I gave birth to a girl. I had never seen any creature as unlikely and precious as my newborn daughter, with her tiny perfect fingers and tiny perfect toes. It seemed we had both made it through our trials. Eros and I looked at each other, awed at the young goddess we had made together.
As I lay in bed the night after my daughter’s birth – drowsing infant on my breast, and my husband sleeping at my side – I looked back at my life and found it noteworthy mainly for all the different types of love it contained. There was Eros, of course, and there always would be, but there were also mymother and father, my teacher Atalanta, my cousin Iphigenia, and even the old blind poet who had taught me so much. There were Hekate and Demeter too, fretting over me like a pair of grandmothers – love I had never expected. There was Zephyrus, who had been so thoughtless at first and then so loyal in a crisis. He had declared himself an uncle to our newborn daughter, swearing that the winds themselves would protect her. There were all the others who had helped me along the way, from a group of nameless ants near Eleusis to Charon the ferryman. Even pitiless Persephone had shown me mercy. And now here was my daughter, waiting to show me yet another type of love.
Eros and I decided to name her Hedone, which meansJoy.
When Joy was a month or so old, the three of us returned from the beach to find Aphrodite lounging on the terrace under the afternoon sun.
‘What are you doing here?’ Eros demanded, laying a protective hand on my arm. I could feel the tension thrumming through him like an electric current.
Aphrodite looked at me with the casual malice of a cat startled from its nap. ‘I’ve come to see my granddaughter, of course,’ she replied. Joy was asleep in my arms, a small mercy.
The goddess peered at the child, then flinched back in revulsion. ‘She is so small and wrinkled. What did you do to her?’
‘Nothing,’ I replied. ‘She’s a baby.’
Aphrodite snorted. ‘It’s probably her half-mortal blood. I haven’t forgotten your deception after the apotheosis vote, Eros,’ she added with a glare. ‘Bad breeding always shows.’
Eros opened his mouth, but I touched his shoulder to silence him. I placed Joy’s sleeping form in his arms and asked him togive me a moment alone with Aphrodite. He gave me a puzzled glance but did as I asked.
‘Aphrodite,’ I began. ‘We are all gods now. I finished the tasks you gave me. Let us find an end to the grudge between us.’
The goddess’s face darkened. ‘I will never love you as all the others seem to,’ she hissed. ‘They dote on you, though you’ve done nothing to deserve it. I won’t. It is enough that I permit you to share divinity with me, despite all your betrayals. Don’t ask me to celebrate it.’
‘Why do you hate me so much?’ I asked.
‘I wouldn’t waste hate on you, peasant ingrate.’
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. I could not imagine being weighed down by such petty grudges at the threshold of eternity. ‘Peasant is a strange insult – even when I was mortal, I was a princess. So why do you dislike me, then?’
Aphrodite stared balefully up at me, her beautiful face twisted. The question seemed to strain at her, until the force needed to keep the truth in was greater than her fear of speaking it.
‘He gets to keep you,’ she finally spat.
I remembered Adonis, who had been Aphrodite’s lover before he was Persephone’s. And suddenly I understood. All creatures fell in love through her influence, but Aphrodite herself had never been able to taste love in all its aspects. No one ever stayed for more than a season. She attracted men and gods like moths to a flame, but inevitably they burned to a crisp. Real love meant caring for someone else as much as you did yourself, and Aphrodite always put herself above all others.
Perhaps a god could change, but Aphrodite needed to decide that for herself.
Aphrodite left without another word, taking wing in the shape of a dove. Eros peered out at me from the door of the house, tilting his head inquiringly.
I lifted my hands in a gesture of helplessness.I did what I could, I wanted to say. Even in a divine existence, it seemed, not everything was perfect.
Joy grew quickly, far faster than a mortal child. She was clever, possessing both her mother’s stubbornness and her father’s streak of mischief.
As she grew, Joy led me back to the human world I had long neglected. She would go missing, and Eros or I would find her playing with a group of mortal children or sneaking treats from indulgent human mothers. She seemed to know that she had ties to the mortal world, although I never breathed a word about my past.
When I went to fetch my daughter, I saw how much had changed in a few short years. The cities of the Greeks stood empty and dilapidated, their inhabitants fled. The great markets that had once been the pride of our people were now sparse, with only a few vegetables or fish for sale. The lack of young men perplexed me at first, until I realized that they must have been conscripted to fight on the plains of Troy. The Late Bronze Age Collapse, future historians would call it.
Things came to pass as I had seen at Aulis. The Greek army remained at war with Troy for ten years, and Agamemnon’s army went raiding other cities in the meantime. They put entire towns to the torch, slaughtered the men, and enslaved the women. Then came the fall of Troy and all the atrocities that went with it.
Everywhere, chaos.
What should I do for them?I wondered, gazing at the destruction below.
The answer came to me immediately, drifting up from the depths of my unconscious mind.
Anything you can.
I thought of Medusa, saying that hunger and cold were far worse than any monster. Some of the gods fought on the side of the Trojans, and others on behalf of the Greeks. But none of them paid any attention to the old women and hungry children left at home.
