As Alcie nodded and started down the passageway, Iole saw on her friend’s face everything that Alcie had tried so hard to keep from telling her: she truly cared for the oversized youth, and if Iole had read all the signs right, Homer cared for Alcie as well. For reasons she couldn’t explain (even with her mighty brain), this thought made Iole smile, and she resolved not to pester Alcie further about her feelings for Homer.
Approaching the captain’s cabin once more, they expected to hear a cacophony of shrieks and moans as arrows flew out of the room. But instead, when they poked their heads around the door, they saw Eros simply sitting on the open cover of the book, laughing and squealing, his bow off to one side.
Seeing them, Eros flew up and buzzed very close to Alcie’s ear, then ran, laughing, straight across her forehead. Without thinking Iole raised her sword to hit him and came very close to chopping off Alcie’s nose.
“Iole . . . stop!” said Alcie. “Let him go! Alpha, he’s a god, and beta, I’ll wager my ruby and pearl hairclip that he’s not part of what goes in the box.”
“Gods,” said Iole, “I should have thought of that.”
Eros flew by and tickled Iole’s ear as he bolted out the doorway and up the passage.
“Now . . . the book. How do we capture . . . ?” said Alcie, as both turned their attention to the rows of teeth.
But the teeth were gone.
At least it looked that way from across the room. Iole scanned the inside rim of the book. It was smooth and even.
“That’s weird,” she said.
“Yes, and we’re living such normal lives,” said Alcie dryly.
They stared at what appeared to be a plain leather book cover with a few sheaves of papyrus still loosely bound inside. Finally Alcie reached out her hand and held the soft brown calfskin between her fingers.
“I think whatever enchantment the book had fallen under must have been lifted when we captured Misery,” she said, pulling the book toward her.
“And the Syracusa is not rolling or shuddering anymore,” affirmed Iole.
“Excellent!” said Alcie.
Slowly, she loosened the red cords binding the letters to the cover. Alcie and Iole spread several of the letters—there were about thirty or so that had not been turned into Eros’s arrows—out in front of them. Taking one apiece, they unfolded the yellowed parchment.
“Oh!” Iole gasped slightly as a long strand of beautiful chestnut-colored hair fell out of the letter in her hand.
“Totally gross or kinda beautiful . . . I can’t decide,” said Alcie, holding up the hair. “Are these all from the same woman?”
“They’ve got to be,” said Iole, lighting a nearby oil lamp.
“These have a lot of gray in them, though,” Alcie said, examining other letters. “Look, this hair isn’t stringy and ashy, and the words on this letter aren’t fading away like before.”
“That was probably because of the spell cast by the lesser evil of Misery . . . like the teeth on the book,” said Iole.
“Look at the signature,” said Alcie, glancing from letter to letter. “It’s never the same way twice.”
They both looked down toward the bottom of their pages.
“Yours for eternity, Latona.”
“Your beloved, Latona.”
“Yours in loneliness, Latona.”
“Your wretched Latona.”
“Figs, listen to this,” said Alcie, and she read aloud from the letter in her hand.
Honored Husband,
These past weeks have been as a lifetime to me, and I pray each day for your safe return. The new moon which brings you home again cannot wax soon enough. Why do you not write? You must know how lonely your absence has made me. You must pass other ships which could deliver a letter, a note to me, do you not? Spare me my loneliness.
In eros, Latona
“What about this?” said Iole. “Um . . . ‘My love’ . . . ‘missing you’ . . . okay, listen to this . . .”
. . . this unease which has gripped my heart will not cease. Today I passed the harbor and thought my eyes beheld your sails. My heart leapt high, but I was deceived. Poseidon is taunting me. My grief at your absence is killing me surely. How I wish you would write.
Awaiting, Latona
With each letter they unfolded, the girls read of the woman’s struggle with her crushing loneliness and despair. She had been the wife of the captain of the ship, left alone for months (sometimes years, they read) at a time. She’d had a child, a boy, who’d grown to manhood without a father’s love.
. . . how he favors you, dearest . . . would that you were here to see it . . .
She’d managed a house and servants, raised her child, and lived out her entire life absolutely alone; forever waiting for her husband’s return. The letters began to become more desperate and pleading, until finally they dissolved into incoherent ramblings.
“Oh . . . no . . . ,” said Alcie, reading one of the few remaining letters, strands of pure gray in her hands.
“What? What is it?”
Alcie lifted her head up and looked at her friend. Iole’s eyes widened slightly and her heart thuh-rumped a little in her chest. Alcie had a tear coursing down her cheek.
“Listen,” she said, the words sticking in her throat.
Sir,
With regret we must inform you that your wife has crossed the river Styx. We believe her death, by no other hand than her own, was swift and painless. Your son, now a youth of 14, is well and is being cared for by the graciousness of the city. All rites and ceremonies for your wife have been prepared and her passage to the Elysian Fields has been assured.
City High Council
“Hounds of Hades,” said Iole, “she killed herself.”
“Because she was so lonely. Because of Misery. I’m sure of it.”
Suddenly, something directly over Iole’s shoulder caught Alcie’s attention: a small stuffed bear made of green and bright blue fabric was lying at the end of the captain’s sleeping cot. Next to it was a stuffed rabbit skin with glass eyes and a pink nose. On the floor was a smooth, round piece of wood with bells and strange black symbols all over it. She glanced to her right and spotted a tiny drum of some exotic kind and a small white toy horse with wings on its back, barely visible behind a decorative fabric draping. And the crates that had been covered by the cloth Alcie had used to capture Misery were each full to the brim with more toys.
“Hey, why are there toys—?” she started, but she had no time to finish her sentence.
There was a sudden, loud noise in the outer passageway. Someone was coming, with heavy footsteps.
Madly, Alcie tried to gather the letters together and place them back between the covers of the book, while Iole ran about pulling letter-arrows out of the walls. But in her rush she and Iole collided coming around the corner of the table, succeeding only in scattering everything further around the room. They heard the footsteps stop and knew that someone, someone big, was standing in the doorway. Alcie and Iole both turned around sheepishly and, looking up, locked eyes with the captain.
He stared hard at the girls for a moment and then he looked at the mess strewn all over his cabin floor. At his sides, his hands were balled in tight fists.
The captain cleared his throat, and Alcie’s eyes instantly met his once again. She suddenly knew what it was like to watch a volcano about to explode. The captain was trying to hold himself back, but she felt sure that he wanted them dead on the spot.
“If I could,” he began slowly, “I would tie both of you to the top of the mainsail and let the seabirds feast on your eyes.”
“But—,” Alcie began, but Iole pinched her hard on the arm.
“Again with the pinching,” Alcie muttered.
“How do you dare!” the captain said, his voice building in intensity. “I warned you—I ordered you. Prying into my personal property, desecrating my possessions, is something I will not tolerate!”
“Sir . . . Captain . . . sir,” sa
id Alcie, “we didn’t have a choice. Really, we didn’t. I’m so not kidding. This book was already on the floor underneath the table. Your wife’s letters were being turned into arrows by Eros, and he was shooting them at us! Look!”
And she pointed to the walls of the cabin and then to the walls of the corridor.
“My wife’s letters . . . ?” His voice fell away as he looked around the room.
“We had to defend ourselves, sir!” said Iole.
“No, you didn’t!” the captain cried. “By Zeus! You could have walked away. You could have come to find me! This is none of your business!”
“Grape skins . . . that’s so not true,” said Alcie, then quickly went on. “I can explain. I mean, can I explain? ’Cause I can explain—everything.”
“Explain? Explain your snooping in my quarters? Well, go ahead. This I must hear.”
“Okay,” said Alcie, stooping to pick up the letters.
“Don’t touch anything else!” cried the captain. “Don’t even move or I will be only too happy to run a sword through each of you.”
“Um. . . okay,” said Alcie.
“Start talking, maiden.”
Quickly and concisely, Alcie told of the box, the school project, Pandy’s trip to Olympus, and the quest for the great and lesser evils. She explained exactly why she and her friends had been on the Peacock, their adventures in Egypt, the ride in Apollo’s Sun Chariot, Pandy’s fall, and the crash landing. But Alcie made certain to stress how important it was that the tiny figure of a woman—“I think it was probably the spirit of your wife,” she interrupted herself—was captured and placed in the box. She and Iole were certain that the woman-spirit was the hiding place of a lesser evil.
“It’s Misery,” she sidetracked again.
She explained that they both thought the answer might be found in the letters, which is the only reason they read them.
“. . . and that’s when we read about your wife killing herself. And then you came in . . . and then we . . . stopped,” she finished.
The captain stared blankly at each of the girls in turn.
“I told Homer not to touch that map. It looks like I have many snoops aboard my ship.”
“He didn’t mean to, sir,” said Iole. “He wasn’t snooping. The chart had come loose and the book of your wife’s letters fell out. He was trying to put it back and that’s when it bit him.”
The captain looked at her, eyebrows raised.
“Before we got the spirit of your wife in the box,” Iole continued, “the book had rows of sharp teeth. But please don’t blame Homer.”
“And I thought I had hidden it so carefully,” he said, gazing without really looking around his cabin. “Shameful thing.”
He turned back to the girls.
“You are mistaken in one thing, Alcie.”
“Figures,” she said.
The captain stooped to pick up several of the unfolded letters; he looked solemnly at the words before him, then held the letters to his heart.
“These are not my wife’s letters,” the captain said.
“They aren’t?” Iole asked.
“No,” he replied. “Latona was my mother.”
The girls stood very still.
“Then,” Iole said at last, “you were the boy in the letter. You never knew your father?”
“Never knew him?” the captain said with a sneer. “I never met him.”
He sat down heavily at the table, leaving Alcie and Iole standing, feeling somewhat helpless.
“My mother would show me a marble bust of my father . . . the great man of the sea!” he began. “Or she’d point to a statue of him in our garden and tell me what a fine man he was. And each day, as I grew up, my mother became more and more lonely. And I became more and more angry. He sent us money . . . but wouldn’t even write to her. Finally, I came home from the academy one day and the house servants gathered around and told me what had happened. I was immediately taken from my home to the one place I swore I would never go—aboard a ship. I wanted to be nothing like my father. But the City High Council told me they were under orders!”
“Orders?” said Iole. “Who was left to give orders?”
“Who indeed?” he said.
The captain paused for a long moment. “It’s as if,” Alcie thought, “he’s trying to decide just how much he can or should tell.”
The captain rose and walked to his chest of private possessions. He lifted the heavy lid and took out a large rectangular case made from a metal that glowed with a faint light blue. He set the case on the table and placed his hand on the clasp, looking at the girls once more.
“Wondrous Aphrodite was and is now in charge of my life. One night, after I’d been at sea only a few weeks, I had a strange urge to go up on deck while everyone slept. Aphrodite the Beautiful rose from the water on the back of a mighty two-tailed fish, telling me she had set me to work on the ship and that I would ultimately become its captain, living out the rest of my days alone and at sea. No man in my lineage would ever again have the chance to make anyone as lonely as my father had made my mother. This was the decree of the Goddess of Love. I would never marry, never know the company of a caring woman, never have a family, and I would never live away from a ship.”
He paused and took a deep breath.
“And the same fate . . . my enduring punishment for the sins of a loveless, self-centered father . . . would befall my sons.”
“Oranges,” said Alcie. “That’s so horrible. I mean— wait! What?”
“Excuse me?” said Iole.
“How can you have sons if you can’t have a family?” said Alcie.
The captain smiled weakly, as if he alone knew the answer to the saddest question ever asked, and lifted up the lid of the case, revealing a soft white light and a faint sound, like the cooing of doves. Inside, surrounded by many folds of deep purple silk, was a gleaming white egg the size of a large melon.
“Grape seeds, that’s some first meal,” Alcie said, then slapped her hand over her mouth.
The captain stared blankly at Alcie for a moment, then began to laugh very hard and very quietly, almost doubling over.
“Never before have I laughed about my dilemma,” he said at last, wiping his eyes. Then he waved his hand across the case. “Maidens, this is . . . or will someday be . . . my son.”
The captain lifted the egg out of the case and held it up to the light of an oil lamp. Inside, the girls could see the faintest outline of a tiny, tightly curled human form.
Alcie looked around again; now the toys made sense. There was baby stuff everywhere! But the girls had been so busy focusing on Misery that they hadn’t noticed. The top shelf of a bookcase was filled with tiny clothes made of the finest cotton and soft, fur-lined leather infant booties. A small Egyptian reed basket lined with a thin Chinese silk mattress and covered with a fine Persian linen blanket lay at the foot of the captain’s pallet. Above this, a crude mobile was nailed into the ceiling. Dangling from it were painted papyrus horses, dryads, lightning bolts, musical instruments, and fishes. There were odd toys and colorful baby clothes from all over the known world peeking out of strange hiding places about the room.
“Wait a tick on the sundial, if you please!” cried Alcie. “This is the Syracusa! The Peacock was destroyed! How did everything from that ship get here?”
“Nothing can change what the gods decree,” the captain said. “When I was spared by the pirates and given the helm of this ship, they brought me down here. Aphrodite, I’m certain, put everything back in its place. This cabin is an exact duplicate of my old cabin on the Peacock.”
Their attention was drawn back to the cooing coming from within the folds of silk.
“What’s that sound?” asked Iole.
“The dove is Aphrodite’s protected bird. I think those sounds are keeping my son safe in some way . . . perhaps even imparting knowledge to him. Nourishing him.”
He put the egg gingerly back in the box.
; “Aphrodite told me that I should have an heir,” the captain said, “who will also have an heir, and so forth, and so the line will continue. I had no idea what she was talking about until one night, several months ago, Aphrodite in a dream gave me instructions to visit a particular market stall the next time I put in to the port at Athens. The vendor handed me this box and refused to take even a single drachma. He only repeated the phrase ‘nine moons’ over and over. When I got back to the Peacock and opened the box, I found this egg and the book of my mother’s letters to my father.”
He sighed deeply.
“I used to pray every day to Aphrodite to release me from this curse,” he continued. “Now I simply pray to all the gods to be able to raise my son well. I keep the egg close so I can tend to it, but I didn’t want to look at my mother’s letters, so I hid the book where I thought it would be safe and forgotten, long before Pandora opened the box. I had no way of knowing that it had since become a dangerous, enchanted thing. It makes perfect sense, though, that the pure source of Misery would find a home within it. I know it lived within my mother while she was still alive.”
“Do you think it was your mother’s spirit we put in the box?” asked Iole.
“No,” he replied. “Aphrodite has assured me that my mother’s soul is happy in the Elysian Fields. I think it was Misery in the shape of my mother.”
There was silence as they all pondered the effect Misery could have.
“Doesn’t seem like a ‘lesser’ evil to me,” said Iole.
“So your son is gonna have an egg, too?” said Alcie.
“Um . . . can we help you clean all of this up?” asked Iole quickly.
“No, but thank you . . . I shall attend to it myself,” the captain replied, looking at the letters everywhere. “I think I’ll do a little reading.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Blackmail
Hera returned to her rooms from raiding the food cupboards, two oversized bowls of ambrosia in her hands. She had nothing for Dido; she didn’t even so much as glance in his direction.
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