Fleeced by Julia Wills Page A

thelittle-known fact that Siren songs don’t have the teeniest effect on rams.
    But Aries could tell that Herakles was already transfixed. Standing on the lakeside with his hands on his enormous hips he swayed in time to the Sirens’ song, chuckling as they brushed their long hair and flicked their fish tails in the air. But Jason didn’t look transfixed at all. Looking across the water, his picture of Medea rolled up tightly and tucked into his belt, he grinned and pushed something into his ears, something soft that rolled like dough and glowed buttery-yellow in the lantern light.
    “What’s he doing, Scroll?” said Aries, craning his neck to try and see more.
    “Bees’ wax,” replied the Scroll knowingly (which is, after all, what you’d expect from an All-Knowing Scroll). “One of his fans passed it to him at the start of the race. He’s going to use the same trick as Odysseus.”
    Panicked, Aries remembered how Odysseus had blocked his ears with bees’ wax on the return voyage from the Battle of Troy, making himself deaf in order to captain his ship safely past the Sirens. He watched wordlessly as Jason dived in, swam past the bobbing sirens, rendered harmless as water lilies, and hauled himself out.
    “That’s it then!” cooed the Scroll. “He’s won!”
    Aries felt the Scroll flutter in delight as the Argonaut smoothed his wet hair, adjusted his chiton and began strolling towards the artists who were already gathering around the Finishing Knoll armed with clay tablets and paintbrushes, set to capture his face as he collected the flag and won.
    “Not yet he hasn’t!” muttered Aries.
    He began backing away from the lake, watching Herakles, who lay on its bank, wallowing like a besotted walrus, his hand tucked inside the head of his lion-skin pelt, making its jaw open and close, to make the Sirens laugh.
    Then, ignoring the Scroll’s papery shrieks, Aries charged. Leaping off the bank he sailed high into the air before bellyflopping into the water.
    Now, as any teacher will tell you, when you drop something big into water, the same bigness (or ‘volume’ as they like to say in science) of water splashes out. Consequently when a gigantic ram leaps into water, a gigantic ram-sized volume of water
whooshes
out. Or in this case
up
– up and along in a moving wall of water that bowled over the lake and smashed down on the Sirens’ heads, snuffing out their singing.
    Herakles immediately started to come round. Sitting up, he prodded his ears with his fingers, blinking in confusion as the Sirens vanished in a
flip-flap

of fish tails and curses, beneath the surface of the lake.
    “Ladies?” murmured Herakles, looking at the flat, unmoving water.
    “Over here!” called Aries, from the middle of the lake.
    Herakles frowned. “You’re not a lady.”
    “No,” said Aries. “Well spotted. I am in fact a ram. But I do have a message for you.”
    Herakles brightened. “Is it from the ladies?”
    “No,” said Aries. “It’s from Jason. Remember him? And that little race you were in?”
    “Jason?” growled Herakles, rising to his feet.
    “Yes,” said Aries, starting to swim gently towards
    the far bank. “He’s too busy winning to talk to you in person, but he asked me to say, ‘Better luck next time!’”
    “Better luck?” Herakles roared and launched himself into the water.
    A couple of seconds later he plunged past Aries in a fury of foam and froth, and clambered out on the other side.
    Aries swam on, watching as the big man sprinted over the grass and pounded up the knoll behind Jason, leaving an open-mouthed Athena in his wake, before hurling himself at Jason’s legs and slammingthe young man to the ground. Aries scrambled out of the water and ran past the furious blur of leopard and lion skin as the two Argonauts punched and pounded each other.
    Galloping on, he craned his head towards the flagpole at the top of the knoll. A fabulous trick had he been a giraffe, but being a ram, with