Chapter 27 A Cold Hearth
The following dawn, Heracles woke.
Danae stretched on the cold ground and rolled over to find the hero sitting up.
Metis was crouched beside him, helping him eat a bowl of leaf paste muddled with crushed cicadas.
A gasp slipped from Danae’s lips, and Heracles looked up, his bony fingers halting on the way to his mouth.
Her heart thundered as she looked into his bloodshot eyes, shadowed by the bruised skin of their deep sockets.
Before she could divine what feelings stirred in the depths of his gaze, Heracles lowered his head, set down the bowl and tugged the cloak over his torso, covering his emaciated chest. His finger joints were swollen, and every movement seemed to cost him.
Metis looked between them, as though she were judging a game of petteia, then stood up. ‘I’ve got lizard traps that need tending.’ And before Danae could protest, she darted out of the hut.
The stone dwelling felt small as a walnut shell and large as the Aegean all at once. Heracles shuffled back into the corner of the hut until his wasted face was draped in shadow. The familiar hand of guilt wrapped around Danae’s throat. Was he afraid of her?
She swallowed, her mouth dry as a parched seabed. She edged toward the hydria and slopped water into one of the cracked bowls, gulping it down. The cool liquid sat painfully in her stomach, the clay trembling in her hand.
When the silence became too strained to bear, she held out the bowl, ‘Do you want some?’
‘No.’ From the gloom, Heracles’ eyes burned like the blue heart of a flame.
‘How do you feel?’
‘Like death.’
Silence slithered once more across the hut.
Finally, he rasped, ‘Where am I?’
‘An island called Delos. We – Telamon, Atalanta and I – rescued you from the Underworld. They … there was a run-in with Eurystheus when we emerged at Lerna, so I had to leave them behind to get you to safety. Metis has been taking care of you. She saved your life.’
Heracles blinked.
‘There is so much to explain. Much I still do not know myself …’ She trailed off, wondering how to begin.
‘Why did you leave?’
Despite the light warming her back, Danae flushed cold.
‘I left because I had to find the Titan Prometheus. That’s why I came with you and the Argonauts to Colchis.
He made a prophecy about me … I wanted to tell you, believe me, there were so many times …
I thought we would find him together. I hoped –’
The angles of Heracles’ face sharpened. ‘Even now, you can’t help but lie.’
‘I’m not lying.’
Suddenly, Heracles leant forward, and Danae recoiled as his skull-like face twisted with hate.
‘Then tell me, what happened to Dolos.’
Danae’s lips parted, but no sound came. She was transported back to Colchis, to the icy quiet, snow creaking beneath her fur-wrapped feet as blood trickled between Dolos’ sightless eyes.
‘It took me a week to realize it was you,’ Heracles continued, his teeth clenched in pain.
‘Days of hunting for a trail through that freezing forest, thinking you’d been kidnapped by shades.
Then it dawned on me – if Dolos and the shade were both killed in the clearing, how did the bag of medicine end up outside my tent. Who stole my lion hide?’
She felt sick, as though the world had turned to sand and she was slipping through it.
‘It was you.’
Lies clustered to her aid: she could tell him that a group of shades had ambushed her and Dolos, she had tried to run back to camp and alert the Argonauts but only had time to drop the elixir by Heracles’ tent before they overpowered her and stole his hide.
But facing him now, those false answers turned to ash on her tongue.
‘This is the truth: Dolos betrayed you. He spent his life manipulating you on the orders of your father. That medicine he fed you was an elixir from Zeus. That is the real source of your strength. It’s why you grew weak when it ran out.
That night outside Colchis, I followed Dolos and caught him meeting with a shade who’d brought him more of the potion from Olympus.
When I discovered the truth and tried to force him to tell you, he stabbed me.
’ She drew a quivering breath. ‘I killed him in self-defence.’
As she spoke, Heracles retreated further towards the back of the hut, curling his body away from the light pouring in from the rising sun.
When she was small, her mother had told her and her siblings the story of Atlas, a Titan, who, after his brethren’s apparent defeat in the Titanomachy, was cast far to the west and condemned by Zeus to hold the weight of the sky on his back for all eternity.
A tale Danae now knew to be a lie. But, in that moment, she felt as though the very heavens rested upon her shoulders.
There was no going back now; Heracles too was a victim of his father. He deserved to know the truth.
‘The Twelve have lied to us about everything.’ Haltingly, she relayed the story Metis had told her: of Chaos, Gaia and Ouranos. She repeated the words of Prometheus’ prophecy and finally she said, ‘I was made a Titan by Gaia, in order to end the reign of the false gods of Mount Olympus.’
For a while neither of them spoke. Then Heracles rasped, ‘This is … madness.’
Danae moved closer, the cold hearth a continent between them. ‘It is the truth. Heracles, deep down you must know that the elixir was what made you strong.’ Her eyes travelled across his atrophied limbs.
Heracles pulled the cloak up to his collarbones. ‘Liar.’ The rise and fall of his bony chest quickened with every breath.
Through the mire of guilt and shame, Danae found an anchor of logic and clung to it. ‘You can ask Metis if you don’t believe me.’
Heracles barked out a harsh laugh. ‘Destroy the son, then kill the father. Was that your plan?’ He looked wild, spittle flecking his cracked lips. ‘Telamon and Atalanta would never abandon me. You killed them too, didn’t you?’
‘No! I would never … You aren’t listening to me. I cared for you, I …’
She could not say it.
She had comforted herself with the belief that she could have meant little to a man like Heracles.
He was a great hero, and she … she did not know what she was any more.
The girl she used to be had loved the fantasy of the man who was unstoppable, the mighty Heracles who could stand by her side and take on the Olympians.
Everything had changed that night in the snow-swathed clearing at the feet of the Caucasus Mountains.
Dolos’ revelation had torn Heracles from the lofty plinth she’d elevated him to before she’d ever set eyes on him.
Now he sat before her, a man in all his complexity and pain, and she did not have the strength to fight for his affection.
The storm had raged, and now all that remained of the intimacy they’d shared was flotsam floating on the tide of fate.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.
His eyes flashed. ‘Save your pity, Daeira.’
The breath caught in her throat. The name she had adopted while disguised as a seer. One last lie to crush.
‘My name isn’t Daeira. It’s Danae.’
Heracles shook his head. ‘I was a fool to think you ever needed saving.’
Tears bloomed in the corners of her eyes. She blinked them away.
‘You told me once you wished you’d been born an ordinary man. Well, you were. You are. When you are well enough you can leave this island and do anything, be anyone.’
Heracles drew a deep, rattling breath. ‘You would not speak this way if you were me, stripped of everything that made you worth anything.’
‘I know how hard it is to feel powerless,’ she said softly. ‘My own powers were taken from me for a time. But, Heracles, you were never meant to be unnaturally strong. You are more than just your name.’
‘I might as well be dead,’ he murmured. ‘There is no life for me in this body.’ He squeezed his bony fingers into a fist. ‘This weak, pathetic shell.’
‘You don’t mean that.’
Heracles’ lip curled. ‘You are just like my father. You used me, until I was no longer needed.’
Of all the arrows he had thrown, this found its mark. Heracles’ face tightened as he watched her, as though her silence laid bare her heart.
‘Get out.’
Tears fell, she could dam them no longer. ‘Heracles, I’m sorry, I’m so …’
She reached across the gulf between them. He recoiled as though her touch would brand him.
‘I said, get out.’
She stood and ran out onto the rocky hillside, the wind stinging her wet cheeks.
There was nothing left but hatred in Heracles’ gaze. Eyes that had been so blue and bright, she’d once thought she could dive into their depths and swim in their waters until her final breath.