She was a hard nut to crack. I’m sure we would have been turned away if Atlas hadn’t already been in the library.
He came out to see what the commotion was, and he inadvertently gave us one of those movie moments that rarely happens in real life, you know the ones, where the character slowly emerges through a veil, gradually coming into focus, and then? Bam! Luscious eye candy. Yeah, usually that character is a woman and usually the veil is gauzy silk instead of industrial-grade plastic, but the principle was the same. Me, Mike, and the female archivist had to stop to remember where we had put our brains.
“Is there a problem?” Atlas asked the archivist.
“No, Mr. Petrakis,” the archivist replied, her face going bright red. She was about my age, maybe a year or two older, and definitely on board the Atlas Train. “They wanted to see what we’ve been working on, but—”
She never got the chance to finish. Atlas grinned at me as he looped his arm through mine and escorted me through the plastic, the archivist gasping behind us as she prevented Mike from following.
“Stay close,” Atlas said. He released my arm, but his hand traveled down to that not-quite-butt region of my lower back. I let it stay there; no need to come out swinging. “We are trying to preserve as much as we can, and it is safer if you do not touch anything.”
“Sure,” I said, as I looked around the library. The two of us were the only ones in the room. The library was well-lit with LED lamps positioned on stands, but the lamps had been kept on their dimmest settings and covered in thin white silk to protect the materials in the room. The effect was like moving through the haze of a million soft candles. The gorgeous mosaic floor had been covered in a heavy white cotton cloth to protect it from foot traffic, and the edges of this cloth were piled around the base of the walls in voluminous clouds of folds. There was a portable radio in the corner. Classical music was playing. I don’t have an ear for that stuff, but it sounded Mozart-y.
No wonder the archivist hadn’t wanted us around—I’d seen hardcore porn with more understated set design.
“We are doing the catalog from the top to the bottom,” he said, pointing towards the highest shelves. These were now empty. “It has all been photographed to preserve its order. What you found, Ms. Blackwell, is a unique example of daily life from the Hellenistic era. Simple details, such as which groups of parchment were placed upon the same shelves, may provide insight to a world many generations removed from ours.”
I nodded and muttered a comment that had nothing at all to do with the fact that a ghost had been moving those parchments around during that entire time, and unless that ghost had been extremely thorough when he moved out, there might be an inexplicable paper coffee cup or candy bar wrapper lying in a corner.
I often wonder about the accuracy of the entire historical record, but, you know. Most of life is just made of varying degrees of bullshit anyhow.
“What have you found?” I asked.
“So much!” Atlas stepped away from me and moved to the open space in the center of the room. The desk and the items on it hadn’t been touched. “This appears to be a lost treatise by Archimedes himself. Many of our discoveries seem to be related to mathematical formulae in some fashion. And there is the art, of course,” he said, as he bent down to lay a gentle hand upon the heavy cloth and the floor beneath it.
He was as giddy as a kid in the modern equivalent of a candy store. I realized I was smiling.
“Ms. Blackwell…” Atlas met my eyes and stood. “I want you to listen to me. I want to tell you something, and you must believe me.”
I dropped my shields. I don’t know why I did it—I guess it was because he was so earnest—but I let his emotions hit me. Sincerity and joy were the two that I could recognize. The rest? I don’t know. I’m nowhere near good enough at reading emotions to get through the complex layers that make up a mind.
All I knew was that Atlas Petrakis wanted to cut through the lies.
“I have told Senator Hanlon to never call me again,” he said. “I am no longer going to feed him information.”
“Former Senator,” I said absently as I brought my shields back up. I really don’t like reading people; I was beginning to think that maybe some of those underlying levels of emotion were lust, because a casual hand on my lower back wasn’t enough to get my panties steaming and holy shit I suddenly wanted to see exactly how well that table had stood the test of time. “Why not? According to Hollywood, playing both sides is a long-standing tradition with art brokers.”
“Because…” He paused. I got the impression that his brain was moving faster than his English. He lowered his voice and took a few steps towards me. “Because you found this place. I saw you do it, and I cannot explain it.
“I do not know what to do with you,” he said, leaning in close, and I smelled spices I couldn’t recognize. “You are a businesswoman, aggressive, calm…then you are a child stomping through a pool of water.
“And then you find this,” he said, pointing to the room. “You claim you are here to bring fame to your husband’s organization, but you won’t take credit for what you have found. I don’t know why you are really here, or what other discoveries you want to pursue, but if this is what you bring with you, then I must be part of it! Hanlon cannot offer me what you can.”
“That’s…very honest,” I admitted. “But I’m sure what I’ve been searching for is already here in this room. [20] As soon as you find it, Mike, Speedy, and I are going home.”
He reached out and laid his hands on my shoulders. I was wearing a sleeveless shirt, and his skin was so hot against mine. “You cannot leave,” he said earnestly. “This room, this is a miracle!”
I peered around Atlas to check on Mike. He was still outside, the archivist steadfast in her efforts to keep anyone else out of the room. If I didn’t get a distraction soon, I’d have to leave with the scroll and beg Helen to teleport it back to its original location.
“Shoulda brought Speedy,” I said.
“What?” he asked, his dark eyes searching my face. His hands began to move down my shoulders…
“Oh, just that he would enjoy what you’ve done here,” I said. There was a worrisome lack of oxygen in the room, and I took a quick step away from him to see if it was easier to breathe when there was some distance between us. Nope. “It’s…neat.”
His eyes were unbelievably dark as he took my hands in his own. “Ms. Blackwell—Hope—”
He pulled me towards him again; I let him pull me towards him again…
God and libido only know what that was going to turn into, as Mike finally managed to convince the archivist to let him into the library.
“Hey Mike!” I shouted, as he came through the plastic, the archivist behind him. “Atlas was about to tell me about the floors! They’re really…neat…”
The archivist’s face went bright red as she saw Atlas standing with his hands on my shoulders.
Ah. Jealousy. Perfect.
“Or…” I said, as I leaned against Atlas and slipped my hand into the back pocket of his jeans. “You can show me that thing you were talking about?”
“Thing?” Atlas asked. “What do you—”
“That thing!” I said, and this time I goosed his butt. Hard.
“Yes,” he said, eyes wide. “Yes. That thing. Of course.”
I began to drag Atlas out of the room, but I also managed to snag the archivist by her waist on the way. “You weren’t lying,” I said to Atlas, before the archivist could break away. “She is really pretty!”
After that, neither of them were paying any attention to Mike.
With one hand on a (firm juicy) butt and another curled around a strange woman’s hips, it was awfully hard to drop the flashlight, but I managed. The heavy cloth layered over the floor caught it and muffled the sound.
Mike found me a few minutes later. I had broken free of both Atlas and the archivist, and was taking selfies with the locals gathered at the metal fence around the N
ymphaeum.
“We good?” I asked.
“We’re good,” he replied. “Atlas and Rebecca?”
“Rebecca? Oh, the archivist. I think they’re over there,” I said, and dipped my head towards one of the nearby supply buildings. “I told them to start without me while I did some fast public relations.”
“You’re a horrible tease,” Mike said.
“Me? Never! It’s a well-known fact that I have the attention span of a goldfish,” I told him. “Who’s down in the Nymphaeum now?”
“Nobody.”
“Well, hell,” I said, as I duckfaced with a giddy tweenager. “Guess we’re the ones standing guard over the place until they’re done romping in the hay. Boning on the lawnmower. Whatever.”
And that’s what we did.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
When Theseus came to Aphidna to visit his mother, I hid in plain sight, and her household worked with us to keep me away from her son.
By the age of sixteen, I had already had my menses for two years. The first time I spotted the bedding, Aethra made me reopen a wound on my leg and told the maids that I had sparred too roughly the day before. The maids were not fooled, but they understood; Theseus was brutal to them. I found clean rags when I needed them, and the soiled ones vanished as if by magic.
To be fair, there was no need to go to such lengths in our deception. Theseus rarely came to the city without an escort, and with him came his women. Beautiful, all of them, many beginning to swell with his bastard children. Three days before he arrived, Aethra would hire the largest mercenaries she could find, and I would make that morning’s lesson a study in pain. By the time Theseus reached Aphidna, my face would be all bruises, and the king’s mother would brandish a leather strap and tell him that, in spite of her best efforts, I was still an unmannered beast. She made sure I kept my hair and clothing plain, my breasts bound tight… He rarely looked at me during these meetings, showing favor instead to his beautiful whores.
Until the day he arrived unannounced, and caught me in his mother’s garden.
He was traveling to a neighboring city, a last attempt to win allies for his impending war against Sparta. It was a trip that gave him reason to pass within a league of Aphidna, and he came to his mother’s house to rest. Aethra and I were taking a late lunch when a maid rushed in, the king several short steps behind her.
There was no time to hide.
He failed to recognize me, and the beginnings of a lusty grin had begun to form on his gaptoothed face. Then, he spotted the Spartan dagger at my waist, and knew.
“Oh, mother,” he said, not moving his eyes from my body. “You play a wicked game.”
“One you have lost,” Aethra said, as she moved to shelter me from her son. “Her brothers are mere days from Athens’ door. Let her return to her family in peace, and you can save your honor.”
“The war will end once I wed her,” he said, and came at me.
“Don’t be a fool, my son!” Aethra shouted, trying to push him away with her words, but he took his own mother by her shoulders and hurled her to the damp earth.
She fell hard, and my blood rose.
No more.
I put myself between the king and Aethra. I pressed a hand to his chest, and felt his skin burn. “Enough,” I said to him. “Your mother has treated me like her own daughter—I will not allow this.”
He covered my hand with one of his own, and used the other to pull me against his waist. He was erect; the household gossip of the maids had prepared me for the feat, but not the fear. “My wife,” he snarled. “Helen of Sparta…mine!”
I answered him the best I way I knew how; I took the dagger his mother had given to me, cut him across the meat of both thighs, and then copied these wounds in the heavy muscles of his arms.
They were not killing wounds; I would not murder Aethra’s son, no matter how I might wish it. They were, however, hard wounds. The last, the one I made in his left arm, was the worst of them, as he realized at that fourth quick stroke that I was crippling him and tried to pull away. That cut ended in an odd upward curl, a bloody fishhook marked upon his flesh.
He tried to come at me again, and I stepped away before he toppled to the ground.
“Put him in a bed,” I told the maids, as the ruined king moved towards me. I stepped backwards, keeping time with his stuttering crawl. He would never touch me again. “Not mine and not his mother’s, and call for the seamstress to stitch him back together.”
He had enough fight left within him to beat his fists against the face of the first woman who tried to help him. I kicked him across the jaw and made a fifth cut while he moaned into the earth.
That fifth cut was quite wicked of me; all the maids of the household smiled.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
I woke screaming.
Hey, you try riding along in a dead princess’s body as she castrates a man, and see what you do, all right?
Speedy twitched in his sleep. I nearly woke him up to talk over Helen’s most recent dream-memory, but thought better of it. He was done with Greece. I needed to get him to his home territory before he started getting dangerously irritable. Emphasis on dangerous.
I tied my hair back, threw on some clothes, and went downstairs.
Mike found me in the bar an hour later. I had a large glass of whiskey in one hand, and those three little beads on their new lanyard in the other. The beads had stopped chirping at me days ago. I wasn’t sure if I was happy or sad about that. I guess I was hoping the liquor would tell me.
Mike sat down beside me, and held up two fingers to the bartender. He waited until his own whiskey arrived before he nudged me with his elbow.
“You okay?”
I nodded. I was three shots into a decent buzz, and feeling much better than I had when I had woken up with somebody else’s memory of slicing a scrotum off with a dagger.
I told Mike about the dream.
To say that he flinched would belittle the subtle art of flinching. Instead, I’ll say he placed his drink on the bar, ordered another double, and drank all three glasses—both of his and mine—without tasting any of them.
“Yep,” I said. “That.”
“Dear Lord,” he said. “We’ve got to get her to stop sending you these dreams.”
“I don’t think she’s going to stop until I do something for her,” I began, as the bartender swept away our glasses and replaced them with new ones. “It’s like what Speedy told me—she’s sending them for a reason. She’s not going to let me go until she’s done.”
“Okay,” he said, shaking his head as the whiskey hit him. “Let’s figure out what she wants, and go do it.”
“I wish it were that simple. She’s not good at communicating,” I said. “Or maybe I’m not good at understanding the message. So far, these dreams have been about her kidnapping and imprisonment. Why aren’t they about that big thing that made her famous? Why aren’t they about what happened in Troy?”
“Good question,” Mike said.
“Or…maybe they are,” I realized, and my stomach sank to my feet. “Maybe this is just the preamble, and then I get to watch another twenty years of politics and war. Which…well, I’d love to know what really happened in the Trojan War, but I don’t have the time to watch it now, and I definitely don’t have the time to tell the rest of the world—
“Oh God,” I groaned. “What if she wants me to be her public image consultant? What if she’s tired of being portrayed as this meek blonde waif in a dress, and she wants me to fix it?
“I don’t know how to do that, Mike!” I grabbed his arm, and he signaled the bartender for another couple of drinks. “How do I make all of Western culture change their image of Helen of Troy to Helen of Sparta? I’m not that good!”
“Easy,” Mike said, as he pushed the whiskey into my hands. “You’re just guessing. Let’s talk this through. What has Helen actually said she wants you to do?”
I thought back to what Helen had told me a
t the Kos Asklepion. “I am tired of this world,” I quoted. “The beast waits below the island. Set us both free.”
“Good,” he said. “So we’ve got an island, a beast, and a command. She wants you to set them free.”
“Speedy thinks she’s helping me,” I said. “That she’s popped into the future and seen where I’m headed, and wants to prep me on what’s coming.”
“Speedy’s almost always right,” Mike said. “So, she’s helping you, but she also wants you to help her? Why would Helen ask you to set her free? She’s a powerful ghost—she’s not limited by physical constraints.”
I huffed out a long breath. “What do we know about the Afterlife?” I asked. “Beside the part where you get to build your own dream house.”
“Damned little. It’s more limbo than reality. You wait there while you decide whether you want to move on from this life to the next.”
“Yeah,” I said. “So why does she think she’s trapped? She could pick up and move on to the next life whenever she wants.”
Mike mulled this over. “I’m a Buddhist,” he finally said.
“You’ve mentioned.”
“Buddhism is big on the problem of getting trapped within cycles of your own making. Much of what holds us back are barriers we impose upon ourselves. These are mental barriers, not physical—they’d apply to dead humans as much as living ones.”
“I’m with you,” I said.
“Now, who’s most likely to stay behind as a ghost?”
“Soldiers, politicians, and creative types who want to continue their experiments or projects or whatever,” I said. It was a good rule of thumb that if someone felt invested in the welfare of the world of the living, they’d stick around. I didn’t like battlefields; way too many dead people still fighting over causes long since resolved. “Fame alone doesn’t tie a ghost down—if it did, we’d be swimming in James Deans and Marilyn Monroes.”
“Exactly,” he said. “Ghosts stick around because they feel they have to. Maybe some of them don’t accept that they already have the ability to move on to the next life…maybe some of them don’t think they have the right to move on.”
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