The Fox Knows Many Things: An Athena Fox Adventure

by Mike Sweeney

  I cursed, pulling on at least three different lines trying to get the lurching boat back under control. He swam away, and he didn’t look back until he was on shore. I reflected there might have been enough money left in Ariadne’s envelope to buy the boat outright. Maybe Vasco da Gama didn’t expect to get his boat back.

  Or see me alive again.

  “Okay,” I said. “I can do this.”

  I adjusted the tension on the boom again and angled myself along so I was running parallel to the shore. The island I wanted was still to the South, out of sight behind the cliffs to my port side.

  Roiling. Some weird disturbance in the water. Looked nasty. I had the tiller up on fingertips now, finessing it as I guided the Wayfarer shore-ward of whatever that was. Looked almost like a whirlpool. Undersea currents? Tidal flows?

  The Aegean gleamed. It was paler towards the shore. In dots and lumps.

  Oh. My. Gods. Rocks. That was undersea rocks I was looking at!

  I threw the tiller over. Wind pulled at my hair as it seemed to drop down on my little boat and the boom shot over my head. We heeled almost into the water and now I was heading right into the teeth of the whirlpool-thingy.

  The boom was flapping loose, corner of the sail almost dipping into the water. “Shit, shit, shit, shit!” I cried.

  No, “sheet.” That’s what he had been saying all along. Mainsheet, a fugitive memory from who knows where came to me. I hauled in on the sheet, the line slippery in my wet hand.

  Okay. Back under control. I gingerly steered away from the disturbance and...bam! The boom flipped back over me again! There was some funny goddamn wind going on in this little corner of the Aegean.

  I looked up. Cliffs. The wind was blowing out to sea. Remnants from Zorbas as it left Attica to head North? It had created a weird eddy here, a partial vacuum in the shadow of the cliffs.

  I switched sides again, wrapped my whole hand around the tiller pole thing, and held my course. Hopefully I wouldn’t get too close to those rocks. I hadn’t brought any chalk.

  Now that I had things sort of under control again, it wasn’t bad at all. I teased through the gap and when I had a little more working room turned back into open water. This time I was expecting the jib. I loosed the port line, stretched out to grab the starboard line out of its cleat and pulled the jib sail into something resembling position.

  The wind was crossing me now, almost at right angles, and I was picking up speed. This must be the remnants of the storm winds, and they were blowing hard and steady.

  The spray was in my face, my flight almost silent except for the wind in the shrouds (assuming this boat had shrouds) and the slapping of waves against the hull. This was great. This was amazing.

  This was insane.

  I was solo-sailing a sixteen foot boat across the Aegean. The Aegean, that crazy, moody sea that could change faces in an instant. That wrecked and trapped Odysseus for ten long years of his life.

  Sailing towards Aráchnos. My Greek wasn’t good but even I could figure that one out. The Island of Spiders.

  “Spiders,” I muttered. “Why did it have to be spiders?” I laughed at myself. I’d been trying to sound like Indiana Jones. It came out more like Ron Weasley.

  Indiana Jones. See, that was the problem. People didn’t think he was real. That would be stupid. But that character, and a laundry list of similar characters, could mislead people into thinking that was the way things really were.

  In archaeology. In the whole artifact-centric view that had even entangled me. But past that, the whole idea of the hero. The idea that there were these people as much above us mortals as the Olympian Gods. People who were stronger and faster and better looking and who could get away with shit. Get away with stunts when the rest of us would end up on YouTube. With a fresh concussion. Get away without consequences because they had a Friend on the Force or some other bullshit excuse.

  And now I really had to wonder. When Satz had hounded me across Europe, he’d been too into his fantasies to recognize that I was out there scared, hurting, and desperate.

  But what did Outis see? He saw me winning. At every step of the way I’d slipped away from Herr Satz. He’d tried himself. Coward’s tricks, but still deadly. And I escaped them, one after another. Popping up again unhurt. And with every day getting closer to Athens and the secret he had been trying to hide.

  It must have looked to him like he had a real-life Indiana Jones on his tail. Pity he was wrong.

  Hey, maybe I wasn’t just a media arts graduate in a silly costume. I did know a little about archaeology. Maybe I couldn’t speak seven languages, but I could fake my way through a conversation in at least three. And maybe all of the globe-trotting I’d done was a narrow slice of Europe. But you had to start somewhere.

  And now here I was, doing the kind of crazy stunt I’d promised Dame Dupond would only be happening in front of the chroma-key screen.

  But I still wasn’t a hero.

  I pulled in on the mainsheet and trimmed a little closer to the wind. I could see Spider Island in front of me. All that was left was to come up with some damned idea of what to do when I got there.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  I REALLY HOPED no one was watching this one.

  When I got closer to the island, there wasn’t any obvious place to pull in. So I turned. Too far. The sail started rippling and my boat slowed, without enough inertia to complete the turn. I played with the jib lines to try to catch some useful wind. Rocked the boat back and forth. Thought about sticking my hands in and paddling but it turned out by working the rudder back and forth I could very slowly edge it around.

  Wind again. The main sail was taut. The sound of water running under the hull returned. Whew! But what in Hades was going on with the jib? The thing was somehow caught up in its own stay. It looked horrible.

  I undid both jib lines and stood up and gingerly worked my way forward over the bow compartment. Tried to pull the heavy nylon-cloth stuff out of the place it wasn’t supposed to be.

  Sound. The boat was turning and the mainsail was ballooning. It lurched into my field of vision in a great white blob, bellying towards me like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. The jib sail caught wind and ripped itself out of my hands.

  “Shit!” My hand was burning and felt wet. I was sure it had stripped the skin right off it. No. Just red. But that had been way too close. I hadn’t tied off anything and the lines were now dangling in the sea.

  I fought my way back the cockpit past the crazed main sail. I was heading directly down wind, everything wide open. I fought the tiller over and yanked hard at the mainsheet with my still stinging hand. Kept heeling around until I was dead into the wind again and the sails were still.

  Caught my breath. That had been a bad one. After that, it was only a matter of going forward and dangling over the water clawing for the lines until I finally had them run back where they belonged. After, that is, I’d snugged the mainsheet down and tied off the tiller with another bit of rope that looked suspiciously like it had been intended for that all along.

  After that, I treated both downwind and upwind a lot more carefully. If I looked very closely, I could get a guess at the wind direction from how the little waves looked. It wasn’t great, but with that and feeling my way towards the edges, I thought I could keep from getting in that kind of trouble again. No, I’d find a new kind of trouble.

  Like how to stop. I could see a beach, now, and in the distance was a house. A really, really big house. So that’s where I wanted to be. But the wind was blowing almost directly towards it.

  Right. The main sail rigging was way too complicated to play with, but I’d seen him haul up the jib and it should be…that cleat.

  Oh, that looked untidy. Half of it had fallen into the water. But at least I was moving slower.

  I crabbed towards the beach. Got as close as I could manage. Then with a brief apology to my brave Wayfarer, ran it straight towards the sand and grounded it with a sandy, sliding crunch t
hat I really hoped wasn’t as bad as it had sounded.

  I was here.

  I clambered out of the boat, which was at an uncomfortable angle. The silence pressed in on me. I’d spent so long listening to the wind and wave, trying to keep my faithful steed in trim, the lack of it bothered me.

  Typical Greek island? It looked not entirely unlike California. The sky and sea, though. The sky was huge and painted and low like an expensive crystal bowl hanging just over the tops of the trees. The Aegean was a deep, moody color. Wine-dark sea, indeed. The shrubbery was greener and spikier and had a lot less of the dry twigs and stickers of the Hollywood Hills I’d hiked when I was younger.

  Aráchnos was almost two islands, a dumbbell shape connected by a stretch of low ground almost narrow enough to be an isthmus. I’d grounded on one side of it. There was a low building with signs of construction on the other side. And sounds of construction. Someone was chipping or hammering at something that sounded both heavy and fragile.

  I trudged up the sand. Pressed close to the shrubbery line, using the small cover it gave me to get a little closer. Looks like someone was either building or expanding a boathouse. They had a nice dock already. Lots of signs of construction, the most obvious being an excavator on tracks, shovel blade at one end and bucket on the other.

  And a guy breaking rocks. There was rubble around him. He was working slowly, maybe because of the huge hammer he was using. Actually, he wasn’t such a slouch himself. The guy had to be well over six feet tall, and I wasn’t going to rule out seven. Seriously, he was huge. A giant in truth. He belonged on a frieze.

  He was dressed in worn workman’s clothes and a peasant cap and he placed another stone on the slab in front of him and reluctantly raised the sledgehammer up and back over his head.

  Not a stone.

  A sherd. He was methodically smashing materials from the site.

  I broke into a dead-heat run. Crossed the last gap in a flying tackle just as he started to bring the hammer down.

  He went over just the way a California Redwood would go over if I was stupid enough to tackle one. I cried out. But he still staggered. And dropped the hammer, which had to be a step in the right direction.

  He was even bigger up close. “You have got to be kidding me,” I muttered. I felt as puny as a Lapith in front of a charging centaur. Enceladus leaned over and one huge hand grabbed for my new jacket.

  I rolled for my life. Gymnastics. Next life, I was going to study gymnastics, not how to dance in the kick line in a high school production of Chicago. I rolled over and up, with a split-leg move that looked like something out of a martial arts movie. If your standard for martial arts movies was really, really low.

  Dropped my hands on the ground and shot out a mule kick that landed right on one of his meaty calves. Encie frowned.

  Oh, not good, not good. He leaned over and gave me a slap like swatting a dog and I yelped and went ass-over-chin across the cleared dirt.

  The pulse was pounding again in my ears as I pushed myself upright. Encie was heading towards me. In a corner of my mind I was noting excavated dirt, wooden forms, bag after bag of cement and an incredibly dusty mixer. They were going to pour a new foundation as soon as they could manage, and if it wasn’t right on top of my archaeological site, I’d hand in my fedora. Boathouse. That must have been what started the whole thing, digging foundations for that.

  My back hit a low wall I really should have known was there. Encie lumbered up to me, arms reaching. I pounded on his exposed stomach, vicious six-inch jabs that did damn all.

  He did have the grace to look down at what I was doing, and that gave me just the inch I needed to wriggle out of the way. One hand clipped my shoulder as I went.

  Oh, that hurt. I bobbed and weaved, trying to track him as he lumbered after me. I felt like poor Hector, being chased around the walls of Troy by the Ancient World’s most perfect killing machine. But to be fair to Achilles, he was in the grip of his aristeia at the time.

  My boots were kicking up dust from the work site. The sweat was gathering under the hat band again. If those hands closed on me I was out of luck. I’d given up on trying to hit him. The best I might do is make him mad, and the only reason I wasn’t a heap of broken bones already is my Greek buddy was as reluctant to seriously hurt me as he was to go back to breaking pots.

  It wouldn’t last. I wasn’t buying time. It wasn’t even lease-to-own. I didn’t have any cavalry to come over the hill. Nobody was coming for me. Yes, he was. He had to be.

  That meant I had no time at all.

  I wasn’t a fighter. When I went and created an archaeologist-adventurer, I’d meant for her to be clever. Well, I needed something clever now. Something damned clever.

  He was closing in again. The heat was getting to him, too. He was hot and getting frustrated and the next time he got within arms reach he wasn’t going to be quite as gentle. And…there. Those pipes. His eye was on me, and he’d gotten used to my zig-zags as I tried to keep him from reaching me. That meant I might be able to lead him.

  “I can do this,” I said under my breath.

  If I got out of this, I was going to come up with a better catchphrase.

  I cut left. Let him close just that one inch more, testing the grip of my boots on the loose dirt. Then right. Too close! He wasn’t an idiot, and fatigue and the remnants of sea legs had thrown me off. His hand caught my hat and clouted it off my head. I felt a new ringing in my head and my vision clouded at just that wrong moment.

  Jumped anyhow. Leap of faith.

  I made it across the pipes. Turned, stumbling, as Encie realized what I’d done and tried to turn but his foot landed on something that rolled and he went over on his back.

  I was still backing away. Serves me right that I fell, too. But I was a lot lighter and I was back on my feet while he was still trying to recover his breath.

  I’d tripped on the sledgehammer. I picked it up off the ground. A new strength was roaring through me, a rising crest with a bright foam of white-hot anger. I plucked up the sledgehammer as if it was nothing and crossed the loose pipes that had tripped up the giant with the grace of a ninja.

  I raised the sledgehammer high. I was so damned tired of being hounded, chased, harassed, poisoned, bombed, hit. It was time I started hitting back. Starting with Enceladus here.

  I hesitated.

  “No.”

  I said it again, louder. “No!”

  This wasn’t me. The poor man was lying quietly, watching me, waiting for the blow.

  “The hell with that!” I twisted my hips and twirled. Dancer, you know. One step, two, spinning in place, the sledgehammer dragging me around until I released it with a throw good enough for the Glasgow games. Or wherever it was they threw giant hammers. It soared across the construction site and slammed into the half-finished boathouse with a most satisfactory smack.

  I dropped my hands and stood there breathing hard, pushing down the killing rage.

  The first bullet missed.

  I was already exhausted. I sprinted anyhow, for the decorative wall I’d seen earlier. Slid in place behind it as the rifle cracked out again with a sound like the world’s angriest slap-stick.

  Outis had a bolt-action rifle. My mind wandered briefly to all the wars of resistance Greece had suffered through, from Ottoman occupation through German. And, from what little I’d gathered, more than a few internal rebellions. There were probably enough guns tucked away in closets to re-arm every gang in LA.

  “You can’t do this!” I shouted over the wall at him. “It’s over.”

  Another shot. He wasn’t a great shot. He didn’t need to be. I had only the one wall for cover and all he needed to do is keep me pinned down while he strolled around to the other side. I really, really wasn’t looking forward to finding out what getting shot felt like. I really, really didn’t want to die. Not now that I had finally figured out what was going on. That was the worst part of dying. You never got to find out how the story ended.
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  Focus!

  What I’d thought about on the water. About heroes. What a crazy quilt I’d woven just from the fact that the guy was hard to pick out of a crowd. Was he really the ultimate outsider I’d been thinking? Was he really so detached from humanity that he couldn’t tell the difference? If everyone was unreal to him already, what did that make a fictional hero?

  No more time. If I did nothing, he’d be in position for a clear shot in a few moments.

  I stood up.

  He snapped a hasty shot and it missed. It took everything I had not to flinch.

  “My name is Athena Fox,” I said. “I am an archaeologist. I have been working with the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and this is over. Now put down your weapon.”

  Outis worked the bolt and chambered a fresh round.

  I smiled.

  “You don’t want to do that,” I said. Confidently.

  I forced the tension from my face and put every bit of acting ability I had into being confident and firm and gods-damned unstoppable. Into being a hero.

  An hour passed. A second.

  I saw his hand spasm. I heard the slight click.

  He cursed and wrenched out the empty magazine and that’s when the horse came over the hill.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  SHE RODE UP in a spray of sand and dust with the sun in her hair and the Aegean at her back. The horse was magnificent. She was stunning and regal. Tall and narrow with pale blond hair and chiseled features. A model’s haughty smile. Impressive and spectacular and, yeah, a little terrifying. This was power, raw power.

  “Mistress,” Outis bowed his head. It was the first and only word I’d ever heard from him.

  I picked up my hat. Dusted it off on my new pants and put it back on my head. “You’d be Diana,” I said.