Fine.
Pandy searched higher and farther. Finally, she spotted a small red glow way above her on the very top of the mountain, surrounding a small tree that hadn’t been there a second ago, she was sure of it.
“Okay, just watch me!” she huffed.
Picking and clawing her way past thinning brush, she found herself on a steep incline of loose stones, overhanging rock ledges, and—she bit her tongue, not saying a word and not even thinking anything—snow. Icy patches covered the ground precisely where she needed to climb. She dug her hands and feet into the snow, moving like an animal ever higher. Twice she slipped and slid back, once coming so close to the edge of a sheer drop, she actually did bite her tongue. She scraped her knees and bruised her shins. She stubbed three toes, hit her head on an overhang, scratched her hands, and broke two nails down to the quick. At last, out of breath, she reached the top of the mountain and the tree, a beautiful spring green underneath the red glow. Plucking several of the largest leaves, she turned and realized that she would have had a view of almost the entire Atlas Mountain range.
Except that now most of it was cloaked by the filmy black wall.
And Jbel Toubkal was nowhere to be seen.
She did notice that the wall, again, didn’t seem to actually touch the earth, and the ground underneath (what she could see in the fading light) was pale, growing whiter as it stretched away.
“More snow,” she sighed, looking at the kilometers of ground before her, knowing their destination was at least a week’s walk away, if not more. But, more importantly, she saw the campfires burning dully far below and realized that the slavers were closer than she thought—and their numbers were massive. She turned to face the deadly descent back down and found the rock now cut through by a smooth path that wound its way in a serpentine back and forth across the mountain.
“Thank you, thank you,” she whispered as she hurried back to the boys. Then, as she was almost upon them, it hit her. She knew what she could use to sew the wound.
“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Thank you,” she practically sang.
She brought out the blue marble map Hera had given her at the beginning of her quest. Using it as an ordinary bowl (knowing that it wouldn’t begin spinning without her tears), Pandy mixed all the herbs into a dry poultice, following Athena’s instructions exactly. She prayed earnestly and fervently to Apollo in Greek. Then she cleaned Amri’s wound of the dried blood and pus, telling him in Kabyle what a really good patient he was being and asking his brother to tell him a joke. Ismailil just looked at Pandy as if she were insane.
“No jokes?” she asked, forcing a smile. “Okay, here’s one my dad used to tell all the time before my mother made him stop: Plato and Socrates walk into a tavern . . .”
As she carefully added drops of water to make a paste of the herbs, she had a flash of herself, no more than two months ago, dragging home from school, being lazy, napping, dawdling, flopping around, thinking she was bored out of her skull. Could she ever have imagined herself working now with such speed and focus, trying to save a little boy’s leg in another part of the world? Not in a gazillion years.
Then Pandy used her power over fire and blew up and down the length of the wound, completely sterilizing it.
“Rope,” she said, “come to me.”
The flap of her carrying pouch flipped back and the coil of enchanted rope, yet another gift from Athena, flew into her hands. Ismailil and Amri were too astonished to even be afraid.
Confused for a split second, she began to speak the next part in Kabyle, but realized just in time that she couldn’t, not without frightening the boys even further.
“Small enough to sew skin,” she said in Greek.
Instantly the rope shrunk itself so small that it all but disappeared.
“Sew Amri’s leg!”
With the speed of a surgeon, the rope, now no thicker than a hair, wound its way in and out of the little boy’s leg, completely sealing the wound. Amri would tell his children years later that it was like being tickled by a crab.
Pandy applied the poultice she’d made to the beautifully sewn wound. Then she took her spare toga and ripped off the hem, knowing that this was a much better use for it anyway, and wrapped Amri’s leg.
“And that is that!” she said.
Thirty seconds later, after remaining silent for the entire procedure, both Ismailil and Amri burst into tears.
“Hey, what the—?” Pandy cried. “No, it’s okay now.”
But the brothers, although they were quiet, simply wouldn’t stop.
“Sheesh. Boys.”
CHAPTER NINE
Book of Letters
Homer led them all down the long passage leading to the captain’s quarters. Immediately, Alcie and Iole knew something was not right. Instead of leading straight off into the ship, the passageway now twisted ever so subtly. The wooden walls had become darker, and small fractures ran through all of the beams. As they neared the captain’s cabin, the fractures in the wood became large enough to expose lamplight from the cabins on the other side of the corridor. Splinters the size of swords stuck out from some of the joists, and the wall sconces were tilted. Every so often, there was a great shudder, as if the Syracusa herself were sighing.
“What’s going on?” Alcie asked.
“I don’t know, but whatever it is, it started in the captain’s cabin.”
“Homer, do you think the captain can be trusted?” Alcie asked.
“Absolutely,” Homer answered, but his voice was far away. “He hates this. He told me he wished that he had actually been sent straight to the underworld when the Peacock was destroyed. But instead he just floated on a plank of wood for days until the Syracusa picked him up. He’s thought more than once about ramming the ship— destroying her somehow—but he doesn’t want to risk the lives of all the prisoners. And it’s, like, an amazing ship.”
“Are you really helping the captain with the charts and maps?” asked Alcie, trying to get him to just look at her.
“I guess so,” Homer replied. “There were a couple of charts he told me to stay away from, so I’ve just been looking at currents and coastlines and stuff.”
Just then, the ship groaned and rolled hard to one side, and they all went crashing heavily into the passageway wall. Homer, who had instinctively thrown up his hand to steady himself, let out a loud cry.
“What’s wrong, Homie—er?” said Alcie.
“Nothing—it’s just my hand. Where it bit me,” he said.
“Where what bit you?” Iole asked.
“This thing, you know? The thing I wanted you to see.”
“Let me see your hand!” Alcie said sharply. She quickly added in a softer tone, “Please.”
He held out his right hand: a chunk of flesh was missing from the meaty side of his thumb, almost down to his wrist. The edges of the wound were jagged, as if he’d been bitten by something with dozens of tiny serrated teeth. He’d tried to staunch the wound by wrapping it tightly in the folds of his robe, but using his hand to keep himself righted after the ship had rolled had started the flow of blood again.
“Gods—,” Iole said, genuinely alarmed, “we’ve got to stop the bleeding. The Eye of Horus . . . it’s in my pouch back in the cabin.”
“It’s okay. It’ll stop in a moment—it’s just muscle,” he protested. “I got sliced worse than this back in gladiator school. I really need to show you something.”
Abruptly, Iole turned her head in the direction of the captain’s quarters.
“Listen—”
Every so often, there was a light whirring or whistling sound followed by the short, sharp squelch of splintering wood. Occasionally, the whirring was followed by a soft thud. After several thuds, the end of Iole’s nose tingled ever so slightly.
“Do you smell that?”
“Something spoiled . . . like bad fruit or juice,” Alcie said.
“It’s more like . . . like . . . burned hair!”
said Iole, recalling their first adventure capturing Jealousy. “That’s how I smelled after almost being roasted on the Altar of the Oracle of Delphi!”
Homer was now rubbing his hand vigorously within the folds of his robe.
Then he burst into tears.
“Whoa,” said Alcie under her breath.
“Uh, Homer, what’s going on?” Iole asked.
“I don’t know,” he moaned, his eyes shut very tight, grasping his wounded hand and rocking his whole body so that it bumped into the wall. “I just feel really— really—um—sad.”
“Homer . . . look at me,” Iole said. “Tell me everything that happened before you came to our cabin. Okay? This is—oh, what’s your word—totally important.”
He opened his eyes, tears running down his cheeks.
“Well, when I came into his quarters this morning, the captain was gone. But he wanted me to look at the map of the Balearic Islands, so I went to get it, and, um, one of the charts that the captain didn’t want me to see was hanging down a little ways off of its rod. I just tried to ignore it, you know? Then the ship rolled way to one side . . . but gently, like normal . . . nothing like what’s happening now . . . and the chart fell down a little farther. I didn’t want the captain to think that I had looked at it, so I tugged on it a little and tried to send it rolling back up. But when I did, it unfurled all the way and this thing fell out.”
“Thing?” said Alcie.
The Syracusa shuddered so violently at that moment that they thought they heard something snap on the deck overhead.
“It was a book . . . just a little book,” Homer said, his lower lip quivering so badly, his words were almost lost. “So I, like, went to pick it up—to put it back, you know? Then it jumped at my hand and bit me. And then some . . . things flew out of the book. That’s when I came to get you.”
Alcie and Iole stared at Homer for a moment, his face now turned toward the wall in abject despair. Alcie reached forward and touched Homer lightly on his unhurt hand.
“Come on.”
The three of them moved toward the captain’s quarters. Not wanting to be hindered at any time by a bolted door, the pirates had purposefully removed it.
“I think—maybe you’re gonna want to bend down,” said Homer, lowering himself to the floor as they rounded a corner.
“Why?” asked Iole.
“Because there’s things flying all over the room and sticking in the walls.”
Sure enough, several arrows were sticking out in the passageway wall directly across from the door. It was as if someone were shooting them out from inside the room.
Alcie and Iole ducked down and crawled the rest of the way to the door. Alcie stuck her head around the doorframe.
The walls of the small room were covered with arrows: sticking into wooden chairs and open charts and protruding up from the floor. There were arrows on the captain’s sleeping cot and stuck into the large wooden chest where he kept his private articles. But there were also several small sheets of parchment lying on the floor, a dark-edged hole burned into the center and a thin wisp of smoke rising off of each one.
Suddenly an arrow whizzed by Alcie’s ear and zinged into the wall behind her. It gave off a sound like a low moan.
After it had stopped jiggling up and down, she quickly yanked it from the wall and found it was not an arrow, in the usual sense, at all.
It was a tightly rolled piece of parchment. Alcie held it to her nose, coughing a little at the smell of burned hair. She began to unroll the paper, over Iole’s protestations.
She had unrolled about six or seven centimeters, revealing a beautifully scripted letter, when a clump of something stringy dropped out, exploded with a white-hot pop in midair, and landed on the floor. The pungent smell of burned hair again filled the narrow passageway, causing everyone to gasp.
Two more letter-arrows shot through the doorway and landed in the back wall; these two flew with high-pitched feminine wails of different notes—almost as if they were wailing in harmony.
Fully unrolling the letter still in Alcie’s hand, they saw it was either faded or discolored as if blackened by a fire. They could make out only a few random words; words like “desperate,” “unbelievable,” “nightmares,” and “lonely.”
“Moldy green melons!” said Alcie, reading as much as she could. “This person was not having a good time.”
At the very bottom were the words “My breaking heart still clings— —beloved, Latona.”
Another letter-arrow shot out of the room with a deep low-throated yowl, but this one banged off a bronze shield hanging in the passageway. It fell to the floor with a soft thud and quickly unrolled itself flat. This time, when the stringy substance hit the air, it ignited and started a small fast-burning fire in the center of the letter. The scent of burning hair again filled the passageway as the letter went up in flames.
Iole reached up and pulled another letter out of the wall, nearly grazed by one incoming.
“She must have included a lock of her hair in every letter,” Iole said, unrolling the letter fully. “But why? And who is she?”
The letter was in much the same condition as the first. But as Iole had unrolled it, certain words seemed to fade or obscure and other words and phrases became more legible. “Predicament,” “gone so long,” and “disease of the heart,” popped out in full black ink.
They heard a sudden chatter inside the captain’s room and Alcie stuck her head around the doorframe once again.
On the floor, underneath the table in the center of the room, lay a small leather-bound book. It was opening and closing slowly, revealing hundreds of small ivory-colored teeth set in two rows around the top and bottom edges. But it wasn’t opening and closing all by itself. They saw two tiny figures inside the book: a woman with long, long hair and a small boy. Both were made of a transparent silvery-blue substance and moved like steamy fluid, leaving trails of silver-blue in the air behind them. They were talking to each other in squeaky, high-pitched voices.
“Kumquats . . . ,” said Alcie softly.
Both the woman and the boy were pushing on the inside cover of the book, trying to get it to stay open. Finally, they flipped the heavy leather cover backward and the small boy, no bigger than Alcie’s fist, jumped on top. It was then that Alcie saw the teensiest set of wings on the boy’s back.
The boy squeaked something to the woman, who picked up a small bow from inside the book and handed it to him. Walking to the top of the book, she ripped a single page from the inside. She rolled the page into a small cylinder and gave it to the boy. He quickly placed it on his bow and shot the “arrow” through the door and into the passageway wall. The two then fell back laughing, tumbling down into the now hollowed-out inside of the book, which allowed the leather cover to snap shut again. Then the whole process started all over.
“That’s Eros!” Iole said as the arrow went moaning over their heads, crashing into the bronze shield.
“The God of Love?” Alcie whispered, pinching her nose as the hair inside the arrow ignited.
“I’m sure of it,” Iole said, “but Pandy told us that the gods were going to be helping her whenever they could. If she—or we—were meant to find whatever this is, then shooting letters that could kill us is not helping!”
“Iole, Eros is immortal but he’s only about two years old. He’s just a little baby god,” Alcie countered. “He wouldn’t know what he’s doing.”
The two shimmery figures were now pushing the book of letters farther to one side of the room in order to be able to shoot the “arrows” directly at Alcie, Iole, and Homer. However, they accidentally sent it careening into one of the support poles in the center of the cabin. Immediately, the book took a bite out of the old wood, and the ship shuddered violently again as she rolled to one side, all the beams creaking and moaning, sending a silver tray and an urn crashing to the floor. That’s when Alcie noticed other bite marks in the cabin: the walls, a table, the floor itself.
“It’s eating the ship,” Alcie muttered.
“What?” asked Iole.
“Or it’s infecting it somehow,” Alcie said, staring back at Iole. “The ship is . . . feeling it. That’s why it’s lurching and groaning!”
“Feeling what?”
“We have to do something!” Alcie’s face was suddenly grim. “The three of us—”
“Homer’s gone,” Iole said. “He crawled away a while ago.”
Fine, Alcie thought; she knew that having him there in his condition would probably only make matters worse.
“The two of us, then. Okay, here we go,” she said, hoping that her words were sounding the way Pandy would have said them. “I’ll go in and surprise them. And then . . . and then . . .”
Without warning, Alcie quickly reached up and snatched the bronze shield off the passageway wall. Another of Eros’s arrows came perilously close to piercing her rear end. Then she turned and ran, yelling, into the room.
“Ahhhh!”
The two figures were so startled that Eros dropped his bow.
“Ahhhh!” they screamed together.
Then Iole rushed in.
“Ahhhh!”
“Ahhhh!”
“Get them!” Alcie yelled.
Instantly Eros took off flying around the room. With no more arrows to shoot, he began dive-bombing the girls, howling with laughter.
Alcie dropped to the floor and went after the little woman, but she was so swift that Alcie caught only handfuls of blue vapor.
“Don’t touch it with your bare hands!” shouted Iole.
“Give me something!”
Iole ran to the far side of the cabin and snatched a thin fabric covering off of a pile of crates.
“Here!”
Alcie caught the cloth in the air and moved to scoop up the woman, but she was too fast and ran right under Iole’s legs; Alcie tried to follow, sending both girls sprawling. Alcie chased the woman behind the pile of crates only to see her dash out the other side.
Pandora Gets Lazy Page 6
