Retreating in this fashion, the patrol would lure the enemy into the valley. When the invaders filled the pass, the mountaineers, stationed at both peaks, would launch their boulders.
Now, fate had decreed that Mother Earth’s new spell was to be tested at the very moment of its brewing. As Gaia, lodged in her deepest cavern, was muttering over her cauldron, and the magic vapors were steaming out of the cave—up, up, through seams of coal and iron, through sapphire bed and fertile muck—just at that moment, Anteus was racing ahead of his army, charging after the Amaleki patrol.… The white camels were running before him, carrying their young riders toward the mountain pass, but running as fast as they could; for Anteus could cover fifty yards at a stride and was gaining on them.
The patrol rode into the fatal valley, Anteus rushing after them. His giants were nowhere in sight; he had left them far behind. And the mountaineers, seeing the gigantic figure enter the trap, assumed that the rest of his army was on his heels, and began to roll their boulders.
A huge rock hit Anteus, knocking him off his feet. Other boulders rained down; rock fell on rock, chipping each other, filling the air with flying shale. Anteus was buried deep. And the mountaineers cheered as they saw the monster vanish under the rockfall.
They cheered too soon. For the first wisps of vapor from the magic cauldron drifted up through the valley bed and touched Anteus as the rocks fell. Dimly, he heard a voice chanting:
“… let him touch earth
who gave him birth …
I shall staunch his gore,
his strength restore …
He shall rise from me,
as mighty as before …”
The massive weight of rock had driven him to the floor of the valley, deep into the lap of his mother. Half crushed as he was, bones shattered, ripped open, bleeding from a hundred wounds, he touched the primal energy that had made him be. He drank of her strength. He felt a strange force surging through him. A marvelous elation sang through his veins … a joyous power.
He arose, shrugging off shale. He climbed to his feet, rocks cascading off his shoulders like water off a breaching whale. The mountaineers, staring from above, were amazed to see the entire valley shudder. The enormous rock pile was heaving as though the earth were quaking beneath. Before their astounded gaze a giant arose, holding a boulder in each huge hand.
He hurled the boulders, first at one peak, then at the other, crushing dozens of the Amaleki with each throw. By this time, his own troops had arrived. He motioned them up one slope; he, himself, charged up the other. The brave mountaineers, who had never been defeated, streamed down to meet the giants.
They were massacred. Clubbed, stomped, hurled bodily off the mountain, or simply had their necks wrung like chickens. Some few were able to flee, and hide in caves. All the rest were slaughtered.
The giants were too heavy to ride camels. So they skinned the prize beasts like rabbits and roasted them over their camp-fires. Camel meat is tough and stringy, but the giants were very hungry.
From that day on, Anteus knew himself to be invincible. Earth’s magic never failed. Stricken to the ground, he would rise again, stronger than before, and destroy whoever had felled him.
And it was this magical endowment that served him so well when he finally battled Hercules.
4
Bowman, Banger, Butcher
Anteus had picked giants for his Royal Guard—not simply outsized mortals but the offspring of monsters who had abducted nymphs and spawned gigantic, shaggy humanoid creatures. When he had recruited the largest and most savage of these, he trained them in the use of weapons. And although the weakest of them was capable of finishing off an armed warrior with his bare hands, they were kept hard at work until they were expert with bow, sword, spear, and battle-axe.
Now, Anteus was not the kind of war chief who stood on a hill well behind the front line, looking at maps. He led his men into battle. He charged like a bull, leaping over ditches, crashing through walls, battering to death anyone who couldn’t scurry out of his way … leaving his men to mop up after him. Which meant cutting the throat of anyone left alive.
If the enemy were strong enough to field an army against him—which seldom happened—the Royal Guard dogged the king’s footsteps as he rushed into the hottest part of the battle, forming a hedge of blades about him.
After leading his troops through several campaigns, and studying each man’s performance, Anteus selected three of his Guardsmen as his personal escorts, who would accompany him everywhere, on and off the field, and might be called upon for special tasks. They were the three most ferocious fighters, of course; their names were Gobi, Mordo, and Kell.
Gobi was a bowman, but with too powerful a pull for any wooden bow. He had to make himself a special weapon. After a successful mammoth hunt, when a beast had been killed with the loss of only thirty beaters, Gobi claimed a tusk for himself. The slain animal had been exceptionally big, even for a mammoth—whose size is calculated as having been at least twice that of our own elephant—and its tusk was more than fifteen feet long.
Gobi split that tusk. And the shaft of ivory, cut and polished and bound at each tapered end with copper wire, became his bow. A cured strand of mammoth gut was his bowstring. His arrows, plumed with an eagle’s tailfeathers and tipped with razor-sharp bronze points, were longer than ordinary spears.
When he bent that bow almost double and let his arrow fly, the enormous shaft could split an oak tree and pass through an armored man standing behind it.
Only Gobi himself could use that bow. Anteus was even stronger than Gobi and could bend it easily, but the bow was too refined a weapon for him; he preferred a club or his great mallet fists.
Mordo worshiped Anteus and copied everything he did. The club became his favorite weapon, and he had a collection of the most massive bludgeons ever used. Most of them were hardwood, carved to a perfect balance, but he also had one cudgel of glittering brass for ceremonial slaughter. And, in one battle, it was said, having shattered his club while squashing a chariot, he had raced to a nearby olive grove, uprooted a full-grown tree and used that as a club—roots, branches, and all—flailing an entire enemy patrol to bloody gobbets of flesh.
Modeling himself further on Anteus, Mordo sometimes cast aside his club and waded into battle armed only with his fists. He toughened his hands by soaking them in salt water. And when he clenched those huge paws into fists, planted his legs, thick as trees, and swung his oxbow shoulders, whipping his long arms about, then, indeed, those fists became weapons as deadly as any ever forged in a smithy.
As for Kell, he was a man of blades. He liked to cut and thrust. His dagger was as long as the usual sword, his sword longer than a lance. The shaft of his spear was tall as a mast. When he went into battle with these blades stabbing and slicing, he wrought such carnage that he chose to clothe himself not in armor but in a long one-piece leather apron such as butchers wear. Indeed, he was known as “the butcher,” and was perhaps the most feared of Anteus’s band of killers.
A young poet, once, made reckless by moonlight, composed a song and was foolish enough to sing it:
“Gobi, Mordo, Kell …
Bowman, Banger, Butcher,
Serve the tyrant well …
And though we go there first,
we’ll wait for them in hell …”
He vanished very soon afterward and was never seen again. And although people remembered the song and sometimes whispered it to themselves, no one dared sing it aloud. Indeed, it wasn’t heard again for many years—not until a young hero named Hercules landed on a Libyan beach and started doing what he had sworn to do.
5
Hera’s Grudge
Hercules’ second task had been to kill the hundred-headed Hydra—each of whose heads held fifty teeth, and whose bite was so poisonous that a single scratch from any one of those five thousand teeth would kill a hippo in the wink of an eye.
After Hercules had slain the Hydra, he dipped a
n arrow into its envenomed blood so that he might have one ultimate weapon. Then, afterward, he found that he was unable to make himself use that arrow no matter how great his peril. For he was afraid that if he did use it, its poison would enter the flowing waters, and be carried by the wind, and seep into the earth, poisoning crops and cattle—and people. He felt that he would rather lose his own life than do such a thing.
Nevertheless, he kept the poisoned arrow. And its very possession was to cause him endless woe—which began when he faced Anteus.
It happened this way:
Of all the females in the universe, human and divine, Hera, Queen of the Gods, was considered the most fortunate. Her wealth was as boundless as her extravagance. Her power was limited only by the will of her husband, Zeus, and not always then. And her majestic beauty was renewable by means of a magic spring in which no one else was permitted to bathe.
Nevertheless, for all her wealth and power and beauty, Hera was not happy.
Having made a habit of indulging every whim, she could be thrown into a tantrum by the slightest disappointment. And because she considered now that she was suffering a series of major disappointments, her fury was shaking heaven and earth, and beginning to ruffle even the icy composure of the gods.
“I simply can’t bear it,” she snarled to herself. “That scurvy little lout, Hercules, has managed to defeat every monster I’ve thrown against him. It’s beyond belief how he has been able to do this. But he has … he has.… He simply refuses to be vanquished, the mangy cur. And if I don’t destroy him soon, I’ll suffocate with rage. I’m finding it hard to breathe right now. The trouble with me is that I’m simply too kindly by nature to pursue a feud the way I should. What I need is some truly murderous counsel.”
Whereupon, she sent for her friend, Hecate, Queen of the Harpies, and the world’s foremost expert on various forms of vendetta and mayhem.
Upon receiving Hera’s message, the young hag who was Hecate spread her great wings and flew from her underworld aerie up to the top of Mount Olympus, where dwelt the high gods. She found Hera in the orchard. Sunlight sifted through a lacework of branches, and the two towering females met in a play of checkered light and amid the mingled fragrance of crushed grass and ripening fruit.
“Esteemed mistress! Patroness!” cried Hecate. “Beloved friend. How can I serve you?”
“Good Hecate, teach me to kill.”
“Pardon, my lady, but I should have supposed this to be the subject on which you would need no instruction.”
“Perhaps I have had some success in the past at eliminating those obnoxious to me,” said Hera. “But I seem to be losing my touch. Do you think I’m mellowing with age?”
“No, my queen, I do not. You seem to me as youthful, as energetic, as divinely vicious as ever. Perhaps even more so.”
“You are too kind,” murmured Hera. “The fact is that my worst enemy, the mortal I hate more than any other, more than any creature on earth, in the sea, or in your own smoky realm, continues to live and thrive despite my best efforts. I speak of Hercules, son of Zeus, by that cooing bitch, Alcmene, Lady of the Light Footsteps. Zeus has spawned swarms of children, as you know, and only two of them by me—and I hate and loathe and despise every one of them, of course. But worst of all, by far, do I abhor Hercules. For his mother was the most beautiful of my husband’s paramours, and he is the strongest of Zeus’s ill-gotten sons. Consequently, I decided to get him killed in the most painful way possible, and proceeded to involve him with monster after monster—all to no avail. He has overcome the Nemean Lion, the hundred-headed Hydra, and the three-bodied Geryon, fearsome creatures all, each of whom had devoured several generations of heroes. Now I’m at my wits’ end and need your help, if you have any to give me.”
“What we must do,” said Hecate, “is find Hercules’ weak point.”
“Don’t you think I’ve tried?” cried Hera. “I’ve confronted him with three of the most dreadful monsters ever hatched. While they were looking for his weak point, he slew them all.”
“Allow me to differ, gracious lady. His adventure with the Hydra did reveal a weakness in him, perhaps a fatal one.”
“I’m listening.…”
“It’s not in the usual physical sense that he’s vulnerable,” said Hecate. “But he’s cursed with a loving heart and an overheated imagination. He can be successfully attacked through those he cares for.”
“Be specific.”
“Hercules is a special hero to children. They dote on tales of his battles, follow him in hordes … and he is very fond of them.”
“So?”
“So … this gives me an idea. As you know, he has never shot that arrow he dipped in Hydra blood. He’s afraid the poison might spread. Well, we use this fear. We visit his sleep with a dream. We show him one of these children, a little boy, wanting to touch a weapon of the hero he adores. The boy rummages through Hercules’ quiver and scratches his finger on an arrow—the poison arrow! The boy froths at the mouth, stiffens, dies. Hercules, knotted in this horrid nightmare, will view it not as a simple sleep vapor but as a prophetic vision, a solemn warning from on high. And once we hook him on this illusion, we’ll know how to play him like a fish. We’ll extract from him a penitential vow to go unarmed into his next adventure. And then we shall pit him, naked and weaponless, against a monster who has so far proved invincible, and whom I count as the most destructive force on earth.”
“Who is this champion?”
“His name is Anteus, youngest son of Mother Earth and the Primal Snake, and the most fearsome of all that dreadful litter. He’s a giant, presently king of Libya, and our current favorite down below. For the past few years, he has sent us more corpses than all other monsters combined.”
“What makes him so invincible?” asked Hera.
“His size. His bloodlust. The fact that he has surrounded himself with a band of giants almost as fearsome as he is, and whom only he can control.”
“I don’t know …” murmured Hera. “When I think of Geryon and the Hydra and what Hercules did to them, I can’t seem to put much confidence in ordinary giants.”
“Anteus is no ordinary giant,” said Hecate. “He is larger than the largest Titan, and of more than Titanic strength. He can kick over a fortified castle like an anthill and crush its defenders underfoot. Besides all this, he has a secret power. He is the favorite son of Mother Earth, and she has endowed him with a unique virtue. If ever thrown to earth, Anteus draws new strength from his mother. And no matter how grievously injured he has been, will arise whole, healed, unblemished, with strength restored. Doesn’t he sound a little better to you, my lady?”
“Well, my dear,” said Hera. “You are certainly eloquent on his behalf. Let’s just hope for the best. Shall we start concocting that poison-arrow dream?”
6
Landfall in Libya
Thus it was that when Hercules crossed the Middle Sea to challenge Anteus, he carried no weapons. He did wear his lion skin—that hide he had taken from the Nemean Lion and which made a marvelous lightweight flexible armor—for it could turn any blade. As a helmet he wore the lion’s skull. But horrified by his dream, keeping his own vow, he had left bow and arrows, spear, sword, and club behind.
He was rafting across the narrow arm of sea that divided the Iberian Peninsula from the northwestern spur of Africa ruled by Anteus. He had chosen a raft instead of a sailing vessel because this was the season when strong winds blew out of the south, and in those days sailboats could not tack; they could only run before the wind.
He had made his raft very simply, by lashing fallen trees together. Another tree trunk, which he had trimmed of branches, was his oar. The raft was unsinkable, but huge and clumsy—so heavy that twenty oarsmen would have been unable to manage it. But Hercules, using his single tree-trunk oar, made it skim over the water like a canoe.
Day and night he rowed. It was heavy work, moving the raft against headwinds, but he rowed without rest. Always before,
he had gone joyously into battle, but this time for some reason he felt gloomy about the coming ordeal … and wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible. He was, however, to meet Anteus sooner than he wished.
Anteus enjoyed fishing, but the ordinary ways were far too tame for him. His idea of good sport was to wade out hip-deep—which meant about twenty feet of water—and there to hunt the man-eating sharks and giant octopi that lurked offshore. Before this, however, he would have provided himself with live bait, and his method of bait gathering was another of the royal techniques that terrified the Libyans.
He would appear in the courtyard at the morning lineup where prisoners were being thrown into the stewpot. Roaring, “You … you … you …,” he would select six of them—eight if they were small—and, while they were still thanking him for their reprieve, would snatch them up in his huge paws and, two by two, knock their heads together. He did it gently, just enough to put them out; then he would stuff them in a sack and stride off toward the sea.
On this particular morning, the bait was more vigorous than usual. Some of the men in the sack came to and began to thrash about before Anteus reached the water. He raised his fist to smash at the restless bulge, but then thought: “The livelier they are the more they’ll splash in the water. The more they splash the sooner they’ll draw the sharks.…” So he simply shifted the sack on his shoulder and strode on.
He crossed the narrow beach and waded into the surf. The sea was rougher than usual. The south wind was behind him, blowing against the incoming tide, driving the breakers back on each other. Anteus frowned. Turbulent water meant that swimmers would be harder for the sharks to see. He would have to wait patiently in the water, or speed things up by spilling some blood. And Anteus had little patience.
When he was out far enough, he reached into the sack and pulled out one of the men, who screamed and struggled but was as helpless as a frog in the hands of a cruel boy. Anteus pinched his ear between thumb and forefinger and simply tore it off. He held the shrieking man upside down so that he could bleed into the water. Then, when the blood was spreading nicely, he tossed the man into the sea, and watched him as he began to swim frantically toward shore. Too late! A triangular black fin was cutting through the water toward him.
Monsters of Greek Mythology, Volume One Page 8
