The First Heroes Read online

  Whether for tin or wine or gold or amber, commerce brought the Bronze Age cultures of northern and western Europe into contact with peoples of the south and east. With luxuries and staples, merchants wove vast webs of resources, creating an interdependence among powers great and small, far and near. How alien such travelers must have found the lands they visited and their inhabitants, and how strange these travelers and their goods must have seemed to their hosts. At such convergences foreign notions hybridized with one another and norms mutated as people were forced to adapt, embracing or rejecting influences far more profound than the material goods brought by merchant ship or caravan.

  Harry Turtledove, master of the myriad ifs of history, explores how how much stranger still it might be if these Bronze Age peoples had not been—quite—human.

  The Horse of Bronze

  HARRY TURTLEDOVE

  Iknew, the last time we fought the sphinxes, this dearth of tin would trouble us. I knew, and I was right, and I had the privilege—if that is what you want to call it—of saying as much beforehand, so that a good many of the hes in the warband heard me being clever. And much grief and labor and danger and fear my cleverness won for me, too, though I could not know that ahead of time.

  “Oh, copper will serve well enough,” said Oreus, who is a he who needs no wine to run wild. He brandished an axe. It gleamed red as blood in the firelight of our encampment, for he had polished it with loving care.

  “Too soft,” Hylaeus said. He carried a fine old sword, leaf-shaped, as green with patina as growing wheat save for the cutting edge, which gleamed a little darker than Oreus’s axe blade. “Bronze is better, and the sphinxes, gods curse them, are bound to have a great plenty of it.”

  Oreus brandished the axe once more. “Just have to hit harder, then,” he said cheerfully. “Hit hard enough, and anything will fall over.”

  With a snort, Hylaeus turned to me. “Will you listen to him, Cheiron? Will you just listen? All balls and no sense.”

  If this does not describe half our folk—oh, far more than half, by the Cloud-Mother from whom we are sprung—then never have I heard a phrase that does. “Hylaeus is right,” I told Oreus. “With tin to harden their weapons properly, the sphinxes will cause us more trouble than they usually do.”

  And Oreus turned his back on me and made as if to lash out with his hinder hooves. All balls and no brains, sure enough, as Hylaeus had said. I snatched up my own spear—a new one, worse luck, with a head of copper unalloyed—and would have skewered him as he deserved had he provoked me even a little more. He must have realized as much, for he flinched away and said, “We’ll give the sphinxes some of this, too.” Then he did kick, but not right in my direction.

  In worried tones, Hylaeus said, “I wonder if what they say about the Tin Isle is true.”

  “Well, to the crows with me if I believe it’s been overrun by monsters,” I replied. “Some things are natural, and some just aren’t. But something’s gone wrong, or we wouldn’t have had to do without tin shipments for so long.”

  Looking back on it, thinking about the Tin Isle while we were camped out not far from the sphinxes’ stronghold, in the debatable land north and east of their river-valley homeland, seems strange. This is a country of broiling sun, and one that will never match or even approach the river valley in wealth, for it is as dry as baked straw. Only a few paltry folk dwell therein, and they pay tribute to the sphinxes who hold the land as a shield for their better country. Those folk would pay tribute to us, too, if only we could drive away the sphinxes.

  They found us the next morning. Keeping our camp secret from them for as long as we had struck me as something of a miracle. With their eagle-feathered wings, they can soar high over a battlefield, looking for a fight. And so this one did. Hideous, screeching laughter came from it as it spied us. They have faces that put me in mind of our own shes, but lengthened and twisted into a foxlike muzzle, and full of hatred—to say nothing of fangs.

  “Now we’re for it,” I said, watching the accursed thing wing off southward, listening to its wails fade in the distance. “They’ll come by land and air, bedeviling us till we’re like to go mad.”

  Nessus strung his great bow. When he thrummed the bowstring, he got a note like the ones a he draws from a harp with a sound box made from the shell of a tortoise. “Some of them will be sorry they tried,” he said. Nessus can send an arrow farther than any male I know.

  “Some of us will be sorry they tried, too,” I answered. I had not liked this expedition from the beginning and never would have consented to it had I not hoped we might get on the scent of a new source of tin. That seemed more unlikely with each league farther south we traveled. Wherever the sphinxes got the metal to harden their bronze, it was not there.

  But we were there, and we were about to pay the price for it. I had put out sentries, though our folk are far from fond of being so forethoughtful. One of them cried, “The sphinxes! The sphinxes come!”

  We had enough time to snatch up our weapons and form the roughest sort of line before they swarmed upon us like so many lions. They are smaller and swifter than we. We are stronger. Who is fiercer . . . Well, that is why they have battles: to find out who is fiercer.

  Sometimes the sphinxes will not close with us at all, but content themselves with shooting arrows and dropping stones and screeching curses from afar. That day, though, they proved eager enough to fight. Our warbands seldom penetrate so far into their land. I suppose they thought to punish us for our arrogance—as if they have none of their own.

  The riddle of the sphinxes is why, with their wings and fangs and talons, they do not rule far more of the land around the Inner Sea than in fact they hold. The answer to the riddle is simplicity itself: they are sphinxes, and so savage and vile and hateful they can seldom decide what to do next or make any other folk obey them save through force and fear. On the one hand, they hold the richest river valley the gods ever made. On the other, they could be so much more than they are. As well they do not see it themselves, I suppose.

  But whether they see it or not, they had enough and to spare that day to send us home with our plumed tails hanging down in dismay. Along with their ferocity and their wings, their bronze weapons won the fight for them. Oreus practiced his philosophy, if you care to dignify it with such a word, when he hit one of the sphinxes’ shields as hard as he could with his copper-headed axe. The metal that faced the shield was well laced with tin, and so much harder than the blade that smote it that the axe head bent to uselessness from the blow. Hit something hard enough and . . . This possibility had not entered into Oreus’s calculations. Of course, Oreus is not one who can count above fourteen without polluting himself.

  Which is not to say I was sorry he was part of our warband. On the contrary. The axe failing of the purpose for which it was intended, he hurled it in the startled sphinx’s face. The sphinx yowled in pain and rage. Before it could do more than yowl, Oreus stood high on his hinder pair of legs and lashed out with his forehooves. Blood flew. The sphinx, screaming now rather than yammering, tried to take wing. He snatched it out of the air with his hands, threw it down, and trampled it in the dirt with all four feet.

  “Who’s next?” he cried, and none of the sphinxes had the nerve to challenge him.

  Elsewhere in the field, though, we did not do so well. I would it were otherwise, but no. Before the day was even half done, we streamed north in full retreat, our hopes as dead as that lake of wildly salty water lying not far inland from where we were. The sphinxes pursued, jeering us on. I posted three hes beneath an overhanging rock, so they might not be easily seen from the air. They ambushed the sphinxes leading the chase as prettily as you might want. That, unfortunately, was a trick we could play only once, and one that salved the sore of our defeat without curing it.

  When evening came, I took Oreus aside and said, “Now do you see why we need tin for our weapons?”

  He nodded, his great chest heaving with the exertion of the fight an
d the long gallop afterward and the shame he knew that that gallop had been away from the foe. “Aye, by the gods who made us, I do,” he replied. “It is because I am too strong for copper alone.”

  I laughed. Despite the sting of a battle lost, I could not help laughing. “So you are, my dear,” I said. “And what do you propose to do about that?”

  He frowned. Thought never came easy for him. At length, he said, “We need tin, Cheiron, as you say. If I’m going to smash the sphinxes, we need tin.” His thought might not have come easy, but it came straight.

  I nodded. “You’re right. We do. And where do you propose to get it?”

  Again, he had to think. Again, he made heavy going of it. Again, he managed. “Well, we will not get it from the sphinxes. That’s all too plain. They’ve got their supply, whatever it is, and they aren’t about to give it up. Only one other place I can think of that has it.”

  “The Tin Isle?” I said.

  Now he nodded. “The Tin Isle. I wonder what’s become of it. We paid the folk there a pretty price for their miserable metal. Why don’t their traders come down to us any more?”

  “I don’t know the answer to that, either,” I said. “If we go there—and if the gods are kind—we’ll find out, and bring home word along with the tin.”

  Oreus frowned at that. “And if the gods are unkind?”

  With a shrug, I answered, “If the gods are unkind, we won’t come back ourselves. It’s a long way to the Tin Isle, with many strange folk between hither and yon.” That only made Oreus snort and throw up his tail like a banner. He has his faults, does Oreus, and no one knows them better than I—certainly not he, for lack of self-knowledge is conspicuous among them—but only a fool would call him craven. I went on, “And whatever has befallen the folk who grub the tin from the ground may meet us, too.”

  His hands folded into fists. He made as if to rear, to stamp something into submission with his forehooves. But there was nothing he could smite. He scowled. He wanted to smash frustration, as he wants to smash everything. Another fault, without a doubt, but a brave fault, let it be said. “Anything that tries to befall me will rue the day,” he declared. Idiocy and arrogance, you are thinking. No doubt. Yet somehow idiocy and arrogance of a sort that cheered me.

  And so we built a ship, something centaurs seldom undertake. The Chalcippus, we named her—the Horse of Bronze. She was a big, sturdy craft, for centaurs are a big, sturdy folk. We need more space to hold enough rowers to drive a ship at a respectable turn of speed. Sphinxes, now, can pack themselves more tightly than we would dream of doing.

  But the valley in which the sphinxes dwell has no timber worth the name. They build their ships from bundled sheaves of papyrus plants. These strange vessels serve them well enough on their tame river, less so when they venture out onto the open waters of the Inner Sea.

  We have fine timber in our country. The hills are green with pine and oak. We would have to cut and burn for years on end to despoil them of their trees. I do not like to think the dryads would ever thus be robbed of their homes. Not while the world remains as it is, I daresay, shall they be.

  Once the wood was cut into boards and seasoned, we built the hull, joining planks edge to edge with mortise and tenon work and adding a skeleton of ribs at the end of the job for the sake of stiffening against the insults of wave and wind. We painted bright eyes, laughing eyes, at the bow that the ship might see her way through any danger, and the shes wove her a sail of linen they dyed a saffron the color of the sun.

  Finding a crew was not the difficult matter I had feared it might be. Rather, my trouble was picking and choosing from among the swarm of hes who sought to sail in search of the Tin Isle. Had I not named Oreus among their number, I am sure he would have come after me with all the wild strength in him. Thus are feuds born. But choose him I did, and Hylaeus, and Nessus, and enough others to row the Chalcippus and to fight her: for I felt we would need to fight her before all was said and done.

  Sail west to the mouth of the Inner Sea, then north along the coast of the strange lands fronting Ocean the Great—thus in reverse, it was said, the tin came down from the far northwest. What folk dwelt along much of the way, what dangers we would meet—well, why did we make the voyage, if not to learn such things?

  Not long before we set out, Oreus sidled up to me. In a low voice, he said, “What do you think, Cheiron? On our travels, do you suppose we’ll find—wine?” He whispered the last word.

  Even if he had spoken more softly still, it would have been too loud. Wine is . . . Wine is the most wonderful poison in all the world, as any of us who have tasted it will attest. It is a madness, a fire, a delight beyond compare. I know nothing hes or shes would not do to possess it, and I know nothing they might not do after possessing it. As well we have never learned the secret of making the marvelous, deadly stuff for ourselves. Gods only know what might become of us if we could poison ourselves whenever and however we chose.

  I said, “I know not. I do not want to find out. And I tell you this, Oreus: if you seek to sail on the Horse of Bronze for the sake of wine and not for the sake of tin, sail you shall not.”

  A flush climbed from where his torso rose above his forelegs all the way to the top of his head. “Not I, Cheiron. I swear it. Not I,” he said. “But a he cannot keep from wondering . . .”

  “Well, may we all keep wondering through the whole of the voyage,” I said. “I have known the madness of wine, known it and wish I had not. What we do when we have tasted of it—some I do not remember, and some I wish I did not remember. Past that, I will say no more.”

  “Neither will I, then,” Oreus promised. But he did not promise to forget. I wish I could have forced such a vow from him, but the only thing worse than a promise broken is a promise made or forced that is certain to be broken.

  We set out on a fine spring day, the sun shining down brightly from the sky. A wind off the hills filled my nostrils with the spicy fragrance of pines. It also filled the saffron sail that pulled the Horse of Bronze across the wine-dark sea (an omen I should have taken, but I did not, I did not) fast enough to cut a creamy wake in the water.

  The Inner Sea was calm. In spring and summer, the Inner Sea usually is. The Chalcippus’s motion was as smooth and gentle as an easy trot across a meadow. This notwithstanding, several strong hes leaned over the rail and puked up their guts all the way to the horse in them. Some simply cannot take the sea, do what they will.

  I am not one who suffers so. I stood at the stern, one hand on each steering oar. Another he called the stroke. He set the speed at my direction, but I did not have to do it myself. I was captain aboard the Chalcippus, yes, but among us he who leads must have a light hand, or those he presumes to lead will follow no more. Not all hes see this clearly, which is one reason we have been known—oh, yes, we have been known—to fight among ourselves.

  But all was well when we first set out. The wind blew strongly, and from a favorable direction. We did not have to row long or row hard. But I wanted the hes to get some notion of what they would need to do later, if the wind faltered or if we fell in with enemies. They still reckoned rowing a sport and not a drudgery, and so they worked with a will. I knew that was liable to change as readily as the wind, but I made the most of it while it lasted.

  Some of the hes muttered when we passed out of sight of land. “Are you foals again?” I called to them. “Do you think you will fall off the edge of the earth here in the middle of the Inner Sea? Wait till we are come to Ocean the Great. Then you will find something worth worrying about.”

  They went on muttering, but now they muttered at me. That I did not mind. I feared no mutiny, not yet. When I set my will against theirs in any serious way, then I would see. A captain who does not know when to let the crew grumble deserves all the trouble he finds, and he will find plenty.

  Oreus came up to me when new land heaved itself up over the western horizon. “Is it true what they say about the folk of these foreign parts?” he aske
d. He was young, as I have said; the failed attack against the sphinxes had been his first time away from the homeland.

  “They say all manner of things about the folk of foreign parts,” I answered. “Some of them are true, some nothing but lies. The same happens when other folk speak of us.”

  He gestured impatiently. “You know what I mean. Is it true the folk hereabouts”—he pointed to the land ahead—”are cripples? Missing half their hindquarters?”

  “The fauns? Cripples?” I laughed. “By the gods who made them, no! They are as they are supposed to be, and they’ll run the legs off you if you give them half a chance. They’re made like satyrs. They’re half brute, even more so than satyrs, but that’s how they work: torso and thinking head above, horse below.”

  “But only the back part of a horse?” he persisted. When I nodded, he gave back a shudder. “That’s disgusting. I can stand it on goaty satyrs, because they’re sort of like us only not really. But these faun things—it’s like whoever made them couldn’t wait to finish the job properly.”

  “Fauns are not mockeries of us. They are themselves. If you expect them to behave the way we do, you’ll get a nasty surprise. If you expect them to act the way they really do, everything will be fine—as long as you keep an eye on them.”

  He did not like that. I had not expected that he would. But then, after what passed for reflection with him, he brightened. “If they give me a hard time, I’ll bash them.”

  “Good,” I said. It might not be good at all—it probably would not be good at all, but telling Oreus not to hit something was like telling the sun not to cross the sky. You could do it, but would he heed you?

  I did not want to come ashore among the fauns at all. But rowing is thirsty work, and our water jars were low. And so, warily, with archers and spearers posted at the bow, I brought the Chalcippus toward the mouth of a little stream that ran down into the sea.