In the Shadow of Heroes

by Nicholas Bowling

  While he was lost in his thoughts he wasn’t watching where he was putting his feet, and abruptly tripped over a tree stump. He looked up from where he lay prone in the soil and saw several more ahead, misshapen and bulbous.

  ‘We must be close,’ said Tog from up front. ‘The druids put these here.’

  Cadmus squinted in the gloom. Only when he got to his feet and put a hand on one of them did he discover what they really were. He jerked back like he’d stuck his hand in a fire.

  They were skulls. Human skulls, stacked on top of each other and pierced through with a stake. There were more of them, leading in a line towards the centre of the grove. When he looked up he saw bones suspended from the boughs of the oak trees, and small human figures made from twigs and grass hung alongside them.

  More dark shapes loomed beyond the woods, monumental things with corners and hard edges. They came to a clearing in the trees and found stones, at least three times as tall as Cadmus was, carved into rectangular slabs and arranged in a circle. On top of these, more slabs had been laid horizontally, and there were more skulls and bones tucked into alcoves in the rock. In the centre of the circle was some form of altar, flat and circular like a millstone. Here was one druid shrine, it seemed, that the Romans hadn’t destroyed.

  It was unnaturally quiet in the centre. The ashes on the altar were cold and damp.

  On the other side of the clearing, beyond one of the stone arches, was a flight of shallow, uneven steps leading to a narrow crevasse. At the bottom was the mouth of a cave, a vertical slash like a wound in the rocks. Cadmus went to the top of the steps and stared into the chasm. The sun was beneath the sea now, and the druid shrine was cloaked in purple twilight. The cave was darker still. A deep, living blackness.

  ‘This must be it.’

  ‘Let me go first,’ said Tog.

  ‘No,’ Cadmus said, more firmly than he had been expecting. ‘She said I had to go alone. I’m not putting you in any more danger. I’ll need a lookout anyway.’

  Tog made a face that didn’t fill him with confidence. He went to one of the strange hanging totems, yanked one of the bones free and wrapped it in some material torn from his cloak. Then he collected some tinder and returned to the mouth of the cave.

  ‘Do you remember what my master looks like?’ he said to Tog.

  ‘From the dinner? I think so. Old. No hair.’

  ‘That’s close enough,’ said Cadmus with a sad smile.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘If things go wrong and I don’t come back, go and find him. I want him to know what happened.’

  Tog nodded.

  ‘Thank you.’ He looked into the abyss. ‘Audentis fortuna iuvat,’ he muttered, and before Tog could ask what he meant, he disappeared under the earth.

  XXVI

  Stepping into the cave felt like sinking to the bottom of a deep, cold lake.

  Once inside, Cadmus set about lighting a small fire with flints, as Tog had shown him. From this he lit the material he had wrapped around the end of the bone to make a torch. Its light licked feebly over the walls of the cave. The jagged and broken shapes of the rock passed just over his head, glistening with moisture, and his breath echoed back at him from the walls. Even if Tog had been able to come with him, Cadmus thought, there was a good chance she wouldn’t have fitted through this narrow fissure in the earth.

  Go quickly. Go lightly. Go alone.

  All the things that Eriopis had said swarmed in the darkness with him. What if she was right, and Fate had always been pulling him towards this point, to this corner of the earth, to this dark, oppressive tomb? What if his missing sandal really had marked him out as the inheritor of the fleece? What if he’d had no choice over anything in his life, since the day he was abandoned by his parents? That was a bleak thought.

  The tunnel opened up. The shapes of the rocks changed. They no longer looked natural and chaotic, but carved and ordered. Cadmus caught a glimpse of four huge, horned heads, grotesque in the firelight. He cried out, dropping the torch and cowering in the wet sand.

  A hero indeed.

  When he heard nothing but the trickle of moisture from the rocks and the hiss of the flames on the floor, he retrieved the torch and held it up to what he had seen.

  They were carved from the cave wall, four colossal bulls, eyes rolling and mouths gaping in terror and exhaustion. They towered above him, so tall that Cadmus could only reach up to touch their open mouths when he was on tiptoes. When he did, something black came off on his fingers. They were coated in soot.

  In the story of the Argonauts, Jason’s first challenge had been to master King Aeëtes’s fire-breathing cattle and use them to plough one of his fields. Here they were again, carved with exquisite menace into the wall of the chamber. It seemed fire had passed from the statues’ lips at some point, but their throats had long since gone cold. He looked around the cave to see if there was some sort of trigger he had missed. The floor was just sand, with a few uneven rocks making a path towards another cleft in the cave wall. Nothing to trip on, nothing concealed under the earth. A strange trial, if that was what it was. Or perhaps it was simply so old that it no longer worked.

  Eager to escape from under the bulls’ wild eyes, he picked his way over the path on tiptoes and reached the entrance to the next passageway. Nothing happened. That didn’t make him feel any better. He wanted something to happen. His body was as tense as a primed catapult.

  He felt his way along the damp rocks and into the next chamber. At first he thought it was empty, but as he came forward the flames of the torch danced off something laid out in rows on the floor. The sight was somehow more unsettling than the monstrous statues of the last chamber. Hundreds of helmets, half-buried in the sand. Their plumes had mostly rotted, and the bronze was patched with dull green, but they filled the entire chamber from one wall to the other.

  Cadmus tentatively nudged one of them with his foot. There was a head beneath it. The helmet belonged to a man, buried standing upright, as far as his empty eye sockets. When he looked closer, Cadmus saw that next to each head was the very tip of a spear, protruding from the earth.

  A phalanx of soldiers, born from the earth. In the story, Jason had defeated these men by throwing a rock among them and causing such confusion that they turned upon themselves. But the warriors in front of Cadmus were dead and buried and perfectly still. Again he scanned the cave for something he hadn’t seen, but there was no clue as to the dead men’s purpose.

  Ahead the walls narrowed. A cold, sour-smelling draught passed from one end of the cave, whispering of the secrets yet to be found. He moved carefully among the helmets and the spearheads and squeezed through the fissure into the third chamber.

  This was where the path ended. It was smaller than the previous two rooms. In the centre was a deep stone sarcophagus, covered with intricately engraved symbols and lines of text that seemed to be some ancient, corrupted form of Doric Greek. Hanging above it, only visible when he brought the torch into the middle of the chamber, was a huge serpentine head, fangs bared, eyes shining with something that seemed more alive than stone or marble.

  Cadmus had seen pictures of Jason’s final trial, reproduced on urns and frescoes. He could clearly remember the image of a man’s torso hanging limply from the snake’s mouth while Athena looked on. The snake here was easily large enough to swallow a man.

  He came around the side of the coffin, one eye on the gaping maw above him, and tried to read the inscriptions carved into the stone. He set the torch in the earth and got down on his hands and knees. Some of the words were indecipherable, but he understood enough.

  It was the story of Medea’s life, but it bore little resemblance to the myths he had learnt growing up. He scanned over the lines and matched the words he recognized with the pictures above. Here she was, spurned by Jason and hated by his people. Here she was, reclaiming her ‘dowry’ after Jason’s betrayal, and taking the Golden Fleece for her own. Here she was, not murdering her children, but
escaping with them to Athens. The final piece of the inscription told of how she had exiled herself to the edge of the world, and how the Golden Fleece ‘resided for ever with her remains’.

  He lingered on that last word for a moment, then stood up and looked over the huge stone box. If her remains were inside, the fleece would be with them.

  He felt for the edges of the sarcophagus’s lid, jammed his fingers underneath, and pulled. It was unspeakably heavy. He strained until his fingertips were white and raw, but it wouldn’t move.

  Just as he collapsed from the effort, there was a noise from one of the other chambers. A voice, perhaps, but so distant and distorted he couldn’t tell if it was man or woman or animal. Had Tog followed him inside? Or Orthus? Perhaps it was his own voice, echoing back at him? He sat on the damp ground and listened, heart trembling with more than just exhaustion.

  The cave was silent again.

  Cadmus got to his feet and set to his task once more. The sooner he got the sarcophagus open, the sooner he could escape this grim underworld. He gritted his teeth and hauled with all of his bodyweight, but the thick stone lid must have been at least two or three times as heavy as him. He strained until he was deafened by the blood in his ears. Then, just as his limbs felt ready to burst, it moved.

  Slowly, bit by grinding bit, he shifted the slab to one side. It teetered on the edge for a moment and fell to the earth with a thud. The sarcophagus exhaled. A cloud arose from inside, thick with dust and incense. There was no smell of rot. It was the smell of the temple, of the shrine, not of the grave.

  He peered into its depths.

  The body that lay before him seemed to be of a woman who had died only a few hours earlier. In fact, it hardly looked like she had died at all. Her skin was dove-white, and just as soft, plump, even; by contrast, her hair was black as Hades, thick and unbound. The resemblance to Eriopis was easy to see. Even her robes looked similar, shrouded as she was in layers of vivid crimson, and she wore the same assortment of golden pendants and bracelets.

  It was true. All of it.

  As he stared, he was drawn to Medea’s eyes. They were wide open. In the centre of the left eye there seemed to be a circle of amber, or gold, or newly beaten bronze. It shone with a light of its own. His thoughts jarred. He had seen those eyes a thousand times. They were his own.

  Time seemed to stop.Various half-conceived notions came together, theories formed and evaporated. He was brought back to himself by another echo from the chamber behind him. A voice, he was sure of it. Footsteps too.

  Then there was a whoosh that sounded like the squalls he had endured on the Argo. Shrieks and cries. A crackling like a bonfire catching light. What had happened? What if he was trapped?

  Cadmus had forgotten why he had come to the grave in the first place. The Golden Fleece. It was nowhere to be seen. He ran his hands along the inside of the sarcophagus. Nothing. He tried, gingerly, to feel beneath Medea’s body, but at the slightest touch her perfectly preserved form collapsed into dust and only her faded robes and tarnished jewellery remained in the bottom of the casket. It was as though she had never been there at all.

  The voices grew louder. They were in the next chamber along now. There was another unexpected sound – the grind of metal on rusted metal, followed by a crash of sand, like a wave hitting the shore. What was happening back there?

  There was nowhere for Cadmus to go. The walls of the cave were completely smooth, no nooks or crannies to hide in. Featureless, with the exception of the stone snake and its giant fanged head.

  The footsteps came closer. Twenty or more, he estimated.

  Cadmus did the only thing he could. He extinguished his torch and climbed up on to the edge of the sarcophagus. From there he could just reach the neck of the snake, protruding like a tree trunk from the rocks. He swung himself up on to its back, then shimmied up to its head. There he waited, listening to his heartbeat, trying not to cough.

  Torchlight licked over the cave walls, followed by shadows of men. He could hear their breath. There was a pained wheezing from one of the intruders, a gurgling of fluid-filled lungs. Erratic, shuffling steps. Cadmus knew who it was even before his bent silhouette emerged from the passageway.

  Polydamas paused on the threshold of the chamber and leant heavily on his stick. Then he came forward a single step, and did the same. And again, and again. The soothsayer wasn’t just tired, Cadmus thought. He was probing the ground for something.

  After half a dozen paces, the stick knocked against something hard. Polydamas hissed and pushed down with all his weight. There was a dull clunk, like someone hitting two stones together.

  Go quickly. Go lightly. Go alone.

  Cadmus suddenly realized how he had passed through the trials of the tomb unscathed. There were traps set into the floor, and he was simply too light to set them off. A grown man would have triggered them. So would Tog. So would an average-sized boy of his age. Only the puniest of heroes could have made it through each chamber.

  He was still grinning in the darkness when this last trap began to operate. A few moments after Polydamas had pressed on the stone, the snake’s head began to shudder. Behind him, where the statue met the cave wall, the rock cracked and the statue began to sway like a felled tree. Cadmus’s stomach flew up into his ribs as he tumbled down from his perch, clinging to the stone head. The huge fangs struck the ground right where Polydamas had pressed with his stick, sending up a cloud of dust on either side. The rest of the snake’s body shattered and filled Medea’s open sarcophagus with rubble.

  Cadmus rolled forward and found himself at the feet of Polydamas. He looked up, spitting dirt. For the first time, he could see under the soothsayer’s veil. The man’s head looked like a walnut, or a swelling fungus, his wrinkles so deep and thick they almost covered his eyes completely.

  The ancient creature smiled slowly. Cadmus thought he could hear the skin around his mouth creaking. Then he drew his familiar rattling breath, and extended his arm as though to help Cadmus up from the floor.

  Cadmus ran, and collided head first with a vast, immovable body. One of the heroidai – not the real Sons of the Heroes, but Nero’s imitations in their brightly coloured masks and armour. A thick pair of arms grasped him around the waist, and suddenly he was being carried back out of the cave, kicking and screaming like a wayward child.

  XXVII

  As he was dragged back to the world above, Cadmus passed through the other two chambers and saw that their traps had also been set off. In the second, the dead men had erupted out of the ground and now stood to attention in rows, weapons pointing at the ceiling. If he had been a little heavier, the rusted spearheads would have passed straight through him. The first chamber was now unbearably hot, and two of Nero’s guards had removed their masks and were tending to burns. The bulls, it seemed, still worked perfectly.

  The cool night air was a relief when they emerged from the mouth of the cave. The druids’ shrine looked very different now. A detachment of Roman legionaries, perhaps as many as fifty, were standing in a semicircle around the altar. They were plainly ill at ease to be in such an unholy place. Some moved their lips in silent prayer.

  There was no Tog. No Tullus either.

  The giant pushed Cadmus towards a pair of the soldiers.

  ‘Is this him?’ one of them said. ‘I thought we were here to butcher a few barbarians.’

  The giant stared at him.

  ‘Throw him in prison with the other one,’ he said from behind his mask. ‘The emperor wants him.’

  For a moment it looked like the legionaries might disobey him, or at least offer a retort. But they just sighed, bound Cadmus’s hands, and led him back through the grove. As they went, the trees seemed to lurch and writhe in the light of their torches.

  ‘Since when do we take orders from gladiators?’ one of them grumbled.

  ‘Since now,’ said the other. ‘Don’t complain, at least we’re out of that place. Bloody horrible. Don’t want to know what sorts
of things happen in there, but I can guess.’

  ‘Who’s the runt, then?’

  ‘Search me.’

  ‘We haven’t come all this way for him, have we?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Who are you, runt?’ said the first one.

  Cadmus played dumb.

  ‘Oi! Who are you? What were you doing in that cave?’

  ‘He’s British, you idiot, he doesn’t understand you.’

  ‘Well, I wish someone would tell me what we’re doing here. I’m frozen stiff. I need a proper meal. Biscuits for breakfast, biscuits for dinner. Last time I had a proper cup of wine we were in Rome.’

  ‘You had wine last night.’

  ‘I said proper wine. Italian stuff. Falernian.’

  ‘As if you can afford Falernian.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  And so it went on. It appeared the emperor had kept them all in the dark about their purpose in Mona. If he wasn’t careful, he’d have a mutiny on his hands.

  They led him through the camp, still arguing, to the same wooden cage in which Eriopis had been imprisoned. As they opened the door and threw him inside, he caught a glimpse of Orthus skulking around the other wagons. There was still no sign of Tog. Perhaps she had escaped. Perhaps something much, much worse had happened.

  Eriopis sat upright, head thrown back as though sniffing the air. Cadmus watched her closely for a moment. She looked identical to the body he had seen in the sarcophagus. The legionaries wandered back to their tents, still grumbling, and took the light of their torches with them.

  The priestess reached out and gently clasped his head in the darkness, as she had when they first met.

  ‘Did you find the tomb?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you saw her?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘And the Golden Fleece?’