Monsters of Greek Mythology, Volume Two (33 page)

Nevertheless, she did succeed in taking hold of herself and wrenching her thoughts back to her task.

“I seem destined to meet some terrible creatures,” she said to herself. “Beginning with this lion—and, in all likelihood, ending with this lion. But if I do get past him somehow, there appears to be an array of other monsters in my future. The question is how to conduct myself. I'm large for a person but tiny in comparison with these creatures. Therefore I must cultivate other qualities. Speed … surprise … I must hone my wits so that I may be swift in decision also, and fertile in tactics. Swift—swift—I must be sudden and swift.”

She found another use for her spear—as a vaulting pole. On an empty stretch of beach she came across an old temple with crumbling walls, thirty feet high, and practiced there. Holding her spear, she would run full speed at a wall, plant the butt of the spear, and hurl herself up, up. The great shaft bent beneath her, then recoiled—and she, extending her arms and flattening her body, would ride the upspring, releasing the spear as it straightened, and soaring over the wall. She vaulted rivers in this way, and huts. She loved to vault; it was like flying.

Nevertheless, the critical question was still unanswered when she reached Mount Nemea. How could she bring herself to stalk an animal and try to kill it? And so she was weakened by doubt as she stood on a slope of the mountain, deafened by a great racketing roar, waiting for the beast to approach. Smoothly, ponderously, he came—sulphur yellow, the size of three lions, his teeth a murderous grin in the sunlight. Palaemona crouched behind a boulder, watching.

And, as she saw him coming toward her, she felt her doubts dropping away. It was no animal she saw, but something else.

True lions and tigers blend with their terrain. Sun tawny, striped with shadow, they belong to their portion of earth. But this one belonged nowhere; he was an alien presence. Trees shuddered as he passed, the grass shrank away. His eyes were not gemmed with light; they were flat, blank disks, metallic. He stood outside the great life chain of hunting, feeding, flight, and pursuit. He belonged only to death and visited the living as a fatal stranger. He was a monster: a reason for heroes.

Now, watching him come, Palaemona felt her mouth filling with the taste of honey. A delicious sweet chill laved her body, tuning her reflexes, loosening her muscles. Everything came alive. Trees and rocks loomed with miraculous clarity. The grass became filaments of light. Death slouched toward her and made the world new.

She unslung her bow and notched an arrow. She waited for the lion to come closer, then launched her bolt. She saw it cleave the air and strike the beast's chest, clattering harmlessly to the ground. As fast as she could pull arrow from quiver she launched her bolts. One after the other they skidded off the lion and fell to earth.

The lion yawned, crouched slightly, and came toward her. She tossed her bow away and hurled her great spear. It glanced off his shoulder and split an ash tree. The lion yawned and prowled closer. Now he was very close. She choked in the fumes of his rotting-meat breath. She raised her club, which was a single uprooted tree with its twigs trimmed off, and smashed it down on the beast's head. The club shattered, and the lion struck. Palaemona sprang away from the lightning jab of his paw—but not quite in time. One razor claw sheared away her sailcloth tunic and touched her thigh, and the touch was a wound. Naked and bleeding, weaponless, she ran for her spear. The lion did not follow immediately but sniffed at the bloody tunic, tail swishing—then raised his huge head to observe the futile antics of his prey.

And they were futile, Palaemona knew. But futility was no novelty to this girl. Magic salvage had been the lesson of her life. Despised, she had found love. Plain, she had become beautiful. Dwarfed, she had grown.

“I can't hurt him,” she thought. “And with a stroke of his paw, light as a caress, he rends my flesh. These are the last moments of my life. I'll try to keep busy.”

She whirled and ran uphill. The lion looked up from the tunic again, saw her running, and followed. Her tall legs flashed; she covered ten feet at a stride. The lion, hardly seeming to move, gained ground with every step. The spear weighed her down as she ran, but she held on to it. She dodged behind a huge boulder and stabbed the earth behind it, driving her spear deep—then planted her feet and pulled back on the haft. The boulder did not budge. The lion was coming uphill. Palaemona heard herself crying strange words: “All Mother, help me now!”

She pulled on the shaft, exerting all her tremendous strength. Red-hot needles jabbed her lungs. She went half blind with strain; everything swam in a red mist. But she did not let go. She bent the shaft toward the ground, feeling the rock begin to move. The movement was joy. Joy mixed with pain and became strength—then ebbed to pain again as the red mist darkened. With her last strength she pressed the shaft. The butt end touched the ground. The boulder leaped out of its age-old socket and began to roll downhill. It rolled terrifically, flattening bushes, picking up speed, going straight for the lion.

Reacting with incredible speed, he leaped out of its path. But it grazed him and bowled him off his feet. He fell heavily and lay stunned.

Filling with savage exultance as she saw her enemy fallen, she gave herself time to draw one deep breath that was pure energy. She yanked the spear from the earth. Holding it like a vaulting pole, she charged downhill, planted the butt of her spear, and leaped. The shaft bent, then sprang straight, hurling her high. But she did not release her pole as vaulters do; she clutched the spear, shifting her grip as she reached the top of her leap and turned in the air—holding the spear point-first as she dived.

The lion tried to scramble out of the way, but kept his head raised. And Palaemona, striking with all the weight of her fall and all the coiled might of her shoulder muscles, drove the needle-pointed spike into the only part of him not shielded by his armor hide—into his eye. Through the thick jelly of his eye the spike drove, deep into his brainpan. Palaemona twisted away as he writhed in agony—flailing at the spear shaft with his paws, snapping at air, snarling, frothing, dying monstrously.

Palaemona staggered toward him. She was bruised from her fall; her wound bled. But triumph swallowed pain. She stood over the beast, watching him die. He was only twitching now. The twitching stopped.

Now she had to skin him. “Bring his pelt to Mycenae,” the order had read. But how was she to take this hide that no blade could cut? An idea came to her as she studied the great tawny corpse. She knelt and snapped off one of his claws. It was the size of a dagger, but sharper than any dagger. Using the claw as a skinning knife, she flayed the beast and rolled his hide into a bundle.

Palaemona was reeling with fatigue now, but she had a few more things to do. She pulled out all the lion's claws to make arrowheads of. She reached into his maw and wrenched out his teeth, remembering dimly that Melampus had used ivory knives for surgery because he did not like the effect of metal cutting into living flesh.

The memory of him brought no grief now. This battle had twisted her into a new mode. She had accomplished the first of her tasks. And there was a remote hope, the serpent had said, that if she finished her mysterious labors, she might snatch her beloved from the hands of Hades. It was Melampus restored she must think of now, not Melampus gone. This reeking corpse was the lion-shape of hope.

PROCRUSTES

For BOAZ

Whose name meant strength,

and will again

Characters

Monsters

Gods

Mortals

Others

Contents

CHAPTER I

The Robber Clan

CHAPTER II

The Wager

CHAPTER III

The Skull

CHAPTER IV

Basher

CHAPTER V

Bender

CHAPTER VI

Shady

CHAPTER VII

The Inn

CHAPTER VIII

Evander

CHAPTER IX

The Great Sow

CHAPTER X

Wild Mushrooms

CHAPTER XI

Rehearsal for Vengesnce

CHAPTER XII

The Bent Pine

CHAPTER XIII

The Man with the Club

CHAPTER XIV

The Edge of the Cliff

CHAPTER XV

The Procrustean Bed

1

The Robber Clan

Once, there was a murderous father and his three bandit sons who had never learned to pronounce their own names but called themselves Basher, Bender, Shady, and Stretch—which also described their specialties. They worked the road from Troezen to Athens, each staking out a different section where he practiced his particular brand of banditry.

The son Basher bore a huge brass club and bashed travelers over the head—but robbed them first because he didn't like to handle loot that was spattered with brains.

His brother Bender stationed himself at a curve in the road girded by pine trees. His specialty was to bend a pine to the ground when a traveler was passing and invite him to observe a curious bird's nest in the branches. No one seemed to welcome this invitation, but the bird fancier was much too big to say no to. Bender would courteously keep the enormous bow of the pine tree bent until his guest was leaning over its boughs searching for the nest—then let go. The tree would whip up with terrific force, hurling its victim into the air. It was usually a corpse that fell to the ground; it was surely a corpse that lay there when Bender left.

The third brother's post was a narrow ledge of road hugging a cliff that overlooked the sea. Now, one of his feet happened to be much larger than the other, so large that he was able to hold it over his head, shading himself from the sun. There he squatted and waited for someone to pass. At the base of his rock stood a bucket full of water.

“This is a toll road,” Shady would tell the traveler. “And your fee is to wash my feet. Drop your moneybags right there; that's right—hurry, please! My feet are very hot and dusty. The big one's hot, the small one's dusty.”

Shady was even bigger than Bender, who was bigger than Basher, who was twice as big as anyone coming down the road. And no one had ever refused to do as Shady asked. He would sit, relaxed, smiling and chatting as his feet were soaped and scrubbed, then, with one clean kick, send the washer over the cliff. Some were broken against the rocks, others drowned; still others might have survived the fall and swum away were it not for a giant turtle who lived in the tidal pool under the cliff and had changed his diet from algae to fresh meat.

The father, Procrustes, called himself Stretch. He practiced a more leisurely form of larceny. He kept an inn on the southern slope of the final mountain and was the worst robber of all.

Procrustes himself had educated his sons. He trained them the way he drove oxen—with a heavy whip. His major subject was how to get hold of someone else's property in the quickest possible time and with the least resistance from its owner. He used lectures and fieldwork, peppering both with liberal applications of the whip. Some mornings started with a lecture in the boneyard. The boys sprawled among fragments of skeletons, drawing designs in the dust with splinters of bone. When they were smaller they had perched on the skulls. Their father towered above them, his voice booming down with such thunderous force that they felt the words vibrating inside them.