The Gods' Day to Die

by David Welch

  The next book on the shelf was untitled, and slimmer than the rest. Curious, he pulled it from its slot. It didn’t look like much. It was large and square, about fourteen inches on a side. It was leather-bound, but it had no decoration or title. He rested it atop the bookcase and opened to the first page.

  A face looked back at him. It was the face of a young man, a painting. And it was a very good painting, in full color and nearly photorealistic. The man couldn’t have been more than eighteen. His raven-black hair was done in a strange style. It looked like he had clips made of bone holding it pulled back against the side of his head. There was something vaguely familiar about the man’s face. It didn’t really click until Desmond looked at his eyes.

  They were ice blue. He’d seen those eyes just hours earlier, staring down at him as Artemis had ridden him to climax.

  He froze, realizing why the man looked so familiar. It was a familial resemblance. Somehow the young man was related to Artemis. Other features now fell into place. The curve of his jaw, the line of the man’s cheekbones . . .

  Brother? Son? He didn’t know. Glancing down the page, he saw a line of script at the bottom. It was written in no alphabet he’d ever seen. And while he could only read Latin script, he’d seen enough of foreign alphabets to know this wasn’t something common. Not Greek nor Cyrillic nor Armenian, not even close to Asian characters.

  His mind flashed on the image of Artemis chuckling at the man on TV as he talked about Linear A. The script before him was not Linear A; at least it didn’t look like the images on television. But what if it were something comparably ancient? Something nobody alive was supposed to know? What if Artemis were a greater history buff that he had previously imagined?

  He dismissed the idea. If she was some sort of archaeological genius, and had actually cracked these ancient scripts, why wouldn’t she be telling the world? People got Nobel prizes for that sort of stuff.

  He continued flipping through the pages. Face after face stared out at him, men and women, each with their own line of unknown writing at the bottom. Occasionally he’d see a picture of a boy or a girl, his mind concluding that whoever these children were, they hadn’t made it to adulthood. Otherwise they’d be painted as adults, like most of the people in the book.

  And somehow, these men and women were all related to Artemis. Most of them had her look, with about half of them displaying her piercing blue eyes. Even those who didn’t immediately resemble Artemis always had a feature or two of hers; you just had to look. Most of the faces were Caucasoid, but a few had a different look, the look of somebody of mixed race. The last page held just such a face. Except this page wasn’t a painting, it was an old black-and-white photograph.

  The image was of a young man, dressed in clothing from the turn of the twentieth century. He too looked vaguely like Artemis. But a single look at him told you that one of his parents had been Native American. And if his face didn’t convince a person, the single feather he wore woven into his hair gave it away.

  Was that it after all? Had Artemis just been honoring one of her forefathers in a way he would’ve recognized? A great-grandfather, perhaps? He wasn’t sure. Artemis didn’t look particularly Native American, though if this man had married a Caucasian, and his descendants had done the same . . . it wasn’t entirely impossible for Artemis to bear no resemblance. But even that conclusion felt off to him. How many people did remembrance rituals for their great-grandparents? Hell, how many people had even met their great-grandparents? His had all died before he was born. He knew vaguely of their names but not much else.

  More curious than ever, he closed the book and put it down. Unconsciously his eyes rose to the picture of the Civil War nurse. Perhaps that was why she had it, because it was some distant relative of hers. Heck, maybe this woman had been the mother of that last native-looking man in the book. Perhaps Artemis was just one of those people who were into family trees? It made sense. She clearly loved history, and it wasn’t a big leap to go from loving history to looking into your own.

  As he thought this, something in the picture caught his eye. It was barely perceptible. At first he thought it was just some imperfection, like a lot of old photographs had. It was small enough that it certainly could be just such a flaw. He leaned closer, right up against the picture, squinting to see.

  He found himself staring at the woman’s head. Her hair was pulled back tightly, revealing a small scar above her left ear. He could just make out the shape of it, and once he did, his heart skipped a beat. He knew why it had caught his attention in the first place.

  He’d seen it minutes ago. Des leapt back several feet, his heart racing uncontrollably, his mind too chaotic to reason. He took several breaths, shaking his head to clear away the mess of crazy thoughts running through it. This done, he walked up to the picture again, taking another close look. He felt cold confusion come over him, filling his chest. The scar was there, and it was the same shape as the one he’d seen on Artemis. Narrow, with a slight bulge at one end.

  Impossible! I’m seeing what I want to see.

  That had to be it. His mind was playing tricks on him. It was seeing the woman in the picture, associating her with Artemis, then filling in the blanks. Memory did that all the time. It was notoriously unreliable, everybody knew that.

  He blinked a few times, expecting the image to change, hoping for his mind to quit its games. The picture would be there, objective and unchanging, and he’d feel like a fool for possibly thinking that the woman was actually Artemis. But each time the tiny scar remained. And he found himself seeing other similarities. The shape of the woman’s eyes, for example. They didn’t just bear a resemblance to Artemis’ eyes, they seemed to be exact copies of them. The slight, individual curves were there.

  He found himself staring at the picture like some sort of forensic investigator, poring over every detail. The shape of her lips, the prominence of her cheekbones, the line of her jaw . . . one by one he examined her features, and one by one he found himself wondering if he was staring at Artemis herself. Or her clone. Or maybe Artemis was the clone, made from the DNA of this long-dead woman.

  Seriously? He shook his head, incredulous at the thought. Artemis a clone of some Civil War nurse? Human cloning was illegal, and given that Artemis was maybe a year or two younger than him, at best, it certainly hadn’t been technologically possible when she’d been born. And one hundred fifty years ago? He doubted people had even come up with the idea of human cloning then, much less preserved some random nurse’s DNA so that more than a century into the future somebody would be able to recreate her. Nonsense!

  So what then? How could two people separated by a century and a half be identical right down to the scars?

  His mind fought to understand. Bits of reason began to break through. When the impossible is eliminated, whatever remains, however improbable . . . But what improbability was he looking at here? He didn’t know. Either two women with staggeringly similar DNA had been born a hundred fifty years apart, or his insane cloning scheme was actually true, and Artemis was—

  His thoughts stopped dead, the name ringing out in his head. Artemis. Artemis. Ancient Greek Goddess of the Hunt. He heard his old history professor, going on about how myths were usually based on a kernel of truth. That voice rang in his head, over and over. Impossible, his inner voice replied. It didn’t sound as convincing as he hoped it would.

  Artemis . . . they’d joked about that old story when he’d found her naked in that pond. But now even that stood out to him. How many people went out of their way to bathe in ponds? How many people these days had ever bathed in a pond? That was something out of ancient history, something you saw in B-movies featuring attractive men and women running around in revealing loincloths.

  Or is it something she made a habit of in times past? So much so that she still ducks out to indulge it today?

  He shook his head to clear out the nons
ense. It didn’t work. Every time he looked at that picture, he couldn’t help but think that he was seeing the impossible, that he had just stared the impossible in the face, that he was sleeping with the impossible three nights a week.

  Still shaking his head, he turned his attention back to the book and flipped it open to the last page. Looking at the photograph, he realized immediately that it was of more recent vintage than the one on the wall. His confusion grew deeper. The man looked older than Artemis, probably nearing forty based on the amount of weathering in his face. Which meant his insane new theory couldn’t be true. If Artemis was Artemis, then she would be forever young. This man wasn’t. So he had to be one of her ancestors, and the nurse had to be someone different, someone long dead.

  Unless he is one of her descendants.

  The thought struck him cold. The Greek gods had been known to mate with mortals and produce mortal children, demigods. But that was crazy. He was not honestly standing here thinking that Artemis was an immortal goddess who had given birth to a mortal half-native son sometime in the eighteen sixties! Hell, that was as nuts as his cloning theories.

  But the thought wouldn’t leave him. He flipped backward through the pages of the book. With another cold shiver, he realized that all of these people could be her descendants. Des may not have known much about his own great-grandparents, but based on the pictures he’d seen, he knew that they hadn’t looked like him. Three generations of marriage had brought enough variation into his lineage that nobody would be able to tell he and they were family just by looking. The faces staring up at him from the pages looked so much like Artemis that it was impossible to mistake their relation to her.

  Her children?

  Soft footfalls on the stairs broke his concentration. He looked, seeing Artemis appear in the doorway. She had on a bathrobe, her hair frizzy from sleep.

  “There you are,” she said. “Couldn’t sleep?”

  “Uh . . . no,” he said.

  Artemis squinted as her eyes adjusted to the sudden light. Her expression soured when she saw the book in his hands.

  “Oh,” she said, not sounding as if she had been caught off guard. “You like my paintings? It’s just a hobby of mine—”

  “A hobby,” Desmond said. Her words set off a suspicion in his mind. “Like offering tobacco on Spirit Lake?”

  He held up the book, opened to the last page. Artemis was silent for a long moment, the wheels clearly turning in her head.

  “Oh, yes. That’s my great-great-grandfather, if you’d believe it,” she said.

  “I’m not sure I would,” he replied.

  “Well, why not?” she asked, her tone light.

  “Because the woman in the photograph above the bookshelf has the exact same scar above her ear that you do,” said Desmond, his voice shaking.

  The sour expression returned for a split second, just long enough for Desmond to take notice of it.

  “I know, I’ve seen that too. Remarkable coinci—”

  “And the same eyes, mouth, cheeks, forehead . . . everything about her is identical to you,” he pressed.

  Artemis sighed, frowned, and looked down at her feet.

  “What do you think is happening here, Desmond?” she asked.

  “What do I think . . .” he repeated, glancing around at all the ancient stuff with new appreciation. “I think something isn’t right, to say the least. And I know I sound absolutely crazy for saying this . . . but I can’t come up with anything else. You’re her, aren’t you? That’s not some photo you bought. That’s you.”

  “Are you out of your mind?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Desmond said. “Maybe . . . yes? I—It’s not possible. The exact same scar in the exact same place! A book of faces all freakishly resembling yours, as if they were your children! What is going on, Artemis?”

  Another long moment passed, and she said nothing. From the frown on her face, it was clear to him that she was struggling with something. This did nothing to help allay his unsettled mind. Finally she walked over, taking the book from his hands. She gazed upon the photograph with sad eyes, running her fingers carefully over the image.

  “Desmond, you may not want to hear this . . .” she said.

  “I think it’s too late for that,” he said. “Either you’re some sort of time traveler, or you are the woman in that picture. Or maybe I’m just fucking nuts.”

  “Don’t be foolish,” she said dismissively. “You’re not nuts. And time travel is impossible.”

  “Yeah,” Desmond said. “But so is immortality . . .”

  “No,” she replied softly, “it isn’t.”

  The words hung over them, neither one sure what to say. Desmond had a hard time bringing himself to believe it. Looking at her, he saw a young woman in her twenties, with her whole life before her. He realized, with an inward sardonic laugh, that if what she was saying were true, she did have her whole life ahead of her.

  Oh, yeah, definitely nuts.

  So he stood there, facing the impossible. And his mind still fought the idea of accepting it. It could not be true. It couldn’t. Sure, there were some jellyfish that reverted to a budding stage at the end of their natural lives, basically restarting their life cycles. And there were single-celled amoebas that divided themselves equally, so in a sense the original amoeba was still alive and well inside all of its descendants. And there were things like viruses that could stay dormant for God knew how long before reactivating. And he was definitely grasping at straws to try and make sense of this because he knew damn well that mammals could not do such things. It was impossible.

  “You’re the first person in a millennium who’s figured it out on their own,” she finally said. “Usually I have to tell them.”

  “Artemis . . .” he said, “this is . . . I mean . . . What the hell is going on?”

  “Come on,” she said, taking him by the hand and tucking the book under her arm. “Let’s go upstairs. This could take a while.”

  A half hour later, Desmond sat on the sectional across the coffee table from Artemis. She sipped tea, and stared with a worried gaze into the cup, working up to the task. Uncertainty ran through her, a rare feeling given how much she’d seen and done. But it always did when moments like this came. It had been like this when she’d told Crow Foot the truth, and when she’d told their son Diving Eagle. She hadn’t revealed the truth to anyone since her last son, over a century ago.

  “Artemis?” he said.

  “Okay,” she said, putting down the tea. “You may not know how to believe this . . . but that woman in the picture is me.”

  He sat stock still, saying nothing.

  “My brother went to fight for the Union, so I went to be a nurse, afraid for him. Of course, we got sent to different theaters so it didn’t really help . . .”

  “Your brother? There’s more than one of you?”

  “Yes,” she replied, “Ares. He enlisted.”

  “Ares . . .” he said distantly. “Ares, Artemis. So you are that Artemis?”

  “No,” she said. “Well . . . yes. Sort of. I’m not a god. But for a long time, people . . . sort of thought I was. That we were.”

  “Right,” he said, sarcasm creeping into his voice.

  She sighed and got to her feet. She always thought better when moving.

  “Look, this is easier if I start from the beginning. I know it’ll seem crazy to you, but could you just let me tell you first? I promise I’ll answer all your questions when I’m done.”

  A guarded look crossed his face.

  “Please, Desmond?” she said. “If you want to be with me, it’s important you know. So you can make your choice.”

  “Fine,” he said. “I guess. Go ahead, let’s hear it.”

  She cleared her throat, and took a deep breath.

  “There was a tribe of people, t
he Vesclevi. Around four thousand BC—”

  “Four thousand BC?!” Desmond interrupted. Artemis shot him an annoyed glare, and he sank back into the couch, shaking his head.

  “Around four thousand BC they were living in what is now northeast Macedonia. They’d moved there several hundred years earlier, probably from Caucasus. Definitely from somewhere farther east.

  “Anyway, the Vesclevi were known in the region for living long lives. By the standards of the day, forty was old, but my forefathers were regularly living seventy or eighty years. Then, around four thousand BC, my grandfather Kronos was born.”

  “Kronos, as in Zeus’ father Kronos?” Desmond asked.

  “Yes. I see you know your mythology,” she said.

  “Read most of the classics after college,” he said with a wave. “Never thought I’d be living them.”

  “Anyway, Kronos lived a long life. And right away people noticed that he aged slower than those around him, even among the Vesclevi. He had children with his first wife, and raised them like a normal family. But his first wife died when she was in her seventies. Kronos still looked like he was in his forties. Then he met a woman named Rhea. She wandered into his home from a nearby Vesclevi village that had expelled her because, like Kronos, she also aged slower than most. She was already forty-five when they met. The two married, and to everyone’s surprise Rhea was still capable of having children. They had three that survived childhood: Zeus, Hades, and Poseidon.

  “At first nobody noticed any differences. Everybody knew their parents had aged slowly, so they figured it was no shock when the kids did. They didn’t figure out until later that after the three brothers had reached their mid-twenties, their aging didn’t just slow, it stopped.