Hero for Hire
Authors: C. B. Pratt
Tags: #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Fantasy, #Historical, #Myths & Legends, #Greek & Roman, #Sword & Sorcery, #Science Fiction, #Alternate History, #Alternative History
Table of Contents
Author's Note:
To avoid tedious scenes of bartering, I have moved the existence of the coin back in time. The Dorians/Greeks had no coinage; everything -- goods, the services of a hero-for-hire -- was 'paid for' with other goods and different services. It was not until approximately four to six hundred years after the time of this book that some clever Lydians, in what is now Turkey, invented the portable, easily recognized, and easily degraded coin.
Copyright Notice:
Hero For Hire
Copyright © 2013 by C. B. Pratt
ISBN# 978-0-9895401-1-7
All rights reserved
Jori, my favorite Phoenician pirate, understood everything about my latest mission except for two things. The how and the why.
“To hunt a harpy is a good and noble act but to capture one and bring it across the sea...this is madness.”
“Probably. But it’s the best way I know to get five hundred drachma together in a hurry.”
He shook his head as if giving me up for lost and toyed with a couple of loose stones atop the sea-wall where we sat. “This cage you mean to build, I have never heard of such a thing. Will it be strong enough?”
“I don’t really know. No one has ever tried this before.”
“Other people are wise, sometimes. No, no, Eno, my friend, it is madness.”
“But you’ll take me there?”
Jori tends to fidget when he doesn’t want to give a straightforward yea or nay. It’s the merchant in him. He always wants to make a deal and you don’t get what you want as a trader by saying yes or no without every detail hashed out. That's why, when he gets fed up with negotiations, he turns back to piracy. Piracy is simple.
“Surely you must know someone who can lend you this money?”
“Like who?”
“You have done much work for important people. What about that rich merchant from Carthage? Or King Lycymon? He was very grateful.”
My turn to shake my head. “A king’s gratitude lasts as long as the walk from the steps of his throne to his front gate. I’ve never had one yet hand me a basket and the keys to his treasury with orders to help myself.”
“But you saved him from poison!”
“Poison administered by his favorite concubine. He was glad to know what was behind all the vomiting, but he hated giving her up. The Queen was pleased.”
“Maybe she’ll give you the money.”
“She wasn’t that pleased.” She’d offered something, all right, but after witnessing what the king did to his would-be poisoner, I didn’t wait around to find out what he did to men who committed adultery with his queen. I told her I was for hire, but not interested in that kind of work, and slipped out a window when the king came in through the bedroom door.
A couple of months ago I got a message from her, reminding me that Lycymon had gone off to Troy with most of the other rulers of Greek city-states and wondering if I was still available for ‘hire.’ I told her my rates had gone up and am waiting to hear whether it was a real job or just more fun-and-games.
In the loose conglomeration of states, alliances, defeats, and victories that is Hellas, there's a definite pecking order. Astride the top of the heap stand the Olympian Gods, family of Zeus the Mighty. Quarrelsome, proud, immortal, their family troubles often affect the mortal population, almost never to the benefit of the poor working slob who just wants to get his catch in or the harvest safely under cover. There are more gods beyond the Olympians, gods of rain, of wind, of dreams, of sleep. Naiads live in water, dryads live in trees, maenads roam the mountains, any one of which can trip a man up and ruin his life.
Between Gods and mortals are the heroes, men of might and valor clad in supernatural armor and unending self-satisfaction. They are usually related in some degree to the Olympian they are fighting against or for. The Gods admire them as the finest examples of human-kind, though that doesn't always prevent heroes from coming to a sticky end. Their stories are the stuff of legend, told and re-told around countless fires. Emulating them is an excellent way to wind up dead.
So what is a farmer or petty king to do when all the heroes are off fighting somewhere else? Somewhere like Troy, for instance.
The Battle for Troy has been good for my business. With most of the big-name heroes off salvaging Menelaus’ pride, wounded by a wandering wife, who are you going to summon to battle the monsters rampaging through your vineyards and carrying off your maidens? What about the guy who’d posted the following in the marketplace?
Hero for Hire. All monsters dispatched from carnivorous geese to Minotaurs. Special rates for multiples. Eno the Thracian at the sign of the Ram’s Head, one flight up.
But, to be a bit vain myself, I’m more than your average sword-swinger. Let’s say you’re a nice young prince, new to the ruling game, and you’ve got this chief vizier with a square beard and a twisted mind. Sure, you could just hack off his head and hire a fresh face but there’s something about the job that turns an ordinary civil servant into a gibbering, war-whooping maniac with eyes for your wife, your daughter, or your throne.
Throw in a few magical powers, and you’re going to find yourself in need of some muscle. Muscle alone is all very well but muscle that can outthink the traps, monsters, and mental trickery old Weird Beard has thrown around his Fortress of Death is easily worth an extra five drachma per day. Plus expenses.
I’m getting a reputation for being that man. It doesn’t pay all that well but I’m in demand more than ever recently. Business has been picking up as preternatural creatures seem to be on the increase. I'd just gotten back from a nice little job in Syria where...well, another time.
“After all you have said about women, about Queen Helen, now you want to do this because of some girl?” Jori clicked his tongue chidingly.
“I can’t very well get married if I can’t afford to keep her.”
“Keep her? A man does not keep a woman; she keeps him. Come back with me to Tyre. My mother has many fine girls in her eye. She will choose you one. One that can cook. Even pretty if you must be so picky.”
“Why doesn’t she choose one for you?”
“Oh, she says I am too young to marry.”
Jori is maybe three years older than I am, though I admit he doesn’t look it. His smooth brown face is hardly weather-beaten at all, considering his profession. He has a few lines around his quick brown eyes, peering under a fringe of smooth hair, that hair enough to mark him out as xeno, Not-Greek. He doesn’t seem strong enough to do the heavy work of a ship. I know of at least one sailor, now dead, who thought that a slim, youthful-appearing captain meant an easy mutiny. I didn’t see the end result myself, but these stories get around. Sailors gossip more than washerwomen.
He has his own ship, the
Chelidion
, not the biggest or the fanciest but enough to take him around the rim of the known world. Not all the goods she carries appear on a manifest. I travel with him when I happen to be going in the same direction. He claims that his grandfather did a favor for some sea-god or other but says he doesn’t know the details. It’s why the sea is always calm for him.
I have no quarrel with any supernatural being, from the Olympians down to the weakest sand-sprite, so far as I know. But they can be an easily offended bunch, so I am careful with my lustrations and sacrifices. At the moment, I was wooing Hymen and Aphrodite, all because I’d glimpsed a face in the marketplace.
I’d been buying eggs, a homely pursuit, and turned away just as a girl, an ordinary girl, let the corner of her veil fall. She’d been holding it to her face to keep out the dust and donkey smells. Maybe if she’d been barefaced, I wouldn’t have noticed her. As it was, I caught a glimpse of a pink cheek and a pair of eyes that, though dark, were bright as the flicker of a star.
The power of one of Zeus’ thunderbolts is nothing compared to Aphrodite’s.
I forgot about the eggs, though I’d already paid for them, and turned to follow her. But it was the harvest festival and there were more women in the streets than at any other time so I lost sight of her in the crowds. When I came home, a broadly-grinning messenger boy was waiting on my steps with the eggs and word of her father’s name, occupation and directions to his home. There are no secrets in the Piraeus agora.
Her father is an oil merchant, doing good business for himself. Well-enough that he can pick and choose a suitor for his third daughter. A near-penniless hero for hire is not his first choice. But a man with acquaintances among royal houses and strength of arm and head might make a useful son-in-law. And even if Minthe hadn’t hit me with a thunderbolt, I might still be interested in marriage into a family like Karoli’s. Even heroes have to think about retiring sometime.
So, after a wink and a nod and an introduction from the local matchmaker, I was informed that if I had five hundred drachma tucked away, I could consider myself a son-in-law. There were, however, a couple of other suitors in the hunt, both of whom were younger, better-looking, and didn’t have to kill anything or anybody for a living. Sometimes I’d comfort myself with the idea that they were weedy specimens without a good tale to tell between them. But for all I knew, that’s what simple, home-loving girls like Minthe preferred.
I would have liked to ask her. But nice girls like that never talked to their future husbands. Or saw them. Or even knew there was such a man until her father told her otherwise.
Fortunately, a day or two later, when I was wracking my brain for a way to come up with the money, I received a messenger from the king of Leros, a small backwater island, with word that his herdsman were being menaced by a harpy.
Over a glass of wine, the messenger mentioned that the harpy seemed to be both small and confused, no doubt in the hope of getting me to lower my prices. I made him a good deal for I knew that the King of Troezen had a standing offer of four hundred drachmas to anyone who could bring him a harpy alive and undamaged.
The King of Troezen loved the hunt and was especially keen on fighting monsters in the good old heroic style, face-to-face, carefully ensuring that the monster was hamstrung or drugged before he risked himself in front of his guests.
So I’d solve the Leronian Harpy issue by capturing it, charging a couple hundred drachmas, and then delivering it to King Pavlos for another four hundred. Everybody’s happy and I’m rich enough to marry Minthe and live without working at least until our first baby was born.
I should have remembered that coincidences are always unlucky for me.
* * *
A week later, the
Chelidion
came dancing up to the quay. The cage I was having built was about done and I thought it was just more good fortune that Jori showed up to take me along to Leros.
“Yes,” he said at last. “I will take you and your crazy idea there. I will do more. I will wait for you and, if you live, take you to Troezen.”
“Have more wine,” I pushed a beaker towards him across the sticky table. “How soon can we leave? I don’t want anyone else getting there ahead of us.”
“What would you have done if I hadn’t arrived?”
“Drunk that wine myself,” I said, watching the last of it disappear down his throat, “and hired Telamon.”
“That fool? He gets lost every time he puts his nose out of port. And his crew are all cut-throats.”
“Safety against piracy. I hear a lot of that goes on, this time of year.”
He hiccupped when he wanted to laugh and looked cross-eyed at the beaker. Before he fell over, we agreed to meet in two days’ time at the boat. He was having her bottom tarred and I needed the time to finish the cage.
It had cost a bit more than I anticipated, as is usually the way with custom work. No ropes tied these corners together. Harpies have sharp claws. The blacksmith had protested the impossibility when I said I wanted the wooden bars joined with iron but on my last visit to the agora, I saw that he’d put up his own placard, describing his new ‘method of ironwork, revealed in a dream from the master-contriver, the god Hephaestus himself.’
When I mentioned this questionable advertisement, playfully twisting a few left-over bars of iron into decorative shapes, he threw in the use of a cart to get the thing to the quayside free of charge. Idle boys ran along behind it, any excuse to scamp off school or work. I threw a few hemi-obols among them, remembering my own boyhood craving for sesame honey candy and jellied quince.
Jori had picked up a new crew since I’d last traveled with him. They seemed shy of me. It’s the muscles. And maybe my reputation. Lifting the cage into the boat without using the winch might explain their attitude too.
I kept up my exercises during the voyage, having little else to do. Prudently, I skipped my usual swims. Though the sea was flat as my hand, the water was somehow uninviting, greyish-yellow foam scumming the water-line and an oily sheen sliding from one small wave to the next. There was some muttering among the crew at this but Jori soon set them tasks to take their minds off any evil omens they might invent.
“Lazy men,” Jori said to me. “It’s the last time I take men from Ithaca. King Odysseus took the best with him and all that’s left is the dregs of the port. It is the same story all over Hellas these days.”
“Do you still run supplies to Troy?”
“No,” he said, curling his lip. “The blockade is very strong, like a wall of wood. Now I run supplies to the Greeks.”
“The city can’t hold out forever.” I was only repeating what everyone else said. It had been the better part of two years since Queen Helen had run off with Prince Paris. No one seemed to know if she’d gone of her own free will, or if he’d ensorcelled her somehow. If he had, it was with Aphrodite’s contrivance and I wasn’t about to utter a word against the Lady. Not with the plans I had in mind.
Thinking of my future wife made the time sweep by. Soon we were looking at the rising coast of Leros. The white houses tumbled like a child’s blocks down to the water’s edge. Somewhere there was a famous shrine to Artemis, goddess of the hunt among other things, where I would make a sacrifice to implore her good wishes. First stop, however, was the palace.