I LOOKED BACK to see where the voice was coming from. I heard Diomedes’ sword slide from its sheath.
“Odysseus!” Not only was it my name, but the voice itself was familiar. “Odysseus, Lord of Ithaca! Come back! I command you!”
Then I recognized it. Looking to my right through a forest of flame, I beheld Agamemnon, Son of Atreus, Lord of the Argives. He stood about a stone’s throw away. The old warlord. The last I’d seen of him was on the beaches of Troy. He had a ship full of slaves and gold under his feet, and in spite of myself—for I never much liked the man—I thought he had never looked so majestic. “Say what you like,” I’d whispered to Diomedes, who had come down with me to see him off. “He is a bully and a lout and the sort of man who would steal his best friend’s woman . . . but that fellow knows how to carry himself like a king.” Even at the age of sixty, he cut a powerful figure: his tan face scarred and coarse from battle, his broad, broken nose and white beard falling across his chest in braids woven with gold . . . the man had a way of holding his head that made you want to bow.
But that was not the man who cringed before us now, writhing in flame. He was still wearing his armor and crown but was blackened from head to toe; his hair hung in knotted mats, and his body shook with pain. Even so, he did his best to stand upright, and when another head poked up out of the tomb, he knocked it back down with his fist.
“Odysseus! Lord of Ithaca! Rescue me, I command you.”
If his imperiousness hadn’t been so pathetic, I might have laughed. The old goat was in no position to give orders, but he just couldn’t help himself. “Diomedes! Is that you? Good man. Get me out of here. Now.”
Diomedes looked over at me with half his face screwed into a frown. “I didn’t even like him when he was alive.”
“Diomedes!” he shouted again. “Odysseus! Help me out of here . . . please.”
It was a word we had never heard from King Agamemnon in all our years fighting under him, and it astonished me.
“We should at least try.”
“How do we even know it’s him?” said Diomedes. Poor man. If the episode with Proteus had taught him anything, it was skepticism.
“Just look at him.”
He looked. “Yeah. We should try.”
And we did try over and over, but the heat would not allow us any closer, and there were several rows of tombs between us. At last, sweating and gasping in the path, Diomedes and I gave up.
“Lord Agamemnon, we have failed you,” I shouted. “We can’t even get close enough to throw the rope, and I fear it would burn if we did.”
“That’s all right, boys,” he called back, and with every breath, his voice grew weaker. “You’ve done your best. Besides, Priam is in here with me, and it would have been hard to make him stay behind.”
“Priam?” we both cried at once, and the same bald head popped up in front of him, only to be knocked down again.
“Yes. The old dog-face himself. I’d have to kick him hard to keep him in here, and I’m not sure I have the strength. But tell me one thing before you leave: How is my son?”
Diomedes and I looked at one another again. After three thousand years, who could say? “Lord of men, your son avenged your murder, but he had a tough go of it afterward. Beyond that, we do not know.”
The old man sighed, gave someone in the tomb a kick, and collapsed.
We stared after him in disbelief. “So Priam’s in there with him,” Diomedes mused.
With a new weariness, we returned to the path.
From there, the landscape gradually deteriorated into a crumbling downward climb, unremarkable but for an odd, goaty smell and some scattered evidence of livestock.
“Could be cattle nearby,” I said.
“Or just Proteus.”
I looked nervously about. “A bite of roasted beef might not be such a bad thing, though, eh? Maybe we can kill him while he’s still a cow. You think that counts as cannibalism?”
“Seems to me you’ve seen enough of cannibalism and cattle rustling,” said Diomedes. It was a mean thing to say. On my way back from Troy, I’d lost half my men to a tribe of cannibals, the other half to a botched cattle raid. He knew it was a sore point. Outwardly, I’d blamed the men for their misfortune, but Diomedes knew there was a part of me that still blamed myself. And he knew that mentioning it would shut me up. It worked. There were no further signs of the cattle or any other living thing, and even if there had been, the meager glow of the retreating tombs left us with hardly enough light to walk, much less hunt.
Over time, however, the darkness began to loosen its grip, and the broken earth beneath our feet leveled out. In the distance, the gloom gave way to a pulsing red glow, somber and dull like light through skin.
“I don’t like the look of that,” said Diomedes when we stopped to rest. But there was no avoiding it, so onward we trudged until we found ourselves at the edge of another cliff. What lay below, however, was obscured by a thick red mist. And not just red by reflection of some distant light, but red itself—a deep crimson that made me want to hold my breath and never let it out. In fact, to call it mist is not to do it justice. It was more like pudding—a foul pudding made of old cheese and sweat. We had to climb through this noxious cloud to get to the next level, and by the time we came out on the other side, both Diomedes and I looked as though we had been dipped in blood—which in fact we had.
With the crimson clouds rolling above us, I looked down the steep descent into a landscape that was terrifyingly beautiful. For as far as I could see, everything—every stone, every barren tree, every cloud and puddle—was red. The rocks that tumbled down the face of the cliff glistened like ripe fruit against trickling streams of blood; the base of the cliff dissolved into scarlet sand; and in the distance, dark clouds pelted the earth with drops of ruby ichor distilled from the ether like crystal beads in a witch’s den. Distant bolts of lightning flashed and throbbed. And through it all flowed the steaming river Phlegethon, thrashed to a foam by the violent souls that struggled in its current. One oasis of color did relieve the sickening homogeny of the landscape: just this side of the river, scattered across the sand like bright shells, stood a crowd of tents—hundreds of gleaming cones scattered in yellows, blues, and greens.
“Who do you think lives in those?” I mused. I was about to answer myself when an arrow lodged in the ground in front of me and a gruff voice called from below, “Who is that who descends the slope? Tell it from there; if not, I draw again.”
“I don’t see him,” whispered Diomedes, reaching for his sword.
A second arrow grazed his hand. “Move again, and you will lose the arm altogether,” said a voice from behind us. There was a clattering of hooves and the creaking of drawn bows.
“I am Odysseus, royal Son of Laertes,” I said. “I come from the island of Ithaca. I travel with Diomedes Tydides, Lord of Argos. We mean only to pass through on our way to the lower realms.”
“Ill met then, Odysseus, Son of Laertes, and Diomedes, Son of Tydeus. No one passes here.” A sharp blow to the back sent me sprawling face-first, and Diomedes beside me. Then we were blindfolded, bound, and thrown over the back of a horse—all before I even had a chance to look at our captors.
“I can’t say I saw that coming,” Diomedes said with a grunt.
“Whoever they are, they move fast,” I answered.
And in this ignoble manner, slung side by side like two sacks of barley, Diomedes and I completed the final leg of our descent. I was bumped and jostled till I thought my teeth would fall out. What’s more, my blindfold was bound exceptionally tight, which gave me a ripping headache. It did, however, provide a little gap though which to see the ground pass beneath us.
“Diomedes,” I whispered, “these are real horses.”
“Well, they aren’t sheep.”
“No, what I mean is, these horses are alive,” I said. “Like us. They leave prints in the sand. They aren’t shades.”
“Is that good news?”
“I hope so. If the horses leave tracks, maybe their riders do too, in which case they may be men like us.”
But there were no footprints in the camp at all, only the shallow, round tracks of more and more horses.
Once we had been brought into camp, we were unloaded without ceremony, pulled to our feet, and ordered to walk. Our captors never dismounted but trotted alongside us, shoving us left, now right, now left again . . . I tried to commit the sequence to memory in case we needed to escape, but we might have been back at the entrance to Hades, for all I knew. At last we were ordered to stop, and while we stood silently waiting, our escort cantered off. “I’ll bring this to the attention of Lord Chiron,” he called to the others.
Chiron. I knew the name, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Had I met him? It was a Greek name at least, and that was a good sign. Well, all would be made clear in time. And it was.
Before long, there was a tremendous clatter of galloping hooves, and a deep voice boomed, “Who captured these men? Untie them at once! Nessos! Pholos! Shame on you both. Can’t you see they’re alive? Come now, remove those blindfolds and return their weapons without delay.” And just like that, my liberty and my sight were restored. Which is how I found myself, bewildered and bruised, blinking into the face of Chiron, Lord of Mount Pelion, the Centaur.