It is not my nature to praise an idea I haven’t thought of myself, but if there was a moment during our journey through Hell that could be described as fun, this was it. Teetering on the edge of that gully, I experienced for the first time in a very long while that adolescent thrill that comes from doing something truly stupid—that is, the thrill of being recklessly alive. The slope was far steeper and the mud far slicker than I had anticipated. My shield functioned as a perfect sled; and let me tell you, I slid like an oiled wrestler on a marble floor. Whoosh! No broad-winged eagle in all Greece ever plummeted with such skin-tingling speed as I did then, mud and spray flying in my face. But it also occurred to me in the course of my descent that I hadn’t considered how I was going to stop. Since I couldn’t risk letting go of the shield, I decided just to ride it out and improvise something when the end drew near.
CHAPTER 17
EDGE OF THE ABYSS
THE END DREW NEAR. Near enough, at any rate, for me to make out the bottom of the gully, which, from so far above and through the driving rain, looked unsettlingly similar to a large bowl of maggots. Mind you, I have never seen a bowl of maggots, but were I ever to come across one, I’m quite certain this is what it would look like: gummy and pale, streaked with slime and gore, undulating with the twist and fidget of a thousand distinct struggles. The spectacle was at once mesmerizing and repulsive.
As I sped closer, I made three startling discoveries in quick succession: first, that the “maggots” were, in fact, human bodies in various states of dismemberment; second, that the strange barking sounds had ceased; third, that I was about to be launched face-first into a festering mound of cadavers. I cast desperately about for a solution. None presented itself, and the subsequent impact catapulted me end over end—shield and all—high into the air. I descended again with a ring of struck metal and skidded through a spray of gore until I came to rest with a thud atop the heaving stomach of an enormously fat—but otherwise unidentifiable—creature.
I wiped the blood from my face with one hand, righted myself with the other, and peered through the pelting hail at my new surroundings. As far as I could see in every direction, the ground was littered with the writhing bodies of the damned—every one of them horribly mutilated, legs missing, chests ripped open, wounds gaping from pale flesh. And those closest to me were in worse shape than those farther away. Their whimpers and sobs rose into the air like a mist.
Still more disturbing, however, was the bloated, heaving form upon which I had come to rest. Like the others about me, it was encased in folds of sweating flesh, yet there was little human about it. A black, greasy fur crawling with fleas met my touch as I pushed myself to my feet, and on either side, extending from the fur like four flaccid tumors, a set of legs stretched out, each ending in a twitching claw. Before me, a snakelike tail hung limply to one side.
I shouted for Diomedes and Helen. Behind me, a muffled cry. I spun around.
“Cerberos,” I whispered, recognizing at once the three heads of the Hound of Hades. His middle and largest head stretched straight back. Out of its mouth protruded the kicking legs of Diomedes. The head to my left looked up at me, blinking and dazed. The head to my right was twisted to the side, its eyes shut tight and its long tongue lolling out the side of its muzzle in a puddle of drool. There was a large, blue welt emerging between its eyes. From time to time, it emitted a feeble woof between snuffles.
I slid across the monster’s shoulders and over to where Diomedes lay lodged in its mouth. “Is that you in there?” I shouted into the dog’s nose, wary of the head to my right, which had followed me, panting, as I worked my way across.
I couldn’t quite make out Diomedes’ answer, but I recognized the word “idiot” among a string of muffled expletives, and interpreted this to mean that he wanted out. Diomedes had never been an eloquent man, but he had a way of making his desires known.
“Don’t go anywhere!” I yelled. There were more muffled obscenities as I removed some of my heavier armor and set it in a pile with my shield and bow. Then, standing between Diomedes’ legs with one foot under each arm, I pulled. I hadn’t expected him to slide out so easily, and the force of my effort sent us both flying backward. I ended up on my back with Diomedes in a slick heap on top of me, one sandal working its way into my mouth.
Now both of us were covered in a layer of rank slobber, and the elation of my downhill trip had thoroughly evaporated. “Get off me!” I grumbled. “You stink like dog vomit, and now I do too.”
Diomedes elbowed me hard in the stomach as he stood up.
“What was that for?” I groaned.
Diomedes scowled. “Where do I start?”
“I just pulled you—literally—from the jaws of death. The least you could—”
There was a deep, rumbling growl, and sitting up, I looked into the eyes of Hell’s watchdog.
“Aiki!” whispered Diomedes. The monster was truly horrifying. Fangs protruded from fleshy, drool-spattered jowls. Its black eyes were buried beneath folds of dark fur.
“No sudden movements,” I said out the corner of my mouth. “Remember, he’s more afraid of you than you are of him.”
“I doubt that,” replied Diomedes as he unsheathed his sword. The beast’s head alone was the size of a mule. But neither was it in any condition to attack us. Two of its three heads were insensible, and only with enormous difficulty had it managed to roll over onto its stomach.
“Where is Helen?” asked Diomedes. In the excitement, I’d actually forgotten her. It would be an ironic end for the great beauty of Troy to choke out her last breath in the gullet of a dog.
“Over here.” She was picking her way toward us through the piles of cadavers.
Diomedes smiled.
“You should have seen the Son of Telemon!” she crooned. “He was magnificent! One moment, we were hurtling through the air, helpless, hopeless, hapless—the Hound of Hades awaiting us with all three hideous jaws agape; the next moment, he has cast himself, armor and all, into the mouth of the beast! He saved my life!” She batted her eyes at him and reached for his hand.
“I must have knocked out his other head with my shield,” he said, blushing.
“What about the third?” I asked.
“It was busy trying to eat an ox.”
“A what?” Helen and I said together.
“An ox. Last thing I remember, he was trying to eat an ox with his third head.”
Helen and I looked at each other and back at him.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” said Helen.
“I saw what I saw.”
“Where in the name of the gods would Cerberos find an ox in the Underworld?” I asked.
“I saw what I saw,” he repeated.
Helen shook her head. “I think you’ve been knocked silly. But whatever happened, you surely saved my life. You were wonderful.” She drew out the n in a warbling sigh and leaned forward to kiss him—then thought better of it and shook his hand instead.
“There was an ox . . . ,” he muttered. “I can still smell it. Can’t you smell it?”
“I think that is you,” she said, “but ox or no ox, you have conquered the mighty Hound of Hades.”
“He bit off more than he could chew this time,” added Diomedes, smiling at his cleverness. I really wanted to hit him.
“I am just glad you are both in one piece,” said Helen. “I thought for sure I would have to take the form of a dog just to get out of here.”
“You’d have to what?” asked Diomedes.
Helen smiled. “Act like a dog. You know. Bark and slobber and run around on all fours. I thought I would have to act like a bitch to get past him.”
“Act like?” I said.
Helen sniffed and stepped around me. “You will want to finish him off, though, now that you have disabled him.”
Another deep growl rumbled in the dog’s throat, but it lacked conviction. Diomedes nodded and placed the point of his sword between the folds of flesh at the
dog’s neck. It made a feeble gesture of resistance but was too dazed to do much else.
“Wait!” I knocked Diomedes’ sword to the ground and looked again at the dog’s face. In spite of its ugliness, there was something piteous about it. No doubt, Cerberos would have torn us limb from limb if we hadn’t had the good fortune to knock him out, and his own gluttonous impulsivity was to blame for trying to swallow Diomedes, armor and all; but in spite of that, there was something about the old beast that suggested innocence to me. In fact, as I stood face-to-face with Hell’s own watchdog, I felt a deep nostalgia for my own dear Argos, the loyal hound that had waited twenty years for my return.
I’d bred Argos myself just before leaving for Troy. In fact, I had taken him hunting only once before I left, but already that dog was fast. There could not have been a rabbit or stag in all Achaea that could outrun him. Sadly, my servants were not as fond of him as I, and my departure was only three days old when they stopped feeding him. He degenerated into a common table dog begging for scraps, and when I found him upon my return, he was a skeletal shadow of his former self, mangy and covered with ticks, huddled against a pile of steaming manure for warmth. Neither my servants nor my own son recognized me after all those years away, but when Argos heard my voice, he lowered his ears, wagged his tail, and died. Of all the grief and indignity heaped upon me that day, somehow this touched me most deeply; and now, as I gazed into the dark face of Cerberos, I knew I could not allow Diomedes to kill him.
“Leave him be,” I said, still looking into the dog’s eyes. It tilted its head to the side, and a long pink tongue ran up over its nose.
“Do not mistake that gesture for gratitude,” snarled Helen. “You only remind him of his last meal.”
“She’s right,” added Diomedes.
“I’m sure she is, but even so, leave him alone. He can’t harm us now.”
“Not now,” agreed Helen, “but when he recovers, you can be quite sure he will come after us.”
“She’s right,” Diomedes said again.
“I don’t care whether she’s right,” I said, growing more frustrated by the second. “When the Parthenos freed me, she said to let mercy triumph over justice. She said it twice, in fact. It’s an odd sort of command, but I intend to obey it.”
“Why start now?” Helen protested. “And with that thing? I cannot imagine a creature less worthy of mercy.”
“You.”
Her eyes went cold.
“And me. And Diomedes too. You ought to know that as well as anyone, Helen. None of us was worthy of mercy when we were shown it. But if we’d earned it, then it wouldn’t be mercy. It would be justice. And the Parthenos didn’t tell me to be just. She told me to be merciful.”
Helen gave a resigned smile and nodded; then she bent down and picked up Diomedes’ sword. She moved as if to return it to him but at the last moment turned and drove the blade into the nearest neck. The hound’s eyes popped open, and it made a low, gurgling attempt at a bark, then collapsed.
“No!” I knocked Helen to the ground and grasped the sword with both hands. It pulled out easily, followed by a spurt of black blood. Then I threw the sword aside and turned on Helen, who lay whimpering where I had thrown her. “That dog is the last creature you’ll see in Hades,” I said; and I really might have killed her—choked her to death with my own bare hands, I was that angry.
But Diomedes stepped between us. “Don’t.” He stood with his fists clenched, ready for a fight.
“Get out of my way,” I growled through my teeth. I felt tears coming.
“Think this through, Odysseus. That dog is not worth it.”
“That dog was innocent.”
Helen gave a bitter, choking laugh and gestured at the carnage around us. “Innocent of what?”
By now, she had picked herself up. She was standing just behind Diomedes. “Look at it,” she said. “That is not a dog at all. It is a demon.”
“Whatever he is, he’s helpless.”
“By all the death in Hades!” she swore, and pushed Diomedes to the side, stepping forward so that we were face-to-face. There was a dark, foreign look in her eyes. “I do not know what you have seen here. You have told me nothing about where you have been or what you have suffered. I did not ask and I do not want to know. But I have lived among demons for a long, long time, and I can tell you this much for certain: they are not helpless. They are not merciful. They do not have changes of heart. They are supremely clever and utterly ruthless. They are manipulative and they are cruel; and if we let that thing recover, it will come after us and kill us all. Cerberos is one of the fallen ones. It is one of the race that rebelled against the Authority. It will not thank you for your mercy. It cannot love you. It cannot change its mind. It cannot do anything but hate and torture and kill. I know you miss your family. And it is clear that you miss your dog. I am sure you have regrets. I have them too. Plenty. But this is not the way to redeem yourself. You cannot bring back your family by befriending a demon. Poison will not fill an empty stomach. You have a job to finish, Son of Laertes. If there is any wisdom left in you—not mercy, wisdom—you will abandon whatever foolish notion you have about adopting this beast and recognize that killing me will not help you on your journey.”
By the time she finished speaking, I had entirely forgotten my anger. It wasn’t so much what she said that distracted me as the way she said it. There was something in her manner that struck me wrong. As a fraud of considerable repute, I like to think I have a certain aptitude for reading people—a talent for translating the subtlest expressions into cues. After all, the key to a successful falsehood lies in knowing precisely when to embellish, when to stay silent, and when to press on. This knowledge depends on little more than an arched brow or a sidelong glance, and believe me, many a great lie has been brought low by a misread smile. Which is to say that I had a strong and sudden sense that Helen was hiding something. In fact, if my own two eyes hadn’t testified definitively to the contrary, I would have sworn I’d just been talking to someone else altogether. But she had a point. Cerberos was beyond my help now.
“So be it.” I looked past her to Diomedes, though he wouldn’t meet my gaze. Then I crouched down and had a last look at the dog. He wasn’t dead yet. His dark eyes followed me as I turned and walked away.
CHAPTER 18
DEMONS OF A DIFFERENT SORT
THE HIKE THROUGH the circle of gluttons was long and cheerless. The ground was so littered with Cerberos’ victims that picking our way through was like walking a maze. And I couldn’t get over the feeling that in siding with Helen, Diomedes had betrayed our friendship. More important, it appeared that I had underestimated Helen herself. This bothered me in a particular way because I had always prided myself on being a good judge of character, and I had never judged Helen to be anything more than a beautiful face. Granted, she was an extraordinarily beautiful face—a powerfully beautiful face—but I had never stopped to consider that it might mask a thinking soul. I wondered if anyone ever had. If I missed that, what else was I missing? I glanced back at her now as she tiptoed through the carnage. She always seemed so empty-headed, even now.
Yet there had been signs, hadn’t there? Hadn’t she been the one to see through my disguise when I sneaked into Troy? Hadn’t she almost exposed the ruse behind my wooden horse? I remember well how Anticlos and I had struggled to keep silent, sitting in the belly of that wooden idol as she circled it, tested its joints, knocked, and called our names. Poor Anticlos was so shaken by the sound of her voice (it reminded him of his wife), I’d had to clamp both hands over his mouth to keep him from shouting a reply. I held on to him so tightly, he suffocated. Another unworthy death, and Helen to blame. She alone among the Trojans had suspected our treachery. Yet even then somehow it had never crossed my mind that she might have enough wit to outfox me, the Man of Twists and Turns. She was smart, that woman. Now that I thought of it, she had outsmarted me more than once.
And there was another thing too
. She had been right about Cerberos. When the dog had looked up at me, I’d whispered a little blessing under my breath. I’d gazed into his eyes and prayed for him to the Parthenos. And there, beneath the shaggy brows of that infernal beast, I saw . . . emptiness. Brutality. Cruelty. All bound up in a look that said exactly nothing.
Over time, the carnage thinned out, and we came to another steep descent. Here, a winding path led us down to the fourth ring of Hell, the abode of hoarders and squanderers. At the time, of course, we had no idea where we were, except that it was lower than the level we’d come from, and therefore closer to our destination. Here the path took a sharp turn to the left, following the edge of a pit. Peering into it, I was presented with the most curious landscape of my journey thus far. At first glance, the ground itself seemed to tremble and shift like sand in a sieve, but looking more closely, I could see that each “grain” was in fact an enormous boulder, propelled by a single battered soul. It reminded me of a curious beetle I had once observed while in the land of the Lotus Eaters. For no apparent reason, this beetle spent its days rolling great balls of excrement from one end of the desert to the other. Now I was reminded of that bizarre insect as I watched these souls strain against the weight of their rocks. Each rolled his stone about the pit in a circle, gaining speed until with a crash he collided with that of another.
“Why do they keep it up?” I said. “What do you think is the point of it?”
Diomedes peered over my shoulder into the chasm. “Maybe those rocks are valuable.”
“Nothing is that valuable,” I said.
Diomedes shrugged. “I seem to remember you and Ajax had a pretty big row over a suit of armor.”
“I wouldn’t call it a row.”
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