That was too much for Hylas. He burst into hoots of laughter, and Milo and I joined in, until we had to clutch one another to keep from falling over.
I was still trying to catch my breath when Jason’s foot shot out and dealt me an undeniable kick in the behind. “You think this is funny? You watch her!” he barked at me. “If anything happens to the scrawny little bitch, we’ll stick you in a dress, hand you over to her flea-bitten relatives, and be halfway to Colchis before they figure out they’ve been duped. If you’re lucky, they’ll kill you quickly. If not, they might decide to use their knives to turn you into the daughter they lost. See if you can laugh your way out of that, boy!” He showed his teeth in a satisfied smirk and didn’t understand why I kept on laughing at his threat, even while I walked off to assume my new job as the girl’s keeper.
She greeted my approach with wide, fearful eyes, then she spit at me and missed. “Don’t do that again,” I said calmly. “I know you understand me, so I’m asking you nicely.” For her answer, she worked up a fresh mouthful and let it fly. She missed again, but I didn’t. She wiped her face, slack-jawed with amazement. “Can we talk now?” I asked.
“What we talk?” she demanded sulkily. Her speech was heavily accented and awkward, but we could communicate well enough. “Of how you use me? How I die?”
“How about how to spit?” I suggested.
She lifted her chin and declared, “You are crazy boy.”
“I am Glaucus,” I replied. “I’m not crazy, and I’m not a liar either. You’re going home. Believe it.”
The girl looked away, twisting her fingers together fretfully. “The blind king said that, yes. I heard him. Why should I believe?”
“Not him,” I told her, patting her shoulder gently. She didn’t pull away. “Me.” I felt foolish, asking her to put her faith in me like that. We were strangers. I doubted that I’d do the same if our places were reversed. But it was all I could do.
I was genuinely surprised when she looked up at me again and said, “All right. The good gods are all beautiful, and their words are truth. You are beautiful too, like the young lord who brings springtime, so I will believe you speak the truth, too. But if you lie, the Dark God will take you and the rocks will have your bones.”
“Well, that’s fair enough,” I said. “Now how about something to eat?”
It turned out that Lord Phineas enjoyed making jests. He called the girl his little “dove,” and that turned out to be her name, though not her disposition. I made such a mess of trying to pronounce it in her tongue that she finally laughed and told me to just call her “Dove” in my own language. She and I only had a day’s voyage together before we reached the Clashing Rocks, but we were friends when we parted.
Jason had Dove and me stand together at the Argo’s prow as we approached the narrow waterway. I was ill at ease the whole time, because it put me too close to my brothers. Luckily, Castor and Polydeuces’ side of the ship passed closest to a tricky stretch of coast, where every wavelet seemed to reveal the jagged teeth of half-hidden rocks. They paid strict attention to their rowing, not to me.
Just as the blind king had told us, the heights to either side of the narrows swarmed with wild tribesmen. As we sailed into the shadow of the Clashing Rocks, we heard a shout from the left: their leader calling out a challenge in several different tongues. No doubt he’d mastered just enough words in the most common trade languages of the Middle Sea to conduct his people’s ill-famed business. All of his demands stopped the instant that Dove shouted back, identifying herself.
Within moments, a group of tribesmen from the leader’s side of the narrows had scrambled down the rock face. Those manning the right-hand cliffs vanished from sight, though we knew better than to believe they were really gone. The Argonauts shipped oars and sent a pair of anchor rocks over the side to help hold the ship steady while the manner of Dove’s homecoming was settled. Tribesmen still visible on the heights lowered a young tree trunk, shorn of branches, to their kinfolk. Their leader made signs to let us know that they wanted to use the sapling as a bridge to fetch Dove from our ship. When Jason hesitated, Dove rolled her eyes and exclaimed, “What you fear? That my people attack? The tree is narrow. Only one at a time crosses, unarmed! A child could defend that.”
“All right,” Jason said at last. “But only two of them can set foot on the Argo.” He held up two fingers for the bandits to see.
They accepted his terms, and laid the stripped tree trunk from the shore to the prow. I heard a murmur of disappointment from the oarsmen on the right-hand side of the ship, which included my brothers. They wanted a closer look at the marauders of the Clashing Rocks, but they had to stay put, to help steady the ship.