Someone knocked. But Tremelo didn’t hear them. He’d fallen asleep, his face against the paper he’d been reading.
PART IV
Of remedies of love she knew perchance,
For she could of that art the oldë dance.
—Geoffrey Chaucer,
The Canterbury Tales
20
Misleading Medea reports.
McKenna looked like a pleased schoolboy as he jogged up to Jerry. “We’ve got us a buck. Cruz is just butchering—oh, shit.”
This time nobody had to tell anybody to run away and climb a tree. But it hardly mattered. A lion can be escaped by climbing a tree. But this thing—
Only the body of the creature was lionlike, tawny and immense. The sphinx also had wings. Huge wings. And the head and breasts of a woman—and the facial expression of a woman in an extremely bad temper.
Lamont happened to be in the nearest tree. She bellowed at him—in classical Greek.
“What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon and three at night. And don’t tell me you’ve heard it before! I am sick to death of humans telling me they’ve heard it before!”
Of course, Jerry was the only one who knew what she was saying. “Uh, Lamont . . . ”
The sphinx swiveled her massive head. “Shut up, you! If I wanted you to answer, I’d have asked you. Any more interruptions and I’ll eat all of you for cheating.” She turned on Lamont again. “You don’t know, do you? At last! It’s throttling and gobbling time.”
* * *
Lamont closed his eyes and dug through his eclectic collection of snippets of memory. Desperately. He knew what this monster was, and he even knew that it asked riddles. He could guess that he was being asked one, and he was pretty sure he knew which one it was. He even knew the answer to the damned thing!
What he didn’t know was ancient Greek.
He cleared his throat. Twice. Then: “Er . . . Homo.”
“What? Erhomo? No, sorry.” The fact that the huge female face was actually rather attractive made the lip-smacking particularly horrible.
“I wonder what flavor you are, with that dark skin? Well, I guess all humans taste much the same.” It began to advance towards him. “Besides, I’ve always had a fancy for exotic foods.”
Lamont wracked his brains frantically. He realized now that he’d used the Latin term for “man.” What was the Greek term?
The Anthropology Department.
“Anthropo!”
“What?” The sphinx paused her advance.
Jerry desperately drew an “S” in the air.
“Anthropos!” yelled Lamont.
The sphinx covered its head with its wings. Stamped its paws in frustration. The great talons ripped the soil like so many plows.
Lamont breathed deeply, knowing that he was off the hook. But his mind was still racing. “Hey, Jerry! Offer it a new riddle for its help.”
* * *
Jerry tried. But the sphinx was apparently not even listening. It seemed lost in melancholia, muttering to itself.
“Damned humans. They’ve got nothing to do all day but gossip, gossip, gossip. So now everyone knows my riddle. It’s not fair! Even in remote spots virtually next to Cimmuria they’ve heard.” It began flapping its huge wings, while it ran across the meadow in giant bounds. Just when achieving flight seemed utterly impossible—it did.
Jerry wiped his brow. “Phew. I thought we’d had it that time.”
“Well, it looked close,” said Liz, climbing from her tree. “What the hell went on there?”
Jerry and Lamont explained, as they walked back with McKenna to the kill.
Liz shook her head. “We’re going to have to learn some Greek, and some mythology. Soon.”
McKenna looked up, his eyes caught by motion in the sky. “I think we just left it too late. What the hell is that?” He took a firmer grip on his bayonet-spear. A device which, judging from the look on his face, he didn’t think was going to do him a whole lot of good.
The scales of the two dragons shimmered like polished bronze in the late afternoon sun. The dragons were more like the tasseled Chinese version than the European version, but they were still plainly dragons, even if they moved through the air like plump snakes. The chariot they towed was winged, however. The dragons and the chariot turned in the sky above. They were going to land virtually on top of them.
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