Silence yawned. I knew better than to expect an answer, but silence yawned nonetheless. Normally I enjoyed the chance to speak freely without interruption, but today Gaia’s silence perturbed me. I desperately wished that she would say something, anything, that could illuminate where I had failed. Whether Gaia missed Ouranos or hated him, I would never know. She only stared into the sky, unmoving, unfeeling, as close as a god could come to death.
Then I realized: Death was a mercy.
Death was the one thing that truly set humanity apart from the gods. Death shaped their lives and gave them purpose. Knowledge of death enabled Bellerophon to rise to unimaginable fame, for what immortal had the ambition to become a hero? And now I understood that death had freed Anteia from her suffering. There was no joy or pain in the Underworld, and the waters of the river Lethe washed away all memory.
Death brought about change, birthing untold possibilities. A human being in its lifetime might be a child, a warrior, a parent, a healer, a sage, and finally a corpse. A god could only be a god, unchanging, fulfilling its allotted functions as surely as a planet circles the sun. Death, I was certain, had been responsible in some way for the unbreakable bond between the old man andwoman I had seen so long ago. They were dust now, but their peace haunted me still.
Perhaps it was my natural greed that led me to covet the one thing forbidden to me. Or perhaps it was my lingering confusion around the death of Anteia, or a compulsion to taste what she had experienced. Regardless, I was seized by a single-minded fixation: I wanted to know death.
I opened my veins with slivers of obsidian, though my skin knitted itself together again at once. I cast myself down from great heights, only to feel my bones crack back into place and my torn flesh heal. I drank deadly poisons, but woke from a dreamless sleep to a pounding ache in my head.
The pain was a counterbalance to pleasure, which had ruled my life up to that point until it lost all meaning. My days melted into one another, and I learned nothing from them. They were punctuated by mindless amusements: an order from Aphrodite, a visit from Zephyrus, petty backstabbing among minor gods. I pared my life down to its bare bones, to the sky and the sea and the rock. One year stretched into another, and still there was nothing that stirred my soul.
Repetition was my life back then. The dull procession of years made no impression on me, like footprints in the sand washed away by a rising tide.
5
Psyche
After I returned from the wedding in Sparta, two things happened.
The first was that my nurse Maia died. One day she was upright and bustling about the palace, the next she collapsed suddenly and died before sunset. Some of the servants whispered that a god had struck her down, but my mother, who was as learned as any healer after consulting so many for her own ill health, insisted that Maia’s heart had always been weak. One day it had simply given up.
Whatever the cause, I went from Helen’s wedding to Maia’s funeral, watching the pyre devour the great soft body that I had once held so dear. Perhaps this is why love and death became so intertwined for me.
That was the first thing that happened. The second was that I became beautiful.
It happened nearly overnight. When I woke and glanced at the dim mirror in my bedroom, I was shocked at the woman’s face I saw in the reflection. A narrow chin rising to full cheeks, dark eyes, and a riot of curls. I had been a skinny feral thing, but now my breasts pushed against the front of my tunic and my hips began to spread, which hindered my sense of balanceand made archery practice a challenge. I began to bleed with the dark of the moon, which I found a terrible nuisance.
I was not the only one to notice these changes. Dexios would trip over himself as he took my filly’s reins now, sneaking glances at me when he thought I wasn’t looking. My father’s oath men, never solicitous, gave me an even wider berth.
Worst of all, I received my first marriage proposal.
I wasn’t told of this directly; that would have been improper. Instead, I overheard my mother and father whispering about it one evening in the garden. I had come to ask my father for fletching for new arrows, but instead I found myself frozen behind a pillar, holding my breath as I listened to their exchange.
‘You must admit, it isn’t a bad arrangement,’ my father said.
‘Yes, but Psyche is so young!’ my mother protested. ‘Don’t we have a few more years with her at least?’
I was only thirteen, but many girls became betrothed by that age. My heart began to pound in my ears, and my hands gripped the pillar like claws. I crept back the way I had come, the question dead on my lips.
After that, I threw myself into my training with a renewed fervour. Gone were the days when I complained about hill sprints or sword drills; no longer was I a malingerer when the heat of the day grew too fierce. Now I completed every exercise Atalanta gave me and asked for more besides.
Atalanta noticed this. Atalanta noticed everything. She could tell an animal’s temperament from the faint traces of its prints, and she could read the traceries of discontent in the human heart. She confronted me in her laconic way one night when we were camped in the woods around Tiryns.
‘I will tell you a story,’ Atalanta said, words that never failed to command my attention, ‘about the hunt for the Calydonian boar.’
I looked up sharply from the embers of the fire, which I had been prodding with a short stick. Around us the night lay like velvet on the earth, the dark outlines of trees arcing up against a cloudless sky scattered with stars. The air was cold, but the licking flames warmed us.
I looked expectantly at my teacher. Atalanta had been holding this particular story in reserve for years, and I was hungry for it.
‘As you know,’ Atalanta began, ‘the Calydonian boar was sent by Artemis to punish the people of Aetolia. The king of that country was Meleager, and he summoned the finest hunters to take down the beast. I was one of them.’ A brief smile of remembered pride crossed Atalanta’s face, though it soon faded. ‘There were those who disagreed with his choice, who claimed that the presence of a woman was unlucky. But Meleager insisted that I was an honoured member of the hunting party, and this choice served him well. When the boar charged, I was the only one who didn’t break and run.’
I stared at my teacher, nearly forgetting to breathe. I could almost taste the pungent musk of the beast, see its bulk unfolding like a mountain come to life.
Atalanta went on. ‘I scaled a tree to get better aim. I hit the boar in the eye, and while it raged and blundered, Meleager cut its throat. Once I was down from the tree, I stabbed it in the heart as well. You can never be too careful with boar.
‘Since it was impossible to decide who had delivered the killing blow, Meleager declared that I had drawn first blood and would receive the pelt. The other men did not like this. I had gone from being an unlucky omen to the most fortunate of them all, and they hated me for it. When I declared I would offer the pelt as a sacrifice to Artemis Far-Shooter, I thought this would settle the matter. Who can fault piety to the gods?
