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yet know what it was.
       
    Meanwhile, Heracles was not happy. The world was much heavier than he had guessed. His strength layin action not in endurance. He liked a short sharp fight, a good dinner and sleep. His body was as strong as Atlas’s, but his nature was not. Hera was right about him there. Heracles’s strength was a cover for his weakness.
    Nobody argues with a man who is twice as tall, twice as heavy, twice as hot-tempered, and three times the big head. Argue with Heracles, and he’d crush you. So he was always right. If he took his chariot in to be fixed, it was ‘Right away Mr Heracles, we weren’t busy, we’ll do it now,’ and the long line of chariots waiting to have their axles repaired could moulder to dust, while Heracles’s special racing model was brought to the front of the line.
    The garage fixed the wheel and cleaned the chariot for free. Heracles used the riding box like a horse-drawn dustbin, and it was always full of discarded wineskins and yesterday’s quick-shot boar.
    No matter.
    Heracles would sit on a straw bale and look atdrawings of nymphs while the chariot was made useful and beautiful again. Sometimes people would come and ask for his autograph, and he’d scrawl his name with a bone on a wax tablet. He never paid for anything, and if anyone challenged him, he killed him. His life was simple. He was a simple boy. Women, like wood, were for splitting and for keeping him warm. He loved to divide a woman’s legs and push himself inside her. No woman ever refused him. That was his charm.
    That was his story. No woman who ever refused him lived to tell the tale. Hippolyte had almost got away with it. He had felt pity as he stood over her exhausted body. He had pursued her for a year – or was that Artemis’s hind? He couldn’t remember. It had been a long tiring run though, he knew that, and she was the only woman who could out-distance him. She would have got away if some friends of his hadn’t ambushed her in the mountains.
    As he stood over her, his sweat plopping onto herface, he had wanted to lift her up gently and share his food with her. He thought of marrying her. He asked her if she’d marry him, as he stood there swinging his club. She said something about Amazons never marrying. Something silly like that, and he realised she was just a woman like the rest, who would never know what was good for her. He hesitated, and then knocked off her head the way you open a desert cactus.
    Blood covered his feet. There was some there still, caught under his toenail, a tiny dye-marker of the kind that rich people used to mark their possessions from thieves.
    Poor Heracles. Hera’s milk and Hippolyte’s blood. A man bonded by women.
       
    Then Heracles had a very unpleasant thought. Suppose Atlas never came back?

Three Golden Apples
     

    In his garden, Atlas went to pick the three golden apples.
    As his hand went towards the first, he felt a rumbling under his feet, and he had to steady himself against the tree. The tree bark was cool as silver, though the apple dropped into his hand like molten gold. It was as if somebody else had picked the apple and given it to him. Uneasily he looked around. There was no one there. There was only the cool night.
    Atlas put the fruit into his pocket and made for a second, perfect apple. This time he heard a groan, distinctly, a groan, and felt a terrible pain in his chest. He staggered slightly, bruising his back against the tree, while an apple, whole and unmarked, rolleddown his body to where he caught it in his hand. There it was, in the palm of his hand, a little world complete unto itself.
    For a long time, Atlas gazed at it, and he thought he could see continents under its skin, and the rush of rivers that flowed from one country to another. He laughed, and he felt affection, and pride, and that unbearable tightening in his chest again. He wanted to cry, his tears pouring over the apple, like rain.
    He was not used to feeling. He