More like where on Earth? thought Alex.
He scanned the room, searching for a window to look through, desperate for a reassuring glimpse of the clustered terracotta rooftops of Athens. But there were no windows, just four blank walls hung with stone friezes of horsemen, friezes he’d now realised he’d last seen fixed beneath the roof of Athena’s temple.
“Well?” said Rose, her arms folded, waiting for an answer.
Alex turned and looked at Rose properly for the first time. Of course, it was no surprise that she was unlike any girl he’d seen before, but her appearance was still a shock. Whilst his sisters wore their hair glossed and coiled, pinned into intricate styles with pearl pins, hers was wild and loose and tangled over her shoulders. Unlike the women of old Greece, always so elegantly draped in dresses, Rose’s clothes were baggy and casual. But it was the way she looked at him, her eyes bright with impatience, demanding an answer, which was the most surprising thing of all.
“I’m Alex,” he said at last. He laid a hand on Aries’ head. “And this is Aries.” Aries harrumphed pointedly. “Aries Khryos Khrysamallos,” added Alex, glaring down at the ram.
“That’s some name,” said Rose.
“It’s Greek,” explained Alex.
“Of course.” Rose rolled her eyes and put her hands on her hips. “And I suppose he’s a Greek sheep?”
Aries stamped his hoof furiously.
“Ram,” corrected Alex.
Aries clopped forwards and snuffled against the cheek of the broken caryatid. Kneeling down, Alex put his arm around the ram’s neck and looked at the statue’s face, remembering the countless times he’d walked past her when she’d gleamed in the Greek sunshine.
“Can your mother really fix this?” he asked.
Rose nodded. “Of course she can. Believe me, she loves anything old and made of stone.”
Alex looked across the room at the three statues of reclining goddesses and frowned, recognising them by only their poses, since each goddess was now headless.
“What happened to the Parthenon?” said Alex.
“Nothing’s happened to it,” said Rose flatly. “It’s still in Greece.”
Aries looked up at Alex with wide, worried eyes.
“And we’re not?” said Alex.
Rose shook her head. “Okay. It’s not funny any more.”
Alex stared at her.
“This is the British Museum,” she added. “In London.”
“Britannia?” gasped Alex.
At which Aries bleated furiously and was about to shout something extremely rude, had Alex not clamped his hand around the ram’s muzzle.
“It can’t be!” said Alex, struggling to keep Aries’ mouth closed. “That’s the caryatid Athena chose for her portal! So, how did she move?”
“Right! That’s enough!” Rose held her hands up in front of her. “Either stop acting weird and come with me, or take your chances with them out there!” She nodded towards the doors at the back of the room and Alex followed her gaze to see several tourists still clamouring against the glass, pushing for a better view, staring and pointing. “Your choice.”
Five minutes later Rose had led them out of the Parthenon room and down into the basement of the British Museum. Now they followed her along underground corridors that criss-crossed like a maze and led to storerooms filled with exhibits for repair or storage. Alex looked up, fascinated by the dots of twinkling light set into the ceiling. He wanted to reach up and touch them, to see if they burned like fire or were full of lightning sparks, but knowing that it would make Rose even more annoyed he hurried on, Aries’ hoof-falls ringing in his ears.
“In here,” said Rose finally, opening a door at the end of the corridor and stepping inside.
Cramped and stuffy, the room was lit by dingy yellow light and filled with rows of wooden shelves that stretched almost from one wall to the other with only a narrow aisle to walk around them. Every shelf was crammed with boxes and packing cases spilling straw. Vase-shaped bundles in bubble wrap and glass trays of pinned oily black beetles were wedged between rows of leather suitcases bearing handwritten brown labels. A mummified lizard stared balefully down at Alex from the far corner, its glass eyes dull. On the shelf below, stuffed tarantulas the size of rubber gloves arched beneath glass domes. Of course, on any other day, the sort of other day when he hadn’t been plunged into modern London, Alex would have loved this room. He’d have spent hours studying the beetles and lifting the spiders from their boxes to stroke the fur on their legs. Even the Underworld Zoo, with all its monsters, had nothing quite so hairy and marvellous15. But as Aries squeezed between the first two shelves and began to snuffle around in the hope of finding something to eat, Alex turned away from the spiders and looked at Rose who was pulling out a blanket from beneath a jar of desiccated bat wings.
Now he thought about it, she had been pretty brave in standing up to the guards. And she hadn’t batted an eyelid at the rows of gigantic spiders in here. Impressive. For a girl, he quickly reminded himself, confident that she’d probably still just burst into tears and run away if he told her the real truth about who they were16.
“Perhaps,” said Alex, “your husband might be able to help us?”
“Husband?” snapped Rose and thumped the blanket onto the floor.
Thanks to Rose’s mother’s daily lectures on antiquity she knew that ancient Greek girls were married by the age of fourteen, usually to a man in his thirties, chosen by her father. She wasn’t amused. “For the last time, snap out of this freaky Greek routine or I’m going for the guards!”
She sat down on the blanket and drew her knees up under her chin, scowling. At which, Aries, who hadn’t eaten for at least three hours – which, as he’d have told you, in ram-terms is forever, but had now discovered a crate of tasty naval flags – looked up, the red flag of the Imperial Japanese Navy trailing from the corner of his mouth.
“Touchy, isn’t she?” he muttered between chews. “No wonder her family can’t find a man for her.”
Rose’s jaw fell open. She gasped, staring wide-eyed at Aries, and turned to Alex.
“Do that again!” she insisted.
“Do what?” said Alex, clamping Aries’ mouth shut.
“Throw your voice! Make him look like he can talk!” said Rose. “It’s awesome!”
Aries pulled his nose out of Alex’s fingers. “How nice of you to say so!”
“No way!” spluttered Rose, scrambling to her feet. “That time was seriously spooky!”
“Spooky, my cud!” spat Aries, flinging Alex’s hand away. “Do you know to whom you are speaking?” Rose stared bewildered as Aries went on, stamping his hoof in time with his words. “The ram of the Golden Fleece!”
By now Rose was at the door, her palm around its handle, but Aries was faster, in the way that furious rams always are, and he swung his weight against the door with a thump. “And there’s no need to look like that about it, either!” he went on, staring up crossly at her. “I know it must be rather disappointing to see me bald, but—”
Aries turned and regarded the boy loftily. “I hope all modern Earth people aren’t like her!”
“Like what?” demanded Rose, her annoyance overtaking her shock.
“Fickle,” said Aries simply. “Helping one minute and going as goggly as Narcissus the next.”
Rose looked astonished.
“I can explain,” said Alex, pushing his hair back off his face. “If you really want to know, that is?”
He waited, watching the flush disappear from her face as the panic seemed to fade, replaced by something else.
Curiosity.
Perhaps, Alex thought, he’d been wrong about her after all. Even though she was a girl, she hadn’t dived out of the door and fled back upstairs to find the guards. He frowned. His own sisters would have run squealing from a room at the most ordinary of things or thing – a beetle scuttling over the floor would have had them lifting their skirts and sprinting away. And this could hardly be an ordinary day for Rose.
“It is a long story,” he said tentatively. “And you’ll find it strange and perhaps frightening…”
“Are you going to stay and listen?” asked Aries, bustling past to sit next to Alex. “Good. Alex is excellent at stories. In fact, the Minotaur always asks for two at bedtime and as for Chimera—”
“Aries!” said Alex.
Aries snapped his mouth shut.
“Go on,” Rose encouraged him. “I’m listening.”
Alex took a deep breath. “Aries is telling the truth when he says he’s the ram of the Golden Fleece—”
“As in the myth?” Rose interrupted. “I thought that was just a made-up story—”
Aries tapped his horn against the shelf. “Do I sound made-up to you?”
“No, but,” Rose paused, thinking. “You’re in the book of Greek stories my mum gave me last Christmas. Except in your picture you’re covered in golden wool. Let me think… The Golden Fleece? That’s the one with Jason, isn’t it?”
Aries and Alex nodded.
“So, did he really exist, too?” Rose’s cheeks grew pink. Her eyes glittered. “Was he a total hunk like the story says?”
“No,” said Aries. “That bit was made-up.”
Rose turned to Alex. “So, who are you, then? You’re not in the myth, are you?”
Alex shook his head. “No. I was an ordinary potter in Attica when the Argonauts sailed.”
Rose edged back against the wall, her face growing pale beneath her freckles. “But that was, like, ages ago, wasn’t it? How old are you?”
Alex shrugged. “Technically, I was thirteen when I died—”
“Died,” Rose repeated emptily.
“Of the plague,” explained Alex.
“He’s not infectious any more,” said Aries, seeing the look of fear on her face.
“But you are a ghost?” Rose’s eyebrows, which had been rising at each new thing she’d been told, now completely vanished under her fringe.
Alex nodded. “We prefer to call ourselves shades.” He stretched out his legs in front of him.
“But you look as solid as anyone else,” she said, frowning and touching him gingerly with a finger. “You know, normal,” she added before glancing down at his tunic and filthy bare feet. “Sort of.” She stretched out her legs too. “So, why’ve you come back?”
For the next twenty minutes Rose listened, her eyes growing wider and wider, as Alex explained what had really happened that night in Kolkis, of how Medea had used her spiteful magic to trick Drako and how Aries had finally won the chance to come back to Earth to find his fleece. Luckily for Alex and Aries, Rose’s mother had always taught her daughter to be polite and to listen to what others had to say, even if they were Greek and dead and one of them happened to be a magical ram. And even though what they said was the most remarkable, fantastical and crazy story Rose had ever heard in her life, it was also, she knew, the only story that could explain how a boy and a talking ram had simply appeared through a brick wall of the museum.
“What I don’t get,” she said eventually, “is why Jason didn’t look after the fleece and take it with him to the Underworld when he died.”
Alex shrugged. “All we know is that he wore it on the day he married Medea. It was in all the news scrolls. But after that, well…” He shrugged.
“But no fleece?” finished Rose. “So, how will you track it down?”
Alex sighed. “I’m not sure. I mean, we were supposed to start at the Parthenon.” He scowled at the boxes of rolled up maps on the top of the nearest shelf. “I still don’t understand how we ended up in London.”
“Lots of pieces of the Parthenon were moved,” said Rose simply. She tucked her hair behind her ear, thinking. “Important things usually end up in museums, which is why this is so strange.”
“What is?” said Alex, relieved that she was taking them so seriously.
“Well, shouldn’t the fleece be in a museum, too? I mean, if it was left up on Earth like you say it was, then surely…” she looked up at them, her brow furrowed, “surely it’d be the star exhibit somewhere?”
Aries beamed and rubbed his ears against her elbow.
Rose smiled down at him. “But if it were in a museum, like, any museum, anywhere, then I’d know about it. Believe me, Mum would have dragged me to see it from my pushchair years ago.”
“So it’s not?” said Alex.
Rose shook her head. “Someone somewhere must still have it.” She leaned back against the shelf. “Maybe some old duke and duchess have it hanging on the walls of their dining room,” she went on, thinking out loud. “Or a Chinese emperor’s using it as a bedroom rug in his golden pagoda.”
Aries wrinkled up his nose at the suggestion of toes scrunching into his golden wool.
Rose shrugged. “Haven’t you got any clues or help at all?”
“Only this,” said Alex, rummaging in his bag for the Scroll.
It gave a grumpy rustle as it unfurled and looked at Rose through one of its ragged holes.
Rose stared blankly. “What is it?”
“An All-Knowing, talking Scroll,” said Alex. “Or at least it was before someone decided to eat half of it for his lunch. I don’t think there’s enough of it to work properly now. It’s probably useless.”
“It was useless before,” muttered Aries.
The Scroll harrumphed.
“Hmm,” said Rose, tracing one of the holes in the parchment with her fingertip. “I’m not so sure.”
She examined the Scroll, turning it this way and that, studying the edges of the holes, stroking the damage. Soon it began to purr like a cat and Alex felt himself brighten. Perhaps Rose might be able to do something? Rose would, of course, because just like her mother – although she would hate my pointing this out – she was one of nature’s fixers and never able to see a problem without her mind worrying and fiddling and wondering how to solve it.
“I’m sure I could patch this up,” she said, handing it back to Alex with a smile. “But right now I have to go back upstairs.”
Alex felt a ripple of panic in his chest. “Why?”
“To tell Mum about the caryatid, of course,” said Rose, rising to her feet. “Otherwise Ron and Eric will freak out and then who knows what’ll happen.”
“But you will—”
“Come back?” finished Rose. “Of course I will! Don’t worry!”
Aries planted his head on her waist. “Promise?”
Rose stroked his muzzle. “Promise!”
“But what about the guards?” said Alex.
“Simple,” smiled Rose. “I tell Mum that the guards dealt with you and the guards that Mum dealt with you. As long as she fixes the caryatid and they don’t get into trouble, there won’t be a problem.”
(See, like I said, one of nature’s fixers.)
She turned towards the door.
“But what shall we do while you’re gone?” asked Alex.
Rose looked back over her shoulder. “Stay out of sight and think about how I can help you. Okay?”
“Olives,” said Aries.
Rose exchanged glances with Alex.
“That’s how you can help me,” added Aries, seeing their puzzled faces. “Do you know, I haven’t eaten properly for days? Not unless you count a mouthful of withered oblivion bushes and a few furry biscuits from the bottom of Alex’s bag, which frankly I do not. Green olives would be nicest, if you can find them in this London place.”
Shaking her head, Rose turned away and began walking up the corridor.
15. Marvellous, however, would not have been the first word I would have chosen. “Aaaargh!” and “Get it away from me,” would have been much higher up my list.
16. Of course, it wasn’t really Alex’s fault that he was so absolutely wrong about girls. Since ancient Athenian men didn’t allow women to vote or have jobs or even step out of the house on their own, many of them simply never discovered just how capable, smart and, frankly, all-round brilliant, women are.