Blood of the Heroes

by Steve White

  “It’s just as well Sidney was already dead when he went through the portal with them.”

  “Good point.” Jason shivered. “I wonder if he thought of that, and deliberately provoked them into killing him?” He shook his head. “I never would have thought it of him. But then, I never would have thought any of it of him.”

  “I suppose we never really know each other until we’re forced to make extreme decisions, do we?” She continued to avoid his eyes.

  “I guess not. But what about you? What happened to you after your capture?”

  “Oh, they took me back to Knossos,” she said briskly, as though grateful for the change of subject. “The palace was still in an uproar over the disappearance of the idol. The chief priestess was out of her mind with rage. I don’t know what they would have done to me. But then, before they could make up their minds, the sky darkened, and the tsunami hit the coast. Knossos was too far inland for that. But the secondary quakes did a lot of damage, and fires started when all those oil lamps got knocked over. The wind whipped those fires into something resembling a firestorm. Everything collapsed into panic. I was able to get away in the confusion.

  “Afterwards, hiding out in the countryside, I met an escaped slave who spoke Achaean. He knew about this cave. It seems there’s a cult of Zeus among the slaves from the mainland; it makes you wonder how long he’s been laying the groundwork for his little power play. Anyway, this slave gave me directions. It’s not far.”

  “Not if you have two good feet,” Jason remarked pointedly.

  “Oh, yes! Let me see that.” She carefully removed the filthy bindings from his left foot and wrapped it anew, muttering apologies for her lack of anything cold to put on it, while continuing with her story. “After I got here and settled into this cave, the local shepherds thought I must be some kind or priestess or wise-woman. I didn’t do anything to discourage that impression,” she added primly. “I was able to do some healing that they found impressive—I have experience in twenty-fourth-century first aid from my field work on Mithras, in addition to the course the Temporal Regulatory Authority put me through. In return, they’ve kept me supplied with food.”

  “Not bad cheese,” Jason commented, taking another sample.

  “Now, though, they’re staying away. They’re getting more and more of a worse class of refugees from the north.”

  “Yes—I spent a little time with some of those.”

  “So you can understand why these people have taken themselves—and their sheep, and their daughters—into hiding. You can also understand why, when I saw you …” She looked embarrassed in the firelight. “Well, I didn’t recognize you, and—”

  “I guess I do look a little savage,” Jason acknowledged with a smile.

  She smiled back, then looked at him levelly. “So what are we going to do now?”

  “We’re going to wait. It wouldn’t do us any good to go anywhere else on Crete even if I was up to it. We can forage for food— I can even forage for food if I don’t have to do it fast.”

  “Yes,” she nodded. “You’re right. This is where Perseus will be looking for us.”

  “Well, yes. And it’s going to be important to get you set up somewhere, to wait until you snap back to the linear present. You see, you’re going to have to wait in this era without me for a while.”

  “What?”

  “You were in that pocket universe, with its distorted time, longer than Sidney and I were,” Jason explained. “More to the point, your TRD was there a lot longer than ours. It turns out that I wasn’t there very long after all; I can bring up the countdown on my optical display, and I’m due for retrieval before too much longer. But I have no idea when you are, and I have no way of finding out. The timer in my brain implant is linked to my own TRD and its atomic ‘clock.’ Nobody ever dreamed that the members of an expedition wouldn’t all return at the same time—it’s unprecedented in the history of the Temporal Regulatory Authority. In fact, it’s unprecedented to have any of them return behind schedule. When I appear on the displacer stage, late and alone, it’s going to be two firsts. Rutherford is probably going to have a stroke when he finds out he’s going to have to keep the stage clear for some indefinite time, until you appear!” He chuckled evilly at the thought, then sobered. “It means you’ll have to keep your TRD with you at all times. It also means you’ll have no advance notice of your retrieval. One fine day, without warning, this world will vanish and you’ll be in the dome in Australia. I’m sorry, but there’s no help for it.”

  “I see,” Deirdre nodded. It was, Jason decided, only natural that she looked so very thoughtful.

  *

  The days passed, with their breathtaking sunsets and cold nights. Jason’s broken bone gradually knitted itself together, and he was able to venture further and further afield, gathering firewood and seeking out food. He fashioned a crude bow and managed a little light hunting for the wild goats and tiny deer that roamed the mountainside. It was a tedious and still-painful effort for a small yield, but it was necessary to supplement their food supply. The shepherds of the Nidha plain were still mostly in hiding from the runaway slaves and other fugitives who had, for whatever reasons, found it advisable to remove themselves to this remote district.

  After a while, the locals crept out again and began coming back to the sacred cave and the strange but kindly woman who dwelt there. But then the visits became less frequent, and those who did come acted frightened. Since none of them spoke Achaean, Jason and Deirdre were unable to ascertain the source of their fear.

  They found out a few nights later.

  *

  Jason awoke to a kick in his side, a flare of torches, and Deirdre’s screams.

  He reached out, grabbed a hairy ankle, and pulled, sending the man sprawling. Then he sprang to his feet, forgetting his still-not-altogether-healed fracture. The pain made him stagger, and he was grasped from behind by two pairs of hands. He saw Deirdre, being held in the same way by one ragged man and being groped by a couple of others, while a half-dozen others stood around making comments. They were mostly armed with knives and cudgels, although a few had spears. He had barely had time to take it all in when a face came into his line of sight at close range. The puzzlement on that face gave way to recognition, and then to a laugh whose joviality would have been easier to appreciate if Koza’s breath hadn’t been so bad.

  “Jason! By Rhea’s tits, you made it this far—and on that foot! And then you ended up with her! ” Koza jerked a thumb in Deirdre’s direction and laughed again. “What a man! Let him go, you turd-eaters!” Jason’s arms were released, but he noted that his erstwhile captors were still eyeing him watchfully. Koza flung a brawny arm around his shoulder and spoke in what passed with him for a quiet voice.

  “See here, Jason, we’ve been on the run—a little trouble down by the coast—and since we’ve come up here the locals have kept themselves and their women hidden. And sheep are no substitute. Now, I don’t begrudge you your good luck in catching this piece. But the fact is, you’ve already had the use of her for a while, and we’re a little hard up, if you take my meaning. Don’t get upset—you can still share her. But you ought to let your old friends have her first. Don’t you think that’s fair?” His tone was ingratiating, but left no doubt as to the basic unimportance of what Jason thought was fair.

  Jason assumed his best raffish smile. “Sure. Seems reasonable to me. I just hope you like it, after …” He launched into a detailed and boastful explanation of why they might not find Deirdre altogether satisfying after her time with him. Koza roared with laughter, and the vigilance of the two men flanking Jason seemed to ease.

  “Is that so?” Koza finally bellowed. “Well, we’ll see about that!” He turned toward Deirdre and started to remove his tunic. “Spread her!” he ordered his underlings. Everyone else relaxed to enjoy the show.

  Koza had his tunic up over his head, temporarily confining his arms, when Jason pivoted on his good foot and brought his left
leg around a sweeping kick that knocked a spear-carrying bandit’s legs out from under him. As the man lost his balance, Jason grasped the spear and rammed its butt into another man’s side. Then, as swiftly as his bad foot permitted, he sprang for Koza.

  He almost made it before Koza’s tunic came completely off. But at the sudden tumult, the bandit leader threw it off, whirled around, and with the unerring instinct of a veteran brawler, stamped on Jason’s left foot.

  For an instant, pain was all that Jason knew, or could know, and he collapsed. The naked Koza snatched a cudgel from one of his men and raised it two-handed over his head as he advanced, his face a mask of rage.

  He had almost reached Jason when his expression turned to one of blank surprise, and a spearpoint protruded from his chest. Already dead, he toppled over forward, revealing the shield-bearing, helmeted figure in the cave mouth who had hurled the spear.

  Other similarly equipped warriors rushed in past him. It wasn’t so much a fight as a massacre of the trapped bandits. Jason barely noticed the slaughter, for he recognized the spearman even before he removed his boar’s-tusk helmet. He had seen a spear-cast like that once before, on the road between Tiryns and Lerna.

  “Perseus!” he called, rising awkwardly to his feet.

  Before the Hero could reply, Deirdre had rushed past Jason and flung herself into his arms with what sounded very much like a sob.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  To Jason’s delight, they sailed from Crete aboard Sotades’ ship.

  “Yes,” said the grizzled old mariner—as Jason still couldn’t help thinking of him, even though he would have been considered no more than middle-aged in Jason’s world. “We were in Lerna when Poseidon made his anger felt. The coast gave us some shelter—unlike a lot of places, including practically all the islands. Thank Zeus I wasn’t home on Seriphos!” He spat over the rail with the expressiveness Jason remembered. “But we survived. And when Perseus and his warriors came down to the coast from Mycenae looking for ships … well, I would have joined even if it had been somebody besides Perseus.”

  “So you were willing to put to sea after … what had happened? When this isn’t the sailing season even in normal times?”

  “Of course.” Sotades looked surprised that the question had even been asked. “All the shipmasters wanted to join Perseus’ great raid on Keftiu, just like all the warriors of the Argolid. Everybody knew he enjoyed the favor of the gods. First he appeared at Mycenae in Zeus’ chariot. And then, just as he was telling the warriors what was going to happen—it actually happened!” Sotades gave a smiling headshake of quasi-fatherly pride. “That Perseus!”

  “Yes, I can imagine the effect that must have had,” said Jason absently. They were standing in the stern, with Jason leaning on a crutch and Sotades gripping the helm against the still-treacherous currents and blustery winds. Behind them, the cliffs of Crete were dropping below the horizon. There, various adventurers who had elected to stay behind were already starting to squabble over Knossos. Perseus was leaving them to their squabbling. There would be no empire of the mainland and the islands; such a thing was beyond the scope of people at the Achaeans’ level of political evolution. Perseus would return to Mycenae—their current destination—and content himself with the Argolid.

  And as for Zeus …

  “So,” he said in what he hoped was the right tone of voice, “you’re certainly right about Perseus being favored by the gods—or at least by Zeus and Poseidon and the rest of the younger gods. And I suppose that what Poseidon did to Kalliste, which was sacred to Rhea, proves …” He let his voice trail off and gave Sotades a quizzical glance.

  “I don’t really know anything about these deep matters,” growled the skipper. It was a quiet growl, accompanied by an anxious glance over his shoulder. Like any sensible man, Sotades was hedging his bets. “But some say that the gods have a new king—that Zeus has taken over from Cronus, his father, and imprisoned the Old Gods in Tartarus!”

  Close enough , thought Jason. Except that it wasn’t Zeus who did it.

  “Well,” he remarked aloud, “it does seem to stand to reason that the Old Gods would punish such talk if they still could.”

  “Hmm … You know, you may have something there.” This seemed to resolve Sotades’ theological perplexities, such as they were. “And anyway, who will defy the power of the younger gods now?” He gestured toward the starboard bow and beyond it, to the northeast where Kalliste had been. A black cloud still hung over the horizon.

  Following his gesture, Jason noticed Perseus and Deirdre standing in the bows, arm in arm. As usual.

  *

  Sidney , Jason thought with a touch of sadness, would have felt vindicated by Mycenae. Not that there had ever really been any controversy about the great cyclopean stone walls that still stood in the twenty-fourth century. Everyone agreed that they dated to the fourteenth century b.c., with the extension that included the Lion Gate to be added a century later. In this era, the hillock overlooking the Plain of Argos was surmounted only by a wooden stockade—and not much of a stockade, for this was a politically powerless neutral ground between Argos and Tiryns.

  That all began to change almost the instant they arrived. Perseus was a man in a hurry, and a stronger stockade began to go up. Nobody denied his right to establish himself here; his earlier spectacular arrival and accurate prophecy gave him a certain local clout. Not that he was ignoring the real basis of royal power in Achaean society: the giving of rich gifts to the warrior nobles, thus placing them under an obligation that wasn’t formal enough to be called “vassalage” but was nonetheless real. His Cretan plunder gave him the wherewithal to do this on an unprecedented scale. Acrisius and Proetus still sat in Argos and Tiryns respectively, but if legendry was any guide their “accidental” demise was only a matter of time.

  Loot wasn’t the only thing Perseus had brought back from Crete to cement his power. Jason had noticed some Cretans in the ships who looked a cut above the general run of captured slaves.

  Perseus chatted with him about it one day, as they stood on the summit where the new megaron was being built, looking out over the entire citadel—the perfect spot from which to survey the work on the new stockade. It would, thought Jason, have been a crushing disappointment to classicists and romanticists. It looked like any other construction site, only very low-tech.

  “Yes,” the Hero was saying, “I had never really thought about these things before. But while we were on Keftiu, I began to wonder if there might be something to be said for being able to … well, you know, keep track of things, the way the Minos had always done for the Old Gods and their priestesses. So I thought I’d bring in some of their scribes to do it for me.”

  “But,” Jason asked, “how will you know they’re not taking a cut for themselves?”

  “Oh, of course they’ll do that. They always did on Keftiu. But I see what you mean: how will I know they’re not cheating me ? Well, it will help that their language is so close to the one I grew up with on Seriphos. Early on, I’ll let them know I can understand what they’re saying among themselves.”

  “That should help,” Jason agreed. “Still … wouldn’t it be even better if they were keeping their records in your own language? And if you had people you knew you could trust who could read those records?”

  Perseus stared at him uncomprehendingly, as though he had spoken a non sequitur —which, Jason knew, he had, from Perseus’ standpoint.

  He described the exchange to Deirdre a few days later. It was sunset—yet another sunset of sinister beauty. They were standing beside the circular area Perseus was laying out just beyond the main gate of the stockade to hold the remains of himself and his descendants—“Grave Circle

  A,” as the archaeologists would one day name it. Heinrich Schliemann, believing that “I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon,” would never dream of the true identity of the man whose gold death mask he had set eyes on—the first to do so in thirty-four centuries.

/>   And as for me , thought Jason, remembering that famous death mask, now I finally know why Perseus looked strangely familiar when I first saw him. And I also know how he’s going to look in middle age, with a beard.

  “Of course Perseus didn’t have the slightest idea what I was talking about,” he finished. “In his world, writing is, by definition, linked with the language of Keftiu. So naturally the scribes he brought back must do their record-keeping in that language, and in their own script—Linear A, as it will one day be known. The idea that any language can be written down—including Achaean Greek—is beyond him.”

  “But somebody will think of it eventually,” Deirdre predicted. “And then the Cretan scribes will be out of a job.”

  “Right. Some genius will get the idea of adapting Linear A to the sounds of Achaean, much like Saint Cyril will adapt the Greek alphabet to Slavic two and a half millennia from now. The result will be Linear B. Then a later wave of mainland Greek conquerors will carry it to Crete with them. And that’s the answer to a riddle that’s going to support innumerable academic careers, starting in the twentieth century.”

  “Sidney realized that, at the last, didn’t he?” Deirdre asked softly.

  “Yes.” Jason sat down on the low stone wall surrounding the grave-circle-to-be, for all at once his left foot was giving him renewed pain. “He understood all sorts of things—like the artistic flowering of Crete in ‘Late Palaces’ period. We’re seeing the start of that. One of the Achaean warlords there will win out in the end—and probably take the name ‘Minos’ and all the prestige that goes with it. The Cretan artists will be working for Achaean patrons, and from that cross-fertilization will emerge the synthesis our age thinks of as ‘Minoan.’ “

  “So,” said Deirdre after a while, not meeting his eyes, “Sidney knew all this—the fulfillment of a lifetime for him—and still he … did what he did.” With an unconscious motion, she touched the little plastic case she wore tied to her arm.