Chapter 9 #2
The sound of my name in his mouth sends a jolt through my body.
“Aphrodite,” he says again, this time giving a brusque gesture with his hand.
Belatedly, I realize what he means. “If you want to get past,” I say, “excuse me will do.”
A short, exasperated sigh escapes his throat. “It’s better for everyone,” he says, “if I leave right now. And you’re standing in the way of my chariot.”
His rudeness makes my anger, never far from the surface when he’s around, flare up into heat. “Why don’t you just do as Zeus asks?” I burst out. “What difference does it make to you, to fight one war or another?”
His gaze flickers over me, contemptuous. “Did he tell you to wait for me here? Is this his new strategy?”
“I don’t act for Zeus,” I say.
He laughs and it’s a mocking sound, entirely devoid of mirth. “If you say so.”
“You and Zeus,” I hiss, “are just the same.”
For an instant, he looks surprised, then commands himself again, his eyes granite once more. “If we were,” he says, “you’d be whispering in my ear, trying to persuade me to do your bidding. It doesn’t work on me. As you might have noticed.”
I blink. I can’t quash the image his words summon in my mind.
Leaning in close to him to lift that bronze helmet from his head, dipping my head to his, my lips brushing his earlobe.
“Neither of you cares how many mortals die,” I snap, trying to refocus.
“You argue over which ones or where, but the outcome never changes. I heard you in there. You’ll both spill the blood of thousands for the sake of your egos. ”
He shakes his head and moves past me as though my words were empty air. He doesn’t push me aside, but briefly his body touches mine and I can smell smoke and leather and earth. Then he’s in the chariot, reins gathered in his fist, about to leave.
I swing myself up onto the chariot at his side.
“What are you doing?” He’s jolted into incredulity.
“Just admit it,” I say. “As much as you argue with him, you both want the same thing.”
“And what’s that?”
“Destruction,” I say. “And power.”
He stares at me. “What I want,” he says, “is for you to get out of my chariot so that I can go.”
I fold my arms and stare right back. He’s not leaving until he concedes that I’m right. The blood is surging through my veins, carrying me on a wave of fury and determination.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
I don’t move.
“Fine,” he says, his voice tight with anger. “You can fly yourself back from Thrace.”
He snaps the reins, and the horses leap to his command. I jerk backward, grabbing hold of the wooden rim in front to keep my balance.
His horses are fast and powerful, muscles shifting under their smooth flanks as they trot across the yard, their hooves beginning to lift into the air.
He’s waiting for me to jump off.
I clench my fingers around the wood, locking myself into place.
We start to ascend, the air cold against the heated skin of my face, and finally I question my wisdom.
But it’s too late. Olympus is shrinking beneath us with dizzying speed.
“What are you doing?” I yelp.
“Going home,” he answers. He glances down at me. “You had your chance to get off.”
“I’m not going to Thrace with you.” I twist around, looking at the receding shape of our cloud-wreathed mountain.
He shrugs. “Jump out now, then.”
But I’m not going to make an undignified dive over the side of his chariot. “Really?” I say. “You’re taking me hostage just because I said you’re like Zeus?”
“You’re hardly a hostage,” he says. “You’re an immortal goddess. You can turn into a dove and fly away from me anytime you like. And you’re wrong.”
“What do you mean, I’m wrong?”
He sighs. “Because it isn’t about power. Not for me.”
I hesitate, curious against my better judgment. “What was that display in the throne room about, if not power?” I ask.
“You were there.” He leans back, his armor shining bronze in the sunlight. For once, he’s answering, not firing back a jibe. “You could see Hera. She’s desperate for me to challenge him—a real challenge. She’d love for me to overthrow him.”
“And you wouldn’t?” I raise an eyebrow, skeptical.
“Not for her.” His smile is grim. “It won’t be any better with her at the helm.
If I fight him—a real fight, not just a squabble in the throne room—I’d be doing what she wants.
And if I obey him, he gets to win whatever warped game they’re playing with each other.
All they care about is power, and I won’t help either of them get it. ”
I frown. “I don’t understand.”
He loosens his grip on the reins, letting them rest on the dark wood.
The horses trot onwards through the empty air, the fire they breathe flowing back toward us in two bright streams. “You heard Zeus, complaining about his city. He thinks that war is something he can control, that it can be fought when he wants, to get whatever it is that he wants.”
“And?” I say. “Don’t you control it?”
He shakes his head. “No. War can’t be controlled—it’s an impulse, an instinct.
That’s what he can’t understand. He didn’t make me the God of War any more than he made you the Goddess of Love.
It’s what we are, what we’ve always been.
If he burned himself up with his own thunderbolt tomorrow, we wouldn’t be anything else. ”
I can feel myself unbending, just a fraction. Listening to him again, when I know I should leave. But, despite myself, I’m intrigued by his words. How would he know what I am or always have been?
Has he been paying attention to me? Thinking about me? Watching me without my realizing?
Silence hangs between us.
“You’ve always been close to Zeus,” he says at last.
“I don’t argue with him,” I say. “It’s not the same thing.”
“Really?”
“I’m not here because of Zeus,” I say. “He didn’t send me.”
His eyes meet mine. “I believe you.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” He smiles wryly. “Maybe it’s the way you sound when you talk about him. You have the same anger in your voice as when I refused your request to save Phaon. I believed you had nothing but contempt for me then. I can believe you feel the same about Zeus.”
“Well,” I say, “that makes you more perceptive than him at least.”
Ares laughs. “He has no idea.”
“No idea about what?”
“About us. Who we are, what we do. He doesn’t understand war. I’m sure he knows nothing about love either.” He snorts. “They’d both exist without him, and they’ll both outlast him. They aren’t tools that he can use.”
That he’s drawing a parallel between our realms again confuses me. There can’t be a common ground between our spheres of power. “But he will kill all your warriors, just like he said. Don’t you care about that?”
“Why would I?”
“Of course,” I say wearily. “I know what regard you have for mortal life.”
The horses arc upward, over a high mountain range, swooping above the snow-capped peaks.
“Aphrodite.”
This time he doesn’t sound exasperated. There’s an undercurrent of something else there, something dangerously close to warmth.
It makes me far more afraid than his anger did.
“No one goes to war thinking they won’t die. Phaon knew it. My tribes know it; they embrace it. If they die in battle, they die doing something glorious, something they can’t not do. If they die early, at least they know what it is to be alive.”
I shake my head. “There are better ways to discover what it is to be alive.”
He shrugs. “Maybe.”
“So Zeus can destroy your army, and you don’t care because you’ll raise another one,” I say. “Does it go on forever?”
Before he can answer, my breath is taken away by the sight in front of me. “What’s that?” I gasp.
On the upper slopes of a mountain, skeletal trees of a barren forest reach out their spindled branches, the bleak rock face forbidding all the way to the summit.
A black mirror of Olympus—the same walls and gates and columns of our shining palace but built in iron and granite.
It stands grim and so unwelcoming that even the rays of sunlight stretching across the sky seem to weaken when they reach it, managing to cast only a ghostly pall.
An eagle-owl flies over the roof, its awful shriek echoing from the rock and dying away in the air.
“This,” Ares says, “is Mount Haemus. My home.”
Past the spiked gates, the horses come in to land, their bronze hooves clattering on the black stone floor as I stare around us, unable to formulate a response.
A figure emerges from within, a black cloak concealing her features until she shakes back her hood and begins to unhook the horses.
One of the Keres, the strange sisters I saw on the battlefield.
Another comes to join her, both pale and gaunt, their eyes black pools that never meet mine.
Their hands are clawed, long talons hooked from each finger, but the horses must be used to them, and remain stoic under their ministrations.
Ares jumps lightly from the chariot. “My attendants,” he says, nodding at the Keres. Their indifference to me is palpable.
I gaze around, stunned. “When did you build this place?”
“When I realized how intolerable life on Olympus was,” he says quietly. “So a long time ago.”
I look at the twisted shadows of the iron gates, the eerie sisters leading the horses away through a dark archway, the empty expanse of the courtyard and the sheer drop at the edge of the mountain.
I wonder how many times he’s landed here, raging from an argument on Olympus, pacing the stone floor with his fists clenched, brooding in this desolate place with only his own fury for company. The emptiness of it makes me feel cold.
I have to ask him now, if I ever want an answer.
“Ares,” I say, “I just want to know.”
He looks at me. It feels like the first time our eyes have met without anger.
“Why didn’t you save Phaon when I asked?”
He nods. There’s a thoughtfulness to him that I’ve never seen before, now his simmering fury is gone. “Because,” he says quietly, “there’s always a reason to save them all.”
“So you save none?”
“That’s right.”
I swallow. Of course. Nothing could fit better with the hollow despair of the world he’s made for himself here on this bleak mountain. A world where no one can ever be saved.
“That’s what I thought,” I say softly, and, before he can say another word, I spring from the chariot into the air, cloaked in dove feathers to take me as far away from here as I can possibly be.