If at Faust You Don`t Succeed

CHAPTER 8

Faust arrived at the inn in the forest twenty minutes later. He had a yellowish bruise on his temple from his headlong contact with the oak tree, but other than that seemed perfectly all right. Helen was windblown, but lovelier than ever.

Faust entered the tavern and came face-to-face with Odysseus, who said, "I know who you are. You are named Faust."

"There's no secret about that," Faust replied.

"And you have Helen of Troy in your possession."

Odysseus introduced himself and Achilles. If Faust was impressed, he did not show it.

"The fact is," Odysseus said, "we want Helen back. Your demon had no right to kidnap her from her husband's home in Tartaros."

"Don't take it up with me," Faust said. "She was given to me, and I'm going to keep her."

"It seems to me I've heard all this before," Odysseus said, alluding to the events that began the Iliad, when Achilles objected to giving up the girl Briseis to Agamemnon, and, when Agamemnon wouldn't give her back, sulked in his tent until the Greeks almost lost the Trojan war.

"Maybe you have heard it," Achilles said. "It matters not. Give her to us."

"Not a chance. Are you going to try to take her from me?" From an inner pocket of his cloak he drew a flintlock.

"If we wanted to, believe me, we could," Odysseus said. "And yon weapon would not stop us. But hold your sword, Achilles. There is a better way."

Odysseus put two fingers in his mouth and whistled, a long, low, mournful whistle that was answered almost at once by a screaming and shrieking noise that at first seemed like wind and then resolved itself into old ladies' voices.

The door of the tavern was suddenly blown open by a blast of ill-smelling air. The Furies flew in. They came as three big crows with dusty black feathers, screaming and squawking and bombarding everyone with smelly excrement. Then they transformed themselves into their human shape—three old women, long-nosed and red eyed, wearing ragged, dusty black garments. Alecto was fat, and Tisiphone was skinny, and the third, Megaera, was both fat and skinny, but in all the wrong places. All the sisters had eyes like fried eggs after the yolk has run. They danced around Faust, screeching and cackling, laughing and hooting, leaping and capering, and Faust tried to maintain a dignified silence, but it was difficult with these ancient harridans carrying on so.

At length Faust said, "This behavior will do you no good, my dear ladies, because I am not of your time and construct and so it is unlikely that your presence will fill me with pious horror."

"Pious, schmious," Tisiphone said. "Maybe we can't coerce you physically. But you will find it difficult to carry on a conversation with us screaming in your ear all the time."

"This is ridiculous," Faust said.

"But that's the way it is," Tisiphone said. "Maybe you'd like to hear us sing a particularly irritating folk song with several hundred choruses? All together, girls."

Faust reeled back in alarm as the Furies burst into an early Hellenic version of "Roll out the Barrel." It somewhat resembled the sound of a pack of hyenas in heat, but was worse, far worse. Faust bore up under it for a moment, but found he couldn't think, could barely breathe, and finally in desperation he held up his hand.

"I crave a moment's silence, ladies, while I consider my situation."

With precious silence reigning again in his head, Faust retired to the other end of the room to have a little conversation with the tavern keeper. But the Furies didn't trust him, because immediately they began to converse among themselves, in voices that seemed to emanate from his own mind. The voices were pretending to be his own interior consciousness, saying, "Well, hell, I don't know how I got myself into this fix. I can't even hear myself think with this din going on in my head. And if I were to think, what would I think about? Helen? But how can I think of Helen when these old hags have my mind filled with the horror and repulsion of themselves?"

The old ladies were gone as suddenly as they had come. Helen was gone with them. Odysseus and Achilles had also left, and Faust ate a pannikin of bread and washed it down with a draught of wine. He was annoyed at having lost Helen, but then he hadn't wanted her much in the first place. Being rid of her freed him to devote all of his powers to the main chance, becoming the Faust of record in the great contest of Dark and Light. There was no time to waste. He went outside and took to his horse again, and soon he was riding hard on Mack's trail.