The God Beneath the Sea

by Leon Garfield

  In the groin of the gaunt mountain the three blind, stone-faced creatures laughed again. Atropos fingered her shears. The blades were sharp. To test them – just to test them – she had slit a new-spun thread.

  Prometheus knelt beside his cold, quiet creation, not instantly knowing what was amiss, what had fled.

  The watchful crane that had perched in the rafters was gone. Hermes the messenger had taken a shade to the echoing world of the dead. Alone and bewildered, it flitted on the further bank of the River Styx.

  The first man had died.

  ‘So frail a thread?’ whispered Prometheus. ‘Was it the clay . . . or the seeds themselves? I had hoped – but it was not to be. What can you do against the gods and the Fates with the fragile, pitiful life I’ve given you?’

  Then Prometheus buried his dead in the shadow of the poplar tree and mourned till it was light.

  NINE

  FIRE

  ‘My father bids me tell you to destroy them, great Prometheus; or he will do so himself.’

  Thus Hermes, messenger of the gods, as he stood, piercing bright, in the Titan’s garden, washed by the morning sun.

  ‘Why? Why? How have they offended? What is their crime?’

  ‘Who knows what is in the mind of Zeus? Perhaps he is offended, Lord Prometheus? Perhaps he finds what you have made too close in aspect to the gods? Perhaps he sees them as a mockery? Gods who are subject to the Fates . . . Destroy them, Prometheus. So my father says.’

  ‘And you, good Hermes? Is it your wish, too?’

  The god looked sideways, avoiding the Titan’s despairing eyes; shifted from foot to winged foot and smiled as his shadow seemed to dance off into the trees.

  ‘Between you and me, Prometheus . . . no. Not particularly, that is. I think they have a certain charm. Personally, I like them. I assure you, Prometheus, that such messages as, from time to time, I bring from this great god or that, do not necessarily reflect my own opinions.’

  Hermes, ever politic, ever unwilling to offend, watched the mighty Titan curiously; he continued, ‘Believe me, my friend – I understand your affection and your sorrow. When I summoned the shade of the one that died, I was troubled, Prometheus. As we entered the grove of black poplars, this shade and I, it asked me: Why, why? And I could not answer. Then, when I led it to the dark river and dragged it aboard the evil, rotting boat, and it saw there was no one else there but bony Charon, again it begged me: Why, why?

  ‘We came to the further bank, and still there was no one else by. And so to the Field of Asphodel: empty, empty . . .

  ‘It clung to me, Prometheus, as I left it, still begging me to tell it why.

  ‘It knew nothing; had not lived more than the winking of an eye – yet it sensed the vastness of its loss. I looked back, and never in all the universe have I seen anything so lonely as that single, frightened shade wandering over the ashy ground and crying: Why, why?’

  The Titan listened and groaned in anguish; then Hermes added softly: ‘They are so frail, Prometheus. Your creatures are so pitifully frail. Are they worth their labour?’

  Eagerly the Titan laid his hand on Hermes’ ribboned staff – as if to deflect or soften the god’s terrible message.

  ‘But I will strengthen them! I will refine the substance, purify it and pluck out the seeds that menace. I—’

  ‘It is too late, Prometheus. They are doomed.’

  ‘By Zeus?’

  ‘If not by my father, then by every wind that blows. How could they endure, never knowing when Atropos might take it into her blind head to slit the thread of their lives?’

  How indeed? And the more Hermes argued, the more intolerable seemed the burden Prometheus’ fragile creatures would have to bear.

  Yet their very frailty stung the Titan’s heart and strengthened his great will. He begged bright Hermes to plead with his father for a little respite. If the creatures were destined to flicker out – then let them perish of their own accord. But spare them the dreadful thunderbolt. Let them see and love the gods, however briefly, and, maybe, find some favour in their sight—

  Here, subtle Hermes pursed his lips and tapped his staff against his head.

  ‘Between you and me, my friend, I fancy you’ve hit on something. I don’t promise – I never promise – but if your creatures were to find favour in great Zeus’s eyes . . . that is to say, if they were to go out of their way to please, then who knows? Think on that, Lord Prometheus; and I will undertake to delay my father’s hand.’

  Between Arcadia and Attica, there was a place called Sicyon where the creatures of Prometheus had begun to make a home. It was here, in a myrtle grove – once dear to Hermes – that Prometheus put it into men’s minds to honour the gods. A rich, red bull, sleek and portly, was sacrified and the Titan cupped his hands to his vast mouth and shouted up to Olympus for almighty Zeus to descend and be mankind’s first guest.

  ‘See, great god! My creatures honour you and worship you! Come down so they may behold you and give you the best of the earth!’

  He shaded his eyes and stared desperately up towards the curtains of cloud that veiled the mountain’s divine summit.

  Even as he watched, a finger of lightning crooked round them and drew them briefly apart. Then came a roll of thunder. The god had heard. The god would come.

  Eagerly Prometheus stripped the blood-dappled skin from the bull and divided the carcass, laying the bones and fat beneath one part of the hide, and the steaming flesh beneath the other; but in his haste he had not detached the stomach . . . Two portions: one for the god – and one for mankind.

  Wide-eyed and innocent that they were, poised on the edge of extinction, the Titan’s creatures watched as their great creator toiled and struggled to save them.

  Suddenly they shrank back. A fearful radiance seared their naked eyes and scorched their skin. They cried out and fled into the shadows of the myrtles, hiding their faces in their hands. The blaze had been unendurable. It lingered on the inner eye where it burned its vision. Within the scalding radiance had been a shape. A shimmering fluent shape, part man-like, part immeasurably greater. Eyes had seen them – eyes like merciless suns.

  It had been the god . . .

  ‘Welcome, mighty Zeus. Welcome, father of the gods, lord of the sky! Your feast is ready. Mankind awaits.’

  The Titan stood back as the fiery god stared round the grove. Then, seeing that Prometheus’ poor creatures were blasted by his light, Zeus veiled his lustre and smiled.

  He saw the covered portions of the slaughtered bull. He nodded. They had not skimped their offering. The beast had been of the finest.

  He touched one portion, lifted a corner of the hide. The stomach: it reeked of offal. He turned to the other. He glimpsed rich fat. Prometheus trembled; all-seeing Zeus nodded.

  He pointed to the second portion.

  ‘I have chosen,’ the mighty god decreed. ‘From now through all eternity, in feast and holy sacrifice, this portion is for the immortal gods, and that for mankind.’

  He flung back the skin he had chosen. Beneath the rich layer of fat lay nothing but the animal’s wretched, meatless bones. The divine portion . . .

  Prometheus bowed his head to hide a helpless smile. He awaited the enraged god’s thunderbolt. But Zeus’ anger took a subtler form.

  ‘Let them eat their flesh raw,’ he said. ‘I forbid them the use of fire.’

  Without fire, they would die. Their slender limbs would freeze, their blood congeal and their bright eyes glaze and film like scum on a quiet pond. The angry god had doomed them as surely as if he’d hurled his thunderbolt and scorched them in an instant.

  Prometheus wept slow, bitter tears. It had been his own smile that had brought it about: mighty Zeus had taken this way of punishing him. The smile of the father was to be the death’s-head grin of his children.

  For a while, fury took hold of him – and his gentle brother watched with terror and awe as great Prometheus paced their garden, bursting asunder the well-te
nded trees as if they’d been straw. Then the Titan passed into despair. War and violence had ever been hateful to him. The mighty struggles his nature demanded had all been in the mind.

  He knew he could not storm Olympus and drag down the father of the gods. He lacked both Zeus’ strength and Zeus’ instant passion. Thinking had ever held him back.

  For long it had preserved him – and saved him from the fearful fate of all his race. But now that power had reached its end – the limits of his mind. Thought stared into soul; and soul stared back at thought. They were the same; and the tragic Titan knew that he must destroy himself to save his children: men.

  Some time during the night, mankind saw him shining among the thick trees that cloaked the northern slopes of Mount Olympus. His light pierced the branches so that it seemed as if some star had fallen and been caught in a vast black net.

  Then his light was snuffed in a deep cleft in the rock, and the Titan mounted unseen.

  An owl flew out of the trees, screeched several times, then fluttered uncertainly, hovering as if seeking its moment to pounce. It screeched again, and began to pursue a devious path in the night air, leading higher and higher up the mountain.

  It was the owl of the goddess Athene.

  The hidden Titan saw it and knew that the goddess had not turned against him. She had sent her owl to lead him secretly into the fortress of the gods. This was the most she could do for him. Mighty though she was, even she feared her blazing father’s wrath.

  Now came another bird out of the night. A crane perched in the Titan’s twisting path. It stared at him with bright, inquisitive eyes.

  ‘Though I will not help you, Prometheus,’ whispered the voice of cunning Hermes, ‘I will not stand in your path.’ The crane flew off and its soft cry came back to the mounting Titan. ‘There is what you seek in my brother Hephaestus’ forge.’

  Flames gleamed and danced on the twenty golden bellows as they rose and fell like twenty gigantic beating hearts. They breathed on the forge, increasing its fire till the lip of its rocky prison shivered and ran.

  Shadows loomed and lumbered against the huge smithy’s walls. Rods and crucibles made the shapes of nodding beasts; and in their midst crouched the shadow of a misshapen monster on bird-thin legs that were broken sharply by the angle of the floor and walls. Hephaestus was at work. He was making a wedding gift for Aphrodite, his wife. He scowled tempestuously as he beat out the gold on the black anvil with a loud, regular clang. He was fashioning the clasp of a girdle . . .

  Suddenly the god’s heat-inflamed eyes quickened. A strange shadow had crossed his on the wall. It moved secretly among the beast-like shadows of the rods and crucibles which seemed to nod and swear at it, then crowd it under their own dangerous night.

  Hephaestus turned. He saw a hand, holding an unkindled torch. He saw it reach forward, plunge in and out of the fire. The torch flared. It was alight.

  The god looked up. Prometheus stood before him.

  ‘For my children,’ whispered the despairing Titan. ‘For mankind.’

  The two great outcasts stared at one another. ‘Take it and be gone,’ muttered the god.

  For long after the Titan had departed, Hephaestus brooded over his anvil. His mighty hammer leaned against his knee . . . and the beaten gold grew cool. Then the god began again. His hammer rose and fell till fountains of sparks leaped up and seemed to engulf him in robes of broken fire.

  At last he rested. The smithy grew quiet and the ugly god examined the clasp he had made. It was a golden hand holding a torch. It seemed to be caressing it, and the torch was spurting its vital fire. So delicately wrought was this hand that it seemed to tremble – to move, even with tenderness . . .

  The god nodded. Here in this eternal clasp was his own fierce love for Aphrodite – and Prometheus’ aching love for mankind.

  He fastened it to the girdle with rivets as fine as hair and hobbled off to the laughing goddess of his dreams.

  TEN

  AN ORDINARY WOMAN

  Still Zeus did not strike the defiant Titan down. Prometheus had opposed him, set his command aside. Fire flickered below and strengthened the new, aspiring life.

  Time and again Prometheus turned his eyes to heaven so that he might see his destruction blazing forth. But the lord of the sky seemed to have turned his back. Had grave Athene pleaded with her father? Had subtle Hermes put a case?

  The Titan’s uncertainty grew agonised as his time ran out. Nonetheless, he still laboured for his creatures, teaching them what he could to widen their narrow foothold between the Fates and the gods. At night he brooded in the mysterious room where man had been born. Already he had begun to refine the precious substance of Chaos. Strange spots and scales he’d discovered on the bright seeds. These he scraped away and confined in a small jar which he sealed and hid. He suspected them to be some malignant rot . . .

  ‘Can you fashion a woman, my clever, ugly son? Can you make her as skilfully as Prometheus made his creatures below?’

  The father of the gods stared down from his gold and ivory throne in the great council chamber. ‘Not of gold, nor silver, nor imperishable bronze; but of the self-same clay the Titan used – the soft wet clay of Attica?’

  Hephaestus shuffled and blinked his reddened eyes away from Zeus’ radiance. The fire of his forge was as night beside the blazing noon of Zeus.

  ‘Fetch me the clay and I will make such a woman.’

  Zeus nodded; and swift as thought Hermes sped down, twisting through the cloudy swarms of bees that sang above the lower slopes of Mount Hymettus.

  Hephaestus waited; and presently, the thieving god returned with Prometheus’ clay.

  Hephaestus set about his task and Hermes, leaning against the lintel post of the smithy door, watched the great artificer at his work.

  Unlike Prometheus, the god worked slowly. He seemed to seek the form within the dull shapeless clay. Even as Hermes watched, his burnt and twisted fingers probed and dragged at hair, cheeks, lips, breasts and limbs as if he was freeing rather than creating them. He tore the clay away from her eyes as if it had been a blindfold; and suddenly a woman stared at Hermes in the doorway. Even though he knew his ill-tempered brother’s marvellous skill, Hermes was startled by this strange new evidence of it.

  Her height was perhaps a finger’s breadth below Aphrodite’s; but otherwise her beauty was not of Olympus. It had the darker, richer colours of the earth. Hephaestus had fashioned a woman far beyond the Titan’s skill.

  She stood beside the mighty anvil and as the twenty golden bellows breathed on the fire, the heat drew tears of moisture out of the clay so that she seemed to be weeping before she had life. Then Zeus bade Aeolus, warder of the four winds, breathe life into her nostrils and mouth.

  She stirred; she moved; she stared about her with a sweet vacancy, understanding nothing – feeling nothing.

  Being formed from unseeded clay, she had neither passions nor qualities.

  So life-giving Zeus commanded the immortal gods to enrich her with their gifts.

  First Hestia, gentlest of the children of Cronus, gave this woman a gentleness and generosity not unlike her own; and the vacant eyes took on a soft and tender gleam. But Ares, roughly elbowing forward, forced on her a touch of himself, so that behind the tender gleam there glinted the flicker of a savage fire.

  Next great Apollo gave her sweet and tempting grace of movement – such as he himself delighted in; but straightway his moon-sister Artemis gave her defensive quickness, modesty and virginity.

  Glorious Demeter shook her head. Never quite in sympathy with Artemis, she blessed the woman with a richly fertile womb – and the knowledge of it. This knowledge now glinted mysteriously from under the downcast lashes that the mighty huntress’s gift had imposed.

  ‘And I will give her wisdom,’ said Athene suddenly. She had divined the danger there lurked in this woman, compounded as she was of so many opposing passions. ‘I will give her wisdom so that her gifts may be well-used.’ />
  Zeus frowned; but could not deny the powerful goddess her right. So he bade Hermes give Athene’s gift a double edge, with curiosity and deceit.

  Now the woman turned and smiled gratefully at each of the gods in turn; her eyes seemed to linger so that her last look was always sideways . . . till imperious Hera hastened to cover her nakedness with fine, cloudy robes. This woman was curiously disturbing. Beside her, the hot nymphs were but as children – their amorous leapings and twinings as children’s games . . . Then Zeus gave her a name: Pandora – all giving.

  She bowed her head. ‘Great goddess,’ she murmured, raising her face now to lovely Aphrodite while her eyes lingered timidly on smiling Zeus. ‘Is there no gift from you? Are you displeased with me? Have I unknowingly offended you? If so, I beg forgiveness . . . and plead for your gift. For without it, I think, all would wither away unused.’

  So Aphrodite laughed – and lent Pandora the girdle that Hephaestus had made for her – the girdle that kindled desire.

  ‘With such a piece of work,’ murmured the king of the gods as he brooded down on Pandora, ‘what need have I of thunderbolts?’

  It was Hermes who led her down the slopes of Mount Olympus; and as the gods watched, none was sorry to see her go.

  ‘What harsh message do you bring from Olympus now, Hermes?’

  Prometheus and his brother were in their orchard, securing the well-filled branches with stout props, when the great herald rippled through the trees.

  ‘No message, Lord Prometheus,’ answered the god courteously. He had plucked an apple in passing and now speared it idly on his ribboned staff. He stared at it as if surprised. ‘I bring a gift. Indeed, Prometheus, there is no need to look at me so angrily, as if you would refuse. The gift does not concern you. It is for your brother, Epimetheus.’

  He pointed his staff, with the red apple on its head, at the second Titan, the ever-gentle, not over-wise Epimetheus.

  ‘The gift of the gods is for you.’

  Epimetheus came forward with a pleased smile. His heart was open; his nature unsuspecting. Such happy beings as he are always the last of their race.