Great Goddesses

by Nikita Gill

This . . . this was not what she was expecting. She is standing in the doorway of Hestia’s cosy cottage. It is filled to the brim with women who are in full conversational sway. Each one is a reformation of sorts in her trade. One thing is for sure, between the warmth of the wooden and soft-hued room and the laughter resonating, Hestia still knew how to put together the most wonderful of gatherings. Each person seemed perfectly chosen to bring out the fire in the people they were talking to.

  And for the first time in her life, Aphrodite feels out of place.

  Men have always been easy for her. Women . . . she had spent too much time trying to protect her men from them, she didn’t know how to be around them without suspicion, or doubt.

  Hestia appears behind her, hands her a glass of wine and gently nudges her forward.

  ‘Stop being silly, and come and join the conversation.’

  Aphrodite opens her mouth to protest, to turn back, to run, then closes it again. Finally, she goes against her nature, perches on a comfortable red sofa and lifts the crystal-clear glass to her mouth, a sip of rich wine putting her slightly more at ease.

  The women around her add fullness by smiling, laughing, conversing like she has never heard before. There’s a comfort here, an easiness she begins to realise she was missing all along.

  Even ancient beings have something new to learn once in a while.

  In all her tens of thousands of years alive she had gone without this kind of friendly, warm company. The company of other women.

  The Blacksmith God

  You should have been King.

  But the Gods are shallow;

  instead, the arms that were

  meant to love you unconditionally

  threw you off a holy mountain

  to a wounded, savage fate below.

  But was it savage? Away from the cruel

  sight of feckless, venomous Gods,

  you grew to be kind and unspoiled, sweet Hephaestus.

  You learned to turn metal into magic,

  made the mortal children toys and helmets

  in your adopted village of mortals,

  and when you were summoned to Olympus

  how the children wept for their gentle friend Hephaestus.

  When Zeus tried to give you

  the Goddess of Love as an apology –

  as if abandonment is easily bandaged

  and not a lifelong debt you will forever carry –

  you shook your head vehemently.

  ‘Please. No. Do not punish her, or me.’

  You knew she loved your brother Ares.

  Zeus fixed you with his icy gaze.

  ‘I do not take my word back, boy.’

  ‘But she will never stay with me.’

  Hera looks to Zeus, and then to the son

  she had forsaken for the first time with sympathy.

  ‘It gets easier. Slowly you too

  will learn how to cope with it.’

  Lessons from Hephaestus

  If hate is what made you,

  how does one replace it with love?

  You learn sweetness despite

  being built of jealous commands.

  You choose a different path

  than your blood demands.

  When no one aids you,

  you build your own legs.

  You learn how to be needed

  instead of the easiness of wanted.

  And when the burning

  inside your chest claws,

  insults you as forgotten, hideous,

  unloved every single night,

  you learn how to create iron, then a sword,

  and challenge those demons to a fight.

  The Marriage Bed

  Homer, Hesiod, Pindar,

  they will tell you that

  she was disgusted by him,

  that she stole away from

  their marriage bed for she saw

  nothing but golden shackles.

  That Ares held her heart forever

  as the man who she shared

  too much with as her lover.

  But by Olympus, that man,

  with his work-worn hands

  and his forgiving, steadfast love.

  That blacksmith who wore his God-skin

  so uneasily, but his heart on his sleeve,

  always so much more mortal than the rest.

  Sometimes, the poets get it wrong.

  We think beauty is for beauty

  and passion alone for love.

  I suppose a tragic romance

  fraught with unhappiness

  makes for a better poem

  than a love that takes millennia

  to grow. But is it so very wrong

  to believe the one they called the ugliest

  had the loveliest heart, and hearts like his

  are far more fertile ground than bloody

  battlefields for love, true love, to grow?

  Hephaestus’s Tale

  What do you do when you see a love so pure, so completely unwavering other than bow to it?

  *

  They say she was as beautiful as he was hideous. That there was no love lost there. They were wrong.

  On their wedding day, she sobs, and her anguish can be heard outside her dressing chamber. ‘I don’t want to marry him,’ she tells Ares, who is holding her close in his defeated arms. ‘Can’t you tell your father I don’t want to marry him?’

  Ares’s face is lost between rage and sorrow. ‘I’ve asked. You know what he said.’

  Zeus would have his way about this. There were only so many times he would entertain the grievances of other Gods after he had made his decision. Go too far, and you end up working years of labour in Tartarus. And he was hardest on his own sons.

  ‘But not him, Ares.’ She doesn’t need to say, ‘I will never love him like I love you.’

  It’s true. She never does.

  Hephaestus knows where his wife goes on the nights he does not come back from the volcano. He hears the whispers from the tongues of crueller Gods when he walks past the eastern pillars to his room in the morning. They pretend to be there to watch Helios’s ascent. Instead, they gossip about his brother and his wife. ‘Poor Hephaestus,’ they whisper loudly in mock sympathy, within earshot. ‘He has no idea.’

  He does. But he cannot find it in his heart to fault her for continuing to love his brother when it is he who has been made her husband by force.

  He is patient and he has a gentle heart. His fall from Olympus taught him to have more faith in that it taught him to listen to unkind words designed to hurt.

  They said he was as hideous as she was beautiful. That there was no love lost there.

  He wore his kindness better than he wore his Godhood and never once raised his voice at her. Somewhere along the way, she started to notice the soft things about him. Like how he was always there when she was sad. Silent and waiting.

  They were wrong.

  The first time she visited him within the volcano, the three Cyclopes, Brontes in particular, fussed over her so much she wondered why she had not visited before. They brought her nectar, piled jewellery at her feet, asked over and over again if they should lower the temperature of the dark, molten interiors for her. This was less for her, and more because they wanted a chance to show off how they could make magma cool with a single word, but she does not mind.

  She was not sure why she had come down to visit him this time. So many Gods and Goddesses vied for her attentions at this very moment, yet all she could think of was her husband. Which confounded her.

  He had never mattered enough before.

  It was in the forge that she felt like she was looking at him for the first time. Brontes, the gentlest but also lo
udest of all the Cyclopes, was proudly leading her to Hephaestus to present her, but she stopped him by gently touching his arm and shaking her head. She wanted to stay hidden, in the shadows, watching him work. He nodded, slightly sulky at the idea he didn’t get to watch Hephaestus’s expression when he saw Aphrodite, but did as he was told.

  Close to a crimson and orange glowing igneous archway she watched as he worked in a way she had never seen any God on Olympus work. Everything he crafted was a labour of such careful love. No wonder he came home with blackened hands, his titanium, prosthetic leg sometimes smeared with cooling lava.

  After a few minutes, it was as though he sensed her; he lowered his hammer and looked to her.

  A smile dawned on her lips.

  ‘It was you, wasn’t it? It was always you. Why didn’t you tell me?’

  His smile was both rueful and soft all at once. ‘You never asked.’

  It was hard to believe that he was Hera’s son.

  But then he had been cared for by the old mortal man who found him as a crying, hurt babe at the base of a mountain, raised in a small village, and his nurture spoke louder than his genealogy did. He didn’t know any other way than to work for what he had.

  His mortal father told him: ‘Adapt.’

  It was all he knew how to do well.

  Strangely, it is the one quality he shared with his wife.

  He had seen the cruel side of Aphrodite and the soft side of her, but he had never seen her like this. With all her attention in rapture of him, standing in the forge of all places. When she came to him, he took her hand and she doesn’t flinch. Instead, she kisses him as though they have both been drowning all this time and this kiss is the only survival they have.

  This was the day he finally understood why she is called the Goddess of Love.

  Eros was born not long after this day.

  As the baby’s wails filled Olympus, the whispers started anew. They thought he was Ares’ son, but one look at the boy’s molten eyes and gentle disposition told the truth.

  Once, over too much heady ambrosia, Hermes asked him how he had made her fall in love. Hephaestus answered, ‘When I held her, I held her gently so that she always knew she could fly away and I would never harm her or clip her wings.’ When he looked at his wife, his eyes were soft. ‘She chose never to leave.’

  They say she was as beautiful as he was hideous. That there was no love lost there.

  They were wrong.

  The Sun God

  Who else could tame the sun

  other than a boy of gold

  born melody-souled

  and prophecy-tongued.

  Poetry in those veins,

  healing in his eyes,

  but if he so desired

  he could turn cities hollow.

  The story goes that Midas

  had a golden touch, but

  if gold could name itself,

  it would choose to be named Apollo.

  Apollo’s Secret

  He found it easier to be friends with women.

  His sister Artemis. Athena. The Muses.

  Women wanted to know him for more than his power

  and his fearsome nature of burning; they spoke about

  poetry, archery, healing, music, warmth.

  All this he found with women, but men,

  he was both in love and hate with them. You see,

  when you live forever, people scrutinise you.

  You cannot want what you want, or even what you need.

  You are expected to fill the world with Gods and Demigods like you.

  (So what if all the children are damned and broken.

  As if it isn’t the legacy of their family to leave broken children.)

  But men made his whole body erupt with passion,

  a thousand gleaming suns scorched in his celestial body.

  He saw so much of the future at once

  he had to invent his Oracles to cope.

  He had to do something with all those foresights

  that seared his skin, which no one wanted to hear.

  So he tried to give away his prophetic powers

  to vessel after vessel but never could get rid of the prophecies.

  He tried to be with the mothers to his children

  but destroyed them in the all-consuming of himself.

  And one day, Aphrodite, who was unable to see

  their torment or his, asked him, ‘Why, why are you like this?’

  ‘Because,’ he whispered helplessly, almost to himself,

  ‘I don’t know how to survive my immortality being anything else.’

  If you ever want to know what happens when a God

  suppresses a part of himself, look no further than the trail of ashes behind Apollo.

  Apollo to Icarus

  Seeing you come to me should be catharsis

  but instead it takes on the colour of murder.

  It is because you are the mortal one between us.

  More beautiful in your emotion, easier to kill,

  all that energy inside you as quickly perishable

  as the entire lifespan of a butterfly.

  Maybe this was why I wanted you.

  I had grown cold with the responsibility for the sun.

  Destruction was not what I intended for you,

  but this is what happens to all who follow in my wake.

  Ask the sunflower who she used to be; she will tell you

  she was once a nymph who fell in love with me.

  This is the difference between ichor and iron.

  The universe made you closer to itself than us.

  The water will take better care of you than me.

  Let me melt your wings, you belong to the sea.

  Now a stillness neither of us knew before.

  Now a softness no one can answer for.

  The Moon Goddess

  There is something moon-soaked

  and dawn-flavoured about her.

  Something kissed by the wild

  and loved by lightning.

  She, the Goddess of storm hunting

  and wolves and moonlight magic.

  She, the queen of the forest,

  of womanhood more brutal than tragic.

  The Moon Writes a Love Letter to Artemis

  I choose you, the rarest of beings,

  for the belonging I never had with

  your aunt Selene. She was meant to be

  my mother, my food giver, but I found her

  too little in love with me, and more in love

  with watching love. But you, dear Artemis,

  you with the wings that you made from

  your own silver-tipped wishes, how you

  always just took what you wanted,

  I watched you become midwife to your mother

  at birth and help bring your twin into this world,

  this is what I wanted to belong to.

  The dark saplings of unmanageable wilderness

  that run through your veins mixing with

  the gold of ichor, this is how you flick

  your wrists and bend whole forests to your will.

  The brow that holds a scar from the first fray

  you won against your brother and gold-eyed

  like the wolves who sing to me every night,

  how could I ever resist falling in love with you?

  So I took myself from the arms of all my lovers

  and gave myself to you. Tell me, Artemis, do

  you love me too? Perhaps you do.

  Why else when your father sat you

  on his throne as an untamable girl child,

  and asked you what you wanted,

  you tol
d him: ‘Give me the moon.’

  An Interlude with Artemis

  The night sky is a wolf’s mouth today,

  and Artemis, bathed in solitude, is on her wild hunt.

  I meet her by the silver lake and ask her

  about her alone and would she ever give it up for love.

  She laughs as she gestures to the exquisite forest.

  ‘What about love? I have enough.

  How can any one person compare to such splendour?

  I traded my duties for belonging to myself,

  for this wolf-wild heart was not made to surrender.’

  Modern Apollo and Artemis

  Neither of them looked back that last journey walking down the mountains, away from crumbling Olympus.

  People give abandonment many names to make themselves feel better. Apollo named his necessary. He called it ‘the lesser of two evils’.

  Artemis was more brutal. She named hers ‘freedom’. In retrospect, that is what it had been for him too. Ever the dutiful son, however, he couldn’t call it that in front of his father. Zeus had always preferred Artemis to him, no matter what he sacrificed for his father’s love.

  Walking away from the toxicity, still glowing in all their gold and silver finery, they had travelled the world, looking for a home together. For the first time, they chose different paths.

  For the first time since their birth, Apollo did not know where Artemis was.

  Mountains have turned into skyscrapers. The horizon holds an emptiness as the sun has learned how to govern itself. Only the moon still holds her promises. Artemis has made sure of that.

  But there is now an endless fury in her bones.

  Still the queen of the hunt, still the favourite lover of the forest, but both have altered. She leaves her bow and arrow for switchblades and hunting knives. Tosses in her deer skin and armour for leather jackets and jeans.

  Her nymphs have changed too, abandoning the trees for motorcycles, a sharpness to each of their birdlike mouths, mercilessness in their eyes. Years ago, when she had taught them to embrace the darkness, given them direction, trained them to be unafraid of their own woods, which they all carried inside their hearts, she didn’t think that it was the smoke of cars, roads and glittering cities she would lead them into.