In that instant, Pandy realized that if the ship held together they would all be safe.
Then the storm stopped. Completely.
Within minutes, the sky was clear and blue. The coastline of Greece was visible once again and the jagged rock formations were in exactly the same spot as before the storm. Which, Pandy knew, meant that the
Peacock
hadn’t moved at all. The Ionian Sea lay before them smooth as a looking glass.
“Rope . . . let us go,” Pandy said softly. The rope released her and Iole instantly. “Smaller . . . very small,” she said, and the rope nestled itself into the palm of her hand. She tucked it behind her silver girdle.
The sailors began to crawl from their hiding places all over the deck. The two who had restrained Alcie immediately backed away, because she was still nipping at them.
“Come on, Iole,” Pandy said, helping her waterlogged friend to her feet. They stumbled over to Alcie, standing against the mast, her hands still intertwined with the ropes. Alcie was swearing at the sailors who’d held her captive, demonstrating her other affliction: anytime she cursed (which was a lot), it came out as . . . fruit.
“Figs! Lemons! Pears to you both!” she called to the now-laughing sailors, her arms over her head.
“Alcie . . . you can let go now, you know,” Pandy said.
“Oh!” Alcie said with a start. “Oh, right!”
The three girls dragged themselves past the crew members now checking the ship, the deck, and the cargo for damage. The men were calling out that the storm was bad all right but they’d seen worse, each one trying to outdo the others with tall tales, as the girls slipped down into the passageway below deck.
Safe and warm once again, the girls locked their cabin door and took off their soaked outer togas, hanging them on the ends of their sleeping cots to dry. No one spoke for a long time.
“What was that?” Iole said finally.
“Duh!” said Alcie, sitting on her cot with her back against the hull of the ship. “Only the worst storm
I’ve
ever seen.”
“It was more than that,” said Iole, turning to Pandy, “wasn’t it?”
“I don’t know. I-I think . . . ,” Pandy stammered. “Yes. It was more than just a bad storm.”
“What? What do you mean more?” Alcie asked.
“Pandy . . . I saw the peacock in the air,” Iole said.
“What peacock?” said Alcie.
“If the peacock had tried to help in some way, or calm the winds,” Iole went on, “but it was screeching . . .”
“I know . . . it’s a sign of some sort,” Pandy replied.
“Sign? What sign?” Alcie barked.
“Alcie, just listen, okay?” said Pandy, curling her legs up underneath her and rubbing her side where she’d smashed into the railing. Dido, her dog, had been severely tossed about in their cabin during the storm and now he laid his head, a small cut just above his right eye, in Pandy’s lap. “If I knew exactly what was going on, believe me, I’d tell you. I know you guys didn’t have to come with me on this quest, and you know I’d never keep anything from you.”
She dropped her voice to a whisper.
“Hera sent the storm. I’d bet all our food supplies on it. Did you see how quickly the storm cleared up once there was no chance that Iole or I would be killed?”
“But why, Pandy?” said Iole. “She’s the one who gave you the map when you were up on Olympus in front of Zeus. She’s the one who took pity on you and convinced Zeus not to boil you in oil, but to let you come on this search. She gave you the gold coins as a clue to go to Egypt.”
“Look,” Pandy sighed, “all I know is that Hera says one thing and means another. And she doesn’t like me; she pretends to, but she doesn’t. At all.”
She put the small coil of rope back in her leather carrying pouch.
“Why wouldn’t she like you?” asked Alcie.
“I don’t know yet,” Pandy shot back, then she dropped her voice again. “The only thing I’m pretty sure of is that whatever she’s doing . . . it’s going to get worse.”
7:09 a.m.
The following morning, Pandy forced herself back onto the top deck. Now, standing at the railing, the old wood still soaked through, Pandy kept looking back. The coast of mainland Greece had disappeared at least twenty minutes ago, but she was still stubbornly staring behind her, trying to will it back into view.
The large cargo ship carrying Pandora Atheneus Andromaeche Helena, her best friends Alcie and Iole, and her white shepherd dog, Dido, had left the port city of Crisa four days earlier heading for Egypt. The girls had wanted to book a cabin on a passenger ship, something a bit more comfortable, but none were leaving for Alexandria for at least a week and there was no time to spare. They also didn’t have the money for comfort so they had to make do with a freight ship laden with crates of Greek tiles, baskets of cured meat, sacks of falafel mix, and a gift from the University of Athens of hundreds of leather-bound books for the magnificent library at Alexandria. It had taken the oarsmen the better part of a day to move the heavy ship through the Gulf of Corinth, negotiate a narrow straight, and sail out into the open Ionian Sea on their way across the Mediterranean.
Pandy had stood on deck almost the entire time. Long before Alcie and Iole had awakened each morning and long after they went below deck to their closet-sized cabin each night, Pandy was at the railing, watching as Greece floated by and wondering when, if ever, any of them would set foot on its shores again.
Almost three weeks had gone by since she’d seen her family or her home in Athens. And what weeks they had been. Never before, she thought, in the long history of the world, had one person caused so much trouble. Just by being dumb . . . and selfish . . . and totally irresponsible. Even though she was thirteen and officially a maiden and supposed to know better.
It had been almost six weeks since she had taken the box containing all the evils that could plague mankind to school for a big class assignment—just to show off. Her father, Prometheus, had been entrusted by Zeus himself with keeping the box safe and sealed. Prometheus made Pandy promise that she would never, ever, ever touch it. She had given her word to him when she was six years old. And seven years later, just to be better than everyone else, she had totally and completely disobeyed him. All for a stupid school project! The box had accidentally been opened and everything had escaped.
Well, that was the way her pathetic life went—duh! No surprise.
Pandy was even sorry that the two meanest girls at the Athena Maiden Middle School, Helen and Hippia, had been reduced to big hairless salamanders because they had been standing too close to the box when the lid flipped up. Okay, it was kinda, sorta their fault: they
had
tricked Pandy into letting them see the box and they
had
promised they wouldn’t open it and it
was
kinda nice that they were out of her life and weren’t tormenting her and her friends anymore, but no one deserved to be turned into a flopping black lizard.
The small island of Cythera at the southern end of Greece was now fading from view. What kind of people lived there, she wondered. How had they been affected by all the trouble that was now loose in the world? What had she done to them?
Pandy suddenly wanted to fly overboard and into the ocean. Even having been nearly drowned only the day before, she wanted to swim to the island and stay there, hiding among the rocks and cypress trees, eating nothing but berries and green olives . . . maybe a rat. She
should
eat a rat. A big rat the size of a goat.
She didn’t want to go to Egypt. She didn’t want to fulfill her promise to Zeus to recapture, within six months’ time, every evil plague that had escaped, no matter where it was, no matter how dangerous. She just wanted to hide and slowly waste away on that island right out there; her bones poking through her skin, her nails becoming claws, and her eyeballs falling into the dirt as she died—finally—of starvation.
Then Pandy remembered Zeus’s words to her as she had stood before him and all the other immortals weeks earlier in the great hall on Mount Olympus: “I would follow you, Daughter of Prometheus. I would follow you down to the depths of your dreams . . . I would hunt you into the flames of Tartarus and bring your body back for the punishment you deserve.”
And she had known even then that Zeus, Supreme Ruler and King of all Gods, would keep his word. After the box had been opened, Pandy and her family were summoned to Mount Olympus, where she had been given a choice. She alone of the great house of Prometheus would recapture the evils or her family would suffer unspeakable torments for the rest of eternity. If she didn’t accept or if she failed in her quest, everyone related to her would be cleaning sewage pits in the underworld (and that would be the fun part) forever.
“Okay,” Pandy thought. “So jumping overboard is out.”
Perhaps the whole ordeal wouldn’t be so terrible. After all, they had already managed to capture one of the seven most deadly plagues. Just days earlier, in Delphi, they had trapped Jealousy. The girls had been attacked by Harpies and Iole had almost been roasted to death over the sacrificial fire, but in the end they had been successful, and now they were on their way to Egypt to capture Vanity. And they had just managed to weather what was probably the worst storm in the entire history of the planet. So, how bad could it be? Of course, neither she nor Alcie nor Iole spoke Egyptian and she had no idea where to look for Vanity if they ever actually got there . . . but how bad could it be?
Really?
“Sheesh,” she thought. They were all toast.
There was only one good thing that had come from any of this: she had discovered her power over fire. Well . . . she’d discovered that she had a power over fire; she didn’t know exactly how extensive it was or all the things that she could do with it. But it went way beyond the little trick her father taught her of creating heat with her breath by blowing on embers or wood or coals and heating them until they glowed red hot.
Turning forward, she saw a larger island coming into view. She stopped one of the sailors and asked what it was.
“Crete,” he replied tersely, and went about his task of tying off the freshly patched mainsail. None of the sailors had been very nice to the girls during the voyage. They weren’t mean exactly, they were just busy, and Pandy and Iole tried to keep out of their way. Alcie, however, couldn’t have cared less about being underfoot and was fascinated by shipboard life.
Hearing the name of the island, Pandy immediately went down below to the small cabin she shared with her friends. Dido was asleep on Pandy’s cot, but Alcie and Iole were nowhere to be found.
She walked the short passageway to the oar room. Peeking her head in, she saw two hundred men—slaves, actually—sitting on long benches, twenty rows deep. An aisle that ran the length of the room (which almost ran the length of the ship) cut the rows in half: five men on one side, five on the other. Each group of five held fast to a large oar that stuck out of a little hole in the side of the ship and down into the water. The men were pulling these heavy oars back and forth. It was one sailor’s job to pound the drum at the far end of the room so the oars were moved in perfect unison and didn’t get smashed together. Another man, the leader of the rowers, walked up and down the aisle calling time with the drummer.
“Stroke! Stroke! Stroke!” he called endlessly.
Pandy saw Alcie where she usually found her friend these days: sitting by the drummer, mesmerized as he beat out the rhythm. She caught Alcie’s eye and motioned for her to come. Alcie skirted the caller, ignoring his dirty look as she walked straight as an arrow up the aisle.
“This better be good,” Alcie griped. “I’m having fun and you had to interrupt. Oranges!”
Alcie and Iole had also been standing close to the box when it had first been opened. Not as close as Helen and Hippia, so they were still fairly functional and had all their hair, but both of Pandy’s friends had been affected. Iole came down with a nasty case of wiggling, tickling bumps on her arms and legs, but her skin had been healed when she was suspended over the sacrificial flame of the Oracle at Delphi. Unfortunately, Alcie’s afflictions were still very much there.
“Come on,” said Pandy. “We’ve got to find Iole.”
“Why?”
“You’ll see.”
Pandy led Alcie down another passageway. They passed the crew quarters and the small, empty dining hall. They passed the sleeping quarters for the captain of the ship, which also served as the chart room and library. At last they came to the galley. This was where Iole could be found much of the time, in a small anteroom; petting the lamb, the goat, the three piglets, and the two chickens that were going to be used to feed the crew and the four passengers. To satisfy over two hundred people during a voyage lasting a week and a half, the cook was in the habit of creating giant cauldrons of stew and using lots of vegetables to extend such meager amounts of meat. But Iole had made it her mission to try to get the cook to go completely vegetarian. At first the cook paid no attention to her because she was small and fragile; not even a maiden yet, still just a girl. But when Iole continued to show up at the galley entrance, he threatened to roast her instead of the goat.