Glaucus was a small, leathery, white-bearded man, very youthful for his age. In those first magical days when language was still in bud, people were often named for their appearance. Glaucus means “gray-green”; his mother had named him for his sea-colored eyes. Delia’s eyes were the same color but larger. She didn’t like to close them. She told Cerberus that she slept with her eyes open to see where dreams came from. And he believed her because he could actually do that. At night, his heads took turns sleeping, one remaining always on guard.
6
Wild Boars
Behind Delia’s fishing village was a great forest. In this dark, dense wood was something more menacing than shark or bear. The trees were held sacred by Dodona, a powerful woodland goddess, who permitted no one to chop them down. They grew tall and broad. The acorns and pine nuts they dropped were very fat. And the wild boars that fed on pine nuts and acorns grew to enormous size. Weighing between seven hundred and a thousand pounds, they ran with crushing speed on their short legs. Their tusks were ivory spears, their hooves sharp as hatchets, and their bristles like barbed wire. Everyone feared them; no one hunted them. And they had formed a taste for human flesh.
To make matters worse, these wild pigs were very intelligent. They had learned to hunt in small herds, helping one another, as wolves do. When the killer boars went on a rampage, even bears and lions would slink out of their way.
But Cerberus, who had hunted the great white shark and giant octopi, viewed these boars as small game. His overconfidence was to plunge Delia into dreadful peril. She had promised him wild pig to eat. One day, blithely ignoring all danger, as was her habit, she led Cerberus across a wide meadow into the forest, where she knew the boars came to eat the acorns. The great dog bounded along, full of delight. Everything pleased him—the meadow grass, the smell of trees, the salt wind, the hot sun—and, most of all, the slender child running beside him.
Seeing the shadow of a hawk gliding over the field, he swerved suddenly and began to chase it for pure joy, leaving Delia far behind, whirling back only when he heard her scream. Beyond her, swifter than hawk shadow, dense, hurtling, murderous, was a wild boar. Delia ran toward Cerberus, but the boar was coming so fast she seemed to be standing still.
Cerberus left the ground in a mighty leap, sailed over the girl’s head, landed on the other side of her, and crouched to meet the charging boar. The beast came fast, aiming the ivory spears of its tusks straight at the dog’s chest. Three heads lunged. Each pair of side jaws seized a front leg of the boar. The jaws of the center head closed on the boar’s snout, twisting it, trying to heave the animal over.
But a boar with its short legs and great weight is harder to overturn than a bull. The beast planted itself firmly, bracing its legs and shaking its head, trying to work free and stab its tusks into Cerberus. But the dog twisted with such cruel strength that the beast, wanting to ease the agony on its snout, began to turn away from the biting, and slowly let itself be pulled over.
Then all three sets of jaws savaged the belly of the boar. Its hatchet hooves struck. Cerberus bled. But he ignored his wounds and tore at the boar’s guts. Then he crouched before Delia. She leaped on his back, and he galloped toward a nearby river. The rest of the herd appeared on the brow of the hill and began to race toward them. The beasts sped past the fallen boar, who, greedy even in his death throes, was eating his own entrails.
Cerberus raced to the river and plunged in. The herd surged after him, but they skidded to a halt at the edge of the water, watching the dog swim across, bearing the child on his back. Pigs swim, but slowly. They knew they could never catch him in the water. They watched as he swam to the opposite shore. To their amazement, the little girl, instead of vanishing into the woods, scrambled off the dog’s back and climbed a tree, while the dog jumped into the river and swam back toward them.
The mob of wild boars howled savagely. Their enemy was actually coming back to challenge them. They couldn’t wait for the pleasure of bearing him to earth beneath their weight, thrusting their tusks into his loathed body, trampling him to bloody rags under their sharp hooves.
Cerberus was swimming toward them. He stopped in the middle of the river and swam in slow circles, all three heads barking a challenge. The boars pawed the water’s edge, hesitating—then, with a great splash, they rushed into the water.
Cerberus ducked under. The pigs tried to swim faster, but they were already pushing through the water as fast as they could. They reached the spot where the dog had been and swam around in circles, waiting for him to surface. They knew he had to come up to breathe. But like all things that seem certain, this had a flaw in it. What they did not know was that Cerberus, though dog-shaped, was sea-monster born and could breathe underwater. And such ignorance was fatal.
One by one the wild boars disappeared. Cerberus, hovering invisibly beneath the surface of the river, simply caught their legs in his jaws and drew each beast under, holding it there until it was thoroughly drowned. Then he’d let it sink to the bottom. The boars on the surface were barely aware of what was happening. If they saw the others disappearing, they thought they were diving for the dog and didn’t realize their error until they felt their own legs being seized in a terrible grip, felt themselves being pulled helplessly underneath and watched with popping eyes as their own breath of life became bubbles rising away from them forever.
Delia balanced herself on the bough of an oak, watching the river. Cerberus was invisible, but having seen him kill a shark, she knew his prowess underwater and understood what was happening. She grew so excited that she began to dance on the bough. The heavy limb started swinging and almost threw her off. But she was as comfortable in a tree as a squirrel.
The last pig went under. Dragonflies, which had departed when the herd came, skimmed back, wings glittering. Cerberus surfaced and swam to shore. He shook himself mightily. Delia dropped out of the tree and ran to meet him. She flung her arms about each of his necks and kissed each cold nose.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“You’re welcome,” growled the middle head.
“You’re bleeding!” she cried. “Let’s hurry home. My father can fix you. So can I. I know how to use those herbs.”
“Just a few scratches,” muttered Cerberus. “Nothing at all.”
“Not nothing!”
She leaped onto his back and lovingly drummed her heels into his side. He galloped toward home.
7
Hecate’s Idea
Down in Tartarus, Hades sat on his great throne of ebony and pearl, receiving a report from his chief aide, Hecate. She was frowning importantly, but her wings quivered with secret pleasure. For she had bad news to pass on to her employer, and nothing pleased her more. She was the kind of underling, in fact, who believed that trouble and confusion conferred status upon her. If there was none, she made some. That was how she had risen to be High Hag of all the departments of Hell.
“I regret to inform your majesty that five more ghosts escaped last month,” announced Hecate. “And I had to send out a whole squadron of Harpies to catch them. Also, two of the Undead managed to smuggle themselves in, trying to join two who had died. This also took much time and effort before they could be found and deported. The fact is, oh king, our security is not what it should be.”
“What you tell me,” said Hades, “makes me even more determined to get that three-headed dog down here. Some time ago I asked you to give thought to this problem. Have you?”
“I have, my lord. I sent two of my best Harpies to spy upon him. And I, myself, have braved the loathsomely cheerful sunshine of the upper regions so that I might observe him personally. I believe I have arrived at a strategy for his recruitment.”
“Do you think you can stop praising yourself long enough to describe it to me?”
“My strategy is based on a reading of his character. You must understand that he is afflicted by an ailment to which gods and monsters are usually immune; he has a loving heart. This
means that his wits are muffled by a kind of innocence and that, for all his strength and ferocity, he can be manipulated.”
“Speak on.”
“He has found someone to love besides his mother. A little girl whom he rescued from a shark and who has become the dearest thing in life to him. We’ll use her to bend him to our design. We’ll have her killed. Her shade will be brought to us; Cerberus will follow. Once he is here, we shall know how to keep him.”
“Your idea seems promising,” said Hades, “but I detect a few loopholes in the plan. Let’s think it through.”
“Any strategy must profit from your wisdom, my lord.”
“If Cerberus dotes on this child, he must guard her night and day, for that is a dog’s nature. Who then can possibly get close enough to her to separate her soul from her body?”
“Difficult, I grant,” said Hecate. “But not impossible.”
“You have a candidate for the job?”
Hecate whistled. Something shambled in. Hades, employer of monsters, was experienced in various forms of ugliness. But he gasped as he saw what had entered his throne room. It was huge, hunched, sidling, and covered with a flaming red pelt. Through its fur Hades saw blue things crawling, seething, glinting, as if its entire body were covered by bluebottle flies.
“I have been using him as a sentinel,” said Hecate. “But he is ready for higher tasks. His name is Argus.”
“What’s crawling on him?”
“Eyes,” said Hecate. “He has a hundred of them. He sees anywhere, everywhere. He has eyes on the ends of his fingers so that he can poke them into places where others cannot see. Nothing escapes his vigil, nothing! And he’s a killer, too. If you give me leave, my lord, I shall send him after the little girl.”
“Send him, send him,” muttered Hades. “Just get him out of my sight.”
Hecate waved her hand. Argus bowed and sidled out of the throne room, eyes rolling and glinting.
8
Decoy and Death
It was a sunny morning. Cerberus was sullenly prowling the beach. Delia had gone to the tidal pool, bidding him not to come, for she knew he was jealous of the attention she paid her father’s animal patients.
The shadow of great wings glided over the beach; Cerberus crouched, hackles rising. He goggled in surprise at the creature hovering above him—a female figure with brass wings and a whip curled at her belt. She was tall and stern-looking, white-haired, but with a young face. She landed nearby and came striding toward him. “Greetings, Cerberus,” she said.
He had no way of knowing she was a Harpy; he didn’t know there was such a thing. But he remembered something his mother had told him. “Are you one of my Gorgon aunts?” he asked.
“Why, yes,” said the Harpy, who, like all those who work for the King of Hell, had been taught to lie very smoothly. “That’s who I am, an aunt. But I come on a sad errand, dear nephew. Your mother is quite ill.”
“Ill? Her?”
“Well, “wounded. She chose to take on a shark and octopus simultaneously, both the biggest of their kind. She was almost strangled, and lost much blood before she could dispose of them.”
“Is she dying?” asked Cerberus.
“We hope not, we hope not. But she’s asking for you. You’re her favorite.”
He thought of racing off to inform Delia, but he didn’t want to waste a moment. “She’ll know,” he thought. “She’ll understand it’s something important that takes me away and that I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Without further hesitation he charged into the sea and began to swim as fast as he could toward the underwater cave where he had been born.
The Harpy mounted on the air, cackling, and flew off to report to Hecate that the ruse had worked—that Cerberus had been lured away, leaving the girl unguarded.
Delia was at the saltwater pool, feeding herbs to a seal that had been stabbed by a swordfish and was bleeding to death in the water when her father had rescued it. Glaucus had taken it home, bound its wounds, and put it on a diet of healing herbs. Now it was recovered enough to pass to Delia’s care. The seal was a clever, playful animal, and Delia had grown quite fond of it. She was careful, though, not to spend too much time at the tidal pool, for she knew how jealous Cerberus could be of other animals in her care.
Delia fed the seal some more herbs and patted its sleek head. A shadow fell upon her. She thought it was one of her brothers and did not turn around. Her reckless courage had become a kind of family joke, and her big brothers were always jumping out at her, trying to scare her.
Delia reached behind her to give a pinch and touched coarse fur. She turned swiftly and found herself in the grasp of something huge, hairy, and flaming red. Most horrible of all, under its fur it was crawling with eyes. Even the paws grasping her had eyes. And they were all looking at her.
She tried to call for Cerberus. But the creature took her slender throat almost gently between two great, furred fingers, and tweaked the life out of her like someone snuffing a candle flame.
The seal flung itself at the monster, who, as calmly as a horse whisking away a fly, lifted the seal by its tail and shattered its head against a rock. Draping Delia’s body over one arm, he scuttled away like a giant red crab.
Argus climbed a cliff, as Hecate had instructed, and dropped the body onto the rocks below, so that it would appear that the girl, who was always rock climbing, had been killed in an accidental fall. Then he sped toward the cave called Avernus, that would lead him back through underground chambers to Tartarus and his mistress, Hecate.
9
The Body on the Rocks
After swimming a short distance, Cerberus was astonished to meet his mother. “Mother, mother!” he cried. “Are you all again?”
“Well? Of course I am,” replied Echidne. “Why shouldn’t I be?”
“I mean, are your wounds all healed?”
“What wounds?”
“Weren’t you almost killed in a terrible fight with a shark and an octopus?”
“My dear child, who’s been telling you these tales?”
“One of your sisters. A Gorgon.”
“What did she look like?”
“Brass wings …”
“Yes, Gorgons have those.”
“White-haired, with a rather handsome face, though cruel.”
“Handsome face? The Gorgons are all frightfully ugly. Squashed noses, bulging eyes, yellow fangs, seaweed hair. Besides, they’re not in this part of the world. They’re far north. They dwell upon a frozen marsh with their sister, Medusa. Whatever you saw was not a Gorgon.”
“Who is she then?” asked Cerberus. “And why was she telling me lies about you?”
“Brass wings … white hair … anything else you remember?”
“She had a whip at her belt.”
“Of course. My dear pup, it was a Harpy that came to you. One of Hecate’s dreadful hellish echelon. They all serve that odious god, Hades. You can be sure of this though: she meant you no good.”
“Why would she tell me you were dying?”
“She knew, perhaps, that you would come to me as fast as you could. But why would she want you to do that? What have you been doing?”
“Guarding a little girl named Delia—whom I love,” replied Cerberus.
“Perhaps they mean her some harm?”
As soon as he heard his mother’s words, Cerberus knew with dreadful certainty that they were true. Without a moment’s hesitation, he turned and shot away so fast he spun a hole in the water as he went. His wake was a whirling tunnel.
When Cerberus reached the village where Glaucus dwelt, he found everyone out searching for Delia. The dog raced to the tidal pool, because that, he knew, was where Delia had been when the Harpy came to trick him. A dead seal lay there, its head smashed. How strange! Had the Harpy killed it?
Cerberus lifted his three heads and snuffed the wind. Then he whirled and rushed off. The faint spoor grew stronger as he ran. He was following the exact co
urse that Argus had taken. He scrambled up the cliff, braced himself at the edge, and looked down. The strange scent was quite strong now. And there was something else, something he did not want to accept.
The three heads howled softly in unison. The dog scrambled down the cliff to reach the body of the child upon the rocks. His six eyes were blinded by tears. His three throats were choked with sobbing howls. He couldn’t bear to look at her. In two days the gulls had done their work, and crabs had fed there too.
His grief was no soft, sad thing but a savage beast tearing at his entrails. He shivered with agony, but half-welcomed the pain because it blurs memory. But vivid images burned through—how she had looked—her scratched, ivory-brown legs, her black bell of hair, her glinting green eyes. He remembered the raucous challenge of her laugh—how it had been when she flung her slender arms about his neck.
He thought he would perish then. He wanted to. But grief turned to rage. The idea of vengeance filled his great body, making him tremble with a new rush of venomous energy. Not for nothing had he been given his strength; not for nothing such teeth, such claws, such fighting skills. He would find whoever had killed her, and rip and rend, tear flesh, crush bone. Yes … he would live till then.
Cerberus scrambled back up the cliff to where the scent was strongest, and sniffed the grass. Faint waves of odor filtered through his great desire—became lines, took on shape, flushed with color. All his senses fused. Smell became sight. Upon the visionary pan of his brain was printed the image of a red-furred, shambling thing—a creature more horrible than any he had ever seen. It would have to be that way to have done so horrible a deed.
But what was it? Who was it? Where could he find it? Cerberus ran back to Delia’s hut and led her brothers to the rocks below the cliffs so that they might take her body and burn it decently upon a funeral pyre. Glaucus, he was told, had sailed off across the bay to a mountain range where he hoped to find the cave Avernus. He knew it led to the Kingdom of Death, and he wished only to follow his daughter and stay with her. He didn’t want her to be lonely.
Monsters of Greek Mythology, Volume One Page 18
