Herc by Phoenicia Rogerson

Author:Phoenicia Rogerson [Rogerson, Phoenicia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2023-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Theseus II

How do you become a hero?

That’s not rhetorical. And it’s not a moral thing. I wasn’t stuck on what traits to embody or what the most righteous path was. I had enough examples of heroes to know what I was aiming for.

My issue was in the practical sense. How do you get into being a hero? It’s not like being a king where you’re born to it, or being a soldier where you join an army. All the times I imagined it when I was a kid, I could see the before and I could see the after, but I never thought about the bridge you take to get there.

I thought I was on track when I went to Hades with Piri. Like, I never really believed we’d manage to save Persephone and make her Piri’s wife, but I thought it would set us up as heroes. A return trip to the land of the dead with a still-beating heart should do that.

All it did was teach me how irrelevant I am, in the scheme of things. Persephone didn’t even talk to us. She looked over at her husband, the one who kidnapped her in the first place.

‘They’ve come to rescue me.’

And she smirked, like we were so cute and darling and pathetic for caring. Maybe that pity was what saved us. We spent two years stuck to Hades’ throne before my cousin Hercules came down and rescued me and together we left my blood brother to die.

After the Hades thing, I spent a lot of time in between. I went back to meet my father who’s a king and I learned how to walk again. I’d spent so long working for people to see me as a fighter, and now I was right back to people using words like whippy and asking if I was a runner. I didn’t want to be fast, I wanted to be strong. But whatever I did, it wasn’t going to make a difference to how people saw me.

At least I could walk, I told myself, so I spent a lot of time wandering around Greece, hoping something vaguely heroic would leap out at me. This brought me to Tiryns, with the logic that it was where my cousin Hercules had made his name.

(Though I didn’t ask Eurystheus. The first time we met he told me all heroes should be summarily killed. Twice.)

The whispers spun around Tiryns. Someone had fallen off the city walls – no, someone was pushed. Everyone else went to the bottom to rubberneck – it was a slow day, before that – but I ran to the top. I was right. There he was.

‘Cousin?’ I said. I should have been sure, but he looked so fucking different and he smelled weirdly of perfume. He was sitting with his head between his legs, bowed almost all the way down to the floor, making noises so guttural I couldn’t work out if he was choking or crying. ‘I didn’t know you were in town.

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