The Eighth Arrow

by J. Augustine Wetta

  Helen rolled her eyes. “Men like you always assume that you’re in charge. For the best, I suppose. If you ever really ran things, there would be nothing but wars and orgies.” She looked me over with a wry smile. “Well, thank you just the same for saving me.” Out of the corner of my vision I watched her close her eyes and lean her head back. “I am so tired,” she purred. “How long have I been blown about in that in storm, I wonder? A thousand years? Ten thousand?”

  “You’re safe now,” declared Diomedes. He was pretending to rest, but I could see he was watching her as well.

  “Thank you, Son of Tydeus,” she answered, yawning. Then she drew one arm over her eyes and slept—just like that. It couldn’t have been a comfortable position, but it was graceful.

  When I looked again at Diomedes, he too was asleep. He had the most amazing ability to sleep and wake at will. Sleep—like most everything else in his life—was a mission. He’d spend no more time on it than was absolutely necessary. Do it. Have it done. Move on. He was the same way about food.

  I watched the rain, marveling over the woman I’d left behind in Limbo. I had always underestimated her. Who else had I misjudged? Could I be missing something even now? Before long, I too drifted off.

  I dreamt I stood between a tiger and a tree.

  The tree was an olive, grafted to wild stock. I stood before it within a circle of light, and just outside that circle, the tiger’s eyes, bright and green as glass, blinked in the gloom. I used my sword to dig a trench, and when it had been dug, I killed the tiger and filled the trench with its blood. Then, from out of the darkness stepped eight souls—seven of the suitors I had killed in my home when I returned from Troy: Calydoneos, Antinous, Rhomachos, Ithacos, Thoas, Agelaos, Stratios; then, last of all, the giant Ajax. When they had drunk their fill from the trench, they prophesied, each closing his eyes in turn and lifting his hands to the heavens. But the words poured from their lips in a jumble so that the harder I tried, the less I understood. And through it all, Ajax alone remained silent, standing like a mountain in their midst. When the others had departed, I addressed him. “Great Son of Telemon, Bulwark of the Achaeans, why do you keep company with those dogs? Surely there is no one more blessed than you, and none to come in the future. While you were still alive, we honored you as we did the gods. Now that you have crossed the Styx, you must be a great prince among the dead.” Yet Ajax did not answer but receded silently into the darkness.

  At this I awoke, astonished and dispirited and wondering what the dream could mean. I understood why Ajax would not speak. In life, we had parted on bad terms. In death, it seemed, we were to remain so. But the tiger and the tree and the seven suitors? This was a mystery.

  Of course, sometimes, a dream is just a dream.

  Beyond our shelter, the storm continued to rage. Across from me, Helen lay still with her arm across her eyes. She was spattered with gore. But more important—and this I hadn’t noticed before—there was something wrong with her hand.

  “What happened to you?” I asked when at last she awoke.

  Helen looked down at her bloodied cloak. “Nothing beyond what has always happened here,” she said. “The souls in this storm are all that remain of those who surrendered reason to passion—and lost their heavenly inheritance in the process.”

  “No. I mean, what happened to your hand?”

  She scowled and slipped it under her shawl.

  “You lost a finger?”

  “An accident.”

  “What sort?”

  “What do you care? It was an accident. I have a flaw now. Does that make you happy?” She seemed genuinely hurt.

  “Calm down,” I said. “We’ve all got scars.” But it did make me a little happy, and I might have questioned her further if Diomedes hadn’t awakened. “We have slept adequately,” he declared.

  Helen stretched and yawned. (Like a cat, I thought to myself, and with about the same loyalties.) “I haven’t slept nearly enough.”

  “I’m sure you’re exhausted,” answered Diomedes, softening a little. “You’ve been through a lot. But we can’t stay here. We have a mission to accomplish. Besides that, this shelter is starting to stink. It’s making me sick.”

  I had been wondering about the smell myself. It was like dead fish. Or seaweed.

  Helen blushed. “It must be me. I haven’t had a proper bath in years.” She ran her hands down her neck and over her shoulders. Like she was bathing.

  Diomedes coughed and smoothed his hair. “Actually, it isn’t so bad. And I’m not exactly sick. Just kind of empty in the middle. Around the stomach.”

  “Diomedes,” I said, grateful for the change of topic, “I think you’re hungry. It’s been so long since we’ve eaten, you’ve forgotten what hunger feels like.” I opened the leather pouch and looked at the twelve little loaves.

  “Is that what I think it is?” gasped Helen. Before I could stop her, she reached into the bag and snatched one of them out.

  Diomedes leaned forward. “I wouldn’t—”

  But she had already popped it into her mouth. “Wouldn’ whad?” she asked through a mouth full of bread.

  “Wouldn’t eat it,” I answered. “We think it might be poisoned.”

  Helen stopped chewing and looked at me, then at Diomedes, then at the giant, who was cowering against the far wall of our shelter. Then she shrugged and swallowed. “What harm could it do? I am dead already.”

  Diomedes and I waited to see if anything would happen. But nothing did. And nothing continued to happen. “It did not taste poisoned,” said Helen, “but I have been dead for a long time. It might be that I cannot taste it.”

  “Or maybe it’s just regular bread,” said Diomedes.

  “It is not,” said the giant.

  “Not what?” I asked. “Not bread? Is it a sort of fruit? A stone? It doesn’t look like a stone.”

  “It is not just bread,” the giant continued. “It is not bread at all. And I will not speak of it further. The next time you open that bag, you will lose your guide.”

  Helen cast him a bemused look. “It most certainly is bread. I could be dead a thousand years, but I would still know a loaf of bread when I saw it. Your giant is either a fool or a fabricator.”

  I looked back at the giant, but he wouldn’t say another word.

  “Well, we won’t run out of water anytime soon,” said Diomedes, changing the subject. “But we will need to leave this shelter, and I don’t see any sign that the storm is letting up.”

  I looked out into the rain. “The wind is strong. How do you figure on walking in it?”

  “We could each tie ourselves to a big rock,” suggested Helen.

  Diomedes and I exchanged a glance. Yes, this was Helen, to be sure. Long on ideas, short on wit.

  “Tell me, then,” I said, “how would you suggest we move the rocks?”

  Helen thought some more. “We could tie ourselves to the giant.”

  “Then what would we tie the giant to?” I replied.

  A longer silence. I watched Helen closely. She wasn’t the sharpest dart in the quiver, but she might be on to something. If we were going to make any headway through the storm, we would need to anchor ourselves somehow.

  And then it came to me. “Diomedes, hand me the rope,” I said. I spread out my arrows on the floor and sorted them by weight.

  “What are you up to?” he asked, looking rather anxious. In spite of his long association with me—or perhaps because of it—Diomedes had remained skeptical of any strategy that did not favor punching something or pushing it out of the way.

  “I’m going to attach this rope to one of my arrows, then shoot it out into the storm. It’s bound to stick in something sooner or later, and when it does, we’ll just pull ourselves along.”

  Diomedes grimaced, and Helen put her face in her hands.

  “What are you so upset about?” I said. “It beats tying yourself to a big rock.”

  “How is the arrow going to fly anywhere in th
at wind?” asked Diomedes as I frayed the end of the rope with my sword. “It will blow about like a leaf.”

  “Not if it’s missing its feathers.” I singled out the arrow that had lost its fletching and began to whittle a hole near the base of the shaft.

  “Does this make any sense to you?” Diomedes asked the giant.

  “Yes,” he answered.

  “I don’t need accuracy,” I said, working the ends of the rope through the hole. “I just need something that will hold its course through all that wind. Since this arrow has no vanes, it won’t get blown about so much. And it’s heavy, so if I pull hard, it ought to fly pretty far.”

  Helen and Diomedes remained unconvinced, but since neither could come up with a better plan, we went ahead with mine.

  The first few attempts were disappointing. The arrow clattered against stone surfaces, got tangled up in the rope, or stuck shallow and had to be pulled back; but eventually I got the hang of it and landed a firm shot between two sharp rocks about a stone’s throw away. I pulled the rope taut and secured it to a broken pillar at the back of our shelter.

  “You first,” I said to the giant.

  “Me?”

  “You’re the strongest.”

  He nodded, pushed his way to the front of our shelter, gave the rope one hard tug, then stepped into the storm. He spent most of his effort staying on his feet, but he did eventually make it to the other side, and once he had made certain the arrow was securely fixed, he braced himself and signaled for us to follow.

  I smiled at Diomedes. “You’re next.”

  He bit his lip and looked at Helen and me. “You’re absolutely certain there’s no other way.”

  “No other,” I said. Then I clapped him on the shoulder and looped the rope under his belt. “Trust me.”

  CHAPTER 15

  THE THIRD ARROW

  DIOMEDES TIGHTENED his helmet and blew out his breath. He braced himself against the side of our shelter, cast one last desperate look in my direction, and then whispered a curse and stepped into the rain. He had taken maybe three steps when the wind caught his shield and sent him hurtling end over end. He spun around the rope like a flag on a wheel until at last the wind hurled him back into the hut. He hit the wall with a thud and lay panting on the ground.

  “Are you all right?” asked Helen, bending over him to brush the rain from his face. It was dark in our little shelter, but I could see he was a little green.

  “If it weren’t so painful, I might have enjoyed that,” said Diomedes, and then he gasped, rolled over, and puked. Helen retreated to the far side of the shelter. Since we hadn’t eaten in three thousand years, there wasn’t much to show for his efforts. Before long, he was ready to try again.

  “Now use your shield to steady yourself against the wind,” I said before pushing him out.

  This time, he did not spin around the rope but hurtled along the length of it, dragged by his shield arm, barking every time he hit a rock. There wasn’t much besides the rubble to slow him down, so by the time he reached the end of the rope, he was moving fast. The giant, arms outstretched and braced for the impact, was knocked on his back; and the two of them might have careened off into the hurricane if the giant had not shrewdly buried the arrow under several large stones.

  Next, I secured Helen to the rope by her sash. She tucked up her tunic and stepped into the wind. Would you believe, she slid across like a bird in flight—straight into Diomedes’ waiting arms. She could not have been more graceful if she’d actually had wings. Some folk are just born to look good, I guess.

  Now that it was my turn at last, I realized there was a flaw in my plan—I had failed to take into account what should be done with the rope once the last man came across. Obviously, I had to untie my end so that it could be reused once I arrived at the other. But that meant one end of the line would be unanchored. Well, like my father used to tell me, there are three things you don’t do in life: you don’t steal from a Cyclops, you don’t swindle a witch, and you don’t change your plans once you’ve put them in motion. It occurred to me as I peered out into the raging storm that I had deliberately violated his first two prohibitions and that the third wasn’t good advice anyway. So, throwing caution to the wind (in more ways than one), I untied the rope, fastened it to my belt, sat down on my shield, and launched myself into the squall, hoping that the combined efforts of the giant and Diomedes would be enough to reel me in.

  I flipped about in that whistling wind like a lure on a fishing line. One moment I was bouncing head over heels through mounds of crushed marble; the next I was soaring through the air, caught up in a cyclone of bloodied flesh; then I was slammed to the ground again, where more bricks and marble broke my fall. My companions did their best to haul me in, and as I lay gasping at their feet, looking up into a blinding cloud of rain and sleet, I thought to myself that there must be a better way.

  There wasn’t. We did, however, adapt to the process as we worked our way across that second ring of Hell, but I was knocked unconscious so many times that even now the whole episode remains a blur. At last we reached the edge of the storm, where the tornadoes yielded to a slow, greasy rain. Here we found the remains of some sort of temple, long demolished but not inhospitable compared to the chaos we’d left behind. Pillars of various sizes lay scattered across the marble floor, which, though running with rain, was at least free of mud and sharp stone. There we decided to rest.

  This too turned out to be a bad idea.

  We sat for some time, collecting our wits and admiring the new dents in our armor, the storm like a wall to our right, and a thick fog rolling on our left. Curiously enough, the rope had weathered the storm without any visible damage, and this lifted my spirits. But more curious still, Helen had come through without a single scratch or bruise. “Gracefulness is not without its advantages,” she said with a smile, and charming as that smile was, I couldn’t help feeling a little suspicious.

  The giant, for his part, did not appear at all comfortable. He paced back and forth like a cat in a cage, and every now and then, he would stop to face the storm, as if in expectation of something yet unseen.

  We didn’t have to wait long to see it. Diomedes and I were preparing to move on when the thing made its appearance. I had my shield up and was pulling the strap over my head when Helen stopped and whirled toward the clouds. “What is it?” I asked, unshouldering my bow; but already I could hear something moving toward us through the fog. It made a sound like a whisper but with a bit of a squeal at the end, and it pronounced exactly one word: “H-H-H-Helen.”

  Helen’s face blanched, and we all froze, straining our eyes into the fog. I leaned into the breeze. Surely this was some trick of the senses. But no, the word came to us again on the wind, clearer now, and with more voice behind it: “H-H-H-Helen!” There was no mistaking it. Something was speaking to us from within the clouds. Diomedes drew his sword, and I nocked an arrow, figuring that whatever came out of the clouds, I wanted to hit it with something sharp.

  A pungent odor engulfed us—like something dead, like an old wound—and then a deafening screech followed and an enormous mass of feathers and filth came hurtling out of the clouds. We ducked as it screamed over our heads and into a pile of marble on the other side. We looked on in horror as it stood up.

  During my adventures, I had heard that Sirens dwelt in the Underworld. Moreover, I had spotted several off the coast of Anthemusa during my voyage home from Troy. But I had never been close enough to smell one, and I must say that of a Siren’s many abhorrent qualities, the smell was by far its worst—the kind of stench that had a personality of its own: an amalgam of rot, sweat, and excrement. And the only thing to distract from the smell was the beast’s sheer ugliness. It had the wings and lower half of a vulture but the upper half of a woman. Black hair fell in tangled mats across its skeletal shoulders and dangled into a face so twisted with rage and hate that the features seemed to run together. Broken yellow fangs protruded from its mouth at odd an
gles, giving its speech a wet lisp.

  “H-H-Hel-l-len. Dear, lof-f-fely Hel-l-len,” it said. “You weren’t thinking of leaf-f-fing us, were you? No. No. No. Of course not. That wouldn’t do. We lof-f-fe you, Hel-l-len. We’d mis-s-s-s you terribly. You are our treas-s-sure.”

  The great beast trundled forward several steps, black talons clicking on the marble. It moved awkwardly, listing from side to side, its hooked and dripping nose thrust forward. When it saw me draw my bow, the Siren halted and thrust its head under one wing, chewed savagely at some hidden itch, and sneezed. I noticed it had a silver shield slung over its back.

  “I s-s-see you found your l-l-lance, Ignotus,” the monster hissed as it pulled its face out from under its wing, “but you’ll want to complete the s-s-set, will you not?”

  Our giant didn’t speak but crouched behind us, holding his spear in both hands.

  “Come now,” the Siren continued, “I’ll trade you the shh-hield for the girl. A generous of-f-fer by any account.” When Ignotus refused to answer, the Siren snapped its head to the side and examined me with one eye, then Diomedes with the other. “S-S-Sons of Adam,” it shrieked, “let me h-h-have the girl. She belongs h-h-here anyway. Let me take h-h-her, and perhaps I’ll let you es-s-scape into the f-f-fog.”

  “With all due respect,” I answered, “the lady doesn’t seem to want to stay.”

  The Siren screeched with laughter, coughed up a wad of feathers, and left a dropping in the dirt at her feet. “Give me the gir-r-r-l, or I’ll r-r-rip off your limbs and bathe in your blood.”

  If truth be told, I was fully prepared to surrender Helen to the Siren if it came to that. Like I said, I’m not one to fight over a woman—particularly a woman like Helen. But I’m not too fond of bullies either; so I dropped to one knee and let fly the arrow. It strayed left and caught the Siren in the shoulder, but it was a good strong shot, and it knocked her over. As I stood to admire my handiwork, the Siren hurtled into the air screaming, plucked the dart from her shoulder, and flung it back at me. Had she taken time to aim, my story would surely have ended here, but the arrow landed among the rocks behind me. Infuriated all the more, the demon launched itself straight at me, slamming me against Diomedes and knocking him out cold. Then it turned and seized Helen in one claw, spread its tattered wings, and screamed like a winter wind. From where I lay, it was hard to make out exactly what was going on. The Siren had its back to me, and its broad wings beat a spray of stinking mud high into the air. But judging from the Siren’s curses, Helen was putting up a fight—and possibly having the better of it.