She acknowledged a hit with a small smile. “Yeah. Without coffee and a cigarette my day doesn’t start. And I haven’t had either. I’ve only got six smokes left in that packet. I’m saving them for emergencies.”
“But why go swimming in your clothes?” he asked.
“If I took them off, I thought those bloody Achaeans might join me. I wanted to wash that monster’s blood off properly and I wanted to get something for breakfast.” She pointed to a pile of shells at her feet. “Clams. Big, beautiful clams. Hey—I can hardly believe that this is the Med. It is just so pristine.”
Jerry’s knowledge of seafood was at the eaten-it-when-paid-for-by-somebody-else level. That had been presented on a restaurant plate, not dripping and au naturelle on the deck of a pentekonter.
“How do we prepare them?” he asked warily.
She shrugged, scowled and shivered. “You’re asking me? I can’t cook!”
It was a relief to find something she couldn’t do. “Can I offer you my jacket?” he said, offering the somewhat worse for wear windbreaker.
She smiled crookedly at him. Raised an eyebrow. “And deprive you of your view?”
Jerry had been trying not to stare. But there was something very compelling about that view. He felt himself blush to the roots of his hair. “Um . . . er . . . ”
She chuckled. “I’d have taken it off if it wasn’t for those goons. Don’t worry. I kept my coat dry. You can act the gentleman and hold your jacket up as a view-shield for the Achaeans.”
Jerry decided his best move would have been to hold it in front of his own eyes.
13
We will rock you.
The black ship picked her way along a coastline jagged with bays and sea-spearing headlands. Looking inland from the black headlands and white coves, Liz could see the land dancing a heat-hazed forest green. The sea was deep, clear and dark, with just a slight chop on it. Sometimes flying fish feathered away before the slicing ram. For a while dolphins surfed along the bow wave. To seaward, the skyline lay blue and limpid, unbroken by anything more solid than occasional twists of gulls hanging in skeins above distant fish shoals.
The close-up view was a lot less calming—grumbling Achaean sailors. And her translator was looking decidedly pale, and clinging to the gunwale. Liz never got sick, but the information Jerry had just given her was unsettling. . . .
For hors d’oeuvres, there had been his translation—given only reluctantly, due to her vehement insistence—of the chant the Achaeans had been using to time the oar strokes. A charming little ditty which reflected their cheery view of life.
Kill all the men!
Rape all th’women!
Sell all th’children!
Into sla-ve-reee!
Then, there was the main course.
The symplegades. The “wandering” or “clashing” rocks. And she, the sorceress, was supposed to steer them past them. “How can rocks move?” she demanded.
Jerry shook his head weakly. “How could you have half-serpent, half-fish, half-women monsters?”
“That’s a half too many,” she said, irritable because she didn’t have an answer, and pedantic because of it.
“You know what I mean. The rules are different.”
She shook her head. “I don’t accept that. Underlying biological and physical principles have to apply . . . ”
Jerry looked ahead. “Well, apply them to that,” he said grimly, pointing.
They’d entered a long inlet. The water, far from becoming more still, was beginning to peak into little curls of foam. Applying her knowledge of oceanography, Liz realized they must have sailed over a high point somewhere back there. The big open-water rollers here were coming together; reinforcing each other, as peaks met peaks and troughs met troughs. And ahead, in a welter of thundering breakers, lay the wandering rocks. Enormous, sheer-faced, granitic-looking slabs. The gap they’d have to sail into was such a ravel of wild water that she wasn’t surprised no ships passed through. It wasn’t moving rocks—it was just really dangerous sea.
And then she saw it. A bird winging its way through the gap . . .
With a grumbling they could hear across a mile of water, the huge rocks slithered forward. The meeting was tumultuous. And then slowly the rocks moved apart again.
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