The Ruin of Eros

Chapter Two

Our town must be one of the handsomest in all the Peloponnese, or at least that’s what I believe. I have never gone further than Corinth and that was only once, with Father, but I think it is hard to imagine a landscape I would like better. From up here, in the mountains, sometimes it feels like you can see the whole world. The winters are harsh enough, but the summers are gentle, and in spring anemones grow everywhere in the fields. Most people with some status live in the center of the town but Father likes it further out, where we are. There, the red-gold roofs of barns and farmyards shine in the sun, and the sound of pigs and cattle and now and then a rooster pierces the air. In the early mornings all you hear are birds. At night the sky is so deep a navy it looks black, and the constellations burn.

And far down below, at what looks like the very bottom of the world, you can see the sea. Father says it is the same color as my eyes.

The streets that lead to the Agora get wider as we approach, and soon a handful of onlookers becomes dozens. The streets look different from my perch on top of this high carriage, looking down.

“Slow, you stupid beasts, slow ,” I mutter anxiously, tugging on the reins the way Yiannis showed me. Hector and I are the last carriage in the parade. Ahead of us, the others represent the sea and the heavens, the polis of Sikyon, and the nymphs that attend Aphrodite as handmaidens. But since we are last, I must work the hardest to keep our horses from charging forward— otherwise we will all tumble into each other like a handful of marbles.

I think how Dimitra would laugh at that.

It is only the three of us: father, Dimitra, and me. My mother died when I was born, and it was the birthing of me that killed her. She gave me my name before she died. They say it was the last word she uttered. Psycheandra: soul warrior . Dimitra scoffs at it. You see, my mother was not Dimitra’s mother: my father has lost two wives now. The first, Dimitra’s mother, was a local girl, born and bred in Sikyon as Father was. It was no great love-match, I think. He was a military man, frequently away from Sikyon on some campaign or other, and the business of finding a wife had been long postponed. When he reached the age of thirty, however, he came under pressure from his family, and Dimitra’s mother was found. But then, only a year after Dimitra’s birth, he returned from his latest military campaign to learn that a great sickness had come to Sikyon while he was away. Dimitra’s mother was one of many to perish.

He left Dimitra with his sister, our aunt, and went back to the front to fight again. This time the war he went to was the great Atlantean war. It was supposed to be over in months but lasted two whole winters. When he returned from Atlantis, he was a decorated soldier and a married man: he’d brought an Atlantean bride home with him.

You might think that both having lost our mothers so early in life, Dimitra and I would understand each other better. You might think we’d be closer. But that’s not exactly true. We were close, once, but no longer.

My sister was an angelic-looking child, highly praised for her prettiness since infancy. She never had an awkward stage, even in those years of puberty which afflict so many young women. Meanwhile, as a child, I was not considered noteworthy: my neck was too long, my hands and feet too big, my arms too skinny, my eyes a little too large in my childish face. But a strange thing happened the summer of my fourteenth year: I began to be beautiful. I say this not to boast—on the contrary, it worries me. They say my mother was beautiful, and because of it none of the women in the village liked her. Even the midwife was late to attend her labor. I try not to wonder whether it would have made any difference, had she been on time.

Dimitra has stayed as pretty as she ever was, but the gossip in town began to change after I became beautiful. They say I have now surpassed my sister, that I began to outshine her years ago. Dimitra knows it, and hates me for it. Meanwhile I fear the townspeople have lost the run of themselves—Sikyonians love to exaggerate—and when they have finished comparing me to Dimitra they start to compare me to others. Fairer than Persephone, goddess of spring, they say. Fairer then the goddess of dawn, Eos. Father reports the things he’s heard with pride, and I worry he has become indiscreet. I worry that he’s let it go to his head and boasts of it.

Gods are jealous creatures—look at what happened to Medusa. People think she was born with a head full of snakes, but that’s not true. Most monsters aren’t born, they’re made. You’d be surprised how many of them used to be human once. Beautiful humans, most of them. But it doesn’t do to be too beautiful.

The houses get grander as we make our way down the main street, toward the Agora, which is the assembly-place for the whole town. Twice a month there is a great market there, and every day it’s where the men congregate to talk, drink wine, and agree on the great things they have done for the city. This long building we’re passing now is where the Council sits, and behind it, raised up on a mound and decorated in blue and red and gold, is the king’s palace. But that’s not where we’re going today.

As we move into the Agora, the murmur of the crowds becomes a roar. I don’t envy the job of the first chariot in the parade, having to carve a path through them. Sikyonians get like this on festival days: transported, euphoric, over-excited. It’s a combination of alcohol and hemp-flower, heat and crowds. Fights will break out before nightfall, I’m sure of it. But right now, they’re roaring with delight. Roaring for us.

“Wave, Hector,” I encourage him. It’s Hector, as Eros, who should be drawing the bigger cheers today. But I can see quite clearly, it’s me they’re looking at. Hector doesn’t seem disappointed: he’s a sweet boy, and looks mesmerized by the crowds. Some of them throw roses, and he reaches out to catch them.

“Careful!” I say under my breath as I wave and smile and try to keep all this pearly fabric from billowing out of the carriage and under its wheels. “Thorns, Hector.”

But he’s already found out his mistake, and drops the stem from his grip with a cry of disgust.

That’s roses for you. No wonder they’re Aphrodite’s flower.

Beauty always has a sting in the tail.

“Do you hear?” Hector says, and I look down to see his eyes wide in admiration, staring at me.

“Hear what?”

“The people.” He looks proudly at me. “What they’re saying.

Aphrodite , I hear the crowd murmuring. The murmur grows in a wave, bigger and bigger. The children are on their fathers’ shoulders, cheering. I think some of the small ones must believe I’m the real Aphrodite, their eyes are so big, their faces so dazzled and euphoric. Even some of the women look quite overcome, dabbing at their eyes; some even bow and curtsy as we pass. I had thought to face some hostility out here, families who wanted their own daughters chosen for this day or for Yiannis Demou’s hand, but it seems everyone is content to stare and murmur—or cheer, or weep. I want to remind them that it’s all just silly pageantry. I don’t want my fellow citizens to forget, even for a moment, who I really am: just a local girl, Councilman Andreos’s daughter, nothing more.

“We all knew you’d be chosen,” Hector says proudly, turning my way. “More beautiful than Aphrodite herself, that’s what my father says.”

“Hush, Hector!” I resist the urge to clamp a hand across his mouth, and feel a cold breeze wrap around my neck. Such words are dangerous. At least Hector’s were lost in the shouts of the crowd, and no one heard him but me. I just hope his father and others like him have not been too indiscreet.

I do not mean to be ungrateful, if it is as Father says and my beauty is a gift. One should be grateful for gifts. But I wonder if it is not so much a gift as a simple matter of accident. Perhaps gods scatter beauty among humans the way a handful of grain is scattered among chickens, with no meaning, no intent. Or perhaps the intent is amusement: to watch the chickens peck and fight, making chaos over what the gods have strewn.

Beauty is a currency like any other, I suppose—and for the most part, it is the only currency a woman has in our world. With it we can buy things: some security, perhaps, or a little independence. A husband; a house of our own to run. Sometimes we can buy a little respect. But sometimes it feels as though I am nothing but a face; nothing but my limbs and breasts and hair. Nothing but what they see. Whether I am good or brave, righteous or deceitful, my face can tell you nothing of that. Sometimes I feel I would like to peel back my skin and see inside of myself. Sometimes I wonder, if I were ugly, would I have figured out more about who I really am by now?

But I wave and smile, wave and smile, as we pass through the Agora. Here is where my new charioteering skills need some extra help, as we parade in a circle around the center for all the crowd to cheer. I wonder how many hundreds of people are here. Perhaps a thousand or more. It smells of sweat and scented oils, mint and oregano, and alcohol. I look for my sister’s face but don’t see it. The reins slip a little and burn my hand, but at least the horses don’t bolt. The burn on my hand is nothing. I am a fast healer; it will be gone before tomorrow, and stings only a little. I’m more concerned about my dress, which I have to tug at to keep it inside the chariot—it’s so long, I’m worried about it getting caught under the wheels and pulling me with it.

The dress is beautiful, though I would have preferred to be the one creating it, instead of the one wearing it. Father says my mother had a great talent at the loom, and the one she used still sits in our house, in a little room where no one hardly goes but me. I think if I’d been born a man, I should have liked to be a great artist—a potter, perhaps—but instead, as a woman, I may weave: that is our way of storytelling. Of creating.

The dress I’m wearing now, though, was not made by anyone in Sikyon. Yiannis’s father, Kirios Demou, is a trader, and imports the most exquisite fabrics: this dress is made from the sheerest, finest linen, woven from flax imported all the way from the Egyptian lands, dyed in the most exquisite blues and golds, and fastened with gold brooches. I’ve never seen anything like it: so gauzy, so light, so ethereal. Surely when Aphrodite emerged from the oceans in a gown of sea foam, this is indeed how it would have appeared. Tiny pearls stitched into the gown catch the sun like beads of rolling water. No expense must have been spared.

A woman grabs my hand and kisses it. The impulse seems to start a trend as others follow suit. They mean no harm, but my skin crawls as another pair of lips presses against my hand and I hear the murmur of Aphrodite grow in another great wave. Surely they understand I’m only here to honor the goddess, not to be honored myself.

I see the king watching in the middle of the square, raised up on a palanquin of red silk. I can’t see his face but I hope he’s pleased with the spectacle. If he’s not, we’ll know it soon.

It’s a relief when the cheers reach their peak and the parade leader gets the signal to move on. Now we must draw our chariots around in a final circle, then out of the Agora and up the mountain pass to Eros’s temple. We carve our way slowly out of the square and through the last street in town, which gives over to a steep uphill path. I flick the reins now to nudge the white horses forward, following the chariots ahead of us as we slowly begin the ascent.

The white rocks kick from under the horses’ feet as we climb up the steep mountainside. It’s high summer, and my hands slip a little on the reins, so sticky are they with sweat. Flies buzz. Hector plucks at his outfit: they’ve dressed him up in a suit of gold, and it looks much heavier than my sheer frock, poor boy. The crowds are behind us now: they will follow on foot, carousing already, until they reach the temple. Instead of the awestruck murmurs of the crowds, now there is the sound of flies buzzing, and from back in the town, the yapping of dogs travels on the wind. Heat comes up from the ground, washing over us. Hector pants and wipes his brow.

“It’s too hot! I need water.”

I wish I had brought some for us. My headache is stronger now.

“Soon we’ll be out of the sun,” I promise. The crowds following us on foot won’t be bringing water, though: they’ll be bringing wine, barrels upon barrels of it, four men to a barrel, hauling them on stretchers to the foot of the temple. When we get there, one of the priests will call the gods’ attention and dedicate the wine to them, and then our king will break the first cask and everyone will begin their merry-making.

It’s going to be a long night. At least Hector and I and the other performers won’t be expected to stay past the opening ceremony. Men’s hands become freer the more they drink, I know that by now.

Then one of the horses stumbles, sending a rush of rocks cascading down the hillside behind us. Sweat prickles my neck as I grab the reins hard. I feel like those rocks—precarious, unbalanced, much too near to the precipice. Then the horse shies, kicking, and I fear for our chariot; it could easily lose a wheel here. We bounce hard, and Hector is flung back; I grab him by the collar, keeping the reins in one hand. A wind blows through the dusty air.

“Are you all right?”

He pants and nods, and climbs back onto his feet.

“Hurry,” he says. “We’ll be late.”

And indeed, I can hear the crowds on foot close behind us, and ahead, the chariots are all but out of sight. I breathe deep, the hot summer air thick in my lungs, and flick the reins again. Eros, watch over us, I think. I’m not much given to prayer usually, but the feeling of foreboding is strong today.

And then the horses round the last bend, and the temple looms before us in all its fearful splendor, high as twenty men and brilliant in the sun. I try to shake the feeling that something in there is watching me.