I told her of the shrine and the rabbit.
“Clever,” she said. “Allowing my son to think he stole you away without notice. Did you know a party from Sparta arrived in Athens this morning?”
My heart leapt; she saw it, and held up her hands to calm me. “No,” she said. “You are still a prisoner, and will be for months, perhaps years. It will be politics first, followed by war. Tyndareus has wanted to put Athens in its place, and your abduction is the excuse he needs to do so.”
I said nothing for several minutes, as I finally felt hunger and thirst for the first time since my capture. I had allowed myself to eat only what I needed to keep from growing weak; now, I began to eat for pleasure.
“This bothers you?” Aethra asked, mistaking my silence for sadness. “That your father would use you?”
I glanced up from my plate. The surprise on my face must have been plain, as she tried to explain: “He has spread rumors of your beauty far and wide, to pull suitors towards Sparta.”
I was stunned. “My…my beauty? I am no beauty.”
“Truth means little in politics. How better to entice men than by offering them a beautiful princess? Also,” she added, “mark how Tyndareus has done nothing to quash this tale of Zeus as your true father. Such a story is a gift to him; your value exceeds that of your sister’s.”
This made sense: Clytemnestra’s face matched my own, but there were fewer offers for her.
“I am not beautiful,” I said. “Nor do I want to be.”
“Ah,” Aethra said. “That’s a mistake—every princess should want to be beautiful. Do you expect to be married to a Spartan prince?”
That made me laugh.
“Then you accept that you’ll be married to a king outside of Sparta?”
“Of course,” I replied. I had known since I was a crawling babe that my marriage would be a weapon in my country’s hands. As much as I might wish to stay at home, my leaving Sparta would strengthen it.
“Beauty improves your value. The more valuable you are, the better your father can use you when he decides who you should marry. He is fortunate, your father, that so many men want to wed the child of a god. I would fear doing so, myself.”
I remembered the long lists of suitors who had come to pledge for my hand, Theseus and Pirithous among them. Father had not said yes or no to any of them, claiming I was still too young to wed, and the offers of wealth and power had increased as they sought to change his mind.
Clytemnestra thought it hilarious that so many men wished to possess a girl because they thought her to be half a bird.
“Father would never permit my marriage to align Sparta with Athens,” I said, as I slowly came to understand how I had been used to bait my father’s trap. “He says they are a weak people, and he does not approve of Theseus on the throne.”
I saw it now, my father’s plan, and I felt pride in him.
Aethra nodded. “Your abduction was a challenge to Sparta’s honor, and one that could not go unpunished. Tyndareus will use it as reason to go to war with an old enemy. So now you are here,” she said, spreading her hands wide. “I hope that you will join me in making the best of a bad situation. I would dearly regret needing to keep you in chains for the length of your stay.”
“I promise you peace,” I said to her. “I only wish my father had told me I was a lure for your son—I might not have put out his teeth.”
That made Aethra laugh merrily. “A Spartan, come along quietly? Never. A wolf in a cage must be true to its nature, or all will know they have caught merely a dog.”
“Why do you tell me these things?” I asked the old woman. “In a war between Sparta and Athens, I would think you would side with Athens.”
“I would, and I will,” Aethra said. “But it is only fair to tell you how you have been used— girls who are born to kings are made to suffer for their fathers.”
She took a breath to steady herself. “Theseus thinks himself the child of a god,” she added. “Not the bastard son of a visiting king who my father sent to my bed when I was barely older than yourself.
“One day, Helen, when a princess is given to you for her own protection, I hope you will remember this, and that you will be kind.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Kos was…
Well, it’s no Athens.
It is, however, a damned pleasant vacation spot.
I was on a Mediterranean beach, wearing a string bikini and one of those ludicrous oversized floppy hats. My koala buddy was neck-deep in warm sand and digging ever lower as he made happy chortling noises, and Mike and I were pretending to ignore Atlas as he played in the nearby surf.
“That is just cruel,” I muttered, as I flipped a page of the book I wasn’t reading. “What’s he doing, anyhow?”
“He’s trying to get you to go swimming with him,” Mike replied.
“Married woman here, thank-yew-vaary-much.”
“I thought you were in medical school,” Mike said. “They haven’t covered the differences between swimming and sex yet?”
“You go frolic with him, then.”
“He’s too young,” Mike said. “I need a little seasoning on my bones.”
I grunted something about minimal age differences and terrible dick jokes, and yanked the brim of my hat down over my face.
I was thinking I’d nap, since sleep had gotten much easier. Napping meant I could expect to show up in my usual dreams of platypuses (platypuseses? platypi?) and roller-skating with my seventh-grade English teacher. Much, much more pleasant than riding shotgun on the life experiences of a long-dead princess.
I didn’t exactly miss Helen, but I was wondering why she had stopped checking in. Maybe she had shown me all she needed to, or maybe she didn’t like Kos. Or maybe… Hell, what did I know about anything that happened over twenty-five hundred years ago? What I did know was that we’d been here all of two days, and she hadn’t shown up once. That was okay, though: kid-Helen appeared to be in good hands when I left her. Evil Dude’s Surprisingly Nice Mom was one of those women in her early fifties who had her shit so tightly knit together that she could wear it as a sweater—
Um. Moving on from that analogy.
Let’s just say that I was sure that Surprisingly Nice Mom wouldn’t allow anything unsavory to happen to Helen on her watch, and that was a huge relief to me.
Strange, how Helen’s opinions didn’t mesh with my own. I saw Surprisingly Nice Mom as an energetic woman who was still in the prime of her life: Helen thought that Mom was barely a sneeze away from toppling into death.
But maybe that wasn’t cultural. Maybe that was just the normal opinion-colored lens of early adolescence. Riding along in Helen’s skull was bringing back my own memories of how I used to see the world, and yeah, there were some similarities that couldn’t be explained by anything other than pure dumb youth. At least Helen didn’t seem to be driven by the usual self-destructive reasoning which passed for teenage logic. Or maybe Spartan discipline trumped hormones…
Heh. Spartan bootcamp. There’s an idea for modern miscreant youth. Similar to military school, but with phalanx formations. They could show 300 as their recruitment video. Hell, I’d go to that camp!
I snuck another peek at Atlas. Waves were crashing around all him, the spray from the water cast rainbows around his body… It was ridiculous.
Speedy hurled sand in my face.
“Jesus!” I said, spitting. He hadn’t gotten any in my eyes, but he had nailed my mouth. “Speedy, what the hell?!”
“You were drooling,” he said. His ears were back. “Figured you’d want to save what little dignity you might have scraped together before his cousin gets here.”
“What?” I was busy licking my arm to get the sand off of my tongue, so I didn’t notice that Darling had arrived beside our beach chairs. Her shadow fell on me and I glanced up mid-lick.
The sun was behind her, so her face was lost in a blur of dark features. The lines of her face neck were stark and
clean, right until they disappeared under her jacket, and I had the quick impression that she was trying to be ugly.
“Inconvenient time?” she asked, as she sat down in the shade of our umbrella.
I shrugged and reached for a towel so I could scrub out my mouth on the terrycloth. “No. Any news?”
“Yes,” the thief said, nodding. “The guard will let us in tonight, and will make sure we are alone.”
Let me tell you one of the practically infinite number of problems with trying to track down ancient historical documents: it turns out one does not simply walk into the Library of Alexandria. Or what’s left of it.
We’ve all heard about the Library of Alexandria, and, if you’re like me—well, like I used to be before I had to learn all of this crap—you thought it was a big library that held a lot of books and burned down a long, long time ago.
We’re not even close.
Keep in mind that the first Library was built in Egypt and had a lot of influence from the Greeks, two ancient civilizations that weren’t exactly known for their modest small-scale constructions. Instead of thinking of it as a quaint little building full of books, imagine a library as built by Donald Trump. Words like ostentatious and opulent didn’t even begin to cover it. It was a gigantic shrine to the human experience.
(This Library was part of, and I kid you not, a museum with artifacts from even older civilizations, which contained some pieces left over from the private collections that the Egyptian pharaohs kept before those existed. Don’t think too hard about this because if you look at it too closely, it becomes one of those illusions when the Thing contains a smaller version of the same Thing, which in turn contains an even smaller version of the same Thing, and so on until it all tapers off into infinity and/or the first cartoon doodle ever done by a single-celled organism.)
Oh, and the Library didn’t burn down just once. It burned down four different times, each time taking part of the collection with it. Those ancient archivists were fast learners, though, and after that first fire, they began creating satellite libraries to store copies of their books. Like most backup systems, not everything got copied over, but enough was preserved to make its mark on antiquity.
Unfortunately for us—unfortunately for the whole of Western civilization, really—the first time the Library burned was after Archimedes (and maybe Posidonius) would have studied there. It was possible that most of his original works were torched in that first fire.
However, it is also possible that backups of what survived were made and moved to Kos.
Nothing lasts forever. You have any idea how much paper is lost each year? Fire and water and careless patrons with their indiscriminate application of bookmarks, not to mention those gnarly little bugs which find any organic material to be damned tasty. The paper used in the Library was different than that what we use today, but it still was susceptible to those same destructive forces. Scribes would have made copies of Archimedes’ work nearly as soon as it was written, just to ensure there’d be one or two that would beat the odds. These might have gone out to the sister libraries in Alexandria that existed before that first fire, and were sent out to the satellite libraries to help preserve the knowledge after the place started burning down.
One final fact in our favor? Kos was an ancient science palace. It’s where modern medicine was invented, and where one of the first and best schools of astronomy was established. If ancient archivists were sorting books into piles to send out to various satellite libraries, Kos would have gotten the batch marked “Nerd.”
So…
On the one hand, the satellite library at Kos was one of the smallest ones. Most modern scholars tend to ignore it.
On the other hand, we were most likely to find something previously undiscovered at the satellite library at Kos, because its contents were germane to our needs and most modern scholars tend to ignore it. We weren’t here because it was likely we’d find undiscovered information on the Mechanism—we were here as it was one of the only places left on earth where it might be remotely possible to find that lost information!
I enjoy grasping at straws. It keeps the reflexes sharp.
But?
Problem: we couldn’t get access to the freakin’ stuff.
Atlas had tried to work his magic, and they had laughed in his (oh-so-divine) face. Something about approved clearance, and the online digitized archives being just as good as the real thing for his American tourists.
They weren’t, though; Speedy needed access to the originals. Originals have liner notes and handwritten personal memos. Little sketches in the margins, maybe. Things that might have been missed.
The solution?
We were going to break in to the Library of Alexandria.
Not rob it, mind! When I say break in, what I’m actually saying is bribe the night watchman and promise to leave all food and drink outside. I was sketchy about the legality, sure, but everyone assured me this was a time-honored custom among scholars who wanted to search through the archives but couldn’t get official access. We wouldn’t be caught on camera, and in the unlikely event the cops showed up, a little extra money would send them on their merry way.
Besides, the surviving archives weren’t kept in a museum-museum. They were kept in a nice climate-controlled basement, and the documents were preserved between pieces of acid-free Plexiglas. When it came right down to it, we weren’t committing burglary as much as we were going to sit around and read in a pleasant air-conditioned room. [10]
Darling had gone to arrange it so we could sneak in and out without meeting anyone on the way. Flip open an unlocked back door, plunder the knowledge of the ancient world, and leave with no one the wiser.
Simple as pie.
“When?” I asked her.
“Midnight,” she said. “We will have three hours alone.”
“That’s not nearly enough time,” Speedy said, as he jumped up into my lap. I howled and crammed a towel under him. “That’s barely long enough to narrow down the search parameters.”
“Then we will go back tomorrow night, animal,” Darling said. “And then the night after that, until you are satisfied. The three hours after midnight is the window in which we are not likely to be caught.”
Atlas came up to stand beside Darling, puffing slightly from his short run up the beach. Darling took an obvious step away from her cousin and hurled a towel at him. This, he looped around his waist, giving him the appearance of wearing absolutely nothing under the towel, and Mike and I were suddenly very busy looking for our respective whatevers in the communal beach bag.
“I’m hungry,” Darling said. “I will find you later.”
“I’m hungry, too,” I said, thinking I might be able to get a decent conversation out of the thief over lunch. But then Speedy said he was hungry, and the five of us ended up at a little spot on the city’s main drag.
It was nice. Kos had a large marketplace, and we took a table outside so we could people-watch. Mike sat with his back to the wall, and I sat directly across from him so he could search the crowd behind me without being obvious about it. Every time he saw someone he thought was one of our new goons, he marked it by tearing a piece off of his paper napkin.
Truth be told, I got a little worried when he needed a new napkin.
Somebody had set a hell of a lot of Hired Goons on our tail.
Any guesses who that certain somebody was? Hanlon, right? We’re all betting on Hanlon? Nobody wants anybody else in the pool?
Okay, then.
I let Atlas order our meals, the compromise being that Darling had to order our appetizers, drinks, and desserts. Both of them tried to one-up the other on finding the most authentic tastes of Kos. Us meat-eaters ended up with fish dishes that tasted almost Italian, and the vegetarians got sweet grains and vegetables baked into flatbreads. All of us devoured what Mike referred to as the Platonic ideal of an appetizer, breads and cheeses in a spicy cream sauce.
Mike and I ordered seconds. And then
thirds.
(Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of eensie-weensie cocktail dresses, I will fear no carbohydrate: for I train a minimum of twenty hours a week and after that I go to work…)
We were all feeling decent, I think, but it’s hard to have a good conversation when one or more members of a party actively hate each other. So, you know. Play to their strengths.
“Hey, Atlas?” I asked, as I shoveled more of that spicy cream sauce onto a triangle made from hard toast. “Tell me more about Helen. Uh…Helen of Troy.”
Mike didn’t so much as blink, but Speedy? His ears flattened against his head. [11]
Atlas didn’t notice; Darling did, and her eyes went from Speedy to me, bang-bang, smooth and quick.
I didn’t care. Seriously did not care. Whatever she thought was going on couldn’t possibly be anywhere close to the truth, and I was tired of doing Google searches which gave me the same information over and over again.
And, um… Well…
I couldn’t remember the names of the other people involved.
What? One old Greek name sounds like any other to me, especially when a language I don’t speak is being autotranslated in my subconscious. I was lucky to have remembered Helen’s name, and that’s because I grew up with a different Helen who kicked me off of a jungle gym when I was five. Wikipedia is plenty helpful about the whole “of Troy” phase of Helen’s (the other Helen, not the sociopathic playground one) life, but her Spartan childhood is treated like an afterthought at best.
“What do you want to know?” Atlas asked.
“You said she was a Spartan, right? Start at the beginning and work her timeline.”
“As you wish.” Atlas tapped a few commands into his phone, and then handed it to me. An old painting was displayed on the screen. A naked woman and a giant swan were standing in an awkward embrace, while two of those naked infant cherubs the Renaissance painters were so fond of played the role of voyeurs.
“Have you heard of Leda and the Swan?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I replied. “Part of the Zeus Rape Myth collection, right?”
Greek Key Page 12