by Glyn Iliffe
‘You are a proud man, that much is evident. How could any son of Zeus be otherwise? But after your crime, Zeus agreed to let Hera choose your path to absolution. She is an astute goddess, though, and a most terrible enemy! She sees your pride, Heracles – the pride that once attracted her to your father – and knows how to stop you from ever being free of what you did.’
He felt the twitching of his temper. The Pythoness – or the god that had possessed her – was goading him, revelling in his torment.
‘Then tell me what I must do. What are these tasks? Who will decide them?’
She leaned forward, resting her bony hands on her knees as she examined him with her snake-like eyes.
‘What are the tasks? I don’t know. Who will decide them? Your new master, of course. You are to become a slave until the last task is completed.’
‘A slave!’ Heracles exclaimed. ‘But I have never called any man Master ! I never will.’
‘As I said, Hera is astute. But you will have to accept the yoke of slavery if you want to be free of your crime.’
‘Free? And how will slavery cleanse my conscience?’
‘By revelation! The labours given you will be like the layers of an onion. If you succeed in peeling them back, you will eventually find the truth. And the truth will set you free.’
He glanced at Elatos, who stared back at him impassively.
‘Then I will do it. What choice do I have? I will become a slave and complete these impossible tasks. And then I will be free. But you have yet to tell me one thing.’
She sat up and her forked tongue slithered from her mouth, flickering for a moment in the fume-filled air.
‘The name of your new master,’ she said, anticipating his question. ‘You will not like it. It may be too much for you.’
‘Nothing is too much for me.’
‘Not even the man whom Hera pulled prematurely from his mother’s womb, a short while before you were born? The man she made the oldest of all the grandchildren of Perseus, so that he would claim the thrones of Tiryns and Mycenae that Zeus had set aside for you?’
Heracles’s eyes narrowed and his lips curled back into a sneer.
‘Eurystheus!’
‘King Eurystheus,’ the Pythoness corrected him. ‘Your cousin, and soon to become your master.’
There had been hatred between the families of Heracles and Eurystheus since before the cousins had been born. When Heracles’s stepfather, Amphitryon, had accidentally killed his own father-in-law, King Electryon, Electryon’s brother had him exiled from the kingdoms of Tiryns and Mycenae. This brother – Sthenelus – had then claimed the twin thrones for himself; and now his son, Eurystheus, had inherited the crown. And from everything Heracles had heard, Eurystheus was a simpering, foppish fool.
He clenched his fists, asking himself if there was not some alternative. His dead mother would have hated him for becoming a bondsman to the son of her detested uncle. She would have expected him to refuse. But then she would have despised him more for the atrocity he had committed. Everyone despised him for that.
‘I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘I’ll go to Tiryns, become Eurystheus’s slave and perform the tasks he sets for me. Then I will be free.’
‘More than free,’ said the Pythoness. ‘When Zeus agreed to let Hera choose your punishment, he granted himself the choice of your prize.’
‘Prize. I don’t care for any prize. All I want is to be released from this nightmare.’
‘The prize he has chosen is to make you like himself. To make you immortal.’
‘Immortal? No man can live forever, except through his children – and my children are dead.’
‘And yet there are other ways for a man to become immortal,’ she replied.
She looked him in the eye, then her chin dropped onto her chest and her body flopped forward. Elatos rushed to her and slowly lifted her from the tripod.
‘That’s enough now,’ he said. ‘You’ve exhausted her. Let me put her to bed, then I will lead you back to the upper temple.’
‘I’ll find it myself,’ Heracles answered, plucking one of the torches from its bracket.
‘But Python! The beast can kill a man with a single strike of its head.’
‘That would be too much of a mercy, my friend,’ Heracles replied. ‘The gods would rather keep me as their plaything.’
He turned and held the torch towards the low tunnel that led to the upper cavern.
‘Wait!’
He looked back to see the priestess staring at him. Her eyes were milky blue again, and the power of the goddess had left her.
‘What was your crime?’ she asked, in her childlike voice.
‘My crime?’ he said. ‘My crime was that I murdered my own children.’
Chapter Three
The Skull on the Hill
Megara stooped and placed several oatcakes, wrapped in muslin, in a small basket at the entrance to the temple. She pushed aside the curtain – a patterned blanket – and entered the gloomy interior. Two small oil lamps burned at the corners of a knee-high dais, filling the air with their fumes. A wooden figurine stood at the centre of the platform, tall and wide-hipped, with one arm crossed beneath its bare breasts. The other was at its side, clutching a bow. The face of the statue was round and flat with a long thin nose, its curious features made even stranger by the flickering light from the lamps. It had once been painted in bright colours, but these had dulled over time and were difficult to discern in the darkness. Strings of fresh flowers lay coiled at its feet.
Megara was dressed in black, with her dark hair pinned up behind her head to reveal her pale, striking face. Her lips were full, her jawline soft and rounded, and her nose small with slightly flared nostrils; a plain enough face, were it not for her large blue eyes, naturally outlined by long black lashes and surmounted by stern brows. She wore an inquisitive, slightly surprised look that made her seem vulnerable; and yet her eyes brimmed with an intelligence that was as sharp as a drawn sword. She glanced around the shadowy temple, saw it was empty, and knelt before the dais.
‘Lady Artemis,’ she began, but the words were quickly choked by tears.
She stared at the feet of the statue, aware of the cold, hard floor beneath her knees and the terrible emotions that made every muscle in her chest stiff with tension. Then she lowered her head into her hands and closed her eyes, squeezing out the tears so they fell in large droplets. For a brief and soothing moment the world was blocked out, lost in shadow. Then her mind’s eye was filled with a vision of three fires blazing in the darkness. She tried to fight off the memory, but her resistance was weak. If anything, the vision grew stronger and clearer, demanding that she face up to what had happened in her life. Through closed eyes she saw the three small pyres, fanned by a west wind that sent orange sparks spiralling up into the night air. She remembered the stench of burning flesh, and the horror of the flames licking at the black shapes as they lay still on their beds of pine logs. The awful warmth on her skin, and the knowledge it was fuelled by the bodies of her own children. It was all she remembered of the funeral before she passed out, but it was enough. Enough to haunt her for the rest of her life.
‘Lady Artemis, help me find peace. I can’t take this any more. Why didn’t you let him kill me too? Why couldn’t I have died with my babies, rather than being left here on my own, living this nightmare over and over again?’
She just wanted the grief to end and the pain to be gone. But she knew it would never end. No one would take it from her. Not even the gods could do that. So she would have to endure it. She had to be strong if she was to go on. She had faced hardships before. None as difficult as this. Nothing powerful enough to rend mind from soul, like the loss of her family. But she had come through them, and she would come through this too.
‘Be strong,’ she told herself.
She lifted her face to the effigy of Artemis, her eyes damp with tears and her breath shaky. She shut her eyes again and tried to remember her child
ren as they had been in life, so full of joy and energy. She fought off the indelible image of their funeral and bent her mind towards happier memories. She glimpsed an image of them running through a field of tall crops, taller even than Megara. For a moment it was all she could remember, but she clung on to it, dug deeper until she recalled the brightness of the sunshine and the heat of it on her bare arms; the laughter of the boys and the sight of two butterflies chasing each other across the heads of the corn. She smiled, her heart aching for the happiness of that moment, wanting to be there now and be able to gather her children up into her arms again.
And then she remembered why they had been laughing; saw him chasing them through the crops on either side of the track, roaring like a lion and making them squeal with delight and terror. Heracles. How he had loved them! And how they had loved him! There was not a child in Thebes who did not adore him – following him in troops through the market place, just waiting for the moment when he would turn and chase them, tickling whoever he caught.
And how she had loved him. At first she had resented being given to him by her father, a mere prize for freeing Thebes from the domination of King Erginus. But that first night he had won her over. She had had lovers before, two of them – both secret, terrified, fumbling affairs, with men whose lust for her was marred by their terror of what her father, King Creon, would do to them if they were discovered. But Heracles had been different. She knew he had slept with many women before. All Greece knew that. And yet he had made her feel that she was the only one that mattered. Somehow he always made her feel that way. The touch of those hands – hands that had killed so many warriors in battle, and which contained such terrifying strength – was both gentle and exhilarating. When he picked her up and carried her to their bed, she had never felt so safe, or so wanted.
Yes, he had won her over, that first night and every moment they had shared since. She remembered watching him rebuild the home her father had given them – a modest house on the hills overlooking Thebes (keeping Heracles safely outside of the city walls, she thought to herself), with a few rooms and plenty of land to grow vines and keep livestock. Heracles had transformed it within weeks: adding new wings and a second floor, digging a well, clearing out rocks from the soil where he planted their vineyard and using them to build pens for goats and pigs. And as he worked in the heat of the day, his half-naked body gleaming with sweat, she and her maids had sat in the shade of an olive grove weaving tapestries and curtains.
It had only been their home for a few months before Therimachus had arrived. He had been such a difficult baby, sleeping all day and crying most of the night. But Heracles had shown nothing but patience and love for his firstborn. Where most men Megara knew would have left the care of their infant sons to the womenfolk – only taking proper notice of them when they were old enough to be taken on hunts or start learning the skills needed to become a man – he had never been so happy as when he was in the presence of little Theri. He had been no different with their other children, Creontiades and Deicoon. His love for them seemed limitless, making what he had done to them all the more incomprehensible.
She opened her eyes to the gloom of the temple. She could still sense the strong sunlight outside and smell the pine trees all around, but in here everything was darkness. Her heart was heavy in her chest, making every breath a struggle, every movement an unwelcome labour. For her grief was not only for her children. She had lost her husband too. She wanted to hate him for what he had done, but she could not. She loved him too much, even now. And it hurt. She wanted her feelings to fade quickly, giving her space to deal with the deaths of her children. But she could not separate them. They had been a family. Almost every memory she had of her babies included Heracles. To scorch him out of those memories would be to lose something of her boys, too, and she could not bear to lose even the slightest piece of what remained of them.
So she had to understand. What had changed an adoring father into a murderer? Why had the husband who loved her so much tried to kill her? Drunkenness? Madness – a madness that had possessed him for a single night and left behind no memory? Were such things possible? Her father’s priests had blamed Heracles’s insanity on the gods, but too many people blamed these things on the gods! She had never been able to understand how a person could accept tragedy with a fatalistic shrug and say it was divine will. A herdsman who has lost half his flock to disease tells himself it was the arrows of Apollo and is content. A ship’s captain loses his ship in a storm and says it was the whim of Poseidon, to whom he has been sacrificing all his life.
But she would not accept that Heracles did what he did because the gods willed it upon him. If she was ever to be reconciled to the destruction of her family – if she was to be able to live her life again – she had to know why her husband, in a single night, had been transformed from the father and protector of her children, to their murderer.
‘Megara?’
Startled from her thoughts, she stood quickly and brushed away her tears with the heels of her hands. Looking down at herself, she patted the dust from her knees – so obvious on her black dress – and instinctively touched her hair.
‘Megara? Are you in there?’
It was Iolaus. She relaxed a little at the sound of his voice, and smiled to herself.
‘Yes, Iolaus. Give me a moment.’
She put her fingers into the corners of her eyes, drying away the last of the dampness, then drew her cloak tighter around her shoulders and pushed the curtain aside. The antechamber beyond was small, but brilliantly lit by the sunlight pouring in through the open door. She stepped out into the woodland clearing and was forced to shield her eyes from the golden glow. Iolaus stood at the centre of the clearing, a young, well-dressed man with a light beard and handsome features. He looked little like his uncle, but as she glanced at him she was nevertheless reminded of Heracles. The faint resemblance to her husband both thrilled and shocked her, and she was forced to conceal her emotions behind a confused smile. His concerned expression was transformed by a smile of his own.
‘How did you find me?’
‘I…’ he began, and his smile faded.
‘You followed me? You followed me here, didn’t you?’
His guilt was written all over his face, but she was not angry. She could never be angry around Iolaus.
‘I followed you,’ he admitted. ‘I was worried for you. I am worried for you.’
‘Don’t be.’ She put her arms around him and rested her head on his shoulder. ‘I won’t kill myself. I’m not the type. I’ve chosen the difficult path through this, and I’ll stick to it.’
Iolaus was the other victim of Heracles’s crime. He loved his uncle like a father, idolizing him in a way he never could his own father – the stiff and scholarly Iphicles. Heracles had chosen him as his squire, and Iolaus – always hankering after glory – had served him with loyalty. So after Heracles’s madness, he had felt lost; like Megara, he was unable to comprehend what had happened. She remembered how he had saved Heracles from taking his own life the morning after the murders, when the realization of what he had done was at its most raw and painful, and how he had taken his uncle’s weapons from him – even his great bow – and hidden them where he could not turn them on himself again. But he had not been able to forgive him. Youthful adulation rarely survived such falls from grace.
When Heracles had been sent into exile by Creon, and had gone to seek purification from his friend, King Thespius, Iolaus had not followed him as she had expected. Rather, he had made it his duty to keep an eye on her.
‘I’m glad,’ he said, stepping back awkwardly from her embrace and looking at the grass. ‘That gives me some peace. Can I walk you back to the palace?’
She nodded, and hooked her arm through his. The air of the wood was warm and filled with the smell of late blossoms as they walked. With the birds singing in the foliage above their heads she could almost see through her grief, though the recognition of a moment’s contentme
nt brought it back to her again, with the added bitterness of guilt at having – briefly – put aside the deaths of her children. She felt her heart race and her breathing judder, and clutched tightly at Iolaus’s arm. He glanced at her in surprise, then looked ahead again.
The path through the trees began to descend. The steps that had been cut into the hillside were worn and crumbling in places, but with his arm for support they took the slope steadily and soon found themselves beside a woodland stream. It gurgled over large boulders, rushing ever downwards as they followed its course past tumbling falls and alongside deep pools, where the water gathered for the next descent. Large black fish were visible beneath the surface.
Then, through a clearing in the trees, she glimpsed the walls of Thebes in the valley below. Thanks to her husband, the city no longer paid tribute to Orchomenus and was prospering. The battlements had been repaired, the towers rebuilt and new gates made to replace the ones that King Erginus had burned down. Armed guards patrolled the walls again. Most hopeful of all was the sound of voices – merchants shouting out their wares, the calls and laughter of children, even the bleating of sheep and goats – that floated up to them on the breeze. With it came the smell of woodsmoke, cooked meat and fresh bread.
But if Thebes had found its beating heart again, there was another place that had lost the happiness it had once enjoyed. She looked past the city to the wooded slopes on the western hills. The home she had shared with Heracles gleamed like a skull in the sunlight, its walls bleached white and its windows empty and lifeless. Over two weeks had passed since that terrible morning, when she had woken to find her world in ruins about her. She had not crossed the threshold of her home since.
Iolaus followed the direction of her gaze.
‘Will you ever go back there?’ he asked.
She shook her head.
‘I can’t. I know what I’ll see.’
‘It can be cleaned,’ he said. ‘The broken furniture removed, the…’
He faltered.