Table Of ContentContents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Epigraph
Glossary
Acknowledgments
Mythic Misadventures by Carolyn Hennesy
Imprint
For Donald
And to the memory of Harriet Shapiro, Ph.D.,
who got my girls out of the water.
And much, much more.
CHAPTER ONE
Out of a Clear Blue Sky
“It’s gaining on us!” Pandy screamed, craning her neck to look back over her
shoulder.
“Don’t look at it!” Homer barked. “Pull your cloak over your head!”
“What is it!” Pandy screamed.
“Just keep going!” Homer yelled, his eyes frantically scanning the horizon
ahead for something he knew he’d never find: someplace—any place—that he,
Pandy, and Iole could hide.
Nothing.
Only sand.
Their three camels, whipped into a frenzy, were running at a speed Pandy
couldn’t even comprehend. Even watching wild horses race across fields back
home, she’d never seen anything move as fast. With one arm wrapped tightly
around Dido as he curled, shivering, in front of her, it was all she could do to
stay on top of her beast as it flew across the desert, trying to outrun what was
coming up behind them.
A dark mass, deep brown and thick, was now less than five kilometers away
and bearing down hard and fast with a dull roar.
Two hours earlier, the midmorning sky had been a clear, pale blue—almost
white; the sun beating down brutally on them as it had for the past eleven and a
half uneventful days. The boredom of the Arabian desert had been broken by
only two things. One was a melancholy followed by a testiness that had slowly
crept into Homer’s demeanor. For the first several days of their journey, Homer
had been his usual quiet but courteous self as they traveled from Aphrodisias,
across the lands of Galatia, Cilicia, and Syria, and finally into the endless
expanse of desert toward Baghdad. Then, it seemed to Pandy, Homer had grown
annoyed by the many people commenting and asking questions about their
strange beasts. He had become sullen, almost rude, in answering, even when the
question had not been put to him directly. Pandy thought she overheard him say
something like, “We’re riding these because of her,” and flicking a hand in her
direction.
The other was the fact that two days earlier, Iole had become very, very sick.
Pale, sweating, and unable to keep any food in her stomach, Iole was becoming
so ill that Pandy was in great fear for her friend’s life. The healing powers of the
enchanted Eye of Horus weren’t working, and calling on the tiny bust of Athena
for advice proved useless; Pandy couldn’t get even a single sound out of it.
There was no priestess around to intercede on Iole’s behalf with Apollo, the God
of Healing, and Pandy knew that her own prayers, if they were getting through,
might not make much difference. Even though Apollo had been quite taken with
Iole when he’d met her in Alexandria, he had saved her life once already, when
she was very little, and he might feel a bit put-upon if asked to do it again.
It was only as she turned back to check on Iole for the umpteenth time that
day that Pandy had seen it: the thin brown line growing steadily into a large
brown mass heading straight for them.
“Homer!” she’d yelled at that moment, pointing.
With just a quick glance behind, Homer recognized what was coming.
“Get Dido up!” he cried. Pandy called to her dog, who’d been walking along
beside, and at once Dido made the tremendous leap. Instantly Homer spurred his
camel forward and the others had immediately followed. Now, he knew, they
were in a race for their lives. And they were probably going to lose.
Suddenly, a fleck of foam hit Pandy’s right cheek. As she wiped it away,
another flew into her eye, and then another caught the tip of Dido’s ear. She
looked at her camel, its mouth covered in creamy white spittle as the creature
began to tire. She looked back at Homer’s camel; its eyes were rimmed with red,
evidence that its heart was beating too hard. Hermes had said that a camel was
the heartiest of beasts, able to go weeks without food or water in desperate
conditions, but these three had been running flat out for hours and they weren’t
immortal: the strain was clear.
“We can’t keep going!” she screamed.
“We have to!” Homer yelled back, urging his camel onward.
Pandy’s mind flashed back to the deck of the ship The Peacock as it crossed
the Ionian Sea on its way to Egypt, desperately trying to outrun a whirling black
funnel that ultimately destroyed the ship and her crew. Then she thought of the
great mass of the heavens forming an impenetrable wall around the Atlas
Mountains, which she’d had to crawl under.
“Gods,” Pandy thought angrily as another wad of spittle landed on her chin.
“I am so sick of large, loud walls and masses and whatever trying to destroy us!”
Suddenly, Pandy heard a different sound: a coughing, choking gag. Glancing
to her left she saw Iole, barely on her camel, her arms flopping helplessly
because she was no longer strong enough to handle the reins, her head shaking
violently up and down with each stride, and her tiny first meal of flatbread and
dates coming up and dribbling out of her mouth. Suddenly, Iole’s hands flew
high in the air as she was pitched backward and hurled to the ground.
“Look out!” Pandy shrieked as Homer’s camel narrowly missed trampling
Iole’s head where she lay on the sand. Immediately, both Pandy and Homer
brought their camels around and were off their mounts in seconds. Without
warning, Homer’s camel knelt on the ground, closed its eyes, and whinnied to
the other two. It was a sure sign that all three camels knew there was no
outrunning the mass and would go no farther. But, as Pandy watched, the two
other camels approached the first and knelt beside it, forming a small semicircle
—and a barrier between her, Homer, and Iole and the storm. Pandy took this to
mean that they were helping their human riders.
The brown mass was almost upon them.
“What do we do?” Pandy called to Homer.
“It’s a sandstorm, Pandora,” Homer yelled over the growing din, his eyes
avoiding hers. “There’s nothing we can do.”
In the middle of the desert, with a tremendous wave of sand about to hit them
full force, the only thing on Pandy’s mind was that Homer had used a tone with
her as if she were the stupidest person in the world. As if she were someone else.
For a split second, that was the entire focus of her brain.
“Get over here!” Homer yelled. Homer had carried Iole to his camel and was
nestling her in a crook between its forelegs and belly, using the animal’s back as
a shield. “Move!”
“Dido, come!” Pandy commanded, and he was at her side in a second.
Holding him close, Pandy threw herself against the camel, feeling its warmth, its
chest still heaving from the hard run.
“Give me the rope!” Homer yelled, a momentary raise in the pitch and roar of
the storm drowning out his words.
Pandy only saw his lips move.
“What?” Pandy cried.
Without pausing to repeat himself, Homer grabbed her leather pouch and
quickly fished out the enchanted rope. He gestured wildly until Pandy
understood.
“Rope,” she cried, the first grains of sand crunching against her teeth as the
storm bore down. “Thicker and longer!”
At once, the rope began to change in her hand. It grew thicker, but it also
became much shorter. Then without warning, it turned into a tiny string. Then
the rope grew longer, but it looked as if it had been burned in a fire.
“There’s something wrong with it!” Pandy screamed.
“Give it to me!” Homer yelled, and without even looking at it, he yanked the
rope from her hands. In Homer’s grip, it remained long enough that he was able
to frantically tie one end around his waist, then loop it in a knot around Iole,
another around Dido, and finally tie the other end to Pandy.
“Hold us fast!” Pandy yelled down to the rope, hoping that whatever was
wrong was just a momentary glitch.
Homer was now furiously pulling at the camel’s saddle blanket, trying to
wrench it free from where it was pinned underneath. With a grunt, he tore it
loose and tossed it over Iole and himself.
“For Ares’ sake!” Homer screamed at Pandy, his voice as full of rage and
fury as the sound of the storm only seconds from impact. “Pull your cloak over
your head and get under!”
Pandy wrapped her cloak tightly around herself and dove under the blanket
with Dido just as the thick cloud of harsh, churning sand hit them with the force
of a wall being blown apart. Pandy felt as if she were being beaten on all sides,
poked with pointed sticks, and stung by millions of bees. And even though the
rope was binding them all together, she could feel the unbelievable push of the
wind buffeting her legs, shoulders, and head. She knew that without the rope,
she could easily have been driven away from the others and out into the desert.
She ran her hands along the rope’s surface and found tiny metal spikes poking
out. The next instant, they were gone.
And then the sand began to find its way in.
Pandy’s mother’s cloak, even with a thick blanket covering it, was no match
for the immense volume of fine sand whirling and swirling, and soon her legs,
arms, neck, face, and hair were coated in layer upon layer. She covered her face
with her hands but in vain. The sand was working its way through every crevice,
no matter how small—filling her ears, pushing under her eyelids and into her
mouth, and, worst of all, slowly inching up her nose.
Again, an image from the past flared in her mind: falling through the desert
floor in Egypt and into the Chamber of Despair and thinking she was going to
drown as the sand instantly filled her mouth, nose, and ears. But that was quickly
over as she crashed through the ceiling of the chamber and went plummeting
through the dark, open air to the ground below.
This … this was going to be a slow, agonizing death for all of them … lost in
a foreign land, Iole sick or possibly already dead, Homer unaccountably distant,
and her quest unfinished. Miserable, she envisioned their lungs filling slowly
with sand.
The only bright spot, Pandy mused, desperately trying to spit out the grit, was
that Alcie wasn’t here to suffer through it with them.
Alcie was already gone.
