The Ruin of Eros

Chapter Twenty-Five

The path to Delphi starts high in the mountains. It’s colder than I expected for late summer, and I keep the hood of my cloak pulled close around me.

In the horse’s saddlebags I have the few valuables I found that had not been taken. A handful of coins; a gold signet ring of my father’s. There was no food left in the house, but the garden had not yet been fully dug up, so I was able to forage a little there, and put the grains and vegetables I gathered in a sack to take with us, along with a full waterskin. Along with the coins, I’m hoping that will last long enough to get us to Delphi. After that, I’ll have to figure something else out.

I noticed something else, when I was fastening on my bag of meager provisions: a quiver of arrows, hooked to the horse’s saddle. I would have noticed them earlier, I suppose, if I hadn’t been so distracted. Out in the barn I found an old bow, and now I ride with the quiver of arrows slung across my back.

Poison arrows . I wonder what he carried them for. And then I think of the things he said to me; the lessons, as I see it now, that he was trying to teach me.

What is a god but a demon by another name?

Just because he is the god of love, does not mean he isn’t dangerous. All gods are dangerous. I should know that by now.

Either way, I’m glad of the extra defense. When Father taught us combat, Dimitra was always better with the sword or javelin, but I could shoot an arrow straighter than she ever could, so these won’t go amiss.

I adjust the quiver on my back, and look out over the mountain road, the azure sea in the distance. Soon it’s nearing sunset; the sky is clear except for a patch of thick clouds blowing in from the west. A flock of birds flies overhead—they circle once, split apart, then knit back together. Although I ride alone, with not another soul in sight, I wonder how many traveled along this mountain pass a short while ago, in the exodus Lydia described. As for us, our road will go west from here, before taking us down through the mountain passes to the coast, and then we’ll follow the bay around toward the crossing at Patras. Then we’ll go east again, skirting Nafpaktos and Galaxidi, until we finally reach Delphi.

The stallion snorts and shakes his mane; I almost think he welcomes the journey. That makes one of us.

I reach a hand forward and stroke the side of his great muzzle.

Ajax, I remember. That is this noble creature’s name.

“You have done me a great service,” I say to him. “I hope you will not regret it.”

I had half-expected him to turn against me, the further I led him from the temple. I thought perhaps he would pull away, seeking to return to his master, but he rides as easily with me as if we were old friends. Even so, I have the sense that all of it is on his terms: I have not forgotten the way it went before, when I tried to ride him out of there against his will.

As stubborn as his master , I think, but it only brings a tightness to my chest.

You will not see me again , he said .

Forget what you can.

The words echo through me. Did he mean it? After all that happened between us? Perhaps he hates me now. I betrayed him, after all. I broke a vow, somehow I brought his temple to the ground. He warned me—it was the one thing he made me promise.

If only he had told me the truth, I think, but I know well enough why he didn’t. Better to let me believe he was monstrous, if it kept me from the temptation of looking. If it kept me from a curse of madness.

So am I mad? Perhaps. If love is madness, if desire is madness.

It sounds wrong—it sounds stupid and dangerous—to use words like that. Words like love . But what else am I to call this? First I hated him. Then I desired him. Then I began to love him. All against my wishes, against my better judgment.

And I cannot forget that feeling, when he first opened his eyes. It felt like falling through time, as if the future and the past had compressed into one. And the most strange and wondrous part of all: in each instant, he was there. As though the memories of the future were already made, as though the whole of our lives had already been intertwined. Whatever part of our mortal selves is deathless, I felt that part of me sing out. How can I describe it, except that I felt certain our fates were bound?

But that cannot be.

It must not be. It is impossible, and worse than impossible, it’s dangerous.

He will return to the Pantheon, and forget me. What was it he said, before? Your lifetime, your father’s and your father’s father’s, are nothing to a god. He may not forget me overnight, but what does time matter to him?

I lower my head, and turn into the wind. We ride through the night. I’m tired, but not tired enough to sleep—and besides, I feel safer up here, on Ajax’s broad back. There are few places to seek shelter on these open roads, and no telling who or what might come across me as I slept.

I bring my fingers to the Shroud that hangs around my neck. I suppose it must be working: the earth has not opened up to swallow me yet, nor has some dreaded creature emerged from these mountain passes.

Did he really think he could rescue me from the cliffs that day, and keep the secret from her? Did he really believe she would not find us out?

Gods can be fools, I suppose, as much as mortals can. But he was right about one thing: the wrath she has for me will only be redoubled now.

I think of all the little things he told me, the oblique comments that meant nothing at the time. The family he spoke of, the two brothers he’d been parted from in childhood. I know who they are: Aphrodite may be married to Hephaestus, but none of her children come from his seed—she is the goddess of love, but not loyalty, and her three sons are all born of the war-god, Ares. And of these, Eros is known to be her favorite. The youngest; the one she raised to be like her, a love-god, while Ares raised the other two in his own image.

A dangerous family, to be sure.

Still, whatever offense Eros has caused to his family, I suppose it is nothing to mine. I finger the knot in the medallion’s leather string again. I had better ensure it does not loosen. The moonlight picks out the path ahead, but my eye can only follow some small distance before it blends back into brush. It would be easy, I think, to get lost up here. I am tired, but I keep my eyes open, and the threat of sliding off of Ajax’s broad back is incentive enough.

Morning comes, slow and red. I reach a village, and then another one after that. The path becomes a road, and after a while I see others on it—here and there another horse-rider, here and there a person on foot. I keep the hood of my cloak up, and my eyes on the path. I don’t want their attention. I don’t want them to ask where I’m from or why I’m traveling this way. I don’t want them to notice that I’m a woman, and young.

When dusk starts to fall for the second night, I think about stopping. I’m exhausted. How long is it since I slept?

I ask around to find a room before the darkness thickens. The xenodochoi , the villagers who offer up their rooms for travelers, do so as a holy act—but they are more eager to host some guests than others, that much is easy to see. The first door is opened by a woman, who narrows her eyes at me and tells me their house is full. The next door is opened by a man, and although he says there is room for me, I do not like how he says it. I dismount to ask some children playing in a small square. They eye me curiously; one of them has dark eyes that remind me of young Hector Georgiou.

“Try the house with the red door, after the shrine,” the boy says. “Kirios Hieronymus is good to wayfarers.”

Sure enough, when I knock the door opens quickly, and a stocky man with deep brown hair ushers me in. There’s a free room, he says, and a table with bread and wine for me if I wish it.

“Will you have this for it?” I take my father’s ring from the bag and show it to him.

He looks at it, looks back at me, then shakes his head.

“Keep it, girl,” he says gruffly. “You may eat as a guest tonight.”

I take my bread and wine in the one large room where other travelers are dining. I seat myself in a dark corner; they barely notice me come in, so deep are they in conversation.

“You’ve felt the storms, have you not?” one of them is saying. “If you knew how to cast for omens, brother, you would know it. Something is amiss with the gods.”

“Something is always amiss with the gods,” another says, waving his companion’s words away with a mouthful of wine. “They fight more than we do down here.”

“Be that as it may,” a third one says, “whatever her priestesses decree, we’d be fools not to follow.”

“Whose priestesses?” I say at last, and the men go silent, turning my way. They stare, but I don’t lower my hood.

“Why, Aphrodite,” the first of them, a tall, whiskered fellow, says. The others are tight-lipped, seeming unsure whether they ought to share such speculations with a woman.

“Her priests have issued a decree,” the whiskered man continues. “Those seeking her blessing are no longer to worship her son, the god Eros.”

The piece of bread falls from my hand. What can this mean? As the whiskered man’s companion said, we are used to the gods and their fighting—but this seems different.

“Rumor has it the temples of Eros have been falling. We are not to rebuild them, the priests say. Even his shrines are not to be used. Likenesses and statues are to be covered or put away.”

I swallow, feeling a chill go down my spine.

“But surely such a thing will not happen. He is one of our gods. We can’t just… stop .”

The men look at each other.

“There are many gods we have stopped worshiping over the years,” one says finally. “Our ancestors worshiped the Titans.”

True enough. The Titans were an ancient race, and I suppose no one has worshiped them in these lands since Zeus brought his clan to Mount Olympus—but that was many years ago.

The man shrugs. “No doubt with every generation, some are lost.”

I say nothing. It is too hard to fathom. Gods cannot be killed, and yet…what he is describing sounds almost like a death.

“Well,” one of the other men says, “I reckon it’s time we turn in.” He eyes me as he says it, and there’s a hesitant rumble of agreement. Left alone in the room, I finish my bread and wine slowly, then climb to my room and lock the door. I push the weight of the bed against the door, and through the night I lie with my mother’s knife beside the pillow.

At first light I slip out to the stables, untie Ajax, and pull my aching limbs up over his back. Ajax, I think, suffers none of my exhaustion. Even on these dusty paths, his black coat looks sleek and unsullied, his mane as lush as ever, and the walking does not appear to tire him. Nor does he show any reluctance, any instinct to pull against me or run off. And I know that is not because he is tame—he is a wild creature, much wilder than I. I can only judge that he is here by choice; that he remains here, with me, by choice. I whisper to him as we walk on.

“I have heard strange things of your master last night, Ajax. I do not know what to make of them.”

The roads are empty enough, and if anyone thinks me a madwoman for conversing with her horse, they keep it to themselves.

By the time the sun is halfway through its ascent, I have my first glance of the sea, and something about the sight brings tears to my eyes. By noon, we are riding by the coast. It is bracing, euphoric even. I feel something stirring as I watch the waves glinting under the sun, the blue ripples laced with gold. From the high vantage point of Sikyon, though the sea was within sight, it felt remote. Not so now as we ride through these flat lands, along this endless briny expanse—dancing, ever-shifting. My mother was an island girl, the child of fisher-people. Perhaps that’s why my blood seems to rejoice at the sight of all this.

We have to wait a while for a ferryman at Patras, but the crossing itself takes no more than half an hour, with the currents in our favor. I give him an extra coin because I can tell he’s not pleased about Ajax; it’s a large enough ferry, and not unusual for a rider to cross with their horse, but the great stallion looks bigger on the boat than he did on land.

I avoid the center of Patras town, heading east with the bay as soon as we land. Soon its outskirts give way to villages, poorer ones than those I passed through yesterday: these are squat mud-and-clay houses, with small rough statuettes outside the doors for protection. I see that the villagers here pray to Hestia and Hecate for the most part. Hestia, to keep their fires burning and their homes tended. As for Hecate, the goddess of darkness, I cannot say; perhaps fearful things happen here in the night. Open fires have been lit here and there along the road, and flies congregate in pockets above what smells like goat meat. Children play on the dirt path, and their parents call at them to stay clear as I ride by. I ride through the night again, and on the third day, I begin to spot other travelers headed to Delphi.

They stand out—they’re pilgrims, like me. There is a hum of anxiety about them; in some cases, desperation. Some are sick, or carry sick children with them. The sight pulls at me. It is not hard to imagine what questions they bring for the oracle.

But it is not only the poor who go this way. I see rich men, too, borne along in fine carriages with many servants. Rich and poor, young and old: I spot more and more of them, and by the fourth day, there are a flood of us. Military men and others who look like farmers; women from all walks of life, accompanied by their husbands or servants, and two who ride with no male companion at all—I see their curious glances find me, perhaps wondering the same of me as I am wondering of them. A man and a young boy; a group of soldiers on horseback; a man in shackles, shorn: I guess at all the questions these many people carry with them for the oracle. Some questions will be life-changing, some seemingly small. Some querents come to be relieved of their fears, others to confirm them. Some will beg for miracles they do not really want.

Perhaps, like me, they seek and fear the truth in the same degree.

*

The town of Delphi is small, a cluster of innkeepers and merchants selling trinkets to the pilgrims. But the crowds! I had expected some, but not this! It is busier than I had ever imagined. The temple is above the town, high on a mountainside, and from down here, milling with the crowds, I can only see flashes of color amid the foliage. A winding path leads uphill, a series of switchbacks toward the shrine at the very top where the oracle sits. The Pythia , they call her. They say she can answer any question you ask, but that does not mean she will.

There are priests and priestesses in red robes, trying to impose some order on the crowds swarming around the foot of the hill. Zealots, a man next to me mutters under his breath. I understand what he means. Now and again we had passersby come to visit our temple in Sikyon, but they were nothing like this. Here, the crowd is full of intensity, the air practically hums with it. I, too, am unnerved by those who make too much of religion; the kind who become glassy-eyed, like sleepwalkers, when they talk about their god. I think there will be many such here.

“An orderly line, please,” someone is calling, and two priests walk firmly down the path, maneuvering stragglers, forcing us into some semblance of a line.

I’ve had to pay a man at an inn to keep Ajax under his watch; everyone must climb to the oracle’s shrine on foot, there is no other way. Paupers and princes, all must go the same path.

“Look here!” A wealthy-looking man with a gold coronet and a retinue of military men catches one of the priests by the edge of his robe. “We have gold, and plenty of it. I come on an errand of the king of Thebes. Can’t you show us to a place further up this line?”

The priest looks at him.

“We have many errands here, from many kings. And what good is your coin to us? Here we live on the mercy of the gods.”

The man falls back in line with a snort of disgust, and soon he’s bargaining with those lined up ahead of him, exchanging coins to move a place or two along.

We wait, and the hours pass; the sun moves through the sky. Finally I am near the top of the line—surely it cannot be long until I am brought forward—and now that I’m so close, half of me has the urge to disappear. Not everyone believes in the oracle’s proclamations, and perhaps I will not believe her myself, once I know what she has to say. But I’m very much afraid that I will believe her…and that I may not like what I hear. Like everyone else, it seems I am afraid to know the truth, when it comes down to it.

A priestess with a coil of braids crowning her head comes down the line. “The oracle cannot see everyone, you are too many today. Some of you will have to come back tomorrow.”

I don’t know whether it’s disappointment or relief that makes my heart clench, but the rest of the crowd seems to feel no such indecision. They are angry: there is murmuring, then arguing, then shoving. When I feel a hand on my shoulder, I am sure someone is about to throw me to the ground. They want my place in the line, and don’t care how they get it. But then I realize the hand is a woman’s, and a voice, low and soft, is saying my name.