The Gifts of Pandora, page 18
As if … she … was …
Glamoured to look like any other aristocratic mortal, Athene sat in the assembly, watching as the young prince Theseus, seated beside King Aegeus, took in the assembly in his father’s court. This man, the descendant of Pandion, had his ancestor’s bearing, if not quite his aspect. The way he surveyed the gathered aristoi—and that pompous emissary of Minos—it reminded her of a leopard. He was more than his father had ever been, and Athene couldn’t help but quirk a smile at that.
Ah, but then, she had seen this moment, hadn’t she?
“The nine years have passed,” the emissary intoned, with the air of a speech he had given before. “And upon this, the twenty-seventh anniversary of your crimes”—he stretched the last word with such arrogance Athene rolled her eyes—“the time has come to once again send your seven boys and seven girls to sate the beast.”
Theseus rose, his chair scraping noisily along the stone floor. “No.”
“No?” the emissary asked, as if the very word tasted alien to him and his tongue could not quite wrap itself around the sound of it.
“No,” Theseus repeated. “No more sacrifices. I will walk the labyrinth. Find this Minotaur. I kill it, our debt is paid. I fail, your king has claimed the son of his rival. Fair recompense for the loss of his own heir. Either way, Athenai owes no more sacrifices after this.”
The men and women gathered in Aegeus’s throne room gaped at the young man, as if unable to imagine their prince would put forth such an idea. Indeed, Aegeus, too, paled. Perhaps, had he suspected Theseus of such a play, he would not have invited his newly found son to this assembly.
No, but Athene had known it would come to this, long ago, and it was as it should be.
Whatever resulted in the labyrinth beneath Knosós, Theseus had saved his polis. This was the true heir of Pandion. Athene’s heir.
Three days later, Athene felt almost as though she had never been pregnant. Perhaps it was the extra draught of Ambrosia her mother had arranged for her, or perhaps her Titan nature, but she thought mortal women took longer to recoup. Then again, what did she know?
With Mother by her side, she walked the Long Wall that connected Kronion proper to the harbor district well beyond the main gates. She had built this wall long ago and walked its twenty-mile circumference so many times she had lost count, but it felt different now.
“I saw things again,” she admitted. “This time in the waters of my fountain.”
“Hydromancy is a common method of accessing prescience,” Mother said, her own gaze flitting over the hills between the wall and the Aegean Sea, seeming to take in the whole expanse of this island.
“Like your dreams?”
“Oneiromancy can grant toward prescience, yes, but it is distinct in its own right.”
Though not quite sure whether she understood, Athene nodded anyway. She had no energy for an extended lecture upon the intricacies of the Sight. What mattered was Mother seemed to confirm that both what she had seen in the Oracle Mirrors below Olympus last year and this vision from a few days ago represented a real future. Athene was an Oracle.
Hmm. How did her strength at prescience measure up against Apollon? Legend said he was trained by famed—or now infamous—Themis herself in the use of his gift. Probably Athene, novice that she was, had naught on the skills of Helios’s blessed son.
When she fell silent, Mother glanced over at her. “Has word reached you about Merope?”
“The Pleiad?”
“She was wed to Sisyphus of Korinth last year.” Oh, that much Athene knew. She had made it her business to learn of the Kreiad genos. Sisyphus was the son of Hephaistos’s sister Bia, with her husband, the demigod Aiolos. “I imagine Zeus waited until she delivered a babe,” her mother said, voice quiet. “Shortly thereafter, Ares smashed her head upon the acropolis steps. Some rumors claim he broke her spine before that.”
And perhaps did worse before that, Athene imagined, though Mother did not give voice to such things.
For a few moments, silence reigned between them, and Athene traced her finger along the crenelations of the Long Wall. Out here, she could make out farmers’ fields where they grew wheat, and there, olive trees. Sometimes, Kronion seemed peaceful.
“I know why you’re telling me this,” she finally said, pausing to lean against the wall and stare at her mother. “You say Father’s retribution against her is already horrible. And I would not have wanted that, because the Pleiades are not my enemies. The Kreiads, however, are my foes. Hephaistos and his whole cursed line.”
“Including Merope’s newborn child?”
Athene waved that away. “I will make Pandion the first mortal King of Kronion.”
“You want your son to hold authority independent of your own here?”
“Yes.” Other poleis had mortal kings to attend to the prosaic needs of a city, it was time Kronion had this as well. Besides, she had seen it, in her vision. His line would produce kings and heroes for generations to come. This Theseus would walk among the polis to the utter adoration of his people. “And I want to expand Kronion’s power through Pandion.”
Her father might balk on learning a Titan had begun seizing territory or trade routes from another Titan, but mortals were freed from any such restriction.
“Help me achieve it,” Athene said.
“As you wish.”
Athene nodded, and from the look on her mother’s face, the older woman knew well enough what was coming. “I want Kronion to dominate Korinth. I want Hephaistos to watch as his own spawn seizes his polis and strips his genos of all meaning.”
Mother clucked her tongue, then sighed. “These schemes will not avail you, Athene.”
“I’ve foreseen a glorious future for my line!”
The woman reached for Athene, caressing her cheek. “Be that as it may, conquering other poleis, breaking an entire genos, none of this will assuage your wrath. It will stoke it.”
“Then let it be stoked,” Athene growled. “Let it become a conflagration that consumes him, and only in the end will he understand the price of his hubris in thinking he can take whatever he wants. Let all Titans learn the price!”
Though she expected to see grim resolve upon her mother’s face, instead the woman closed her eyes for so long the silence grew uncomfortable. “There is much of your father in you,” she said, when at last her golden gaze settled upon Athene once more. “But I understand your rage. I would not leave my child to face such alone, even if I think you are making a mistake.” A sad smile creased her face. “So be it. We will strive against Korinth and its line. We will strike at them, again and again, until you alone say when it is enough. Then we will see, Athene, if the world has become what you will it.”
Athene could not help but squirm, just a little, at the intimation that, despite having lived sixteen centuries, she was about to be subjected to a very long lesson.
19
Pandora
201 Golden Age
* * *
Reclining beneath the shade of an olive tree, Pandora stroked the scraggly hair of the babe nestled to her breast. In her days as a hetaira—so long ago they seemed now—she had mixed tonics that prevented conception. On Ogygia, she could have found the herbs needed to make such things but no longer had any desire to do so.
Now, she had found something here, with Prometheus, in the year she’d lived on this island. Something a lifetime on Atlantis had denied her.
Beneath her tree, she listened to the waves lap at the shore, feeling almost too content. Such anxieties plagued her, from time to time, as if she did not deserve peace. Always, she tried to push them down. This was real.
She was really here, holding her daughter, luxuriating while her lover built them a larger cottage farther up the mountain. Still not quite the summit where he’d build his Aviary, but that would come in time, she knew.
In the late afternoon, after the babe had woken, fed, and slept once more, Prometheus made his way down the slope. A sheen of sweat glistened upon his bare chest, and he’d tied back his auburn hair.
She offered him a smile in greeting, nodding her head at the amphora of wine beside her. She might have passed it to him but wouldn’t risk waking their child for aught on Earth.
Prometheus poured some wine in a bowl, sipped at it, then pushed it aside. “Have you settled upon a name for her?”
“Hmm. I think, Pyrrha.” She winked. “For the fiery hair she gets from her father.”
He chuckled, answering with a slight, merry shake of his head. “Well, Pyrrha it is, then.”
Nights, sometimes, proved harder. The nightmares had mostly abated, never mind occasional visions in which her mind imagined the torments that must befall the other Prometheus in Tartarus. The reminder that, for all the precious moments she shared with him now, the man she so loved would suffer unimaginable agonies in his future.
She had sworn to him she would find a way to save him.
What, then, did it mean that she made her life here, in the past, happy with him while elsewhere he languished? It meant she had broken that promise, even as she fell ever deeper for him.
She would roll over and stare at his sleeping form and think it was impossible to love someone so much as this. To see the very ambit of the World in the beating of a heart slumbering beside her. Was this tiny family of hers not the very meaning of her life?
A hundred times a night she woke to check on Pyrrha, to make sure her daughter’s breathing sounded proper, that she was warm enough in her blankets. No matter how oft she reassured herself naught would happen, still she needed to see, again and again, that the child remained hale and healthy.
Now, leaning over the tiny form, she knew without doubt: this had been the best year of her life. The only time she had truly felt home since Zeus and Hekate had taken her from Tyros all those years ago.
But was she failing the very man who had helped her claim this life?
Ogygia, it seemed, had once belonged to Atlas before he left to conquer Hesperides Island and ignited the accursed war that yet raged on. It had not come to these shores, though certainly many Titans had tried and failed to claim Atlantis from Atlas. The bodies of those who had attempted it continued to pile up.
Prometheus had told her, some months back, that Atlas was like a brother to him, though not actually, in fact, related to him by blood. Either way, he took no part in the war, save occasionally conferring with other Titans who came and took his counsel. In these cases, he would meet them in private, most oft upon the mountain summit, where he would one day build the Aviary.
On one such day he asked Pandora to take Pyrrha for a walk and she agreed, despite a drizzle of rain falling over the island. It was best, she supposed, to grant him his discretion for his guests. Moreover, he seemed inclined to conceal Pandora from them, as though some of these Titans might pose a threat to her. Thus, from behind a tree in the light woods surrounding their cottage, she watched him escort yet another such Titan up the slope.
It had to be a Titan, for both her height and her luxurious amaranthine himation raised against the weather. Prometheus took females up there oft enough, and Pandora knew another woman might feel the bitter twinge of jealousy at that. How could a Titan male not lust after the grandeur and superlative grace of Nymphs? But Prometheus had never given her the least reason to distrust him. In his eyes, she saw the refraction of his soul. That soul was many things: haunted and brooding and, perhaps, burdened by guilt. But it was true to her, of that she had not the least doubt.
So she watched her lover take the Titan up the slope, noting by the set of her features the war must not go well. It never seemed to.
Once, Pandora had asked Prometheus why so many came to call upon him. “Most seek Oracular insight. Some hope I will actually fight by their side, believing I aided Ouranos in ending the Time of Nyx.”
“Did you?”
“After a fashion.”
He was always like that. Perhaps it was his nature to make himself into another, living puzzle box, or perhaps he did so because he knew she could not resist him thus. Either way, she prodded with her questions, moving a piece of his enigma at a time, ever searching for his hidden center.
Such were the games they played in daylight.
And at night, she writhed in the half-light, envisaging the ruination of his flesh and soul in Tartarus.
“What if we could change it?” she asked one morn, while they sat upon a rock overlooking the bay. She worked her tongue around an olive pit, just the way Uncle Phoenix had taught her. Pyrrha rested in Prometheus’s lap, looking out at the waves along with them, blessedly quiet for a moment.
“You mean alter the future.”
“Just don’t side with Zeus in the first place. You helped him win the Titanomachy. You helped him end this Golden Age by destroying the entire Ouranid League. Do you really think the World better off under his rule than it was under the hegemony?”
Prometheus, too, popped an olive in his mouth. When she’d told him of her uncle’s olive lessons, he’d readily joined her in the morning routine. “Better off … Such an interesting question. As if we might abort the flow of history and allow it to stagnate in one moment for all eternity.”
Pandora scoffed. “Because history must move forward regardless does not mean the unfolding that happened resulted in a beneficial transition for anyone.”
“A society that remains mired in place without progress begins to wither.”
Ah. So he did not so much believe his arguing points as he did enjoy the act of debating her. “A move toward tyranny doesn’t qualify as progress. We surrendered a flawed oligarchy for an insane autocrat.” She paused, softening her face. “He hurts you. He hurts me, and he hurts so many others, playing with lives like pieces on the draughts board. He does not, so far as I can see, move toward any greater aim than his own gratification. And all the while, he demands we worship him as a god, as though his ego needed its flames fanned.”
Now Prometheus grimaced, if only for an instant, then stroked Pyrrha’s brow with one thumb. For a long time, he held his peace, staring at the waves. He’d told her once that most Oracles required a medium to harness prescience. For him—for pyromancers—that was flame, though others could see things in the tides. Cleromancers read cast pebbles, tiles, or bones. It seemed, in her estimation, what one really needed was a sufficiently complex system through which the Oracle could fall into a trance and access some hidden part of themselves.
As Prometheus was no hydromancer, he could not be reading the waves. Rather, he must flounder in the shifting currents of his own thoughts. Pandora could empathize with such a situation.
After a time, she reached over to trace her fingers along the back of his hand, and he looked up at her. “Some think the Moirai, the Fates, mere metaphor for the forces that govern our lives. But they are the arbiters or emissaries of Ananke itself. They weave all our lives as threads within a greater tapestry. Suppose you could change the past, pluck a strand, and alter the picture. Could you do so with any certainty of not unraveling the whole of the tapestry in the process?”
She sniffed. This was what it always came back to, a war in her mind. If she prevented Prometheus from siding with Zeus and thus stopped Zeus from winning the Titanomachy, the sixteen centuries since then would not have happened. She could never predict the course of events that might have followed. Maybe their world would enjoy a continuing Golden Age, would not fall under the thumb of a despot. Europa might have lived a happy life in Tyros. Pandora might have grown up in Agenor’s court, remained Europa’s ward, perhaps even wed when the time came.
Of course, she never would have met this man whom she loved so much it hurt.
The weight of that knowledge—that all the good in her life ensued as a result from all the bad—clenched around her very soul, threatening to crack it wide.
Like any such conclusions, her line of reasoning only led to more questions. “If we cannot or dare not change the past and thus the future, why would you even ever build a Box that would allow for time travel?”
Prometheus sighed, his shoulder slumping. Oh, he had mulled this over long as well, hadn’t he? “I can only imagine I will build this in the future because you gave it to me now.”
His answer slapped her like a blow to the face. It left her gaping in voiceless abhorrence, unable to tear her gaze from his face. At least, not until he pointedly looked down at Pyrrha.
“We have a daughter,” he said simply.
And there, like a clarion, it rang through her mind. She had given him the Box to study. He used it to invent it. Because he knew this moment, because he loved her, because he loved their daughter. Pandora gasped at the sudden pain in her chest as her lungs seized up, unable to draw breath after the weight that had fallen upon her like some cyclopean monument.
This had all always happened.
His hand grasped her shoulder to steady her, but it wasn’t enough, and her vision dimmed at the fringes.
Her swooning had lasted but a moment, though its source stalked the corners of her mind in constricting circles, round and round, with ever deepening implications. What if Prometheus sided with Zeus because that was what had led to Pandora being here now, allowing their love? Allowing Pyrrha’s very existence?
If so, then he had never intended the Box to change the past or future, but rather to create the blessed moments of his own history. He had fulfilled his own past. Had seen her in Atlantis and known the time had arrived for him to begin the creation of this loop.
Pyrrha held against one shoulder, Prometheus had helped her back to their cottage and eased her down by the fire pit.
“You deal with it better than I imagine most would,” he said, once he’d settled the babe down for a nap. Because he could read the whirring of her mind writ plain upon her features. Because he had gone through the same deductions in his own mind already.
