She ducked into her tent, stowing Dolos’s knife with her own and securing her bag across her chest. Then she crept through the camp and boarded theArgo, picking her way between the camouflaging tree branches to the store cabin. She took only what she needed: a pack of biscuits, a couple of slices of salted meat, a heel of bread and a waterskin.
Lastly, she walked toward Heracles’s tent.
The closer she came, the more her limbs shook. She stood outside his tent flap, the blood of his closest friend staining her hands. She wanted to go inside and explain. Dolos had tried to kill her, he was in league with Zeus, it hadn’t been her fault. But then she would have to tell him everything else. Dolos was right. It would break him. Heracles said it himself: all he had was his legendary reputation. It would kill him to know he was just an ordinary man.
Silently, she laid the bag of strength elixir by the tent flap. She didn’t want him to be without it, now she knew how much he needed it.
She’d been full of hope when she believed destiny had twined Heracles’s path with hers. But now she saw it was just a fantasy. An illusion, like Heracles himself.
She looked at the impenetrable lion hide propped up on the branch outside his tent, like a real beast standing guard at his door. Her vision had allowed her to believe that she didn’t have to do it alone. But now she saw with searing clarity what the omphalos shard had really shown her. There had only been one person climbing the mountain.
It is you, said the voice.It has always been you.You are the last daughter. You alone are the reckoning.
40
A Mountain at the End of the World
Danae shielded her eyes against the rioting snow and peered up at the peak of the mountain. The path had ended long ago, but she’d pressed on, clambering over boulders of frozen rock until she could go no further. Above her was a sheer sheet of ice. Torrents of flakes whipped by so fast, the mountain appeared to be moving. The longer she stared at it, the smaller she became.
There was no other way up.
She swallowed. She’d scaled cliffs this steep back home. But on Naxos they were sun-drenched, and she’d been unencumbered by thick furs wound around her limbs. In this place of ice and snow, even when the sun was at its brightest it had no warmth.
She made sure Heracles’s lion hide was tied securely around her chest, tightened the strap of her bag and pulled the knives from her belt. She drove the first into the ice and gave it a wiggle. It held. She plunged in the second, then began to climb.
The higher she went, the harder it became to keep her balance in the buffeting gale. Each time the blades pierced the ice she held her breath, waiting for it to crumble. Soon she became so used to the ache in her limbs she no longer registered the pain.
After a while, time lost all meaning. She tried to track her progress by counting each heave of her body toward the peak. But when she got to somewhere in the hundreds, her thoughts wandered. She saw home in her mind’s eye, imagined running up the dirt track from the beach, the smell of her mother’s honey cakes wafting through the yard.
Then her foot slipped.
She flailed, panic exploding through her as she fell. The world fragmented in a blur of white, protruding rocks bashing her as she tumbled down the ice.
Then her fingers caught a jutting ledge. She clung on, sucking in stabbing lungfuls of frozen air, fighting to claw her mind back together. She still had her bag and one of the knives, the other was lost to the storm.
Squinting through watery eyes, she looked up. A slash of black cracked the snow coverage above the ledge. Beyond it, the mountain seemed to stretch endlessly into the raging sky.
Defeat wound its fingers around her chest. Hours of climbing wasted.
She ground the hopelessness between her teeth. She couldn’t give up now. Not when she’d come this far. With a grunt of pain, she swung her left arm up. Her one remaining blade clattered onto the rock as her fingers scraped over the lip. She could feel herself slipping, her legs sliding uselessly down the ice as she pushed against it. Willing the last of her strength into her arms, she heaved, sinews screaming with the effort, and slumped onto the ledge.
It was the entrance to a cave.
She dragged her body forward, pulling her legs up onto the rock. Pain twitched through her limbs, snatching her breath. There was no room to stand, and even if there had been it was beyond her now. As she lay there, calm settled over her. She knew she had to get up, had to keep climbing, but she couldn’t move.
She stared into the dark belly of the cave, her breath dancing like little ghosts in the gloom.
Tawny feathers drifted through the air, still restless after her struggle with the griffin the night before. The blood around the creature’s carcass had dried overnight, staining the cave floor the color of rust. Danae looked at the gruesome remains dispassionately. It was just a dead thing. It couldn’t hurt her now.
After killing it, she’d pillaged the griffin’s hoard and built a fire with every scrap of wood she could find. She’d melted the frozen waterskin, then stripped the beast’s feathers, sliced chunks from its breast and roasted them over the flames. The meat was rich and surprisingly tender. It was the first hot meal she’d eaten since the Stymphalian birds.
Even after several hours of sleep, her body still tingled with the griffin’s life-threads. Manto’s pipe was in her lap. She must have fallen asleep smoking it. She was grateful she’d had something to take the edge off spending the night in an icy cave with only a dead griffin for company. She picked it up and traced the outline of the tree painted on the barrel.
“I’m almost there,” she whispered. She wished her friend could see how far she’d come.
She packed the pipe away in her bag, then carved up what meat she could carry and wrapped the portions in the remnants of her dress. Once harvested, she heaved the remains of the griffin to the mouth of the cave and pushed its body over the ledge. It gave her a glimmer of satisfaction to watch it bash unceremoniously against the ice. Fitting, for a creature half-formed from the sacred bird of Zeus.
She breathed in a lungful of freezing air. There was a calmness to the mountain now. The storm had dissipated, and rods of sunlight pierced the clouds that yesterday seemed impenetrable.
