I gave him a startled glance. “Do I seem like the swooning type?” I asked, giving him the stink-eye.
He shrugged. “No, but then he doesn’t necessarily wait for the swooning. He’s more the grab and go type.” He looked to Hades. “Sounds like someone we know. Surprised you two aren’t best buds.”
Hades glared.
We followed him toward the gates, but he stopped a distance before them to mutter a spell to let us pass through the invisible barrier, like the one we’d seen explode outside of Tartarus. Once we’d stepped through the barrier, the glitter of the gemstone gate was almost blinding. It was a wonder the Underworld wasn’t awash in thieves. Then again, maybe it was. But Hades’s realm was like a roach hotel. You no sooner checked in than you checked out…permanently.
Hades put a hand to the ornate gates that rose to triple our height and they began to swing inward, so silently that we could hear the buzz of the bees beyond and the wingbeats of fireflies. Or maybe that was my imagination, but there was a music to the place, and a sweet breeze that wafted out toward us, scented with flowers and the smell of dew-drenched grass.
I breathed deeply as I passed through the gates, taking in the barely traveled path before us and the orchard all around, trees heavy with every kind of fruit imaginable. I wondered if the Elysian Fields had been modeled on the Garden of Eden or vice versa or… What did it matter? The thoughts flitted away along with all my cares. If I could just stay here in this heaven then no one else could ever get hurt because of me. No death, no destruction. No mystery, motives or murder.
Apollo pinched me. I yelped and jumped, then punched his arm. Hard. “What did you do that for?”
“The Elysian Fields, they’re making you peaceful, yes? Complacent? It’s something in the air here. It’s like a drug. Get over it.”
“You get over it,” I said stupidly. I rubbed my butt where I still felt his pinch. “Next time I pinch you back.”
He flashed a smile at me as lethal as Typhoeus. “I’m ready to turn the other cheek.”
I stuck my tongue out at him. But he
had
broken the spell. For now. I still felt the pull and the peace of the Elysian Fields…and most compelling the release from responsibility. But now I could remember that there were people who needed me, even if
they
didn’t think so. And those people were waiting for our help.
“Any way you can crank down on the happy hormones?” I asked. “I think rallying the troops for battle would go a whole lot smoother.”
Hades muttered yet another spell so low that I could barely hear it, and in a language I couldn’t understand. The breeze stopped. The sound of wingbeats and the buzzing insects no longer carried toward us. Everything seemed dead still, as though perfection had been trapped in amber. No longer a living, breathing thing.
As we walked through the orchard, I spotted a temple up on a hill. Classic architecture, built on the highest point, looking down. It had the typical pillars, pitched roof and triangular pediment at the pinnacle. I couldn’t see the relief carvings, but at a guess they’d be Hades’s greatest hits. I wondered what those would be. On the upside, he wasn’t the philanderer that most of the gods were. On the downside, he’d kidnapped his wife and impressed her into marriage against her will and he wasn’t exactly known for his heroism.
“The Hall of Heroes?” I asked, looking up.
“Precisely,” he answered.
It wasn’t as far off as it looked. Once past the orchard, we came to a grassy area that led into what looked like a temple complex or market square, similar to a Roman agora. Half-clothed children played hide and seek among the pillars, and a few women lay about in a grassy area nearby, drowsing, only half watching the children. No one else was about. I guessed everyone else was already at the Hall of Heroes.
The women began to sit or stand as Hades approached, but he motioned them down and smiled with almost a fatherly beneficence at the children. Could it be the Elysian Fields worked its magic on Hades as well? It was the first time I’d seen anything but a sadistic smile or out-and-out rage on his face. He directed us beyond the agora to a path that wound a little as we climbed, our view of the temple above and the agora below obscured from time to time by the trees in the way, some of which rose straight into the air, almost like Christmas trees that had never been cut out of their restraining mesh. They were that narrow and concentrated. Just like some actual trees on the actual Greek landscape. In fact, Elysia was so much like home, no one could possibly get homesick…except for the lack of monsters to fight, wars to win or other heroic pursuits. We were about to change all that.
As we took a turn of the path and it opened up onto the leveled grounds surrounding the hall, a child spotted us and flew into action, yelling that we’d arrived in Greek so ancient I barely understood.
We were met at the propylaea, the grand entrance to the temple, by a gaggle of men, some of them covered in the traditional drapery, some much more exposed. One wore not much more than a huge golden lion pelt thrown over his shoulder with the lion’s own teeth used to clamp the cloak shut. I struggled to remember which hero that might be. Didn’t Hercules have some labor involving a lion? He was definitely hero-sized—as if Andre the Giant and Arnold Schwarzenegger at his biggest had borne some bizarre love child with thick black hair and a manly beard coming to a neat point over his heart. The others were equally intimidating—young men with flowing hair and bodies that encouraged overpriced gym memberships. Or with tight black curls and arms of steel, stomachs going to paunch. All clearly men of action, even if that action was a distant memory.
They all looked at us with wary, barely leashed hunger.
“You called us,” Lion-man said, stepping forward.
I remembered now. That had to be the famed Nemean Lion cloak from Hercules’s first labor. It was said to make him invulnerable, though if that was true, how had he ever ended up here?
“I did,” Hades admitted. “But I will not discuss it with you on the steps of the hall. If you’ve forgotten how to treat your host, then perhaps you have forgotten too much to be of use.”
He was riling them up, giving them something to prove, working the crowd before we’d even begun. It was cleverly done.
An even larger man elbowed Hercules aside, and said heartily, “My son forgets his manners. Come, come, please, we have brought enough for a feast.”
Son
? I wondered, struggling to remember who Hercules’s father might be.
“Ah, Perseus,” Hades said, clamping a hand down on his massive shoulder. “That’s more like it.” He sent a glare Hercules’s way and proceeded into the hall with Perseus as the others closed around us and followed. I was getting
way
more attention than I was comfortable with and realized that I was still in my makeup artist warpaint with my hair all dramatically pinned and curled. You’d think after all the action I’d seen that it would have fallen, but it was shellacked to within an inch of its life. Short of Cerberus and his foul and vaporous doggy breath, I didn’t know if anything would wilt it.
I glared all around me at the attention, but it seemed that heroes were not so much cowed by dirty looks. In fact, two young men only seemed encouraged—one with twinkling golden eyes, the other with rare green, but alike enough otherwise to be twins.
The green-eyed twin sidled up to me. “Hello,” he said with a “come here often?” implied.
I rolled my eyes, but that only brought me to the golden-eyed twin, who said, “Want to tell us what’s going on?”
“I’m sure Hades will fill you in.”
“Well then, want to fool around?” the green-eyed one asked, moving in closer. Apparently, come-ons hadn’t changed much since ancient times. I didn’t have the least bit of trouble understanding
that.
I upped my glare and he turned up the wattage on his smile from lewd to lascivious.
I looked to Apollo in amusement. He was eying the twins as if he’d like to bash their heads in but wouldn’t deny me the pleasure. Somehow, it put the devil into me.
“Maybe later,” I said, letting my face relax into my best coquettish look.
“Really?” green-eyes said. He hit his twin. “Hear that, Castor?”
Apollo growled and moved in.
“You two had better beat it for now,” I told them.
The golden-eyed one gave me a wink and a half bow before grabbing his twin by the cloak and pulling him into the sea of men. Mostly men, anyway. Here and there was a woman or a child, but overwhelmingly the Elysian Fields—or at least the Hall of Heroes—seemed to be populated by men. Darn sexist ancients. Where would Theseus have been without Ariadne’s ball of string to find his way out of the labyrinth? And Achilles’s heel was only famous because that was where his mama had held him when she dipped him into the River Styx to make him invulnerable but for that one little spot. Gah.
Apollo must have sensed my agitation. “Don’t worry, you’re twice the hero of anyone here.”
“Yeah, how do you figure?”
“You successfully resisted the charms of Castor and Pollux, a Herculean task, I’m sure.”
I grinned. “That only puts me on his level.”
“Well, then there’s the fact that you’ve resisted me all this time. Oh, and fought Zeus, Poseidon and Hephaestus and lived to tell about it. You’ve faced down Dionysus, Hades and his hellhounds. Need I go on?”
“I didn’t do any of those things alone,” I protested.
“And you think they did?”
He had a point. Jason had his Argonauts; Odysseus had his fleet.
And then I spotted a group of warrior women off to the side…Amazons? Had I been wrong about their existence? The previously unknown fan-girl in me geeked out at the thought. Most were easily as tall as the male warriors, and they were dressed much the same. They weren’t one-breasted that I could tell, but their chests did seem to be bound flat and their hair short-cropped or tightly woven to keep it from being gripped in battle. One of them gave me a nod as she caught my eye and I nodded back.
We crossed into the temple proper, and the huge cryselephantine statue at the front of it made me catch my breath, and then spin around as I noticed others in less well-lit alcoves. Apollo closed my mouth for me.
“But—but that’s—” I began, pointing at the statue that had first caught my eye, a huge ivory and gold representation of Athena Parthenos that had once stood in the Parthenon, if histories and the scale model in the National Archaeological Museum were accurate. Was it a reproduction or—
“It’s the real thing,” Hades said, turning to see why we’d stopped. “The Turks looted it once upon a time. Hermes actually helped me steal it back, along with the statue of Zeus that once sat in his temple at Olympus.”
I didn’t remember ever reading about the statue that held the place of honor—Hades on his throne, Persephone at his side—but he didn’t comment on that one and neither did I. In fact, he couldn’t even bring himself to look.
Instead, he turned in a circle, surrounded by the heroes of old, making eye contact with as many as he could. “
Men
,” see, sexist, “I’ve called you all here because a new threat menaces the world. Many of the monsters you’ve faced and defeated in the past have escaped Tartarus.
Rhea
has awakened and has called them to her. The time for heroes is once again. Hermes and Pan—” he looked at us to confirm, “—Zeus and Poseidon wait to do battle with them. They need an army. Will you supply it?” This last he yelled, pumping a fist in the air to crank up the crowd.
“Yes!” came the shouted reply, but it wasn’t unanimous, and there was some hesitation.
Hades looked around again, assessing, studying, piercing right into their hearts. “I said,” he rumbled, “WILL. YOU. FIGHT?”
The roar this time was almost deafening, as the men thumped their chests or beat on their nearest neighbor. The smell of testosterone was in the air.
“Then come!” Hades strode to the foot of his monumental statue and stopped at the base of the throne to mutter a spell and carve symbols in the air. A door appeared in the base, and he pushed it in with a solid blow. The panel moved in and over, revealing such a stockpile of weapons I wondered what Hades had been stockpiling them
for
. “Arm yourselves,” he ordered.
There was a bottleneck in the doorway as all the heroes tried to rush in at once—the Amazons, I was glad to see, near the head of the pack.
I pushed my way through as well. I didn’t want to end up with the picked-over remains—a barbeque fork where only a trident would do and that sort of thing. I immediately went for the wall of projectile weapons. Hades didn’t have guns, oddly enough, which were the only weapons I was trained to use, but crossbows worked on the same principal—load, point and shoot. I could handle that. Apollo was right beside me, choosing a more traditional bow and two quivers of arrows.
Finally
, armed and fully dangerous.
Clangs rang out as some heroes tested their steel against others, until Hades called a halt to it. “Follow me!” he called by way of a war cry. His voice bounced all around the room, and a cheer went up, drowning it out. Swords were raised in exaltation, and Hades looked oddly regal, his goth Don Johnson look replaced now with a bronze breastplate sporting a hydra’s heads decoration in raised relief. He’d chosen a sword nearly as big as he was, but he made it seem light as he swung it in a full loop and then pointed forward in the universal sign for “Charge!”
We all marched after him as he led us from the Hall of Heroes, down the winding path and back through the agora. Some men stopped to kiss women or children—or remove swords and helmets from children who thought they’d come along. By the time we reached the diamond gates, only the warriors remained. The heroes and me, headed to face the monsters and men at least triple our sizes with bronze-age weaponry and a few gods for good measure.
Chapter Thirteen
“You can laugh or cry in the face of danger. Laughter is far more disconcerting for the enemy.”
—Pappous