The Fox Knows Many Things: An Athena Fox Adventure

by Mike Sweeney

  I finished the story almost reluctantly. I’d been so distracted I hadn’t noticed it was really not that warm, and the breeze was drying my skin out. Time to go inside, wash up, have tender viands set out before me. Skip getting covered in olive oil from head to toe, though.

  And, actually, now that I was paying attention to it again, my stomach wasn’t enthused about lunch, either. Normally, I had the constitution of the Wasteland Wanderer, but between the Venice lagoon and poisoned beer and all, if anything could challenge it this week could.

  As I was coming down the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there. It was…odd. I found him strangely hard to describe. Average build, ordinary looks, normal clothes. There was nothing about him that stood out.

  And that by itself was sort of remarkable. I mused on it as I continued down towards the deck of eats and drinks. He was so average he became a statistical anomaly, a point on what was supposed to be a smooth bell curve. The man with one wife and two-thirds of a child. Poor kid.

  What I thought of as the commerce deck was interesting. Still more hotel than ship, except for the wide windows that let in the great Mediterranean sky and a glimpse of the endless sea.

  Of course, the signs were all for safety and ship’s regulations, not for studio tours or whatever. So that was different.

  There was a gift shop, or should that be supplies shop. The kind of place larger hotels had, where you could restock on bottled water and bar soap and batteries. There was a really ugly wool sweater in the front display.

  And a bar, Metamorphoses the sign said, with brass and chrome and soft lighting and a loud, friendly drunk who looked like he’d been sent by Central Casting. Hawaiian shirt, stupid hat and all. Seriously. I had to stop and admire him. Admire the perfection of stereotype. Or something.

  Or maybe he just made me homesick.

  “Well, don’t just stand there, little lady! Come on, put your feet up, have a cold one.”

  He’d seen me. I shrugged and headed that way. It was the familiar older crowd inside. This kind of travel was for the financially solvent, and that state tended towards retirement age, not youth.

  “The lady’s a sorceress with the Mai Tai,” the man suggested, nodding towards the bartender. “The name’s Terry. Friends call me Beachcomber.”

  They did, did they? “Pleasure,” I said. “My name’s Penny.”

  “A fellow American.”

  “You’ve been speaking English to me this entire time,” I pointed out.

  “Everyone speaks English,” Terry waved this off. “It’s the, what do you call it.”

  “Lingua franca?”

  “That. You a college girl? You look like my daughter. Youngest. From the second marriage. I hear she’s studying nuclear physics or some such. Amazing.” There was a Texas accent there, but he’d said nuclear, not “nucular.” Interesting.

  “What will you have, ma’am?” The bartender had fixed her cool eyes on me.

  “Ginger ale. Doctor’s orders.”

  “Hey! Can we get some service down here, doll?”

  I locked eyes with the bartender for a moment. She was as dark as the polished wood, eyes that had seen far too much, a woman dangerous and subtle. Not all men were pigs, our shared glance said, but alcohol rarely improved them.

  “Go,” I said. “I can wait.”

  Terry was either too far in his happy place to notice our exchange, or a lot subtler than he appeared. “You’ve done Venice before,” he said instead.

  “First time, actually.”

  “I’m going back to Piraeus to rejoin my baby. Fouled the mainsheet during that little squall and the winch took three feet of rail with it when it went. They should be about done by now.”

  “You have a boat?”

  “Prettiest little Bristol you’ve ever seen. A classic design. Yawl rig with both Genoa and a hundred per-center, and a Beta 14 to get through a crowded harbor when the winds aren’t playing nice. I never cruise on engine, though. Sail is the only way to go.”

  “It sounds wonderful,” I said.

  “Nothing like single-handing your way across the open sea,” Terry told me.

  “Yeah. Oops.” My stomach gave a little lurch. “Raincheck on that ginger ale,” I told Circe.

  “Don’t let it get you down, kid,” Terry told me as I stood up. “You’ll always have a squall or two to weather, but there really isn’t anything like this life.”

  “I suppose,” I said.

  I made it back to my cabin before my breakfast came back.

  The only silver lining is I’d spent extra for a private cabin and I had my own bathroom.

  Other than that, my stomach was a mess, the cabin was too small, the smell of diesel fuel was giving me a headache, and I was bored silly. Who was it who said traveling by sea was like being in prison plus a chance of drowning? Sounded like Mark Twain. Him and his “coldest winter…” crap.

  I opened up Kindle and tried to read a little. I’d finished The Odyssey, but I had more Homer loaded.

  So I started to read about Achilles and why he was sulking in his tent. And I realized very early on I didn’t like any of these people. When the narrative hit the horse-trading over poor Chryseis and Briseis I decided I wanted all these so-called heroes to die. As soon as possible. Sign me up for Team Clytemnestra.

  I was so freaking done with this. I just wanted to crawl into bed — my bed, my comfortable bed — hug Flopsie tight and draw the covers over my head and not have to deal any more. To hell with having to watch everything, think through everything. With only being able to communicate in pidgin and semaphore. With never fitting in, with always being the outsider, with always being recognized as different. Travel was, to be blunt, downright horrifying.

  The hell with history and god and myths and especially the hell with car ferries. Oops. There went my stomach again.

  I rinsed out my mouth and pulled the sweat-sticky shirt away from my body. Better out than in for whatever that was. Bad food or something from the lagoon or who knows. I parked myself under the ventilator and slowly started to feel a little better.

  Back to the struggle. It was supposed to be one of the great works of literature, after all.

  And, yeah, it did get better. When it finally got to some fighting, it was sort of interesting. Not for the fighting, but for some of the details.

  The aristeia, for instance. This was a thing that happened to the heroes of The Iliad. It was a Zen state the samurai movies would recognize, a pure focused state of skilled mayhem. The aristeia was like that moment in a movie where the theme song would play and suddenly the hero was invincible, doing something spectacular and cool and gunning down enemies by the busload.

  Yeah, about that. These were the heroes, and nobody else got a name. Hell, the assembled armies of the Greeks and Trojans were lucky to get metal weapons. Not that those lasted; every sword in the epic broke almost immediately, leaving even heroes with nothing but rocks to fight with.

  And armor. Couldn’t forget the armor. I reflected it was a lot like the medieval knight, a walking tank that, like the one that ran on treads, couldn’t be hit by any ordinary soldier. The named heroes had lavish armor. The foot troops had nothing. Which only made me hate the so-called heroes more.

  And that actually got me appreciating the book. Because as much as it held up as paragons these men whose only claim to heroism was how many rivers they could fill with blood, it also was unflinching in looking at the reality, the brutality, and the cost. At, say, poor Hector saying good-bye to his family. The most emotional part of the book is when Achilles met with the father of the man he had slain and found it in himself to forgive his foe and move on.

  At the heart of the book was the choice Achilles faced. To live a quiet life but a long one, or to become a hero and to die in one brief flash of glory.

  Yeah, fine, but Aggie was still getting stabbed in the brisket once he got home and I was fine with that.

  I napped for a little at that point and eventual
ly it dawned on me I was okay again. I was even a little hungry. I cleaned up as best as I could without getting involved in a whole shower, locked everything but phone and cash in the cabin, and ventured out to see the great wide world.

  It was quiet outside. The guests with cabins had gone to them. Or maybe they were sleeping in their RV’s down in the holds. The only people up seemed to be crew, and they had that rumbled, strained, almost angry look of surviving hour fifteen of a twenty-hour shift. It was probably a good idea not to cross them.

  Those seating settings around the outside walls looked even more like a hotel now. That is, like the Hyatt a friend had dragged me to for some fan convention or other. What was her name, Aki or something? She’d been into cosplay. Last I heard she’d moved to Boston. Anyhow, just like that convention, people had parked at the seats, making pillow forts out of their own luggage while they tried to get some sleep.

  I kept going. On the Port side of the ship were row after row of the same chairs you got in an airliner. It didn’t strike me as any more comfortable on water. Less so. This was thirty hours from port to port. Few people were actually in their seats, though, I noticed. Many had camped out between the rows. I didn’t image it was that clean down there but they’d brought sleeping mats and blankets.

  They were prepared. This wasn’t the bar crowd either. I wondered what the story was here. Temporary workers? There were several kids. Babies, even. Families, making a long commute across the divides modern economies forced on people?

  I still couldn’t imagine what it must take to carry a young child through all of this, sleeping on the floor because a cabin was too expensive. But then, humans had been doing that for a very long time. Otherwise we’d have never crossed out of Africa in the first place.

  Still, there was a sameness here. Youth or not, business or pleasure, bar tabs or not, we were all part of the great nation of Travellandia, that global region of waiting areas and rental cars, signs in six languages and food that was always bad. A whole land paved in bad carpet.

  I sort of snuck past the bar. It was dark, though, and Beachcomber wasn’t there. Just as well. Although I suppose I could have always bought that hideous wool sweater at the gift shop and snuck out of the cave in that. Ah, sorry. Odyssey jokes, now? Odysseus had called himself “Nobody” to confuse poor Polyphemus during that incident. Leading to the famous line, “Nobody is attacking me!”

  That would make a good name for my nowhere man earlier, though. Outis, in Greek. Nemo in Latin. Yes, the Emily Wilson translation had a great index.

  As I kept up my wandering, I found myself thinking what it would be like to be a human blank. There’d been a theory a while back that some people were born without the proper pheromones. That they just didn’t register as human to the rest of, well, humanity. That got shot down. Psychology is more complicated than that.

  But the idea was still compelling. I’d assume it would become reciprocal. He’d be inhabiting a world of phantoms. Of animatronic people no more real to him than the characters in a video game. It would be in short a kind of psychopathy. Outis might think himself invisible and invincible because he was the only real person, the only one with an interior life.

  I was still sticky, and stinky, with sick-sweat. I pushed open a door to go on deck. There was a night fog on the Adriatic. I thought I could see the lights of other traffic but I couldn’t be sure. The Moon was white and gibbous and low on the horizon and otherwise the sky was quite black. Outside, the motel look was gone. Instead, it was very much like the USS Hornet had been, thick steel covered in even thicker paint. Lifeboats shrouded in thick canvas like value-size Incan mummies, lumps of machinery covered in bolt heads, signs that would be cryptic to a land-lubber no matter what language they were in.

  Unremarkable and unnoticeable. I felt the skin prickle on my arms, and not just because a chill night breeze was blowing.

  The man on the stair who hadn’t been there? What if he hadn’t been there in Munich, too?

  My mind jumped into overdrive.

  Arrogant in his invisibility. A normal person would skulk and fidget and look suspicious trying to dump a bottle of pills into a drink in the middle of a crowded tent. Not him. And if was the wrong drink, why would he care? None of us were real to him. That was it, that was how! He could have been an arm's reach away this entire trip and I’d never have noticed him. It was only when our eyes met, and mine met only blankness, and…

  I whirled. And I was a second too late. I was ten years too late.

  Nobody was behind me and he grabbed me low and he lifted. I was still sucking in breath to yell when I went over the rail.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  MY FIRST MOMENTS were blind panic. I jack-knifed in the air, ducking instinctively to not slam my skull into something as I went down. I hit badly, stinging my exposed skin, salt spraying into my eyes and mouth. I was choking and trying to see and all I could do is flail madly.

  Too many movies were flashing through my head and I thrashed madly to get away from giant spinning chopping propellers and I tried to cough out the water and I tried to scream for help. All at the same time. For my pains all I got was more water where it didn’t belong. By the time throat and eyes cleared my ship was churning water away from me. Of course I screamed anyhow. Of course no-one heard.

  No panic. Not now. I was surprisingly calm. I was in the middle of the fucking Adriatic Sea, at least thirty miles from the nearest coast, in the middle of the night.

  But the water was warm, I was young and strong, and this was after all a major shipping lane. And only a few days past full moon.

  I was going to survive. I was going to get back to Athens. I was getting damned tired of being thrown down things, into things, and off things. It was about time I started the throwing. I was going to find who was behind this and I was going to kick their ass!

  First things first.

  Phone? The display didn’t even come on. Water and electronics don’t mix.

  Second was the jacket. It was a good jacket. I’d worn it in the very first Athena Fox video. But right now it was weighing me down and restricting my arms.

  I just about drowned trying to get the damned thing off. But at last off it came and I let it settle into the depths as the trapped air slowly left it.

  Trapped air. Maybe I could have used the jacket for flotation. No, what was that thing they’d said about water survival? You were supposed to make water wings from your pants.

  Yeah, good luck with that. I wouldn’t get them over my boots and after the struggle with the jacket I wasn’t looking forward to trying to untie my boots underwater.

  Were there sharks in the Adriatic? Probably. There seemed to be sharks everywhere. Nothing I could do about it if there were.

  Tread water as lightly as I could. Try to float low in the water, just high enough to breathe, conserving strength. Oops. A little higher than that. I coughed away more salt water that had gone where it shouldn’t. It wasn’t stormy, but there was some chop.

  “Blow winds, blow. Crack your cheeks,” I said aloud. That line had always made me laugh. I wonder if Shakespeare had intended the fart joke? I wouldn’t put it past him.

  Just the thing to keep my spirits up. So, what did I remember of the Bard from my flirtation with theatre? Lessee… “This rough magic I do abjure. Something something music, I’ll break my staff, and deeper than did ever plummet sound I’ll drown my books…” Um, no. Not the right direction to go. Perhaps something else from the same play? “Five fathoms deep thy father lies…” Nope nope double nope! Yeah, right. Quote from a play that starts with a shipwreck.

  So, Hamlet. “Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or by arms, no, taking up arms against a sea of troubles, to end them. Ah, to sleep, perchance to dream! But in this sleep called death — what the hell are you trying to do to me, Bill?”

  Okay, there was a whole monologue I’d memorized. You had to. One classic, one contemporary. Pract
icing for auditions. Not that I ever had. I’d never taken a role outside of my high school theatre. Sure, they made us audition for that, but that was just part of the exercise.

  Breathe. “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace to the last syllable of recorded time. And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. Out out brief what the fuck!”

  Okay, no more Shakespeare. Death, death everywhere. And quoting from the Scottish Play? I wasn’t superstitious, but I’d been in theatre far too long to do that.

  Yeah, right. Listen to me. I’d been in high school theatre. For a couple of years. Okay, for most of high school. The band had been very understanding. Even when I ran into a couple of old friends playing in the orchestra pit.

  Which was a particularly nasty place for a musician. I mean, you got used to squeaky chairs, and not enough elbow room, and not being able to hear anything, not the people across the room, not the music the audience was hearing, nothing but the player on your right who could not find her pitch if you shoved a chromatic tuner up her nose.

  But pit? No light, not even room to stand up sometimes, you could barely even see the conductor and dust, dust, dust.

  Oh, like I’d earned boasting rights about playing conditions. I’d played in concert what, twice? I’d barely been a band geek long enough to give it up.

  Story of my life. I’d taken on so many things. Thrown myself into them, more like. I’d stuck with the violin through two years and change. Was just reaching the point where they could stick me in the back row of the second violins, right next to the violas. In junior high. By high school, we had people who were playing jazz well enough to cut their first album.

  It was Burbank, after all.

  So my dad had been proud. I still don’t know if it hurt him to see me giving up music. If he even saw it that way, or just saw singing on stage as a different instrument. I also don’t know if he still thought I might have gone into music because of him and tried to keep it up because of him.