Blood of the Heroes

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Blood of the Heroes Page 10

by Steve White


  “Yes,” he nodded. “This is the road to Argos. We’ll go back there and claim Acrisius’ hospitality. He won’t mind that we’re in trouble with his brother—he’ll probably give us a good-conduct medal. We’ll stay there just long enough for me to take a proper look at your wound, and for us to get a little rest. Then we’ll resume our original plan and take the road to Lerna. It’s more imperative than ever that we get passage on a ship.”

  “Why?”

  “Never mind.” He could have told her why, because he knew where her TRD had been taken. But this was no time for lengthy explanations. “Come on, let’s move.”

  They trudged on into the gathering heat of the August morning. They had covered about three miles—almost halfway to the Inachos and the border between the feuding brothers’ territories, in fact—when Jason heard the rumbling behind them, growing louder in pursuit. Even as he whirled around, he knew in the pit of his stomach he was going to see chariots.

  Chapter Eight

  There were three of the chariots, thundering down the road from Tiryns.

  Jason knew about them from his forced-draft orientation. They were light, with four-spoked wheels, and axles set well to the rear for mobility. Two-horse teams could draw them at high speed, even though those horses were small—more like ponies to Jason’s eyes—and had inefficient chest-strap harnesses. Each carried a lightly clad charioteer and a full-armed warrior.

  Earlier in this century, such chariots had overturned the world as thoroughly as stirrup-using shock cavalry would do two thousand years in the future, enabling barbarian invaders to conquer the already-ancient civilizations of the Near East in a series of blitzkriegs. Yet those barbarians had used them as mobile platforms from which opposing infantry formations could be crumpled up with showers of arrows and then finished off with a charge. The Achaean Greeks, if Homer was to be believed, had regarded archery as not quite the thing, and had used the new superweapon as a mere prestige vehicle. It seemed absurd, as though some Industrial Revolution-era army had used tanks to transport soldiers to battlefields where they alighted and proceeded to fire volleys with muzzle-loaders. Nagel had speculated aloud that Homer, a few centuries later when chariots had fallen into disuse, might have misunderstood the old oral epics.

  Now it looked as though they were going to find out the truth at first hand.

  Jason looked around frantically. They were in fairly flat country; the surrounding terrain was only marginally less suited for wheeled vehicles than this “road.” The only possible sources of cover were the occasional olive groves and orchards. There had been a few cultivators visible in the distance, but they were now disappearing as fast as their legs would carry them—a common reaction, Jason imagined, to the sight of war chariots.

  All these thoughts took Jason less than a second. “Run!” he yelled at his companions, pointing with his spear at an olive grove, and he suited the action to the word. Deirdre and Nagel needed no further urging.

  The chariots veered off the road on a course calculated to intercept them. It was a bumpy ride for them, and as the lead chariot got closer Jason saw that the warrior was holding onto a balance thong attached to the car’s rim with his left hand lest he be jolted out despite a highly trained sense of balance. His right hand gripped a spear underhand, which indicated that these people really did wield weapons from their chariots, even if they drew the line at using bow and arrow against human prey. Jason halfway expected Nagel to pause for a lecture on the subject.

  And he might just as well , he thought with a sudden onrush of despair. They quite obviously weren’t going to make it to the dubious shelter of the grove. Jason alone couldn’t even have made it, in his hunger and exhaustion, much less Deirdre with her loss of blood and Nagel with his middle-aged wind.

  They were not so much running as staggering when Jason came to a gasping halt, muttered “Shit!” and turned to face the onrushing chariots with spear at high port. “Keep going!” he snapped at the other two. “I’ll try to delay them.”

  To his astonishment, Nagel disobeyed him, pointing his spear and making an attempt at a fighting stance that would have been funny in any other circumstances. Deirdre simply took a deep breath and stood.

  “Shit,” Jason repeated. The lead chariot was getting close. Jason faced the thundering hooves with upraised spear and waited for death.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed something flash past him from the direction of the olive grove.

  Before Jason’s mind had even had time to process that glimpse, a thrown spear transfixed the lead chariot warrior at the base of his throat. Spurting blood, he fell heavily against his charioteer, who lost control of the team. Neighing wildly, the horses slewed around in too tight a turn for even the highly maneuverable chariot to handle. It capsized, crushing its occupants and bringing the horses down in a maddened, screaming tangle, trapped by their harness and traces.

  The other two charioteers veered desperately away to either side, barely avoiding a collision. It gave Jason a respite, and he turned to stare in the direction from which the spear had come.

  A man was approaching at a run—presumably the man who had thrown the spear, although if so it had been a phenomenal throw. He was hefting a second spear as he ran, his long hair streaming in the wind behind him and his mouth open in a wordless war cry. He was running toward the chariot that had turned off toward Jason’s left, and whose charioteer was now bringing it around to resume its charge.

  The stranger drew back and hurled his spear, all in one continuous, flowing motion at which Jason, even at this moment, gawked. But this chariot warrior was ready. He raised his shield at an angle, and the spear clanged off it. But the effort caused the warrior to get in the way of his charioteer, and the momentum of the charge was broken. And the stranger had gone directly from that beautiful, Olympic-quality javelin throw into a dead run that brought him up to the chariot even as its charioteer was trying to get the team back under control. He grasped the bridle of the right-hand horse with his left hand, giving a twist which made the animals rear and spill the chariot’s occupants.

  The fallen charioteer had had enough; he sprang to his feet and set out at a dead run in the direction of Tiryns. But the warrior hefted his shield—round, and small enough to use in a chariot, unlike the great figure-eight shields favored by the local infantry—and advanced on the stranger, flourishing a long, narrow thrusting sword of the kind the archaeologists would, with a certain poetic license, call “rapiers.”

  The stranger drew from its sling a sword-dagger like the one Jason had been divested of at Tiryns. Simultaneously, he took off a cloak he wore over his tunic and twirled it around his left forearm in lieu of a shield.

  A rumbling from behind reminded Jason of the third chariot. It had taken longer to make a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, but now it was approaching, its warrior raising his spear for a throw at the stranger. But then the charioteer had to swerve to avoid the wreck of the first chariot, spoiling the spearman’s throw and partially killing the vehicle’s momentum.

  Without pausing for thought, Jason plunged forward, hitting the ground and rolling up to the wheels, now turning slowly enough for their four spokes to be individually visible. He thrust his spear between two of those spokes.

  He couldn’t possibly have done it with a more advanced, many-spoked wheel. But he managed to get the spear shaft through both wheels before it was snatched out of his hand … and slammed up against the bottom of the car, an instant brake. The light chariot kicked forward like a catapult, sending its occupants sailing forward over the backs of the loudly protesting horses. The charioteer thudded to the ground at exactly the wrong angle, and lay still with a broken neck. The warrior staggered to his feet and turned on the now-unarmed Jason with one of the long slender swords. Jason got to his feet and into defensive stance … just in time to hear a yell off to the left.

  It was Nagel, charging in with clumsy enthusiasm. The dismounted chariot warrior turned aside an
d, in a motion of visibly contemptuous ease, knocked the historian’s jabbing spear aside with his shield. He was drawing back his sword for a thrust when Jason sprang forward and crashed into him. The long sword was not designed for close quarters; its wielder could do nothing as Jason got an arm around his neck and, with a quick vicious sideways motion, broke his neck as thoroughly as that of his charioteer.

  “Well done, Sidney,” Jason sighed as he got to his feet. It hadn’t been, really, but he felt no inclination to quibble about technique. Besides, he was watching with interest as the stranger confirmed his own theory of the short sword-dagger’s superiority, sending his opponent tumbling to the ground trying to hold in his spilling guts.

  Briskly businesslike, the stranger walked over to the overturned first chariot, whose horses still thrashed about in their pain and confusion. He cut their throats. Blood gushed forth to soak into the ground.

  Deirdre stared, speechless with horror, and Jason thought Nagel was going to be sick. He wasn’t immune to their feelings himself. But he recognized the act as one of mercy—the only realistic mercy for those broken-legged little horses. The other two teams, he noted, were walking around slowly, munching grass and pulling the inconsiderable weight of their unoccupied chariots. They must have been trained not to run off in the absence of their charioteers.

  The stranger finally turned to them. “Rejoice,” he greeted conventionally, with a smile of guileless friendliness. The face wearing that smile was nearly beardless. Jason hadn’t noticed his youth before, probably because of his size—tall even for Jason’s native milieu, extremely tall for this one—and the awesome physical competence he had just displayed. But viewed close up he was clearly under twenty and built like a, well, Greek god. His features were regular, with a wide, rather thin-lipped mouth and a narrow, straight-bridged nose. His long thick hair was a richly deep, dark chestnut brown, his eyes bluish-gray, his complexion fairer than the local average but well-tanned and currently somewhat flushed from exertion.

  To Jason, there was a vague half-familiarity about that face, which dissolved like the memory of a dream when he tried to put his finger on it.

  “Rejoice,” Jason responded cautiously. He knew nothing about this formidable kid, including how he stood with respect to Proetus of Tiryns. “We are in your debt.”

  “Not at all. I was resting in that olive grove—I’ve had a long journey, you see—when I heard the chariots on the road from Tiryns.” The fresh young face came as close to a scowl as it could manage, and Jason began to relax a little. “Did Proetus send them?”

  “Yes. We escaped during the night from Tiryns, where Proetus had imprisoned us. Do you know of him?”

  “I do indeed. He is my great-uncle.” Jason’s apprehensions returned in full force, for he wasn’t at all sure he relished the prospect of going up against this character, kid or no. But then he noticed that the handsome face had gone expressionless. “Some people believe—wrongly—that he is also my father, for he dishonored my mother, his niece Danaë.”

  Behind Jason, Nagel gasped. Jason ignored it, for he thought he saw an opening. “Well, then, you will understand why we fell afoul of him. He wished to dishonor this lady, Deianeira.” He launched into the stock story of their lives, and added a heavily edited account of their recent adventures, omitting all mention of the gods and attributing their incarceration at Tiryns simply to Proetus’ lust. Then another thought occurred to him. “Acrisius of Argos must be your grandfather—and he is the enemy of Proetus. We were on our way there, to seek his hospitality. Would you—?”

  “No.” The young face took on an incongruously grave look. “Acrisius may not be quite as much of a pig as Proetus. But after my birth, he cast out my mother, his own daughter, for he would not believe her when she told him who my true father was. He put the two of us on a ship and exiled us to the island of Seriphos. Sooner or later,” added the youth matter-of-factly, “I will take vengeance on him and Proetus both.”

  Nagel spoke up. “But that is not why you are in the Argolid now, is it?” He asked the question as though he already knew its answer.

  “No. I’m on an errand for King Polydectes of Seriphos, who was guardian to my mother until I came of age. But I must avoid Acrisius—and so should you. He is not to be trusted.”

  “Hmm… .” Jason still wasn’t sure how far he could confide in this affable young man. “We have an ‘errand’ of our own. We must recover a very valuable article belonging to the lady Deianeira. And we need to find a ship. We were hoping to find one at Lerna.”

  The stranger brightened. “Lerna! There must be fate in this. May I accompany you?”

  “By all means.” There was, Jason reflected, something to be said for traveling in the company of someone this handy in a fight. “Of course, if we’re to avoid Argos, we’ll have to leave the road and travel southwestward.”

  “So much the better. We need to leave the roads in any case; that one charioteer who escaped will tell Proetus. Unfortunately, we won’t be able to take the chariots.” The stranger turned to the grazing teams. Deirdre sucked in a breath as though she was afraid he was going to do to them what he’d done to the injured ones. But he merely smacked their rumps and sent them on their way. Jason, who had been wondering how he was going to disguise his amateurism at driving the things, was relieved. He was also curious.

  “What takes you to Lerna?” he asked the stranger, after the latter had finished a businesslike looting of the chariot warriors’ bodies.

  “It’s my errand. I must bring Polydectes one of the heads of the Hydra. Since Lerna is where the Hydra is supposed to have lived, it seems the natural place to start looking, don’t you think?’

  “No doubt,” Jason managed. He remembered what a “head of the Hydra” really was, for the bandit had used the term in Proetus’ hall. Surely this innocent-seeming young man could have no idea that he was talking about a weapon forged by a technology that had no place in his world.

  He pulled himself together. “Well, I wish you luck. And we welcome your company. Oh, by the way, you never told us your name.”

  “Perseus,” the young man said politely. “Son of Zeus,” he added.

  *

  They stopped that night at a goatherd’s hut not far from the marshes. Jason could have gone further, and Perseus wasn’t even breathing hard, but Deirdre’s color was worse and she could barely continue reeling forward, although she’d be damned and in hell before she’d admit it. The goatherd offered them the poor hospitality his means permitted—the custom evidently applied up and down the social scale. He also looked healthily apprehensive at the presence of armed men, although Perseus treated him with the same sunny amiability he seemed to show to anyone he didn’t have reason to kill. The hospitality became downright effusive when the goatherd learned he was hosting a Hero.

  Apropos of which, Jason needed badly to talk to Nagel.

  First, though, he removed Deirdre’s bandage and examined her wound closely. It wasn’t oozing anything, nor was there any redness around it, to his relief. The broad-spectrum immunizations that everybody routinely got in their world weren’t an absolute guarantee against infection, but they helped. In conjunction with the very basic precautions Hyperion had ordained, they evidently had been enough. Jason prevailed upon the goatherd to boil some water in a ceramic pot—metal implements were only for the wealthy in this world. Then he replaced the bandage, tying it as tightly as he dared—and as Deirdre could stand—to hold together the lips of the wound, whose looks he didn’t like. If he’d had any sort of needles and thread, he would have done some stitches, using wine as a disinfectant. But he didn’t. At a minimum, she was going to have one hell of a scar. At least, he jollied her, it was in an inconspicuous place. Then he poured enough of the goatherd’s wine (by courtesy so called) into her to dissolve her resistance to letting exhaustion and pain take her. She was giving out ladylike snores by the time he finally gestured to Nagel to follow him outside, under the sky of an Earth wi
th no electric lighting.

  “It’s what I was trying to tell you before we reached Tiryns,” the historian jittered. “The legends are quite explicit that Perseus’ mother was Danaë, daughter of Acrisius … and that his father was Zeus.”

  “Zeus?” Jason echoed. ” The Zeus?”

  Nagel nodded. “Of course, in this era he’s not regarded as the king of the gods, as he will be in Homer’s time. He’s simply the weather god. And I suppose we must assume he’s one of the … entities we’ve seen.”

  “Entities that are obviously nonhuman. I don’t care what the Greek myths say; they can’t possibly have issue with humans!”

  “Of course not!” said Nagel peevishly. “I can’t account for that part. But everything else fits, including his ‘errand’ for Polydectes, king of Seriphos, where he and his mother were exiled. The legend says Polydectes was holding over him the threat of raping his mother, but it’s possible that he’s too embarrassed to tell us that part.”

  Jason waved the point aside and thought hard. “Look, Sidney, I don’t pretend to your knowledge of this stuff. But wasn’t it Perseus’ task to bring back the head of the Gorgon Medusa?”

  “Yes—the head that turned men to stone if they looked on its face. But Medusa and her sister Gorgons were linked with the Lernean Hydra, whose heads also had magical properties, such as shooting out fire—a laser guide beam, as we know.”

  “What was the linkage?”

  “They were both descended from the sea deity, Phorcys. The Gorgons were daughters of his; the Hydra was a child of his daughter Echidne—the prototypical mermaid, being half beautiful woman and half sea serpent—by the monster Typhon. Confusion on the part of the later myth compilers was understandable.”

  “But they got the genealogies so exactly!”

  “Royal genealogies were orally transmitted with great care. This was a necessity. But with monsters, it was permissible to let the fancy have free rein.” Nagel permitted himself a dry chuckle. “To take just one example, in the legends as they have come down to us, the Hydra is killed by Herakles, a descendant of Perseus. But here we have its heads already believed to be available as portable weapons in Perseus’ lifetime!”

 

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