Warnings: violence
Spoilers: allusions to 1.10
Time: pre-1.11
Enjoy! Second half coming soon.
Gods of Weymouth
A thing missed: whiskey. Here wine is drunk like water, and tastes not much different from water; undiluted wine is the purview of northern savages, who guzzle it to induce madness.
Madness and Jason have become closer as of late.
Not missed: Facebook, his flatmate Mick (who was going to be an ex-flatmate if he clogged the toilet one more time), ties, online dating, exact-change-only buses. He does miss mobile phones: his and Pythagoras' lives would be much easier if Hercules could drunk-dial which tavern he needed rescuing from. (Also, Pythagoras and texting. He laughs at the image of Pythagoras holding an iPhone upside-down and asking, 'What is a lawl?' with that almost-alarmed curiosity of his.)
Also, taverns stink. So do people. And the bathhouse: he thought he was in for a spa. And it was, except waters are healing, so of course the first (and last, though he does suck it up and visit the frigidarium with the fountain) time he's soaking in the warmth, pre-realisation that, yuck, a hundred people have been in this not-chlorinated water before him, a man with what looks rather horrifically like blisters on his patchy skull climbs in while clutching a talisman to Hygeia. And Jason gets out, thankyouverymuch, because whatever caused that is most likely catching—and, ew, yeah, there are blisters on the man in places that are not his face.
Showers are high on his list of Missed Things. That, and Febreeze and toilet paper. And Tesco Value chicken tikka. And the microwave to cook it in. And Article 5 of the Declaration of Human Rights. The one that says, by the way, torture is not a valid method of interrogation.
This falls under the half of his misadventures not instigated by Hercules: Doe-eyed wife with split-skinned hands and a sickened husband, and he's cursed, she swears it, because the husband is a runaway slave from King Pelos of Thera next island over, and everyone knows that Pelos is sleeping with a witch. So won't he go and destroy whatever voodoo the witch-with-benefits is working on her escapee husband, so then maybe the curse might go away and this wife can stop twisting his heartstrings with her big brown eyes and work-dried skin?
Keen to reduce the number of infirm grossing up the baths, Jason says, 'Sure.'
Keen to state the obvious, Pythagoras says, 'You're mad. It's half a days' journey and you'll have to break into the palace of a king nearly as powerful as Minos.'
Jason is pouring winey water into a wineskin (made from a goat's stomach, but he has eaten haggis, so let's not judge). By now he can do this with a minimum sloshed over the lip. Licking the drops from his finger and stoppering it, he says, 'Don't forget the witch.'
'Yes. She will have the palace enchanted.'
'Will she turn me into a frog?'
Pythagoras is giving him the look of almost-alarmed curiosity. Fractals and triangles whirl about papyrus that has to be pinned flat with stones; curled scraps litter the surface and invade the bench and floor. 'Transformation is convoluted magic. Surely she would just choose some simple way to kill you?'
'Surely,' he says. He sighs, and tucks his bedroll (memory foam: how many millennia away is he?) under his arm. 'I guess I'll find out.'
He tromps down the steps and into the glare of Atlantis, and he revels in the saturated colour. Now, to the docks, where he can get passage to Thera with the exact silver the doe-eyed (and well-researched) wife gave him. Ever the gentlemen, he had opened his mouth to refuse, but then remembered that, oh, the money they don't have to spare isn't just his to squander on heroism, because let's face it, if Pythagoras misses one more meal he won't be visible from the side, and Hercules isn't going to cut back on his taverning to make up for Jason's little holiday.
'You don't think you're going alone, do you?' comes a voice close and clear in the hubbub, and Jason spins to see Pythagoras, vivid technicolour, with a goat stomach slung over a shoulder (muscle and collarbone form an acute triangle) and a striped blanket (stiff and itchy rug) tucked under an arm.
Jason grins. 'You're procrastinating.'
'I don't procrastinate,' he sniffs, pulling at the strap across his chest. 'Thoughts need to settle, sometimes, like wine.'
'How would you know?' he says. 'It's all watered down anyway.'
He tilts his head and blinks as if Jason were a rather curious specimen. 'Jason, sometimes I don't understand half the things you say.'
'That's mutual,' Jason says. Pythagoras makes a rocking half-step, misinterpreting banter as a sign of unwelcome, and Jason hooks a finger over the strap to tug him closer. 'Have you left a note for Hercules?'
'I doubt he'll be back until the turn of the week, but yes.'
'We'll need more silver for the ferry,' Jason realises.
Now there's a look, smile tilted askance to something wicked. 'Diocles will favour me a free journey.' Jason laughs into the bright blue-yellow world he finds himself heroing about in, and Pythagoras, a little crestfallen at his failed show of deviousness, sidesteps a woman with a basket on her head and brushes Jason's shoulder with his own.
Diocles waves Pythagoras onto the sailboat without a single word exchanged. Jason tries to follow in his shadow and gets an oar held to his throat.
He pays the wife's silver.
Dropping onto the bench next to Pythagoras, a risk what with all the pointy joints and rib edges liable to stab, he says, 'How—'
'It's a long story.' He tucks the bedroll under the bench and snags Jason's to do the same. Doubled over, he adds, 'Too long to bother recounting.'
'We're stuck on a boat,' Jason points out, eyeing the lethal ridge of spines jutting from Pythagoras' neck.
'I have equations to ponder,' Pythagoras says. 'I would not want your instinct for danger to put me behind my work.'
It's low but effective. Jason ponders their shared avoidance of backstories (and adds Dramamine to Missed Things) as the boat bobs across the bay, Pythagoras resting an elbow on the edge of the boat to peer into some unseen realm beneath the water.
Gladfreaked for his congenital gymnastics skills, Jason flips onto a parapet as he did on his first night months ago, then reaches an arm down to help Pythagoras scrabble up with rather less pizzazz. Now afternoon, they have left their supplies in scrub beyond sight of the palace and approached from the south slope, which drops forty-five degrees for defence.
'How,' Pythagoras gasps, clambering from the stone he toppled onto (and Jason, okay, maybe leapt away from all the flailing points), 'can you move like a Spartan but possess a wrist like seaweed?'
'What?' He senses insult; it takes a moment to connect, and in that time they creep to the door. Belatedly he defends, 'My swordsmanship has improved.'
'So has mine,' Pythagoras grumbles, peering through the keyhole. 'Through frequency of use, not regular training. There is no one on the other side.'
'We haven't been turned to ash yet,' he says. 'Maybe Pelos feels no threat.'
'Maybe.' It is profoundly unconvinced. He pushes the tab down and the door swings inward. A bit lighter on the scepticism: 'Maybe.' He flashes Jason a sun-glare grin (trig must really be giving him crap today) and says, 'After you, Great Hero of Atlantis.'
'I've figured it out,' Jason huffs, tucking into another niche. (What architect thought hidey-holes were a good idea in a palace?) Pythagoras spins a hundred eighty degrees, hands half-lifted, but there are no near niches and so he shuffles in, packing them nice and cosy, face-to-face and very stabbable.
He breathes, 'What?' and the word brushes the curls on Jason's forehead.
'This is a labyrinth. Thieves like us get lost and starve, and Pelos doesn't need to bother with guards.'
'You overestimate our skill,' Pythagoras says. 'This is the third time we've stopped in this alcove.'
'Second.'
Pythagoras frowns; he turns his head to look at the window cut from the opposite wall, now purpling, and Jason scrunches his nose so he doesn't sneeze at the tickle of hair. 'No, this is certainly the third.'
Jason sighs and drops his head onto the plaster behind. It is a pretty palace; he knows, having seen all of it at least twice (thrice). Walls are painted primaries: blue dolphins arc, and red schools of fish eye them, and yellow cityscapes cut idealised, sharp geometry that rather oddly reminds him of Pythagoras, who is straighter-than-life vertices and segments. Obscure parallels occur to him when wandering a palace painted like a crèche.
'I don't say this often,' Jason whispers, pressing his spine against the wall, 'but I think it's a good thing Hercules is off on a weekend bar crawl.'
Pythagoras' brows pinch a triangle above his nose. 'I don't know how crawling is good,' he says, 'but this palace is not designed for him.' He rolls his head to stare at the back wall that seaweed sways up from, and a question itches Jason's tongue—but backstories equal bad, yeah? Even if Pythagoras does deign to answer, gods forbid he ask for something in return.
'There are hidden rooms here,' Pythagoras murmurs, and Jason seizes the distraction from the sort of acidy regret of their bone-strong but also, sometimes, fleshless friendship.
'How can you tell?'
'These alcoves. There are no doors to account for the space behind the walls.' He raps knuckles on the wall behind him in point. 'The courtyard is too small and the halls too narrow.'
The seaweed sinuates like spines. Pythagoras' foot is braced between Jason's. Jason says, 'Round three?'
'Four.' Pythagoras sighs. 'Triangles are much simpler companions.' In the dimming day, he rests the heel of a hand under Jason's collarbone so he slides out without collision. The vestige of his sanity suggests separating, since they have established the shocking lack of guards. It does not take two to shatter a clay model, or burn some weird-stinking herb bundle, or tip a bowl of rooster colons, or whatever creepy crap witches-with-benefits use to punish runaway slaves and their doe-eyed wives. Jason ignores this.
Pythagoras trips over Jason's foot when they fold into another niche (a noblewoman and her servants glide by, oblivious in their natter) and slams a hand into a frolicking dolphin that sinks into the wall which is not exactly a wall after all. It swings in, and Jason, holding Pythagoras around his stomach, says into the black passage, 'Huh.'
Pythagoras regains his footing and shakes out his hand. He frowns, but they can distinguish nothing with the sky all but inked.
They have to walk single-file into the witchy lair. Or at least it looks like a witchy lair. Thing is, there four bowls of smelly gut-stuff, and a shelf of clay figures, and rafters full of bundled plants, and Jason's pretty sure that black flutter in the corner of his eye is a bat and not imagined, but he won't swear on much of anything anymore. There are no cavorting sea creatures on the water-stained plaster. Also, a woman is dunking a clay head into a bowl of blood (or it sure as hell looks like blood in torchglow). Her plaited hair pendulums where her bottom ribs wing, then she turns her head.
They kind of stare at each other in surprise, the head submerged to its chin. (Hope no one's drowning.) Another something flits not-quite-in-sight. There's a sword at his hip, but Jason figures this is not the best time for swords, so he squawks, 'Hello.'
'Sorry to interrupt.' Pythagoras' voice constricts like he's swallowed vinegar. 'We'll just let ourselves out.'
'There is no need.' It is deep, and the woman's lips do not move; it takes Jason a second to turn and see the slick-headed, cross-armed man spanned wider than the doorway.
Jason discovers that oh, what do you know, he can cartwheel with no hands and kick a spear from a guard's grip upside-down. Pythagoras slops rooster guts into another's face and slams the bowl onto his skull; he says, 'Now you're showing off.'
Jason wings a smile and leaps onto a back, yanks hair and rips the spear from fingers. This continues to their advantage, as only one man can charge through the doorway at a time, and destruction of pottery and spilling of bowls and trampling of herbs is the point of this whole misadventure, so really the guards are doing them a favour.
A big, walloping favour that ends with Jason's head ringing bells when he's somersaulted to the floor and Pythagoras' arms raised in a trident surrender with a stickable thing pointed at organs better off inside his skin.
Things go a bit pear-shaped from here.
Jason backs against the wall, sword taken, with a trident at his throat. He stares cross-eyed, and though it's one shade above pitch in the torchlight, the prongs are flaking, used and uncleaned. The bells are falling away to leave vibrating pain at his right temple, but it's of the ouch-that's-gonna-bruise variety, not the ouch-that's-gonna-haemorrhage variety.
Pythagoras is herded to the opposite wall, small of his back hitting the wooden workbench and his torso bending over and away from a spear at his heart. In the dim his eyes irradiate blue.
'You are not a common thief,' Pelos notes, stepping up beside the trident-holding guard and meeting Jason's eyes. 'No thief fights like you.'
Jason swallows, middle prong scraping his throat. Six men sprawl the floor, including Pythagoras' victim, and the one sending Jason narrow-eyed death-wishes from the other end of the trident got a bowl of octopus ink to the face.
'What is your purpose here?' Pelos asks. 'To kidnap Medea for your own ends?' The witch huddles in the doorway, picking bits of entrails from her petrol hair with blood-rusted fingers. Now she sidles out, lifting a bowl from the ground and frowning rather like a mother surveying a child-destroyed room.
Jason says, 'We wish no one harm.'
'To obtain a service from her, then.' Pelos taps his chin. 'You would hardly need to go to such lengths, a god-touched man like yourself. No, then. To destroy her protections, and leave me vulnerable.' He nods and turns away.
'No!' Jason gasps more air than voice. 'I said we wish no harm.'
There is a small table against a wall; it rattles and screeches, curling Jason's toes in his sandals, when Pelos drags it to the centre of the room. Jason looks up from it and is caught at Pythagoras. He is spattered red from wrists to elbows and a print smears his shirt at the left ribcage.
'If that is true,' Pelos says, 'then why are six of my men incapacitated?'
'They had weapons,' Jason says. 'Sharp weapons. And they were running and yelling at us.'
Pelos' face cannot be analysed in the dim between them. Medea collects sherds in the bowl. His words are flat: 'Who are you?'
'Jason,' he says. 'I am of no consequence.'
Pelos snaps his fingers at spear-guard, and then—flailing, and Pythagoras snaps, 'Hey!' and gets a woompf to the gut that doubles him over airless, then his hand is splayed into a starfish on the table and Jason's got an arm hooked around his throat and the trident to his back pinning him humming still.
'Move,' the guard rasps hot and oniony (toothbrushes, they're not complicated) into his ear. 'Please, move again so that I may rip your spine from your back.'
'You are far from inconsequential,' Pelos says, eyeing the bronze and bone tools jumbled across the workbench Pythagoras has been dragged from. 'Not least, you have ruined the better part of Medea's work.'
'Sorry about that,' Pythagoras wheezes, hunched and tugging at the hand clamped so tight around his wrist he cannot slide his fingers together. 'But this really isn't necessary.'
'You have fought better than any I have ever seen,' Pelos continues, and scrapes a bronze-head mallet from the table. Pythagoras cannot see behind, but Jason's expression widens his eyes and quickens the rise-fall of his shoulders. Jason shakes his head and flickers a grin; Pythagoras scowls and pointedly pulls at his arm, unappeased.
'Tell me who you are,' Pelos says, wandering to the side of the table and into Pythagoras' sight—and his skin goes glowy in the dark, like a ghost, and the vertex of his Adam's apple leaps and plummets.
'I'm Jason,' he says, 'I've told you that.'
'Jason of where?' He could be small-chatting at a pub for all the concern in his voice.
'Jason—Jason of Weymouth,' he babbles, missing pubs and now he really, really, means it when he says he needs an undiluted drink. Whiskey. He'll invent it, when they survive this. Medea relights a brazier, and they blink in bonfire reds.
'Weymouth. It is unfamiliar to me, and I'm an educated man.'
Pythagoras rolls his eyes. His fingertips look a bit purple.
'It is not… of the Aegean world,' Jason fumbles. 'It is north.'
'Paionia is north.'
'And north of Paionia?' Pythagoras asks, eyes glued to Jason and pointedly not the hammer spinning a perfect, lazy circumference half a metre away.
Pelos hums admittance. 'Jason, hero of the north. Tell me, do all Weymouth men fight like you?'
'When they feel the need.'
'Do they run like you?'
'Quicker,' he says, because talking so far equates to fingers remaining attached to hands.
'Do they share your immunity to our gods?' he asks.
'I suppose they would,' he says, though he hasn't the foggiest idea what's going on at this point, and hell, Pythagoras is beginning to look intrigued. And since he's in for it all, he adds, 'We've, uh, been promised protection by the fierce gods… god Dorset. Even abroad. And we're all mad warriors; we drink wine straight.'
'Fierce indeed.' The flicker at the corner of his mouth does not match the white spots blotted over his pupils. He says, 'You, then, are no Weymouthian,' and casts a glance at Pythagoras, who carries shadows in the channels above his collarbones and has ink on his fingers. A side-glance at Jason, then Pelos zeroes back on Pythagoras, who bends a little lower. 'Who sent you?'
'Um,' he says, overarching his fingers off the table. The clamp around his wrist tightens; Jason knows by the lengthened creases from the corners of his eyes. 'Um.'
'Most erudite,' Pelos says, and spins the hammer.
Pythagoras fish-gobs a couple times, then manages, 'We have come to remove a curse. That is all. Not an important one—I mean, to you.'
Medea's voice is bitter, sherds piled in her arms and hair dark-haloing her face. 'They've destroyed more than petty curses.'
'Your warrior, Jason of Weymouth,' Pelos says. 'I would be willing to trade your freedom for his servitude, if you could assure me that he is not already in bondage to another king.'
Pythagoras' lips seal into a line, and he flares breath. Fear not quite cut from his eyes so they glint sharp, he scorns, 'You are a fool who leaches others' power.'
The guard drags the far two fingers to the side, leaving the index and middle spread. They are splotched black. Pythagoras, shoulders twisted oblique to accommodate the lost height from his pinned hand, snaps, 'Really? Must it be the right? It is inconvenient.'
'We will leave!' Jason cries. 'We will leave with the freedom we came with, and in return you will be lucky to never witness Weymouth or its gods.'
Medea scoffs. 'Let me turn them into frogs, Pelos. That would be far more entertaining than their current spineless forms.'
Pelos hums consideration. He says, 'Inconvenient and unbalanced.' A moment and there are two hands pinned to the table, forcing Pythagoras to bow, and his brittle rage fragments and he says, 'No no no, that was not the intended solution.' The guard leans to put weight on the wrists, but despite the partial view, Jason sees Pythagoras' arms, pulled obtuse, shivering in unfelt cold.
'Let him go,' Jason says. 'I will—'
'Gods help me, Jason, if you try to sacrifice yourself!' It would be fierce an octave lower. His shoulders peak small. Jason snags on his stare, and his surrender falters into pleas: they need out, and he will build a shrine to Dorset, he swears it, he'll start a bloody cult in His honour—this isn't happening, it isn't—just get the hell out with his friend restored, and—
'You promise retribution for crimes I have not yet committed,' Pelos says. Half a metre away, there is one more arc then a plummeted tangent and Jason can't, his eyes flinch shut and there's no time to repair his cowardice or shout and
bangsnap
slams his heart off-rhythm
and Pythagoras cries hoarse and chokes silent after two quicklong seconds on air-stealing shock.
Jason lurches from the trident shouting, 'Pythag—' but the arm gags and yanks him back, and it is too late, Pythagoras' face is hidden in an arm and his knees are buckled to the floor and his hands are still clamped to the table in prayer so all Jason sees are hypotenuses of scapulae falling-up-falling in failed flight.
Pelos says, 'I would see them come to my gates, these gods and warriors, and claim them for my own.'
An exhale carries a thin keen.
Pelos raises the hammer to the top of a freefall curve.
