IN DUE COURSE, we arrived. I had grown so accustomed to the sway of Geryon’s flight that the sudden stillness made me dizzy. I released my grip on the monster’s fur and slid off his back into a puddle. Ajax lay nearby, more shaken than I. Without a word, Geryon sprang into the air and was gone. I didn’t even have a chance to thank him—not that I would have.
“I feel sick,” moaned Ajax.
“Men are not meant for flight,” I agreed.
Even Diomedes looked a little green.
Not far away, Proteus alighted in a puddle of his own, shook his wings into arms, and pushed himself back into the shape of an old man. Again there was that appalling odor of dead fish. Then, achingly and with enormous effort, he stood upright, unaware that we were watching. He bent over stiffly, coughed up something, and passed wind. How frail he looked.
“You trust that over me?” I said to Diomedes.
“You chose a dog over me.” He stepped forward, still gripping my sword. I reached for my bow.
“Not here, lads,” said Ajax, stepping between us. “I don’t quite get what’s going on between you two, but I figure we got bigger eggs to crack.” He turned to Diomedes. “Give him back his sword.”
Diomedes balked. “Do you trust him?”
Ajax considered the question. “No. But then, I don’t so much trust you neither, all a sudden. And I know it en’t right to take a man’s sword when he’s in a pinch. So give it back, and let’s get a move on before somethin’ ugly eats us.” He waited for Diomedes to comply. “Go on, now.”
Diomedes handed me the sword, scowling. With Ajax towering over us, we must have looked rather like a couple of chastised children.
“He started it,” muttered Diomedes.
I stuck my tongue out.
“So where are we?” said Ajax.
I looked around. There wasn’t much to see. “Chiron’s map is rather vague from here on out,” I said. Behind us roared the waterfall we had passed on our way down. To our left and right, the terrain stretched out in a featureless waste—the same iron gray that had followed us from the start. Straight ahead, however, the land dropped off sharply, and from just beyond the ridge, a sound like splitting wood erupted at regular intervals amid a steady, crunching thud. I walked to the ridge and peered over.
Below, in a queue kept orderly by fierce-looking sentries, an endless procession of naked souls jogged in single file along a gravel path. A step to their left, a second line moved in the opposite direction. It was an oddly civilized arrangement, and it reminded me of a phenomenon I had once witnessed at a festival near Kazarma. The bridge there was too small for all the pilgrims to cross at once, and the people trying to get out were packed against the people trying to get in. Some clever soldier had ordered everyone on the north side to walk eastward and everyone on the south side to walk westward. It was a brilliant idea, though it never caught on.
Next I turned my attention to the sentries, who stood out black as pitch against the pale flesh of their prisoners. They were a great deal shorter than your average man, and their limbs were unnaturally thin. I’d seen a fellow once among the Lotus Eaters who had so succumbed to the lotus drug that he had altogether ceased eating real food. He was such a frightening spectacle, stretched out in a gutter in skeletal despair, that the mere sight of him had shaken me out of my inebriation and sent me running for my ship, towing my shipmates in hand like so many weeping children. The gaunt figures below, however, exhibited none of the emaciated languor of the Lotus Eaters. They leapt about with their whips clutched in bony hands, spry, alert, savagely lashing any unfortunate that lagged behind. They had short goatlike horns growing from their foreheads, and their skin was smooth as polished stone.
I sank to my haunches, inched back from the ridge, pulled Chiron’s map out of my quiver, and spread it on the ground. “So here we are,” I said to Ajax. Diomedes walked over, but I positioned myself so that he couldn’t see. I pointed to the uppermost of ten concentric rings in the eighth circle of Hell, which Chiron had labeled “Malebolge”.
“Maleh . . . Muleh . . . Moleh . . . what sort a name’s that?” asked Ajax.
“Malebolge? I don’t know,” I answered. “It sounds Trojan. Whatever it is, though, it’s bad. Just over that ridge are some nasty-looking little fellows with whips. Luckily, the map says there’s a bridge ahead on our left. Of course, Chiron never saw any of this for himself, so it might not be there at all.”
“A bridge to where?” asked Diomedes.
I ignored him.
“What’s on the other side?” asked Ajax.
“Nine more of the same, I expect. It seems each ring is like a valley with a bridge spanning over it. The map just says ‘Realm of the Leopard’. But that’s why he gave it to me: to fill in the gaps.”
By now, Ajax had lost interest and was climbing up to the ridge to have a look for himself. He returned almost immediately, with his shaggy brows thoroughly knit.
“What’s the matter?” asked Diomedes.
“I was afraid of that,” he answered.
“Afraid of what?” I said.
“Devils.”
“What?”
“Devils,” he repeated. “They’re little gods, I think. Or demigods. Like nymphs, but ugly and mean. I seen them before. They make their way up to the woods from time to time, though the Centaurs keep ’em from getting any further. Nasty things. Come in all shapes and sizes, each one uglier than the next.”
“So it’s settled,” I said. “We take the bridge.”
“If there is one,” muttered Diomedes.
We set off to the left, and Proteus, seeing that we were finally on the move, followed at a distance.
Chiron happened to be right about the bridges. They were hard to miss. Built from the all-too-familiar iron-gray stone, they shot up into the air in extravagantly tall arches. The workmanship was magnificent—“Cyclopean”, we would have called it back home—mortarless, and built of such intricate patterns, one felt that if a single block were moved, the entire structure might tumble into the valley. Yet whoever had built them had not been concerned about appearance. Piles of debris lay strewn everywhere, and on the bridge itself as though the workmen had left in a hurry.
We kept to the middle of the bridge at first, worried that if we strayed too near the edge, we might attract the attention of the horned sentries, but there was no hiding Ajax, and we soon discovered that the devils had no interest in us anyway—or it appeared so. Here too we were mistaken.