With a despairing lunge, my right hand manages to free itself from the thickening coils and grasp my xiphos hilt. I wrench the sword blade free of the scabbard, twist and… and then another serpent appears, smaller than the first but just as vicious. It coils round my waist and encircles my arm, locking it against the heaving mound of slithering muscle that already envelops me.
A heartbeat later, Bria pulls the sword from my hand and swings, cleaving through the first serpent’s spine behind the skewered head, swinging the blade again to decapitate the second snake. They shudder, convulsing so hard they almost pump the last air from my lungs. I struggle free, gasping, and roll away, sucking down gulps of air as my vision swims.
‘Well, that was unexpected,’ Bria remarks, ‘Nice reflexes, Ithaca.’
She wipes my blade on her tunic and hands it to me, hilt first.
‘Don’t tell me those snakes were in here since the burial?’
‘Maybe: it’s an old Egyptian trick – you establish a breeding pit alongside the grave, with tunnels between the two chambers. The idea is that some of the serpents will be in the grave when robbers come. But I suspect these were more than just your ordinary snake.’
While I’m recovering, Bria blithely heaves the lid aside and stares down at the corpse within. ‘Jocasta, Jocasta, look at you now,’ she crows.
I peer in. Eurybates and I have, over the years, discussed why such embalming works in Egypt but isn’t practiced here. It’s dry as dust on the fringe of the desert, the only water coming from the great river Nile, but too much damp can turn an embalmed corpse into a melting mush. I’ve been dreading what Jocasta will be like now.
But my fears, in this regard at least, are baseless. At first glance, the old queen’s body is mere dried-up skin and sinew, plastered over bones and wrapped in cloth. Gold at her ears and throat glimmers in the light of the oil lamp, and there’s a shimmer of white peeking through a gap in the grave wrap.
‘You knew her too?’ I ask Bria.
‘Jocasta? Oh yes, poor lass. Her first husband Laius was a brute, she had her only son snatched from her breast moments after he was born, and then ended up marrying that son, all unknowingly. She was happy with Oedipus, though. Four children, when she never had another with Laius – that tells you something. But secrets will out.’
Together we unwrap Jocasta’s body. She hadn’t been tall, and what hair she has left is very long, a dark brown hue that’s lost all lustre. I had expected insect life – beetles, worms, ants. But again the body is clean – perhaps the snakes took care of that. Bria casually pockets Jocasta’s gold earrings and necklace. ‘I always envied her those,’ she says in a satisfied voice.
‘Don’t wear them around the Epigoni,’ I advise. I examine the gleaming white dress the corpse is buried in: the grave wrap is dusty and stained but the robe we’ve dug down to find is almost unblemished. And the threadwork and embroidery patterns are truly bewitching; they seem to move as you look at them. It would be easy to study the thing for hours. When I touch it, I realize it’s not ordinary cloth, but some fusion of silk and metal – strong yet amazingly supple. Wearing it would be strange, but I sense it might be extraordinarily comfortable.
‘It’s seems well preserved,’ I comment.
Bria scowls and points. There’s a yellowish stain and a rent in the hem of the bodice, where a section of fabric seems to be missing altogether. ‘It’s imperfect, Ithaca. Things enchanted by Hephaestus are always perfect. This robe has lost something…’ She stares deeply, a glow like moonlight bleeding from her eyes, then she mutters. ‘I understand now. The daemon which Hephaestus imprisoned in the robe escaped into one of the snakes, sometime in the last ten years. That’s how the creature grew so large.’
I look back at the beheaded serpents and shudder. ‘So is the robe no use to us?’
‘Correct. As of now. But it can be repaired.’ Bria gives me a look that’s hard to decipher; one of those rare moments when her smug, I-can-handle-anything mask slips. ‘I’d hoped we wouldn’t have to do this,’ she sighs. ‘But perhaps it’s a good thing…’
‘What is?’
‘You’ll see,’ she says tersely.
Without further ado, she unceremoniously pulls the dress from the corpse, leaving me to ease the dead queen back into her resting place and replace the lid. I’m still somewhat squeamish around those serpent bodies, but I have nowhere else to put them except beside the casket. Jocasta won’t care; she’s long gone, leaving only skin, sinew and bones.
Hurriedly, I fill in the cist hole, while Bria spends the whole time cooing over the dress, her eyelids and hands fluttering nervously all the while. When I’ve dragged the final covering slab back into place, she passes her hand over the grave and, in an instant, it’s as if it’s never been disturbed. Bria’s full of interesting little tricks of the trade; one day I may need to learn them.
There’ll be a price, no doubt, so I’m not in a screaming hurry.
‘Now what?’ I ask Bria.
‘Now?’ She strokes the robe of Harmonia possessively but her eyes are far away, as if steeling herself for an ordeal. ‘Now, Odysseus, we have to find a smith.’
11 – Hephaestus
‘O strong-willed, mighty Hephaestus, with your unquenchable fire, your dazzling, blazing god-given light, mighty-fisted, eternal torch-bearer, O craftsman who exists through your art, O perfect elemental part of the cosmos: all-engulfing, all-conquering, all-powerful, all-consuming: aether, sun, stars, moon, pure light are the forms through which you, Hephaestus manifest yourself to mankind.’
—Orphic Hymn 66 to Hephaestus
Argos, Peloponnese
Bria leads me back into Argos, where we creep along darkened streets. She’s doused the lamp and has the shimmering white robe rolled up inside her cloak. We re-enter the city the same way we left, a rope secured by a grappling hook, in a lightly patrolled section of the outer palisade and, with clever timing, elude the guards stationed on the walls and the night watch. There’s no one else up and about in the streets. Above us, the citadel looms, its sturdy mud-brick fortifications clothed in darkness. Dawn is still an hour away and everything is still and silent.
Bria is walking like someone following an old, out-of-date map. After a few false turns we fetch up before a large, low-slung timber building. There are big wooden doors, which Bria eases open far enough to let us slide in, before pushing it to behind us.
It’s a forge, a smithy strewn with tools and half-made items: bronze axe heads and shield bosses, mattocks and wheel rims and daggers still lacking their wooden hilt grips. The fires have burnt down to embers, and someone is snoring in the room behind. I tiptoe to the inner door and see a burly man and his fleshy woman deeply asleep, an infant snuffling in a cot beside their sleeping mat. The air reeks of charcoal and oil and heated metal.
Bria taps my shoulder and draws me back to the embers. ‘A smithy was once the most magical place in the world,’ she whispers. ‘Imagine it: here was a man who could use fire and ancient knowledge to turn lumps of ore into durable metal tools and weapons. Every part of the process involved secret recipes, prayers and invocations. Hephaestus didn’t need priests – his smiths were priests, with a magic far more tangible than those of many other gods. Zeus thought tying his own worship to the Smith so important, his priests proclaimed Hephaestus as his son. Zeus gave him the Goddess of Love as his mate in the tales – in other words, he aligned the two cults to bind him ever closer to the burgeoning machine of worship that the Olympian gods were creating. Hephaestus was that important.’
She stirs the embers with a poker, muttering something under her breath, and they flare slightly.
‘Every forge was a place of worship and magic, Odysseus, and this one is the oldest in Argos. Remember last year, how we opened a doorway into Hades’s realm? In a similar way, every smithy is a pathway to the Great Smithy: to the Realm of Hephaestus.’
My gut tenses from a mix of fear and exhilaration – if I understand Bria a
right, we will be entering a world parallel to this earthly one but not of it, with its own rules and inhabited by its own beings, elemental creatures with powers I can only guess at. In Hades’s kingdom of Erebus last year, I almost lost everything; but I also found my father, and received the blessing of my forebear, Prometheus himself. What prizes and payments might there be here?
‘So what do we do?’ I ask.
She gives me an oddly vulnerable look. ‘Follow my lead – and be ready to get me out if I ask you to. But only if I ask, you understand? This could go well, but there are risks. Hephaestus is not what he was: his worship has declined, his cult is sidelined and being forgotten, and he can feel extinction coming. He’s lonely, bitter, despairing and desperate, and well… he and I have some history.’
None of this sounds good. The worst parts of the journey through Hades pass through my mind: the many-headed dog Cerberus; the punishments of Sisyphus and Prometheus; the glimpses of Tartarus; and the hideous fruits in Persephone’s Grove. Is the Smith’s secret place likely to be any better – especially if he’s got some old grudge against Bria?
‘Is this truly necessary?’ I ask.
‘If we want the Epigoni to rally together and emerge victorious, yes,’ Bria replies. She meets my eye. ‘If you hear an owl shriek, you’ll know we’re in deep trouble. Do whatever you can to call me back – understand?’
‘No I don’t! Call you back – what does that mean?’ I demand, more loudly than I’d intended.
‘Hush, you’ll see,’ she tells me, exasperatingly. But she turns away, taking a resolute breath and casting a fine powder over the embers – frankincense and tamarisk resin from the smell of it. They flare up in hues of deep crimson and gold as she raises her voice in a toneless chant: ‘To Hephaestus, fumigation from frankincense and manna. Strong, mighty Hephaestus, bearing splendid light…’
I’m worried she’ll rouse the smith and his family, but apart from a gentle, bubbling gurgle from the infant, the sound of her voice seems to go unnoticed, as if passing elsewhere. The smoke emerging from the embers begins to churn, filling the forge room without choking us, swirling around to form an opaque curtain.
I sense that same feeling of transition I experienced last year, when we left our world and entered the realm of Hades: my vision is blurring, my body feels weightless and now the very air tastes different, full of heat and smoke and burning incense.
We’re leaving that mortal forge, and are now in some kind of threshold place.
‘Odysseus, this is our last chance to speak unheard,’ Bria murmurs. ‘I said earlier that Hephaestus isn’t what he was. But he’s still a god, and we are about to enter his realm, where he takes his own form and everything is shaped according to his desire, and by what people believe about him. If we displease him, he can destroy us. Anything we want we’re going to have to bargain for.’
‘Will your “history” with him help or hinder that?’
‘I don’t know,’ she admits, which does nothing for my equilibrium.
‘Where does he stand with regard to Achaea and Troy?’ I ask.
‘Don’t worry about that,’ she tells me, and when I go to protest she puts a finger to my lips and elaborates. ‘There are smith gods in every culture but they’re all in decline. Smiths are no longer priests, they’re mere tradesmen. The ascendant gods now are those that explain the unexplainable – nature, death and the like. Those are the gods we make offerings to for survival: war gods, sea gods, gods of love and birth and procreation, gods of the afterlife, harvest queens. They’re the coming deities.’
‘So Hephaestus is becoming irrelevant?’
‘Probably, but he’s still a factor. The Ares cult has muscled in on his old alliance with Aphrodite – it was their priests that spread the story of Hephaestus being crippled. They belittled him to further weaken his worship, and his lameness is now seen as canon. The next step will be to discredit the tales of him being Zeus’s son. In a few generations he’ll be forgotten, and Aphrodite will have always been mated to Ares. That’s how it works.’
‘What about the tale of Hephaestus and Athena?’ I ask. ‘The rape attempt?’
Bria frowns. ‘You heard Teliope’s response, in Tiryns.’
‘But is it just a tale? I know you’ve told me that such stories impact the way the gods are worshipped, but—’
‘Aphrodite wanted Athena weakened, so she set a trap: she told Hephaestus she’d meet him, using a human body, in his avatar’s smithy in Athens. Then she tricked an avatar of Athena – it was Iodama, who you met last year – to go to the smithy in her place.’
‘Why?’
‘Quite simply, to be raped. Hephaestus thought he was going to a passionate encounter with Aphrodite, and when Iodama arrived, having already called Athena into herself, he thought she was a willing substitute. If Hephaestus had succeeded in pinning her down and having his way, Athena’s virginity would have been lost, and her cult thrown into disarray: that was Aphrodite’s intent.’
‘But Iodama escaped?’
Bria nods briskly. ‘She did, and saved our mistress. Beliefs shape gods, but gods also shape beliefs, Ithaca. If she’d succumbed, the nature of Athena would be quite different now; and her worship much altered and weakened. Virginity is highly prized in certain religious circles – it’s considered a holy state – so losing it would have probably destroyed her cult, as Aphrodite purposed.’
We share a somewhat disgusted look. ‘The more I know of the gods, the less I revere them,’ I admit.
Bria surprises me by pecking my cheek. ‘That’s the spirit, Ithaca,’ she murmurs. ‘But don’t say such things to anyone but me.’
She turns away, raising her voice once more in that high, eerie chant. Gradually, another noise reaches us: the slow, deep clangour of a hammer striking metal. It grows and grows until it’s pounding through our flesh, reverberating through our bones, swelling in power and intensity. It fills my senses, becomes the only sound.
When I think I can stand it no more, Bria grips my hand and turns to face the curtain of swirling smoke, picking a direction where the crimson glow behind the grey is deepest and the ringing hammer is loudest, and leads me through.
* * *
We walk a short corridor of smoke and emerge in a large cavern, the ceiling of hewn rock high above and the whole chamber lit by shifting crimson hues. A stone floor runs all the way to the edge of a fiery rift, a deep cleft against the far wall from which eruptions of lava burst and cascade back down into the depths. The heat hits us like like a fist full in the face, and sulphurous air sears our lungs.
Right at the edge of the rift there’s a forge and bellows, and a mighty-thewed figure is silhouetted against the red-lit rock. He’s hammering away at a bronze blade, a sword as long as a man, the metal radiant with heat when he plunges it back in the furnace to soften it. The sound is deafening, each clang a blow to the senses, to sanity.
Bria drops my hand and composes herself for a moment, her face transiting through fear and back to her usual mask of brazen confidence. Once she’s ready, she strides forward and calls out in a piercing voice.
‘Ho, Hephaestus, it’s been a while!’
The Smith God pauses mid-blow and turns as we approach. My first impression is of a wall of muscle so thick and corded it barely seems human, a hunch-backed figure with arms like tree trunks. He’s clad in no more than a leather apron, and his skin is ridged and pitted with welts, scars and pockmarks. Were he to stand straight he’d be more than seven foot tall, I realize with a gulp, but his right leg is twisted and bent, and the left bears most of his weight.
Even in his own realm, he’s a cripple, I realize, and that tells me much about the power of belief. This is not an avatar body – even here inside his own realm, this is how he sees himself, such is his despair.
I focus on his face: he was handsome once, that is clear, but his cheeks and chin are blotched with burn scars, old and new. He has deep-set, mournful eyes that catch the glow of the chasm
and glimmer like molten lava. His beard is singed and patchy, his mouth is twisted into a sour grimace and his teeth are broken.
He’s probably never seen Bria in this particular body, but he seems to recognize her instantly – and his expression is far from welcoming. ‘You,’ he snarls in a voice like grinding stone. He lowers the hammer and flicks the blade he’s been working on into the fiery rift. ‘You dare come here?’
He takes what seems no more than a staggering step forward, yet in an instant he’s bridged the gap between us, seized Bria by the throat and lifted her off the ground. ‘I should brain you before your poison tongue has the chance to taint the air.’
It’s probably suicidal but I go to her aid, only to be backhanded across the chamber, barely managing to check myself at the very rim of the fiery chasm. I’m still lying there winded, the stone burning hot beneath me, and he’s glaring at her and panting hard, as if he’s trying to work out whether to snap her neck before or after casting her into the lava pit.
Her face isn’t frightened – it’s sad. ‘Heph,’ she manages to gasp. ‘I’m back.’
For a moment he seems to soften, then new anger boils up and he simply drops her, turns away and howls at the ceiling, his voice echoing off the chamber walls before silence falls. He whirls on her again, sprawled at his feet, and bellows, ‘How long has it been, you faithless whore?’
‘Um… a century,’ she mumbles, massaging her neck.
He staggers, then catches himself on his forge and stands there, bent and shaking. ‘I had straight limbs then,’ he says in a pained voice. ‘And you… Bria… I believed in you.’
Bria stands tentatively, her face momentarily a mirror of his – two scarred, scared souls. I’ve never seen her like this. ‘Heph, you don’t know what I’ve been through, the things I’ve had to do.’
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