CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
“OH! KALóS! YOU ARE RIGHT on time for the banquet.” Professor Ilaria ushered Elliott and Finch into an extravagant, lush banquet of grandeur, far more exorbitant than either of them were expecting.
Elliott gaped at the fire.
Balefires. Torches. Fire pits. A massive pyre surrounded by trestles of fine, luxuriant pomegranates, honey, figs, wines, and apples. All enclosed in fire. The heat was unbearable given it was the ides of July.
On the lengthy dining tables, there were offerings of roasted rams and tenderloin, as well as platters of baklava and loukoumades. The tables were bracketed with the pyre and balefires.
Elliott froze. As he squinted, it almost appeared as if someone arranged a skeleton in the flames of the pyre, but as he peered closer, it was merely the structure of the spokes and pyre wood. He shook his head. There was no way someone had prepared a staged skeleton to burn in front of him.
Yet Lucien haunted his mind after his father attempted to abduct him. Last night, Elliott had flown into panic when James slept on top of him. He’d stumbled into the bathroom, fighting back the hectoring, harassing visions of the butchery of Lucien.
His soul was in a war of attrition. He was petrified he would succumb to the gnawing guilt in front of everyone.
What do you think the theater department actually performs?
“Come! Come!” Professor Ilaria had insisted that a friend attend the banquet with Elliott for support of his major moment. She would hear of nothing else.
James and Kitty were at a gourmet dinner together for her late birthday celebration, and Elliott thought Finch might enjoy a fine banquet. Elliott despised the grist meal of the infirmary and at his first chance he invited Finch to the exquisite spread.
Finch coughed beside him, raspy for breath. “All of this is for us? How are we going to finish it all?” There were troves of intricate cuisines, befitting of a small kingdom and all its commoners.
Professor Ilaria kissed Elliott’s cheeks, indifferent to Finch, even when Elliott introduced them. “Professor, this is–”
“Aphrodítē,” she corrected him at once, ordained in luminescent sea foam robes. “You may refer to me as Mother, if you prefer, or the epithet Philommêdês as given by Hesiod in Theogony. Have you read Theogony yet, my dear, Er?s?”
“Oh, sorry. Aphrodite–” Elliott shook his head, his memory failing him already. The required reading list on the theater curriculum was the length of a comprehensive archaeology monograph. “No, sorry, I haven’t read the Theogony. This is my friend, Finch Hudskin. Finch, this is–um–Aphrodite.”
“It’s not ‘the Theogony’ it’s simply ‘Theogony.’ Surely, James has extolled to you at length my wonderful performances of The Birth of Aphrodítē?
” She lured them towards tables toppled with rams, an excessive amount of burnt and roasted meat.
As Professor Ilaria led them through the grand curtains, theater students bowed before them as though Elliott was truly descending from Mount Olympus instead of the stage entrance.
“I wrote the Birth of Aphrodítē for the summer recitation. He’s taken you to see me, hasn’t he? ”
She had so many questions about her former protégé that Elliott couldn’t keep up. As though it was a banquet for James Wilde, even most of James’s favorite foods were there.
“Sorry–I–yeah. He totally has shown me. But, um, I have the memory of a goldfish.” Elliott desperately tried to remember what James had ever said of Theogony. “‘No gossip ever dies away entirely, if many people voice it: it too is a kind of divinity.[17]’”
Professor Ilaria gasped in pure delight. “He has taken you to witness me. How perfect.”
Elliott tried to cover for him. “He’s shy about how much his professors really mean to him. He cherishes the memories in private.”
Elliott’s heart skipped. He didn’t know what he said wrong that tears glistened in her histrionic eyes. “I would’ve loved to have known this of him beforehand. I would’ve forgiven all. You must understand the fates and the furies took matters out of my hands.”
There was a wild, frenzied gaze beneath her eyes.
Elliott didn’t know what part of Theogony she was quoting, or if she was quoting it at all. As students approached him, he raised his hand, anxiously declining the heavy robes of scarlet.
A few sophomores stared at him, agape.
“Don’t be fucking dense, wear it.” A senior hissed at him to lift his arms.
“She’ll punish us because of this bird brain,” Elliott thought he heard someone say, but the crackling of dozens of fires were consuming him.
It was too absurdly humid for thick-fabric robes.
The enormous stage lights above him directly scorched him with hot electricity.
The stench of burnt flesh made him vertiginously nauseous.
He didn’t want to throw up on the material.
Stomach acid stung the back of his throat. Elliott politely accepted the robes.
Elliott’s once-healed bruises flared with retribution across his neck and chest as he gazed into the fire. He couldn’t keep his eyes off of it.
It felt like he was back in the bloodied snow, witnessing Lucien’s body burn before him.