The Gifts of Pandora, page 17
17
Pandora
200 Golden Age
* * *
The wave of refugees had swept Pandora up and into the city of Helion. She’d long heard tales of the place, though never seen it before. In the stories, a great Colossus had straddled the narrow inlet into the ringed bay. Here, no such monument existed. Of course not—it had not been built yet.
Her mind lurched in wild gyrations, the very World seeming upended by the circumstances in which she found herself. Had she heard some bard speak such a tale, she’d have called him a madman or a drunk. Or both. It was not so much she felt she wandered in a dream, but that a shroud that had blanketed her senses had fallen away. She at last saw the truth of life.
Cyclopean limestone walls encircled the polis, but despite their height and thickness, people pushed away from them, terrified of the Titan Khione who closed in upon the city. Even knowing how this ended—or how history recorded it ending—Pandora could not really blame them. A thin layer of snow now caked the rooftops and she felt the cold wafting off those outer walls.
Unless she missed her guess, an actual blizzard must rage outside, engulfing Helios’s war bands in frozen rage. Of course, no one would allow her upon the walls to check, but she imagined what the fields must look like, encased in white. She was witnessing history unfold around her, and the thrill of that filtered the terror of her situation.
With nowhere to go, she sat in a tent pavilion the refugees had set up between the main tenements of the outer city and the cyclopean wall. Thousands of men, women, and children sat huddled here, wrapped in blankets and gazing upon their loved ones in desperate need of reassurance. Pandora could have given them that, could have told them the city didn’t fall. But such words would have condemned her as a madwoman and probably seen her driven from this camp.
And what if she was wrong? Yes, she’d seen a play about these events thousands of years after the fact. Did Kalliope even know the full truth of these days when she wrought her play? Did she record history or modify it for dramatic reasons? If Pandora had actually somehow entered the past, was the past guaranteed to play out just as it had before, or could her mere presence change the outcome of the siege? These and a hundred more questions spiraled around her mind. Especially: could she return to her own time?
Still, it was not with total surprise she spotted the herald come amid the refugees, even before he banged his staff for attention. “The invader Khione is dead.” Another clack of staff upon flagstone. “Khione is dead, slain by Helios’s own daughter, Artemis.” And once more he brought the staff down. “Return to your homes.”
Pandora almost laughed. She might have to wait a while before her home became available. Atlantis wasn’t even Atlantis yet. At the moment, it was probably still called Hesperides Island. Her mirth rapidly subsided, though, replaced by a tightness in her chest. Everything she’d ever known didn’t even exist.
She didn’t exist.
Half dazed, having not a clue what to do, she wandered the city even as most of the other occupants of the tent pavilion began to filter out of the city. They could return to their farms and villages, though, if Pandora had her history correct, the Ambrosial War had only just begun and would rage on for some years to come. Maybe nowhere was truly safe, and that thought ought to terrify her.
Or … or could she simply adjust a few panels on the box and have it take her somewhere else? Did she travel upon the will of Ananke, or did she, in using the box, spit in the very eyes of the Moirai? More to the point, if Prometheus’s box could take her to any place or time, how could she begin to understand its workings? Just activating it without knowing what she was about might manage to drop her somewhere worse than this.
The gilded palace of Helion himself lay atop the acropolis, which itself sat upon a mountain at the city’s heart. As the blizzard abated, the palace reflected sunlight in an aureate gleam that seemed nigh blinding from below. Perhaps the Titan lord could help her, though she couldn’t imagine why he would. Her own golden eyes meant she probably carried his blood, yes, but so did innumerable others, and any Titan blood in her veins was too diluted to name her even a Nymph. Or maybe, at this point, none of the genē would even be established.
Pandora rubbed at her temples. How was she to function in a land that operated under such different paradigms?
And then, descending from the mountain, perhaps having come from the palace itself, she spied the auburn-haired Titan. Twice she blinked in an effort to reassure herself it was really him beyond the gleaming sunlight.
Maybe he was the one person who might offer some answer as to how she’d come here, or why.
Of their own accord, her legs broke into a run, a frantic dash that threw herself in Prometheus’s path, panting, chest heaving.
The Titan fell back a step at her approach, his crystal eyes widening. His expression fell away almost as quickly, and he caught her elbows. “Pandora.”
And if the run had stolen most of her breath, that simple name knocked what remained from her lungs like a blow from his muscled arms. He knew her. He knew her, some four thousand years before she’d even be born. How in Hades’s infernal necropolis could he know her? How was any of this possible?
The question stilled upon her tongue, as if her heart was too weak to dare to ask it. Instead, she stood there in aphonic stupor, gazing at him, silently imploring him to force the World to make some kind of sense.
With a gentle hand upon her shoulder, he guided her back down the mountain. “This place is not safe. War has come here, and it won’t end with Khione’s death.” Was that a tremor in his voice as well? He too struggled to make sense of events unfolding around him. So it was not that he had come from the future like herself … No. Something else. “I have a home on Ogygia. We can sail there and find safety.”
“The Aviary, right?” Her voice sounded like it belonged to some other person. The words seemed to come from some place outside of herself.
He glanced at her abruptly, his shock returned for so brief a moment she might have imagined it. “I have considered building such a place. I have not found the time, as yet.”
Pandora found it hard to swallow. To hear such things only compounded the daze she’d found herself walking in since awakening on Helion. Despite the whirring of her thoughts, she couldn’t formulate a coherent question while they walked.
In silence, she allowed him to guide her to the harbor, and onto a sailboat not so different from the one they’d taken out of Marsa a few days … A few thousand years from now.
From outside the city, Pandora caught sight of lingering frost upon the cyclopean wall and the fields surrounding the polis. Already, the sun had begun to melt the aftereffects of the blizzard, but it might take days before all the snows had vanished.
Prometheus made for Atlantis—what would soon be Atlantis, she supposed. She had heard Knosós existed even in ancient times, maybe even into the Time of Nyx. Perhaps they would stop there to gather supplies before skirting the greater island to reach Ogygia. There was a strange familiarity to all this, as if she sat across from exactly the same Prometheus she had just watched get sent down to Tartarus.
As if this was already her friend, though he hadn’t met her yet. But he knew her name … Was it from his pyromantic visions? Was something else going on?
“You have so many questions writ upon your face,” he said, when Helion lay many hours behind them.
So many they threatened to crush her beneath their weight. Questions of such import they made all that had passed in her life until now seem petty. Perhaps everything else was petty in the face of the monumental shift in reality she had experienced. While others went about their lives, thrust into their narrow perspectives, she had passed through time.
In Helion, amid the refugees, she’d managed to acquire a satchel. Producing it, she fished out the box he’d made and offered it to him with both hands, as if in supplication. Let him make sense of all of this. Oh, please let him.
After setting the tiller, he scooted over beside her and took the box, turning it one way and then the next.
“Send me back,” she rasped. Part of her longed to touch his hand again, to reassure herself he was real and not in Tartarus. In this time, she might again talk to her friend, might share long conversations and games of draughts. Might have more time. But this wasn’t her time.
Prometheus adjusted a panel on the box, frowning. And Pandora winced. What if he triggered it again without meaning to? “This sent you back in time,” he said, with the air of one talking as much to himself as to her. “Is it based upon the Time Chamber of Vulgeth?”
He was asking her? She swallowed. “I don’t know how you made it.” Much less what he was even talking about or where Vulgeth was or any such thing.
He took that in without visible reaction. “I’ll work on your box when we get to Ogygia.”
“It’s your box.”
“Are you so certain of that? You are, after all, the one who used it. I would rather call it Pandora’s Box.”
Pandora hugged herself, hardly knowing what to say. She felt so overwrought she could make no sense of any of this. She felt like a spectator watching a drama unfold upon a stage … save the stage kept expanding, until they all lay within its ambit.
On Ogygia, he took her not atop the mountain, but to a small cottage upon its lower slope. Everything was different, from the rocks to the trees, but Pandora was fair certain this place would one day become Marsa. The lay of the land, that didn’t change. In the intervening millennia, the tiny cluster of fishing houses they had passed would become the harbor.
Compared to his Aviary, the cottage seemed quaint, with a single bedroll upon the floor, lying in front of a fire pit. Outside, Prometheus set about cooking a casserole, laced with cod and bits of other fish he’d bought from the fishermen. Once he’d folded it all together, he stuck it in a clay oven, then settled down beside her on the ground.
“I cannot fathom where best to even start,” she said.
He turned his sapphire gaze upon her. She expected him to take her hand, as he so oft had done to offer comfort, but now he seemed more reserved. Ah. Because all the moments they’d shared had not yet happened for him.
“Start with whatever seems most pressing and build upon the questions that arise from that.”
Pandora folded her hands in her lap. “You don’t know all the things that have happened to me, though I shared them with you in my past. You were …” The words stuck in her throat. After a lifetime of sheltering her heart, an exposure seemed to open it to fresh wounds. “I cared about you. I cared, and something happened.”
He pursed his lips. “Your mind reels from reconciling the anachronic implications of our meeting then and now.”
“Yes.”
“You ask yourself, did the me you knew recall this very conversation?”
Such a question had crept in upon her while they sailed from Helion. She had introduced herself to Prometheus on Atlantis and he’d said he’d heard of her already. Heard of her from now? But he already knew her name, even when he found her in Helion, no doubt from his visions. Innominate dread stilled her tongue, even as her flesh prickled.
“I am asking.”
“And am I to speculate about what my future self knows?”
Finally, she managed to give voice to her fear. “If you did—will have known—the implication is that my presence here may not have actually changed the past as yet.”
“What do you think?”
Perhaps, that if she had managed to take some steps that might have actually altered her relationship with Prometheus, then the one from her time might not have saved her from Atlantis. Would that unmake the version of her who now sat beside him on Ogygia, four thousand years before those events?
Such weavings of her mind made their own history at least as great a puzzle box as the device he’d built. Her Box.
They ate the casserole and he invited her to rest upon the bedroll in his cottage, while he himself slept on the floor across from the fire.
The expression upon his face, the roil of pain and sympathy as Kratos beat him, it woke her. Sweat had plastered Pandora’s hair to her face. The better part of her nightmares had ceased since using the Box, so perhaps Morpheus had truly haunted her dreams, seeking her in her own time, while here she was beyond his reach.
But Prometheus’s visage in that moment … it tore through her heart. It carved it asunder like a knife. He’d known he was going to his own damnation. He’d known he would suffer, and he thought of her, how it would pain her.
Blinking away tears, she forced herself to sit.
Across the fire pit, eyes sparkling like crystals in the tenebrous cottage, he had pushed himself up on one arm and now stared at her. More sympathy, concern even.
Pandora edged her way closer to him. “I saw you … tortured.” The pain of it wracked her, left her voice quivering. “They dragged you down, said they’d cast you into Tartarus.”
A slight shudder seized him, though his gaze remained fixed upon her.
“I swore I’d find a way to help you.”
“Then I believe you will.”
She placed her palms upon his cheeks. “Maybe you don’t know what you meant to me. Will mean.” Surely, she herself had not fathomed it then. Maybe not even until now. She pulled herself forward until she was straddling him, then kissed him. At first, unsure how he’d react, she merely brushed her lips over his.
Then his hands fell upon her hips and she had her answer. It was not the rhythm of her clients she fell into, but one far more intimate for its uniqueness and uncertainty. His lips massaging her own, her tongue exploring his mouth. The flush of his initial intrusion inside her, as he leaned backward, as she guided him.
There was something deeper here than she had ever experienced. Something glorious in the reign of true choice and the need, not of custom, but of connection. A soothing, heaving whirl of flesh and emotion.
She felt him convulse beneath her. His release surged into her in a coruscating wave as though some rush of energy passed through her. His crystal eyes glinted with a whorl of stars in motion. And more, in her mind’s eye, she saw a maelstrom of visions, like fragments of his life. A flaming cavern drenched in smoke and lambent from lava flows. Standing upon the balcony of some twisted tower, gazing out into iridescent vapors as lightning and flame played upon one another in a dance. And a spreading of a living night across the sky, as if the gloaming claiming the World were a thing of writhing tentacles, lurching its way into reality.
These things, and a thousand more flashes all blurred together into mad amalgams that tried to swallow her mind and soul. All of it, his whole history, was a tempest of nightmares. An unfathomable weight borne upon his shoulders, as if all the World was his responsibility.
Physically and emotionally spent, she collapsed onto his chest, not caring that tears leaked from her eyes onto him.
The depth of him stretched so far back, so wide, she imagined no one could grasp the whole of this Titan. But she would try. She had lost him in her time. Maybe here, she could finally have something to hold on to.
18
Athene
1571 Silver Age
* * *
“Pandion,” Athene said, when her mother offered her the babe wrapped in a bundle. “His name is Pandion, and one day he shall be king of Kronion.”
Mother smiled knowingly. “You’ll have to raise him as a demigod,” she said.
Athene gaped at her uncomprehending.
“If you don’t want to acknowledge the father, then the father cannot be a Titan.”
Athene balked. It would mean Pandion would never sample Ambrosia, and though his Titan blood would extend his life, he would live and die as a mortal, unless he so impressed Father. But the alternative was impossible. Mother was right …
With a nod, Mother left Athene to recline upon her bed. She nursed the child, then slept with her hand upon his tiny chest, soothed by its regular rise and fall. A dozen times she woke, needing to reassure herself the breaths still came as they ought.
But the child was strong, and she need not fear, she knew. He was a Titan.
In the morn, a wet nurse saw to Pandion, and Athene stretched her legs, walking along the halls of her palace in the acropolis. Father had gifted her the very polis founded by his own father when she came to adulthood, and Athene had strived to rule it well. Before granting her the city, he’d erected both this palace and a temple for the mortals to come and offer her worship and sacrifices. Every so often, the priests would bring in food and wine and goods left in the temple in her honor, and sometimes Athene would even use them, though occasionally the food rotted in the sun before it got to her.
Sometimes the citizens left new sandals or khitons or tiaras or jewelry, and when she would wear their gifts in the agora below, Athene fancied she oft caught cheers or boasting. Look how the goddess wears the sandals I crafted for her! I left her that bracelet on my son’s birth!
Yes, she had to admit, their adoration was intoxicating, and sometimes she extended her strolls just to see if anyone would notice her garb. Now, though, she remained secluded in the palace, preferring to stroll in the courtyard.
Basking in the sunlight, she paused before the fountain, taking solace in its burbling flow. Water cascaded out of the open palms of a mermaid, flowing through her fingers onto a lower shelf of layered seashells. From there, it pitched into the greater basin, in which swam a shoal of goldfish. Athene watched the patterns formed by the falling water, and it was as if those waters massaged the whole of her aching body. As if they flowed over the expanse of her soul, soothing away all the stresses of time.
