The Oracle at Delphi didn’t prophesy about just anyone. If the oracle spoke of an individual, then there was something significant about them, something noteworthy. Once the oracle uttered her name, Mirzam of Teumessia was destined for a famous life.
If it had ever been clear (and the oracle’s prophecies seldom were), repetition distorted the remarkable prophecy attached to Mirzam, scattering it into a thousand variations. The consensus, however, was that the Oracle at Delphi had declared her to be a quarry so swift, nothing could ever catch her. A particular embellishment of this version circulated widely: she could not be killed by anyone whatsoever- even death could not catch her. With such a guarantee attached to her, Mirzam fell into eclectic and unusual lines of work, garnering herself the sobriquet of ‘the Teumessian Fox.’
Of course, Mirzam’s unusual aptitude attracted those in need of a blockade runner, courier, burglar, or spy. She never lacked for employment, and she traveled extensively throughout known space. Rumors arose, from time to time, of the Teumessian Fox’s capture; but these were never seriously credited, for, if true, her escape was even more improbable than her capture in the first place. No one slipped out of custody on Sirius Prime, or escaped the dungeons of Eta Canis Majoris 3. Mirzam’s reputation for success on the missions she undertook was unimpeachable; therefore, she was believed to really be uncatchable, as the prophecy (reportedly) said.
The prophecy, predictably, attracted another sort of attention. Some of her pursuers were hired to give chase, and some represented justice and the law, but some simply desired to test themselves against a quarry with such a gift. Then, there were the three most fearsome hunters of all. Long before she learned their names, they were familiar to her: Orion, Artemis, even Leto.
———
When she was twelve years old (before the oracle had irrevocably set her on the path to becoming the legendary Teumessian Fox), Mirzam walked her friend Adhara to the airbus, at the end of a visit. While she stood behind the gate, waving to Adhara, a tall woman calmly strode through the staff and boarded the airbus unobserved. She was dressed in a thick red cloak draped over outlandish dark armor, curved knives strapped to her thighs.
“No!” Mirzam leaped forward to the gate. “Adhara! Adhara, come back! Come out! Get off! Get off!”
Staff kept Mirzam from running onto the airbus to drag her friend off, of course, but Adhara saw the disturbance and ventured to the airbus’s hatch. Mirzam screamed desperately for her, begging her to disembark.
“If you get off, you won’t have time to get back on before we take off,” the attendant who was about to lock the hatch warned the hesitating girl.
Adhara glanced apprehensively to her left, where the strangely attired woman had paused, then ran down to her hysterical friend, and the hatch slammed shut behind her. “Mirzam! What the hell?”
“Did you see her?” Mirzam shrugged off the staffmember who was restraining her and grabbed Adhara’s hand, dragging her away from the airbus.
“Did I- I thought I saw, like, a woman, in a weird black outfit, and red….” Adhara glanced over her shoulder at the airbus, which was humming contentedly as it powered up. “By the door. She’s not there anymore.” Mirzam looked back, too. Leto was staring at them, perplexed, through the glass of the closed hatch.
“What is your problem?” Adhara demanded, snatching her hand back and stopping, arms crossed. “My bag is still on there. Mother is going to be so mad I missed the-“
The airbus exploded.
———
Mirzam did not only see these hunters when they were about their business of reaping souls. Every so often over the course of her life, she would glance up, or turn around suddenly, and one of them was there, watching her. It was only natural, she supposed, for them to be curious and uneasy about her, especially given the prophecy from the Oracle at Delphi- after all, she was curious and uneasy about them, herself. What was unnatural was that she saw them, although they were not yet in active pursuit of her.
Sometimes it was Leto, wearing her strange black armor and crimson cloak. The willowy, dark-haired woman would be staring at her thoughtfully from across an expanse of open water or through the windows of a passing starship. Sometimes it was Artemis, slouching in a dirty camo vest and cargo pants as if she had just emerged from the woods, leaves and twigs still tangled in her wild hair. The hunter would be salivating at Mirzam from the other side of the street, hands clenched into fists lest they reach for the bow slung across her back; the effort to restrain herself made the muscles bunch under the sun-browned skin on her bare arms. Sometimes it was Orion, designer clothes clinging to the carefully sculpted bulk of his muscle-bound body. He would be slipping through the crowd on the other side of the room, glowering, one hand holding the famous javelin that was said to never miss its target.
———
“So I told her, ‘But I’m the Teumessian Fox,’ and then… I hit the emergency eject,” Mirzam concluded, slapping her hand against the table with satisfied emphasis. The twins sitting with her burst into shocked laughter, and she grinned broadly.
“No, you didn’t!” Adhara gasped.
“To our Teumessian Fox,” Adlura raised her wineglass, “and another year of your madcap adventures.”
They were celebrating Mirzam’s birthday in style at a fine restaurant; the twins were bedecked ostentatiously, jingling in gold from their headdresses to their sandals. Mirzam was, of necessity, always ready to run at a moment’s notice, and wore more sensible attire. As she dug her spoon into her bowl of barley and lentils, a flicker of unusual light made her glance up.
Bathed in a cold blue glow, Orion stood across the restaurant, next to the bar near the front doors. He gripped his famous javelin in one meaty hand, and he was staring directly at her, with his full mouth twisted into a hungry leer. This time, he was not alone. A hellhound waited expectantly at his hip, a gargantuan beast with a blazing face. Mirzam did not hear its menacing growl; rather, she felt it rumble through her chest. It was as if the vibration loosened her ribs, and they contracted in its wake, constricting about her lungs so she could scarcely breathe. The ghastly blue light of the Underworld glared out of the hound’s eyes and shone from its mouth, and crackled at the tips of its short fur- all black, save for a white stripe down its muzzle. The marking was distinctive: this was the famed Laelaps. There was only one reason for Orion to be out stalking the fox who could outrun all pursuit, armed with both the javelin that always found its mark and the fabled hound that always caught its prey.
Mirzam of Teumessia slowly set her spoon down in the dish and braced the palms of her shaking hands against the edge of the table. Orion turned slightly and spoke some command to Laelaps; the hunter’s eyes flickered eagerly back to her, and the hellhound gathered its long legs underneath its lean body. It sprang with a snarl, but Mirzam had already launched herself into motion- skidding her chair back, vaulting over the table between her thunderstruck friends, disappearing through the double acting swing doors to the kitchen.
She ran as she had never run before, with all the accumulated cunning of the Teumessian Fox. She employed every trick she had ever learned, and invented a few more, besides; but neither time, nor space, nor cleverness was enough. No fox could outwit a hound that always caught its prey. The hellhound didn’t care if she could give any computer system the slip, or traverse the circumference of a planet on foot. Laelaps never lost her scent, whether she fled to a watery moon or took refuge in the void of space. Foreboding settled in her mind and robbed the chase of the glorious joy it usually held for her.
———
The moment Laelaps’ jaws clamped down where her neck met her shoulder, Mirzam of Teumessia knew it had been declared from the depths: her time had come. Laelaps had reared up behind her and driven her to the ground, and she hit the gravel hard on all fours, its heavy paws on her back and its fangs deep enough to grind against bone. The hellhound’s wide mouth radiated the merciless frigidity of death, and, where it was wrapped around her, her flesh instantly froze solid. She tried unsuccessfully to twist out from under Laelaps, and uttered a faint moan at the sensation of ice and teeth, a mixture of painful and bizarre.
Orion sauntered up beside her, an unattractive smirk on his handsome face. He leaned on his javelin with constructed casualness, studying her smugly. “So, death can catch you, after all.”
“The oracle didn’t say I could never be caught,” Mirzam corrected, then sucked in a shaky breath. “It said I could always escape.” She kicked behind herself and aimed her left fist just beside her right ear; her heel drove into the hellhound’s belly, and her knuckles into its tender snout. Laelaps released her and jumped backwards with a surprised yowl.
Instantly, Mirzam lunged and seized Orion’s javelin, one hand on either side of his. The arm below Laelaps’ bite did not respond perfectly. Still, her other was sufficient- not to wrench the javelin from him, for she did not possess the strength, regardless- but to rotate it, spinning it around his own fist. The wooden shaft struck him straight up the face; blood sprayed into his honey-colored hair and streamed into his eyes, blinding him. Both hands going instinctively to his injury, he bellowed in rage. The Teumessian Fox darted off, javelin clutched in her good hand.
———
Mirzam fled headlong, running- running- too terrified for coherent thought; her brain could not bear to acknowledge the awful reality that a chunk of her neck and shoulder was brutally cold. Instinct drew her towards heat, and she made her way into a nearby desert. Overwrought and exhausted, she stumbled, and fell shivering into scorched sand, rolling until she landed on her back in a valley between dunes, the famous javelin at her side. Her body demanded rest, despite the burning bed of sand, and her eyes flickered shut.
Not safe. Can’t stay here. Unabashed terror coursed through Mirzam and her eyes shot back open, but running was not as simple as it had been in the rest of her life. Before she fully lifted her head, pain overshadowed everything else in her existence. She flopped back in response to the onslaught, lips between her teeth to quell a ragged scream.
Have to run. As the initial paroxysm passed, she steadied herself with a few deep breaths, digesting the new information about exactly how many of her muscles were involved in sitting up- especially muscles in her neck. After another abortive attempt, followed by her first rational thought in hours, Mirzam tentatively reached up, and found the motion reasonably comfortable. She cupped her hands behind her neck; she lifted it with them, straining every fiber in her abdomen, and managed to heave herself into a sitting position. Using the javelin for support, she regained her feet.
With time, after enough stumbles, she learned to roll to her side before trying to rise. She learned, too, that it was impossible to melt her nightmare. The merciless sun ravaged her in the desert, parching her body, burning her exposed skin until it blistered in shrill protest… but to no effect, at the join of her neck and shoulder. The best physicians were unable to cure something they could not see; the wisemen and mystics shunned her, astounded and horrorstruck. Exhaustion inescapably compelled her to rest, to lie down; and, every time she awoke, she had to grimly fight against the icy mass that made it agony merely to rise and resume her running.
———
Orion and Laelaps caught up to her again, for eventually even the Teumessian Fox can be run down and cornered. She found herself in a dead end, back against a wall, as she squinted into a sunrise at the hunter and hound blocking her only escape. She hefted the javelin in her good hand (her non-dominant hand), and wondered if the legend about its never missing its target was as reliable as the legend about her never being caught.
“No further, you two. I’m sure you recognize this.”
Orion grimaced, but stopped and rested his large club on his shoulder; and Laelaps panted happily at his side, no less hellish and spectral in the dawn. “It doesn’t miss,” he reluctantly grumbled, “but you only get one throw. Whichever of us survives will still take you down.”
“What do I care? I can escape the dog as many times as it catches me. Call off, or I’ll give you your javelin back, pointy end first.”
His gaze lingered half a moment too long on the high collar covering her sunburned neck. “Artemis would hunt you then- and her mother would join her. And they don’t have to drag you to hell in order to make you miserable for an eternity.”
Mirzam struggled to not twitch, to not favor her injury and reveal what he already suspected. She feared that, no matter what the oracle had said, she would not survive many more bites from a hellhound. “That’d mean my misery at the price of theirs- an unending hunt.”
“A draw, then… for now,” he muttered sulkily.
Orion spun around and stormed off, snapping his fingers for the hellhound. Laelaps tilted its broad head and whined, confusion evident in its glowing blue eyes, then dashed away obediently. Mirzam of Teumessia let both the javelin and her frozen shoulder droop, but only for a second. Her every breath was borrowed beyond her allotted time, now, and she dared not waste a single one standing still. The Teumessian Fox leaped forward lightly on her toes and, as she had always done, ran.
Liked “Canis Major”? Read about the ancient myths that inspired it in this blog post.