Robert Sheckley - Agamemnon's Run

Pyliades was croaking, "Good for you, Commander. We'll show these Trojan swine a thing or two . . ."

Agamemnon was already rolling to his feet, just in time to see the other soldier thrust his sword deep into the doctor's belly. The soldier's helmet had come off in the fight. Agamemnon seized him from behind, bent back his head, and cut his throat. There was silence in the house of the sick man.

There were four corpses on the floor. The doctor had just passed away. Pyliades was dead, but with a grin on his face. Agamemnon hoped it was a grin of triumph rather than the sardonic grin of the plague victim.

The soldier whose throat he'd cut lay in a pool of his own blood. Steam was rising from it. The red-bearded soldier, with the knife in his brain, wasn't bleeding much. But he was as dead as the others. Agamemnon himself was uninjured. He could scarcely believe it. He shook himself to make sure.

He was fine. Now, to find Charon.

He reached inside his tunic, pulled out the amethyst that Dionysus had given him. He looked around the room through it.

The room was a dark violet. The proportions weren't as he remembered them. The amethyst seemed to have distorting properties. Agamemnon experienced a wave of dizziness. He sat down on the floor. Taking a deep breath, he calmed himself with an effort of will and looked around the room again.

He saw what looked like a wisp of smoke taking shape. Was it from the oil lamp? No, that had been broken during the fight—a wonder it hadn't set the place on fire.

At the same time he felt the walls of the hovel changing, expanding, dissolving.

Agamemnon blinked. The room was transforming fast. He was disoriented. He could no longer see the walls. He was outside. He lowered the amethyst to reorient himself.

He was indeed outside. Not even in Mycenae. He was sitting on a boulder on a low, marshy shore. There was a river in front of him. Its waters were black, sleek, oily. It appeared to be twilight or early evening. The sun was nowhere in sight, although it had been afternoon when all this began. There were no stars in the darkness, no light anywhere. Yet he could see. Some distance ahead of him, on a low ridge of rock poking out of the mud, there were four figures. Agamemnon thought he knew who they were. In the gloom he could also make out a sort of dock on the shore beyond the four figures. A long, low boat was tied to one of its pillars, and a man was standing in it.

The man was gesturing, and his voice came through clearly. "Come on, you guys! You know the drill. Come to the boat. The boat's not going to come to you."

The four rose and began walking to the dock. Their steps were the slow, unhurried footsteps of the dead. Agamemnon got up and hurried to join them.

He reached the dock at the same time they did. He recognized the doctor, Pyliades, and the two soldiers.

The man in the boat was urging them to move along, get aboard, get on with it.

"Come on," he said, "1 have no time to waste. Do you think you're the only dead awaiting transportation? Move along now, get aboard . . . You there," he said to Agamemnon, "you've got no business here. You're still living."

Agamemnon held up the amethyst. "I need to come aboard. You're Charon, aren't you?"

"His son," the man said. "One of his sons. We're all called Charon. Too much work for the old man alone. Too much for us now, too! But we do what we can. You've got the psychopomp stone, so I guess you can come aboard." He turned to the others. Did you bring any money for the passage?"

They shook their heads. "It was all too sudden," the doctor said.

"I will stand surety for them," Agamemnon said. "And for myself as well. I'll deposit the money wherever you want upon my return. You have the word of Agamemnon, king of kings."

"Make sure you don't forget, or when your time comes, your shade will be left here on the shore."

"How much do you want?" Agamemnon asked. "The fee is one obol per dead man, but five obols for you because you're alive and weigh more. Go to any Thomas Cook, have them convert your currency into the obol, and deposit it in the Infernal Account."

"Thomas Cook has an infernal account."

"Didn't know that, did you?"

Agamemnon and the others got on Charon's boat. It was narrow, with two rows of built-in benches facing each other. Agamemnon and Pyliades sat on one side, the two soldiers on the other, and the doctor, after a moment's hesitation, sat on a little bench in front of a shelter cabin, at right angles to the benches. Charon untied the mooring line and pushed the boat away from the dock. Once free, he set a steering oar in place, and stood on the decked stern and began to gently scull the boat.

They sat in silence for a while as the boat glided over the dark waters.

At last Agamemnon said, "Is this going to take long?"

"It'll take as long as it takes," Charon said. "Why? You in a rush?"

"Not exactly," Agamemnon said. "Just curious. And interested in getting to the bottom of these mysteries."

"Give your curiosity a rest," Charon said. "Here in the land of the dead, just as in the land of the living, no sooner do you understand one mystery than another comes up to replace it. There's no satisfying curiosity. I remember when Heracles came through here. He was in a tearing hurry, couldn't wait to wrestle with Cerberus and bring him up to the world of the living."

"They say he succeeded," Agamemnon said.

"Sure. But what good did it do him? When he got back, King Eurystheus just had another job for him. There's no end of things to do when you're alive."

The red-bearded soldier abruptly said, "I just want you to know, Agamemnon, that I bear you no ill will for having killed me."

"That's good of you," Agamemnon said. "After you tried so hard to kill me."

"There was nothing personal about it," the red-beard said. "I am Sallices, commander of Aegithus' bodyguard in Mycenae. I was ordered to kill you. I follow orders."

"And look where they have brought you!" Agamemnon said.

"Where else would I be going but here? If not this year, then the next, or the one after that."

"I didn't expect to be killed," the other soldier said. "I am Creonides. My time in Aegisthus' service was over at the end of the week. I was going back to my little farm outside Argos. Returning to my wife and baby daughter."

"I can't believe this self-pitying nonsense," the doctor said. "My name is Strepsiades. I am a respected doctor of Cos, an island famous for its healers. I came to Mycenae for purely humanitarian reasons, to give what help I could to victims of the plague that you fellows carried back from Asia. And how am I rewarded? A villainous soldier kills me so there should be no witnesses to the illegal and immoral execution of his lord."

"But I was just following orders," Creonides said. "My immediate commander, Sallices here, ordered me to do it." "And I," Sallices said, "was following the orders of my commander, the noble Aegisthus."

"But those were immoral orders!" Pyliades said, sitting up and speaking now for the first time in a firm deep voice, with no signs of plague on him. "Any man can see that!"

"Do you really think so?" Sallices asked. "And what if the orders were immoral? What is a soldier supposed to do, question and decide on each order given to him by his superiors? I've heard that you fellows did a few things you weren't so proud of during the Trojan War. Killing the whole population of Troy, and burning the city."

"We were avenging ourselve for the theft of Helen!" Plyiades declared hotly.

"And what was Helen to you?" Sallices asked. "Your wife or daughter? Not a bit of it! The wife of a king not even of your own country, since you are Argives, not Spartans. And anyhow, according to all accounts, the lady left Menelaus and went away with Paris willingly. So what were you avenging?"