Chapter 21 The Island
Danae hit the sea like a chisel cracking marble.
Her body responded before her mind had recovered from the fall.
She struck out against the swell and broke the surface, gasping.
Through stinging eyes, she watched Hylas collapse on the little beach, his white coat gleaming with sweat.
Her chest ached at the invasion of salt in her wounds, but the wind was so strong and her arms so weak, she couldn’t have held on to the horse a moment longer.
And falling into the sea was preferable to smacking into hard earth.
She couldn’t see Heracles. Heart thundering, she twisted about, then caught sight of a long shape drifting a yard or so behind her. She swam towards it. The gouges on her chest screamed, the collar growing heavier with each stroke, but she forced her limbs to keep slicing through the ocean.
When she reached Heracles, she flipped him onto his back and threaded his bony arm through hers, then kicked towards the shore.
The muscles beneath her collarbone felt like they were tearing as she dragged him through clouds of seaweed up onto the sand. He was so tall and thin it looked as though he’d been stretched, like the jealous sea had tried to keep hold of him.
As she gazed down at the hero, memory threatened to envelop her. Another beach, another body, a life swept away by the tide.
Not this time.
She let out a guttural moan as she heaved Heracles onto his side and thumped his back.
‘Breathe, gods damn you.’ She hit him again and again.
The hero coughed, and the memory of Alea was sent scurrying back to the depths of her mind as Heracles retched onto the sand.
She rubbed his back, his bones sharp beneath her fingers.
Her movements slowed as she traced the familiar scars, remembering a time when they lay together on a different shore; the strength of him then, his weight pressing into her, the power corded in his limbs.
She held onto the sensation of being circled in his arms, feeling safe for the first time since fleeing Naxos.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I’m so sorry.’ Her cheeks were damp. From the sea or sorrow, she could not tell.
Heracles’ eyes were closed. His breath, a rattling rasp.
Danae sagged back on her heels and flopped down beside him, gazing up at the cloud-speckled sky through heavy lids. A lone gull hovered above her, buffeted by the wind. Every part of her ached. She knew she had to find help or they would both perish, but she could not move.
After escaping Lerna, they’d flown for hours. All the while Danae had clung to Heracles for fear of him falling. When Hylas eventually spotted Delos and dipped his wings, she almost cried with relief, before her limbs failed her and she slipped into the azure arms of the Aegean Sea.
If she did not know the winged horse so well, she would have thought he’d made a mistake in bringing them to this place.
Delos was a small, stony island, with little to show for itself but craggy rocks, hardy shrubbery and tufts of yellowing grass.
From the sky there appeared to be only one bay, shaped like a crescent moon.
The rest of the coast was a saw of primordial cliffs and jagged boulders.
There seemed to be no dwellings of any kind, no sign that the island was inhabited at all.
But Hylas had never led her wrong before.
The horse seemed to have an internal compass embedded in his skull, navigating the world as though following a trail on a map. She wondered if that was Hades’ doing.
A shiver fluttered over her skin. With great effort, she sat up. The sun had dipped behind the island’s rocky peak. In the shadow, the wind leached any warmth baked into the land. She looked at Heracles. His skin had prickled into gooseflesh.
She could curl up beside him, share her warmth for the night. But out here, exposed to the elements, her battered body might not be enough.
‘Hylas! Come here.’
The horse whinnied, staggered to his feet, then walked towards her, his head low.
‘Stay close and keep him warm. He must survive. Do you understand?’
Hylas wearily nuzzled her hand, then sank down beside Heracles and lifted a wing over the hero’s shivering frame.
Danae brushed the grains from her palms and looked inland, shielding her eyes from the last blaze of light. She squinted, her gaze snagging on what looked like a whisper of smoke billowing from halfway up the rocky hill. She stared at the spot, wondering if she had been mistaken.
Then it came again, a dark tendril twisting into the sky before being erased by the wind.
‘I’m going to get help.’ She regarded the prone forms of Heracles and Hylas. ‘Neither of you are allowed to die while I’m gone.’
Setting her jaw, she strode towards the stony hill. Between the swathes of tawny grass covering the land beyond the beach were splashes of colour; robust little flowers with thick stems and purple petals, mixed with yolk-bright blooms and even the occasional silken red poppy.
‘Argh.’ Danae glanced down at her calf, clawed by a nearby shrub of prickly spurge. Even the plants here were sharp.
The little vegetation there was thinned as she approached the hill.
Only the spurge sprouted in spiky pillows between the granite boulders.
Some of the rocks were a warm umber, some grey as a stormy sky, peppered with blotches of yellow lichen.
Loose stones slowed her progress as she climbed, her once sure limbs weak and trembling.
The peak of the hill seemed to grow further away with each step she took.
She glanced back at the beach. Heracles and Hylas were still nestled together on the shore.
Fear curled tighter around her heart with each passing moment, as though she could sense death waiting for the last dregs of sunlight to vanish from the world.
If she failed to find help, Heracles would not see another sunrise.
Soon she was forced to climb on all fours. Chest aching, she paused, clinging to a rock as the wind tore at her back.
Then she caught the scent of the smoke.
Finding a foothold between two boulders, she pushed herself up, but something tightened around her leg. She cried out and slipped backwards, landing painfully across the rocks.
Bracing against the sharp stones, she heaved herself up and tugged Telamon’s knife from her belt.
Her right ankle was caught in some kind of trap, the binding so tight it burned her skin.
It looked to be concocted from thin but sturdy twine and twirled like a spider’s web around her foot.
It was secured to the surrounding rocks in at least ten places and had been completely invisible until she’d stepped on it.
‘You’re a funny-looking lizard.’
Danae twisted around, her knife in her fist.
A tiny woman stood on the lip of stone above her.
She was wiry with a delicate face, her deep-brown skin riveted by the sun.
Danae could not place her age. Her long black hair, bound roughly in an old rag, bore no threads of silver, and she moved without the stiffness of advanced age, yet there was an ancient wildness about her that seemed to echo the rocks themselves.
She was barefoot and wore the strangest clothes Danae had ever seen: a long-sleeved tunic of undyed wool and a skirt that was bound between her legs.
‘Please,’ Danae gasped, ‘I need help, my friend is gravely ill.’
The woman cocked her head, staring at Danae. Her eyes were so dark they were almost black, like a bird’s. ‘You don’t look so good yourself.’ Her accent was broad and strange, her voice rough as though it were not often used.
‘Are you Metis?’
The woman’s nostrils flared, then she leapt down from the rocky ridge, landing on all fours beside Danae like a cat.
Her beady eyes narrowed. Then she snatched Danae’s knife, retreating to a safe distance to examine it, running a finger along its bronze length.
Her gaze flicked back to Danae and settled on the iron collar.
‘Why is that around your neck?’ She gestured with the knife, staring at the collar like it was a viper.
Danae watched her, heart thumping a drumbeat in her chest. ‘To keep me weak.’ She tried to move her trapped foot.
The more she strained the tighter the bonds became.
‘My name is Danae. I’ve been told to seek out Metis on this island.
But please, my friend is on the beach. He will perish before nightfall if I don’t get him to shelter. ’
‘Who sent you?’ The woman’s eyes hardened, her expression all edges.
‘Later. I will explain everything later, but we must go to my –’ Danae stopped abruptly as the woman slashed through her bindings. She left the blade balanced on the rock between them.
‘Leave by whatever means you came.’ The woman turned and began to scurry back up the hillside.
Danae took up the knife and scrabbled to her feet. ‘You have to help him. He’ll die if you don’t.’
The woman paused and glanced over her shoulder. ‘I have to do nothing. You came here uninvited, trampled over my island and ruined a perfectly good lizard trap. Why should I help you?’
Danae opened her mouth, but words failed her. ‘Please,’ she repeated feebly.
The woman sniffed. ‘Your friend is not of this island, he’s not mine to heal.’
Rage flickered in Danae’s aching chest. ‘You won’t even see him? You would just leave Heracles to die?’
At the hero’s name something too quick to discern darted across the woman’s face. ‘Zeus’ boy?’
In her urgency Danae did not dwell on the strange familiarity of the question.
‘Yes.’
The woman seemed to wrestle with herself. Then she said, ‘Take me to him.’
The woman navigated the steep rocky slope with the ease of a mountain goat, Danae struggling to match her speed. When they reached the beach, they broke into a run, pacing across the ribbons of sun-crisped seaweed strewn about the shore.