by William Tenn
Although she couldn't be the whole answer. She didn't know enough about anything outside of the latest quotations on whiskey-by-the-case-F.O.B.-distillery to have created the peculiar chronological trap that the apartment contained. Who was it then? Or what? And, above all and most important, why?
Dictys had come up, surrounded by his bully-boys in semi-sarongs.
"A bad day," he told the townsfolk. "Didn't catch a single solitary horror. Just this fake hero."
"That's all right, Dictys," the man who had previously expressed confidence in the king's thermal reliability reassured him. "He'll still be a good excuse for a party."
"Sure," someone else chimed in. "With an execution, the evening won't be entirely lost."
"I know, I know," Dictys admitted morosely. "But I wanted a specimen for the zoo. An execution won't be the same thing at all."
While most of the surrounding individuals applauded the extremely commendable detachment of so scientific an attitude, Percy saw a man with a voluminous white mantle push out to the front of the group and look at him more closely and curiously than anyone else had. The man had a peculiarly bright saffron skin, Percy noticed, when a fold of the cloak came down from his face for a moment.
"What made you think he was a monster?" the man asked Dictys, putting the fold carefully back in place.
"The chest he was riding, from the cliff, it looked like part of him. It was round and white and had all kinds of metal pieces sticking out. I've never seen anything like it before—and I've been to the mainland twice."
"Where is the chest?"
The large man pointed over his shoulder with a thumb the size of a small banana. "Oh, we left it on the cliff with the rest of the stuff he had in it. You can never tell about strange pieces of furniture: sometimes they come alive or burst into flame or—Say! Are you a stranger in town?"
The white-cloaked man dropped a hand to his mid-section. He passed it once across his abdomen and, as Dictys advanced truculently upon him, he disappeared.
There were breaking bubbles of comment all through the crowd.
"What was that?"
"Where in the world did he go, Eunapius?"
"I don't know but, if you ask me, he wasn't all human."
"Mama, I wanna go home!"
"Sh-h-h, Leontis. There may be a cooking today. You wouldn't want to miss that, would you?"
"What do you think he was, Dictys?"
Their leader scratched his matted hair. "Well, he couldn't have been what I thought he was, just an ordinary stranger passing through. I wanted to grab him and put him under arrest. If he was a stranger or a wandering merchant and had forgotten to register with the commander of the palace guard, he'd have been liable to the Foreigner's Penalty Tax."
"You mean all his goods impounded and his right arm burned off before his face?"
"More or less, at the discretion of the guard commander. But I think he must have been either a wizard or a major monster. In fact, from the color of his skin, I'd say he was a human-type monster. Wasn't it gold?"
Agesilaus nodded. "It was gold, all right. What they call on the mainland the Olympian type of monster. Those aren't supposed to be too bad. According to the mainlanders, they help men lots of times."
"When they help men, it's for their own good reasons," Dictys growled. "Not that I have anything against major monsters," he explained hurriedly to Agesilaus. "They have their own private quarrels, and men should stay out of them if they don't want to get badly hurt."
From the anxious speed with which he had added the last remark, Percy deduced a certain real fear of what the man called "major monsters." Evidently, minor monsters were something else again, since Dictys had been fishing for them, and the king maintained a kind of zoo. But why had the golden-skinned stranger been so interested in him? Had he something to do with Percy's arrival here?
He had long lost all feeling in his wrists and ankles and was wondering dizzily if they intended to keep him hanging in the village square as a kind of permanent decoration, when there was a musical clank of metal armor and an uneven tramping of feet.
A very hoarse voice said, "King Polydectes of Seriphos will see the prisoner now."
Percy sighed with real gusto as two men shouldered his pole again and began jouncing him along the main avenue. Not only was he going to go to a place where his side of the story could be heard at last, but he now knew the name of the island kingdom on which his errant bathtub had stumbled so unceremoniously.
Seriphos. He went through his memory rapidly. No, he didn't know anything about an island called Seriphos. Except what he had learned in the past hour or so. That it was fairly close to the Greek mainland and therefore in the warm Aegean Sea. And that it was awaiting the fulfillment of an ancient legend to the effect that the Gorgon killer Perseus was to land there sometime before starting out on his heroic quest.
Also, that it had a judicial system that bore a close resemblance to a power saw.
He was carried up a single step and into a courtyard with an enormous ceiling supported by four massive pillars of stone. Menon slipped the pole out of the rope loops at his hands and feet, and the other bearer cut his bonds with a few generous slashes of a long bronze knife.
They stood him on his feet and stepped back. "Feel better now?"
Percy pitched forward on his face. He bounced hard on the painted cement floor.
"His legs," Menon explained to his buddy. "They've fallen asleep."
"Always happens," the other said professionally. "Every damn time."
The return of circulation was grim, swirling agony. Percy moaned and rolled about on the floor, rubbing his wrists and ankles with hands that felt like wooden boards. A few people came over and squatted down beside him for a moment to stare at his face or watch his struggles. No one offered to help.
After a while, he was able to bow-leg painfully upright. His guards grabbed him and shoved him between them against a pillar.
Most of the townspeople had followed him into the hall. The news was spreading, it would seem. Every few moments someone else came in—butchers with their dripping meat cleavers, peasants with their scythes, women carrying rush baskets filled with berries and vegetables.
The newcomers would have him pointed out to them. Then they would either smile and nod slowly in satisfaction, or they would turn and run out fast, in evident haste to get Cousin Hybrias or Aunt Thea before all the fun was over.
In the middle of the courtyard, beside a blackened hearth roughly the size of the entire apartment which Percy had so recently vacated, a man sat on an enormously wide stone throne.
At first glance, he seemed to be lolling in a large number of strangely shaped cushions. Closer examination, however, revealed the cushions to be a fine collection of young and pretty girls who varied as much in their coloring as they did in their interest in the affairs of state going on before them. One extremely pretty blonde who formed part of the king's foot-stool was snoringly sound asleep. Another, a gorgeous Negro girl, most of whose body was obscured by a large masculine shoulder, was expostulating vehemently into the monarch's right ear and waving her hand at a moaning figure prostrate before the throne.
"See here, Tontibbi," the king told her at last in a highly exasperated voice, "I've got my own system of punishments, and I don't want any decadent females from an over-civilized part of the world to be suggesting changes all the time, no matter how imaginative they might be. We're rough-and-ready folk here on Seriphos, and we go in for simple entertainments. And if you African snobs want to go around calling us barbarians, well, go right ahead. We're proud of the name."
The dark girl scowled and subsided back into the recesses of the great throne. The assembled crowd applauded vehemently.
"That's the way, Polydectes. You tell these stuck-up foreigners where to get off!" an elderly farmer cheered.
"Well," Polydectes said slowly and thoughtfully. "The way I see it—why shouldn't what was good enough in my father's day be good eno
ugh for me?"
"Don't you just love the way he puts things?" a beaming housewife remarked to her neighbor. "I think it's lovely to have a king who's so clever with words!"
"Besides," her friend replied, "I don't understand all this crazy desire for change all the time. What could be better than disposing of criminals by cooking them over a slow fire? The way King Polydectes's chef does it, we usually get four or five hours out of the weakest man. He starts after supper, and by the time he's through, it's quite dark, and everyone feels like having a good night's sleep after a fine, enjoyable evening. Personally, I wouldn't dream of asking for anything more."
Percy felt his stomach turn in a slow, rocking half-circle. The man who was lying before the king screamed a little bit and tried to grind his face into the cement floor.
What kind of people were they anyway? They talked of the most horrible things with the same equanimity as if they might be discussing the latest movie or wrestling match they'd seen the night before on television.
Well, of course, public executions were the closest these people came to such things as movies or television. Percy remembered stories he'd read in the newspapers of crowds turning out to attend hangings in various parts of the United States. That was the twentieth century! And an execution was still a sufficiently fine spectacle for many men to bring their dates, for some women to bring their children, and for a few enterprising businessmen to hawk tiny replicas of the gallows on which a fellow human was frantically kicking his life away.
All of which was well and good, but didn't help him very much in his present predicament. If only he could figure out some approach which these people would honor, if only he could learn a little bit about their ideas of right and wrong in time to do himself some good!
He strained to catch every detail of what was going on. He needed clues as to their courtroom procedure. Would he get a lawyer to defend him? He doubted it from what he'd seen so far. Yet there had been talk of a trial, there had been mention of a jury. There was a little frozen comfort in these civilized institutions no matter how they were applied, he decided.
And then he wasn't so sure.
"I'm getting tired of this," the king broke into the prostrate prisoner's brokenhearted babble. He lifted his head and waved vaguely at the assembled crowd. "Hey, jury! Any of you willing to insist on this man's innocence?"
"Uh-uh. Guilty!"
"Guilty as hell!"
"The low-down beast! Cooking's too good for him. Hey, Brion, what'd he do?"
"How should I know? I just came in. Must have been something bad, or he wouldn't be on trial."
"Guilty, guilty, guilty! Let's get on to the next case. That looks good!"
"Raise the prisoner for sentencing," King Polydectes commanded. Two guards leaped forward and lifted the writhing, pleading man. The king pointed a forefinger solemnly at the ceiling. "By virtue of the power vested in me by me," he intoned, "I hereby sentence you to—to... just a minute now. To—"
"To cooking over a slow fire," the Negro girl behind him said bitterly. "Is it ever anything else?"
Polydectes pounded a barrel-like fist angrily into his open palm. "You better be careful, Tontibbi! You'll go into the kettle yourself, if you don't watch out! You might have spoiled the whole legality of the trial! All right, take him away," he said in disgust. "You heard what she said. Do it."
"I'm sorry, Polydectes," the girl murmured contritely. "I get so bored! Go ahead, sentence him yourself."
The king shook his head unhappily.
"Naa-a-ah! There's no pleasure in it anymore. Just try to control yourself from now on, huh?"
"I will," she promised, snuggling down again.
As they lifted the vaguely struggling man by his arms, Percy gasped in horror. He understood why he hadn't been able to make out any of the prisoner's words—his tongue had been torn out! There were great drying crusts of blood all over his face and still more coming down his chin to his chest. The man was obviously so weak from loss of blood that he could hardly stand by himself, but so terrified by the agonizing imminence of his doom that he had been desperately trying to make himself understood in some way. His hands waved hopelessly, and a dreadful tongueless moan kept rolling out of his mouth as he was dragged, his toes plowing thin furrows in the dust of the floor, off to a small room which was probably the execution antechamber.
"See?" Menon said to Percy, who was feebly massaging his belly. "He tried to influence the jury before trial. From what I hear, they were the soldiers."
It began to make a kind of highly disagreeable sense, Percy decided. Every citizen on the island—soldiers, civilians, policemen, noblemen, whatever—was a potential member of the jury in any criminal case. The fact that these people took the responsibilities of office rather lightly by the standards of the world he had just left was not as important as their right to crowd into any trial and participate in the verdict. Therefore, if you were arrested on Seriphos for an offense, no matter how flimsy the accusation, you must, above all, not protest your innocence. The man who arrested you would be a talesman, and the punishment for violating this particular law was swift and comprehensive. He began to feel a surprising glow of gratitude for the gag that Dictys had stuffed in his mouth. Why, the man had actually been human even though, instead of pulling Percy's tongue out, he had virtually shoved it down his throat.
But how could you defend yourself when people like these brought you to trial?
"Next case!" the king roared. "And let's cut it short. We're all getting hungry, and there's a pretty good execution scheduled for after supper. I don't like to keep my people waiting."
"And that's why we call him Good King Polydectes," a woman murmured as Percy was dragged before the throne and flung down hard.
"Charged," a somewhat familiar voice said above his head, "with impersonating a hero, i.e., Perseus, who, according to the legend—"
"I heard the legend, Dictys," his brother said grumpily. "We went all through it in the previous case. Let's find this man guilty, too, and start to adjourn. I don't know why there are so many Perseuses these days and so few fake Heracleses or Theseuses. I guess it's like anything else: someone starts a fad, and before you know what's happened, everybody's doing it."
Dictys's curiosity had been aroused. "What do you mean you went all through it in the previous case?"
"Oh, a couple of my soldiers were on duty up on the hills investigating a report that those small-size monsters, the flying ones, you know which I mean...?"
"Harpies? You mean the ones with heads of girls and the bodies, wings, and claws of birds, don't you?"
Polydectes sighed. "Those. It's wonderful to have a brother who knows his monsters so well. I get all mixed up whenever I try to keep them straight in my head. I just have a simple rule: if it has no more and no less than two arms, two legs, and one head, then it's human. Otherwise, it's a monster."
"That leaves out the golden-skinned Olympians. They're not human, either. I don't know exactly what they are, but a lot of people would classify them with the major monsters."
"And a lot wouldn't," the king pointed out. "So there you are. Where exactly it is that you are, I don't know, but—Anyway, there's been a couple of reports lately that these things, these harpies, have been smuggling contraband into the island from the air and cutting into the royal revenues of Seriphos. I sent a squad up to Mount Lassus to look into the matter. They were settling down to a little meal before going into action, when this man came blundering down the hill. They arrested him as soon as he told them he was Perseus. After they arrested him, of course, and he still tried to argue, they punished him on the spot for jury-tampering under my edict of last summer. Now, I felt they might have been a bit too zealous, but—What is this fellow still doing here? Didn't we find him guilty?"
"Not yet," Dictys assured him. "You haven't asked the jury. But that's all right. I'm in no hurry."
"Well, I am." The monarch spread his hands out at his eager people. "Guilty, eh?"
"Oh, sure!"
"Guilty ten times over!"
"His crimes show in his face, every one of them!"
"Hooray for Just King Polydectes!"
Just King Polydectes beamed. "Thank you, my friends, thank you. Now, as for the sentencing—"
Percy leaped to his feet. "What kind of a trial is this anyway?" he raged. "You might give a man a chance for his life!"
King Polydectes shook his head in amazement. He leaned forward to stare at Percy closely, almost squashing a feminine footstool who had just begun to stretch. He was as large as his brother but, since his waist competed burstingly with his height, the effect was overpowering. Also, while most of the people on the island—male and female—seemed to dress in a negligent sheepskin or sagging loincloth, the two royal brothers wore richly dyed woolen garments, and the king sported what must once have been a clean tunic of the finest linen.
"I don't know what's upset you, young fellow, but you've had all the chance for your life that the laws of Seriphos allow. Now, why don't you be quiet about it and take your punishment like a man?"
"Listen, please listen!" Percy begged. "Not only am I not a citizen of Seriphos, but I'm not even a citizen of this world. All I want is the chance of finding a way back, practically anything that—"
"That's the whole point," the king explained. "Our laws are not made for citizens—at least not the ones about cooking over a slow fire. Citizens who go wrong get thrown off cliffs or strangled outside the walls at high noon, things like that. Only non-citizens get punished this way. This is how I keep my people happy to be under my rule. Now do you understand? Let's not have any more trouble, huh? Let's be grown-up about paying the penalty for our crimes."
Percy grabbed at his hair, pulled out an exasperated clump, and jumped on it. "Look, the way this whole thing started—I won't begin with Mrs. Danner—it's impossible, insane to stand here and watch what—Just a minute." He took a deep breath, conscious of the necessity to remain calm, to be very, very persuasive—to be, above all, reasonable. "There was a slight misunderstanding when I met your brother. A sea serpent—" he paused for a moment, took a deep breath and went on "—an honest-to-gosh real sea serpent came up to me in my—in my floating chest and welcomed me as the son of Danae. So when I was asked by Dictys who I was—"