“That would explain the battlefields,” I sighed.
Mike nodded. “If we accept that ghosts think they still have obligations,” he said. “That feeling of responsibility means they feel compelled to follow patterns they already have the power to break.”
“Sounds good,” I said. “So, if we follow this logic, what? We’ve decided Helen’s sticking around because she feels responsible for something…maybe…?”
“Yes, but how does an island fit into this?” he asked. “And which island? There are hundreds of them around Greece.”
“Not to mention the beast,” I said. “Which is a very vague term, and could mean anything from Theseus’ ghost to a llama with a bad combover.”
We slumped over our drinks.
“We need more data,” I said, as I poked at a salt shaker.
“Yeah, we do,” he said. “We’re just grasping at straws here.”
“Think we could just call Helen and ask?”
He didn’t reply.
“Thought not,” I said. I threw a bunch of money on the bar, and went back upstairs to bed.
CHAPTER THIRTY
My brothers were waiting at the gate.
They had grown in our four years apart, but I would know them anywhere: Castor and Polydeuces, the pride of Sparta. Leaders of the Dioscuri. Hard and wicked men.
They did not recognize me.
I let them into Aethra’s household, and their eyes moved past me before they jerked back to my face.
“Soft living,” said Polydeuces, the first words I had heard from my family’s own lips since I was taken captive. “They have turned you into an Athenian whore.”
I hit him hard enough to split his cheek open, and laid him flat with a kick I had learned from one of Aethra’s hired mercenaries. When he finally caught his breath, he began laughing, and gathered me into his arms.
“Sister,” he said. “It’s time to come home.”
“Long past time,” I said. “What kept you?”
“Father,” Castor replied. “He wanted to be sure that Theseus would never control Athens again.”
I laughed, perhaps a little too well. “Never,” I promised them, as I led them to Aethra’s reception hall. The queen sat, waiting, the women of her household gathered around her. Their fear was thick enough to taste; the Dioscuri were proud of their reputation as killers of the wicked and unjust, and these women had helped imprison their sister.
“Where is the king?” Polydeuces asked, as he circled the room like a hunting wolf. “He is supposed to be in this house.”
I looked to Aethra, who closed her eyes and waited to see if I would finally slit her son’s throat.
“He is on his way to the Underworld,” I said. “If he has not already arrived.”
“Your doing?”
I nodded. “He was a coward, a thief of women. If he lives, he will never repeat his crimes—I have made sure of that.”
“Where?” asked Castor, and I nodded towards the bedroom where Theseus lay wrapped in his pain. My brother held out his arm, and I slipped mine through his.
He felt like home. I rested my head against his shoulder for a brief moment, and then took him to see the king.
Six days had passed from when Theseus had come upon me in his mother’s garden. The healers kept changing the poultices, but the smell of ripe infection assaulted my brother as he pulled aside the bed curtains. The king twisted within his fever dreams, moaning of curses, of monsters…
“Well done, sister,” my brother told me, pride in his voice. “Well done, indeed.”
“He might yet live,” I admitted. “He’s quite strong. But if he does…”
I threw back the sheets to show Castor that last wound.
Even the Dioscuri can feel revulsion. My brother recoiled from what I had done to the king.
“Helen…” he began, but could not finish.
We heard screams from the great room, and we hurried to see Polydeuces take his sword to the first maid.
“Stop,” I said, my command ringing through the hall.
My brother pulled his sword from the woman’s chest. He wiped it on her robe before he held it out to me. “Apologies, sister,” he said. “The right is yours.”
“Aethra has been like a mother to me,” I said. “And these women helped protect me from her son. They will not be harmed—never. Not while I live.”
Polydeuces saw what he had done, and was ashamed. He bowed before Aethra.
I will never know what he planned to say, as the maids began to scream for another reason.
The sounds of their terror and anguish had woken something in the ruined king. Theseus stood in the doorway, black blood seeping from his wounds and yellow tears pouring down his face. He wore nothing, and my brothers froze at the sight.
I did not. I took up Polydeuces’ sword and pressed it to the king’s neck.
“Do it,” he hissed.
“No,” I said. I took a step back and let the sword fall to my side.
“Do it, or I will kill all who you love,” he said, and his mad eyes turned towards Aethra. “I will start with her.”
I turned my back to him and walked away.
“They come with us,” I told my brothers, as I pointed to Aethra and her maids, and ignored how the ruined king howled behind me.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The archivists working in the library found the scroll two days after Mike and I left it there. Atlas tried to get me to come down to the library to look at it: I declined, and sent Mike in my place. Mike said the scroll had been placed in a clear Plexiglas tube for protection, and Atlas had donned lint-free cotton gloves to remove it and show him the elaborate sketches of Archimedes’ orreries.
Mike says he oohed! and aahed! in the proper places, and that Atlas still didn’t realize that the abnormal discoloration in the corner was actually a three-day-old coffee stain.
I made reservations for a flight out of Athens the following day.
But…
“The beast waits below the island. Set us both free.”
Now, as Speedy put it, we had two options. One? We get on the plane, head back to America, and the queen could go fuck herself…so to speak. If the cultural barriers between the living and the dead worked the way I thought they did, we’d never see or hear from Helen again. I probably shouldn’t go back to Greece, but, you know, I could easily avoid an entire country if properly motivated.
The second option was to tell her we were planning to leave unless she could give us better instructions.
Speedy wasn’t for that at all. He kept harping on the tornado in the coffee shop, and said that if things got that bad when the queen was trying to get our attention, she’d probably do a damned fine job of killing us if that’s how she wanted the meeting to play out.
I figured it wouldn’t hurt to be polite.
Probably.
Speedy, Mike, and I rented a car, and drove back to Lindos to visit the Temple of Athena. We had researched the hell out of possible locations on Rhodes that were associated with Helen, and there’s a story in the Lindos Chronicles that Helen had dedicated two bracelets to Athena at that particular temple. Helen plus bracelets equaled the closest we could come to forming a physical connection to the queen on Rhodes. [21]
We hoped it would be enough to get her attention.
Mike and I did without the donkeys, and we arrived at the top of the hill just before the last tours of the day left the acropolis. I bribed the guards to be busy somewhere else for an hour, and the four of us—me, Mike, Speedy, and the bright green avatar of my husband—arranged ourselves along the plinth of the Temple of Athena at twilight.
I cupped the three beads in my hands and joined Mike in meditating our butts off on the image of the dead queen.
It was almost full dark before Sparky nodded at the open air beside us and said, “She’s here.”
“Speedy?”
“On it,” the koala said, and started spewing Greek.
The queen’s face on my phone’s screen grew dark, and a whole bunch of gigantic loose stones that were lying around the plinth detached themselves from the earth and began floating towards us. Fast.
I rose, took a few steps towards the space where Helen stood, and shouted: “Stop!”
The stones dropped and clattered against the plinth. Some of them were huge, bigger than me and Mike put together; I really didn’t want to have to explain how those got up there to a guard. Or an archaeologist. Or a mortician.
“Tell us what you want,” I said. “No riddles. No shortcuts. We don’t speak the same language, so dumb it down for us!”
The queen’s eyes moved from me to the koala on my shoulders. Speedy translated; Helen replied.
“She says she wants us to go to the island,” Speedy said. “Kill the beast, set them both free. No new information. She’s getting really angry,” he added, as if I couldn’t see the rocks beginning to twitch and levitate again.
“No shit,” I said. “Tell her we would, if we knew which island. This is Greece—there are hundreds of them!”
Speedy spat out the words as quickly as he could.
“Holy crap,” Sparky said in a low voice.
“What?” Mike and I asked, but the queen’s laughter through our phones was our answer.
“What’s happening?” I whispered to my husband.
The koala shushed us; Helen was speaking.
“Huh,” Speedy said.
“What?!”
“She apologized,” he said. “She says she’s forgotten what it’s like to be limited by time and space.”
Okay.
Bear with me while I explain this part, because I’ve never seen anything like it before, and I doubt I ever will again.
The floating stones began to swing around us in a tight circle.
Now, when I say stones, what I’m really saying is pieces of ancient buildings the size of cars. This made for a very…unpleasant experience.
The stones twirled and danced, and I got the impression Helen was taking her time about aligning them in a specific order.
Then, the stones stopped. They hung there in midair, one of Archimedes’ orreries without the need for the limits of gears.
The stones plummeted to the ground and cracked apart. The shards—the unnecessary pieces—were swept aside as if a large invisible broom had passed across the plinth. What was left behind were carefully cut sculptures, with brand-new bumps and ridges all over them, positioned across the temple floor in a too-regular order.
As a finishing touch? The shards that had been swept aside came flying back in a dusty whirlwind, grinding themselves down into fragments the size of sand. This sand was laid across the plinth in waves. Literally, waves. As in: this sand was moving in ripples like the surface of the ocean. I could see eddies and sounds around each of the large stone sculptures.
The creepiest part of this whole creepy process? The waves floated at my thigh. I pushed my hands through them, and there was an inch of pulverized stone which felt smooth and silky, like warm, dry water…and there was just open air beneath this.
Okay.
I hang out with Benjamin Franklin on a daily basis. As far as powerful American ghosts go, only George Washington has more juice than Ben. I’ve seen those guys do amazing, magical things for nothing more than the sake of personal convenience.
Both of them working together couldn’t have put on a telekinetic display of this magnitude.
The four of us wandered around the plinth, waves made of dust crashing around our knees and our jaws hanging somewhere around our navels.
None of us wanted to admit that what Helen had just done—the precision and the size of it—had no place in a sane reality.
Sparky recovered first. “I think…” he began, and then launched his avatar into the air. He flew fifteen feet straight up for a better view. “I think it’s a map of an archipelago.”
“Which one?” I asked.
“A Greek one.”
“Thank you, Mike. I mean, which Greek archipelago? And which island?” I asked. “Do you think we have to search them all?”
Maybe Helen understood more English than she let on, I don’t know, or maybe comedic timing transcends language barriers. Whatever the case, that was the exact moment a bolt of bright white lightning shot down from the heavens and set one of those giant stones on fire!
“Ah,” I said, as I watched the rock melt into a pool of red-hot slag. “That one.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The ruined king came to Sparta seven years after I thought he was dead.
I was pregnant with my fourth child; had I realized the old man was the man who had kidnapped me, I would have had him slain before he could enter my home and pollute the air my unborn babe and I breathed.
I sat, stiff and heavy on my throne, as I attended to the needs of my country. My husband was away, engaged in the trade of war, and I was alone on the dais. It had been a hard winter, and the fire in the center of the room burned as hot as my men could make it.
Petitioners came and went, their concerns defining their lives and mine for the time it took me to address them. I consulted with Aethra often; she was always by my side of late, as we waited for my child’s time to come.
The last petitioner was announced. An old man shuffled towards me, his face hidden by a heavy cloak. When he reached the dais, he pushed his hood back and sneered.
He had meant it to be a shocking revelation, I am sure, but even his own mother could not recognize what Theseus had become. He had aged fifty years in seven, his limbs thin, his face a skull within skin.
I recognized him by the scar on his left arm, the long white line that ended in a fishhook that spun up towards his heart.
So did Aethra; I heard her gasp at what her son had become.
I nodded to the nearest guard. “Kill him.”
“Hold!” There was still enough command in the old king’s voice to freeze even a Spartan warrior. “I will speak with your queen before I die.”
I held up a hand to the soldier. “He knows he will never leave this room,” I said. “Let him speak.”
What a fool I was.
“Helen, Queen of Sparta,” Theseus spat. “You’ve brought me to ruin.”
I said nothing. There was no need for me to point out what was obvious.
Aethra had the mother’s prerogative of chastising her son, and so she did. “The fault is yours, Theseus,” she said, moving ever closer to my throne. I placed my hand over hers, and felt her quaking; she had so nearly escaped seeing her son die in front of her. “Had you left this girl alone, you would still be a king.”
“And whole,” I added. The members of my court chuckled, but I knew my words were petty as I said them. The Dioscuri had told all of Greece how I had brought down the king of Athens, and every man in the room knew what Theseus lacked beneath those beggar’s robes.
His face grew wild with rage.
“Dog’s bitch,” he swore. “Whore of a queen. Mark me—I bring your doom.”
I kept my own face calm as I studied him for traces of disease. I saw none, but that did not mean he had not brought sickness to my court.
“Oh?” I asked, pillowing my chin on my hand.
He removed a dagger from his robes. Its black blade was short and straight; its handle too heavy for throwing. Still, I nodded to my guards and they closed around him, spears at the ready.
“I have been across the sea,” he said. “I found an Egyptian who taught me their magic.”
The old king bowed his head and began to whisper in a language I did not know, and the guards looked to me for guidance.
Before I could tell them to run him through, Theseus snapped to his full height. “Helen of Sparta!” he shouted. “Hear me! You are cursed! I curse you, your children, your entire line! Your kingdom, cursed! The Age of Heroes ends with you, Helen!”
His voice dropped to cold fury. “I pledge my shade to this,” he said. “You will
never know another moment’s peace. Not in your lifetime, and not after death. This I vow.”
Theseus drew the black dagger across his own belly.
The old king’s guts poured from him as he toppled forward, into the fire, and he burned while he screamed my name.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Sparky and I were sitting on the roof of my hotel. We had a great view of the ocean. We were both pretending to watch it.
Yeah, I could have woken Speedy or Mike, but when you’ve watched a man eviscerate himself before burning alive? Well, you don’t want to be with anybody but the one you love more than anyone else.
We were getting close to the half-hour mark. Neither of us wanted to be the first to say that he should go back to his body.
“I’m tired of ghosts,” I said quietly.
“Me, too.”
“Everybody’s hurting. Pain should stop once you die, not…” I didn’t know what to say, but Sparky knew what I meant.
“Not continue, not become worse, and definitely not spill over on to anybody else,” he said.
“Yeah.”
He held up his left hand; it still had all of the fine details that were always stamped into Sparky’s avatar, but these were starting to run into each other at the edges. The image of his wedding band started out as crisp, the Celtic knots twinning into each other; as I watched, the lines began to run like water.
“You’ve got to go,” I said.
“One last time,” he said. “While it’s fresh.”
I sighed, and repeated everything I could remember about the most recent dream. I included all of the details. Even the smells.
“The thing is,” I finished, “I’m damned sure Helen doesn’t believe in curses. She didn’t believe the bullshit that Daddy Dearest was a god, so why should she believe in magic?”
“Well,” Sparky said, his eyes going distant as he read something online, “Sparta had a string of bad luck right around that time. There was a plague, then Helen was kidnapped by Paris, and then the Trojan War began.”
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