Chapter 16 #2
He tilts his head. “Maybe it’s inevitable,” he concedes. “However self-absorbed they all are, the gods love to uncover each other’s secrets.” He frowns, then softens again. “But if they do—if they already have—we won’t let it be a problem.”
“Really?” I ask.
He pulls me tighter against him. “It’s either that or we end this. And I don’t want it to end.”
My heart thrills. “Neither do I.” I reach up to kiss him. “But I do have to go,” I say reluctantly. “I never like to be away from Cyprus for too long.”
“Fine,” he says. “I probably do have a war somewhere anyway.”
He frames it like a joke, but I know how seriously he takes his worshippers. He wants to be back with them just the same as I feel the pull toward mine.
I kiss him goodbye, letting go of him against my every instinct, and stepping into my chariot. The vulture croaks, its baleful eyes malevolent on me. Ares tosses it a chunk of glistening meat and it quietens. My doves let out an anxious trill.
“Don’t stay away too long,” Ares says. With no breastplate or helmet, no spear or shield in his hand, there is an ease about him, as startling as a blade of sunlight breaking through storm clouds.
So often is he brooding, his shoulders squared against the world.
It feels like a rare and precious thing to see him this open.
“I won’t.”
—
Before I go to Cyprus, I stop at Olympus to ask Charis how Hephaestus is.
“Why don’t you go back there?” she says. “See him for yourself.”
I hesitate.
“He’d like to see you,” she urges. “No one is keeping watch there. You’ll be safe.”
Sweet Charis. A more conniving goddess would encourage me to stay away, but she truly cares for him. If she says he wants to see me, then he does.
Anxiety gnaws at my stomach as I think of how I left him. I don’t want to see him hurting and alone again.
But perhaps I can help. “I’ll go,” I say. “Will you come with me?”
She shakes her head. “No,” she says. “You go by yourself. I think you’ll be surprised by what you find.”
—
The entrance to Hephaestus’ volcano has changed. When I went before, it was a clumsy opening punched through the rock. Now it’s shaped into a smooth archway, concealed by one large boulder so that it’s not visible to any passersby.
The narrow tunnel has been widened to a domed passageway, the roof high above my head, filled with signs of Hephaestus’ workmanship.
It’s lined with statues, each carved with such painstaking detail that they look as though they could take a step forwards at any moment.
I smile, admiring them as I walk, my heart lifting with the evidence of my friend’s recovery everywhere I look.
This is what Charis wanted me to see. Hephaestus is getting better, and so I hope the bitterness will have drained out of our last encounter, letting us be friends once more.
I step into the cavernous interior of the volcano, and it is transformed.
Before, Hephaestus had shaped his fiery prison into a hollow cave using streams of lava that surged under his control.
Now he’s channeled them into one lake of fire on the back wall, caged within an iron grate.
The smoke rises through a chimney cut into the rock all the way to the top of the volcano, where soot and ash spray from the crater.
An anvil stands in the center; hammers and tongs hang on hooks that line the curved walls, along with axes, swords, chains and arrows.
My eyes run from one work to the next: here a shield set with ivory bearing a monstrous face worked from shining metal and blue glass; there stacks of gold and silver wine-bowls, bows and arrows, shelves of jars and chalices, a seven-pointed crown set with fabulous jewels.
Someone is hammering metal beside the hearth, and I assume it’s Hephaestus. He’s tall with powerful shoulders and arms rippling with strength. But, as the light flickers across him, I see how vast he really is, the singular eye in the middle of his forehead gazing at me.
“Aphrodite?”
I turn, and there is Hephaestus. Not slumped and weakened as I saw him last but standing—though I realize as I look more closely that he rests his weight on a staff by his side.
“Hephaestus?” I say. “This place—you—it’s nearly unrecognizable.”
He smiles, not with the warmth I’m used to seeing from him, but a smile nonetheless. “Does it feel familiar?”
My eyes sweep across the vast space. It’s alive with energy, hot and smoky, thrumming with purpose. “It’s like your forge on Olympus,” I say, “only more magnificent.”
Hephaestus nods toward the Cyclops, who strides past us and through a set of doors leading further into the volcano.
“He works for you?” I ask.
“He and his brothers,” Hephaestus says. “They’re skilled and hard-working, dedicated to their craft.” He gestures to the wall of weaponry.
“Is it all forged by Cyclopes?” I ask.
“Some of it by them, some by me. We work together.”
“I’m so happy to see you like this,” I say, “and to know you aren’t alone here.”
“The Olympians abandoned me,” he says, “but they despise the Cyclopes too. They’d never think of our joining forces.
They’re useful enough for hauling blocks of stone, but I remember how the gods would sneer at them.
” He looks at me steadily. “The same way they sneered at me. They think we’re grotesque and ungainly, not worthy of their respect. ”
It’s not an unfair assessment. “I know they’re self-centered, I know how cruel they can be. But look at you here—look at what you’ve built. If Zeus could see it—”
He snorts. “He wouldn’t understand anything beyond what he could take from here. But it isn’t just Zeus.”
“You’ve made something better here than any of us ever could,” I tell him. “I’m impressed. I’m sure the other gods would be too, even if they never admitted it.”
He walks toward me, and I see how much he relies on the staff for support.
He moves with a kind of practiced ease, but one leg drags behind the other with every step.
When he stops in front of me, I breathe in the familiar scent of him, smoky and comforting, reminding me of all the hours whiled away in his forge together.
His warm, brown eyes are clear now—no longer clouded with pain and exhaustion.
“This would be the only thing they’d notice,” he says softly, glancing down at the staff.
Now he’s closer, I can see the ornate patterns he’s carved into the silver handle, catching the light as he moves.
“It’s another reason to hate me,” he says. “To dismiss me as broken and ugly.”
“Then they’re wrong,” I say. “You aren’t broken, and I’ve never thought of you as ugly.”
I see the impulse in his heart but don’t have time to dodge before he’s swooped to kiss me, his lips pressed against mine without warning, his free hand cupping the back of my head and holding me there.
“Hephaestus!” I splutter, wriggling free.
His face is still a fraction of an inch from mine. “Because of Ares?” he asks.
“No.” I put my hands on his shoulders and push him back.
He doesn’t have to move—he feels like solid iron—but he drops his hand and steps away.
My breath is coming fast and short. I know how long he’s wanted to do that, but he’s never tried before.
Perhaps he feels like he has little left to lose now.
“You’re my friend,” I say.
“A friend,” he repeats. He says it as though it’s an absurd concept.
“I wanted to see you triumphant and restored,” I say. “I wanted to help, not—”
“Not be at my side when this happens,” he finishes.
He’s been broken down to fragments and clawed his way back. I don’t want to deal another blow. I take a deep breath. “Not like that. I came here to find you—”
“Not soon enough.” He cuts me off.
“What?”
“You weren’t here soon enough,” he says, “to stop this injury taking hold. Without the elixir of the gods, my leg couldn’t heal. And now look at me. Who could ever…” He doesn’t finish his sentence, and it’s only the crack in his voice and the abyss of pain quivering beneath that tempers my fury.
“I tried,” I say. The suggestion hovers on my tongue, the answer to the question he didn’t quite ask: who could love him like this?
He might not be able to see inside hearts the way that I can, but hasn’t he noticed that Charis has come every day?
Doesn’t he wonder why? I can’t tell him.
She asked me not to interfere, and, besides, she’s no consolation prize to be offered up in exchange.
My heart twists, thinking how he’s recovered under her ministrations, thinking it wouldn’t hurt for me to come back.
He rubs a hand over his eyes, his face suddenly weary. “I know,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t blame you for seeing the worst in the world right now,” I say gently. “But it isn’t as bleak as you think.”
He doesn’t answer.
I swallow. “Well,” I say, “I’ll go, then.”
As I walk to the entrance, the sound of hammering resumes behind me, the forge bursting back into action. The clang of metal and stone, the hiss of fire and steam, noises I once found so welcoming.
When I swing the door shut in my wake, there is nothing but silence.
—
I find Eros in a glade on Cyprus, a favorite spot of his. He’s reclining on the grassy earth, his back propped up against a low rock. A mortal man sleeps against his bare chest, held in the circle of his arms, dappled sunlight falling across his face.
“Are you busy?” I ask, my voice low.
Eros smiles up at me. “Not now,” he says and gently eases his way free, resting his lover’s head carefully on the ground without disturbing him.
He stands, wrapping a chiton loosely around one shoulder so that it falls free of his wings, and we walk some distance away. “Handsome,” I remark, glancing at the mortal before I conjure mist around us to conceal us from view if he wakes.
“He is.” Our quiet conversation doesn’t make the man so much as stir from his slumber. “What brings you here? You look troubled.”
As we stroll along the bank of the stream running through the glade, the water bubbling merrily and crystal clear, I tell him about Hephaestus.
“Hardly a surprise,” he says.
“I know.”
“You weren’t tempted by him, then?”
“I wasn’t.”
Eros tilts his head, thoughtful. “He’s not just a blacksmith anymore; he’s the God of the Volcano,” he says. “And a lonely exile. You don’t find that romantic? Intriguing? Inviting?” He lingers over the words with relish.
“No. But it sounds like you might.” I rake my fingers through my hair in exasperation.
He looks at me appraisingly. “You turned Dionysus down on Naxos,” he says. “And now Hephaestus. Not because of Ares, surely?”
“No,” I say, “it can’t be that.” Ares was supposed to be what all my affairs have been—short-lived and one of many.
And then he told me I had his heart. And I can’t stop mine from yearning for him alone.
Eros nods shrewdly. “Don’t worry about it,” he says. “This is what you do; it’s who you are. So you’re in love with Ares now. You’ll be in love a hundred more times. That’s the part of you that will never change, and nor should it.”
“Maybe,” I say. I know what he’s saying makes sense.
Eros glances at me under his long lashes, then changes the subject. “You didn’t see Galatea in Sicily?”
“No,” I say. “Is that where you took her?”
He nods. “The forest nymphs she joined,” he says, “they belong to Artemis.”
I frown. “Galatea is in the service of Artemis?”
He looks rueful. “She’s Artemis’ beloved now.”
I consider it. “That might not be so bad,” I reason. “It might give Artemis something to be grateful to me for at last.”
Eros winces. “Not exactly,” he says.
“What do you mean? I created Galatea!”
Eros claps his hand on my shoulder in sympathy. “You know Artemis,” he says. “Always contrary. She bears a grudge against you for what Pygmalion did to her lover.”
I flounder. “But if it wasn’t for me, Galatea wouldn’t even exist.”
“There’s no reasoning with her,” Eros says. “You know that.”
I sigh. Over by the rock, the sleeping man begins to stir. “I’ll leave you,” I say, nodding toward him.
“No,” says Eros. “I’m not staying. In fact, why don’t you come with me? I’m going to the Hellespont.”
“What for?”
“There’s a girl in a tower there, separated from her lover by the water. Now that the waves have calmed, and the winter storms are over, I’ll whisper to her to set a light in the window, guiding him so he can swim across and climb to her.”
“That sounds nice,” I say. I imagine the young man plunging into the cold water, his eyes fixed on the star of light shining in the darkness, every stroke bringing him closer to her while she waits, eager for him to be in her arms.
“Or else there’s the daughter of a king who’s been praying to us. She’s fallen in love with the leader of the invading enemy. She watches every battle, dreaming of betrayal, searching for a way to give him the advantage so he can take their city and her with it.”
“I don’t think that can end very well,” I say, doubtful, and Eros shrugs.
“It doesn’t matter how it ends,” he says. “It’s the thrill of it now, the heat and the passion, the way that love makes them burn. That’s what you always taught me.”
I bite my lip. “So long as they don’t all end up in ashes.”
He squeezes my hand. “Don’t worry,” he says. “Are you coming?”
I shake my head. “No. You take care of it.”
I watch him disappear into the skies. His words still linger in my mind: that this affair with Ares will give way to a hundred more. He knows me well enough for me to think he’s right.
But I’m not so sure.