“Papos, quickly! Over here!” I had the rope halfway down to the floor of the valley by now.
The thieves fled in terror before the serpent, but Autolycos, to my dismay, did not. He stood his ground, looking into the viper’s yellow eyes with calm contempt. And the snake struck him. It sank its fangs deep into his chest, convulsing as it released its venom.
“Papos!” I screamed, and then our eyes met. A look of genuine delight crossed his face, followed by a sudden grimace as the serpent pulled away. As we looked at one another, a pale stain spread across his chest and down his arms and legs till his whole body was white with death. His skin turned stiff and hard. His eyes shriveled in their sockets, and his cheeks sunk into his jaws. The nails popped from his fingers, and then, as I looked on, his body crumbled into ash.
I turned away, trembling with grief, and walked the rest of the bridge without daring to look back.
CHAPTER 8
LIARS
WHEN I ARRIVED at the base of the next bridge, I had another look at Chiron’s map. I didn’t need to. I knew perfectly well where I was: the valley of liars. I had managed to avoid thinking about it until now, but if there was one stage of this journey I had dreaded above the others, it was returning to the ring where I had already spent an eternity of suffering. This ring ought to have been the easiest; I knew this part of Hell as well as I knew my own home—better, I suppose, for having spent so much more time here; but even from where I stood, I could hear the screams; and the air, sweet with the stench of burnt flesh, filled me with a dread so deep, I couldn’t move.
I stood for the longest time, blinking and swallowing and willing my legs to take me forward, but my body would not obey. Eventually, I turned away from the bridge and found a rock to sit on. I took my sword and bow and placed them on the ground in front of me. I leaned my quiver against the rock, then sat with my head in my hands and prayed for strength.
But the strength didn’t come. As soon as I’d stand up, the paralysis would return. Then back I’d sink to my place on the rock. Why should this be so difficult? Surely it wasn’t just the memory of the suffering. It wasn’t the fire itself, I think, or the agony of the souls that burned in it. The landscape was no more threatening or lonely than anywhere else in Hell. Yet somehow the thought of returning—even just to pass through—was more than I could bear.
And then, when I felt my spirits could sink no lower, I reached for Penelope’s cup—and found that it was missing from my belt. I leapt to my feet with a gasp, scoured the earth around the rock, and retraced my steps to the bridge and back, groaning and slapping my thighs. All to no avail. How could I ever go on, I thought, now that I’d lost my last source of consolation? I laid all my gear out on the ground before me and sorted through it piece by piece, hoping with the sort of irrationality that arises only from despair that I might discover the cup beneath some belt or pad or fold of cloth. I emptied my pouch and quiver.
I heard a voice behind me. “Oh, for the sake of the gods. Are you that dense?”
I spun around to see Proteus sitting, cross-legged as usual, atop the same rock I’d been sitting on. “He took it.”
“Who? Who took what?” I asked. Proteus’ sudden reappearance had driven my thoughts, already muddled, into further confusion.
“Diomedes took your cup. I watched him do it while you were climbing the slope back at the broken bridge.”
“Diomedes stole from me?”
Proteus seemed to frown and grin at the same time. “I know you by reputation, Odysseus, and I know you are not so daft as all that.”
“But why would he steal from me?”
Proteus rolled his yellow eyes and climbed laboriously down from the rock. He shuffled all the way up to me till our noses were almost touching. He was so much shorter than I, he had to bend backward to look me in the face. “To hurt you,” he said.
I retreated and pressed the heels of my palms into my eyes. Would Diomedes have done such a thing? Proteus advanced, pressing his finger into my chest. “I do not entirely understand what you did to that young man, but you . . . hurt . . . him.” With each word, he poked me again.
“I? Him!”
“Listen to me, Odysseus. I understand putting the lives of your wife and son before that of your friend. I’m not sure Diomedes would understand it, but most men would. Your dog, though? And that vicious, thieving grandfather of yours? I have abjured the society of men, have lived in more or less constant isolation for three thousand years, so I may not be the most sensitive observer”—here he stopped for a moment to consider the truth of his self-accusation, then nodded and went on—“but that man really loves you. He loves you more than he loves his own father. More than he ever loved anyone, I suspect. And that is a sacred thing, a love like that. But you have treated it lightly. You have thrown it back at him so many times, I think he just finally had enough.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I said. “Why do you care?”
“I do not care. He is your friend. Or not. It is no business of mine either way. Granted, I do have a certain vested interest in your ultimate failure, but for the short term, I should rather see the two of you together. So . . . objectively and subjectively speaking, I feel confident telling you that you have made a terrible mistake and need to set things right with your friend.”
I blinked at him for a time, torn between the ugliness of the speaker and the truth of his speech. I had never really stopped to consider why Diomedes was so devoted to me. I suppose it is a measure of my self-love that I just assumed he ought to be. Now that he was gone, though, I think I understood.
“I have to find him,” I said.
Proteus smiled. “Yes, you do.”
Then I picked up my gear, grit my teeth, and crossed the bridge.
I walked in the measured footprints of my former friend. His tracks were not difficult to follow. Every print started with a deep, determined dig of the heel and ended with a push of the toes that scattered the dust behind it like a sneeze. Diomedes marched the way he did everything in life—single-mindedly, without slowing down or straying to the left or the right. To judge by the evenness of his tracks, he didn’t even look around as he walked.
“Why did you return for me?” I asked Proteus as we began the next descent. He had been following at a distance, and we hadn’t spoken since leaving the valley of thieves.
He shrugged. “Your friend Diomedes is not a clever fellow. I put little stock in him finishing the journey on his own. Mind you, he is far easier to get along with, but I figure my chances are better with the Man of Many Faces; besides which, you are the bigger prize.”
“Seems like you’re going to an awful lot of trouble,” I said. “Why don’t you just change into an eagle and fly out of here?”
Proteus sneered and shook his head. “Not that easy.”
“The changing part ought to be. All you need is water, right?”
“Water and a hundred years of practice.”
“What is there to practice? It’s magic. Just wave your hands in the air and say some funny words. That’s the way it works, right?”
Proteus shook his head and ran his hands through his hair. “Have you ever broken a bone, Odysseus?”
“Have I what?” Proteus’ thoughts seemed to swing erratically from one topic to another. (I was given to such mental wandering myself but found it disconcerting in others.)
“A bone. Have you ever broken a bone?”
“I . . . uh . . . my leg. When I was young.”
“Which one?”
“Who cares? I thought you were going to explain your shape-shifting.”
“I am. Now tell me, which one?”
“The shin. When I was a boy. I slipped on some rocks when I was fishing. Cracked my leg right open. A bit of the bone pushed through the skin.”
“Ah. That is a good one,” he said. His voice had a disconcerting ring of satisfaction in it. “How much did it hurt?”
“Are you kidding?”
&
nbsp; “I am not kidding.”
“It hurt a lot.”
“Well, then. If you can think back to the day you broke that bone, see if you can reimagine the pain—that stab of fire that radiated from the leg into every part of your body, the sharp surge of nausea, the desperate sense of frailty . . .” His voice trailed off.
“All right.”
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“Well, if you can do that, then you have just the slightest understanding of what shape-shifting is about.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Of course not. You see, when you broke that shin of yours, someone had to reset it. Am I right?”
I nodded.
“Then, over time, it healed. But it has never quite been the same, has it?”
“It aches when a storm is coming.”
Proteus nodded. “I do hate storms.” He lapsed into a contemplative sort of silence. “More important, though, the shape of your leg was slightly altered after it healed.”
I nodded.
“Imagine, then, breaking all your bones at once and resetting them all at once.”
I grimaced.
“Ah. Now you begin to understand.” He spit on his left hand—the one with four fingers—and held it up. Then as I looked on, his thumb cracked and bent and snapped and shrank into itself while the missing finger grew back. Each small shift followed a grinding patter of crunches and pops. When the transformation had finished, he lowered his hand again and gave it a little shake.
“But how did you learn to do it?” I said.
“Practice,” he answered. “Lots and lots and lots of practice.” I examined him closely as he hobbled along beside me. He did look rather beat-up.
“Why?”
Proteus stopped and looked up at me. “You and your questions. You are worse than a wood nymph.” He shook his head and continued. “A woman, naturally. A witch. She promised me immortality. She promised to give me fame and power—and herself.”
“And did she?”
Proteus looked surprised. “Why, of course. She gave me everything. But first”—he shuddered—“I had to learn to break my bones.”
“She must have been beautiful.”
“No, actually. But she could be when she wanted to.”
“What’s the difference?”
Proteus ruffled his blue hair. “You are the most astonishing mix of wit and idiocy.” He rolled his eyes. “Beauty may be enough for a mortal, but when you have to live with someone forever . . .” He walked for a time saying nothing but shaking his head. Then he spoke again. “She began with my fingers. Broke all the digits of my left hand. Every bone of every finger. Then we waited for them to heal. A few weeks later, once the pain had started to ebb in that left hand, she did the right. Then the arm. Then the other arm. My feet, legs, ribs, skull. Oh, I broke my skull so many times . . . There is a rock somewhere in Pharos that will never be its natural color.”
“You did all that for love of a witch.”
Proteus laughed. “Certainly not. I did it for immortality. And immortality is what I got. It took years to break all my bones. Hundreds of years. I did not even realize how long it was taking. And by the time I was done, all I really wanted was to die. Of course, by then I could not.”
“But you’re here.”
“Yes, I am.”
“Ah. I see. You’re hoping that Hades will give you a peaceful death in exchange for my life.”
“No. No. He does not have that sort of power. What I would really like is simply to rest somewhere for a while. It does not have to be a comfortable place, just stable.” He smiled to himself. “I should like to settle down as a seal, perhaps. That is a nice shape, when you stop to think about it.” He pushed his blue hair out of his eyes. “Just a big bag of flesh. In a shape like that, you can let your bones float about wherever they want. Besides that, I like seals. They are friendly creatures. And loyal. The smell is off-putting, but one grows accustomed to it.”
Here our conversation ended, for Proteus had grown tired and I had begun to wonder why he was telling me so much.
At the top of the next bridge, Diomedes’ tracks altered. It seemed he had hesitated briefly, looking out across the expanse of lowest Hell. And truly, the vision from the top of this last bridge was enough to give anyone pause. Gazing out across the infernal gloom—not quite darkness, but neither was it light—the lowest level of Hell appeared to me as the mouth of a great caldron, bubbling over with steam. A fog spread across the chasm that was so dense, I was able to make out only what appeared to be a ring of towers pushing their domed crowns through the mist like islands in a roiling sea.
“Those must be the only mountains in Hades,” I mused aloud.
“And that one is moving,” Proteus added.
I looked again. The undulating fog made it difficult to discern at first, but sure enough, the peaks of the mountains were swaying, dipping, and reemerging with a rhythm of their own.
“Well now, that is curious,” I said as I followed Proteus down into the mist.
CHAPTER 9
A MOUNTAIN IN THE MIST
THE LAND AT THE BASE of the last bridge was flat and gravelly, the larger rocks and debris having settled at the wall of the previous valley; but all around us, moving like a thing alive, the fog bubbled and hissed, stroking us with icy fingers as we passed. Before long, the gray of the sand, sky, and fog began to wash together. Indeed, if I had been suspended from my ankles, the landscape would have appeared no different, and I began to worry that we might be walking in circles. The longer we marched, the more disoriented and depressed I felt. Even my thoughts trudged in circles, returning continually to my lost wife, my lost son, my lost friend.
“Odysseus, look!” said Proteus, freezing in his steps. I nearly ran him over.
“What is it now?” I snapped. To keep from stepping on him, I’d had to steady myself by putting both hands on his head.
“The tower,” he said, as he pulled away. He nodded toward a peak rising out of the mist directly in front of us. It couldn’t have been more than a bowshot away. In my distraction, I hadn’t even noticed it. The effect of suddenly confronting something so large and so close served only to disorient me further, and I again found myself reaching for Proteus’ head. Then the tower moved. An arm extended from its left side, then another from its right side, and a deep yawn echoed through the mist. “That is not a mountain,” observed Proteus.
“Well observed.”
Proteus stepped forward and squinted his yellow eyes into the mist. “Why, it is human!” he exclaimed.
Or rather, it was humanlike, for its proportions were well beyond those of any man I’d ever seen. As we inched closer, it appeared that the giant was buried from the waist down, its broad belly resting on the sand like a sweaty sack of barley.
“He must be fifty times the size of Ajax!” I gasped.
We were close enough now to make out the giant’s features, which, aside from his enormous girth, were surprisingly ordinary. From a distance, he looked no different from any other man. On drawing closer, however, those same features took on a grotesque particularity—every hair on his skin a swinging rope, every boil and pore a spurting geyser. His nostrils opened above us like two dank caves, bristling with black spines, thick as stalactites and dripping with damp.
“I wonder if that’s how we look to a rabbit?” I whispered.
“It is,” replied Proteus.
The giant was asleep, and his shoulders slumped forward. His head rested on his chest, and a great lake of drool was collecting in his lower lip. I was so engrossed in this spectacle, I failed to notice when Diomedes’ tracks veered sharply to the left, and soon found myself tumbling to the bottom of a deep rut in the sand.
If he wasn’t awake before, the giant was certainly awake now. The lake of drool emptied from his lip in a great torrent, and he leaned forward to look at me, curling his other lip in disgust. “Raphèl mai amècche zabi almi!” he ex
claimed in a voice so deep and loud, I thought my head would burst. “Raphèl mai almi!” he shouted. His breath washed over me in a hot, noxious wave.
“Run!” I cried as the giant raised his fist. Lucky for me, he was as clumsy as he was inarticulate. The fist came crashing down beside me, and I was on my feet and away before the giant could take another swipe. Proteus, however, was not so lucky. His leg was broken.
“That looks bad,” I said, once I’d caught my breath. I could hear the bone cracking under the skin. Slowly, he pushed it back. “But then, I guess you’re used to it.”
Proteus grimaced as he rose to his feet. “This would explain the ruts in the sand,” he said, turning to look at the hole we’d fallen in. It extended in a broad half circle that marked the extent of the giant’s reach. We set off to the right, therefore, hoping to find a way around him.
Where the giant’s reach ended, however, another giant stood, equally fierce and twice as ugly. But there was no trench around this one, and closer inspection revealed that his arms were pinned to his sides by a thick chain. We thus concluded that he was safe to approach, and, with caution, ventured near enough to see that neither he nor the other giant was in fact buried to the waist; they stood, rather, in a deep, broad crater, their stomachs resting on its outer edge.
I couldn’t see all the way across, but in the distance, I could make out the shapes of other giants—a dozen or so, standing at intervals around the rim. This meant we had at last arrived at the lowest level of Hell. I strained my eyes in the fog. I could only guess at its depth. “We could search for a way down,” I said. “Or you could lower me down by the rope.”
“How do you know it will be long enough?” asked Proteus, peeking over the edge.
“I don’t, which is why I’m expecting you to fly down there and have a look around.”
Proteus considered my proposal for a moment, then shook his head.
“It would take you only a moment!” I protested.
“It would,” he said, frowning at the mist, “but there is just no telling what may be down there.”
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