Diomedes looked at me and shook his head.
“But in any case,” said Chiron, returning his attention to the ribbons, “you will surely want to see what I have here. Come, now.”
Reluctantly, Diomedes and I trudged over to the table.
By now, Chiron had the case open and was looking inside with a worried frown. “Funny. I could have sworn . . .” He held it upside down and shook it.
“Really,” I said, “it’s quite unnecessary. In fact, we’d just as soon not see it—whatever it is.”
Chiron reached his hand in the case and felt around, held it up to his eye, shook it again. “But I know I . . .” Chiron stopped himself, set the case on the table, and closed his eyes. “May I have my map back?” He held out his hand.
“Excuse me? I’m not sure I understand.”
“Just give it back.”
I swallowed, grimaced, reached into my quiver, and handed him the scroll.
“Thank you.” Chiron shook his head. Then he looked over at me and smiled. “Odysseus. Wily Odysseus. Man of Twists and Turns.” He laughed. “Have you seen it already? Well, let us have a look anyway.” He spread it out on the table and placed a shard of pottery on each corner. “This,” said Chiron with evident pride in his work, “is my map of Hades. Well, you can call it Hades. It’s more like Tartaros.”
“Excuse me, Lord Chiron,” I interrupted, “but aren’t you angry?”
Chiron looked up from his map. “Angry? With you? Why?”
“I stole from you.”
“You did.”
“And that doesn’t anger you?”
“At first it did,” he said musingly, “but then I thought, ‘Is one angry at the wolf for hunting sheep? Angry at the fly for biting or the crow for eating grain?’ ”
I looked at him, baffled.
“You are a thief, Odysseus. Dishonesty is part of your nature. If I were angry, that anger should turn against myself for leaving something so valuable unguarded in your presence.”
“But . . . I stole from you.”
Chiron laughed again and put his hand on my shoulder. “The horse runs, the wolf hunts, the dog barks, Odysseus lies and steals. I would be a fool to resent you for being what you are.” He tousled my hair as if I were a child. “Worry not. You are what you are. Now back to the map.” He leaned over the table and smoothed the parchment flat with both hands.
Somehow his clemency was more troubling to me than any rebuke. I’d been called a thief and a liar before. It had been a point of pride for me. Yet hearing Chiron say it with such candor made me ashamed of myself. Why was that? I remembered something Homer had told me back in Limbo: “You will be a greater hero when you learn to distinguish your lies from your self.” But here was Chiron, cheerfully insisting that my lies were simply part of my nature.
I couldn’t dwell on it. I turned my attention to the map.
CHAPTER 5
A MAP OF HADES
I HAVE SPENT SOME TIME exploring this world,” continued Chiron, “and have heard it called by many names—Inferno, Erebus, Abaddon, Tartaros, Sheol, Gehenna . . . This is a place where wrongdoing is punished. A prison of sorts. To many here, it is known as ‘Hell’.”
“Hell.” On the Centaur’s lips, the word sounded more like a prison than Hades. “It all just keeps getting worse and worse.”
“And that is good news for you.”
Diomedes raised his eyebrows. “How’s that?”
“Well, as you might imagine, I have had quite a lot of time to think this over, and it stands to reason that if there is a place in the Underworld where the unjust are punished, then there is surely a place where the just are rewarded. Take the angeloi, for example. They must come from somewhere. They aren’t of earthly origin, but they clearly don’t belong down here either, so I can only surmise that there must be a third ‘world’ unlike Hell or Earth. You see, the one thing I have noticed on my expeditions is that every soul—every one without exception—deserves to be here. I never came across a single soul that had not earned exactly the punishment he received. But you are not the first to escape. A great number left Limbo at the time of the Great Tremor—the earthquake that caused the breach between this circle and the one above.”
“Breach?” said Diomedes. “Circle?”
“Forgive me,” said Chiron, looking at him with a curious half smile. “I am getting ahead of myself. The breach to which I refer is the very place where Nessos and Pholos found you.”
We looked at him blankly.
“The place where you descended from the level above. Just past the Minotaur.”
“The what?” we asked in unison.
“The Minotaur. Did you not see him? He lives in the breach.”
“I think we saw his tracks,” said Diomedes.
“Funny. I wonder why he didn’t bother you. Well, there’s something else for me to reflect upon after you leave. But it matters not. You are beyond them now. The place to which I refer is just about—move your arm—here.” Chiron pointed to a spot on the map about halfway down. “The wall gave way right here when the Great Tremor shook the Underworld. Before then, there was no way to move from one level to the next.”
I walked around the table and looked over Diomedes’ shoulder. It was hard to make sense of what the old Centaur was saying, but somehow it gave me hope.
“Just before the two of you died, the last of the Centaurs were driven from the world above. We had been a violent, vulgar race—no doubt, you have heard stories—and we found ourselves condemned to boil in this bloody river as our punishment. It was I who first suggested to my brethren that we lift our voices in prayer, but it took the Great Tremor to convince them. Such an earthquake shook this place that even Pholos relented and raised his arms to the heavens.” Chiron smiled now. “The answer was immediate. An angelos appeared at the bank of the river. A messenger of god like your friend, Ignatius. He was dressed in light and carried an orb of crystal in his right hand. In his left, he wielded a golden rod. On Earth, he said, the children of Centauros had disgraced their maker. We had failed to fulfill the purpose for which we had been shaped, embracing instead lives of violence and excess. For this, he said, we had been justly condemned.
“Well, we could see that the angelos spoke with authority, and the gravity of his words rang in our ears like thunder. Like thunder, I tell you. My people were thrown into a despair that felt all the deeper in the presence of such hope. There was wailing, and weeping, and a great gnashing of teeth. We begged the god’s messenger to show us how we might redeem ourselves. To intercede for us on Mount Olympus. After all, we had never known our purpose. How could we be blamed for forgetting it?
“We must have looked so wretched, groveling in the sand and blood. Whether this was what moved him, I cannot know, but he calmed his anger. Forgot his rage. Gave us a task, the completion of which would compensate for our failures—and beyond that, earn us immortality, for the god of the heavens, he said, is a god of mercy.
“Of course, we begged him to tell us the name of this unseen god, that we might worship him properly, but he only shook his head. ‘The four-letter name is not to be uttered here,’ he said. ‘You need only know that He is.’ ”
“Then he explained our task to us. We were needed here, on the banks of the river Styx to guard its occupants and prevent the Harpies from escaping to the upper levels. We accepted this charge and have remained here ever since, earning our freedom.”
I looked at the old Centaur and nodded. “Your words give me hope, venerable Chiron, and I am glad to hear that the race of Centauros will live on. But I don’t see how this will help us with our quest.”
“Look here.” By now he had managed to extricate the arrow from his beard and was using it to point to the map. “This is Hades as I have come to know it. Granted, the map is incomplete, but you can see there is a certain logic to the architecture of the Underworld. It is not merely a chaos of pain; its very structure is dictated by the demands of justice. Each l
evel, you see, corresponds to a particular vice—sins of passion near the top, calculated sins near the bottom. Each level is smaller than the one above because the more evil there is in a place, the less it actually exists; so the whole landscape ends up looking like . . . like a kind of funnel. A series of concentric circles. And the lower you go, the more severe the punishment.”
“So the souls at the bottom are the ones that the gods really hate,” said Diomedes.
“No. No. No. You have missed my point. It is exactly the opposite. There is only one god—this god of the four-letter name—and he does not hate anyone. The damned souls hate Him.”
“So you’re saying the souls here have actually chosen their punishment?” I said.
“In a manner of speaking, yes. They chose to do evil and refused to repent. Didn’t you?”
I mulled over his words. I hadn’t exactly chosen to burn for three thousand years, but neither, in all that time, had I asked for release. When I did, the favor was granted.
“Here, then,” said Chiron, rolling up the map. He placed it in my hands, smiling. “Your stories have made an old Centaur happy and have won you a steadfast friend. I would like to give you this as a parting gift, one guest-friend to another.”
“But . . . I stole from you—in your own home!”
Chiron paused in thought for a moment as though I had suggested something novel. “Who is to say what is mine and what is yours in the afterlife? Seems to me it all belongs to someone else now.” He smiled at me and winked. “You must need it more than I do, or you wouldn’t have tried to steal it in the first place. Think of it as compensation for your story. I shall have many ages to mull over your words, and the pleasure I shall take in them is worth at least this piece of parchment. Or if you prefer, you may think of it as a favor to me. You can finish the map—fill in the gaps, and when you pass this way again, return it.”
“The gaps?”
Chiron took the map back out of my hands and unrolled it again. “You see this bit here?” He pointed to a large blank at the bottom of the page. “That is where you are going.”
I closed my eyes and lowered my forehead onto a fist. “I thought you said the map would help me.”
“I said it would help. I didn’t say it would help you.”
Diomedes laughed.
“But I think it will. I’ve been able to sketch out some of the larger features: the ten valleys of Malebolge, the bridges, Lake Cocytus . . . These are useful things to know.”
I smiled. “They are indeed, Lord Chiron. I am an ungrateful wretch. I would be happy to finish your map. I owe you at least that much for trying to steal it.”
He leaned over and touched his forehead to mine. It was an oddly intimate gesture. “Perhaps you have changed after all. Oh! And that reminds me . . .” He pulled a small vial from one of his shelves. “I want you to take this as well. It is the last of my healing oils. I brought a great load of them down with me when we were exiled from the living world, but our war with the Harpies has taken its toll. This is all I have left.”
I tied the flask next to Penelope’s cup, wondering how many more gifts I could afford to carry. As it was, I must have looked rather like a traveling merchant, with all the flasks, bottles, and bags I was toting. “Chiron,” I said, clasping his hand in mine, “Far-Shooter, Wound Healer, Mapmaker. I am unworthy of your friendship. It is with a heavy heart that I must leave you.”
Chiron released my hand. “Not so fast, Son of Laertes. We have to get you across this river, now, don’t we? And my brethren will not be eager to ford it. The woods on the other side are infested with Harpies.”
I shuddered. “Harpies. Now I’m not so eager myself.”
“Not to worry. We have been at war with those old hags for centuries, and they have learned to respect our bows. The difficulty will be in convincing my brethren to help you. Wait here. They have surely come to a decision by now. And Odysseus,” he said, stopping at the door, “help yourself to anything in my tent.”
CHAPTER 6
AN ATTEMPT AT ELOQUENCE
SO WE WAITED. And we waited some more. Clearly, Chiron was having some difficulty convincing his brothers to help us, and not surprisingly. The sons of men and the sons of Centauros had never mixed well, especially in the wake of a certain marriage feast at Thessaly. The Centaurs, as everyone knows, are not among the more civilized races, and their fondness for wine was never matched by a love of moderation. So when Pirithous invited them to his wedding, he should have suspected it would end badly, which in fact it did, the whole affair culminating in a massive riot of drunkenness and savagery, with dead on both sides and a permanent rift of resentment settling between the two races.
“If they decide not to help us,” said Diomedes after a while, “what will we do?”
“I don’t know.” I took out Chiron’s map and spread it out on the table again.
“I suppose we must trust that all of this is in the hands of the gods,” he said.
“The god,” I said. “Chiron says there’s only one.”
“Well, Chiron might be wrong,” he answered. “In which case, you just ditched a thousand years of tradition in favor of one man’s opinion.”
“Technically speaking, he isn’t a man at all,” I replied. “But even so, that old bard we met in Limbo seemed to have his doubts as well. And what’s more, with the exception of Athena, I never much liked our gods anyway.”
“Shhhh!” Diomedes looked over his shoulder as though one of them might be standing there in the room with us. “If they’re listening, you’re likely to wind up pushing a rock for the rest of eternity—or worse!”
“Which is exactly why I don’t like them.”
Diomedes winced. In the long, convoluted stories of our ancestors, one point was made abundantly clear: it didn’t take much to provoke the anger of the Achaean gods. All you had to do to set them off was neglect a sacrifice or brag about your children or let someone give you an exaggerated compliment, and the next thing you knew, your parents were maimed, your children dead, and your feet submerged in boiling mud. Speaking twice the way I had could land someone in hot water—literally. But at this point, I didn’t figure I had much to lose. Besides that, I didn’t want Diomedes to win the argument.
“What makes you so quick to believe Chiron anyway?” asked Diomedes.
“Well, for one, he’s older than you.”
“So?”
“And smarter.”
“Fine.”
“And wiser.”
“Perhaps.”
“So if he’s older, smarter, and wiser than you, I can’t see that I have much reason to trust your opinions over his. And you know, there is a difference between superstition and tradition. Chiron’s odds of confusing those two are far less than yours.”
“Somehow I still find it all a little farfetched. If there’s only that one god, and he’s so just and merciful and whatnot . . . then why all this?”
“All what?”
“All this blood and filth and fire. If Chiron’s god is so good, why doesn’t he just fix everything and be done with it?”
I thought this over for a moment. “I guess he wouldn’t be particularly good if he didn’t let us make our own mistakes, and he wouldn’t be particularly just if he let evil acts go unpunished.”
Just then there was a commotion outside the tent and Chiron appeared at the entrance. “The boys would like to hear from you themselves,” he said. “Follow me.”
Chiron led us to a spot beside the river where the Centaurs had assembled in a wide circle. A dark Centaur with russet skin and a mane of jet-black hair stepped forward to speak. “Sons of Men,” he said, “Lord Chiron speaks highly of you. If not for his words, we would never have condescended to hear your request. It is only out of respect for him that we have refrained from killing you outright. Yet for all this, we would have one question answered, and from your own lips. Why, after all the centuries of hatred between your race and ours, should the sons of Cen
tauros put themselves at your service?”
I looked around at the circle of stern faces and cleared my throat.
“Not you, Son of Laertes,” said the Centaur. “Him.” He gestured at Diomedes.
“Great Lord of the Bow,” I said, taking a step forward, “my friend is not skilled with words. If you would hear our plea—”
“We will hear your plea, Odysseus, Man of Many Faces. But not from you. We know well your name, and we know well your skill with words. Your lying tales have reached us even in the Underworld. We have no use for them.”
Chiron winced but said nothing.
“Instead,” the Centaur continued, “we would hear your petition from steady Tydeus’ son, known the world over for his courage.”
I stepped out of the circle, mortified. Diomedes stepped forward.
“Centaurs,” he said after a long, awkward silence, “I . . . I’m sorry. I . . . well . . . I just don’t see that there is any reason for you to help us.”
I groaned aloud.
“I don’t know what to say. I . . . you see . . . I am as much a liar as my friend, you see . . . so I don’t deserve your compassion either. And . . . I honestly can’t think of any reason why you’d want to help us. Me . . . you see . . . I am a man, and . . . and not such a good man either, really. In fact, I’m pretty sure I would never have helped you—at least . . . not while I was alive. Really. Right.” (It physically hurt just listening to him. I found myself forcing a broad grin and wishing more than anything that I could shrink into my armor like a turtle.) “Yet, gentlemen . . . uh . . . gentle . . . horses . . .” There were some muffled snorts. Diomedes grimaced. “Unworthy though I am, a god showed me mercy—and mercy when I least deserved it. So . . . if you would be godlike, maybe you would have mercy on me too.” He looked around the circle, his face red and sweaty, tears welling in his eyes. It was no way to end a speech.
I had to say something—anything—so long as it took the focus off Diomedes. I grit my teeth and stepped into the circle. But just as I did, a Centaur stepped forward from the other side. He had bright red hair that flowed down his back to mingle with his coat. Unlike the others, he wore no beard. He had a restless demeanor and shifted from hoof to hoof as he spoke. “Brethren,” he said, “who among us has more cause to hate the sons of men than I? They are a vicious, treacherous, arrogant race. I, Nessos, have the scars to prove it!” He thumped his chest. A long red scar ran across it. “A son of man gave me this scar, and it was that same son of man whom I poisoned with my very blood.” He looked around the circle at the rows of stern faces. “This man—this Son of Tydeus—he speaks truth. He does not deserve our compassion.” There were snorts of approval from the assembly. “But take note of that, brothers. Today I heard a man speak truth, and speak it plainly.” Silence. “I owe a debt of hatred to the race of men, and I’ve been paying it back in blood for many years.” He paused and kicked the dirt with a hoof. “I’ve had enough blood. I’ve had a river of it. Today, I pay my debt in mercy. The rest of you may do as you please, but as for me and my bow, today we serve the sons of men.”
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