Then there was a hand in her own, pulling her from the water. Her senses warped, and she thought she was flying—for the ceiling of the cave was suddenly close, and then she was standing upon it, looking at the wall of water above her head, only realizing that the water was not above her, but instead below. A trick of perspective; the pull of the earth had reversed. She was on the ceiling.
Under her feet, the roof of the cavern of the well of songs was soft, powdery, like the beach. Or like what Isme imagined clouds would feel like, if she walked on them.
She had but to turn around and there he was: Apollon, god of music and light.
He was young, almost as herself, or so she would have thought from estimating what she knew about Lycander the mostly-man. He was completely beardless, but stood tall like a man, taller than any she had seen, his body fleshed into muscle. His skin shone like bronze in the sun. Only one shoulder was draped with a woven cloth.
Isme could only think to fling herself down on her face, which in the reversed perspective of the ceiling, only made her throw herself upwards higher than him. She did not question how she knew who he was—she simply knew, and responded.
“Child of Orpheus,” he said, above and around her. His voice was like the low reverberation of a stringed instrument, yet unlike any she had ever heard. “I bring this to you—the golden ambrosia of the Olympians. Drink it, as I command, and learn.”
Something hard and warm was in her hand, where nothing had been before. Isme did not question—only obeyed—and it was like drinking air, like sipping smoke—
Stars burst on her vision, and she was flying, the cavern ceiling above-under her body cracked, split open, herself slipping down—no, up—and she wondered what was beyond this ceiling—then remembered, the well of song was between her body and soul, and so she was breaking through into her soul itself—
Body and soul were being severed. Isme screamed. She had found death after all.
She did not know how long she panicked, but her screaming went on and on, the cracks riveting deeper into the cavern, herself floating-falling further up and down. The whole world inverted, up and down meaningless, day and night hurling by as though the sun had loosed his hold on his steeds and the moon fled ahead—
When she came back to some semblance of herself, Isme knew that she had changed. An alteration of the cavern—the ceiling tunneling upward, becoming not a cave but a hole, and herself sliding up the sides, further away from the water of the well of souls. Apollon moved without moving—keeping pace with her descending ascent, as though the world was warping around him rather than himself moving through it.
Seeing she had calmed, the frenzy over, Apollon said, “You are now leaving behind the realm of mankind, and entering into that of the soul. The body is a trap and you have escaped into the world of pure thought where knowledge and revelation lie.”
“I don’t understand,” Isme choked, but what she was thinking and did not say was: You stood there and watched me flail and scream and did nothing to help me.
“I do not expect you to, not at first,” Apollon said, and gave no indication that he could read her thoughts; or, if he could, that he cared what she was thinking. His eyes gazed at her steadily, without blinking, almost looking through her as though she was not really there. They were golden, and Isme was reminded of Kleto.
Apollon said, “Now you will return to who you should have been. Welcome, my child Apollonis.”
Isme let the word track across her mind—the name, Apollonis, meaning “from Apollon,” the typical name given to a daughter when the father did not want to come up with a special name—Briseis was the daughter of Brises, Chryseis the daughter of Chryses—and she realized that she was not named after her true father...
“That is not my name,” Isme told him, correcting without thinking, otherwise she would have known not to speak this way to a god. “I am Isme, daughter of Epimetheus.”
“No,” said Apollon, and there was neither condemnation nor gentleness in his voice. “That is the name forced upon you by the ones who stole you from me.”
This claim seemed so extraordinary that Isme forgot where she was, that she was slipping up down a long tunnel, and may well be dying—but then when she came back to herself, she recognized first the insult: the implication that Apollon did not recognize her for herself, and that her father was someone who had no claim.
She recalled when her father had first told her of her origins, that she had been born to a man and woman across the sea in a land she did not know. She had wondered whether he expected her to react poorly to such news—and the feeling of her own determination rising within her, that one revelation was not enough to change her thirteen years under Epimetheus’s steady guiding hand. The same determination was surging within her now—
“That is not my name,” said Isme. One was not supposed to speak to the gods with disrespect, for that was to scorn the entire cosmos—but she knew who she was talking to and said everything anyway. “I am not the child of a thief. My birth mother and her husband cast me away, and my grandmother handed me over to my father.”
Apollon did not look surprised by any of this outburst. Instead, he said, “You were not cast out.” He let those words linger in the air and Isme could not think of what to say in response. He continued, “When you were brought to my temple, and the prophecy of your future knowledge was spoken, you were dedicated to me. But in the night you were stolen and handed off to those who preferred to keep your knowledge for themselves.”
Isme was not quite willing to call a god a liar directly. So she said nothing, and instead reached out and seized at the rock she was sliding—down? up?—along. The first few tries failed but then she caught and felt her wrists strain nearly out of their sockets. But she stopped falling. Apollon hovered beside her like a nervous bird.
Though his face did not look at all concerned.
“Your real name is Apollonis,” he continued. “There have been many Apollonis. Through the ages you and your sisters Cephisso and Borysthenis have served me. Sometimes you three are called by other names, like Nete or Mese or Hypate. You have died and returned to dust and come back up again, my most faithful daughters always bringing news straight from the source of all knowledge and life: the grave below.”
“I...” Isme began, but words seemed to tumble through her like the cascade of waves in a storm, never stopping long enough to let her truly think. After many tries she managed, “Are you saying that I have lived before? That I have gone down into the underworld like all mortals, and then somehow come up to the living again?”
Isme had listened to the old woman in the temple at Delphi and began to grasp that knowledge came from the underworld—the idea that she herself also came from there...
“A question with a suitably complicated answer,” said Apollon. “What is a person, god, object or thing, except what it does and functions as? If a king rules a city well, and dies, and his son or even a stranger takes up the same rule, life in the city not changing nor the goodness of her rulers, has the original king truly died? Or is kingship an office, and the individual inhabiting the throne merely a figurehead for the true power?”
“I don’t know,” said Isme, who was considering herself suitably bewildered. Yet even as she said this, she could feel her mind stretching, reaching out to take hold of the corner of his question, drawing the whole fabric of it closer to examine each individual thread. She did not understand now—but perhaps if she thought deeply enough she would.
“You know very little,” Apollon said, in agreement with Isme’s thoughts. “But with the transformation of your mind, the opening of this gateway and your ascent into the realm beyond the physical, soon you will know more than any mortal. You will become a prophetess at Delphi, speaking what others do not understand.”
Things others do not understand, Isme thought—and almost asked: Like the end of this world? But she did not speak, worried that if she did, she would just receive another puzzle
to ponder over. Already all this disorientation had her head hurting.
“Know this,” said Apollon, “Your first lesson as a prophetess of logic and reason. The ultimate truth of existence is that all of reality carries no meaning or purpose. Every being alive will ultimately perish and be plowed under into the realm of Hades, where it will become nothing but an unintelligible echo—including the great Gaea herself. Therefore, every fleeting moment is only a small drop in a stream that dries up and is gone. All things—happiness, suffering, striving, people, ideas—are nothing.”
These words poured through Isme’s ears like cool water descending down all the way to her toes. She shivered. Objections rose like the dawning of the sun, the only thing to keep her warm. The stone was cool under her grip. She said, “That cannot be.”
“Know this: your second lesson as a prophetess of logic,” said Apollon, continuing as though her objection was hardly worth answering. “There are three aspects that define man’s existence. But the nature of reality is such that a man can only have two of those aspects and must forsake the other.”
Isme watched him hold up a hand with three fingers raised, his thumb sticking out. And he said, “The things are: happiness, knowledge, and self-awareness.”
He put down his second finger, “One can be happy if one has knowledge, for while one will understand that you will die in the world will end, one will not fully comprehend this because of a lack of self-awareness. Thus one goes along deluded about the meaning of one’s life, neglecting to realize that you are actually worth nothing, merely paying lip service to the reality while not truly applying it to yourself.”
He put down his pointer finger, “One can be happy if one has self-awareness, but not the knowledge that the world and yourself will end. One thus lives without the knowledge that would destroy one’s happiness, a delusion that one has continual meaning brought about by continual existence even past the realm of the dead.”
And he collapsed his thumb into a fist, “And one can have knowledge and self-awareness, which is to know that ultimately destruction will overtake oneself, that the world and all it contains is a meaningless exercise in suffering, and thus one forsakes happiness, for then the only people who have happiness are the ones who are truly mad.”
“That can’t be,” repeated Isme, turning the three aspects over in her mind. Some deep part of herself revolted against them, against the claim of meaninglessness, needing no reason she understood. She could not find a way to unravel the claim or the three aspects in and of themselves, but she could think to add something that would challenge them by changing the stated nature of the universe. “This world will end, all will perish, but there is always hope.”
“Hope,” said Apollon, “is a lie designed by people who have no self-awareness, as a way to deny themselves understanding of their truly impossible state.”
“No,” said Isme, “We can strive for more, be the best we are during our lives, enjoy our lives. And we can seek to find a way to live on in fame and glory. And earn a better afterlife—perhaps in the Elysian fields, among the heroes.”
“Fame is pointless,” said Apollon. “Glory is pointless. Every story is forgotten. The sun will dim and crack like an egg. The flash of joy that is rarely in your life will be a grain of sand against time spent as a shade below. There are no Elysian Fields—that is a bedtime story told by people deluded with hope. All fields below are asphodel, kings and heroes and gods and murderers and paupers alike.”
No Elysium—at these words Isme felt something sink within her, nearly let go of the rock ledge, would have been swept downward. Except she remembered just in time: she was falling up. And she knew that if what she was hearing was terrible now, how much worse it would be if she continued along the path Apollon had carved within her.
She said, “If there is no Elysian Fields, then there must be no Tartarus, either.” As she said this, something in her went cold again, thinking about how wonderful people of the stories like beloved Alcestis were now grouped with men like Tantalus—
“No,” said Apollon, “Tartarus exists. It is always possible that the shades of men can fall into worse states; it is simply impossible for them to rise to higher states. Not that it matters anyway—for they have forgotten their crimes like the rest of the dead.”
And Isme wondered then about herself:
I murdered those men, she thought, even if unintentionally. And here is the god, Apollon, saying that rising from the depths is impossible. Is there be no absolution? I thought the gods could do such things—my father said that he heard Paris of Troy, before stealing Helen, first came to Sparta to ask for absolution of blood guilt for killing a boy... and the gods granted that...
But maybe there is no way for my blood guilt to be absolved.
She said, half trying to distract herself from this horrifying possibility, “Well, maybe someday there will be something other than the fields of Asphodel.”
“You are describing something that would need to remake the universe from below the depths unto the height beyond the stars,” said Apollon. “Not even the gods can do that.”
“I—” Isme felt words constricting on the inside of her throat, said what she was truly thinking: “There must be something that gives life purpose.” Bowing her head to the rock, she felt the strain in her fingers, said, “Perhaps we will all vanish into the underworld, but for now we live and move and breathe—maybe that is enough.”
“I have just explained why that is operating under a delusion,” said Apollon. “That is to go through life in denial, lacking self-awareness or pretending that the knowledge of the universe’s lack of purpose is not true. That is the same as your claim about hope. You have simply repeated the same error using different words.”
There must be something. Isme’s mind rose, stones laid atop one another to build into walls and palaces—even as she clung to the side of the tunnel down and up into her own soul, seeing no escape, she knew that this might well be the most important conversation of her life. It would define the rest of her—
Important conversations, she thought, and again her mind trailed back to that night on the island when her father had told her where she had come from. She saw his worry crinkled in the corner of his beady eyes, and the way his eyes had relaxed with relief when she told him that despite knowing about Orpheus, nothing had changed, she was still his child...
And Isme said, “Love.”
For a long time Apollon was silent, and Isme’s thoughts trailed over old paths she had worn through her heart, those long days on the island when her father alone was the only person she knew in all the world. How patient he had been with her, his hands showing hers how to hew stone for new arrowheads, how to fish without a net, how to make fire without her cheating method—
Then Apollon said, “Love is the worst of all.”
“You lie!” Isme felt the denial well up from her throat like vomit. She spoke without forethought, not caring that she was speaking to her own grandfather, much less the son of Zeus and a god in his own right—but even as she realized this, she knew that she would not have changed what she said if she had thought about it first.
Apollon did not seem offended. Something like amusement smeared across his features. He looked very much like her own father did, when Isme had said something foolish or sometimes asked a particularly good question. Like he was proud of her.
He said, “What is love? An emotion that spurs people against their own interests. It is the string that keeps all the firewood together so it can burn, without which the truth would emerge and all would see the underlying meaninglessness of existence.”
“No,” Isme disagreed, remembering her father’s face when he looked at her, after they had seen the sea reclaiming her lost sailors. His eyes had been soft at the corners.
“Love is the god-killer,” said Apollon, and Isme started at the claim, staring.
Apollon seemed satisfied by this reaction, and said, “In love, Gaea brought for
th Ouranos, who usurped and replaced her. In love, Ouranos cast down his hundred-armed children who he despised seeing on his adored Gaea. In love, Gaea urged Kronos to destroy his father, and in love Rhea preserved her son Zeus, who destroyed his father in turn. In love, Zeus pursues his lovers—and in love, Hera punishes them.”
“That is not love,” Isme objected. “That’s twisted—”
“You are redefining love so that it carries only positive connotations,” Apollon said. “Rhea’s love for her children led to her husband’s mutilation and usurpation. She may feel—truly—positive emotions for her children, may not have intended the result, but what did that lead to? Her husband tortured and destroyed. Is not love horrifying?”
Isme sucked in a breath, ready to argue—
“And Epimetheus,” said Apollon, drawing breath back out of Isme’s lungs. “Love moved him to accept Pandora as a gift, and through her brought destruction on all his mortal children. He loved her—and because of that, a world ended, and untold thousands died.”
Isme found that she could not think of anything to say. This seemed a reasonable interpretation of the story—her own father had brought about the end of the last world—and in a flash, she understood how he had been able to see those dead sailors carried out to sea, to comprehend how he had looked at her that night with understanding in his eyes, and not the weight of judgement—
“And your father,” Apollon said, calmly. “My son, mighty Orpheus—able to sing the dead back to life, and not killed by my father Zeus like your uncle Asclepius was, for sheer wonder of what he could sing. In love, he wed Eurydice—and lost her. In love, he went to the underworld to find her. And in love he was unable to withstand one more moment from looking behind him—ending them both in misery and shame.”
Drawing his full height, Apollon announced, “Orpheus’s head now sings a dirge of love, how it brought him to destruction, this very day on the other side of the world.”
Everyone Should Eat His Own Turtle (A Greek Myth Novel) Page 19