Herc
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Synopsis
‘Astonishingly vivid’ Jodi Taylor
This should be the story of Hercules: his twelve labours, his endless adventures…everyone’s favourite hero, right?
Well, it’s not.
This is the story of everyone else:
Alcmene: Herc’s mother (She has knives everywhere)
Hylas: Herc’s first friend (They were more than friends)
Megara: Herc’s wife (She’ll tell you about their marriage)
Eurystheus: Oversaw Herc’s labours (He never asked for the job)
His friends, his enemies, his wives, his children, his lovers, his rivals, his gods, his victims.
It’s time to hear their stories.
Read by Kristin Atherton, Marlowe Chan-Reeves, Maryam Grace, Loreece Harrison, Sebastian Humphreys, Jay Layfette Valentine, Theo Solomon, Gary Turner and a full cast
Told with humour and heart, Herc gives voice to the silenced characters, in this feminist, queer (and sometimes shocking) retelling of classic Hercules myth.
Perfect for fans of Madeline Miller and Joanne M. Harris
Release date: September 5, 2023
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Print pages: 386
* BingeBooks earns revenue from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate as well as from other retail partners.
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Herc
Phoenicia Rogerson
AMPHITRYON I
We wanted a girl. Alcmene, my wife, and I were born of heroes, which sounds dramatic but mostly meant we had a family history of fire, glory, and dying young. So it came up one night, our legs tangled around each other. I’d like a girl, for our first, whispered, like it was something to be ashamed of. But being born of heroes means nothing runs smooth and we had twin boys.
The conception took place over three nights, and one.
Alcmene was an incredible woman. Smarter than I am, by half. She could hold a thousand thoughts in her head at once and always know exactly which one she needed. She was beautiful, too. She stood tall and straight, with muscles in her arms and with eyes that took in everything around her, and she loved me. I defy any man not to find that beautiful.
Maybe, then, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when she attracted the attention of a god—Zeus, the king himself—but it did, because when he appeared to her, he was wearing my face.
There was a prophecy. It said a descendant of Zeus born around a certain time would rule all those around him. I don’t know why this particular prophecy was so important to Zeus—his progeny tended to grow up to be kings anyway—but it’s best not to question the gods. He decided this son should have a particularly impressive bloodline, so he turned to my wife, born of heroes.
I’m older than I was. I’ve had time to come to terms with it. I’ve tried very hard not to be angry with her. I know, logically, there’s nothing to be done when the king of the gods appears looking like your husband, but I have to wonder. Did he have my mannerisms too? My thoughts and my words and my movements?
The night Zeus appeared to my wife—did he knock on our door?—the world went dark.
I was away, trying to mint myself as a military leader before our family grew. I wanted to be a father to be proud of.
Three days, it stayed dark. What should have been the first morning, we brushed it off. We laughed that Apollo, who drives the sun, was being lazy, distracted by some nymph, maybe. By afternoon we’d stopped laughing—something about the utter blackness choked it off—and quietly speculated that this was the end for man. We supposed the Titans had risen from their prison in Tartarus and deposed their children, the gods, dragged them someplace even darker than the world we inhabited.
By what should have been the evening, I was riding home. Screw war. Screw honor. If this was the end, I wanted to spend it with my wife. By the end of the ride, my steed, a warhorse from as long and splendid a lineage as my own, was fit for nothing but pasture, but it didn’t matter. As our house crept into sight, so did the sun, rising behind it. I didn’t stop to speak to Alcmene, save for fervent whispers of relief, as I scooped her up and carried her to bed.
Even in that state, I noticed the smell. The sheets were well worn, if we’re being polite. I thought nothing of it; my wife was probably lonely while I was at war. I told myself she didn’t want to wash my smell from the pillows in case it was the last she ever saw of me, but it wasn’t. I came home.
We enjoyed each other’s bodies and, for all the fear that preceded it, it was the last time my life was truly simple. When she woke, Alcmene stretched. I’ve always loved the way she stretches, her arms reaching behind her as though she’ll be able to catch the world within them, but this time she winced.
“Not that I didn’t have fun,” she said. “But that last round may have been one too many for me.” She grinned. A woman may have said she was glowing. My soldiers would have offered a coarser adjective.
“What last round?” I mumbled sleepily, enjoying the feeling of my own bed as much as I was the woman beside me. It was good to be home.
“The last one,” she said slowly, like I was some kind of idiot. I often am when I’m half-asleep. Less often when I’m fully awake, but it happens.
“There was only one.”
“If that’s your definition of one round then I’m worried for my back, dear. Just because it was one night—”
“It was morning,” I said,
frowning now.
“Yes, the last round was in the morning. The rest of it was—” She trailed off, the shape of a no forming on our lips as we realized we’d been opposite punch lines in a terrible joke. “We should go to the priest.”
“Let’s,” I said, wrapping an arm around her shoulder so she’d know, for all my shortness of words, I was with her.
The priest confirmed everything I’ve just told you, though by the end of it he couldn’t look Alcmene in the eye. Rather uptight creature, that priest. He added something, too, much scarier than any army or monster I’ve ever faced—twins. One for each father, he said. At least one is yours, he meant, which was wrong. They were both mine.
Well, they were both Alcmene’s and I was also there. The point is, I never thought of Iph as more mine than his brother. I worked hard not to.
The pregnancy felt unusually fast and unusually hard, but maybe that’s the fear speaking. Alcmene’s aunts certainly thought so, laughing it off as the paranoia of any new parent, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off.
“I like Alcaeus. Alcaeus and Iphicles,” my wife said when we talked about their names. “What do you think?” Personally I thought Alcmene, Amphitryon, Alcaeus, and Iphicles sounded like we were singling Iph out from the start, but they were inside her. She could have wanted to call them both Zeus and I’d agree.
“Sounds wonderful, dear.”
“It would be nice if they shared a room, I think. They should be friends, as well as brothers.”
“Sounds wonderful, dear.”
And on and on it went, Alcmene trying to choose which way to go, as if we’d get a say.
The birth was another horrible three-day saga. After months spent praying to, and blessing, and offering dedications to the goddess of childbirth, she took the day off. No matter how hard Alcmene breathed and pushed and cursed, nothing happened. Not until the middle of the night ticked by and Artemis moved her moon beyond our seeing; then it all happened at once.
I’m told that was because of the prophecy, too, that Hera didn’t want Zeus’ preferred offspring to rule, so she delayed his birth until after my brother’s son, Eurystheus, was born. That stung. It wasn’t the child’s fault, but one day he would rule the city that was meant to be mine—it would have been mine, bar an accident in my adolescence. But I couldn’t complain about that. My wife had been in labor for three days.
Our eldest was born, the son of Zeus himself. He was big, for a baby, but that was good. It meant he was healthy. As did the bellow he immediately emitted, scaring off every bird for miles. We handed him to his mother. She must have been shattered, the gods know I was shattered, but the smile on her face when she took him was breathtaking, like everything was suddenly right in this world.
After that, I almost missed Iph being born. He was smaller, but still healthy, still crying with a fine set of lungs. We—and by that I mean she—had done it. We were parents, juggling the boys to and fro as we tried to get them cleaned up.
Alcmene insisted on putting them to bed.
“The first time at least.” She smiled.
“Sounds wonderful, dear.”
Only it wasn’t. No sooner had we sunk to sleep—honestly more of a plummet—than we were woken by a bloodcurdling cry.
“Iphicles,” Alcmene whispered. A laxer parent, I couldn’t tell the difference between the cries of our newborns. “There’s trouble.”
“Babies cry, love. We shouldn’t pander to them,” I mumbled, but she’d already left.
She was right, of course. Our eldest son had disappeared.
“Where’s he gone?” she said, almost too fast for me to follow. “How can he—the servants? No. Hera?”
Hera was, for lack of a better word, our eldest’s stepmother. She’s Zeus’ wife, and the goddess of marriage—a combination that must have been equal parts infuriating and embarrassing given Zeus’ general inability to remain faithful to her. She was never a huge fan of his illegitimate offspring, but I couldn’t imagine she’d stoop to killing an infant.
“He probably just rolled out. We’ll find him,” I tried to reassure her, but I was panicking, too, and the panic made me stupid. We woke the servants and got to searching. We checked every inch of our home and grounds, but nothing showed, not until morning came. We were half-mad by then, jumping at every little noise. It’s a wonder my heart didn’t stop altogether when we heard one of the maids scream.
“Ma’am?” She sounded afraid as she approached Alcmene. My heart plummeted in my chest. No no no no no. “I got him. He’s okay.”
He was more than okay. He was beaming where he lay, two feet deep in a muddy hole that fit his shape as if it’d been dug around him.
The story they tell is that one of the gods stole him from his crib, then gave him to Hera to nurse. If she had, it would’ve granted him more strength, something he really didn’t need. As it was, she realized who he was—salt rubbed into the still-open wound of Zeus’ infidelity—and flung him back to earth, the milk from her breast spreading across the sky, staining it with stars.
Stories. New stars were always appearing, marking the death or birth of someone or other. It would be vain to claim so many for my son.
Whatever the reason, we got him cleaned up and back to bed, none the worse for his little adventure. If anything, his face said: please, Dad, can I go again?
The next night I put them to bed, just in case. We were woken by a scream, again. Iphicles, again. We went running, again, but they were both fine. Iph was crying, our eldest gurgling happily.
We looked more closely.
Our eldest held the mashed remains of a snake in either hand, curled possessively toward his chest. Alcmene scooped him up.
“Shh, Mummy’s here, you’re going to be safe. We’ve got you.”
I felt only seconds away from being called over to tell our newborn that yes, I was here, too, and he was safe. I moved over to Iphicles instead. He was still screaming. I held him so he’d know he wasn’t alone. I didn’t promise him anything.
We called the priest, the same one as before, who seemed particularly grumpy to be making early morning house calls but there you go. He ummed and ahhed while he avoided touching the snake-mash that seemed to be getting everywhere.
“Maybe it was a coincidence?”
“No,” Alcmene said, her tone implying the priest possessed some mental deficiency. “I don’t think an incredibly rare venomous snake coincidentally slithered into my newborn’s fists.”
I thought it was a bluff, about the snake being venomous, but she shook her head when I asked.
“I asked an expert. With the pregnancy, it seemed prudent.”
Over the years I’d find hundreds of things my wife had learned because it seemed prudent. Emergency medical care. The smell and color of any easily available poisons, and many of the more difficult ones, too. How to pacify wild animals, and wilder men. She kept knives in her sandals, and I found them hidden on high shelves more than once.
“That’s two in two nights,” I said quietly to the priest. “What do we do?”
“Appease whoever’s trying to kill him,” he said flippantly, before realizing who he was talking to and flinching. “I am sorry, my lord. It’s early—I forget myself.”
“Don’t be,” Alcmene said. “You’re right.”
How does one appease a goddess? We couldn’t make offerings that would have any meaning to her—what does a mortal, even a general, have that a god wants?
“She wants our son,” Alcmene said finally.
“You don’t mean—” I was horrified.
“No. No, gods, no. We name him after her, so she can claim a share in his glory too. It might help.”
So we didn’t call our son Alcaeus. We named him after a woman who’d already tried to kill him. Twice. We called him Heracles—the glory of Hera.
She stopped directly trying to kill him after that.
We put the boys to sleep in different rooms. We had to. Iph’s first word was snake.
That was the first word
from either of them. Anything physical, Herc got: he could roll over and then walk and run before his brother—but words and numbers were Iph’s domain. They spent their childhood tying each other up in knots in the different contests they’d invented, weighted so they’d win.
The depth of Herc’s strength became obvious when he was five, and he started breaking more than just the gifts his father’s wife sent us. (Alcmene and I joked about opening a menagerie with them. The strangest was the swarms of cicadas that descended upon the house. We spent years debating how exactly Hera planned on killing him with cicadas. Still, Herc scared them off with one of the bellows that characterized his childhood. Even into his teens, a stubbed toe could scare off every herbivore within the city walls.)
It started with his toys. Sturdier than average already, grips were bent, twisted and crushed. Then chairs, until we swallowed the expense of replacing all our furniture with solid marble. Uncomfortable, yes, but safer.
He tripped one day—his feet grew out faster than the rest of him, so he went through randomly clumsy phases—and put out a hand to steady himself. He left a dent in the wall, a perfect handprint. The boys thought it was funny, would measure themselves against it as they grew. Look how big I’m getting, look!
We tried our best to let them be kids, to let them stay kids when the world was pushing them to grow up too fast. We even consulted with seers, the best we could find, like knowing the future would give us some power to avoid it. It didn’t work. They all promised the same things, and all of them were true.
Herc’s going to be a hero. He’s going to kill monsters. His life is going to hurt.
IPHICLES I
He’s my twin—my slightly older twin, if you want to get technical about it, which he did. I’ve never known life without him, so I can’t tell you how he’s different from other brothers, but I can tell you how he’s different from me.
He looks shorter, for one, though our mother insists we’re the same height. It’s his shoulders—they’re so broad they dwarf the rest of him, especially when we were teenagers. He kept his hair shorter than I did, called it a nuisance, and he hated water, pouting every time Mum made him take a bath. He pouted like no one else.
He wasn’t smart, really, no matter what Mum insisted. He had no time for words, deriding oration and metaphor as confusing bullshit.
Language and rhetoric were my best subjects, in retaliation. It’s not that I loved them, especially not to begin with—who doesn’t look at the declensions and wonder why anyone would possibly care—but I liked to win nearly as much as Herc did and I could beat him every time. I found a talent, or made one, and that was that. We got separate tutors, since he was so much better at the fighting and I at the words.
Our parents had some famous teacher come look at him. They kept emphasizing that, hoping Herc would suddenly become passionate about his lessons, Mum telling us about the kings and heroes he’d guided, forgetting that absolutely the coolest thing about Chiron was he was half horse. But it didn’t really matter because he came for the day and told Mum he didn’t want to teach Herc because he wasn’t focused on the right things, and Chiron didn’t want the weight of teaching him the wrong things on his conscience. Mum took great offense to that and we weren’t really allowed to talk about him after.
Herc was kind of upset about it, after all the amazing stories. He worried he couldn’t be a hero if Chiron didn’t teach him. So I whispered in his ear.
“He’s an idiot.”
“How can you tell?”
“He’s got shit on his shoes.” There was a trail of grubby hoofprints leading out of the house. It was probably dirt, not shit, but that wasn’t the point.
Herc laughed and agreed he didn’t want to learn from Old Shit Hooves anyway. Only I wasn’t very good at whispering—I was ten—and our parents heard. Dad nodded approvingly but Mum pursed her lips and threatened to box my ears because being a hero is all well and good but we were too young for such language.
Herc’s lessons were mostly in sharp objects and hitting things, until we turned eleven and, for complicated reasons, he knocked half a forest down with a flying sheep. After that, Mum and Dad decided he needed to learn to be delicate and gentle and whatnot and he should learn some music.
Three broken harps later, his music teacher stormed out, insisting my brother’s fingers never touch an instrument again.
“Do you think he has shit on his feet as well?” I mused, this time out of Mum’s earshot. I’d been learning too.
“Maybe that’s why he kept clenching: ’fraid it would come out.” Herc grinned. The teacher’s shoulders had been so tense they almost rose past his ears. But my parents paid well, so he was happy to keep teaching me. I kept a close eye on him, waiting for the day I could gleefully report to my brother that he did, in fact, have shit on his shoes.
Mum asked around for a sturdier musician for Herc, and thus came Linus. Lovely alliterative Linus who played the lyre and liked, presumably, lions, litotes, and lightning.
He was a fiddly kind of man, always tapping or readjusting something. He was skinny, too, and out of proportion. His whole body was stacked heavier on the left, making you squint when you looked at him.
“Too much of the lyre,” Mum told me when I asked why, a phase of mine that lasted many years and was as formidable as it was annoying. “You see the same on swordsmen. That’s why you two have to learn a bit of everything, keep you balanced.”
“I’ve never seen someone lopsided from talking too much,” I said hopefully.
“You still have to go to wrestling.”
“But Mu-um,” I started.
“Iphicles.”
“Fine.”
I liked Linus. He wasn’t my tutor so it didn’t really matter, but he had a famous brother too—Orpheus something?—so he went out of his way to be kind to me. Herc though: from the moment Linus passed him his lyre without fear, my brother loved him. Linus knew what he could do, of course. Mum led with it when she offered him the job, in the spirit of fairness. (She’s a big believer in the spirit of fairness.) But he handed it over anyway, and Herc looked back at him, shy, or as close an approximation of it as he had.
“Haven’t you heard what I do to nice things?” Like I said, an approximation of shy. It came out more like a threat. Adolescent boys aren’t so great at the wide-eyed and innocent thing.
“Tell me,” Linus said, pretending Mum hadn’t sat him down and explained exactly what my brother did to nice things.
“I break them.” We’d just started puberty, and it wasn’t treating my brother well. His voice cracked unattractively midsentence. I, of course, was perfect.
“What do you think you’d break, on the lyre?”
“The strings?”
“So what?” Linus smiled.
“What do you mean? Then the strings will be broken and I’ll have ruined your instrument like I ruin everything and—” I’d have laughed at that, if he didn’t sound so upset. Plus it’d get me caught eavesdropping.
“Calm down,” Linus said gently. “Strings break all the time. Two did last week. I’ll teach you to replace them when they do.”
It was the first time anyone told him he could fix things, too.
“The neck?” he tried, again.
“It’s not so easy, but it can be mended.”
“I don’t understand. Wouldn’t you be mad?”
“Music doesn’t belong in a museum. It’s meant to be shared and played and carried between people. That means sometimes instruments get broken. It’s okay.”
I don’t claim to understand my brother, so I don’t know why that conversation meant as much to him as it did. I thought it sounded flowery, lame.
Linus started Herc off on the double flute. It looked less fragile than the golden curve of the lyre. They practiced breathing exercises, to coax the notes out.
“They can be nervous, like animals, but if you’re gentle they’ll come out and say hello.” It was a nice story, and a good one for his other students, probably, but saying hello to the fluffy woodland creatures was never my brother’s style.
“Like this?” Herc asked, blowing. It was not the sound of small woodland creatures. It was the sound of a stampede, or Dad snoring.
“Not quite,” Linus said. “Imagine gently releasing a thread, or the breeze that cools you in a swordfight.” Herc fought with such intensity that nothing short of a hurricane would cool him.
“I get it,” Herc exclaimed.
He did not get it. His next blow was, if anything, harder. It failed to elicit any sound from the double flute, save splintering as it split into thousands
of pieces.
“Oops?” Heracles offered, still holding a shard of flute optimistically. Linus handed him the lyre unflinchingly. “Really?”
“Really.” Linus swallowed. “It may suit you better, and it’s easier to demonstrate fingering than breath patterns.” It says a great deal about the respect Herc had for him that he didn’t laugh at the word fingering.
Linus demonstrated until his fingers were blue. He ran his hands along Herc’s arms so he could feel the pressure. He had my brother do the same, and Linus came back with purple fingerprints enrobing his wrists.
The first time Herc ran his fingers over the lyre, not aiming for any particular note, just to recognize their touch, he snapped every string on it. He looked like he was going to cry.
“It’s okay,” Linus exclaimed. “Remember what I told you? Strings we can replace. Strings are fine.”
“They are?”
“They are.”
They spent the rest of the lesson working on finger exercises, normally for children to strengthen their hands, not to weaken them. Linus found bird’s eggs and told him to practice rolling them between his fingers without smashing them.
Brother would never tell Linus this, but he went through twenty-nine in the week between their lessons. The house smelled of egg for months.
Their next session, Linus brought not only spare strings, but a spare lyre too. He held Herc’s hand in his and together they got notes out of the instrument. They weren’t good notes, and they certainly didn’t belong together, but they were, technically, music.
A few months later, Linus’ cousin got married and he took us to the wedding. There were beautiful songs performed by Linus’ other students as well as the man himself. I even sang a tune, though Herc didn’t. Outside of that, we tried not to get too bored when the bride and groom were doing their offerings to the gods because it would be disrespectful. But it took forever. Herc grinned and stood a bit straighter when they said Hera’s name and Linus’ eyebrow went all the way up.
“He’s proud because it’s his name too,” I whispered. I was getting better at that.
“Doesn’t she—” Linus trailed off.
“Try to kill him? Yeah, all the time. But he always beats whatever she sends so it’s all right.” Linus looked unconvinced, but we couldn’t get into it any further before he had to go and be helpful, so me and Herc were left to our own devices.
We snuck a few drinks and we bickered. Nothing new, we’re twins.
I can’t remember which of us made it a fight, who threw the first actually harsh words. Probably me. Brother never worked out the art of a good insult.
I called him stupid. He called me weak and pushed me into a ditch for good measure. It was a gentle shove, from him. I was used to them—it made me a great sailor when I was older—but I was drunk, so I fell awkwardly,
When I stood back up, I was covered in dust, which meant a bath and a lecture from Mum. Worse, I looked like a fool in front of the girls.
(We didn’t have a chance with the girls, we were twelve—nearly thirteen!—but it stung.)
“So how come Linus didn’t ask you to play?” I called after him gently. Condescendingly. It was cruel. I knew exactly why. His songs were a discordant mess and he broke a string roughly once every two minutes.
When he was older, there’d be people begging to write his songs for him, but there weren’t yet. He hadn’t done anything. So he pushed me back into the ditch. I pulled him down with me, and by the time we were home we were laughing, brothers again, united against the horrors of baths.
He might have forgiven me easily, but my brother can hold a grudge for decades, and I wasn’t the one who’d truly snubbed him.
I can’t remember why I was eavesdropping, the day it happened. I was probably bored. I miss that.
Linus was grumpy when they got to their lesson. Maybe his family had been harping on—literally, I imagine, with harps—about finding someone to settle down with. Or maybe the wedding reminded him what music should sound like, out of the hands of an exceptionally untalented child. Maybe he was just a good teacher and he knew eventually he’d have to coax Herc into playing something approaching a song.
Herc was used to Linus lauding him for just picking up an instrument without immediately breaking it. Shocking, then, when Linus held up his hand in the middle of the lyre’s torture and said no.
“You need to move your fingers a little, so they lie flatter,” he said gently.
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