The Ruin of Eros

Chapter Twenty-Four

In the grey pre-dawn light the ruins rise up like broken teeth. Instead of wide streets and noble, elegant buildings, the ground is strewn with rubble in every direction, and mounds of stone.

Oh, Sikyon. What have they done to you?

Razed, as though the fist of a god rammed right down upon it from the sky.

I breathe unsteadily.

And this, too, is to be my fault? The feeling is unbearable.

I don’t want to ride on, but I must. It cannot all be destroyed. But even the horse seems to falter at the sight of so much devastation. His large back sways as we turn down what was once the main street. Now it is nothing more than a series of ruins. Great chunks of rock stand in the ground, trails of dust marking their fall from the mountain above. To my right, down the mountainside, I can see the paths some of the falling boulders took, wide enough to push a cart through. Even the buildings that are still standing look precarious and unsafe. Through windows and gaping holes, I see the signs of abandoned life: kitchens with their pots and braziers shattered; cups and bowls and children’s toys jumbled on the earthen floor. Thin, mewling cats roam in and out of the abandoned homes. Everything smells of dust and desolation.

My home.

A home that betrayed me.

And yet still, it was my home.

By the scale of this ruin, there must be many dead, and yet there are no bodies here, or none that I can see. It makes me think this place was not abandoned straightaway. Some panicked and fled immediately, I suppose. Others waited, tended to the dead and dying, took the time to pack up their homes, and loot the abandoned ones.

I walk from house to house, looking to see what has been left behind. In some places, a little; in others, a lot. How many of my townspeople escaped? Hundreds? Thousands? Just a few?

I urge the black stallion through the streets, but it seems to me he already knows where I want to go. Maybe he’s drawn, just as I am, to the whisper of disaster. At the next crossroads I study the churned-up mud: many feet—horses and humans—have passed through here, moving every possible way. The survivors did not leave as a convoy, then, but fled piecemeal, in families and groups.

Past the agora, the ruin is not so absolute. Here, too, the cats roam freely as if they, now, are the true owners of Sikyon. But here and there I see shadows move behind windows; shutters twitching as I pass. It has not been entirely abandoned, then.

I see a flicker of movement to my left: a child, picking their way nimbly from the rubble at the back of a house, tripping as they run off, their arms full. Carrying some looted bounty, I suppose. They’re glancing back at me as they run. I must be what scared them off.

“Hey!” I call. “Come back! I won’t hurt you. I just…”

But they’ve already gone.

I lead the horse down the dirt roads to the outskirts of town. When we reach the streets around my old home I slow his pace, the beat of his hooves like a tremor in my spine.

The door of our house hangs wide open, and I dismount with a fast-beating heart.

I loop the horse’s reins over a door post and step inside.

“Dimitra?” I call. “Father?”

My voice ricochets back to me. Of course I did not expect them to answer; of course they are not here. And yet, for a moment, I imagined…

I walk through the rooms and find them emptied out. Anything of value that can be carried is gone. Taken by my family as they rode to safety? Or by the looters who came after?

I have heard what it is like in times of war or disaster: the belongings of the dead are shown little respect. Their homes are overrun, their heirlooms melted down. The very rings are pulled from their fingers.

I just never thought I would witness such a thing in my lifetime.

I thought we lived in a protected place. In a protected time.

Our town is one favored by the gods— that was what our king used to say.

I walk through the rooms, which feel cold and no longer mine. It’s not just the emptiness, not just the fine layer of settled dust. Before, the rooms would seem to turn their faces toward me when I entered. Now, they look blindly past me. They don’t know I’m here, or if they know, they no longer care.

This was the place I longed for when I thought myself a prisoner in a demon’s palace. The only home I knew. The place of all my memories.

I trail a hand along the wall, and make my way from my old room to Dimitra’s, and then to Father’s—it used to smell of him, but now it only smells of dust and stone. I open the great wood chest where he kept his clothes. Most of them look to be still here. If he packed some for a journey, they were very few. I run my hands over an old, grey cloak at the bottom of the chest, and pull it out.

I rub the light wool cloak between my thumb and forefinger. My head throbs. I dare not close my eyes, I dare not stop moving. Because if I pause for an instant I will think of him, and the enormity of it all will paralyze me. My cloaked stranger, my demon husband: the one who told me to forget him.

I know what happens to mortals who fall for gods. It never ends well.

And he is Aphrodite’s own son! No wonder he feared her wrath. No wonder he knew she’d hunt me forever: I’m the reason her own son went against her.

And what will she do, now that she knows what he has done? How he cheated and defied his own mother, to save me? I finger the medallion at my neck. I can’t un-see that look in his eyes, the pain of betrayal, the awful resignation.

Enough. I must push these thoughts from my mind.

My father’s room is not so empty as downstairs. The looters did not bother with much here, I suppose—

These things are valuable only to a loved one. The tray where he keeps his brush and soap and scent; his liniments, and the picks he uses for his teeth. And there at the back, a wooden box I know well.

Too sharp for little fingers.

The small, jeweled knife my mother brought with her from Atlantis. The only thing of value she owned. The sheath is old and slightly rusted when I lift it from the box. I slide the knife out to examine the blade.

Still sharp.

I don’t know how my mother came to possess such an object. I asked my father once and I think he was uncomfortable; it seemed to me that he believed my mother might have stolen it. She had lived a hard life, he said, before she came to Sikyon. But for a weapon it was a pretty thing, he admitted. Why should she not treasure it the way other wives might treasure a rich bracelet or a diadem made of gold?

The opals in the hilt catch the light, flaring like tiny flames. I don my father’s cloak, and slip the dagger in one of its deep pockets. It can be dangerous, for a woman traveling alone.

I start, then, at a noise from downstairs. Just the horse, growing restless outside? Or a stray animal perhaps, overturning something in the kitchen. Or something else altogether. I move quietly to the head of the stairs.

If someone is here to loot, they can have what they like. Most things of value are gone, and what is left I don’t care for. But I’m remembering the shadows in the windows that moved as I rode by. Watching me. In a pillaged town, looters may come for more than jewels…

My hand closes around the knife in my pocket. I take a few silent steps down the stairs.

“Lydia?” I stop short.

It’s no marauder—just our old neighbor, Lydia, who taught me to weave when I was only waist-high.

“I—I thought you were an intruder. Here for looting.” My breath catches in a foolish half-laugh. Her milky eyes look me over.

“Psyche.” Her voice is solemn and unsurprised. “So you are not dead after all.”

“I am not.” Though I almost feel it, today. Walking through the devastation of Sikyon, a part of me seems to have died with it.

Lydia’s gaze is steady. I notice that, though she looks much the same as before, her clothes are covered with a layer of dirt, and there is a small gash at her left temple that is still in the way of healing.

“Your sister said she saw the monster that came for you. That he was the size of a tall man, but all shadow. And that later he sprouted terrible wings, and carried you away.”

“It is so.”

“But he did not kill you.”

“The opposite,” I say, and my throat constricts.

Despite her milky gaze, her stare seems to pierce me. She taps her cane and steps closer. Her face is puckered and wary.

“But you are changed,” she remarks. “You fly too close to the sun, girl. I see it in your face. Already you have been singed.”

A question burns in me, but part of me dares not ask. If I don’t ask, I can never hear the worst. But I force myself to speak.

“Can you tell me what became of my family? My father, my sister. Are they alive?”

“They were when they left here,” she says. “What they are now, I know not.”

My heart quickens.

“So they survived…” I gesture. “All this?”

“They were gone before it happened—the king expelled them, not so many days after his men brought you to the rock. They were allowed to bring what their wagon could carry, and the rest was forfeit.” She looks at me. “A few days later, we suffered this collapse. Some said the gods were angry at the king’s harshness: that we had been wrong to expel your family, and to sacrifice you.” She sighs, adjusting her weight, leaning harder on her stick.

“Others blamed you.” She pauses. “But you did as you were bound. If the goddess was thwarted it was not your doing.”

My stomach sinks, hearing her account of it.

“Do you know what direction my family took?” I say. “Where they may have been headed?”

She shakes her head.

“If they knew it, they did not speak of it to me.” Her pale eyes rove slowly, taking in the empty rooms.

“Were you here?” I say haltingly. “When it happened?”

She nods.

“It began in the middle of the day. When the sun was high. It came out of nowhere. Creaking and rumbling, and then a great thundering. Slowly at first, and then fast.” Her fingers tap out a quiet, aimless pattern on the handle of her cane. “For some, there was time to flee. For others, none. The poor took most of the damage. The wealthier end of the town was mostly spared. Such injustice…but it is ever thus.”

It’s hard to look at Lydia’s face.

“Some of us wanted to stay and rebuild, but we did not find much support; too many were afraid. They said that it would be tempting fate to stay. I never saw carts packed so high—gold, jewels, food and wine.” She shrugs her bony shoulders. “I told them they were wasting their time. Places aren’t cursed: people are. Any if a person is cursed, they’re cursed wherever they may go.”

I feel the air sharp in my throat. “You believe that?”

“I do.”

Her pale gaze travels over me.

“I must go looking for them,” I say aloud. “For my family. But I don’t know where to begin.”

She shakes her head.

“I have no answers for you, child. I am no oracle.”

Her thumb rubs the polished wood at the top of her cane. I stare at her.

No oracle.

They’re idle words, and yet they spark a thought in me, a thought that shivers through me. There is a place that I can go for answers, but it is an uncertain road, to be sure. I look out the doorway of the house that was once my home.

An uncertain road, but it’s all there is left.