Cerberus

The hound had let Damon pass. That was what he could not understand afterward: the lowered ears, the slow sweep of the tail, the enormous head moving aside as though a place had been kept for him.

Then his daughter called from the passage behind him, and he turned.

Three heads rose.

Damon stopped with one foot lifted. The nearest muzzle was level with his chest. Beneath its lip a tooth slid into view, long enough to enter him and come out through his back. The other two heads watched the narrow spaces beside it. Something scaled moved through the fur along the creature’s shoulders.

“Father?”

Thaleia’s voice was nearer. There was a scrape of sandals, then the small uncertain light of a lamp. He saw her fingers first, braced against the rock. The last time he had seen them, they were closing on his wrist above black water.

“Stay there,” he said.

She leaned around the bend. Her hair had come out of its binding. One sleeve hung wet and dark against her arm, and a coil of rope crossed her shoulder.

“I’ve brought the long one.”

He looked down at his own hands. No blood under the nails. No split where the mooring line had burned across his palm. He remembered that pain distinctly, and the greater shock when the harbor water closed over his head. Here he felt neither cold nor the need to breathe.

Thaleia set the lamp on a ledge outside the opening.

“I tied it above. There’s enough.”

She said this as she had said it at twelve years old, arguing over the length of a rope for a fishing boat. She was seventeen now. He had meant to let her do the measuring this season without standing over her.

“Don’t come any farther.”

For the first time she looked properly at what stood between them.

The lamplight touched one wet nose. Then another. The third head turned, and she drew back so sharply that her shoulder struck the wall.

“Cerberus,” she whispered.

Damon had heard the name beside hearths, in stories told to children who were not meant to be afraid. Three heads had seemed an extravagance then. Now he could see the use of them. There was no side on which the animal was looking away.

The Long Rope

Thaleia worked the coil off her shoulder without taking her eyes from the hound.

“Hold out your hand.”

“Thaleia—”

“You said to stay here. I’m staying here.”

She made a loop in the end. Her fingers were trembling badly enough to spoil it. She pulled it apart, tried again, and this time made the running knot correctly.

Damon watched the familiar work. A line fastened above. A loop around his wrist. Her weight braced against a stone. It was an arrangement he understood, and he wanted it with a sudden violence that almost carried him forward.

He could go home. There would be the open workshop door and the hemp left soaking in its trough. She would tell him he had frightened her. He would let her shout.

“Throw it low,” he said.

The loop struck the stone at his feet.

None of the three heads moved.

He crouched slowly. A snake lifted from the fur above the central neck, its tongue testing the space where his face had been. He closed his fingers around the rope. He could feel the twist he had put into it himself: a little uneven where Thaleia had called him to his dinner and he had finished in a hurry.

Across the threshold, she smiled.

“See?”

He slipped his hand through the loop.

The rope tightened. Thaleia leaned back, one heel against the wall, drawing him toward her a finger’s breadth at a time. He put his free hand out toward the hound, palm down, as he might have approached a strange dog on a quay.

The central head lowered to smell it.

The head beside the wall closed its jaws over the rope.

There was no snarl. The fibers strained, making small dry sounds. Damon lunged for the length beyond the teeth, and the third head struck his chest with its muzzle. He fell backward. The rope parted.

Thaleia hit the opposite wall. Her lamp rocked on the ledge, spilling a bright tongue of oil over the stone.

Damon scrambled up.

“Your sleeve!”

She slapped the little flame out with her wet cuff. For a moment he could hear nothing but the quick beat of her hand against the rock.

Then she was standing at the opening again, staring at the frayed end.

“That was our best rope.”

The foolishness of it nearly undid him. She looked furious with the rope, as though its failure were an insult they could put right at the workbench.

Damon still had the loop around his wrist. He drew it loose.

Beyond the hound, a bent woman emerged from the passage beside Thaleia. She moved with one hand held out as if someone much smaller ought to be holding it, slipping past the lamp without looking at either of them.

The hound shifted. Its ears eased backward. Its snake-tail swept aside, and the woman went through the space it made, passing Damon into the hall.

Damon took a step after her, away from Thaleia. The great jaws stayed still.

He turned toward his daughter again.

All three mouths opened.

The Open Way

Thaleia had seen it too, but she had seen the wrong part.

“It moved for her.”

“She was going in.”

“Then move away from the door. Let me get beside you.”

She lifted the lamp. Its light shook across the three throats.

Damon went cold, though he had no body left that should have known cold. The hound was lowering its heads. One ear folded back. There it was again, that terrible welcome.

Thaleia put her foot toward the gap.

“Stop!”

She froze, startled by his shout.

“Put it back. On the other side of the stone.”

“You don’t have to shout at me.”

“Put your foot back.”

She did, her face closing in the way he knew too well. He had used that voice when she ruined work, when she stayed out late, when he wanted obedience because explaining himself would take too long. This time she must understand. There was no later in which to make it right.

“It lets us come in,” he said. “Look at me.”

He took two slow steps into the hall.

The hound left him room.

He turned back. Before he could finish the step, one enormous paw came down across his way. Its claws scraped the stone. The central head filled the opening in front of him, and behind it he could see only his daughter’s lamp.

“It won’t let me come out.”

“We haven’t tried everything.”

“No.”

“I could find another way.”

He wanted to say yes. He wanted to send her searching until her lamp burned dry. To have her voice somewhere near him, calling around another bend. The desire shamed him, and still it did not leave.

Thaleia looked past the hound toward the deeper dark.

“I can stay with you.”

The words were quiet now. She set down the lamp and began untying the rope from her waist.

Damon moved toward her without thinking.

The hound drove him back against the wall. Teeth closed on the loose cloth over his shoulder and held. The outer head turned toward Thaleia, ears soft, leaving the inward path beside its cheek open for her.

“Wait,” Damon said.

She was coming.

He could not push the head away. He could not reach her. He flattened his hand against the stone and forced himself to stop struggling. Then he turned his shoulder toward the dark hall.

The teeth loosened.

He stepped inward. The hound released him.

“Thaleia. If you take another step, I shall have to watch you do what I did.”

She stopped with her hands still at the knot.

Above the central head, he could just see her face. There was a smear of soot on her cheek where she had wiped it with the burned sleeve.

“You told me you would come back.”

He had. From the harbor steps, with the loose boat banging against the pilings and someone shouting that a boy was beneath it. He had told her to wait there. He had thought it would take a moment.

“I meant to.”

“You always mean to.”

He had no defense against that. He had sent her home before, angry and alone, while he finished one more job. He had made promises carelessly because there had always been another morning.

“I know,” he said.

She bent over the knot. Her fingers pulled it tight instead of opening it.

“Push the short end back through,” he said.

“I know how.”

He closed his mouth.

She worked it free. The rope slipped from her waist and fell outside the threshold.

For a while neither of them moved. Cerberus watched Damon. A snake settled into the thick fur beneath one ear.

“Take the lamp,” Damon said at last.

Thaleia picked it up.

“And the rope. There’s good length left.”

She looked down at it, then at him.

“You’d make me carry it all the way back?”

“I would.”

Her mouth moved. It might have become a smile on another day. She gathered the damaged line in her free hand, loop after loop, slowly enough that he could watch each one settle.

When she had finished, she lifted the coil onto her shoulder.

“Go on,” he said.

She backed away. At the bend she stopped, holding the lamp high. Damon raised his hand above the three heads so that she could see it.

Then the light moved up the passage.

He kept his hand raised until it was dark. When he lowered it, the short severed loop lay against his palm. He set it on the stone, turned, and walked after the woman who had gone ahead of him.

Behind him, Cerberus lay down across the door.