Demeter was only seconds behind, carrying goblets of nectar and two large spoons.
“Oh,” she giggled, “I feel like a mortal at one of those chic Roman Somnus parties where all the girls get together and paint their nails and give each other makeovers and gossip all night . . . Where’s the dog?”
“Huh?” said Hera, whirling about.
“Where’s the dog?”
“Probably hiding,” Hera said.
“No,” said Demeter, walking into the corner, gazing under the divan. “He’s not here.”
“What do you mean, he’s not here?” shrieked Hera.
“The corner is still warm,” Demeter said, feeling the stones, “and there’s a trail of something sticky leading out onto your balcony.”
“Looks like sandal prints . . . in blood,” said Hera, following the prints outside.
The dark red trail led across Hera’s balcony, with one print on the far railing, but it didn’t continue on the balconies of the adjoining apartments belonging to Hermes, Artemis, and Apollo. It was only looking at the far end of the wing that Hera saw a tiny speck of red dot the railing of the corner apartment.
“Ares,” Hera muttered.
“Oh no,” Demeter whispered. “How do you think he found out?”
“The brat,” Hera spat, moving inside. “She prayed to him. I heard her. Clever girl. I just didn’t think he would be so bold . . . but he’s left me his signature trail.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Keep the nectar cold,” Hera said, clomping through the entryway. “This won’t take long.”
Hera strode down the long hallway, passing fountains and gardens. Halfway to Ares’ rooms, she nearly plowed into Artemis, arriving fresh from a hunt.
“Hey!” yelled Artemis. “Watch where you’re going!”
“Sorry, dear,” Hera said, acting nonchalant, but continuing on. “Oh my, you look all spent. You should take a nap . . . and definitely a bath. If you’ll excuse me.”
Hera pretended to examine an exotic floral arrangement on the far side of the hall until Artemis entered her own apartments. Then she wound her way around several bushes and placed herself squarely in Ares’ entryway. At the sight of her, Dido, lying on a low fur pallet, a huge bowl of choice meats half eaten in front of him, immediately began to growl.
“Hush now,” came a gravelly voice from a chair in the corner of the room. “Rest.”
Immediately, Dido fell asleep.
“You have something of mine,” Hera said, regaining her composure.
“You had something of hers,” Ares replied.
“I’d like it back.”
“I’m glad to see you, at least, are remaining well fed,” said Ares, ignoring her comment.
Hera gazed at Ares. She noticed his helmet, on a table by his side, knowing full well that Ares removed it only when he wanted to be particularly imposing.
“I have to eat,” she replied, calmly ignoring the battle scars that covered his face (some of which bled afresh eternally) and his yellow eyes, narrowed into slits.
“So does the dog,” Ares said. “You mistreated my protected animal and I’m not going to stand by and—”
“Blah, blah. I feed him—”
“I won’t argue,” Ares interrupted. “Now go away or I’ll let it slip to Zeus that he’s here and who brought him. Which I might do anyway.”
Hera walked toward Ares, her voice set at a purr.
“And what exactly will you say?”
“That I was visiting Aphrodite; her apartments are not far from yours. I heard a yelp and I came to check it out. I found the dog dirty, panicked, and starving, which he was. It won’t take Zeus long to put alpha and beta together.”
“Fine,” Hera said, looking directly into Ares’ eyes. “Tell him your theories now that you’ve revealed them to me, wonderful strategist that you are. And when he asks me about it, I will tell him that I know how precious the animal is to Pandora and that I took him only out of love for the child. That this quest is too dangerous for such a helpless animal . . . that I only took him to keep him safe until, and if, she returns. That it is I who was protecting him. Now, whom do you think Zeus will believe?”
Ares stared at Hera for a moment.
“Me,” he said quietly. “And the dog.”
At a snap of his fingers, Dido woke and, looking at Hera, began to speak.
“You are one nasty lady.”
Hera gasped and Ares chuckled.
“You snatched me out of the palace of Cleopatra,” Dido began, “when my mistress was distracted. You trapped me, threw a chain around my neck, and dragged me across the sky. Just to make Pandy miserable and lead her off-track. Don’t think she doesn’t know. And now you have to beat up on a dog? You are one nasty—”
Ares snapped again and Dido was silent.
“Even so,” Hera said after a moment, only the slightest hint of doubt in her voice, “Zeus won’t touch me.”
“Go away and let me think of what you can do to keep me from telling him.”
Defiantly Hera strode toward the entryway and was almost out when she spun on her heel.
“You’re not the boss of me!”
Ares stared at her.
“Fine, keep the mutt!”
Ares continued to stare.
“Zeus hates you, you know. He hates that you’re actually a coward in battle, hates that you run screaming in pain every time you get so much as a hangnail. Would love to disown you and kick you off the mountain.”
Ares stared, then sighed.
“Yes, but he knows my word is good.”
He paused.
“Interesting, isn’t it? He hates me but delights in hurting you. I’ll take the deal I have, because at least it’s honest. The dog stays here, Mother.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Poison Pen
“We saw him every day on the Peacock . . . just talking to himself,” Iole said, skirting a few letter-arrows sticking out of the walls farther down the passageway. “Now here, when we go up on deck, he just wanders over to the railing and . . . at least, I thought he was talking to himself. Can you believe he prays to all the gods—every day! That’s a lot of praying.”
“We’ve been doing a lot of praying too, you know,” Alcie countered.
“Yes, but not to everyone,” Iole said.
“He must ask Athena for wisdom and Apollo for the ability to heal . . . you know, if his little boy ever gets sick or something,” said Alcie.
“I’ll bet he asks Hermes to make his little boy clever and Artemis to protect him,” said Iole.
“I’m just wondering what he prays to Hera for,” said Alcie.
At the mention of Hera’s name, the girls were silent. They rounded the corner of the passageway and were almost to their cabin when Iole halted.
“Look,” she said, pointing across the corridor.
The door to Homer’s cabin was slightly ajar and a small scrap of papyrus was just visible underneath.
Alcie knocked softly on the old, worn wood. There was no answer from inside, so she gently opened the door.
Homer sat on the end of his sleeping pallet, eyes closed and a peaceful smile on his face. He was rubbing his wounded hand with a piece of faded pink cloth, softly humming to himself. Beside him on the cot lay two tidy stacks of papyrus sheets, each about one centimeter high, and a quill pen, its feathers bent and smashed at odd angles.
“Homer?” said Alcie. “Are you all right?”
Homer opened his eyes as the two girls cautiously stepped into his cabin.
“Hi,” he said, his voice sounding old and tired. He took the pink fabric away from his bite.
“Homer! Your hand!” Iole gasped.
“What?” said Alcie.
Homer held up his hand; the bite wound was completely healed.
“Well . . . it was the other hand, then,” said Alcie.
Homer looked at her and held up his other palm. Perfect. A little rough, a few call
uses, but otherwise, both hands were just fine.
“I’m sorry I left you,” Homer began, “but I knew I would just mess things up. After that thing bit me, I started feeling terrible. So sad. Like, I was feeling sad for everyone else. I had taken all the sadness that there ever was or ever would be into myself.”
“Misery?” asked Iole.
“Yeah! That’s it,” he answered. “And so I came back here. I thought about going up on deck, but the only thing I could think of to do there was to jump overboard. Then I saw my quill and my papyrus and, like, I just started writing.”
He looked at the stack of papyrus beside him on the cot and pointed to an empty flask of ink that had rolled into one corner of the cabin.
“This stuff started coming out of me . . . ,” he continued.
“By the bank of the eddying river, clear voiced, the swan alighting sings of Apollo to the beating of his own wings . . .”
Alcie had picked up the stray piece of papyrus from underneath the door. She read the scribbled lines of poetry with the utmost sincerity, almost reverence, but Homer bolted off the cot and tore it out of her hands.
“What? It’s good! It’s really good,” she said as he turned his back on her.
“It’s private,” he said. He stayed with his back to the girls for a moment. Finally, he turned around.
“I was writing about things I had never felt before,” he said. “Then, like, all at once, it started getting weaker and weaker. I mean, that feeling . . . it wasn’t gone immediately, but it was leaving me. And my hand was healing. It was really neat—but I still needed to write.”
“You were poisoned,” said Iole flatly.
“Huh?” Homer said.
“The lesser evil that you found in the book was Misery,” said Alcie. “We’ve got it in a box with adamant shackles around it—oh, and you missed seeing Hephaestus—and when we captured Misery, the teeth on the book disappeared; that’s probably when your hand healed up and you started feeling better.”
“You wrote so much!” said Iole, now standing next to the pallet, gazing at the two stacks.
“It’s the only thing I could think of. I’m named after my great-great-great-great—there are a lot them—great-great-grandfather. I’ve always only wanted to be a poet like him,” he answered.
“Gods,” Iole spoke with reverence, “are you related to that Homer?”
“On my mother’s side.”
“Staggering!”
“Cantaloupes!”
“Why are there two stacks?” asked Iole.
“These are the things I wrote when I was feeling depressed,” he said, pointing to one stack. “And this is what I wrote when the feeling went away.” He held the other stack in his hand. “But if you say I was poisoned, then maybe I didn’t really write them at all . . . maybe it was just the poison working through me.”
Suddenly, Iole had the feeling there was much more to Homer than a wide set of shoulders, slightly limited vocabulary, and a deep affection for Alcie.
“Will you read us something . . . please?” she asked.
“Do you promise you, like, won’t laugh?” he asked.
“We so do,” said Alcie.
“Um, okay,” he said, flipping through the stack of poems he’d written under the influence of Misery. “Okay, this is about one friend who betrays another—”
“Ouch,” said Alcie.
He revealed, in perfectly phrased stanzas and stunning, piercingly beautiful words, the bitter pain felt when one loses a treasured friendship.
“And it kinda, like, goes on from there,” he said after reading a bit.
There was a full thirty-second pause. Homer cast his eyes downward.
“Is it that horri—?” he began.
“Yes, yes,” said Iole, “I think it’s justifiable now. After my dad, Pandy, Pandy’s dad, Alcie, Dido, Athena, Hermes, Hephaestus, and the High Priestesses of Delphi, you are, officially and without sanction, the coolest person I know.”
Alcie just gaped at the tall boy whose head almost bumped against the ceiling.
“And I thought the poem you wrote for me was good!”
Homer’s smile lit up the cabin.
“Beauty from grief!” Iole was now mumbling to herself. “Who knew? Beauty from grief!”
“Homie—er,” Alcie said, “read just one more . . . please?”
“Okay,” he said, picking up a piece of papyrus from the other stack. “This one is a hymn to Aphrodite.”
After his reading, there was another full thirty-second pause.
“That’s better than the first stack,” Iole said, as if in a trance. “Homer, I surmise that you needn’t worry that it was only the poison. First of all, you wrote a wonderful poem for Alcie way back in Egypt, certainly not under the influence of Misery. And you wrote a stack of amazing things after Misery was out of your system. My hypothesis is that Misery opened up a creative channel for you and that your writing will only evolve!”
“Cool.”
“Indubitably.”
“I want to take some of your poems and hymns to school for the next big Gods project, if there is one,” Alcie said. “If Pandy had found these, she never would have messed up like she did.”
“If she hadn’t messed up, I guess I never would have written this stuff,” he replied.
“He’s right!” said Iole. “And you two would never have . . . met . . . nothing, never mind. Way to go, Pandy! Wherever you are.”
They were all jolted from their momentary happiness by a tremendous shout from the deck.
“Land! Land ahead!”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Oh, Heavens!
From the moment Pandy and the boys had been captured, they had been forced to walk, on a gentle but steady incline, from sunrise to sundown each day, with only a short break for mid-meal. Absolute silence was demanded among the captives. Consulting her diary or calling her father at night was out of the question: that would have been downright stupid. But Pandy knew that her father would be out of his mind with worry; she’d never gone so long without letting him know she was okay.
During the first few days, Pandy tapped into reserves of strength (for which she was constantly thanking the gods) in order to carry Amri during times when the little boy became just too tired. Small rest periods came when one raiding party met another and the captains conferred about road conditions, mountain weather, and which towns were going to be plundered next. Or when a prisoner was cut from the line and left on the road.
Sixteen days later, Pandy realized that the entire group could go no farther: the black wall was directly in front of them, blocking the main road, stretching endlessly off to each side and as high above them as they could see. The bottom of the whole mass was hovering less than half a meter off the ground. And, almost indiscernibly, it was creeping toward them.
She and the boys had been subsisting on the tiny rations: very little water and even less food. So, although she had managed once in a while to secretly dip her hands into her pouch and pull out a few dried figs or apricots, she was not at all surprised to find herself hallucinating.
She could see . . . shapes. Hundreds of them.
Staring at the blackness, her brain tricked her eyes into thinking she saw large gray masses on the other side, quite bright, just floating. Suspended. Spheres, most of them, of every size imaginable, suspended in a black soup.
“What are they?” asked Ismailil.
“Oh, good,” Pandy thought, slightly dizzy from hunger, “the boys can see them too.” It was comforting to know she wasn’t the only one losing her mind.
She hadn’t time to come up with a good lie for the brothers.
“On your bellies!” came the order from the front, passed in a shout back along the line.
The entire group was being forced to the ground. Those who didn’t comply quickly enough had their legs flung out from under them by the flat edges of well-swung swords.
Guards were checking the line to make cer
tain everyone was lying on their stomachs, as flat as possible. Then the captain stood at the midpoint so that all could hear.
“You have five days on your bellies, more or less. Keep your noses to the ground. I repeat, do not lift your heads. Don’t touch anything except the road you crawl upon. Only a few of us will accompany you, but we’re used to what lies ahead, so if anyone gets the bright idea to attempt an escape, we’ll hunt you down and force you to stand.”
A truly nasty laugh ran through the kidnappers.
“It’s been . . . a pleasure. Move!”
Slowly, the line began to inch forward as the prisoners actually began to crawl into the space underneath the black wall. One woman close to the head of the line began screaming madly. There was a thud and the screaming stopped, but the line kept moving. Pandy kept her head low, eyes, hands, stomach, and legs on the dirt, which was still cold from the previous night. A sudden spasm of humiliation shook her: this was disgusting and degrading, being made to crawl like a beast. From out of nowhere, a flash of anger lit up her brain, but she squelched it as soon as she felt tension in the chain behind her. Amri was desperately trying to back away from the wall.
“I’m scared.” He almost choked on his tears.
Pandy realized these were the first words she’d heard from the little boy. Her mind went to that strange, responsible place. “Well, I’m not! This is, like, so neat. We can pretend we’re snakes! Or alligators! And it’s only for five days. Okay, I’m gonna be a two-headed green snake with black and yellow spots, slithering over the ground looking for mice. Amri, what are you going to be?”
Less than three months ago, she would have thought she sounded like the biggest, geekiest loser plebe in the known world. Now it was a matter of survival.
The back of the line was now moving into the very small space between the ground and the bottom of the black wall. The air was thick and brown with so much dust; Pandy could see only a meter in any direction. Escape? To where? Plus, she caught sight through the haze of the tiny, reddish men with short spears corralling the prisoners.
“This is dumb. A snake can’t have two heads,” Ismailil called ahead of her.
“Well, I do,” Pandy said. “Amri, what kind of animal are you?”
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