by James Welsh
It was late afternoon, and the Greeks across the lands were enjoying their final moments of the day, in whatever way they could. The farmers were leaning against their plows, enjoying the way their fields glowed yellow in the dusk, the closest many of them would come to seeing gold. Children were laughing and dancing and running in the narrow streets of the towns, with their mothers looking for them. Merchants were closing up their shops and stalls in the marketplace, and the lucky ones were counting their stacks of coins for a third, even fourth time.
Far away from the ports and the towns, there was a lake burrowed in the mountains. It was more of a mirror than a lake, its color the world around it. On the cloudy days, puffs of pearl sailed across the surface – on the rainy days, the lake was black and boiling like murmurs of tar. Now though, the lake was a bloody color, because the setting sun was dying a bloody death. Out of the crimson lake, though, there was a crackling, elderly face staring up, looking an old man in the eye.
The old man had finished rinsing the dust from his face and struggled to stand up, using his gnarled walking cane for support. His clothes looked almost as old as he was, just as wrinkled and blotchy. The old man looked like the walking dead, his eyes the only thing about him that seemed alive, and even that made the rest of him look ruined in comparison. The eyes were rich and deep, almost creamy with unmistakable silver.
Athena looked around her, scanning the steep forest that surrounded the lake. With the forest’s darkness and the sharp mountains all around, there was enough to be suspicious about. Athena thought she had heard something too, but as she spent a minute of silence, listening, there was nothing there. They say that when mortals are given nothing, they try to mold something out of it. She had seen the mortals grope about in the darkness before, their eyes wild, expecting something imaginary to snatch them away. True, Athena was no mortal – she was not so much more perfect as she was less imperfect than a human – but the imagination of a god is much stronger. A god has to be creative – the world owes its existence to the artist in every god and goddess.
But perhaps Athena was expecting something to look for her, because she was looking for something. It was the reason why she was hiking through the Arcadian mountains, disguised as an old beggar. It was why, in her bundle of cloth, she had a long dagger, fashioned by her brother Hephaestus as a favor. The dagger was important to Athena as an old man, because it could be easily tied to the walking cane in her hand: the deadliest spear in the mortal world. Nothing can escape an immortal blade, no matter how it was made.
Why Athena was walking along that lake’s shore began years beforehand. Although Athena had long since been cast out of Mount Olympus – due to the other gods’ fear of her Titaness blood – her worship amongst the mortals was better remembered. The moment a god materializes in the world and makes their self known is when the temples and monuments and statues and paintings begin sweeping the known world. When Athena saw her tributes in the towns she visited, she couldn’t help but smile – if only those people knew that the person they worshipped was walking past them in the crowd. And not too far away from where Athena stood on that lake shore, actually, there was a small temple built in her honor. Other gods would have been insulted by such a stunted temple, one that was barely taller than the trees that surrounded it. But in Arcadia, there was more wildlife than there were people, and so Athena did not mind her short shadow over the region. Besides, she had lived with the mortals long enough to know how much work went into that building, or any building for that matter. When she was first banished from Olympus, she thought that the mortals could build just as quickly, just as brilliantly as the immortals could. And so she was surprised when she watched some of those mortals build a house, taking months to do the task. Legend had it that her ancestors built the palace atop Mount Olympus in only minutes – they would have built it sooner, but they took a break after a few minutes. In the years since Athena came to live with the mortals, though, her ignorance withered, and she came to have a new respect for the mortals. A shrine or a massive temple was an honor to her, as long as they were built with rough human hands.
And, while her temple nearby was modest, a staff of priestesses were always on hand, tending after the worship of their patron goddess as if the world depended on it. One of the priestesses, a wiry, young woman with milky arms, died a few nights before. She had left the comforts of her home that night to pluck a bucketful of water from her well – she was found the next morning, gored to death. The other priestesses became terrified as a result, fearing that the murderer was some rogue god or mischievous faun that didn’t know its place. What else would dare attack the priestess of an immortal? Athena heard the prayers of her priestesses, and so she came to kill the murderer and bring peace to her temple once again. She did this because it was her duty to look after her priestesses, just like they looked after her interests in the world. And she did so, knowing that it was likely no immortal or faun, but probably a stray bull, an easy enough target for her blade.
As immortal as Athena was – as much as her sense of duty towards her temple had steadied her – Athena still felt a twinge of nervousness as she began to walk into the forest, her eyes adjusting as the sunlight dimmed around her. After Athena had been banished from Olympus, her sister Artemis paid her a visit early one morning in her humble home. It had been the first time that Athena had met her sister. Artemis had been forged between Zeus and Hera in the traditional way, after Zeus realized that he had broken that prophecy – he no longer needed to fear his offspring coming to kill him. But Artemis was still very much Hera’s daughter, and like her mother, she too hated all that Athena represented. But when Artemis came to her, asking if they could go hunting together, Athena thought that her sister was extending an offering of peace. There was an irony that the sisters could come to a truce through the blood of hunting, something that the clever Athena immediately noticed. Still, Athena accepted, because she knew she could get more help from a friend than she could from an enemy. It was not long into the hunt, though, that tragedy almost struck. There was a deer between the sisters, and Artemis struck first, her arrow slamming into the deer’s skull. Artemis’ aim was flawless and flawed at the same time: while she did bring down the deer, the arrow was a few inches short of missing the prey altogether and hitting Athena. When Athena brought up this point later, Artemis tried to laugh it off as stray aim. Athena didn’t say so, but she began to suspect that Artemis had been aiming more for her and less for the deer. Athena knew she was immortal and so she couldn’t die, but she still felt the occasional twinges of pain. And Athena had heard enough stories of stray arrows to know that, even if an arrow didn’t kill, it could still sting amazingly so. And so, since that hunting trip, Athena had always hunted alone – she was afraid of becoming like the prey she hunted.
She had not bothered to bring up that incident with her father Zeus. Athena may have still been his favored child, but Zeus was still held to the demands of Queen Hera. War between Zeus’ Athena and Hera’s Artemis would have meant war between the King and Queen themselves, taking the entire kingdom down with them. Athena had only heard of the arguments and even skirmishes between the monarchs, and she did not want to be the reason why that fire sprouted up again. There had not been peace long enough in the kingdom to justify another fight. And so Athena said nothing, because she knew that her father Zeus would do nothing as well.
But for all that Athena knew and would come to know, there was one very important thing she was ignorant of. She had the constant feeling that she wasn’t alone, and her instincts were right. But what she was hunting – and what was hunting her – was not a beast or a human. Instead, the forest teemed with immortality. They say that when enough gods crowded a landscape, that the fundamental qualities of the nature changed. The leaves would refuse to fall from the trees, the birds would stop singing, and the small critters would hide in their shelters in the trees and the ground, all until the
intimidation passed over them. Nature recognized an immortal before man ever could, and so nature bowed, all before man even noticed the kings in front of them.
Some distance behind her, slithering along in the dirt and the grass and puddles, Hades followed. He usually turned into a snake when he was in the world above, so as to avoid attracting attention. Being a snake, even a poisonous one, seemed foolhardy – there were too many birds that could easily pluck him from the ground, too many people that would decapitate a snake out of pure reflex. But no birds dared to go near that snake, sensing something unnatural and foul in his meat, and no humans could kill the serpent, their blades bouncing off the thick scales. He followed Athena dressed as a snake, because he knew Athena was too busy looking above herself – Hades heard enough to know that Athena and most of Olympus were at an uneasy truce with each other. Athena had no time to look down at what was beneath her feet. But Athena should have done so, because her answers could be found in the serpent.
It had been a few nights before, when Hades followed the doomed priestess to her home, much as he was following Athena now. When he found out where she lived, Hades the snake went and bit a bull on a nearby farm. With the bull in an induced coma and nearing death, it was no problem for Hades to assume his usual form and saw one of the horns off with his sword. Armed with the tusk, he crept back to the priestess’ home and waited. When the priestess walked out the door that evening to fetch some water, Hades stabbed her in the heart with the horn. He killed the priestess because he knew that Athena would notice. And he chose that temple in Arcadia because he knew that Zeus would coincidentally be in the same area.
Unknown to Athena – and almost all of the other immortals, except for Hades – Zeus had been taking strolls through the region as of late. Against his will, he had gone through his brief period of fidelity with Hera. He felt pressured to do so, after the scandal that erupted years before when Metis and Athena slid out of his ears, exposing Zeus’ history of lies. But the years are long and memories short, and so it did not take long for Zeus to begin the hunt for new lovers. Before, he had looked for lovers to avoid the prophecy, but now, now he was looking for mistresses because he wanted to. This was more awkward to do now, though, than it was before. He had begun a family with Hera in earnest, after all. Now, Olympus teemed with a new generation of immortals, such as Aphrodite, Ares, Artemis, Apollo, and so on and so forth. He did not doubt that when he left Olympus now for his trips, an always-suspicious Hera ordered her children to look out for their father, to make sure he did not get into more trouble.
Zeus suspected this, and for once his paranoia was correct. But fortunately for the King God, he had his own clever moments, and so the impossible became an inconvenience. So the moment that Zeus touched down in the mortal world, he assumed one of his many shapes: a bull. He lumbered through the lands, snorting and chewing grass and all of the other things he guessed bulls did. The gods and goddesses on Olympus were looking so eagerly for Zeus in a human form, they never thought to suspect the stray bull in the countryside. One day, as Zeus trotted through Arcadia, he came upon a milkmaid at work in a field. She was so busy milking a cow to notice the bull that was walking up behind her. Zeus took a moment of silence to bask in the beauty of a woman. She had short blonde hair and wide hips – from where Zeus stood, he couldn’t see her face, but he assumed that was gorgeous as well. And of course Zeus fell in love with the milkmaid in all of the ways that he shouldn’t have.
When Zeus snorted to announce his presence, the woman turned around sharply. She was taken aback at first, frightened even. In his lust, Zeus had not realized that a mortal woman would be terrified to be in the same field with a fiery bull. And so Zeus lowered his head in an awkward bow towards the woman, as if to show his devotion to the woman. It must have been convincing, because the woman soon gave up her fears and inched forward. She hesitatingly pressed her hand again the bull’s cheek, fearful of giving the beast a start. But Zeus did not lunge forward – if anything, he loved the massage of her fingers – he wanted to curl around her fingers.
Zeus’ plan was the same as it always was – to trick a milkmaid into thinking that he was a loose bull. When the woman tried to lead him down the road, looking for the owner, Zeus would transform and together they would make love, all under the trees that hid him from Olympus. This was the way that the plan usually worked.
But that time, things had to be different.
Perhaps it was because the woman could somehow sense something far more powerful than a bull beneath the leathery skin. Or perhaps it was because the woman was raised in Crete before finding a home in Arcadia. After all, it is in Crete where the bulls are prized as deities, their fertility a sign of a bountiful future for humanity. Whatever the reason, the woman looked around, as if hoping that no one would see what she was about to do. Satisfied, the woman reached in and licked Zeus the bull’s face. Electrified, Zeus gently nudged the woman to the ground. As the woman tore her clothes from herself, Zeus carefully positioned himself over her, afraid of accidentally trampling her in the moment of passion.
And that was how the two made love that afternoon, in a rolling field with no witnesses but the cow the woman had been milking. When Zeus left to go back home to Olympus, he did so confused, for a number of reasons. What he was the most baffled by was his identity in the affair: did he love the woman as a god or as the bull? It was apparent that the woman loved the bull, but Zeus wasn’t sure about himself. Sometimes the bull’s spirit was overpowering, even for a god as mighty as Zeus. Sometimes he could do nothing but stand back, watching with a mixture of amusement and horror as the bull did some of the things it did.
And yet, in spite of Zeus’ misgivings about the weird afternoon with the milkmaid, that had not stopped him from coming back. Each time he returned to the milkmaid, though, he did so as a bull. Sometimes he wondered if he should creep into the woman’s room late one night. He would do so not in his godly form – doing so would crush the woman’s weak mortal heart – but in his usual human form. But he never did this: not only did he feel the woman would not enjoy him as much, but he might not enjoy her as much either. Zeus was especially embarrassed by that last observation, and he didn’t dare boast about the affair to anyone but himself. But it would have taken much more than humiliation to keep Zeus away from those summer afternoons with the milkmaid.
Zeus enjoyed the present of the affair, never stopping to think of the affair’s future. Of course, this was something he never considered about any of his other lusts. Zeus did not know that just a week before, in the heat of the moment, the couple together had conceived a child. And so, unknown to Zeus, a child grew in the mother’s womb. It was no ordinary child, though – it was a hybrid of some sorts, already doomed to a long lifetime of confusion and agony. The woman would eventually give birth, or try to give birth, but the child would kill its mother in its first moment of life. The child would then grow into a horrific beast – it would look like a bull in every way except its legs would look like a man’s arms and legs. It would then become feral, killing dozens of people in the wilderness until a famous hunter would eventually kill it.
Of course, not even Zeus in all of his glory would possibly understand the ugly future that he had already written. Now, he was just lying on the rocky shore of a rushing creek, resting and enjoying what little of the day was left. The stones underneath him were warm still from the afternoon, and the dusk light still felt heated. It was wonderful, every drop of everything, and Zeus lazily hoped that the moment would be forever.
Normally, Zeus as a bull would have been alert, his flared nostrils paying attention to any unusual smells. Once as a bull, he had smelled a hunter from two miles away, and so Zeus was able to escape without the hunter ever knowing he was there. While a human with simple weapons could not break a mighty god, Zeus was afraid that his invulnerability would reveal his true status, and so unintentionally kill the mo
rtal hunter. But now, Zeus was so relaxed, he was no longer paying attention to anything going on around him. And so anything that could happen would happen.
If Zeus had been paying attention, he would have smelled an old man downriver of him, a man who would have looked human but was far from it. Zeus would have been able to smell the dried blood on the old man’s spear – not only that, but Zeus would have even recognized the scent of the metal itself. Any weapon forged by Hephaestus bore a distinctive apple smell – why this was, Zeus never bothered to ask his estranged son.
And still the old man crept closer. While Zeus did not sense the hunter approaching, the man certainly knew that there was a bull nearby. The old man had amazing hearing for his old age, and so he heard the deep sighs of the bull as it breathed lazily. The old man had amazing smell, and he wrinkled his nose at the scent of droppings in the air. And then the old man saw it, the beast supposedly responsible for the death of the priestess. The old man stepped forward carefully, anxiously trying not to rustle the grass and alert the bull. But Zeus as the bull remained motionless, looking more dead than asleep to the world.
The old man quietly pulled the blade out and lashed it to the end of his walking cane. All the while he did this, he looked curiously at the bull. He had seen many of the beasts before, but never one that large – it would have been easy enough to dismiss the bull as simply being well-fed. No, there was something else, something more to the bull, but the old man did not have time to think. Here was a beast, and it must be killed – there was no reasoning around it.
The old man may have raised the makeshift spear, but it was Athena’s hand that threw it. The goddess watched as the spear launched through the air, the cane wobbling a little as it flew. It took barely a moment for the tip of the blade to connect with the bull, for the sharpness to dig through the hide, for the immortal’s spear to drive through the entire body and stick to the ground beneath it. That was all it took, and Athena stood back, satisfied by her revenge, and waiting for the beast’s death-cries. There was a rare glint of fury in Athena’s normally clear eyes, something that would have shocked her if she could see her reflection.
But as the bull folded into the rocky shore, it didn’t unleash a final cry. Instead, something else happened. When the corpse had settled, its skin began to move, or rather, something beneath the skin began to move. Athena watched, morbidly fascinated, as cracks actually began to show in the rough skin of the bull. And then, like an egg hatching, there was a pop and the skin splintered. Something then began to struggle out of the mess of cow innards and muscle and blood. It took Athena a few moments to realize what it was: a beautiful golden eagle. Or rather, it was usually a soft gold, but now the eagle’s color was a massacre red. It slowly lifted its head up, held back by either exhaustion or pain, and it tried to screech its usual screech. The only thing that came out of its beak, though, was a long and ragged hiss, like steam rushing through cracks in the ground.
Athena continued to watch as the eagle stumbled away from the shore – she had by now realized that she had done something wrong, something terribly wrong, but she wasn’t sure what. The eagle staggered a short distance on its wobbly talons before it came to a halt. It was there that the rocky riverbank ended and the ground rose, just slightly, and ran into the forest. The eagle looked up the slow incline, and it gave up. Tiredly, the eagle settled down once more into the rocky riverbank and wrapped its wings around itself, forming a cocoon of feathers. The eagle, and all around it, was still and silent, and still Athena watched.
In a few moments, the bloody gold of the eagle feathers began to calcify and turn grayish as if it was stone, and then Athena realized that the bird had actually turned to stone. And then the eagle was no longer an eagle, but a small boulder, out of place on the floor of pebbles. Athena noticed that the top of the stone was beginning to crackle, and something else was growing out of the stone. It grew and grew until Athena recognized it as being the sapling of an oak tree. And the oak tree grew until it stood just a little bit taller than Athena herself. The tree trunk should have been strong and enduring, but instead the bark was withered, almost diseased. No leaves hung from its branches, which reminded Athena of spider legs, thin and curling. The trunk began to crackle in front of Athena, and then it split altogether, the broken seam running the height of the trunk. From the crack in the tree, Zeus appeared. He stood tall as tall as he always had, but just for a moment, before he collapsed to the ground.
Startled by the sudden appearance of Zeus – not yet understanding the consequences of what she had done – Athena rushed to cradle her father. She struggled to pick up his weight from the ground – as strong as a goddess as she was, there was nothing in the world heavier than Zeus, because he was heavier than the world. Athena struggled, and she realized that Zeus was slick to the touch. And that was when Athena looked away from Zeus’ grimacing face and realized that his entire body was covered in a thick film of ichor – the silvery blood that belonged to the gods themselves and themselves alone. The silver gushed all over Zeus’ robes, forming a slippery puddle around him like an aura. Athena gasped as she finally began to understand.
“Father! Father. Father,” Athena repeated the word, less out of shock and more as a chant, as if the ritual of the word would bring her father back to her. In that moment, she was the child that she never was before, crying out for her father.
By then, the sun had slipped into the west. But even with night approaching, the forest had not turned inky. Rather, the ichor that Zeus bled was glowing brightly but not consistently; instead, the ichor pulsed in its glow, matching the fallen god’s slowing heartbeat. The darkness around them shrank before the ichor’s pulse, but when the glow shrank, the woods’ darkness approached. Each time, the pulse shrank just a little bit more, and the darkness crept a little bit closer.
Athena desperately pressed against the gaping wound in Zeus’ chest, but the wound was too large, and her hands too small. Still, she pressed down in the hopes of stopping the gush.
“Athena…”
It was a soft whisper, but loud enough for Athena to hear over her panic. She spun and looked her father in the face. She had never seen him so gray.
“Father, I’m sorry! I didn’t know…!”
“I know, my child, I know,” Zeus rasped. “How could…”
Zeus coughed horrifically and spat on the ground beside him.
“How could you know? How could anyone know?”
What neither Zeus nor Athena knew, though, was that someone did know.
Zeus continued. “Tell them,” he gasped, “tell them…”
His words slipped away.
Athena, frantic, begged, “Tell who what? Tell me!”
But it was too late. Zeus, the King of the Skies, was dead. His eyes stared blankly ahead, his mighty hands limp, his heart finally still. With him went thousands upon thousands of years of history – gone was the triumph of the war with the Titans – gone was the artist of humanity – gone was the engine of the nighttime skies. In the wake of Zeus’ death, the mortals would wonder why the heavens froze at night, the constellations no longer moving in their wide arcs across the sky. What they didn’t know was that those constellations wept, that those portraits no longer saw the need to persist.
For the first time in her life, Athena began to sob. Standing over the fallen Zeus, Athena cried richly as she beat her breast in grief. She lifted herself and screamed, silencing every creature within a mile of where she stood. Exhausted already from her grief – having never suffered tragedy before – Athena slipped down to the ground and curled herself around her dead father.
She held her hands to her face, perhaps to keep the tears in, or perhaps to hide herself from the world. When she finally removed her hands from her face, there was ichor all over Athena’s cheeks and forehead, her hands still stained from trying to save Zeus. The ichor still had its strength; Athena’s face never l
ooked so youthful and vibrant. By the glow of the ichor, Athena was still weeping, but much softer now. Her bloody face shone in the darkness until that too began to dry and fade, plunging her into the darkness she had already felt.
Book 7