homer knew, chained to the pillar in the middle of the pond. There was no telling what might happen if he decided to climb down out of the tree—insanity can often trump brute strength, and Homer knew this also. He made the introductions as quickly and as politely as possible. When Alcie was introduced she took a step forward and accidentally smacked her head on a low-hanging pear. When she reached up to bat it away, Tantalus began shouting at her to back away, not to touch anything. No one was to touch anything.
“I’d offer you some fruit,” Tantalus went on, “if I were more hospitable, but I’m not, so I won’t. Please don’t think me rude, it’s just that it’s been eons since I’ve drank or eaten anything so, mine … all mine! Of course it’s not as good as the ambrosia and nectar my daddy, Zeus, let me eat, but it’s mine, mine, mine.”
“We understand, sir,” said Pandy, knowing full well the story behind the man’s hunger and thirst. “We won’t disturb your meal.”
“You, Alcestis,” Tantalus said, grabbing a nearby peach. “You’re shiny. You shine. Why is that?”
Pandy looked at Alcie’s copper hair and tinted skin reflecting the light ripples off the pool.
“Pandora, you and the youth shine as well, but not so much. Why do I have shiny people at my little watering hole?”
The honest answer that sprung to Pandy’s lips was going to be far too long, so she quickly replaced it with another that was far more clever.
“We’re members of a theatre troupe,” she said. “Summoned by Hades for a command performance, and we’ve lost our way. We’re wearing makeup for our various roles. I am a bronze statue, Homer is an … an … anvil. And Alcie, I mean Alcestis, is a … uh …”
“Copper pot,” Alcie cut in. “We’re performing ‘The Tale of the Wicked Blacksmith.”
“Why doesn’t the short maiden wear any makeup?” Tantalus asked, looking at Iole.
“I’m the director.”
Pandy’s curiosity bubbled up to the surface.
“Might I ask, sir, how you came to be released from the pool?”
“Ah,” Tantalus replied, beaming with no small sense of pride. “You know about me then?”
“Of course,” she said. “Chained forever in a pool, fruit above your head that pulls back when you try to reach for it, water that recedes when you try to drink.”
“Give the lady a hand! Very good, maiden. Well, it was no easy thing to capture me and get me in that pond in the first place, I can assure you. Daddy couldn’t do it the honorable way, like a man, you know. He had to use his immortal powers. But I always knew I’d get out someday. The gods are really quite stupid after all.”
“Whoa,” said Alcie. She’d never heard anyone say anything like that about one god, let alone all of them at once.
“Do you know any gods? Have you ever met one?” Tantalus asked Pandora.
“I have, sir. All of them,” Pandy answered.
Tantalus stopped in the middle of plucking a nectarine and gazed at her.
“So then you know how ridiculous they are! I’m sure they couldn’t wait to tell you their side of the story, could they? Well, I’ll give it to you straight. Yes, I invited all of them down to my house for a feast. Yes, I killed my son, Pelops, and served him up as the main course. Yes, they all recoiled in horror and left without so much as tasting the dessert. But I didn’t roast Pelops, which is the way I know everyone tells it. I boiled him. Big, big difference. And he wasn’t alive, the way some are saying; I did dismember him first. For Olympus’s sake, he looked fine on the platter, like an oddly shaped calf. And what better way to honor the immortals than by offering up your own son! And Demeter actually took a bite! Ate his shoulder, the stupid cannibal!”
Out of the corner of her eye Pandy saw a shape moving through the trees, but somehow she knew to keep her gaze on Tantalus.
“Yes, sir, but how did you get free?” she called up.
“Hera,” Tantalus said matter-of-factly. “She came through my clearing—waddling, actually, her bottom is in a bandage—and she knelt by my pool. Said she deeply felt my suffering, for which I was grateful, and my fear, which I didn’t quite understand. In fact she kept asking me if I was afraid. I kept telling her no, not particularly, just really hungry and thirsty.”
Pandy tensed. Hera had been at this exact spot asking questions about the very evil she sought.
“Then she asked me if I was afraid of fire. I told her I didn’t really think much about it since I was neck-deep in water. She laughed; she was a bit of a nutso, truth be told, but I wasn’t gonna say that to her. Then the gracious Queen of Heaven, that bountiful beauty in blue, fully acknowledged the extent of my eternal punishment: fruit hanging above my head that moves away when I reach for it, fresh water up to my neck that recedes every time I bend to drink. Forever hungry and thirsty. And just because I wanted to have something a little ‘different’ for evening meal. Well, she snapped her fingers, and my hands just slipped out of the manacles. Oh, that first drink … I nearly drained the whole pool. And all this fruit; I’ll never be able to eat it all, but I’m goin
g to have fun trying, so don’t touch.”
“When did this happen?” Pandy asked. “When was Hera here?”
“Only a short time before you arrived,” Tantalus said, picking a wad of apricot skin out of the back of his teeth. “I knew she liked me. At my house, at the feast, after Zeus had used his powers to bind me and was about to send me down here, she came up to me and whispered in my ear that she thought I was terribly inventive in my choice of cuisine. Or was that inventively terrible. Either way, the lady knows talent. And thanks to her, I’ll never be sunk up to my neck again. A few more juicy bits and then it’s exit, Erebus left!”
A glint of white, close by, caught everyone’s attention.
“Not so fast,” said a young man stepping up beside Pandy. His silver-tipped bow was taut and not one but two arrows were set, ready to fly. He was only fifteen at the most, Pandy thought, but had the grace and bearing of someone much older.
“You?” yelled Tantalus. “You’re dead! I cut you up myself!”
“That you did,” said the youth. “And you have my word, no one’s ever going to award you Father of the Year. But the gods took pity on me and restored me to life. I lived out my allotted span of years quite well, no thanks to you. And when I finally died, they rewarded me with the gift of eternal vigor and bloom.”
“What’s that thing on your shoulder, Pelops?” asked Tantalus.
“It’s my shoulder, you idiot. The gods gave me a new shoulder of ivory to replace what Demeter ate.”
“Oh, yeah. That’s right,” Pandy whispered to Alcie.
“You—you speak that way to your father …!” Tantalus choked out.
“That’s it. Enough talk, crazy man. Hades asked me if I would kindly leave the Elysian Fields and get you back into your pond. So here I am. Now are you going to get back into your chains like a good homicidal maniac or do I let fly?”
“Do your worst, you son of a dog … oh, wait, you’re my son,” Tantalus began.
Pelops plucked his bow and sent his arrows whizzing through the air. They both struck their mark, one in Tantalus’s upper thigh, the other in his chest, with such force that he was falling headlong out of the tree and into the pool before he could take another breath.
Pandora Gets Frightened Page 7
