Love Takes a Holiday Again Now it's Iolaus's turn to try to describe to Hercules the events recounted in the original Hercules: The Legendary Journeys episode Love Takes a Holiday, which was written by Gene O’Neill and Noreen Tobin. It was late afternoon when Hercules arrived at the inn where he had agreed to meet Iolaus after his visit to Corinth. The innkeeper greeted him with a hearty handclasp. Hercules had been an occasional guest at the White Hart during the last couple of years, ever since he’d begun his travels to help people in trouble. When he realized he was the first to arrive, Hercules reserved sleeping quarters upstairs and settled in to wait near the cozy hearth in the public bar. “What brings you to these parts, Hercules?” asked the innkeeper as he brought over a plate of cheese and olives. “I’m meeting my friend Iolaus here,” explained the demi-god. “You know him, Marcus: short, blonde …” “Enthusiastic?” suggested Marcus. He apparently remembered Hercules’s frequent companion very well. “He’s not traveling with you now?” “I’ve been in Corinth where my brother’s wife just had a baby boy, and Iolaus decided to take some time to visit a friend. We’re off to Attica together tomorrow.” “A baby boy! Congratulations, Hercules! Have one on the house!” cried Marcus, filling a goblet with wine. Hercules thanked the friendly innkeeper and took a sip of the rich red wine. As he nibbled an olive from the tray, he smiled as he imagined Iolaus’s reaction to the news that he was the uncle of a fine baby boy. In no time he’d be offering to take the boy out to teach him all his old hunter’s tricks. Hercules thought about the circumstances that had led to his recent reunion with his brother after so many years of estrangement. How strange to think that Iphicles was now the King of Corinth! Hercules’s quiet reverie was interrupted by a sudden commotion at the door. Another guest had arrived at the inn. “Hercules, you’ll never believe what happened while I was in Parthea!” Iolaus cried even before he sat down. “Is that goat cheese?” he continued before Hercules could reply. “Delicious! Hey, Marcus! Two more of the same!” he ordered, gesturing to Hercules’s goblet. “I had a really unbelievable time!” Iolaus took a swig of wine, and Hercules took the opportunity to get a word in. “So Evanthia was happy to see you?” he inquired dryly. “She was! Well, not at first, that’s the unbelievable part!” cried Iolaus. “It’s unbelievable that she wasn’t happy to see you?” “It’s unbelievable why! You’ll never guess!” Hercules thought about it. “She got married?” he finally ventured. “No!” Iolaus swallowed a bite of cheese. “She’s still single. It was your family that caused the whole thing.” “My family?” Hercules sighed. “What’s Hera up to now?” he demanded. A giggle bubbled up as Iolaus shook his head in denial. “It wasn’t Hera, thank goodness. It was Aphrodite!” “Aphrodite made Evanthia not happy to see you?” he asked, somewhat confused as to what the Goddess of Love had to do with Iolaus’s sudden and unexpected lack of appeal to a woman. His sister loved interfering in human affairs almost as much as Hera did, but at usually she wanted to help people and bring them pleasure. “She made every woman unhappy to see me! And every other man!” Iolaus signaled the tavern keeper for another plate of food. “You didn’t have any problems in Corinth?” he asked his friend. “Women weren’t swearing off men? Throwing things at them?” “No. Everything was fine.” Hercules paused thoughtfully. “I did hear Rena shouting something at Iphicles just before the baby was born,” he finally admitted. Iolaus laughed. “I guess the spell was localized! She must have lost interest before she could spread it too far. I told her it was a bad idea!” Hercules sat back with his goblet and waited for Iolaus to continue. He couldn’t think what questions to ask to get more information. And he wasn’t sure how much information he really wanted anyway. Finally, Iolaus stopped eating and sighing happily sat back with his own goblet. “I saw Aphrodite in Parthea,” he said. “She appeared to you?” asked Hercules, much surprised. Aphrodite usually preferred to meddle in human affairs anonymously. “Oh, yeah. We’re old buddies since that time in Syros,” said Iolaus. “Remember that time she tried to make Princess Thera fall in love with me?” Hercules nodded uncomfortably. That was one adventure he’d sooner forget. “Well, anyway, she told me she was tired of being the Goddess of Love and wanted to try something else. I guess she was having a kind of mid-life crisis or something. Without her influence in the world, all the women were hating all the men at sight, at least in Parthea. Even Evanthia refused to let me in. She threw a vase at me!” Iolaus took a sip of wine. “But that wasn’t the strangest part, Herc! I met my grandmother in Cilabas!” “Cilabas? Where is that?” asked Hercules, almost dreading to hear the answer. “It’s a village near Parthea,” Iolaus explained. “You’ve never heard of it, right?” he asked, laughing. “No, I don’t think so,” said Hercules. “Should I have?” “No! That’s the amazing part! It’s been missing for fifty years!” “Iolaus, how can a village be missing?” “Hephaestus put a curse on it.” “Hephaestus? What’s he got to do with it?” Hercules shook his head as Iolaus offered to refill his goblet. He’d apparently had too much wine already. Iolaus’s story made no sense whatsoever. “He was mad because my grandmother wouldn’t marry him.” “Your grandmother is an old woman, Iolaus. Why would Hephaestus want to marry her?” “Not that grandmother, Herc! This one, Leandra, is young! When she wouldn’t marry him, he cursed the village and made it disappear for fifty years, with her and everyone else in it!” “And the village just happened to reappear this week?” “Yep! Isn’t it great?” Iolaus happily nibbled on a piece of baklava. “Okay, why did the village reappear this week?” Hercules asked, reluctantly leading Iolaus on. The sooner he finished this tall tale, the better. Then Hercules could tell him about his new nephew. “Well, I don’t know, Herc,” said Iolaus. “There was this guy, Iagos, who apparently got Hephaestus to lift the curse. He’d been telling him that he could get Leandra to marry him in exchange for some armor and weapons.” Hercules frowned. “Not a good idea,” he said. “Bargaining with the gods is never a good idea.” “I wonder if he thought he’d really have to follow through,” said Iolaus. “You know, the story about her and the village must have been almost a folktale to him. It had been fifty years since Cilabas had disappeared, and he probably wasn’t a day over thirty. I wish I could have seen his face when the village actually reappeared!” Iolaus laughed as he imagined Iagos’s startlement at the appearance of the legendary village. “How did you find the village?” asked Hercules. “I was out in the woods showing Aphrodite how to shoot.” “What was Aphrodite doing in the woods?” Hercules tried to imagine his sister, who loved all things sexy and citified, in the woods, but the image escaped him. “I tried to talk her out of it, but she was trying to be the Goddess of the Hunt. We were on a boar hunt.” “Goddess of the Hunt,” Hercules repeated vaguely. Artemis was the Goddess of the Hunt and probably didn’t appreciate her sister encroaching on her territory. “She’d already given up on being Goddess of Music,” Iolaus said as if that explained the matter. “Anyway, I was showing her how to hold a bow, when we heard screaming. When I went to see what it was, I found a bunch of thugs struggling with a woman. After I chased them off, I offered to escort her home.” “You chased them off?” “Well, there was a little punching and kicking involved, but, basically, yeah,” admitted Iolaus. “At first I was afraid she was just in the no Goddess of Love anti-men mood that every other woman I’d seen that day was in, but she was nice. She said she had a child to take care of.” Iolaus popped an olive in his mouth before he continued. “As we were walking to the village, she said she was afraid of the she-demon. When I told her you’d killed it, she was amazed. She didn’t even know who you are!” Iolaus laughed at the memory. “That’s when I knew something really weird was going on!” “Only then?” asked Hercules. “No one in the village had heard of you!” chortled Iolaus. “And they were mad at me because I’d brought Leandra home. It seems Iagos had been there and told them about the curse and that Hephaestus still wanted her. It was his men who had been trying to carry her off when we met.” “But she didn’t want to go? I can’t believe Hephaestus would take a woman by force,” said Hercules. At least some of his divine relatives were honorable. “I think he didn’t know what was going on, Herc. Remember, Iagos had to deliver on his promise one way or another now that the village had rematerialized. I think he was desperate! The villagers were not happy either. Although it was fifty years later, as far as they were concerned, only a day had passed! Boy, were they mad! They actually tried to stone me for bringing Leandra back.” Hercules decided not to even ask about the stoning. Obviously, the villagers had not succeeded in their attempt to kill his partner. “I left there pretty fast, I can tell you. I know when I’m not wanted! Then I ran into Aphrodite again. This time she was being the Goddess of Wisdom! Talk about counter-type casting!” he giggled. “She told me she knew about the curse. I guess it was notorious on Olympus.” “Goddess of Wisdom?” Hercules repeated faintly. Didn’t his sister realize that that required a lot of reading? “Oh, she got bored of that pretty fast!” said Iolaus. “Then she decided she’d be you and commit a lot of derring do!” “Me?” Hercules put out his goblet for a refill, hoping the wine might dull the pain. Iolaus happily continued his story. “While she went off to do heroic deeds, I went back to Leandra’s. Since the villagers wouldn’t talk to her, she still didn’t realize that fifty years had passed. She only knew that Hephaestus wanted her to marry him.” “Wait a minute,” interrupted Hercules. “Didn’t you say she had a child? What did her husband have to say about it?” “She was a widow, Herc. Her husband had been killed in the Punic Wars, can you believe it! Anyway, she still hadn’t found her little boy. He’d wandered off early that morning, or what was that morning to her. I was going to tell her the truth, when Iagos showed up again. This time he had reinforcements. Hephaestus had given him Ares’s armor.” “Iolaus, no one but Ares can wear the armor Hephaestus makes for him.” “Iagos wasn’t wearing the armor, Herc. It just kind of followed him on its own power!” “So what did you do, chase him away again?” “Well, no. The villagers had come too, ready to hand Leandra over. I was fighting them all off, when, in the confusion, one of them must have hit me over the head with something. I was out like a light. When I woke up, Leandra was gone and the villagers were determined to keep me in the village until sunset, hoping to lift the curse. That was when I learned the truth about Leandra’s son. Did I tell you about her son? He’d gone wandering off outside the village, and wasn’t caught in the curse. You’ll never guess who he is!” Hercules shook his head, not daring to venture a guess. “Her little boy was named Skouros! He was my father!” cried Iolaus. Hercules took a deep drink from his goblet. “Your father was from Sparta, wasn’t he?” he asked. “He grew up in Sparta, but he was adopted. He told me once that he’d been abandoned as a small child, that his mother had disappeared!” Iolaus held up the carved green stone medallion that he had worn since his father’s death. “Herc, when I showed Leandra my medallion, she said it had been her husband’s! Little Skouros used to wear it when he played soldiers!” He stared at the stone, rubbing his thumb over the well worn carving. “I had to tell her that her little boy was dead, Herc,” he said at last. “I know he was a grown man, a general, when he died, but to her, he was only a three-year-old kid.” “I’m sorry, Iolaus,” said Hercules, reaching out to pat his friend on the shoulder. “That must have been hard.” “Yeah,” agreed Iolaus. “Imagine losing fifty years in one day, missing your child’s whole life.” He took a sip of wine in the silence. Hercules thought about how he and Iolaus were missing their children’s lives, and not by skipping fifty years into the future. They had had a few more years with their kids than Leandra had, though, and he savored each precious moment. With a sigh he tried to focus his attention back on the story. “Aphrodite came by and rescued me,” said Iolaus. “You should have seen her as the female you, Herc! That girl has got a sense of style, that’s for sure! We went up to Hephaestus’s cave, which was in the mountain above Cilabas. Did you know those two had a ‘thing’ going on?” he asked. “Aphrodite and Hephaestus? I’ve heard rumors,” Hercules admitted reluctantly. “Well, I think they’re true,” said Iolaus. “When we got to the cave, she left me to fight the bronze panther while she ran off to find Heph.” “The bronze panther?” “Hephaestus had made it to guard the cave. Nice little kitty! Not too bright, though. I got it to jump into a bottomless pit, another one of Hephaestus’s little security measures. I finally found Leandra and we were legging it out of there when Iagos showed up again with more of the Ares armor, three of them this time! I’ll tell you, that Heph is a genius! Those things were almost impossible to kill!” “You defeated Ares armor?” cried Hercules. Even he would hesitate to attack those indomitable creations. “I had to get after Iagos and Leandra,” Iolaus shrugged off his feat. “The secret is that they can’t stand water!” He giggled in delight at the memory. “Get them wet, and poof!” he cried, throwing up his hands to demonstrate the poofing. “So what happened to Leandra?” asked Hercules. “She ran for her life,” said Iolaus. “Once the Ares armor was done for, I chased after her, and a good thing I did, too! In her panic, she missed her step and almost fell down a cliff, but luckily I was able to pull her up,” he explained simply, making little of what Hercules suspected had probably been a difficult rescue. “I sent her back to Cilabas and went after Iagos. It was his lust for power that started the whole thing, and I wasn’t about to let him get away with it.” “Where was Aphrodite during all this?” asked Hercules. “She was talking Hephaestus out of his curse on Cilabas. It turns out that he only thought he wanted to marry Leandra because she reminded him of Aphrodite, and he thought she was totally not interested. She’d never realized he had it so bad for her. Meanwhile, that snake Iagos was trying to tell them that the whole village had attacked him! Hephaestus let him into his armory. That’s where I found him.” Iolaus picked up the last piece of baklava. “That could be pretty dangerous, Iolaus,” said Hercules. “All those weapons were made for the gods. Humans aren’t supposed to use them.” “I know, Herc. But Iagos didn’t. Or he didn’t care. He tried to activate more suits of Ares armor, and even tried to use a shield of invisibility, but I know a few old hunter’s tricks myself.” He leaned back and put his feet up on the table. Once again Hercules was sure his friend was making light of a very dangerous situation. That willingness to go jump headfirst into action without regard for danger would get him in real trouble some day, he feared. But it made him glad it was Iolaus who had his back in a fight. “So,” he asked, “Cilabas is still there?” “Oh, yeah! It’s a nice little village, Hercules. Totally unspoiled by modern life. We should go sometime, visit Leandra. It would be like traveling back in time. I bet people would pay money to go there!” “Now you sound like Salmoneus,” Hercules said. He didn’t want to dampen Iolaus’s enthusiasm, but he’d tried time travel once and considered it a very bad idea. “So, what’s up in Corinth, buddy?” asked Iolaus. “How’s Rena and the baby?” “What?” Hercules was startled by the sudden change in subject, but was happy to finally be able to share his news. “Oh, they’re fine, Iolaus. They’re all fine. It’s a boy!” “A boy! That’s great, Uncle Herc,” said Iolaus, raising his goblet in a toast. “And here’s to you, Uncle Iolaus,” Hercules replied, raising his in return. “What do you say we call it a night, Herc,” said Iolaus, getting to his feet. “I’m exhausted!” He stretched his shoulders like a cat. “No wonder, after that adventure!” said Hercules as they headed for the stairs. “Curses, kidnappers, disappearing villages!” “Oh, that was nothing, Herc,” said Iolaus with a yawn. “Aphrodite went back to being Goddess of Love, you know. I just spent the last six days with Evanthia!” THE END February 2005. Thanks to the GoldApple group for the encouragement to keep writing!
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