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  Today was different. Today, for the first time in his life, he thought about what he was doing. He thought about who he was.

  Ladon had told him to go home. What if he did? What if he walked out of the garden and turned away. He could find a ship, change his name. He could leave Heracles behind, an imprint in time, like Ladon, that would fade as the grass grew.

  What if he bent the future as easily as an iron bar? Could he not bend himself out of his fate, and leave fate to curve elsewhere? Why was he fixed, immoveable, plodding out his life like a magnificent ox? Why did he wear Hera’s yoke? And for the first time he thought it was his own yoke he wore.

  He looked up at the stars. There was the constellation of Cancer, another of his enemies elevated by Hera. A giant crab had nipped him in the foot while he was battering the Hydra. He had crushed the crab, but for his pains, there was his foe glittering at him, uncrushable forever.

  Cancer the Crab. The zodiac sign of Home.

  ‘Go home, Heracles’ … no, he would never go home. It was too late.

  * * *

  Heracles got up from under the tree, and taking Ladon’s lopped off tail, scrambled over the wall of the garden and made his way back to Atlas. On the way he caught a sleeping forest pig, and carried it with him to cook and eat. Outwardly, he was still Heracles, bluff, ready, direct, untroubled. Inwardly, some part of him was riven – not by doubt – he did not doubt what he must do, but by a question. He knew what, he no longer knew why.

  Thought-Wasp

  Which is what he said to Atlas when they ate together under a wedge of stars.

  ‘Why are we doing this, mate?’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘You’re holding up the Kosmos and I’m spending twelve years clobbering snakes and thieving fruit. The only good time was chasing Hippolyte, Queen of the Amazons, and she didn’t want anything to do with me when I caught her. Independent women are like that. I don’t know which is worse – the dependent ones who bleat at you all day, or the bitches who couldn’t care less.’

  ‘What happened to Hippolyte?’

  ‘I killed her of course.’

  ‘I knew her once.’

  ‘Sorry mate.’

  There was a pause. Atlas was silent. Heracles drank another skinful of wine. He didn’t want to think. Thinking was like a hornet. It was outside his head buzzing at him.

  ‘What I mean to say, Atlas, is why?’

  ‘There is no why,’ said Atlas.

  ‘That’s just the trouble,’ said Heracles. ‘There is a why, here, or here, or here,’ and he started hitting the side of his head, trying to squash the droning thought.

  Atlas said –

  ‘Bent under the world like this, I hear all the business of men, and the more I hear them questioning their lot, the more I know how futile it is. I hear them plan for tomorrow and die during the night. I hear a woman groaning in labour and her child is stillborn. I hear the terror of the captured man, and suddenly he is set free. I hear a merchant travelling home from the coast with his goods, and robbers set upon him and take all he has. There is no why. There is only the will of the gods and a man’s fate.’

  ‘I’m the strongest man in the world,’ said Heracles.

  ‘Except for me,’ said Atlas.

  ‘And I’m not free …’

  ‘There is no such thing as freedom,’ said Atlas. ‘Freedom is a country that does not exist.’

  ‘It’s home,’ said Heracles. ‘If home is where you want to be.’

  Then Heracles tried to throw off his dark mood.

  ‘So you think you’re stronger than I am, do you Atlas? Can you balance Africa on your dick?’

  Atlas started to laugh, which was unfortunate for the earth, experiencing this as a deep tremor. Heracles already had his own dick out and was working it furiously to make it stand.

  ‘Come on, stick it on here. Let’s have the whole continent smack on my bulb.’

  ‘You’re drunk,’ said Atlas.

  ‘I saw Hera this afternoon. God what a ball-breaker. You know that story about the Milky Way and how it was the milk I spurted out after she suckled me? Well it wasn’t the milk, it was this stuff, but she’s too much of a lady to tell anyone.’

  Heracles was just about to come. ‘This’ll put snow on the Himalayas, eh boy?’

  He lay back, scattered over the stars. ‘Go on Atlas, now you.’

  ‘I don’t have a free hand.’

  ‘I’ll do it for you if you want – mate to mate.’

  ‘I’m too tired.’

  ‘You sound like a girl.’

  ‘You should try holding up the world.’

  ‘I’ve told you, I’ll do it tomorrow. On my nose, like a seal.’ He started to snore.

  ‘Good night Heracles,’ said Atlas, though there was no reply.

  Heracles’s snoring thundered over the world below, while Atlas gazed out, as he always did, into infinite space, wishing he could be part of it, even for one hour.

  Morning came to test Heracles’s promise. There was the tricky question of how Heracles could physically take the Kosmos from Atlas without dropping it. After some discussion it was agreed that Heracles would slide himself up Atlas’s back, like a mating snail, and pull the world down onto his own shoulders.

  It worked well enough, except that the gods themselves were overturned in their beds, and a meteor the size of a town crashed to earth, sinking part of Sicily.

  Atlas felt his gigantic burden slip from his body, and he turned to thank Heracles whose face was red as a pomegranate, his muscles hard-braced as stone.

  ‘It gets easier,’ said Atlas.

  ‘Just go and get the apples,’ was all the response Heracles could manage.

  * * *

  Atlas rubbed his legs and lower back. He had forgotten what standing upright felt like. He stretched his arms above his head, hearing the crack of stiff joints and enjoying the slow easing off of dorsal and trapezius. He trod through the heavens, kicking the stars like stones. He stepped down out of the clouds the way a man steps out of a mist. He was back on earth. He was proportional and seemly. His gigantic nature was contained. He was looking for his garden and he found it.

  When Atlas pushed open the heavy peeling wooden door, some of his high spirits were checked. What time had failed to ruin, Heracles and Ladon had achieved. The ground was scorched and polluted from the serpent’s fiery venom. The wall was down where Heracles had kicked it scrambling over. The cloches and the frames and the stakes and the wires that had trained the apricots to the wall were all broken. What fruit was left was run wild and eaten up by maggots or birds. The good soil that he had dug and sieved was thick with matted grass. His shed had a hole in the roof.

  The garden seemed to represent the loss of everything that had mattered to Atlas; his daughters, his peace and quiet, his own thoughts, his freedom, his pride. Angrily, he grabbed a rusty billhook and when he had cleaned it on his leather belt and sharpened it against a stone, he began to cut back the wasted garden.

  By evening there was a great stack of dead branches and unwanted growth and Atlas set it alight like a funeral pyre. The flames scorched up high, even Heracles could feel them on his neck and he wondered what Atlas was doing. The dense smoke offended the gods, who knew that this was no sacrifice, and Zeus himself decided to intervene. He crept into the garden disguised as a rough old labourer in a donkey skin.

  ‘Is Lord Atlas returned to The Garden of the Hesperides?’

  ‘Who are you?’ said Atlas, piling nettles onto his fire.

  ‘My name is Parsimonius. I have little to spare and little to share but I will help you if I can.’

  ‘How can you help me?’ said Atlas.

  ‘I can warn you that it was Zeus who ordered your punishment and Zeus who will enforce it.’

  ‘You seem to know a lot about Zeus,’ said Atlas.

  ‘I am a religious man.’

  ‘Most mean men call themselves so – it excuses their own beha
viour.’

  ‘How will you excuse your own behaviour?’

  ‘You can tell Almighty Zeus that his bastard son Heracles is holding up the world.’

  Zeus knew nothing of this, or of the encounter with Hera in the garden. Like most women, Hera was careful not to tell her husband everything.

  ‘Heracles has his own punishment to bear.’

  ‘He is able enough to bear his own and mine for a while. Besides he wants to think.’

  Now Zeus was anxious. Real heroes don’t think.

  ‘What is Heracles thinking about?’

  ‘You want to know a lot for a donkey skin don’t you?’ said Atlas, who was beginning to suspect his visitor’s true identity. ‘I’ll tell you for what it’s worth – Heracles is thinking about himself. Yes, Heracles, born with rocks for muscles and a rock between his ears, asked me last night why he should do the gods’ bidding. I thought it was a stupid question, hardly a question at all, but it’s the first question that Heracles has ever asked, other than Which way? and Are you married?’

  ‘What did you answer?’ asked Zeus.

  ‘I made no answer. If there is no question there can be no answer. No one can ask why to the gods.’

  Zeus was relieved by this remark. He did not doubt that even if Heracles was thinking now, he would not be thinking later. What he feared was that Atlas might begin to consider the nature of Heracles’s blind question.

  ‘You answered well, Atlas. I am sure that Zeus will overlook this small excursion.’

  ‘I am sure Zeus knows nothing of it,’ said Atlas.

  ‘Perhaps you are right. Some questions are best not asked at all. If I were asked now, “Where is Atlas?” I should say, “in his usual place”.’

  Parsimonius got up from the tuft where he had been sitting, and bowing to Atlas, left the garden. As soon as he had gone out of the door, Atlas used his arms as jack-levers and heaved himself up the wall so that he could watch his visitor’s path. Parsimonius had vanished completely, but for a small trail of golden-ish dust.

  ‘That was Zeus alright,’ thought Atlas to himself, and something troubled the giant, though he did not yet know what it was.

  Meanwhile, Heracles was not happy. The world was much heavier than he had guessed. His strength lay in action not in endurance. He liked a short sharp fight, a good dinner and sleep. His body was as strong as Atlas’s, but his nature was not. Hera was right about him there. Heracles’s strength was a cover for his weakness.

  Nobody argues with a man who is twice as tall, twice as heavy, twice as hot-tempered, and three times the big head. Argue with Heracles, and he’d crush you. So he was always right. If he took his chariot in to be fixed, it was ‘Right away Mr Heracles, we weren’t busy, we’ll do it now,’ and the long line of chariots waiting to have their axles repaired could moulder to dust, while Heracles’s special racing model was brought to the front of the line.

  The garage fixed the wheel and cleaned the chariot for free. Heracles used the riding box like a horse-drawn dustbin, and it was always full of discarded wineskins and yesterday’s quick-shot boar.

  No matter.

  Heracles would sit on a straw bale and look at drawings of nymphs while the chariot was made useful and beautiful again. Sometimes people would come and ask for his autograph, and he’d scrawl his name with a bone on a wax tablet. He never paid for anything, and if anyone challenged him, he killed him. His life was simple. He was a simple boy. Women, like wood, were for splitting and for keeping him warm. He loved to divide a woman’s legs and push himself inside her. No woman ever refused him. That was his charm.

  That was his story. No woman who ever refused him lived to tell the tale. Hippolyte had almost got away with it. He had felt pity as he stood over her exhausted body. He had pursued her for a year – or was that Artemis’s hind? He couldn’t remember. It had been a long tiring run though, he knew that, and she was the only woman who could out-distance him. She would have got away if some friends of his hadn’t ambushed her in the mountains.

  As he stood over her, his sweat plopping onto her face, he had wanted to lift her up gently and share his food with her. He thought of marrying her. He asked her if she’d marry him, as he stood there swinging his club. She said something about Amazons never marrying. Something silly like that, and he realised she was just a woman like the rest, who would never know what was good for her. He hesitated, and then knocked off her head the way you open a desert cactus.

  Blood covered his feet. There was some there still, caught under his toenail, a tiny dye-marker of the kind that rich people used to mark their possessions from thieves.

  Poor Heracles. Hera’s milk and Hippolyte’s blood. A man bonded by women.

  Then Heracles had a very unpleasant thought. Suppose Atlas never came back?

  Three Golden Apples

  In his garden, Atlas went to pick the three golden apples.

  As his hand went towards the first, he felt a rumbling under his feet, and he had to steady himself against the tree. The tree bark was cool as silver, though the apple dropped into his hand like molten gold. It was as if somebody else had picked the apple and given it to him. Uneasily he looked around. There was no one there. There was only the cool night.

  Atlas put the fruit into his pocket and made for a second, perfect apple. This time he heard a groan, distinctly, a groan, and felt a terrible pain in his chest. He staggered slightly, bruising his back against the tree, while an apple, whole and unmarked, rolled down his body to where he caught it in his hand. There it was, in the palm of his hand, a little world complete unto itself.

  For a long time, Atlas gazed at it, and he thought he could see continents under its skin, and the rush of rivers that flowed from one country to another. He laughed, and he felt affection, and pride, and that unbearable tightening in his chest again. He wanted to cry, his tears pouring over the apple, like rain.

  He was not used to feeling. He saved himself in his lonely hours by thinking. He invented mathematical puzzles and solved them. He plotted the course of the stars. He tried to understand the ways of gods and men, and was mentally constructing a giant history of the world. His thoughts kept him from dying. His thoughts kept him from feeling. What was there to feel anyway – but pain and weight?

  Now, gazing at this tiny world, he felt an emotion he hardly recognised. He did not dare to name it.

  * * *

  Heracles, his strength bound without motion, was having a panic attack. He was alone. There were no fires, no lights, no cooking smells. There was no one to listen to his stories, or to get drunk with, or to praise him. His only company was the hornet buzzing outside of his head, the thought-wasp, buzzing Why? Why? Why?

  In the garden, Atlas put away the second apple and reached for the third. There was a crashing around his head, and a saw of lightning, as yellow as the apple, cut the third fruit from the very top of the tree and hurled it at him. Atlas stretched to catch it, and hit the ground. The apple was heavy as thought. It lay beside him in the grass and try as he might, he could not pick it up.

  Atlas was scared. Like all the sons of Mother Earth, his strength was renewed when he came in contact with the ground. His brother Antaeus had been in hand to hand combat with Heracles, and for a long time it looked as though Antaeus would win, for every time Heracles wrestled him to the ground, Antaeus sprang up again with new strength.

  Heracles, who could be smart when his life was at stake, finally realised that he must hold Antaeus above his head and crack his ribs. It worked.

  But now, Atlas was in his own element and he couldn’t manage to pick up an apple. With huge difficulty he rolled it towards him, and lay looking at it, beside his head.

  His forced exile had taught him to concentrate. He used to go about the world as busy as a man could be, organising, building, farming, making his wine, selling it, supplying jewels to the wealthy, talking with the powerful. He had been one of the powerful.

  A powerful man doesn’t notice mu
ch. He doesn’t need to. Other people notice things for him.

  Atlas, alone in the cosmos, keeper of the world, had learned to interpret every sound, every sign. He knew when there would be a storm or an earthquake. He smelled the burning waste of collided stars. He understood even the smallest sounds – a man turning over in bed, a bird calling danger when a hyena passed. He listened to rocks compress creatures into fossils. He heard the crack of tree-fall, as men cleared the forests.

  Now, lying with his face in the grass, he heard angry shouts from Tartarus, where the dead are, where some of his own brothers were, hating death, wanting life, crowded in a limbo of eternity, longing for time.

  There had never been enough time for all the things Atlas liked to do, and now that he was immortal, he had only the punishment of forever. Forever to be the same person. Forever to perform the same task.

  He listened. He heard a woman pounding beetles to make purple dye. She would do that forever wouldn’t she? That was her work, and though she might spend the evenings eating and drinking and singing and visiting her friends, her life would never change. Did she care? Atlas listened to hear if she sighed – no she did not sigh – she hummed as she pounded, and her mind was elsewhere, on her lover, on her children, on the pleasure of a warm day.

  Would he now, this minute, change his life for hers, give her the world and pick up her pestle and mortar?

  He deceived himself. When he cried for any relief from his monstrous burden, he did not really mean it. He was still Atlas. He was Lord of the Kosmos, wonder of the universe.