Chapter Seventeen
I do, unhesitatingly, but not before I feel the rush of heat from it—it travels from the clay into my hands, lighting my skin like a burn. I cry out, stepping backward. The others move toward me. The clay figurine lies shattered on the floor, and a faint, reddish glow rises up from it. Quickly Ares reaches out, cups the trails of red mist in his palm.
“Show yourself, boy,” he says, commanding. The light seems to wriggle, a flicker of reluctance—and then it swells, and flashes bright enough to make me shut my eyes. I open them to see the outlines of a familiar, sneering face that shimmers before us in mid-air.
“Father.” He smirks. “How pleasant to see you. How are you enjoying Nafplion?”
Deimos . His face is made of the dark red mist, here yet not here. He looks around, taking in our small gathering. His eyes narrow, passing over me to land on Eros.
“So there you are, brother. I confess, I did wonder as to your whereabouts. And now here you appear at our father’s side, no less! You have been waiting for a vacancy there, have you not?”
I feel Eros’s anger beside me. The implication that he somehow wanted things to happen as they did—I can feel how it offends him. I’m sure Deimos can, too.
“Enough, Deimos.” Ares snaps. “I came here to reason with you, though you bring shame on our family with your foolhardy theft, and now it seems you seek to provoke me with your new cult. And the blood-flowers—did you not know they were forbidden? I have lost Spartan men I should not have lost, today.”
“Don’t tell me you didn’t enjoy the skirmish, Father,” Deimos sneers. “You always love that sort of thing.”
Ares raises his voice.
“Young fool! Are you really so blind to what awaits you? If you do not listen to reason, it will be Tartarus for you. Where have you fled to? Tell me, and I will come to you. Together, if we are lucky, we may yet have Olympus put this behind them.”
Deimos smiles.
“I cannot tell you where I am, Father. Or the blade. That would spoil my plans.” He looks at Eros, and then at me. “I am pleased to know where you are, though.”
My blood chills at that.
“Your plans !” Ares scoffs. “I have tried my best to convince Zeus that it was some display of youthful mischief, the sort of indiscretion Hermes might have got up to, or even Dionysus, in his younger years. But he will need to hear it from your lips, if you are to have any hope. The only plan you can have now is to throw yourself at Zeus’s feet and beg forgiveness.”
Deimos cocks his head.
“But that is not how I feel.” He slides a cold glance toward Eros again. “Zeus has betrayed me. All of you have. If you ask me, we need a new order on Olympus.”
Ares laughs thinly.
“And I suppose you’re going to lead that new order?”
“That depends.”
“On what?” Nemese steps forward. Deimos smiles.
“Cousin. Do you seek to reform me, too? You should know better. I thought you more of an expert in lost causes.”
“Enough!” Ares barks. “You’re speaking nonsense, boy.”
Deimos looks at him, his features tightening.
“ You are always ready to lick Zeus’s boots. And no doubt Athena, his favorite, will too. But I assure you not all the gods feel the same. Don’t you see? By taking his great weapon from him, I have altered the shape of our world. He no longer has us all at his command. I, for one, am most interested to see who will rise to the top now…and what they may offer me.”
I glance at Eros. Deimos’s words are dark, but they do not strike me as foolish. The only part that surprises me is that he would be willing to let some other god wield power, and does not seem to seek the throne of Olympus for himself.
“This will not help you, brother,” Eros warns. “It will not bring Phobos back.”
Deimos blinks at him.
“Won’t it? We’ll see.”
Ares lets out an angry sound. “You are deluded, Deimos. You think the other gods disloyal just because you are. But no one would dare to take on Zeus face to face, even now. No god, however foolish, would dare raise arms against Olympus.”
Deimos looks at him as though considering.
“Perhaps not just yet. Olympus is not yet ripe for plucking. If it were me, I think I would build my strength in the mortal realms first—wouldn’t you?” He smiles. “You had better watch out, Father. The great centers of power will be the first to fall. Now that Zeus can no longer lend you his authority, I wouldn’t be surprised if other gods were to look to Sparta with covetous eyes.”
“Young villain,” Ares spits. “Is it chaos you wish to sow?”
Deimos smiles.
“Think of it more as a new beginning.”
And then, like a snuffed flame, he’s gone. There is only a quiver in the air where his face was. Ares exhales sharply. I glance at his thunderous face, and then beside me, to Eros.
“Was that a threat?” Nemese speaks at last. “What he said about Sparta—does he mean to march on it himself?”
I was wondering the same. What if this detour to Nafplion, Deimos’s theft of Spartan territory, was all a ruse to leave Sparta undefended? But Ares shakes his head.
“They’re empty words. I’d like to see the god bold enough to seize Sparta.” He shakes his head. “No, we do not turn back now. If Deimos builds his base at Hydra, then to Hydra we will go.” He glances toward the small window, where dusk is beginning to settle.
“We’ll let the men take tonight to deal with their dead. We march in the morning.”
Eros frowns.
“But do we need the troops, Father? Perhaps they ought to begin their journey back to Sparta. We can go to Hydra alone.”
Ares scowls.
“They are my men. They ride with me. Besides, who knows what other subjects of mine your brother has corrupted? We may need the mortals.”
There is a clanking sound outside the temple doors, making all our eyes turn for a moment.
“That will be the milk.” Ares nods at me. “You, girl. Go see to it.”
I don’t argue. When I open the door, sure enough, the men have left two iron pails of ewe’s milk and a pile of clean rags.
“Here.” Eros is at my side. He takes the pails from me and brings them indoors, then dips a rag in one and wrings it out. He begins to wipe the walls with the milk-soaked cloth. At the mere touch, the red marks vanish. I stare in surprise. Beneath them, the murals seem to glow brighter than before, golden and ethereal. Eros glances at me.
“This has been a sacred place for hundreds of years,” he says, moving down the wall to the next set of murals; his bare, bronzed forearms catch the torch-light. “Whatever is truly holy cannot be so easily erased, no matter what my brother thinks.”
Ares tosses one of the rags at me, and though I would rather have nothing to do with these stained walls and their violent red marks, I know better than to protest.
*
Outside, the afternoon deepens into evening. There are noises, subdued voices and a sense of industry. I walk to the narrow window.
“What’s happening?”
Eros comes to stand by my side.
“They’re building the pyres. The people will burn their dead tonight—Spartan and Nafpliot alike—and it will be no small task.”
He’s right. There were many dead today, too many. I think of the wild-eyed men that sprang from the hills. Some of them were only boys—younger than me—and they were destroyed by something they didn’t understand. And I wonder, too, about the women and children of the town, and the men—for surely there were some—who did not drink the poppy-milk.
Eros follows my gaze.
“I know you disapprove,” he says, “of how things are between gods and mortals. Of how mortal worship is traded for divine favor.” He glances at me. “But those trades, at least, are honest. They take away no free will. Not like the horrors you saw today.”
I say nothing. He’s right, the exchange we are used to between gods and mortals cannot compare to the evil Deimos wrought here today. But can there really be such a thing as a fair bargain, when one side has so much more power than the other?
I glance back inside the temple, where Ares and Nemese have withdrawn to a shadowed corner, talking quietly. I am not sure mortals have quite so much free will as Eros thinks we do.
The night deepens. Eventually the pyres are all lit, and like so many stars scattering the harbor, they burn. The sounds of prayers and dirges drift in the air, and intermittently, the keen, high wailing of a woman mourning. The sound pierces something in me, as though it is not the sound of one woman, one moment in time, but of an uncountable number of women from ages past and present.
“The mortal world…” I turn to Eros, his tall, silent shape at the window beside me. “Has it always been…so sad, so senseless?”
He does not turn his eyes toward me. In them, I see the reflection of a funeral-pyre.
“Sad, yes,” he says. “Though, I hope, not senseless.”
“Even you can’t be sure,” I say, and there is bitterness in my voice. “You are a god, and the best you can manage is hope .”
He looks over.
“The greatest of mysteries are mysteries even to the gods,” he says, and his eyes are solemn. “Faith is for mortals, Psyche. But hope—hope is for us all.”
He takes my face in his hand as the fires outside start to die down.
“You should sleep,” he says. “You need rest.”
He slips off his cloak, spreads it on the ground for me, rolling one end into a makeshift pillow. I think of protesting, but watching this scene out the window is only making me sad. Perhaps it’s time for this day to be over. The cloak is thick and comfortable, the torchlight low and warm. I had not expected my eyelids to feel so heavy, my thoughts to blur, my breath to slow so easily. But soon the torchlight fades to black, and sleep comes for me, and pulls me under.
*
In my dream I see a wide blue expanse, endless leagues of blue sea, and upon it, ships. Ships and more ships, as far as the eye can see. And then, as if I were a bird, my vision swoops closer, until I hover alongside just one of those ships. Two figures stand there. One so familiar, my heart tears at the sight of her. My sister .
Dimitra’s dark hair flies in the wind. Her eyes are narrowed against the bright sea-light; her cheekbones sharp as ever, her gaze lost in the waves. And beside her…
A boy, eight or nine years old by the looks of him, blonde-haired. I know who he is, too—and yet, it cannot be. Surely it is only the dream that makes such a thing possible. But when he turns, looking out over the sea, I am certain. I know those eyes, sea-blue and familiar. Eyes like mine.
I have held Dimitra’s son in my arms, not so long ago. That child should be a babe, still, barely crawling by now.
But for a god-child, there may be different rules .
Is it possible? They say it can be so, for children born of a god. Particularly for those born with great power. I stare at him, this boy in a dream, this child of my sister’s who may or may not be alive still. And then the blue sea vanishes, along with the sailboats, and I wake with a start. Daylight creeps weakly over the temple walls. Eros and the others are nowhere to be seen. Perhaps they’re in the sanctum.
I ease myself from the floor, and from the soft, warm folds of Eros’s cloak. A smell of ash and cinder drifts in from outdoors. The aftermath of so many burning pyres. Charon, the ferryman of the Underworld, will be busy today. Outside the window, the first pink fingers of dawn are in the sky. The dream-fragments are still with me. Dimitra. Nikos .
They say Herkules could crawl within days, run within weeks; that within years of leaving the womb, he was full-grown. Was what I saw just a dream? It didn’t feel like the vision I had in the garden of the Hesperides. And yet it was not like an ordinary dream, either.
I find my way to the door of the sanctum, and hear voices.
“The six doors,” Nemese is saying. “Perhaps it is not coincidence.”
Six doors? Curious to hear more, I step closer, but the stone tiles are uneven, and one rattles underfoot.
“Damn the girl,” I hear Ares breathe. Eros appears at the door, his face tight. The irritation I see there seems equally meant for his father and for me.
“Psyche. You’re awake. Can you go and see to the horses? We will leave soon.”
I hate being dismissed like this, but what did I expect? I give a curt nod, and walk back out toward the main doors, stopping to collect the empty iron pails on the way. I crack open the temple doors, letting the dawn light flood in, and leave the pails on the top step. The air is cool, and the smell of ash and cinders is stronger out here.
You don’t belong with them , a voice inside says. Even with Eros. He is one of them, and you are not. You never will be.
I find Ajax and the other horses where we tethered them yesterday; they have bags of barley now, so I suppose the priests have already seen to them. I rummage in Ajax’s saddle-bags for the remainder of the nuts and berries I gathered from before. The berries are crushed, staining my hands red. It makes me think of the poppies. I find myself stepping around the side of the temple, toward the window I looked out of yesterday, and there they are—a wide field of deep blood-red. I think again of the ghostly runes inside the temple, but curiosity urges me closer, and I squat down to examine one of the stems. Can they really have the power Nemese described? I reach out gingerly and take the stem between my fingers, angling the flower toward me, close enough to see into its dark heart. I shiver. Is it my imagination, or do these petals feel colder to the touch than a flower should; does some faint, strange aroma drift from that black center?
I don’t know why I pluck the flower, but I do. I stare down, and the round black heart of it is like an eye looking back at me. I should drop it. Grind it under my heel and destroy it. But instead, I find myself tucking it into the folds of my chiton. I tell myself I will study it later. It is wise to know one’s enemies, after all.
The streets are cool in the dawn light. The pyres from last night are mostly gone now—the ashes will have been gathered, and brought in urns to the fields outside the city walls. Over it all hangs a bruised silence. There aren’t many citizens out; mostly it’s soldiers, gathered in small groups, talking and cleaning their gear. They look different up close. When I looked down from the mountainside I saw how small they were, how vulnerable, as though I could feel their very mortality. But in the flesh they are broad and strapping, and look so certain of themselves. I am glad for the hood around my face, but even so, I feel eyes on me. And when the wind gusts, shaking off my hood, I feel those eyes even more. I fix my eyes away from the men, hoping the stares will cease, but the feeling of being looked at— stared at—only intensifies. Finally, skin tingling, I turn. Someone is watching me. And when those eyes lock on mine, it feels like the breath leaves my body.