Goddess

by Josephine Angelini

  “I know you all, and I notice that many of us have been lost along the way,” Matt said with real emotion.

  They had waited for him for so long, and every single one of them had come when they were called. Matt couldn’t live with himself if he wasn’t honest about the doubt that he still felt. “I’m sorry, brothers. I’m not sure this war is just. It’s not our goal I question. I know what is right, and I know I need to do it no matter how hard it is for me. But I still have reservations about who we fight alongside.”

  “As you did at Troy,” Telamon said with a knowing half smile, like he was reminding Matt that nothing much had changed. “You fight for no king, and no country, Master. You fight for the right of every man to decide his own fate. As every one of us decided for ourselves when we swore on the blade.”

  “Swore on the blade,” the mass of Myrmidons whispered.

  “One man, one vote,” Telamon prompted.

  “One man, one vote,” the Myrmidons chanted back.

  Matt waited for the chorus of believers to settle down before continuing. There was something about their single-mindedness that disturbed him, especially since what they were repeating in unison was the cornerstone of individual thought, and the jewel of Greek philosophy.

  The idea of “one man, one vote” was the beginning of democracy. Poor or rich, god or mortal, Matt believed that every being should be counted equally. The weak had just as much right to decide for themselves as the powerful. That belief was something he would die to defend. Matt also knew that when one individual acquired too much power, those without power suffered and usually died. He couldn’t live with himself if he let that happen. Not when he could stop it. But he didn’t want to make the same mistakes he had at Troy.

  “The god Hermes has informed me that several Scions wish to join our cause against the Tyrant, but I don’t trust them. What I want each of you to consider is this: Should we go it alone?” Matt asked, stepping back and raising his voice to include all his men in this decision. “What do you say? Should we have Hermes arrange for all of us to meet the Scions? Or can we do this without making alliances with people and with gods who are not much better than the evil we fight?”

  “We fight and die for one purpose, Master,” Telamon said. The word Master was whispered through the men in agreement, unsettling Matt again. “Alone or with allies, it matters not. When you fight, those who seek the same goal as you will claim credit for your victories whether you want them to or not. Only one thing really matters.”

  Matt nodded, his decision made, despite all he knew it would cost him. “The Tyrant must die.”

  Helen lay in the grass, staring at Lucas while he slept. In its first moments, this new world she created was nothing but that—soft grass under her, a sun in the blue sky above her, and Lucas beside her. Then the world grew, because he was suffering.

  She willed the sunshine to take his pain away, the air to heal his wounds, and the ground to nourish him so he didn’t need food or water. In seconds, Lucas was healthy and perfect again. His eyes fluttered open and locked with hers, and Helen’s whole world was in him.

  “Hi,” he said, a smile spreading across his face.

  “Hi,” she replied, smiling back at him.

  “Am I dead?”

  “Not even a little bit.”

  “Oh, good.” He looked up at the bright, blank sky.

  Helen hadn’t had a chance to put any clouds in it yet. Clouds popped into existence as they occurred to her, hazing out the yellow sun perfectly so Lucas wasn’t blinded by it.

  “Are you sure I’m not dead? ’Cuz I feel kinda dead,” he said suspiciously.

  Helen chuckled and laid her hand on his chest. For a moment, the steady thumping of his heart was the only sound in Helen’s world. “You don’t feel dead to me.”

  “That’s all that matters,” he said, turning his head to look at her. Worry darkened his eyes. “I know this isn’t possible. What did you do, Helen?”

  “I made you a world.”

  Lucas sat up and looked around, and she felt suddenly shy, like he was looking at an unfinished painting, and she was still sitting at her easel. Helen willed the grass to stretch out and turn into a field. She put flowers in the grass, bees in the flowers, and filled the air with the scent and sounds of springtime. He watched the world grow, like a carpet unrolling in all directions, and looked back at Helen. He dropped his head, shaking it.

  “It figures. If anyone was ever gifted enough to make a whole new world, it would be you, wouldn’t it?”

  “I’m not the only one ever,” she admitted, sitting up next to Lucas and regarding him seriously. “Hades did it. Zeus did it. Morpheus did it. And . . . Atlanta did it.”

  “Atlanta. As in, Atlantis?” he asked, frowning in thought. Helen nodded. Lucas turned to her, deadly serious. “Helen, do you know where Atlantis is?”

  Helen swallowed and nodded. Like removing a Band-Aid, she figured it would be best if she just got it over with quickly.

  “It’s gone. I don’t know all the details, but Hades told me that it sank forever when Atlanta lost some kind of challenge.” Helen watched Lucas’s face fall, like something in his body ached. “I’m sorry, Lucas. There is no Atlantis.”

  “No. But there’s here,” he said, his mood lifting. Helen looked at him, puzzled.

  “Yes, but no Atlantis means that there’s no immortality. All those years the Houses have been killing each other to get to Atlantis and become immortal . . . and it’s all a fairy tale.”

  “I’ll bet anything your world is better than Atlantis ever was. And I bet if Atlanta could make people immortal, so can you.”

  “Well, thanks, but all I’ve made so far is a field of flowers. Not eternal life.”

  He looked at her for a few moments. Helen knew this look. He gave it to her when he was trying to figure out the best way to explain something complicated to her.

  “Just spit it out,” she groaned, grinning at the inevitable lesson he was about to give her.

  “I’m just thinking about how your world works. Everything you want to happen, happens—no matter how crazy it is, right? But there are still rules,” Lucas said, talking and thinking at the same time. “Let me put it this way. You healed my body. And I know I was pretty close to dead.”

  “Yeah, but . . .”

  “When we go back to the other world. Ah, Earth,” he said, grimacing at how strange it was to say that. “I’m assuming that my wounds won’t come back, will they?”

  “Of course not. You’re healed.”

  “So you changed my body. Whatever you did to my body here will carry over when we return to Earth. That’s one of the rules.” Lucas waited for Helen to nod, which she did slowly, still trying to catch up with him. “Then what’s to say you couldn’t make me immortal here and I’d stay that way, forever, no matter what world we go to?”

  Helen stared at him. “How do you do that? How do you figure everything out so quickly?”

  “You may be all-powerful, but nothing beats plain old logic.” He smiled at her. “Am I right? You can make anyone immortal by bringing them here and willing it?”

  She nodded silently, thinking about how she’d get injured in Hades and wake up in her bed on Earth and still be injured. She knew from experience that if something happened to the body in one world it carried over into all the others. The same went for immortality. Helen knew this was right implicitly, the same way she knew her feet were there even when she wasn’t thinking about them. She could make herself and Lucas immortal just by thinking it here in her world.

  Just one wish made here in this world, sitting in the grass, and she and Lucas could live together, young and healthy forever.

  “Don’t,” Lucas said, his face immobile. He knew what Helen was considering. “We need to really think about this before we go and do anything permanent.”

  Helen thought about how Lucas had looked when she brought him to her world just moments ago—his charred skin, the bone s
howing raw and red in some of the worst spots. She knew she was tough, but she also knew that there were some things she could handle and some things that she couldn’t. Losing Lucas was not something she could handle. Not now, not ever.

  “Of course. We’ll talk about it later.” She smiled placidly at him.

  “Helen,” he began, his eyes widening at her in warning.

  She stood up before Lucas had a chance to lecture her, and pulled him to his feet. “Come on, smarty-pants. I want to go to Paris. Or Rome. Or Stockholm.”

  He didn’t know what she meant until a city skyline appeared at the edge of the field of grass and wildflowers. There was no ugly transition, no garbage heaps or poorly designed public transit hubs, just flowers and then pavement. A gleaming city sprang into being, perfect and contained from the natural world right next to it, like a kingdom in a snow-globe.

  They stepped onto the pavement, and the city and all of its noise and bustle and life surrounded them. The scent of roasting coffee and baking bread filled the air, and their noses led them to a murmuring, clattering café, half a block down.

  “It’s like New York, Vienna, and Reykjavík had a baby with Scotland,” Lucas said in awe.

  He looked up at the buildings, some ancient and castle-like and some gleaming and new. Right outside the tall buildings, a perfect wilderness of forests, lakes, and mountains awaited to be hiked, swam, and skied.

  Lucas shook his head to clear it. “It’s Everycity.”

  “Yes,” Helen laughed softly. “Every city I’ve never been to.”

  “I promised you once that we’d travel,” he said, his face sad. “I’m sorry, Helen. It would have only taken us a few moments, and we could have flown anywhere together. But I never took you.”

  “We had other things on our minds,” she said, taking his hand. “I didn’t build this to shame you. I built it to share with you.”

  Lucas raised his face to the sky, taking in the complex layers of smells and voices.

  “Well, you got everything right—except for one thing.” Lucas swallowed hard and smiled, glancing at her. “It’s a lot cleaner than any city I’ve ever been to.”

  “What can I say, I’m from Nantucket,” Helen said, shrugging. “We don’t do filthy.”

  “Yeah, I’ve noticed. Even the dirt there is clean.” Lucas laughed and turned his whole body to face hers.

  For just a moment, Helen felt like he would kiss her, and everywhere in Everycity the sun shone a little brighter. But he didn’t kiss her. At the last second, he pulled back and changed the subject.

  “Context clues. I know you want something to eat because you made us appear right next to a café,” he said, his voice deep and textured. He turned away and squeezed her hand, like he was trying to snap them both out of a dream. “Come on. Let’s see what you put on the menu.”

  “Wait. Why?” she asked, suddenly shy.

  “This world’s a reflection of your desires.” He led Helen into the busy café before she had a chance to remove anything unobtrusively. He glanced left and right at the tile-top wrought-iron tables, mismatched crockery, and the open rafters above their heads, and smiled. “This is your subconscious. I want to know what you really want.”

  Too late to stop him, Helen followed Lucas as he walked into her subconscious. There was art on the walls—weird combinations of images that would never be on the same wall in a museum.

  Ansel Adams and Toulouse-Lautrec somehow lived in perfect harmony in Helen’s little world. Cancan girls showed their legs next to noble pines buried deep in winter’s bleached purity.

  It was everything that Helen loved about art, and everything she loved about human nature. She looked at another wall and saw a vibrant, almost violent-looking Van Gogh hanging just inches away from a soothing and orderly Mondrian.

  Helen knew that Lucas saw every nuance, every dialogue between the works of art. One image informed the other as Helen went back and forth in her subconscious about what was more alluring—humanity’s ability to be rational and pure, or its need to be messy and sexy.

  Lucas walked right into Helen’s unfinished internal argument and saw everything that was buried inside of her—bare skin fresh from a hot bath, and birch trees dusted with snow. Helen felt naked and laid open for him to stare at. It was so embarrassing she groaned.

  She pulled Lucas into a tiny booth in the corner by the window and put up her menu, like a barricade. She tried to read the menu but it was blank. Just like her mind.

  “Helen?” Lucas said gently, tugging down her menu. “You don’t have to hide anything from me. You know that, right?”

  “S-sure,” she stammered, shaking.

  “I’m not afraid of anything inside of you,” he pressed. “Good. Bad. Creepy. I know darkness. And I’d never judge you for having a few drops of your own.”

  “Oh.” Helen looked around the room. Goya’s disturbing painting Saturn Devouring His Son captured her eye and held it. “And what if it’s more than a few drops?”

  Lucas laughed. He snatched her menu away, threw it to the floor, and grabbed both her hands. “Didn’t I tell you I love you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I meant all of you. Even the weird bits.”

  “Remind me to burn this place to the ground as soon as we leave,” she said, adoring him.

  “Absolutely not.” He looked around at the patrons. People of every race, age, and time period seemed to be hanging out together. Native Americans in feathered headdresses chatted pleasantly with pirates. Girls with eighties mall bangs flirted with guys right out of Elizabethan England. “I like it inside your head. It’s strange, but it suits me.”

  Helen looked around, and it all made sense to her. How cool would it be to be able to go to a café and strike up a conversation with someone from another time and place? It was something she’d always imagined doing, and now it looked like she didn’t have to imagine it anymore. She could be a part of it.

  Neither of them was hungry or thirsty, they were just there to taste something yummy and enjoy each other’s company. It was chilly out, but pleasantly so, and when Helen looked at what they were wearing, both of them were dressed perfectly for a fall day. She hadn’t remembered dressing them, but they were definitely wearing some new clothes.

  “Come on,” he said, standing up and putting on his newly created coat. “I want to take a walk before it snows.”

  They left the café and started wandering down the cobblestone street, past shops and buildings that were busy with all kinds of people going about their lives. Helen had no idea where all these people came from. She guessed she’d made them up or remembered them. Whichever it was, Helen knew they were based in reality, and that was comforting to her. It would have been odd to wander around an empty city, or worse, a city full of mannequin-like robots.

  The sun was setting, and Helen smelled snow in the air, just as Lucas had predicted. Windows lit up with warm glows as people turned on their lights or lit candles. Lucas had his arm over her shoulder as they strolled down the street.

  “There are no poor people. No homeless,” he said suddenly.

  “No,” Helen replied. “Everyone has what they need here.”

  “But how could anyone be grateful for what they have if they didn’t know what it was like not to have what they need?”

  Helen shook her head and looked down. “I’ve always thought that was the lamest argument—that we need some people to be poor in order to remind the rest of us to be grateful. All that really means is that someone has to suffer poverty so other people can feel better about themselves. What a selfish way to look at the world.”

  Lucas chuckled and squeezed her against his side. “I agree. But you have to admit it is human nature to only really appreciate something if you’ve worked for it, or if you know you can lose it. How are you going to make the inhabitants of your little heaven feel fulfilled if everything comes to them easily?”

  “Ah. The old ‘heaven is boring’ problem, huh? Not in
this universe.” Helen looked up at Lucas, and they smiled at each other. “We’ll figure something out. We’ve got plenty of time.”

  “Wait,” he said, narrowing his eyes at her. “What do you mean ‘we’ve got plenty of time’?”

  “Just that we’re young,” Helen replied cagily.

  Before Lucas could continue asking questions, Helen imagined a carnival, and it appeared in front of them. Bright, multicolored lights flashed in the evening light, and cheerful music piped around them. The scent of spun sugar sweetened the air, and elsewhere they could smell something juicy and spicy getting grilled.

  “Amazing,” Lucas breathed. “Everything she wants she gets.”

  Helen pulled on his arm, grinning mischievously. “And what I want right now is to ride the carousel.”

  Matt heard Telamon sound the alarm. No human or Scion would ever be able to discern the skritching noises that the Myrmidons made from the chorus of natural noises on a beach, but Matt could easily tell the difference between the voices of the insects and those of his soldiers.

  He left his tent to watch a party of Scions coming up the beach. Matt had known most of them from Troy and had disliked most of them. Odysseus was the only one worthy of respect.

  “So it’s true,” said a large, blond man. Matt knew him as Menelaus. “The Warrior has finally joined the fight.”

  “Tantalus. Head of Thebes,” Telamon whispered in Matt’s ear. Matt nodded.

  “When Hermes told me that Myrmidons were massing on the shore, I knew the last piece of the puzzle had been found, and you were coming to fight,” Tantalus continued, although Matt hadn’t asked him to. An uncomfortable silence followed as Matt stared at Tantalus, still reluctant to make an alliance with this man, although he knew it was inevitable. The Myrmidons had voted for it.

  “You hired one of my soldiers. Automedon. He was one of my closest friends once,” Matt said, expressionless. “Before he lost his way.”

  “Yes,” Tantalus said warily as he sized up Matt. “I had nothing to do with his death, though.”