Location: Forest North of Larissa
Time Remaining: 23 Days
After many hours of hiking they reached the lake. Fortunately, the fish hadn’t fled their approach the way the rest of the wildlife seemed to have. Achilles took Menelaus’s spear, jumped in the lake, and came back with enough for their little group. Menelaus set about lighting the campfire Odysseus built, but Apollo stopped him, “I’ve got this.”
Apollo held a hand up in the direction of the setting sun, and a ball of brilliant yellow light coalesced in his hand. He casually tossed the ball into the kindling, and the fire roared to life.
“What can’t you do?” Paris asked.
“Plenty,” Apollo laughed.
“Seriously,” Odysseus said, “What’s it like being a god?”
“Odd question coming from you, Odysseus – I think you know Athena better than I do.”
“I want to know your take on it though,” Odysseus said.
Apollo nodded, “It’s lonely. Sometimes it’s fun. Back in the day we used to do this all the time. Rub elbows with mortals, even court them. But at the end of the day we’re not mortals, and people always feel compelled to worship us.”
“You don’t like that?” Hector asked, recalling the elaborate temple to Apollo outside Troy.
“Our father says it's our duty to be custodians of your civilization, to take on the burden of responsibility of keeping humanity from destroying itself. Creating a religion was an expedient means to an end. But there should be a covenant between a man and his god. The man should be devout and abide by his better’s wisdom, but the god should repay that devotion with protection and compassion. Sometimes I feel it’s far more difficult for me to uphold my end of that bargain than it is for men to uphold theirs. The world is complicated and mortals – human or otherwise – are fragile in many ways. No offense.”
“None taken,” Hector skewered one of Achilles’ fish and laid it across the fire.
Odysseus wanted to continue questioning Apollo, but Lycomedes changed the subject, “What do you think we’re hunting tonight? It’s almost dark, and I haven’t seen any beasts of note all day. “
“Beasts of note?” Menelaus said, “I haven’t seen any beasts at all.”
“Aside from my sister’s owl,” Apollo said pointing to Adresteia’s silhouette in the darkness of the tree overhanging their campfire.
“Whoa!” Paris said, “How long’s he been there?!”
“She,” Apollo said, “has been following us all day.” Apollo gave Odysseus a knowing look, “Apparently she wants to keep an eye on this contest.”
“I’ve heard foxes would be a good challenge,” Odysseus moved the topic away from Adresteia, “Especially since we didn’t bring any hunting dogs.”
“Perhaps we should be hunting you,” Lycomedes laughed, “they say you are slyer than any fox.”
Apollo laughed, “That would be an idea. It’s been many years since I hunted men.”
The others grew quiet. Despite their previous conversation, and his exceptional stature, it was easy to forget that Apollo wasn’t human.
“Who did you hunt?” Achilles asked, nonplused by the statement.
“Seven princes of Thebes,” Apollo explained, “and Arty hunted their seven sisters. Not the same Thebes Hector’s betrothed is from.”
“What did they do?” Paris asked.
“Them? Nothing. But the queen of Thebes, their mother, made some inappropriate remarks to our mother, Leto. You may be too young to have noticed, but women in this world have their value chiefly judged by the number of children they sire. Mom only had the two of us. She was barren before Zeus conceived us, and became barren once again after we were born. Queen Niobe, however, had fourteen children – a fact she was quite proud of. That in itself would have been fine, I suppose, but – for reasons I still do not understand – she decided to not only brag about her children, but to spend an entire evening disparaging our mother for her inability to have more than two. Mom tried to argue that quality was more important than quantity, but Niobe tore into her for being a terrible mother. She said Arty was too manly and I was too womanly, and if our father was really Zeus, then the only reason we must be ‘failing our genders’ so severely was because our mother had failed to raise us properly. How well would that sit with any of your parents?”
Everyone shook their heads; Queen Niobe had done two of the worst things possible in their culture – disrespected the gods, and disrespected someone’s mama.
“So, Mom asked Arty and I to make Niobe suffer for her insults and visit divine retribution on the woman’s family by killing all of her children. It seemed harsh, but… our mom had a pretty rough life. Her parents being titans, she was pretty much on the outside of everything, looking in, and then she got saddled with two rambunctious Olympian children who made her life hell for the better part of two decades. So, what were we going to do, right?”
“Do you regret it?” Odysseus asked bluntly.
Apollo picked up a stick and poked the fire to reinvigorate it. Niobe and Leto were both long dead now, so there didn’t seem to be any harm in telling the truth, “Mom just wanted to make Niobe suffer, so Arty and I agreed that we didn’t need to kill the kids, just make their mother think they were dead. We even figured, ‘hey, after she’s groveled for forgiveness we can be the wise and beneficent gods who restored her children to life and made everyone happy.”
“Sounds reasonable,” Odysseus said.
“Right? So I concocted a poison, a sedative that would place someone in such a deep sleep that they would appear dead. I coated our arrows with the poison, and we set off on our hunt. Arty and I are good shots, obviously, so it wasn’t too hard to stick an arrow into something non-vital. I’ve never shot so many ass cheeks as I did that day," Apollo smiled sadly. "We used field points on our arrows rather than our usual broadheads or bodkins, and because of the metabolic suppressant in the poison, I knew there would be very little bleeding to worry about. Just a sting in the tuchus and they'd be dead to the world until I gave them the antidote.”
“Very clever,” Odysseus genuinely admired the reasoning and execution of the deception.
“Too clever,” Apollo frowned, “Niobe was pregnant with her fifteenth child, and feared that we’d come for it next - shoot it right out of her belly. She decided that she needed to entreat Zeus to stop us, and their local wise-woman told her that the best way to get our father's attention was to burn the bodies of her ‘slain’ children on a large pyre. Arty and I managed to intervene in time to spirit away a few of the daughters, but most of the children burned alive.”
“You couldn’t have expected her to do that,” Lycomedes said, “I mean, who does that? Only savages burn their dead.”
“Cremation has a lot of advantages, actually,” Apollo said, “Practical and hygienic. But ‘savage’ or not, it wouldn’t have happened if I had stuck around to see the whole thing play out, rather than flying back to Olympus to brag about our cleverness.”
“What about your sister?” Achilles asked, “Was she as upset as you?”
“Arty is… difficult to understand. To her, animals and human beings are all the same. Neither is better than the other.”
“Does she have that high of an estimation of animals or that low of an estimation of men?” Odysseus asked.
“It meets in the middle with her. She speaks to animals, understands them, but she doesn’t get sentimental about them the way Ares does. She has this whole, survival-of-the-fittest circle-of-life philosophy about it all. So to her, the fact that humans hunt and kill animals… it pretty much means you’re all fair game too. Pun not intended. She felt about as bad about killing those women as you’d feel about slaughtering cattle unnecessarily.”
They all sat quietly for a moment, thinking about the gravity of what they’d just heard. Apollo had regrets, which was not at all god-like. Odysseus had been working with Athena enough that he wasn’t too surprised, but thinking over Apollo’s last words on the matter brought back Odysseus’s feeling that something was wrong about this excursion.
Artemis’s voice came from the woods that ran very nearly up to the edge of the lake – it seemed to come from all around them, emanating from no particular place, as if the forest itself were speaking, “Don’t feel too badly for my brother, boys. The mishap with Niobe’s children was far from the worst thing he’s ever done.”
Odysseus and the other mortals, startled by her voice, jumped up and put their backs to the fire. Menelaus reached for his spear, but Lycomedes chided him, “What are you doing? She’s a goddess, show some reverence.”
“Lycomedes, right?” Artemis’s voice echoed in the forest with an unnerving giggle, “It’s good that you know your place. It makes you useful.”
Apollo stood up, “Arty, come on, you know I’m sorry about Orion. I’ve regretted what I did from the moment he died.”
“Not much solace for him,” the forest answered.
“No, no it’s not,” Apollo nodded, “but terrorizing our friends won’t bring him back, and it isn’t justice. If you want to have it out with me, Arty, say your peace to my face, and tell me what I can do to…”
“To make it up to me?” Artemis said “I think we’re a bit past that point.” At that, Apollo reached for his weapons, only to find that his personally-crafted arrows were missing – going by the tracks in the earth, the hunters had been sufficiently distracted that a number of squirrels had carried them off into the brush, one at a time.
Laughter echoed through the forest all along the edge of the lake. Further down the shore, Odysseus could see the men at the other camps standing and searching for the source. Apollo stood and grabbed a branch from the fire, wishing he had his brother Hephaestus’s talent manipulating the element.
“This isn’t all about you though, dear brother,” the voice hissed, then rose so that the other camps could hear it, “I brought you all here for a hunt, and the time has come.” The men at the other camps cheered, but then she continued, “Just remember, you all said you were game.” Her emphasis on the last word echoed Apollo’s earlier pun.
With no further warning, the forest disgorged an army of beasts of every size. Flies swarmed, birds pecked, squirrels bit, deer charged and kicked, and a small number of bears threw themselves at the panicked men like living siege weapons. A large, black bear came at Paris, it’s eyes glowing in the light of the camp fire, but Apollo threw himself in its path and struck it across the snout with his burning branch. The bear reared up, and staggered Apollo with the swat of one of its massive paws. It swung with its other paw, but Apollo grabbed the creature’s forefoot and twisted it with his superhuman strength – Apollo wasn’t Heracles, but he wasn’t human either. The thick bones in the animal’s foreleg snapped under torsion, and the bear roared in pain. Apollo gouged it in the throat, kicked it between the legs, and threw it into the lake. The god turned to check on the frightened boy, but there was a whistle and a thunk as an arrow struck him in the back and sank deep into his flesh.
Apollo screamed and dropped to his hands and knees next to the fire.
“Oh god, oh god, oh god,” Paris panicked, “What should I do?!”
“Pull the arrow out,” Odysseus said as he dropped a charging elk with a shot to the head.
“Won’t that make him bleed worse?” Paris asked.
Apollo grunted with pain and tried to reach the arrow himself – limber as he was he couldn’t get a grip on it. Hector, Menelaus, Lycomedes, and Achilles were struggling to hold back the avalanche of fur and feathers. Menelaus jumped back as a number of snakes slithered aggressively toward him. Odysseus kicked away a swarm of suddenly carnivorous rabbits, as Adresteia intercepted a hawk diving towards his head.
“He’s a god, he’ll heal quickly once the arrow is out,” Odysseus said. Paris hesitated a moment more and then grabbed the arrow shaft. Apollo screamed from the pain of it moving.
“That crazy bitch!” he cursed, “She shot me! She actually SHOT ME!”
“I can’t pull it out,” Paris said, “it’s stuck!”
“It must be one of mine,” Apollo groaned, “they’re steel broad-heads with the punch of bodkins.”
“Well, I guess you can be proud they work well,” Hector said, “How do you get them out?”
“How close is it to his heart, Paris?” Menelaus asked.
Paris felt around the wound, Apollo wincing from the pain, “It’s high in his back, right side... I think an ear is caught behind his shoulder blade.” Paris said, “But... it's the top of the shoulder blade, so that's well above his heart, right?”
"There's an artery that runs parallel to the collar bone," Hector said, "Fiddle with it too much and you could nick that."
Apollo grunted in pain again, "Get the arrowhead out of me and I'll be fine! I can't heal with steel in my body."
Menelaus made a frustrated sound like someone who knew he had to do something he really didn’t want to do. He skewered a boar with his spear, and then spun around, bringing his big, heavy Spartan shield down on the sturdy shaft of the Olympian arrow like a hammer falling on a nail. Apollo screamed, but the arrowhead punched through his collarbone and erupted from his chest, spraying blood.
“Oh shit!” Achilles shouted, “That was awesome!”
Paris pulled the feathers off of the back end of the arrow before grabbing the front end and yanking it fully out. “I hope I’m never on Menelaus’s bad side,” the boy said, “That was brutal!”
Apollo clapped a hand over the bloody, ragged wound. He wouldn’t bleed out, but blood like his was a hazardous material to say the least. He didn’t want Paris going blind or the Earth giving birth to some horrible monster.
“Sound off my lord!” Hector shouted.
“I’m good,” Apollo lied. It’d been at least a hundred years since he’d been injured – the pain was something of a shock, “I just need a few minutes to heal. Use the fire.”
Odysseus retreated to the other side of the campfire and began jabbing his arrows into the burning kindling before firing them into the brush. The forest wasn’t dry, but it hadn’t rained recently – little fires began to spread everywhere he aimed, turning back the animals that had been rushing in to reinforce the initial wave. Hector and Lycomedes grabbed branches from the fire and brandished them, driving back the beasts assaulting their little camp.
A long howl, echoed from the forest, and the animals attacking their camp retreated to join the assault on the other camps. All but the mosquitoes – the tenacious bugs were everywhere.
“She’s giving us respite,” Menelaus said.
“No,” Apollo tried to pull himself up, “Escalation.”
A thick, clinging fog rolled off of the lake and surrounded them, and then Artemis’s silhouette appeared in the moonlight. Her attire had changed – she’d shredded her green dress to tatters, weaving leaves and grass into it, and smeared dark mud across her fair skin. The crescent moon on her tiara was tilted, giving her the appearance of sharp horns. She clutched her bow in her hand.
For once, Odysseus didn’t stop to think. He didn’t think about whether it was blasphemous or even sensible; he turned and fired at the moon goddess on reflex. Moving with inhuman speed and fluidity, Artemis caught Odysseus’s arrow, nocked it in her own bow, and fired it back at him. Adresteia, swooped in to intercept it just as she had the hawk, but it punctured one of her wings, knocking her out of the air. Odysseus scrambled to help his feathered friend, pulling the arrow out of her wing and putting pressure on the wound.
Despite his earlier reverence, Lycomedes grabbed the broken arrow Paris had pulled from Apollo and lunged at Artemis, hoping the special metal would work on her as well as it had her brother. She grabbed his wrist with one hand and lifted him off the ground, squeezing his arm until he released his grip on the improvised weapon.
She quirked her head and smiled, “Eye to eye with the apex predator and you chose fight over flight? Yes, I think I will keep you.”
Artemis released the man, but then grabbed him by the chest, her thin fingers digging into his sternum, “Let go of your soft, pink face, man’s true nature embrace: hungry and loyal, vicious and noble. Your human self forget, by the light of the moon you shall forever be my pet.” Lycomedes screamed as his bones began snapping and shifting. His flesh swelled and split, thick hair erupting from underneath. As Artemis released him, his scream trailed off into a chilling howl.
“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Odysseus aimed his bow at the wolf-like creature that had replaced the Cretan prince.
“You can’t shoot him!” Menelaus said.
“Seriously?!” Odysseus felt Menelaus’s sense of fraternity was outstripping his common sense.
“He’s one of us – he came out here with us, he goes home with us!”
“No man left behind!” Hector agreed, but moved to cover his little brother.
“Hey, Lycomedes,” Odysseus said, “You still in there somewhere?”
The creature snarled.
“I’m thinking he’s not going to go along with your plan eagerly,” Odysseus said.
Adresteia shifted back to her god-form to heal, and staggered to her feet.
“The man is a wolf and the owl is a woman!” Paris observed.
“Ah, the wonders of the natural world,” Achilles added sarcastically.
Artemis was clearly surprised to see Adresteia, “Nem? Where have you been? You were the next best hunter on Olympus! I’ve missed you!”
Adresteia drew her wings into her back, and flexed her fingers as she extended her talons, electricity arcing between them.
“Nem?” Artemis seemed confused, “Are you mad Nem? We’re just playing; it’s sport.”
“Artemis,” Adresteia said, “I always liked you – as much as I was capable of liking anyone – but you’re acting… insane."
Artemis scoffed, “Well that’s hardly fair coming from a goddess that throws herself in front of danger to save a mortal.”
“You shot your brother in the back.”
“Better than he deserves,” Artemis said.
“And what you’ve… done to that poor man?” Adresteia gestured at the snarling monstrosity the goddess had created.
“What I’ve done is change him from a 'poor man' into a magnificent creature,” Artemis scratched him behind the ears, “And he’s so cuddly now too.”
Adresteia realized that she and Artemis lacked the common sense of basic values necessary to have a rational conversation. “She’s out of your league,” she said to Odysseus, “Go.”
Odysseus hesitated for a moment, then turned and ran towards the next nearest campfire, still besieged by Artemis’s woodland army. He grabbed Achilles by the collar of his tunic as he moved, shouting for the others to follow.
As much as Hector wanted to stand and fight, he had Paris to consider. He grabbed the boy by the arm and ran after Odysseus. Lycomedes charged after them, but Menelaus interceded, striking the side of the creature’s head with his shield before slamming the butt of his spear between its shoulders. Lycomedes sagged to the ground. Menelaus hiked his shield up his arm so that he could take his spear in his off-hand, and hauled Apollo onto his knees. The Olympian was too tall for Menelaus to prop him onto his feet, so the adopted Spartan simply threw his weight forward and dragged the god as best he could.
Artemis drew her bow and fired after him, but as fast as her arrows were, Adresteia’s lightning was faster. She released a brilliant blue-white flash from her hand, and with a crack of thunder the goddess’s arrow fell to the ground in smoldering splinters.
Artemis tilted her head as if she thought that were entertaining, and whistled, “Lyco. Fetch your friends for me; Nem and I have some catching up to do.”
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