The Arms Of Hercules Page 19
"Hector! Deal with this man!"
Burly Hector's blade came down hard on my left shoulder, before I could try to argue my way out of the situation. Even as I reached to grab the swordsman's arms, I felt the now almost-familiar sharp sting, the signal that my body, had it been no more than human, would have suffered a serious wound.
I had not done much killing, by a warrior's standards, and I had no wish to do more. Grabbing my assailant around the middle, I lifted him into the air, turning his body parallel to the ground. Then I held him that way, tucked under my left arm, as I might have carried a squalling child of two or three. My left hand gripped his right wrist, and his left arm was pinned between my forearm and his body. It was a comfortable position for me, leaving me with one arm free, though I had to lean far sideways to balance the additional weight, somewhat greater than my own. By the time we reached that situation, Hector's sword had fallen from his grip, and he could do no harm to anyone, unless they happened to stray in range of his violently kicking legs. My captive writhed and strained, to little purpose, and a strangled sound, compounded of rage and fear, came from him in short gasping bursts.
"He'll do no harm to me," I assured his countrymen, "but he might be dangerous to bystanders. Is there somewhere I can put him safely down? Or must I hurl him into the sea?" With my free hand I pointed out toward the blue horizon. "I fear he'll sink like a rock, with all his armor on."
The priest of Poseidon could only gape in stunned silence at me as I stood leaning sideways, and at his helpless champion. Eventually two of Hector's comrades stepped forward, hulking men who swore that they would hold him securely; and so I was relieved of my burden.
Talking with the more peaceful citizens of Troy as they gathered around while I stood leaning on my club, I learned the reason for Hesione's being in the terrible situation from which I had rescued her. Somehow the idea had spread among the people that Poseidon was angry with the city because Zeus had compelled him to help build its walls. Therefore the Sea God had sent the monster. Somehow the king had been convinced that the monster would be appeased if it received his daughter as a sacrifice; his only reason for such a belief seemed to be that some soothsayer had told him so. I thought that any king who was so spineless would probably not be long on his throne.
I suppose I should note here what I heard later: that the Trojan princess, once she had been set free, behaved in such a shrewish way that I could begin to understand how everyone had been willing to get rid of her.
Once it seemed certain that the natives had given up trying to attack us, Enkidu began to mingle freely with them. People eyed him with wary respect; no doubt they were more than half convinced that he shared my godlike strength. I noticed that he said and did nothing to correct their error.
When I told the Trojans that my nephew and I had sailed out from Corycus, someone asked our purpose in making such a lengthy voyage in a vessel far too small for trade. Naturally I raised the subject of the Apples of the Hesperides.
Somewhat to my surprise, this brought on a veritable buzz of marveling and speculation, with the graybeard counselors exchanging knowing looks.
Immediately my hopes leaped up. "What is it? What can you tell me about them?"
At length, several of our new hosts brightened and told me that a sample, at least, of one of those very Apples was much nearer than I suspected.
Enkidu and I exchanged a hopeful glance. "Just what do these Apples look like, then?" I asked.
A man who had the whitest and longest beard that I had ever seen seemed to take his role of wise counselor very seriously. He made vague gestures with his hands. "They are not unlike ordinary apples, young man—you are familiar with that fruit?"
"I am."
"Not unlike the common fruit, I say, save that each one grows to about the size of a man's head."
"I suppose the tree must be gigantic?"
That seemed to be the general consensus, though a few minutes' additional questioning convinced me that none of these people had actually seen the tree, knew what it looked like, or were even certain where it grew.
"But someone started to tell me, earlier, where I might find a sample of the fruit, at least."
After holding another conference among themselves, the Trojan counselors assured me I could find a specimen of this strange fruit inside a certain cave, which also seemed to be the regular dwelling place of someone named Antaeus. When they spoke his name their voices dropped, and their faces fell, as if in dread.
Persistently I tried to dig for solid information. "This Antaeus keeps an orchard and grows the Apples? He eats them? Feeds them to his animals? Or what?"
The people gathered around me proposed a variety of answers. No one knew.
"I see," I said, nodding as if I actually understood. "And you yourselves have seen this marvelous fruit inside this cave?"
No, as it turned out, actually none of these people had ever been near the cave. And they thought it only right to warn me that no one who went into that den had ever emerged from it alive.
"Is someone watching the entrance day and night, to make sure that never happens?"
My informants did not seem to hear the question. But eventually one of them told me that a few daring souls, keeping watch from a distance, had seen Antaeus carry the Apples into his stronghold, and had recognized them for what they were.
"May I speak to one of these daring souls myself?"
"Alas, sir, they are none of them here now. They have gone voyaging again. One went with the Argonauts."
If they thought I was going to be much impressed by that, they were mistaken. When they told me the man's name, I failed to recognize it.
One point upon which my informants were eagerly agreed was that the den, or cave, of the formidable Antaeus was only about a hundred miles away, westward and northward along the irregular coastline.
After squinting uselessly toward the watery horizon in that direction, I turned back to my informants. "You interest me greatly, my friends. Now tell me, just who, or what, is this Antaeus? You speak of him as if he were something more than merely human."
The answers I was given to that question were not terribly enlightening, but they confirmed me in the opinion that anyone who lived within a hundred miles of the fellow might be anxious to get rid of him.
After an afternoon and night among the tents and lean-tos of the builders of the new walls, enjoying wary Trojan hospitality, Enkidu and I were ready for a few hours of sound sleep, during which time we took turns keeping one eye open—it was an arrangement we practiced more often than not during our travels. By an hour after sunrise we were getting back into our boat again.
Chapter Fifteen
Antaeus
The rosy-fingered dawn had come and gone before my nephew and I put out to sea again, shoving our boat off from the beach that lay half a mile below the rising walls of Troy. By the time of our departure in full daylight, no trace of the sea monster's body was any longer to be seen; I supposed the great ugly mass had been washed away by waves and tide during the night. And in the talk I heard in Troy that morning, from those who had witnessed the event and others who had not, the beast had already grown to twice its authentic size.
Enkidu and I piloted the Skyboat more or less steadily along the coast in the direction that our hosts had indicated, searching for the cave of the strange being, known to them by the name of Antaeus, that they had described to us. We took turns at the helm. Progress was slow at first, because the compass-pyx kept giving us contradictory indications. This, I had been told by Daedalus and others, was a sign that the pilot could form no clear mental image of his goal. We had both tried our hands at piloting, and I could believe that was our problem, but there was nothing we could do about it.
When we had crept along the coast for twenty miles or so, we put in to shore at intervals and began to look seriously for likely caves, and also for people to question on the subject, on the theory that our informants' estimate of distance
might have been wildly wrong and some of their other information unreliable.
In one respect, the legends concerning the being we were looking for proved to be ludicrously inaccurate. My brief stay in that savage and little-populated land convinced me that Antaeus was really king of nothing, not even of the tribe, or guild, of bandits—assuming any such organization could exist. A bandit he was, I suppose, preying on humans whenever he could catch them, though we found no hoard of gold and jewels as in the Lizard's cave. But his predatory nature was the least remarkable thing about Antaeus.
Another falsehood concerning him, told and believed by many who had never come near his cave, was that he was the son of Poseidon and Mother Earth. Other claims, both quite untrue, were that he forced strangers to wrestle with him and that he saved the skulls of his victims to roof a temple of Poseidon. In the course of our brief visit, I had a chance to examine the interior of his cave thoroughly. There were indeed some skulls about, human and animal both, but only as part of a collection of general organic garbage that made the whole place stink. It was nothing like any temple that I ever saw—more like the lair of some wild animal, much danker and gloomier than the Lizard's cheerful parlor.
I had been solemnly assured, by the folk who were building the walls and towers of Ilium, that I could find a specimen of Golden Apple, the very kind that I was looking for, inside the cave of Antaeus. But about the time we were getting close to our goal, it occurred to me to wonder if the Trojans might have said that simply to get rid of me. No doubt I would be welcome back at Troy again, or anywhere else, whenever there was a sea monster to be slain; but I was beginning to realize that at other times I tended to make most people uncomfortable.
"Enk, do you think they might possibly have done that?" I asked, discussing the matter with my nephew after our third or fourth cave had turned out empty. "Given us a wild story about this bandit and his magic Apples just to get rid of us? You tell me I can be scary sometimes."
"Well, you can be, Herc. And yes, I guess they might have been anxious to see us on our way."
But that was one problem we need not have worried about. Antaeus and his strange fruit turned out to be as real as any of the other monsters I had faced.
It was a forbidding stretch of coastline along which we slowly labored, patiently asking directions of each of the few people we chanced to encounter, poor fisherfolk and gatherers of birds' eggs. Eventually, from certain individuals who were not too terrified to speak of Antaeus at all, I heard confirmation that he indeed lived in a cave, where he slept on the bare ground as a means of maintaining his strength in readiness for any eventuality. And these informants even gave us a fairly precise idea of the cave's location, along with urgent warnings that we had better stay away from it.
When we identified the beach we had been told to look for, we pulled our boat a little way up on shore and simply left it there, trusting to its own mysterious powers to protect it from thieves or destruction by the waves. Then we started making our way along the rocky shore as best we could on foot. It was a strange, wild region dotted with seemingly innumerable caves, through many of which the waves went drenching and thundering at high tide.
Enkidu pointed out to me some signs of our quarry's presence before we saw him.
My nephew had been bending over, studying the ground, but suddenly raised his head to tell me, in a very low voice: "I realize now, Unc, what the people back there at Troy forgot to tell us."
"What's that?"
Enkidu made a show of giving it thoughtful consideration before he answered. "I suppose it was for our own good. They didn't want to discourage us, not when we were doing so well."
"Are you going to tell me what, by all the gods? Or am I going to have to strangle you?"
"Hush. This character Antaeus is a Giant." And my nephew stepped back and pointed with a flourish at the ground.
I was shocked into silence for a moment. Then I was on the point of angrily commanding my companion to stop clowning and get on with business. But then my eye fell on the sign that he had seen. Wet sand along the shoreline bore the clear imprint of a giant foot, human in shape if not in size, the five toes clearly marked.
"Indeed he must be," was all that I could get out, at last, in a whisper. The track was fully twice as long as one of mine, and my feet are not particularly small.
Carefully we moved on, in the same direction the marker of the footprint had been going. I half-expected to come upon some Titanic dung droppings among the rocks, but we found no such spoor. I had known humans who were much less fastidious in such matters.
We had gone only another hundred yards or so when Enkidu suddenly stopped and laid his hand upon my arm. His whisper was almost too low for me to hear. "Unc, there he is."
I looked where he was looking, and saw the shaggy brown back of a gigantic head, just visible above some rocks some thirty yards away. And I in turn whispered the names of several gods, in awe.
Cautiously and quietly we stepped sideways until we could get a full-length look at our discovery. Of course the first thing that struck us both about the man, the creature—at first glance I was not sure how to classify our discovery—was his abnormal and truly gigantic size. Imagine a human figure, or rather the crude outline of one, about twelve feet tall and sturdily built.
The second thing that struck me was that there seemed to be something vaguely wrong, out of proportion, with his overall shape.
Continuing to study our quarry from a distance of some thirty or forty yards, I wondered at first whether this might be some mutant man, imbued with earth magic, instead of one of the real, and yet legendary Titans/Giants, supposed to be the sons of Poseidon and Gaia. Considering the matter as coolly as I could, I decided that if Antaeus was a real Giant, and the legends had any truth in them at all, he was certainly one of the smaller ones.
Still, twelve feet in height is a very great deal more than six, and I stood less than that. That cannot be a human being, was my inevitable conclusion, after only a brief observation. I came to that evaluation even though the one before me was clothed after a fashion, wearing a rude, patchwork garment that seemed to have been stitched together from the skins of different beasts.
And the more I looked at him, the more certain I became that his body was not only larger than that of any man, but made of some different stuff. I had no doubt at all that this was one of the fearsome beings that Daedalus and Hermes had tried to describe to me.
The next most notable thing about Antaeus was his skin, which was mostly dark but with the appearance of a grainy, earthy texture. It was somehow surprising to see that it gave and stretched with his movements, as any practical skin must do. The few wrinkles that it bore were at places where in humans wrinkles are slow to form.
Rather than advance at once to confront this strange figure openly, I decided to watch him for a while. There was always the possibility that others of his kind were nearby. Working our way slowly inland so we could observe from a better angle, then peering out from between two rocks on the next hill, we watched him kill a full-sized sheep, wringing its neck as if it had been a chicken. Then he roasted the carcass whole over a fire, and then he ate it, bones and guts and all, avoiding only the woolly skin, which he peeled off and used to wipe his hands. I saw no other sheep around, and we assumed that Antaeus kept no flock of his own and that the one he killed was stolen.
Now and then, during the minutes we spent observing this rude feast, Enkidu and I exchanged whispers, but for the most part we watched in silence. Presently, watching our chances, we were able to move a little closer without being seen. This Giant looked less and less human the closer I got to him and the longer I watched. The difference, as I have mentioned, was not entirely due to the discrepancy in size. His forehead sloped back more sharply than that of any god or human I had ever seen.
His hair, on head and body, emerged from the skin in awkward tufts rather than in the more even distribution generally to be seen upon a human.
The creature, or thing—I found myself less and less able to think of it as a living person—was so eerie that it made my flesh creep.
Enkidu and I continued to stalk the Giant, gradually working our way closer. I wanted to see, among other things, how keen my enemy's senses were and how alert his mind. In the course of this stealthy maneuvering, I found it convenient to leave my club behind, tucked into a crevice between rocks, handle uppermost so I could grab it quickly if need be.
Eventually, inevitably, we pushed our luck too far. This Giant, the first I ever encountered (had he had his way, he would have been also the last) finally caught sight of Enkidu at a distance of some forty feet, sprang up, and ran after him, obviously with no good intention. It was as if a man who had no love for mice or beetles had spotted one of those vermin in some place where they were particularly unwelcome.
Naturally the boy took to his heels and sprinted away, and I jumped from concealment and dashed forward. The Giant, his back to me, gave chase to Enkidu, and was within a few feet of seizing him, before I could get close enough to intervene.
"Antaeus!" I bellowed at him. "This way!"
At the sound of the name, the huge figure stopped in its tracks. In the next moment it had turned, quickly enough; the huge mouth opened, showing a ragged interior whiteness that might have been a row of teeth. A rumbling bass voice came from it, uttering what sounded like words in some language I did not know. How can I describe that voice? I cannot. But I have heard it often, since that day, in nightmares.
Now our enemy came lumbering toward me, long legs devouring the intervening space.
His first ill-advised and rather clumsy attempt to squash me by stamping on me failed when I grabbed his raised foot in midair and twisted his leg until he fell with a great crash on his back. Thinking over the matter later, I realized that at that moment Antaeus must have assumed, not unreasonably, that I was a god.