Fleeced (7 page)

“Ladies and gentlemen!” said Athena, lifting her shield high into the night air. “I give you our Earth-questing heroes!

VII

S
TYX AND
S
TONES

Up on Earth, Rose Pottersby-Weir was bored, bored, bored.

Twelve years old with freckles and a mass of tangled red ringlets, she slumped onto a bench in the
Parthenon
room of the British Museum, listening to her iPod. Hazel Praline, the
fourteen-year-
old pop sensation, was singing about how nobody understood her. Rose scowled in agreement, although, as she reminded herself, it was way easier being misunderstood when you were a famous Texan star who spent your days jetting around the world sipping fruit coolers rather than being stuck in a mouldering old museum.

Staring dismally at the slabs of cream-coloured marble that hung around the walls, Rose remembered how her mother had told her that each piece of the frieze was part of a long carving showing a procession of men on horses that had once decorated the sides of
the Parthenon, Athena’s temple, in Athens. They’d been there for hundreds of years, until a wealthy Victorian called
Elgin
had arrived and shipped them back to decorate his Scottish estate. Soon after, he’d sold them to the museum, where they’d hung ever since. Back in Greece, Athena’s temple was crumbling, eaten away by car fumes and rain and the endless scuffle of tourists’ feet. Rose sighed. She was pretty sure that Athena wouldn’t have been happy about that. Not that Rose actually believed in any of the Greeks’ made-up gods and goddesses, of course, but she now reflected sourly, if Athena were real, Rose would certainly have something in common with her: neither of them would want to be stuck in a museum.

Rose flicked absently onto the next track, entitled ‘What am I doing here?’ and stretched out her long legs. Her trainers squealed against the polished floor, rupturing the quiet and dismaying an elderly lady in a tweed suit who glanced up from the glass box in which stood a model of how the Parthenon used to look and frowned.

Rose felt like sticking out her tongue.

What did that old bat know about ruined holidays?

About sitting around, day after day after day, feeling as dusty as the relics on display?

It was all very well, thought Rose, having a mother who was an archaeologist, but did she really have to spend every single second of Rose’s summer holiday cataloguing South American archives at the British Museum?

And worse, expecting Rose to help her?

Each day was spent the same way: down in the basement, hunched over velvet-lined trays, scrabbling through bits of pots and plates left behind by some old Amazon tribe. Even now, Rose was supposed to be quickly collecting two cups of tea from the museum café and hurrying back downstairs with them, but she knew her mother wouldn’t notice how long she was gone. Not if there was a three-hundred-
year-old
shard of pot with a painting of a toucan feather on it to study. Besides, Rose decided, pulling off her special anti-acid, anti-fingerprint, anti-friction and anti-having-any-fun-document-handling white gloves, she needed a break.

Shoving the gloves into her jeans’ pockets, she watched as yet another tour party meandered into the room. Dressed in shorts and T-shirts, carrying the tour company’s green rucksacks, they looked more like a school of terrapins learning to swim. They flapped around the statues until the tour guide, a tanned man with a long grey beard and yellow
umbrella, called them over to look at the marble caryatid that had once adorned Athena’s temple.

Caryatid.

Sulkily, Rose pulled her earphones out and reminded herself of her mother’s lesson on the subject. “A caryatid, Rose, is a column carved to look like a woman.” Rose knew so many fancy archaeological words now. Even ‘museum’ had been explained to her: ‘muse’ from the Greek word meaning to think, and ‘um’, Rose added darkly in her mind, as in, “Um, can’t we go somewhere else, Mum?”

Somewhere else, like the premiere of Hazel Praline’s new film,
Rodeo Love
, at Leicester Square in two days’ time, for instance? Where the star was going to appear and sing a few songs before her new film was shown?

Some hopes.

Thinking back to her mother’s drawn face, how she’d sighed and told Rose that she wished she could afford to buy her a ticket, Rose folded her arms and stuck her tongue out at the caryatid. The statue gazed loftily back from her special stage, still haughty despite her rain-pitted cheeks, her chipped nose and the way the black velvet curtain that hung across the wall behind her made her marble shoulders look grubby and grey. That was the trouble with archaeology,
Rose decided, it was just so totally dead and over.

“Are we there yet?” wailed Aries.

Two long days had passed since Aries’ victory on the assault course. Two long days spent scaling the Mountains of Misery and crossing the Desert of Disappointment towards the portal to Earth. Two long days of Alex worrying about how they would find the fleece whilst Aries asked him what was for dinner.

Now, having finally arrived at the Cave of Celestial Gloom, they stood, washed in its dim light, halfway up a bank of shale. Behind them the cold black water of the
River Styx
roared, echoing in their ears and bouncing around the damp walls of rock
14
.

“We need to find the Thorn Roses of Oblivion,”
said Alex, gingerly edging his way up the slope towards the dark glistening walls of rock. Beneath his feet the shale crunched, rattling down to splash in the water.

Aries shrugged, vaguely remembering the blackened shrubs draped with the precious possessions the dead brought with them from Earth, stuff that
Charon
, the boatman who ferried the dead across the Styx, insisted they leave behind in order to forget their mortal lives more easily.

Then he sniffed and stared gloomily down at his wet hoof.

Unfortunately the tattered old barque they’d used to cross the river had been cracked and leaky and Aries was now sopping to the knees.

“Who knows what creatures might be swimming in this,” he muttered irritably. “Aquatic ticks of despair, I shouldn’t wonder. Of course, if I had my fleece I’d be waterproof.”

Alex scoured the walls of the cavern. “Would you be moan-proof, too? Besides,” he went on, “if you’d kept your fleece, then we wouldn’t here at the Styx at all, would we?”

“I wish,” groaned Aries, imagining himself golden, beautiful and magnificent strolling around the Underworld.

“But then,” Alex went on, looking at the patches of withered plants around him, “we wouldn’t have met either. You’d have been the magnificent golden ram feted by the gods and I’d have been a lowly zoo hand. You’d never even have spoken to me.”

Aries considered this for a moment. It was an odd and uncomfortable thought and gave him a funny lump in his throat like the time he’d eaten an overlarge stink beetle, and so he stopped thinking it and scrabbled after Alex, up the shale.

“Why don’t we just ask Charon to show us where the portal is?” He looked around the deserted riverbank. “Where is he, anyway?”

“He retired years ago,” replied Alex, “just after the last Greek came down to the Underworld. Give me the Scroll, Aries, I’ll have a look at the map.”

Aries waited for Alex to untie the Scroll from around his neck and delicately unfurl the ancient paper.

“Aries!” Alex’s shout bounced off the rocks as he peered through a hole in the middle of the parchment, a hole the shape of a ram’s mouth.

Aries shrugged. “I was a bit peckish, you know, after all this climbing and—”

“I don’t believe it!” cried Alex. “You’re supposed to be on a heroic quest, Aries! Not an all-you-can-eat
picnic! What are we going to do now? You do realise that this was supposed to be our divine help?”

“Didn’t taste very divine to me,” muttered Aries sulkily. “I’ve had better tasting bog daisies.”

“How-wow-wow d-d-dare you!” spluttered the tattered Scroll, crackling like a badly tuned radio.

“Just look what you’ve done!” fumed Alex, looking anxiously at the trembling Scroll. He waited until it stopped gasping and tried to study the map properly. “According to what’s left of this, the Thorn Roses of Oblivion stand in front of the silvered rock.”

“Silvered rock,” muttered Aries, rolling his eyes.

He hadn’t had a decent meal in days and now they were playing Hunt the Tree.

“We have to snap off a branch to open the portal,” said Alex, as Aries wandered off. “Give me a shout the minute you see them.”

Aries stumbled irritably up the slope and glanced around him. Scowling, he took a bite from a clump of black leaves and stared sulkily at the rock face. Clearly the starvation and damp was affecting his eyes too because the patch of rock in front of him seemed to be dancing with frosted sparkles. They twinkled, flittering like fireflies, and Aries wondered whether to call Alex.

Whilst he was wondering, he bit off the rest of
the branch. This time, he felt something crunch in his mouth, hard as olive stones, and looking back at the snapped branch he saw a broken necklace dripping pearls onto the ground.

Suddenly a ripple danced across the rock face, the sort of ripple that a raindrop makes in a puddle, except that there were no raindrops and there wasn’t a puddle, only granite rising in a sheer wall. And granite, as we all know, doesn’t ripple. Or yowl, come to that, which it now began to do, a yowl that grew louder and echoed around the cavern in a series of wails. Dimly aware of Alex racing over, Aries spat out his mouthful of pearls and watched a second ripple pass across the rock.

“You’ve found it!” yelled Alex triumphantly.

A dark crack snaked up the wall, splitting the rock face like a lightning bolt as on either side the rock face began to quiver and twitch, jerking apart like stone gates. A sudden gust of wind whipped through the gap, hurling dust, grit and the unexpected smell of wax polish into their faces before dying away in the cavern behind them. The rocks jolted still, revealing a dim archway to Earth.

In the sudden eerie stillness Alex turned to Aries and looked into his eyes.

“Just remember, we mustn’t draw attention to
ourselves. Our lives could depend on it, so do exactly as I say. All right?”

Half-kneeling, Alex leaned forwards into the gap and stretched out his hand. His fingers touched something that felt like material, soft and velvety. Disconcerted, he looked back at Aries. “Stone portals should be hard, not soft,” he whispered. He peered into the grey Earthlight. “And where’s the Greek sunshine?”

Aries stuck his nose into the gap to find out for himself. Alex was right. He sniffed at the fabric and took a small nibble, giving it a thorough chew. Finding that it tasted rather good if a little dusty, he tugged a bit harder and dragged another mouthful back through the crevice.

“Aries, no!” hissed Alex and tried to wrestle the cloth from Aries’ mouth.

But it was too late.

It’s funny, thought Rose, the way your eyesight blurs and makes things seem to quiver when you look at them for a long time. She concentrated harder on the curtain hanging behind the caryatid. It definitely seemed to be twitching. She stared harder.

It
was
moving!

Rippling, it seemed to be disappearing backwards,
like water drawn down a plughole. Which was completely ridiculous, she told herself, since there was only a brick wall behind that curtain. But, ridiculous or not, the curtain rings were now flying off and clattering like coins onto the floor around her feet. Squealing, the tour party ran across the room and, stopping mid-sentence, the guide looked back just as the curtain was yanked completely off its pole. It thumped down onto the caryatid, covering her for a brief moment before flicking out like a matador’s cape and sliding backwards, snagging around her base.

“Someone!” he shouted, jabbing his umbrella in the air. “Call the guards!”

Suddenly the curtain was wrenched away and the statue started to rock. For a long breathless second everyone froze, held rapt as she tilted forwards, the startled hush broken only by the
click-click-click
of the statue tipping further and further off its base.

The tour guide jumped out of the way. “We need—”

But his words were lost in a smash of marble as the statue tumbled forwards onto the floor and shattered into several chunks, as priceless pieces of ancient history are prone to do when they crash onto a hard floor.

Rose watched, round-eyed, as the caryatid’s head
rumbled across the floor towards her and bumped against her feet. Either side of her astonished tourists shouted, clicked cameras and squawked into mobiles as beyond the room an alarm bell began clanging. Covering her ears, Rose looked back up at the stand.

Filling the space where the caryatid had stood was a sheep – the biggest, baldest sheep she’d ever seen – and a dazed-looking boy of about her own age. Rose could hardly believe her eyes and couldn’t imagine how they’d managed to clamber up there.

Kicking up its back hooves, the sheep freed itself of the curtain whilst the boy stood absolutely still, pink-faced with horror, staring at the shattered statue on the floor. Hardly surprising, thought Rose, not only had he helped demolish a precious artefact, but he also appeared to be dressed in what looked like a pillowcase, drawn in round the middle by a wide leather belt.