Isandro stood at the foot of the temple’s steps. He held a circular wooden shield; it was plain and unadorned but heavy and solidly made. He was from no noble family, nor was he a soldier and he displayed no symbol of his heritage or allegiance. In his other hand, he clutched the handle of his short sword. The weight of the double-edged blade in his hand was reassuring. Isandro gazed up at the temple. It had been neglected for a long time and its steps were worn and overgrown with weeds. At the top of the steps, mounted on a raised platform stood the temple itself. Creeping plants twisted and wound their way up the temple’s stone columns and the inscriptions on its triangular plinth had been eroded by the elements long ago.
Isandro looked back across the windswept island of Sarpedon. It was bleak and grey and nothing like the warm lush lands of the Aeolia city-states, Isandro’s homeland, that flourished along the coast of Asia Minor. The city-states had grown rich from their copper mines and trade with their neighbouring city-states. Isandro had paid a merchant from the coastal town of Cisthene for his passage to the island. It had cost him dearly despite Sarpedon lying close to Cisthene. The merchant had been reluctant to sail close to Sarpedon’s shores even though it lay along his trade route and hardly delayed his journey south. It was as if a shadow had been cast across Sarpedon since the Medusa had made the island her home. Medusa had once been a beautiful woman but the goddess Athena, in a fit of jealousy and misplaced spite, had turned her into a foul gorgon with a hideous visage and replaced her hair with writhing serpents. Isandro shuddered. He offered a silent prayer to Zeus that the merchant would return for him on his way back to Cisthene. Isandro prayed more fervently still that he would survive to require a return journey. Once more, Isandro turned to face the temple, breathed in deeply and began to climb the temple’s steps towards the creature’s lair.
At the top of the steps, Isandro saw the open doorway to the temple looming darkly in front of him. As he approached the threshold and gazed within, he saw that the thick dust around the entrance had been recently disturbed. He was not the first to take up King Cretholoco’s challenge. The king wanted the beast of Sarpedon dead, the shadow from the island removed and the island resettled. It had been abandoned and deserted for centuries despite the wealth of valuable metals on the island. King Cretholoco’s reward for slaying the Medusa and bringing Sarpedon back under the control of Aeolia was great and would lead to wealth and power. Things that Isandro had never known. Isandro once more prayed that he would return home to Aeolia unlike the others who had sailed to Sarpedon before him.
Cautiously, Isandro entered the temple, his shield raised and his sword held ready. He paused. The darkness was punctuated by flickering torches in braisers along the wall. The ranks of pillars inside the temple cast shadows that danced across the flagstone floor as they criss-crossed in the guttering light. Isandro stood silently and gave himself a few moments for his eyes to adjust to the gloom, straining his ears for any sound of movement. Silence. Someone, or something, must be within the temple to have lit the torches. Still silence. As his eyes adjusted and the shadows started to form into shapes, Isandro crept forward.
Slowly, Isandro moved to the centre of the temple, glancing to his left and right as he advanced. As he neared the first row of pillars, he paused. Still silence. He stepped forward and then from the corner of his eye he saw something to his left lurking behind a pillar. Isandro leapt back and raised his shield in front of his face – he knew he mustn’t look directly into the Medusa’s eyes for she was said to be able to petrify a man to stone with just a glance. He lashed out with his sword but it clanged heavily off of stone. Isandro staggered, his arm jarring from the impact. Panicking, Isandro realised he must have missed the beast and hit the pillar. Isandro regained his balance as quickly as he could, readying his sword and shield for the incoming blow.
It didn’t come.
Isandro stood still suddenly aware he was breathing hard. He still couldn’t hear anything. Desperately, he glanced around his shield. In front of him stood a statue. The statue was of a man armed with a shield and a spear. However, he was not posed heroically as if he had been carved by a stonemason. The statue’s shield arm had been knocked aside and his spear was thrusting forward. A look of terror was etched on to the statue’s face. It was so life-like. Isandro knew at once that this was one of the gorgon’s victims transfixed by her evil gaze as he fought for his life.
As Isandro stared at the statue, he felt a sudden impact and a searing pain in his shoulder as an arrow hit him hard from behind. The force of the blow punched him from his feet and a blinding white light filled his eyes. Isandro hit the ground hard and as he fell he dropped both his sword and shield. Isandro quickly rose to his knees, alert to the danger he was in despite his pain. One hand clutched at the arrow in his shoulder as he reached for his sword. Behind him, he could hear the sound of vicious serpents hissing and spitting, coming closer and closer. Isandro could hear the sound of Medusa’s thick coils scraping across the ground and then the rustle of an arrow being drawn from a quiver.
Desperately, Isandro scrambled to his feet and dashed behind the closest pillar. He felt the rush of the arrow fly past him, missing him by a hair’s breadth. Isandro dared a quick look around the pillar at the beast, raising his sword ready to strike as he did so. Before him, he saw the black coils of a massive serpent slithering across the ground but the serpent’s body stood unnaturally upwards and the black scales merged into the grey withered body of a woman. The hag had a quiver over her shoulder and she clutched a curved dark wooden bow in her hand with nooks made of a browned and aged bone. However, what struck Isandro most was her face, her lipless mouth contained a pair of sharp fangs between which flickered a forked tongue. Her skin was wrinkled and grey with age and instead of hair she had a mass of serpents twisting over her hair, hissing and snapping at one another, their black scales matching Medusa’s. But it was her eyes that held his attention, her yellow eyes mesmerised him, holding his gaze, like a predator transfixing its prey.
Her eyes! Isandro realised with horror that he must not look into her eyes but it was too late. He tried to swing his sword but he couldn’t move his arm, he tried to step back but his feet were rooted to the ground. He couldn’t move anything, he couldn’t even blink, all he could do was stare forward at the beast that had petrified him. Inside his head, Isandro screamed but he didn’t make a noise. He just stood there, one hand clutching his sword back to strike and the other pressed flat against the pillar with the shaft of an arrow protruding from his shoulder.
The monster looked at him, her serpentine hair clicking and snapping as they too regarded him. After a while, the gorgon turned away from him and slithered into the darkness. Isandro stood facing forward, gazing at the rows of pillars that flickered in the torch light.
Isandro did not know how long he had stood there. It could have been days, weeks, months, years or it could even have been centuries. His mind was lost to madness as he stood trapped within his fossilsed body. Every so often, a moment of lucidity would overcome him when the Medusa slithered past to relight her torches before he once more sunk into madness. But now, there was something new, a new presence. Suddenly, in front of him stood a warrior, proud and tall and dressed in bronze armour over his leather tunic. His sword gleamed a fiery orange in the torchlight and his long dark hair curled under his helmet. Cautiously, the warrior crept forward, his eyes sweeping the temple. For a moment, his eyes rested on Isandro. Isandro screamed at him to leave, to get out but his voice echoed in his head and the warrior didn’t hear a sound. Suddenly, the warrior jerked his head around. He had heard something and he crept forward into the shadows, following the path that the Medusa had taken when it had left Isandro all that time ago frozen in his stone-clad tomb. Isandro was once again alone. He stared forward eternally as madness once more dragged him into its hungering embrace.
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