“Is it not blaspheme to depart without sacrifices?” Hanno asked Aba, who stood beside Liva, Bostar, and the helmsman.

  “You think I did not already make sacrifices?” Aba replied.

  “It was unwise of me to think you unprepared.”

  “Be glad for it.”

  “I am.”

  “And there is no heresy in following the king. The gods command us to be loyal.”

  “Their commands seem to have evaded Suffete’s ears,” Hanno noted.

  “Or he has deafened himself,” Aba corrected. “Your senses are unaltered, aren’t they, Hanno?”

  Hanno breathed deep. “I smell salt and see a wide ocean. I taste the clear air and feel the rush of oars beneath my feet.”

  A cheer of dolphins came from the bow. The creatures leapt around the trireme, playing in the wake.

  “And I hear this omen of our coming fortune,” Hanno concluded.

  “Praises be to Tanit,” Aba said.

  “Praises indeed.”

  They listened awhile as Aba’s children urged the rowers on. Fierel climbed down from the mast, apparently bored of his lofty view.

  “No sign of Suffete,” Bostar noted. He stepped down from the stern railing and stowed his bow near the stolen rudders.

  Hanno clapped him on the shoulder.

  “Thank you for your loyalty, my friend,” Hanno said.

  “You never need doubt it,” Bostar replied.

  “But still, it needs be recognized. And yours too, Helmsman.”

  “We talked about this yesterday. Let’s not revisit it,” Artemisia noted, her eyes on the bow as she leaned on the port rudder oar.

  Hanno nodded. “You as well, Liva. Thank you,” he said.

  “Consider this a selfish excursion,” she replied. “I can write your letters, but you still have to teach me to read.”

  “Indeed.”

  “I found this on Suffete’s ship.”

  Liva unrolled a scroll.

  “There’s more words here than on anything you’ve shown me,” she said.

  Hanno investigated the scroll. “The councilman might be disappointed to lose such a thing,” he announced.

  Aba’s eyes widened with shock. “How dare he take the writings from the temple!” she said.

  “What is it?” Liva asked.

  “A telling of the Labors of Melqart,” Hanno noted. “Apparently Suffete needed some religious inspiration for his journey.”

  “I told you he was afraid of you.”

  “Let me take care of this, my king,” Aba insisted.

  “Will you permit me to use it with Liva’s teachings?” Hanno asked.

  Aba frowned. “I suppose. But you must allow me to explain the meanings of the stories after you are done.”

  “I promise,” Liva said.

  Aba continued frowning at the parchment, and appeared ready to add further demands, when Fierel ran for the rails. The child took hold of the rope that Suffete’s man had looped around the stern ornamentation and leapt into the sea. He skipped along the speeding wake like the dolphins at the bow, laughing all the while despite his mother’s furious protests.

  “Shall we begin?” Liva asked Hanno, and readied a desk.

  Hanno spread out the scroll and said, “You remember the letters?”

  “The alphabet of sounds, yes.”

  “Then place them together. What sounds do they make here?”

  Liva frowned. “Guh-ruh-ah-nn-deh.”

  “Now assemble them.”

  “Gr-an-d. Grand. The word is grand.”

  “Grand Melqart. That’s how the story begins.”

  They spent the rest of the day traversing the coast. The dolphins stayed with them for most of the morning, and departed when the shore grew ragged and the waters less still. Despite the waves, the trireme sped forward, and made a solid distance before the sun set.

  It was time enough for Liva to read the first labor of Melqart. She more memorized it than read it, though, for Hanno had to repeat the telling several times.

  By the end of the day, Liva had scratched the images of the letters onto her own blank piece of parchment, crossing through the many failed scribbles until she could place the proper letters in their proper form in their proper order.

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  “Grand Melqart, tasked by the King of Tyre to undertake great labors, was sent to kill an invulnerable lion,” Liva recited as she wrote. “Why did the king want him to kill a lion?”

  “Evil gods bid men of a land we call Assyria to burn Melqart’s wife and children to death. As penance for his failure to protect them, and to re-earn the respect of his people, Melqart was tasked with performing twelve labors.”

  “That’s not in the scroll.”

  “It’s something a reader of the scroll would know.”

  “I don’t know it.”

  “We write these things down for our own use.”

  “Well, when I put these writings together, I’ll make sure to include the other parts of the story. Otherwise it’s confusing.”

  “Do you really not know of Melqart? Of Hercules?”

  “We have many tales of strong men, of those who destroy gods and challenge titans. Though these tales seem less fantastical, due to my recent experiences.”

  Hanno laughed. “Chretes is not mentioned in any tale I’ve heard.”

  “Nor I.”

  “Perhaps he is a lesser titan.”

  “But why would Melqart have to perform these tasks? Wasn’t he a god?”

  “Of a sorts, yes. But it was his deitfic status that made him a failure. The Assyrians burned his family. He failed them. He had to make amends for it. And so he found the lion, and with his great strength, Melqart strangled it. No blade could break its skin, but its neck could still be clasped.”

  “I suppose the meaning is that all things are vulnerable in some way,” Liva noted.

  “This is merely the tale of Melqart. You can assign meaning if you wish, but it isn’t necessary,” Hanno said.

  “But all tales have a meaning. They teach us something.”

  Hanno looked at the endless horizon beneath the falling sun.

  “We’ll need to make for shore soon,” he said. “Finish your writing with what light you have, and we’ll resume the second labor tomorrow.”

  They made camp along the unbroken shore, where their foreagers discovered yellow fruits growing in abundance. They tasted tart and meaty, and Aba praised Tanit for the sun-kissed produce.

  “The winds are with us once more,” Hanno announced when they set sail the next day. “Maintain the tune, Jabnit. Suffete will have the wind as well.”

  “Do you think he’ll follow us?” Bostar asked.

  “At least for a day or two. Though I wonder if he himself will make the journey.”

  “How long before he abandons the chase?”

  “That depends on his desire to catch us.”

  “Well he won’t have his inspirational reading material to help him,” Liva noted, and waved the scroll at Hanno. “Come. I think I know the first line, but one word makes no sense. Help me with the shape of it.”

  Hanno examined the troubled word. “Hydra,” he read aloud.

  “What does it mean?”

  “It means a terribly poisonous snake. Melqart’s second labor. The scroll is incomplete, though. It merely tells of his encounter. There were many snakes in the company of this great, terribly poisonous snake. This was the leader of eight other snakes, and their poison was so powerful that they commanded all venomous beasts.”

  Liva read the myth and had it completed by midday.

  “Melqart had the snakes turn on each other,” Liva realized. “That’s what it means by revolt, here, right?”

  “That is the word’s meaning, yes. Melqart nearly died due to the hydra’s poison. So instead of fighting it, he had the snakes turn on each other. They were immune to their own poison, but when they bit each other, they burned themselves. Then Melqart merely struck them with a stone and defeated the hydra.”

  “The word for many snakes in my tongue is nearly the same as a many-sided snake, if you were to say it a certain way,” Liva noted. “I’ll need to be careful with the translation, if I ever make one.”

  By the third day, Liva not only wrote down the labor of Melqart’s great hunt for the red antelope of Numidia, she began her own series of symbols attached to the sounds of her people’s language. She’d been working on it before, but with the help of the written labors, her progress improved dramatically.

  Liva asked Hanno to explain why the great Melqart needed the assistance of a griffon in his hunt for the fourth labor’s wild boar, and Hanno admitted he didn’t know. They jointly concluded it was poetic that the more terrifying creature was a friend of Melqart’s, while the simple boar was their prey.

  Liva loved the telling of how Melqart cleaned the stables of Jerusalem by constructing an aqueduct from the river and throwing rocks in it until it rose high enough to wash out the stables. She called it cheating, though, and Hanno agreed that it likely upset the King of Jerusalem that Melqart used the city’s walls in his construction.

  On their sixth day from Cerne, Liva copied the tale of Melqart’s betrayal by the griffons. The god fought the birds with bow and sword, weeping all the while. Aba told Liva that when Melqart cursed the gods, it made his further labors worse, for it was not the gods who had turned his friends against him, though their sudden madness made it seem so.

  The seventh labor of Melqart’s hunt for a bull-headed man ended swiftly enough for Liva to further expand her alphabet.

  On the eighth day of their journey, Liva applauded the wisdom of Melqart in how he not only caught the wild horses he was tasked to recover, but strapped them to his chariot so their furious speed could be harnessed for the rest of his journey.

  On the ninth day, Liva marveled that the Queen of Egypt had captured Melqart in his quest to recover her belt.

  “I thought he was a great god. How could he allow himself to be captured?” Liva asked.

  “Melqart has his own weaknesses. Perhaps he didn’t know them,” Hanno offered.

  “So why does she let him go?”

  “Because she is wise.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better to kill Melqart?”

  “That wouldn’t be a terribly good story.”

  “No, but this queen captured a god.”

  “And by setting him free, Melqart became loyal to her, and her friend.”

  “But he could have betrayed her.”

  “Then he would not have been a terribly good god.”

  Liva nodded. “We have no stories of gods captured by queens. I think my people would enjoy this labor,” she said.

  On the tenth day, Liva declared her alphabet complete. She not only wrote down the labor of how Melqart journeyed to the end of the world, she did it in her own language.

  “The Pillars of Hercules. That’s what you called them. Melqart journeyed to the edge of the sea to find this herd of cattle, and built the pillars to declare it the end of the world. Why is it called the Pillars of Hercules if they were built by Melqart?”

  “The Greeks call Melqart Hercules. Others call him Heracles, others Gilgamesh, others a hundred other names. But he is Melqart in all of them,” Hanno explained.

  “So even the same word, the same letters, have multiple meanings?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Then Chretes was wrong. The alphabet is impermanent.”

  Hanno frowned at the words Liva had written.

  “Perhaps the permanence Chretes saw was the idea,” Hanno guessed.

  “How so?”

  “What is the word for Melqart in your language?”

  Liva wrote it down beside the Phoenician letters. Hanno laid his hand on both.

  “They mean the same, though the letters and sounds differ. The idea is fixed. Perhaps Chretes saw that invulnerability, that no matter where the story or word was told and no matter what sounds they made, their meaning remained,” Hanno pondered aloud.

  Liva smiled, and rested her hand where Hanno’s hid the two words.

  “I think I like that,” she said.

  “A philosopher greater than I would have to confirm it,” Hanno noted.

  “It seems sound enough to me. You knew this tale before, yes?”

  “Of course.”

  “All know of it then, in many languages?”

  “All those in what we know of the world.”

  “You’ve sailed beyond the world.”

  “We’ll have to redefine the meaning of even that word.”

  “Which one?”

  “World,” Hanno said. “Its meaning has changed. It no longer represents the lands around the Mediterranean alone.”

  “But the idea remains,” Liva added. “It means everything.”

  “Just more of everything, yes.”

  “Hanno!” Bostar called out from the rail.

  Liva and the king rushed over.

  “On the shore, look,” the bowman prompted.

  The marines joined them at the rails, where they saw cook fires.