He took a deep breath and shouted, “But, Enyo, how can I keep my promise to you, if you let them devour us. You promised! You’ll never be human again . . . ”
A head pulled back. “I never made any promises! Not to someone who can’t even speak proper Greek!”
Jerry oozed puzzlement and sincerity. “But you agreed! ‘The others have to go,’ you said, and ‘We cannot have one human body with many heads,’ you said. ‘Leave it to me,’ you said. ‘Especially Phaedra, she’s a spiteful cat,’ you said.”
“You selfish little bitch!” The Phaedra-head snapped at the Enyo-head.
It went downhill from there. Fast.
Liz had staggered to her feet. She wasn’t looking at the bickering, biting heads. She was looking at the sea. “Little guy, tell the sailors to start rowing like fury,” she said, sotto voce. “The whirlpool has just stopped sucking.”
“Row!” Jerry shouted in his best classical Greek. “Row for your lives!”
For a moment the Greeks looked at him. Then the armour-clad one on the stern said a word that was quite similar sounding. And in a hasty ragged chorus, oar blades bit water.
It took the squabbling heads some time to register.
“They’re getting AWAAAY!” they snarled in chorus.
The oarsmen lashed the water to a foam. A head lunged furiously after them. Liz depressed the trigger on her little pepper-spray canister that she’d picked up from the deck. The effects were wholly unexpected. It should have sprayed an aerosol of eye-streaming, nose-and-throat-irritating gunk. But obviously, like the rifles, that would have failed to obey the rules of this strange universe. Instead they were all overpowered by the smell of fresh-cut onions . . . The essence of onions. About a thousand of them.
The head, streaming tears and spluttering, pulled back, hitting itself against the cliff wall in its haste to back off.
And from beside the far cliff Charybdis began to vomit back her water.
Looking back, Jerry saw an immense and ancient fig tree on the far cliff disappear into the whirl of upflung spray. He didn’t see any more. He was too busy clinging to the gunwale. The oarsmen actually managed to get the black ship up on the plane on the first wave.
Jerry knew that he wasn’t a great sailor. Within two minutes of riding out the waves from the erupting Charybdis, he proved that the whirlpool didn’t have the proprietary rights on vomiting in this part of the world. He had Lamont, the police lieutenant and the tall soldier for company, too.
10
To hell with the
Connecticut Yankee.
Ahead in the distance lay an island. Verdant and tranquil looking.
At the moment Jerry would have accepted any form of land. He just wanted off this ship. It was what the Greeks would have called a pentekonter. It was what a poor sailor called hell. Still—
That must be Thrinicia, Odysseus’ next stop, according to Homer. Somehow Jerry was certain that it would be full of Helios’ broad-browed cattle. Somehow he was certain that the weather would trap them there, and that, no matter what they did, the sailors would kill the cattle and feast on them. . . .
The hides would crawl, and even the roasted meat would groan and low. And then, the departing ship would be sunk.
The gentle breeze brought Achaean voices as well as Achaean rancid-oil-and-sweat bouquet to him. Classical Greek didn’t sound quite like the linguistic theoreticians thought it would.
When he figured out what they were saying, it was even less appetizing than the stench. Odysseus was being cunning again. Jerry began to realize that Scylla and Charybdis might have been lesser evils compared to their present predicament.
” . . . The gods have sent us these fine barbarian slaves. They must be a sign. We are close to my principality on Ithaca. We must press on,” said Odysseus. The oiliness in that voice said: Do not buy this used car.
The one being truculent must be . . . Eurylochus. He was certainly being insistent and not showing Odysseus a great deal of respect. Well, for all the self-praise in the Odyssey, Odysseus’ men had always done pretty much what Odysseus claimed to have advised against. From what Jerry knew of the era, the crew were all minor noblemen, accustomed to doing as they saw fit, with Odysseus’ control over them being tenuous at best. Raiding, piracy and slave-taking had always been part of their lives, and was taken for granted.
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