Well, I don’t know about you, but after all that excitement I could do with a decent cup of tea. However, I’ll soldier on without a brew, quite parched, so that I can tell you about Aries’ best friend, Alex.
Alex was a thirteen-year-old Athenian boy, or at least that’s what he’d been when he died in ancient Greece and come down to the Underworld. Strictly speaking, he was now two thousand, nine hundred and seventy-two years old. But have you ever seen a birthday cake with that many candles? Gangly and with hair as black as ripe olives, he loved being dead. Up on Earth he’d been a potter, spending his days in his grandfather’s cool, white workshop, painting pot after pot after pot. Round pots, squat pots, pots with bulbous middles, pots with long necks, pots with curly handles that snapped off just as you finished painting the picture on them. But down here he was a keeper in the Underworld Zoo, the home to all the old Greek monsters and fabulous animals.
A kind and thoughtful boy, Alex’s choosing to work in the zoo had been a surprise to his parents, especially to his father Lykos. During his lifetime Lykos had been a hoplite in the Athenian Army and had nursed hopes that his only son might follow in his footsteps one day, into a glorious military career. But Alex, who’d even been named after the greatest army leader of them all, Alexander the Great, couldn’t see anything remotely glorious about tramping off on pointless wars, and despite his father’s insistence that his son learn to box and throw javelins, Alex had remained uninterested. Alex, you see, was a thinker, not a thumper.
Now, as you might imagine, the Underworld Zoo wasn’t like any zoo you or I have ever visited: no penguins skidded down ice slides, no hippopotamuses slapped about in mud and absolutely no sea lions ever leaped through a hoop for fish. Instead, the arcades rang with hisses and roars, the slap of tentacles and the clang of bronze beaks. Even that familiar eye-watering whiff you get in Earth zoos was here mingled with the stench of burning earth and vomited bile.
One enclosure held the ghost of the Minotaur, the half-man half-bull creature who prowled within a high-walled maze beneath a viewing balcony. Another held the spectre of the Ceryneian Hind, a deer with golden antlers and hooves made of brass that shot sparks into the air as she scrambled over the rocks. The many-headed Hydra swam in a mesh-covered tank. Wild man-eating horses galloped around paddocks ringed with high bronze fences. The three gorgons, women with snakes for hair, bickered behind special one-way screens to stop their glances turning ghost visitors to stone.
What’s that?
You’re surprised that ghost gorgons could still turn spectators into statues? Or that ghost monsters needed locking up at all? I suppose that’s because someone’s told you that a ghost’s just a ghost. It’s dead, so it can’t be harmed? Well, Greek ghosts are rather different. In fact, they’re more like candles. Bright and brilliant they can spend an eternity in the Underworld. But, if they’re killed a second time, they’re snuffed out. POOF! Like an extinguished flame they vanish in a smoky smudge and become nothing. So the ghost monsters had to be locked up to protect the ghost visitors. Or more importantly, as Alex saw it, to protect the monsters. You see, Alex was not a typical Greek hero. He’s certainly one of the heroes of our story and it is a Greek story, but that’s not the same thing at all. This is because Greek heroes were famous for two things:
- Not liking monsters.
- Killing them.
Alex couldn’t have been more different.
He wouldn’t have given you last week’s stale sardines from the bottom of Hydra’s tank for a Greek hero. Even now, he couldn’t understand why people admired them so much. Of course, it’d been the same old story when he was alive. He remembered how the customers loved pots showing Jason sneaking up on Drako or Herakles firing arrows at the harpies. It was stupid, Alex thought, how people swooned over biceps and shiny armour and never once stopped to think what the heroes actually did. Like attacking monsters that’d simply been minding their own business. It made him sad to think that every one of zoo’s exhibits was the victim of one hero or another’s handiwork with a sword or a spear or a magic shield. He could imagine the monsters’ surprise and terror at being attacked and tried to make up for it with kindness now.
Which isn’t to say he would ever step into one of their enclosures. Oh, no. He understood the monsters and their habits too well to do anything so foolish. After all, habits like tearing people’s legs off with your fangs or goring them through with the spikes on your tail are harder than most to break.
Not that he had to imagine anything when it came to Aries, who told him his opinions on a daily, no hourly, basis. He smiled, wondering what was taking the ram so long at the pavilion this afternoon, and collected the long ladder from the store. Neither a monster, nor in the zoo bosses’ eyes a particularly fabulous animal any more, Aries hadn’t fitted in and, but for Alex’s insistence, he would have been abandoned on some Elysian hillside, anonymous in a shepherd’s flock. It was Alex who had stepped in and demanded that he become his assistant. More than that, he’d built him a small white-walled barn in the courtyard of his family’s house, despite the protests of his mother and two sisters. Now they too had grown used to sharing their sunlit spot with a ram that they loved even when he chewed the heads off the sunflowers or knocked the arms off the statues with his horns.
Late afternoon was Alex’s favourite time of the day, the time after the tourists had gone home and he could be alone and feed the monsters. And so, at about the time Aries was splintering the back door of the pavilion, Alex was climbing a ladder propped up against the side of Scylla’s tank. Scraping away the green weed that floated on the surface of the water with a long pole, he peered down through the iron mesh that covered its surface, just able to make out the sea monster’s dark shape against the tiled floor. She looked like a giant backwards squid with women’s heads fanned out on six tentacles that led into a pair of women’s shoulders. Further down, several dogs’ heads on stalks sprouted from her waist and from then on she was a silvery fish tail. Pretty she wasn’t, but that didn’t matter at all, because when Greek sailors saw her rise frothing out of the sea, good looks were the last thing on their minds. Wet knees, splintered ships, rows and rows of gleaming teeth were all much higher up the list because, furious and terrifying, Scylla had sunk hundreds of ships and drowned more men than Aries had eaten fresh nettles. Today, however, she lay listless on the pool floor, her tail coiled around her, the dogs’ heads snoring out bubbles.
“Scylla!” Alex called down, splashing at the water and tipping in a bucket of sapphire-blue fish and dog bones. “I’ve brought your favourites!”
He willed the women’s eyes to open, for those heads to snake out of the water, for the dogs to bark and snap and keen as she twisted her body into the air before arching down like a trireme in a storm, sending walls of water over the edges.
But she didn’t.
She didn’t do a thing and the treats sank onto the floor.
Feeling worried, Alex slid down the ladder and hurried along the walkway to the stairs leading to an underground glass-fronted viewing tank for a better look. Squashing his face against the glass, he looked at Scylla’s downturned mouth and closed eyes. She hadn’t looked as miserable as this since the day Herakles had killed her.
Hurrying to the next tank of water, which would have appeared uninhabited to you and me, he finally spotted a patch of gently rippling water. Charybdis, the whirlpool, was neither whirling nor pooling. On Earth she’d kept Scylla company, forcing unlucky sailors to choose between being dragged down into her black spinning waters or being eaten alive by Scylla5. However, now she lay as still as a puddle.
Not a ripple.
Sea monsters, by the way, cannot talk. They can blow bubbles and froth, but they’re not great conversationalists. Neither are fire-breathing bulls. They do, of course, love a good scorch of the grass, and can often be seen snorting jets of flame that leave black trails across the meadow. But today, as Alex squinted against the sulphur that wafted from their paddock, he saw the bulls lying silently, their bronze hooves dull in the sunshine, their tails still despite the buzz of ghost flies around them.
Alex felt a stab of panic.
Even the Stymphalian birds had stopped dragging their bronze beaks over the iron bars of their enclosure for once. Usually their cage clanged like a giant glockenspiel, a jangle of metal that could be heard all over the zoo. Now they sat huddled with their backs towards the viewing gallery, a sulky wall of oil-black wings, silent save for the occasional tinkle-edged whisper.
What was the matter with everyone today? For the monsters to be this upset, something big must be happening. Alex bit his lip, wondering what it could possibly be and, feeling more worried than ever at the eerie quiet, turned and ran in the direction of the biggest gossips he knew, the loosest-jawed inhabitants of the zoo, the Skeleton Soldiers.
5. What a charming choice and not one that would have had me rushing to join the Greek Navy.