The Arms Of Hercules

by Fred Saberhagen

  Our minds held only the vaguest kind of map, based entirely on hearsay, of the strange lands before us, but we were satisfied with that. We told each other that we could always ask directions, and we were willing to work for our keep as we went traveling.

  Enkidu asked: "Shall we go first to see that man who's offering the reward for killing the Hydra?"

  I had been thinking about that. "I'm not sure we can find him. I'm not even sure that there's really any reward." I cast a glance back over my shoulder, a habit I seemed to have picked up from our recent visitor. "The messenger, or merchant, or spy, or whatever he was, just wanted to talk of marvels, and maybe half of what he said was true. Maybe. When you think about it, he told us nothing of any practical use."

  My nephew looked disappointed. "He told us about the reward! We can try to find the man who's offering it. He said the man's name is Augeus; I remember that plain enough."

  I thought some more. "The pair of us don't look much like monster slayers," I said at last. "If we tell people we're going to kill this Hydra, they'll only make fun of us."

  "You could kill it, couldn't you? If you hit it the way you hit the lion."

  I let my feet carry me on a few more strides before replying. "I don't think there's anything living in the world that I couldn't kill."

  "That's what I thought, Herc. But you don't sound happy about it."

  I grunted something.

  Enkidu persisted. "So if anyone laughs at us, you could show them how strong you are."

  "Yes. But . . ." But that was the very thing I had spent most of my life trying to conceal. Any such demonstration of superhuman strength, it seemed to me, would inevitably lead down roads I did not want to travel. "No, Enk. I say we find this Hydra monster, kill it if we can, and then go to the man who's put up a reward—if we can find him. Bring him the thing's head, or one of its heads, to show as evidence. Then he'll have to pay us off."

  Not much of a plan, true. But it was enough to keep us going.

  Chapter Five

  A Dirty Joke in the Stable

  As we traveled, I talked with Enkidu about what my mother, though she knew better, hopefully thought of as the secret of my parentage. Of course it was no secret at all. My nephew, like everyone else in Cadmia, seemed well aware that I was the son of Zeus, even though Amphitryon had never mentioned the subject to me, nor had Tiresias in any of our brief encounters. My mother had only admitted the fact to me reluctantly. But my paternity, if far from secret, was still not something my family wanted advertised to the world, or even discussed openly within the family. This at least was the attitude I had absorbed while I was growing up.

  I had brought along my club, of course, when Enkidu and I abandoned our duties as herders to go Hydra hunting. After thinking the matter over, I had also brought along my foster father's last gift to me, though the great bow still lacked a string and I had only a few arrows. You never knew. Actually Enkidu carried the bow and arrows for me most of the time.

  Our other resources were very limited, consisting of the few coins we had happened to have in our pockets when we left home. And naturally the distances on our mental map were all quite hazy, but we agreed that a journey of some hundreds of miles would be required to reach the swamp where the Hydra was said to live. That of course did not seem much of a problem to us at the time. Shortly after leaving the grazing range, we departed Cadmian territory, but fortunately the lands that we traversed were peaceful.

  To earn our keep, on the days when that was necessary, we stopped at farms and in villages along the way, asking for odd jobs. Sometimes people had no work to offer but fed two wanderers out of charity; and sometimes there were days when we went hungry. Once we killed snakes for our bread, in a village that was overrun by them, but they were only ordinary snakes, and we dealt with them by means of ordinary sticks and rocks. More typical was the farm on which we worked to build a wall of rocks.

  The construction work went quickly. I suppose that my speed of movement and my endurance, as distinguished from pure strength, were no better than average for an active youth of sixteen. Certainly they were nothing superhuman. But sheer strength makes most physical tasks much easier, and less tiring.

  As we traveled, the country around us had been gradually changing, so that my nephew and I now walked a road that wound among wooded hills, and now and then crossed a fiercely plunging stream. And everywhere we stopped, we asked where we might find the man who had posted a reward for the Hydra; so far, everyone we spoke to had heard of the monster, but only a few had heard any rumor of a reward. Still, the number of helpful responses increased.

  We came at length to a considerable estate, where the house and its chief outbuildings only became visible after we had walked a long alley of cypress and other trees.

  This estate, according to the people we had most recently spoken to, belonged to the man who was putting up the Hydra reward. Augeus was his name.

  "Sure, lads, he lives up there." The man who answered our latest question looked as if he wondered why in the world we might be looking for the man we had named. But then he closed his mouth and said no more.

  "Is there work available?" I pressed him.

  "I'd say so. Ought to be real shorthanded, right about now." And the man seemed to be absorbed in some private amusement as he watched us walk away.

  The next people we talked to were workers on the estate, field hands who only stared at us when we asked questions. For a time I thought they might be slaves, but I saw no metal collars. They had a general appearance of unhappiness, and none of them looked well fed, and had we been older and wiser we might have taken warning from those facts.

  One of them, speaking in a dull and lifeless voice, told us where we could find the foreman.

  The foreman was a heavyset man of indeterminate age, who carried a cudgel at his belt. Seated on a tree stump, he had a stylus and a tablet in his hands and appeared to have been working his way through some problem in arithmetic. He looked us over quickly as we approached, and did not appear to be impressed.

  Some instinct was trying to warn me to turn around and walk away. But, having come this far, I stubbornly pushed ahead. "Sir, they tell us you need workers. We're just passing through, and—"

  "You'd like some work? Sure, lads, we'll give you a good day's pay for a good day's effort."

  The food we were given was poor, and the beds likewise, but in our brief time on the road we had already encountered worse. After a hard day's work of digging and planting, I fell quickly into a deep sleep. And in that sleep there came a dream of birds, like those of which the traveler had told us: iron talons and feathers sharp as arrows. It seemed that Enkidu was clashing an enormous pair of bronze castanets to frighten the birds out of the thickets, and when they flew out I was doing my best to shoot them with arrows. But I was not having much success . . . the flying things were the size of cranes, and closely resembled the ibises which I had seen only in illustrated books. Except that the beaks of my dream birds were straight, not hooked, and the voice of someone I could not see warned me that they could pierce a bronze breastplate.

  The bull-headed figure who had appeared in my dreams before was back again. This time on awakening I was able to remember some of what he had said.

  "I would bring you dreams more practical than this one, Hercules. This one is not of my devising, but I have entered it, because it is important that we talk."

  "And who are you, dream bringer?"

  The answer was unclear, but perhaps that was only because I did not want it to be plain.

  The speaker's imaged appearance was perfectly distinct, and in my dream I knew that I ought to be able to name him, but that the name I had for him, that was hovering just beneath my conscious knowledge, was wrong. I awoke feeling as close to fear as I had in a long time.

  On our second day of work for Augeus, the foreman assigned Enkidu and me to a new task. The foreman had a certain surface joviality about him, but we both liked him less the
more we saw of him.

  "Come with me," he commanded, and led us out of the farmyard and down a hill.

  When we halted, we were still within easy sight of the main house. "Master's just taken over this land." The foreman seemed to take satisfaction in the claim, as if it benefited him personally. Perhaps it did.

  It was plain that the previous owner had allowed things to deteriorate.

  "Stables have got to be put in order," our boss observed laconically.

  The stables were built in a kind of ravine, below a reservoir. Here the enterprising new landowner, Augeus, had already employed clever artisans. His engineers had obviously come to work with many men and animals at their command, and they had dammed a stream, creating a huge pond to give his livestock water, and also to hold a stock of fish. I could see that there was even a kind of waterwheel under construction, eventually to be incorporated into the dam that held back the water of the pond. Augeus was a rich man now, and he meant to be wealthier in the future.

  Even at a distance, I could see that a monumental task awaited us.

  The stables, a row of low, ramshackle buildings, were in considerable disrepair, but an even more immediate difficulty was that they were horrendously dirty. For some reason the simplest chores had been long neglected. I saw before me a long structure, whose stone walls had once been painted white. There were between fifty and a hundred stalls in a row, with a roof partly of thatch and partly of tile, that had fallen seriously into disrepair. None of the stalls were occupied at the moment, but there was plenty of evidence that they had been, in the recent past.

  Enkidu and I were handed shovels and brooms and told to get to work. New piles of manure were to be created, in a place from whence it could be eventually hauled away for distribution on the fields.

  We put in another hard day's labor, and then another after that, shoveling and carrying muck. Experience on our own estate at home assured me that no cameloids or droms could be safely housed here until the cleanup was accomplished. Not only dung, but the nests of rats and mice had to be removed. There was nothing particularly enjoyable about the task, but as farm work went, it was not the hardest or most uncomfortable. We gritted our teeth and told ourselves that it would last a few more days at most, and we would be on the road again with food in our bellies and some coins in our pockets.

  As we cleaned out stalls, other hollow-eyed workers from time to time brought in animals to reoccupy them. None of these stable hands had much to say.

  About halfway through the third day of our labors, I suddenly paused in my work—breaking off some irritable talk with Enkidu—and for a moment came near forgetting where I was. I had just caught a glimpse of a girl riding by, a slim young figure elegantly dressed, mounted on a fine cameloid, with silver ornaments upon the saddle and bridle—an elegant vision that seemed to belong to an utterly different world from the one in which I labored and fought off flies.

  At first I was sure this glorious apparition had not noticed me at all. But then in passing she turned her head, just once, and looked at me, while I continued to gaze at her. I am sure that my pose and my expression were unconsciously more those of a general's son, or perhaps even a god's offspring, than they were those of your ordinary stable boy. It must have been my manner that caught her attention and caused her to prolong her silent gaze for the space of two or three breaths. For surely there was nothing else about me that might have done so, as I stood, pitchfork in hand, dressed as I was in a tattered herdsman's shirt, and standing up to my ankles in manure.

  That evening, when Enkidu and I reported to the foreman that we had finished our day's work, he stalked over in the gathering dusk to inspect the place. The moment he saw fresh droppings in one of the newly reoccupied stalls, an anger grew in him visibly. I understood later that he seemed to be able to turn his anger on and off at will.

  "Look at that! I said you make it clean. This here place is still shit-dirty!" And he aimed a halfhearted kick at Enkidu, who dodged nimbly away.

  "We want to leave in the morning," I said on a sudden impulse. Until that moment I had been planning to stay on another day or two and earn a few more coins. But Enkidu had already begun to push for a quick departure.

  Eyeing me from under his lowering brow, the foreman only grunted.

  "So," I asked in a clear voice. "What about our pay?"

  "Pay? Pay? You be paid nothing until the stables are all clean, like I tell you in the first place. Meanwhile, what about all the food you been eating? There's a cost for that. And what about the place where you been sleeping?"

  "What about it?" I was dumbfounded.

  "You owe us for that, too."

  "Owe you for it? We've been sleeping here, among the animals."

  "This is not a charity! You got that, dimwits? Now I want to hear no more about pay until you've earned your keep."

  Before I could close my gaping mouth and begin to think again, the man was gone.

  When the two of us were alone again, my nephew said: "Damn it all, Herc, a stable is never going to be spotless. Not with live beasts penned up in it. And they'll be moving more back in tomorrow. The way he talks, we could spend our lives here shoveling and still owe him money."

  I grunted and nodded. The true state of affairs had begun to dawn on me some hours ago, but I had said nothing until I could decide how best to deal with it. And for once Enkidu had been a little slow to catch on.

  "Does he think we're stupid or something?" Enkidu steamed.

  "I guess he does. Or at least he's sure we're scared."

  On top of everything else, my valuable though not very useful bow was suddenly missing, and naturally none of the other workers whom I asked knew what had happened to it—or so they said. Most of them seemed afraid to talk to me at all. Neither did anyone seem interested in anything but their own immediate survival.

  Not for the first time, I wished that I was six and a half feet tall and muscled like a god, with thick, dark stubble on my cheeks and a frowning brow. Then, I thought, no one would have touched my bow.

  When we next encountered the foreman, he also suggested, in the manner of a calculated afterthought, that we should not think of running off before we got the stable cleaned out properly—there were a couple of large fierce dogs that the master employed to find those who departed without paying what they owed. With grim satisfaction at what he assumed to be our helplessness, he took his leave.

  "I want my bow back," I said in a low, thoughtful voice, when he was steps away.

  Almost eagerly he whirled around again. His ears were keener than I had thought, and he evidently thought that we were not worth trying to deceive. "S'pose you don't get it. What'll you do about it?"

  My fists were clenching automatically, but I remained silent, backing away from a physical confrontation.

  When the man was gone, my nephew looked bitterly disappointed. "Why'd you let him do that?" he demanded.

  "Because. If I fight one man, I'll have to fight another, and another. And if I fight I'll break someone's bones . . . and someone else would draw a weapon . . . there'd be all kinds of trouble. It's no fun killing people."

  Enkidu was silent for a time, trying to assess my mood. At last he asked me: "Hercules? What will we do?"

  "Let's forget about our pay and hit the road. We'll head out about midnight, when they're mostly all asleep. We can live without the pay."

  "What about the dogs?"

  "I'll take care of them, if they come after us. But I don't want to start killing people and have to fight a war." Yet, having said that to my friend, still I dallied; neither did I want to leave without relieving my anger.

  * * *

  Shortly after dark on that evening, the girl we had seen riding reappeared. Obviously some relative of the owner's, I thought. Maybe his mistress, though she seemed too young.

  This time she came deliberately to seek us out. She rode her cameloid straight up to where Enkidu and I were standing, and sat in the saddle looking down at us
as if we were a problem that duty required her to solve somehow. Straight brown hair, parted in the middle, framed an entrancing face. Seen at close range, her green eyes and slender body were more fascinating than ever.

  "My name is Hercules," I volunteered, to start a conversation. "And this is Enkidu, who happens to be my nephew."

  The girl appeared to have no interest in our names, nor did she tell us hers. Well, I had to admit it was really none of our business.

  "I just happen to be visiting here," she said at last. Her tone was almost that of one offering an apology. She sighed and seemed to come to a decision. "I heard them talking, up at the house, about you two. They were making jokes."

  "Is it your father's house?" I asked.

  "It belongs to Augeus, who is my uncle. I don't like him much. He's a cruel man. So are his foreman, and his slave drivers."

  "I had begun to form that impression myself," I said. And Enkidu put in, indignantly: "We're not slaves."

  She turned her gaze in his direction. "My advice to you is, if you don't want to become slaves, you'd better make some plan to get away from here."

  "He owes us money!" Enkidu piped up furiously. "Three days' pay! No, now it's four!"

  The girl fumbled out a small purse from somewhere and dug into it. Then she whispered a fervent oath. "This is all I have with me." She held out her hand with two substantial coins on her soft palm. "Take this and go!"

  I could feel the warmth of her body in the two coins when they came into my hand. "We're planning to head out around midnight," I said.

  "That would be wise."

  "But there's one more thing," I said. I was intent on prolonging the conversation, though I hardly had any rational reason for doing so. "Would you happen to know, my lady, what has happened to my bow? I had it with me when I came here, a special gift from my stepfather. And now it's gone."

  She took thought. "What does it look like?"

  When I had described the sturdy stave as best I could, she let me know, shaking her head solemnly, that it was now in the master's collection. "I fear you'll never see it again."