Prologue
Eros
The Greeks have three words for love. The first isphilia, the kind of love that involves liking and grows up between two people who enjoy each other’s company very much. The second isagape, the selfless love of parents for children or between those who are like family to one another. The third iseros, which explains itself – connection, spark, the desire of the body to seek fulfillment in another.
Most people experience at least one of these loves in a lifetime. But it is rare to have all three at once, intertwined like a golden braid. This was what the playwright Aristophanes spoke of when he wove his tale many years after the events of this one, seeking to illuminate the origin of love in its trifold complexity. He claimed that the first human beings were born back-to-back, with two faces and four hands and four legs, each mouth chattering incessantly to its companion as they rolled like wheels over the earth. Zeus grew wary of the power of these people and split them apart with his thunderbolts. They turned into humans as we know them today, who walk around on two legs and speak with only one mouth. And so it is that love came to exist, the playwright claimed, each of us seeking our other half.
I laughed when I heard this. I had been present at the beginning of the world, and it wasn’t anything like that. It is a pretty story, though nothing could be further from the truth for Psyche and me. There is no pretending that we were two parts of some cosmic whole – she was a mortal woman and I a god when we first met, each fierce in our independence. We were not severed halves; we were complete unto ourselves. It is possible that our paths would never have crossed at all had it not been for a chance mistake.
There is something powerful in this, I think. We were not in thrall to destiny or fate, but merely the weight of our own choices. When we turned towards each other like flowers facing the sun, we were not fulfilling some prophecy or old story. We were writing our own.
1
Psyche
Despite my unusual destiny, I began life as an ordinary infant, born like any other to a rush of blood and cries of joy. Though in my case, these were followed by more than a bit of confusion.
My mother and father were the king and queen of a kingdom in rocky Greece called Mycenae. When my mother, Astydamia, learned that she was with child, my father, Alkaios, left the Mycenaean capital of Tiryns and set off across the mountains. He passed through desolate valleys and rode beneath craggy cliffsides populated by nesting griffins, until at last he came to gates that bore the wordsKNOW THYSELF. It wasn’t his own fate he sought to learn at the Oracle of Delphi, but his unborn child’s. Mine. Would I be born healthy and strong? What would I grow up to become?
When my father entered the Oracle’s shadowy earthen chamber, two things struck him. The first was the smell of the place, redolent of sulphur and other scents less recognizable. The second was the sight of the woman who sat on a bronze tripod suspended over an abyss. She wore a peplos robe that swathed her body in folds of yellow fabric, and her hair was bound up in a neat braid around her head. This was the Oracle, and she stared at Alkaios with eyes out of time.
My father shivered. He was a king and used to people trying to wheedle favours from him, but this woman wanted nothing from anyone.
A priest from the order that had sprung up around the Oracle whispered the king’s question in her ear. She sat back and drank in the vapours rising up from the cracks in the earth; these were said to be sent from Apollo himself, god of prophecy, and brought true visions of the future.
A tremor ran through the Oracle. She began to speak in an unearthly voice, one that did not belong to the body of such a delicate woman. My father could not recognize the language she spoke, but the priests were already scribbling on their clay tablets, performing the complex calculations needed to interpret the messages of the Oracle. Gods do not always speak in ways that are easy for mortals to understand, but fortunately the white-bearded priests knew how to translate.
At last, they bestowed the Oracle’s prophecy upon my father. ‘Your child will conquer a monster feared by the gods themselves.’
My father was ecstatic. His son would be a hero! Alkaios had long mourned that he did not share the heroic gifts of his father, Perseus, but sometimes these things skip a generation. His son would be a monster-killer, a hero, and people would come from all across Greece to pay homage to him.
What a pity that I was no son.
When the midwife handed me to my father on the day of my birth, he wouldn’t have been more shocked if he had been given a bear cub. A girl! A girl could not grow up to slay monsters or win renown as a hero. She would spin wool in the women’s quarters with her mother and aunts until she moved into her husband’s house to spin wool there. She would bear children and run the household, and if she was a good woman, she would die in obscurity.
My father weighed his options. He could always abandon my infant self in some remote place and try again. Such things were more common among peasant families who struggled to feed every mouth born to them, but not unknown among royal houses. Perhaps next time the gods would see fit to grant him a son.
Then a peculiar thing happened. He looked into my eyes and fell in love.
There is no other word for it. In that moment, my father knew he loved me enough to tear down the sky itself. He loved me not for who I was, but simplythatI was, his very own child with tiny perfect fingers and tiny perfect toes. I wish I could say that this was the natural reaction of a father meeting his daughter, but experience has shown me otherwise.
Alkaios decided that I would have the education of a prince. He knew that there would be those who questioned this decision, even his own brothers and oath men, but he held firm and called it an act of piety. Zeus’s daughter Artemis, goddess of the moon and wild creatures, was given a sturdy bow for her inheritance and received worship throughout the cities of the Greeks. The Oracle said that the scion of Alkaios would conquer a monster feared by the gods themselves, and so she would.
As my father looked into my tiny, wrinkled face, he realized that he loved me more than the gods or his wife or oath men, or even his own soul. That is why he named me Psyche, which in our language meanssoul.
My mother, as far as I know, never questioned her love for me since the moment I kicked in her womb. I was her first and only child, a late-life baby. Conception had taken long enough that my father’s advisers had urged him to take a second wife or even a concubine, but he respected my mother far too much for that.
She was an unusual woman, my mother Astydamia. She grew up in the distant reaches of Arcadia where the wolf-kings still ruled their forest domains, and she might have received an education not unlike mine had she not been struck by a terrible illness in her youth. My birth taxed her further, and she spent much of her time in the dimly lit women’s quarters, propped up on cushions and spinning wool surrounded by her ladies-in-waiting. My mother was as slender as a lily despite the iron in her soul, and as soon as I was old enough to think anything at all, I remember thinking that I needed to be strong enough for both of us.
Most of my care was given over to my wet nurse, a Thessalian slave named Maia. She was as broad and soft as a bed, with a booming laugh that she unleashed at the slightest provocation. She taught me simple songs and sayings and watched over my first toddling steps. In the evenings, Maia would bring me to my mother, who laid her cool hand upon my forehead and kissed me. So passed my first few years of life in the women’s quarters, a place that smelled like tallow candles and milk.
When I was five years old, all of this changed.
‘Your father is waiting for you, little Psyche,’ Maia told me one day, her wide face solemn.
My father was waiting in the hall outside the women’s chambers. Alkaios was as tall as one of the statues of the gods, and today he wore the armour of a warrior king along with a serious expression. He had inherited the copper skin of his half-Ethiopian mother, Andromeda, which he had passed in turn to me. Anyone would know we were father and daughter, two of a kind, and I wanted to reach up and rub his whiskers as I often did. Instead, I took a cue from his solemnity and followed quietly alongside him, my small legs working to keep up with his long strides.
My father took me to the hero’s room, which is what the servants called the small chamber in the interior of the palace. It was mostly bare, save for a sword and a shield mounted on the wall, along with an altar to send up incense to the hero’s spirit. The shield was bronze and painted shades of emerald and red, though paint had been scraped in several places from what I imagined to be claws of monsters or the swords of barbarians. At the centre was the most terrifying visage I had ever seen – a snarling woman’s face ringed with open-mouthed snakes. She seemed ready to leap from the wall and wrap clawed hands around my throat. I wanted to flee, but I planted my feet and stood firm.
