‘What of Zeus and the other Olympians? If they weren’t chosen how did they come to eat the Hesperides fruit?’
The shadows deepened around Metis’ eyes. ‘That is enough for one day.’
Danae frowned. ‘If Gaia really loves her children like the story says, why has she let Zeus reign with such cruelty for all these years?’
Metis’ lips parted, then Heracles murmured in his sleep, and her head snapped to look at him. Her eyes lingered on the sharp angles of his face as he stilled, then she turned back to Danae.
‘I’ve been asking the same question for nearly a thousand years.’
26. Stones for the Dead
The following days blurred together like a wet mural smudged by careless fingers.
Danae and Metis fell into a steady rhythm. They rose at dawn and lugged the hydria down to the lake to collect fresh water. As they walked, Danae kept an eye on the sea, waiting for a ship carrying Atalanta and Telamon to appear on the horizon, her disappointment mounting with each day they did not come.
After the water vase was replenished, she and Metis would walk the island, inspecting the lizard traps dotted between the rocks, and trawl the long grass for cicadas with a fine net fashioned from what Danae suspected was Metis’ hair. She made sure that Pegasus’ water bowl was refilled when it ran empty, and once the tasks were done, she continued her efforts to try and levitate the stick. While Danae trained, Metis tended to Heracles, who still had not fully regained consciousness.
As time crept on, Danae harboured a secret worry that Pegasus might abandon her. When he flew away each morning, the fear swelled in her gut, only to be dispelled when the horse returned just before nightfall. She was troubled by the idea that he would grow tired of traversing the same splash of sky and eating nothing but dry, brittle grass. Surely, he would wake one day and realize that the life she offered him was pitiful compared to the one provided by his old masters on Olympus.
On the fifth day she returned to the hut after anotherfrustrating afternoon with the stick to find Metis crouched over Heracles, her hands laid upon his chest. She approached slowly, then sank down beside them, captivated by the shimmering threads seeping from Metis’ hands into Heracles’ body.
The woman opened her eyes as though withdrawing from a trance and leant back with a soft sigh.
‘Will you teach me?’
Metis flexed her fingers. ‘It requires a great deal of control to heal a living thing, especially one as complex as a human. You are not simply extending your ichor into an empty object but guiding someone else’s piece of the tapestry of life. To influence another’s body into healing itself takes patience and diplomacy.’ Her eyebrows arched on the last word.
Danae thought of the time she had tried to cure Heracles on Lemnos. She had hurled a clutch of her life-threads into him without any thought or direction, only to have them forcibly ejected.
‘When I’ve mastered levitation, will you show me?’
‘Once you can do as I asked on your first morning and convince a living plant to sprout a new leaf, you will have taken the first step towards learning how to heal others.’
Danae smiled. Her mind flew through possibilities. She thought of her family back on Naxos. She could cure the ache in her mother’s back that lingered after birthing her children, her father’s salt-cracked hands, her nephews’ scrapes from playing in the yard. Then she imagined walking through the village and all those who had shunned her family falling to their knees, begging her to heal their ailing loved ones. And she would grant their wishes, despite how they had treated her kin.
You would be a benevolent god.
Her focus snapped back into the room. She glanced atMetis, concerned that the voice might have somehow escaped her mind. But the woman’s eyes were closed, her attention once more focused on Heracles.
By the sixth day, Danae had almost lost hope that Atalanta and Telamon were coming and realized that, once again, she must face going on alone.
She stood beneath the feathered shade of the lone palm tree beside the lake, the stick gripped between her fists. A moment before, she thought she’d finally cracked it. For five heartbeats the wood had hovered in the air on a cord of her life-threads, her plea chanted down the strands. Then as she asked it to return to her hand it fell, like it always did. A bead of sweat trickled between her shoulder blades. She knew why it hadn’t worked, could feel the precise moment her question tipped into fear and the ebb and flow between her and the stick became a one-sided command.
You must have faith, Metis had said.
She looked around at the dusty earth, the wind-shivered water and the rustling trees. She held in her mind another time she had taken a leap of faith. When she’d stood before Manto’s father, Phineus, on a faraway shore and, after months of lying about her identity, had revealed to the old seer who she truly was. But the courage that had flooded her veins then would not be summoned. Since the Underworld, she had taken too many steps into the unknown and been dashed on the truth that waited like jagged rocks beneath. Gaia may have chosen her to be a Titan, but that did not mean the Mother or anyone else would come to her aid. Creators were not always benevolent. Hades had taught her that.
You alone are enough, said the voice.You are the coming of a newdawn.
Danae bit the soft flesh of her lip so hard she broke theskin. Blood staining her teeth, she dropped the stick and grasped a handful of the tall reeds swaying by the lake’s edge. She gasped as their stalks snapped beneath her fingers and their life-threads surged into her, draining down from the tips of their leaves and up from their water-swollen roots.
She staggered back from the dead plants, revelling in the life coursing through her limbs. The ecstasy lasted longer than after the lizard, but still it was a pitiful drop compared to the ocean she knew she could bathe in.
A familiar surge of shame stung her throat as she looked at the dead reeds lying dull and broken next to their vibrant brethren. She glanced about the island, suddenly self-conscious. A flicker of movement caught her eye. Metis stood atop the island’s rocky hill, silhouetted against the bright sky.
Anger chased away the guilt nesting in Danae’s chest. Metis had promised to teach her, yet the woman had done nothing but instruct her to levitate a stick then left her alone to fend for herself.
The burning sun heating the bellows of her frustration, she stormed up the hillside. Each rock that slipped beneath her feet and spike of spruce that scratched her limbs only fed her rage, and by the time she arrived at the crest of the hill, she had amassed a barrage of accusations ready to fling at Metis.
