‘Sing, Muses, sing to me a story of heroes, and the deathless gods who govern earth, sea and sky.’
But King Eurystheus’s words are no invocation. They are mockery.
His audience of courtiers cackle and crow, guffaw and giggle. They are drunk. They have been for hours, since Eurystheus demanded they gather on the battlements of Tiryns.
He wants all the city to see it when night falls, and Heracles does not return. He wants all the city to see the man’s failure.
‘Kill the lion that stalks Nemea and return to the palace before the new moon.’
That was the task King Eurystheus set Heracles. A delayed execution, his courtiers have come to regard it – for no man could best such a creature, this lion offspring of Echidna, the mother of monstrosity. Whole armies have tried. Whole armies have failed.
But Eurystheus has his reasons. He has heard the whispers, the rumours of Heracles’s heredity – a son of Zeus. True or false, to execute such a man might be to incur the wrath of the gods themselves.
No, Eurystheus thinks as he stands upon the battlements. Better to let Heracles fail, better to let Heracles die by nature’s hand, better to let–
And then the blast of a horn from the watchtower wrenches Eurystheus back to the moment.
There are people on the road below, fleeing, falling, shrieking. Something is moving up on the hillside. Something monstrous. A great black mane, a hide like beaten gold catching the dusking light.
The lion has left Nemea. It has come to stalk Tiryns.
‘Do you wish to hear a story now, King Eurystheus?’ asks a sister of the Muses, her voice close and contemptuous. ‘Do you wish to hear of Heracles, and his great labour?’
The Muses’s story starts with a low growl, bass all body and bruising. The kind of noise you feel not hear.
It rolls about the valleys of Nemea like distant thunder before the deluge. When it draws closer and closer, louder and louder, it shakes dust from timber rooves, sets roosting birds to flight.
And then finally it pitches into a roar, a herald of destruction: fences ripped to shreds; whole flocks butchered; shepherds never to be heard from again.
No one has seen the mountain lion – or at least no one who has survived it – but all have seen the grooves it leaves in the stony outcrops: four claw marks, rock ragged as torn flesh.
These are the tracks Heracles follows.
Across his back is slung bow and quiver, at his side a sword. But he wears no armour. He has never had need of it.
He clambers between crags and scrambles down scree until he finds a cave high in the Nemean hills. It is a meagre palace for this king of lions: a stone shelf for a den, bleached skeletons for courtiers, the howling wind for a herald.
And now Heracles for a regicide.
He moves cautiously, allows his eyes to adjust to the dark of this vacant throne.
He has not seen the beast once all these days tracking it. He has not smelt or heard it. But he has felt a prickle at the back of his neck, this novel sensation he cannot explain, cannot name. And how could he? For Heracles has only ever been the hunter.
He has never been the hunted. Till now.
It comes like a summer squall, all silence and surprise. Two great paws that land upon his shoulders and rake his flesh.
Pain. Sharp and sudden.
Heracles has never known pain of the body. Of the heart, yes – the memory of his madness, the memory of fragile bodies clenched in his fists – but he has never known the sting of the breeze against a gash. He has never felt the beat of his heart answered by the throb of a wound. It is his first taste of that mortality that claimed his wife and children.
It slows him. Dulls him. He is sluggish to bring his sword to bear, and when he finally does – another novelty. His blade shatters against the lion like a rotten branch. The golden hide is impenetrable.
Heracles rolls. He swerves and slides. He escapes further blows, further blossoms of pain with movements like the slosh of water in a pale. But he cannot trade dodge and riposte forever. With each failed attempt to pierce the lion’s hide, its savage paws grow nearer.
He sees only one solution. Embrace the pain.
He throws himself at the beast and roars through the agony that its claws scribble into his shoulders, his thighs, his back.
Reflex kicks in. Holds, locks, grips, grapples. How many hours has Heracles spent wrestling with men in the pankration. And now slick with blood, his arms snake about the lion’s throat. The golden hide might be impenetrable, but the bones it robes are not unbreakable.
Heracles presses. He clamps and crushes. He squeezes the life from the Nemean lion, and it passes like the passing of a storm. Further and further, quieter and quieter, roars succumbing to a low growl, like distant thunder after the deluge.
Then silence.
‘Heracles’s blood decorated that cave like a thousand skeins of red thread unspooled. And soon the lion’s did too. No blade could pierce the hide, but its own claws could. Heracles worried one free from a paw and set to work skinning the pelt, removing the head.’
That is what the sister of the Muses sings to King Eurystheus and his court. She points once more at that shape on the horizon: it is no beast on four legs. It is a man on two, the hide of the Nemean lion slung across his shoulders, its great yawning maw his hood.
‘You may set more monsters for Heracles to slay, O King. More labours. But he will always be armoured now.’
Commissioned by HistoryHit for The Ancients podcast
Written by Andrew Hulse