* * *
Lamont found that the forest was a different place with an aerial escort flying overhead. He’d love to bring his girls here. Hell, it hurt seeing those kids of Medea’s. That was one of the main reasons he’d been fishing. Well, he’d enjoyed the novelty of catching fish. But he had to get home. And if he pushed Jerry Lukacs hard enough, the man would come up with an answer. Jerry was good at putting pieces together. He’d spotted the achronology. He’d work out how to escape from whatever was trapping them in this terrifyingly real but unreal mythworld. He just had to be pushed. And he, Lamont Jackson, would do that pushing. He had a wife and children to get home to.
He spotted a pair of slitted eyes gleaming somewhere in the dark recesses of the forest. “Go ahead,” he sneered. “Make my day.” He jerked his thumb at the two huge dragons soaring above.
The eyes seemed to roll upward.
“Boo!” And they were gone.
Lamont’s stride down the overgrown path turned into something of a jaunty little shuffle.
“Yo—beast! I’m talking to you!
“Snarl all you want! Slobber away!
“Ain’t getting none o’ my—”
* * *
Cruz leaned on his spear, his head tilted back. He spent a few seconds admiring the distant profile of Medea steering her dragons, her long dark hair streaming back. The sorceress was circling above them while they had a rest.
“Quite a woman, ain’t she, Doc?”
Jerry was alarmed. “Uh—Anibal. That . . . ah, lady. Um. Legend appears to be wrong about several details. That’s not surprising, of course, since it was a Greek legend and she was a foreigner. Still . . . ” He paused.
How to explain this best? “She’s, ah, not a woman you want to play around with. If you follow my drift. She takes commitment quite seriously. As in, ah, dead seriously.”
The sergeant chuckled and felt his ribs. “Tell me about it!”
His smile widened a little, and he shrugged. “So what? I’m not really the man-about-town type, to tell you the truth. Although I’d appreciate it if you didn’t spread that around the barracks if we ever get home. And there are advantages to a woman who doesn’t let her man play around. It usually cuts both ways, you know?”
The smile faded a bit, and turned into something almost feral. “Sounds like she got a raw deal. Tell me about this ‘Jason’ guy, Doc. I might wind up meeting him one day.”
By the way Sergeant Anibal Cruz was flexing his forearm muscles, Jerry suspected it might be a very unpleasant meeting. Short, though.
“Well, he was the leader of the Argonauts . . . ”
They started to move off again, and Jerry, even with a stout stick, was finding the going tricky. “Look,” he panted. “I’ll tell you about it, when I’m not trying to—” pant “—keep up. Just . . . remember the story that I know . . . was told by her . . . enemies. She was supposed to have murdered her children before this . . . and they seem very alive to me. She’s also supposed to have . . . killed Glauce . . . that girl who is with her, before this all happened . . . ”
* * *
The dragons spiraled down onto Circe’s castle of well-dressed stone, scattering animals. Jerry, tired but nervous, eyed it with extreme suspicion. The paratrooper’s entrenching tool had made excavating the “moly”—well, the wild garlic they thought was the correct plant, reasonably easy. He resolved not to eat anything if he could possibly avoid it. Even the formidable Medea seemed a trifle wary about seeing Circe, and that, as far as Jerry was concerned, was enough to make anyone cautious.
The sounds coming from within were not those of a lady singing as she plied her loom. They were the raucous sounds of a bunch of good-time boys, deep into partying at what could not have been eleven in the morning.
Medea raised an eyebrow.
“Odysseus and his crew, I suspect,” said Jerry grimly.
Medea pounded on the door.