Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Epigraph
Glossary
Acknowledgments
Mythic Misadventures by Carolyn Hennesy
Imprint
For Donald
And to the memory of Harriet Shapiro, Ph.D.,
who got my girls out of the water.
And much, much more.
CHAPTER ONE
Out of a Clear Blue Sky
“It’s gaining on us!” Pandy screamed, craning her neck to look back over her shoulder.
“Don’t look at it!” Homer barked. “Pull your cloak over your head!”
“What is it!” Pandy screamed.
“Just keep going!” Homer yelled, his eyes frantically scanning the horizon ahead for something he knew he’d never find: someplace—any place—that he, Pandy, and Iole could hide.
Nothing.
Only sand.
Their three camels, whipped into a frenzy, were running at a speed Pandy couldn’t even comprehend. Even watching wild horses race across fields back home, she’d never seen anything move as fast. With one arm wrapped tightly around Dido as he curled, shivering, in front of her, it was all she could do to stay on top of her beast as it flew across the desert, trying to outrun what was coming up behind them.
A dark mass, deep brown and thick, was now less than five kilometers away and bearing down hard and fast with a dull roar.
Two hours earlier, the midmorning sky had been a clear, pale blue—almost white; the sun beating down brutally on them as it had for the past eleven and a half uneventful days. The boredom of the Arabian desert had been broken by only two things. One was a melancholy followed by a testiness that had slowly crept into Homer’s demeanor. For the first several days of their journey, Homer had been his usual quiet but courteous self as they traveled from Aphrodisias, across the lands of Galatia, Cilicia, and Syria, and finally into the endless expanse of desert toward Baghdad. Then, it seemed to Pandy, Homer had grown annoyed by the many people commenting and asking questions about their strange beasts. He had become sullen, almost rude, in answering, even when the question had not been put to him directly. Pandy thought she overheard him say something like, “We’re riding these because of her,” and flicking a hand in her direction.
The other was the fact that two days earlier, Iole had become very, very sick. Pale, sweating, and unable to keep any food in her stomach, Iole was becoming so ill that Pandy was in great fear for her friend’s life. The healing powers of the enchanted Eye of Horus weren’t working, and calling on the tiny bust of Athena for advice proved useless; Pandy couldn’t get even a single sound out of it. There was no priestess around to intercede on Iole’s behalf with Apollo, the God of Healing, and Pandy knew that her own prayers, if they were getting through, might not make much difference. Even though Apollo had been quite taken with Iole when he’d met her in Alexandria, he had saved her life once already, when she was very little, and he might feel a bit put-upon if asked to do it again.
It was only as she turned back to check on Iole for the umpteenth time that day that Pandy had seen it: the thin brown line growing steadily into a large brown mass heading straight for them.
“Homer!” she’d yelled at that moment, pointing.
With just a quick glance behind, Homer recognized what was coming.
“Get Dido up!” he cried. Pandy called to her dog, who’d been walking along beside, and at once Dido made the tremendous leap. Instantly Homer spurred his camel forward and the others had immediately followed. Now, he knew, they were in a race for their lives. And they were probably going to lose.
Suddenly, a fleck of foam hit Pandy’s right cheek. As she wiped it away, another flew into her eye, and then another caught the tip of Dido’s ear. She looked at her camel, its mouth covered in creamy white spittle as the creature began to tire. She looked back at Homer’s camel; its eyes were rimmed with red, evidence that its heart was beating too hard. Hermes had said that a camel was the heartiest of beasts, able to go weeks without food or water in desperate conditions, but these three had been running flat out for hours and they weren’t immortal: the strain was clear.
“We can’t keep going!” she screamed.
“We have to!” Homer yelled back, urging his camel onward.
Pandy’s mind flashed back to the deck of the ship The Peacock as it crossed the Ionian Sea on its way to Egypt, desperately trying to outrun a whirling black funnel that ultimately destroyed the ship and her crew. Then she thought of the great mass of the heavens forming an impenetrable wall around the Atlas Mountains, which she’d had to crawl under.
“Gods,” Pandy thought angrily as another wad of spittle landed on her chin. “I am so sick of large, loud walls and masses and whatever trying to destroy us!”
Suddenly, Pandy heard a different sound: a coughing, choking gag. Glancing to her left she saw Iole, barely on her camel, her arms flopping helplessly because she was no longer strong enough to handle the reins, her head shaking violently up and down with each stride, and her tiny first meal of flatbread and dates coming up and dribbling out of her mouth. Suddenly, Iole’s hands flew high in the air as she was pitched backward and hurled to the ground.
“Look out!” Pandy shrieked as Homer’s camel narrowly missed trampling Iole’s head where she lay on the sand. Immediately, both Pandy and Homer brought their camels around and were off their mounts in seconds. Without warning, Homer’s camel knelt on the ground, closed its eyes, and whinnied to the other two. It was a sure sign that all three camels knew there was no outrunning the mass and would go no farther. But, as Pandy watched, the two other camels approached the first and knelt beside it, forming a small semicircle—and a barrier between her, Homer, and Iole and the storm. Pandy took this to mean that they were helping their human riders.
The brown mass was almost upon them.
“What do we do?” Pandy called to Homer.
“It’s a sandstorm, Pandora,” Homer yelled over the growing din, his eyes avoiding hers. “There’s nothing we can do.”
In the middle of the desert, with a tremendous wave of sand about to hit them full force, the only thing on Pandy’s mind was that Homer had used a tone with her as if she were the stupidest person in the world. As if she were someone else. For a split second, that was the entire focus of her brain.
“Get over here!” Homer yelled. Homer had carried Iole to his camel and was nestling her in a crook between its forelegs and belly, using the animal’s back as a shield. “Move!”
“Dido, come!” Pandy commanded, and he was at her side in a second. Holding him close, Pandy threw herself against the camel, feeling its warmth, its chest still heaving from the hard run.
“Give me the rope!” Homer yelled, a momentary raise in the pitch and roar of the storm drowning out his words.
Pandy only sa
w his lips move.
“What?” Pandy cried.
Without pausing to repeat himself, Homer grabbed her leather pouch and quickly fished out the enchanted rope. He gestured wildly until Pandy understood.
“Rope,” she cried, the first grains of sand crunching against her teeth as the storm bore down. “Thicker and longer!”
At once, the rope began to change in her hand. It grew thicker, but it also became much shorter. Then without warning, it turned into a tiny string. Then the rope grew longer, but it looked as if it had been burned in a fire.
“There’s something wrong with it!” Pandy screamed.
“Give it to me!” Homer yelled, and without even looking at it, he yanked the rope from her hands. In Homer’s grip, it remained long enough that he was able to frantically tie one end around his waist, then loop it in a knot around Iole, another around Dido, and finally tie the other end to Pandy.
“Hold us fast!” Pandy yelled down to the rope, hoping that whatever was wrong was just a momentary glitch.
Homer was now furiously pulling at the camel’s saddle blanket, trying to wrench it free from where it was pinned underneath. With a grunt, he tore it loose and tossed it over Iole and himself.
“For Ares’ sake!” Homer screamed at Pandy, his voice as full of rage and fury as the sound of the storm only seconds from impact. “Pull your cloak over your head and get under!”
Pandy wrapped her cloak tightly around herself and dove under the blanket with Dido just as the thick cloud of harsh, churning sand hit them with the force of a wall being blown apart. Pandy felt as if she were being beaten on all sides, poked with pointed sticks, and stung by millions of bees. And even though the rope was binding them all together, she could feel the unbelievable push of the wind buffeting her legs, shoulders, and head. She knew that without the rope, she could easily have been driven away from the others and out into the desert. She ran her hands along the rope’s surface and found tiny metal spikes poking out. The next instant, they were gone.
And then the sand began to find its way in.
Pandy’s mother’s cloak, even with a thick blanket covering it, was no match for the immense volume of fine sand whirling and swirling, and soon her legs, arms, neck, face, and hair were coated in layer upon layer. She covered her face with her hands but in vain. The sand was working its way through every crevice, no matter how small—filling her ears, pushing under her eyelids and into her mouth, and, worst of all, slowly inching up her nose.
Again, an image from the past flared in her mind: falling through the desert floor in Egypt and into the Chamber of Despair and thinking she was going to drown as the sand instantly filled her mouth, nose, and ears. But that was quickly over as she crashed through the ceiling of the chamber and went plummeting through the dark, open air to the ground below.
This … this was going to be a slow, agonizing death for all of them … lost in a foreign land, Iole sick or possibly already dead, Homer unaccountably distant, and her quest unfinished. Miserable, she envisioned their lungs filling slowly with sand.
The only bright spot, Pandy mused, desperately trying to spit out the grit, was that Alcie wasn’t here to suffer through it with them.
Alcie was already gone.
CHAPTER TWO
A New Friend
“What do you mean, you haven’t seen her yet?” said the first shade, hurrying along the palace corridor, passing enormous dark, lavishly decorated but empty rooms, dead-end porticos, courtyards full of creeping black plants and slow-dripping fountains.
“I’ve been on vacation with my daughter’s family in the Elysian Fields’ upper campground. I arranged it with the Dark Lord weeks ago. I wouldn’t have gone if I’d known there was going to be such a commotion. And who knew we’d have a guest!” said the second, keeping pace. A dim, ugly light from an unseen source barely illuminated the way for the transparent figures. “Tell me about her.”
“Well, first off, she’s very young. Too young to have been taken in such a horrible way.”
“How?” asked the second shade.
“Snake bite.”
“Ouch.”
“Tragic. But she’s got quite a mouth on her, especially for one so young. Swears like a warrior, but she uses fruit,” the first shade continued.
“Original,” said the second.
“Perhaps, though it’s not going over so well with our master. But she’s very pretty. Beautiful reddish hair. At least I think it’s red—hard to tell in this dim light. But, oh! The best thing about her is …”
“Yes? Yes?” asked the second shade.
“She’s got a spark! She’s still got some life left in her!” said the first, pausing outside the door to a small antechamber. “I didn’t realize how much I missed real ‘life’—blood-pumping, heart-beating life! She’s a breath of fresh air!”
“Lemon rinds! I can hear you, you know!” yelled a voice from inside a larger room.
The shades in the corridor quickly hushed and took up their posts, relieving two other shades that had been keeping watch over the young girl.
“And, yes, thank you, I am still pomegranate a-live!” they heard her cry. “At least, I think I am. Maybe. I don’t know anymore. Hey! How long am I gonna have to stay here? The tapestries are cool and everything, and the lamps never seem to burn out, but can I get a window? And is there anything with color anywhere? Look, if I’m worm food already, then will somebody point me in the direction of the Elysian Fields so I can get to rompin’?”
The first shade smiled to the other.
“See what I mean?” she began whispering. “She’s full of—”
But a huge figure at the entrance to the antechamber silenced her immediately.
“But if I am not apricot-apricoty-cot-cot-cot dead,” the shades heard, bowing their heads as the figure passed, followed by a second, moving toward the larger room, “then somebody’s gonna have some explaining to do!”
“Alcestis!” said Hades, filling the entire entryway. “You will be quiet.”
Alcie, from the low couch on which she’d been lying for hours it seemed, whipped her head around to stare at the Dark Lord of the Underworld, paused a moment during which she thought better of staying down, got to her feet, then dropped to her knees.
“I know,” Hades began slowly, “that this has been hard for you. It has been hard for all of us. Believe me.”
“I’m sorry,” Alcie said softly.
“Yes, I’m certain that you are. I also know you can’t help yourself. Stand now.”
As she got to her feet, Alcie suddenly felt like she was five.
“However,” Hades went on, “I am working very hard to find a solution to this whole mess. Now, while time means absolutely nothing to us here, I have just realized that you have been our … guest … for almost twelve of your days and have basically done nothing but sit.”
Alcie was shocked. She couldn’t have been sitting in this oddly beautiful but dark and dreary room for twelve days. Half a day, a day at most. She hadn’t slept or eaten. Time really didn’t mean anything.
“I do apologize,” Hades was continuing, “that this is our first meeting since the day you arrived; I don’t think either of us was in terribly good spirits—no pun intended—to have made a proper greeting then. You were flailing about so, you had to be enchanted into submission and I had to essentially empty my treasury to Charon so that he would ferry you across the river Styx. And I have been busy since. So … so I have now entreated my lovely queen to come and visit with you.”
Immediately, Alcie saw the smaller figure slightly behind Hades: a young woman, sumptuously dressed and bejeweled, only a little older than Alcie, who was waving her hands up and down wildly in a very enthusiastic greeting.
Hades turned to address the woman, who instantly became still, refined, and proper, clear eyes gazing at Alcie, hands at her sides.
“Even though these are the months allotted for her to spend with her mother on Mount Olympus, my w
ife, Persephone,” Hades said, gesturing to the woman, “has graciously consented to return here and will be happy to engage you …”
Hades turned back to Alcie, and Persephone broke into a huge grin and clapped her hands silently.
Alcie’s mouth started to fall open slightly as she stared at the crazy woman.
“… in conversation. She can tell you all about her underworld kingdom. Isn’t that so, my love?”
Hades turned again to Persephone and found her calm, even a little bored, nodding her head slightly in agreement.
“She will see to it …”
Hades continued, turning once again to Alcie as Persephone raised her hands and waggled them joyfully, mouthing the word “Wahoo!”
“… that all your needs are met. Perhaps you are hungry?”
Strangely, Alcie wasn’t, and she began to say so, then noticed Persephone’s head bobbing furiously, directing her how to answer.
“I’m all right … no … no, I’m not all right. I am hungry,” Alcie said slowly, gazing past Hades to Persephone, who gave her a thumbs-up and grinned madly. “I am very … very? … very hungry!”
“Right, then,” said Hades. “We shall see that food is prepared. And now if you will excuse me, I think I know how all of this may be concluded to everyone’s satisfaction. Wife,” he said, turning around as Persephone solemnly bowed her head, “I leave her in your care.”
With that, Hades strode from the room, dismissed the shade guards, and passed through the antechamber and into the corridor. Persephone crooked her neck to watch him as long as she could, then put her finger to her lips as a sign for Alcie to be quiet, waited several seconds more, and then finally whirled around.
“Hi!” she exclaimed, throwing her arms about Alcie in a tremendous hug that nearly knocked the wind out of her. Alcie caught a faint scent of roses and lavender, and saw flickers of fuchsia and light pink in the threads of her gown.
“Oh my gods, oh my gods, oh my gods! I am so happy to see you! He says I consented to come back down here … phah! I begged, do you hear me, I begged! You know my story, right?”
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