“Too bad Alexander’s not around anymore,” Pierce muttered. “He’d probably know exactly where it is.”
Alexander Diotrephes, was one of many names used by the immortal explorer who had inspired the legend of the demigod Herakles, or as the Romans called him, Hercules. Alexander — Hercules — had not actually been the son of the god Zeus, but in a way, he had descended from the heavens, or more precisely, from an alternate dimension. After an extended stay on Earth — several thousand years of walking among humans — he had recently returned home. He had formed the Herculean Society to preserve his legendary legacy and to protect humankind from dangerous truths about the universe. Before leaving he had entrusted its care to Fiona’s father, Jack Sigler. He had, in turn, appointed his good friend George Pierce to oversee day-to-day operations under the auspices of the Cerberus Group.
While many of the stories about Hercules were exaggerations, the product of multiple retellings over the course of the centuries, there was more than a grain of truth in all of them, a fact they had discovered a few months earlier when retracing the legendary Labors of Hercules. Gallo had been astonished by the revelation that Hercules’s travels had taken him well beyond the limits of the then-known world.
Inspiration hit like a lightning bolt. “He did know!” She sat up a little straighter. “It’s in the Heracleia. Look in the Cerberus archives, Cintia. You should find scans of it.”
The Heracleia was an epic poem about Hercules, believed to have been written by Homer — the very same poet to whom the Odyssey was attributed. There was only one physical copy of the poem, written on leaves of papyrus, and locked away in a hermetically sealed vault at Cerberus headquarters in Rome, but there was also a virtual version Gallo had studied.
“Okay, I’ve got the scans,” Dourado said. “But it’s all in Greek.”
Gallo had done a full translation of the poem and knew that her notes were somewhere at Cerberus HQ, but there was no time to send Dourado on a scavenger hunt. “Send me the files. I know what to look for.”
She picked up the phone and began scrolling through the images. It was like picking up a treasured book from childhood. The more she read, the more she remembered of her initial translation.
“Here,” she announced after almost twenty minutes of reading. “In this passage, Herakles is talking about an encounter with a goddess ‘whom the Egyptians call Hecate.’ She tried to seduce him to steal the secret of his long life, and when that didn’t work, she tried to trick him into stealing one of the undying beasts who graze ‘upon the slopes of the mountain where no mortal dares to go, across the sea in the land of the sun’s rising.’”
Pierce nodded. “Okay, that does sound familiar. Hecate is the goddess of sorcery and witchcraft. That could be another name for Circe. Undying beasts could be the cattle of Helios and ‘the land of the sun’s rising’ could be describing Thrinakia.”
Gallo nodded. “Hecate is Greek, not Egyptian, but the Egyptians did worship a goddess named Heqet, a fertility goddess and a symbol of the Nile during flood season.”
“Now you’re losing me.”
“This makes sense, George. Cows were sacred animals in Egypt long before there was any kind of civilization in the Greek isles. In Egyptian mythology, the symbol of the goddess Hathor was the horns of a cow holding the sun. Hathor was either the daughter, wife, mother, or female personification of Ra, the sun god.
“Homer was guilty of getting things mixed up, especially when it came to geography. He probably did it intentionally. But maybe he let something slip here when he mentioned the Egyptians. Maybe the land of Circe is actually somewhere along the Nile, in Egypt. Thrinakia, the land of the sun’s rising, where the sacred cattle are kept, lies across the sea, to the east.”
“Which is it? From Egypt, you have to go north to get to the sea, not east.”
“The Mediterranean is north,” Gallo said with a grin. “But the Red Sea is due east.”
Pierce rubbed his chin. “The Red Sea, huh?”
“It’s not as crazy as it sounds. The Egyptians dug canals connecting the Nile to the Red Sea going back as far as the nineteenth century BCE. Odysseus would have known about that route. According to the poem, after the Trojan War, Odysseus and his men raided a city called Ismaros, in the land of the Cicones. Now supposedly, that’s one of the fixed geographical points, but remember that the events described in these poems took place before the Greek Dark Ages. A lot of places all around the Mediterranean took their names from locations mentioned in the stories, rather than the other way around. So the people that Homer calls Cicones could be almost anyone.”
“Sort of like the way Native Americans are called Indians,” Fiona said. “Because Columbus thought he had landed in India.”
Gallo nodded. “Sort of like that. Some historians have speculated that the city Odysseus called Ismaros was actually Lothal, on the Indian peninsula. It was one of the richest port cities in the ancient world. Odysseus almost certainly would have known about it and he might have considered it a worthwhile prize, especially after the other kings divided up the wealth of Troy.
“After the raid on Ismaros, the poem says he was blown off course and spent the next ten years trying to find his way back home, which when you think about it, doesn’t make a lot of sense, if he’s in the Mediterranean or the Black Sea.”
“Okay,” Pierce said. “For argument’s sake, let’s say you’re right. The land of Circe, a.k.a. Heqet, is Egypt. Where’s Thrinakia?”
“It would also have to be a place with very little flora or fauna; otherwise, Odysseus’s men would not have had to kill Helios’s cattle. So a desert, and there’s a lot of desert on the eastern shore of the Red Sea. Thrinakia is also described as a triangular island. In fact, the word translates as ‘three corners.’ There are some small islands in the Red Sea, but nothing with a mountain. However, a primitive sailor might not be able to distinguish a small peninsula from a large island.”
“Sounds as if you’ve already got a place in mind.”
“I do. A triangle of land, mostly desert, with a mountain that’s considered sacred even today. Thrinakia is the Sinai Peninsula.”
SEVENTEEN
It took a few seconds for Carter to realize that the car had stopped rolling, and another few for her to recognize that she was upright.
Unhurt? That was debatable.
She looked over and saw Fallon, dazed but also uninjured.
“Hey!” she said. “Still with me?”
He mumbled something incoherent.
She tried the door, but it was jammed shut, so she wriggled through the hole where the side window had been. The Aston Martin had come to rest on a grassy patch alongside the road. A crowd of onlookers had gathered, but no one approached. Carter heard sirens in the distance, then a different noise, a high-pitched whine, growing louder.
It was another Stork drone, flying over the road, heading right for them.
She stuck her head inside the car. “Come on. We need to go.”
“Go?” Tanaka asked, as he crawled from the back seat, still clutching his tablet computer. “Go where?”
“Does it matter?” She pointed to the tablet. “Leave that.”
He held it closer, as if fearful that she might try to take it away from him. “I need it to access the satellite.”
“The hacker is using it to track us.” She glanced up at the incoming drone. It wasn’t moving very fast, but it would be on them in a few seconds. “That’s the only reason he didn’t shut you out completely. No electronics.” She tossed her phone aside. “Either leave it behind or stay here with it.”