The Goddess Denied

by Deborah Davitt

  “Please don’t say the words ‘time-travel,’” Kanmi said, through his fingers. “I’m not saying that it’s impossible, because there are some physicists who think it could be done. I just don’t want to reach for that as my first explanation.”

  Erida shook her head. “No. Not time-travel. The godslayers . . . the namtar-demons . . . were spirits of some sort. We know that. We know that the Veil stands outside of time, and lesser spirits have no concept of time. There is now and there is then, and even then is hard to explain to some of them. It’s like explaining three dimensions to someone who’s been plastered flat to a plate for the entirety of their existence.” She paused. “Kanmi’s told me of a vision that Asha relayed to you, of one of the godslayers being summoned into the body of a human in order to fight the pazuzu. That told me more about them than a thousand fragments of scrolls could. This tells us that at least one of them required a mortal host.” Erida shook her head. “They can die, it would seem. Or at least, can be disincarnated, like any other spirit.” She paused. “And we know that in or around 1334 BAC, Akhenaten was killed by one of them. And there is evidence that in 1190 BAC, one or more of them was present at the sack of Troy.”

  Adam’s eyebrows went up. “Troy? As in, the Iliad?”

  “Precisely.” Erida shrugged. “The Hellene gods were despicable—no offense, valkyrie, I know that your sister serves Apollo—”

  “None taken,” Sigrun murmured. “You probably do not wish to know my thoughts on the Hellene gods.”

  Erida nodded. “Half of them seem to have spent their time raping mortals, and there are notable instances in which the heroes of the Iliad are directed to make human sacrifices.”

  “All right,” Minori agreed, clinically. “That is the usual start of the pattern, you said. But I’ve read the Iliad. I don’t see many figures killing gods there.”

  “Bear with me,” Erida murmured. “Let us start at the beginning. What was the reason for the war?”

  Adam squinted. “The goddess of strife threw a golden apple labeled ‘for the fairest,’ and three goddesses squabbled over to whom it should be given,” he said, a little dubiously. The story lacked a certain dignity. He could imagine ripped clothing and bruises on the goddesses as they scrabbled in the dirt for a damned toy. “They all agreed to make Paris of Troy their judge, and each of them offered him bribes to convince him to call her the fairest. He accepted the bribe of Aphrodite, because she promised him the most beautiful woman in the world. Who was, unfortunately, already married.”

  “That is what the Iliad tells us,” Erida acknowledged. “Apollonius Rhodius wrote, however, that Zeus overthrew his father Cronus, long ago. Cronus, who was the master of time, and from whose name we have created words like chronology.” She paused. “Cronus, old Father Time, was not a good or kindly god. He was one of the Titans, and he devoured all of his children except for Zeus, lest they overthrow him, as he had overthrown his father, Uranus. Zeus, on destroying Cronus, was warned by Prometheus, the far-sighted titan who changed sides to fight against Cronus, that Zeus would be slain by one of his own children. And Apollonius Rhodius writes that Zeus decided in the time of Troy to make a purge of all his god-born descendants, for fear that they might rise up and replace him.”

  Adam felt Sigrun start beside him. “Now,” Erida went on, calmly, “mind you, Zeus had been quite obsessed with a nymph named Thetis, but there was a prophecy about her, that claimed that her son would be greater than his father. Zeus couldn’t permit her to bear his children, so he married her off to a human, and she had a son. Achilles. Whom she burned in a fire and dipped in the Styx, trying to remove his mortality. All but the heel. You know the legend. That’s just to show you, again, how much fear was in Zeus. He actually didn’t let his appetites get away from him, for once.” Erida paused. “So, if you want to get rid of all your god-born, what do you do? You incite them to fight against each other. For, oh, twenty years or so. You keep them from having families of their own. You weed them out, and, every so often, a god runs in and joins the battle. Takes part, by guiding the hand of the archer who shoots Achilles in the heel.” She sighed. “And of course, there were human sacrifices. In order to get the prevailing winds in order to bring his fleet to Troy, Agamemnon was forced to sacrifice his own daughter, Iphigenia. This pleased the gods. At the end of the war, Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, sacrificed Polyxena, one of the daughters of the king of Troy, to placate his father’s god-born ghost. And Idomeneus, to placate Poseidon on his way home, promised to sacrifice the first thing he saw when he came home. Since the first creature he saw was his son, he duly sacrificed him. Agamemnon pleased the gods. Neoptolemus pleased the gods. Idomeneus? Was cursed and cast out for his crime.”

  “Apparently,” Sigrun said, tightly, “it was more acceptable to sacrifice women than men.”

  Erida raised a finger. “Perhaps, yes. But here we have a blood-bath. The gods themselves take mortal form, fighting on both sides of the war. Egging on the destruction. Encouraging the blood sacrifices. Seventy thousand men, over the course of twenty years, laid siege to Troy. Some of them took ten years to make their way home, to find that their wives had replaced them with new lovers. To be murdered in their beds.” Erida sighed. “Almost a clean sweep of every god-born. A few remained. The strain of Heracles, the strain of Apollo. Aeneas and his children escaped to the Etruscan settlements that became Rome.”

  “I’m almost rooting for a godslayer to show up, now that you’ve put it this way,” Trennus admitted. “You’re telling it more interestingly than Homer did.”

  “I’m not listing all the ships that sailed, either,” Erida replied, smiling at Trennus. “Now, there is some physical evidence that suggests that at least one godslayer was there for the gods who had started this war, and all its sacrifices. Troy burned. Admittedly, humans with enough torches or magic can burn a city. But the archaeological record at Troy in 1190 BAC . . . give or take forty years or so for the carbon dating . . . goes beyond the merely human. There are sections where the rock of the walls has been superheated and turned to glass, and no, Hephaestus was nowhere recorded in the battle, save as the god who made armaments for various mortal combatants.”

  “We’re just not seeing any deaths of gods,” Kanmi said, shaking his head. “The Iliad would probably mention it if a god died.”

  Erida smirked, faintly. “A Hellene god did die there. But it’s not explained in the Iliad. There is only one source on the topic. And we all know how much to credit a single witness. I’ll get to that in a moment.” She looked around. “So, Prometheus. One of the Titans. Said by the Hellenes to have crafted man and given us technology and fire and the wit to create our own. He tricked Zeus into accepting poorer sacrifices, so that humanity could be fed from the meat that would have otherwise been wasted on the gods. A friend of humanity, and the god most worshipped in Athens, besides Athena . . even though his tomb is said to be in either Argos or Opous, depending on whose tourism information you believe. A tomb rather indicates a dead god, doesn’t it?”

  Adam shook his head blankly. “I . . . I’m not very good with Hellene mythology,” he admitted. “But wasn’t he imprisoned?”

  “Chained to Mount Kazbek, where an eagle ate his liver every day, and it regenerated every night,” Sigrun supplied. “Aeschylus uses his story as an example of the injustice of the gods.” She sighed. “Heracles freed him.”

  “The curious thing,” Erida said, calmly, “is that Mount Kazbek is a day’s drive from this estate. I’ve seen the chains still hanging from the mountain. They’re about the size, each link, of a ship’s anchor chain. Heavy. Enormously so. And even more curious? Is the fact that the mountain behind them is melted in the shape of a man.”

  “Could be a hoax. Iron rusts pretty remarkably in a few hundred years, let alone thousands. Someone might be drumming up the tourist trade.” Kanmi’s voice was thoughtful, however. “But the melted stone is interesting, yes.”

  Adam frowned. “I’m missing
something,” he admitted.

  “Prometheus was a titan, but he was not a fire god. He had to steal fire to give it to mortal man,” Erida explained, accepting the vial of diamond back from Minori, and tucking it away. “Again, this is all explained in my single source, but . . . before I detail this, let me note that there is a legend even known in the West, that a wise centaur took the imprisoned Titan’s place. Everyone in the West claims that it was Chiron. But I ask you . . . what is a centaur, but a creature that is half of one thing . . .”

  “. . . and half of another,” Kanmi said, his head coming up. “A god-born?”

  “Or a spirit in the body of a man,” Trennus supplied.

  Sigrun shifted uncomfortably at the word centaur, but stilled now. “You think a godslayer freed Prometheus and took his place, instead of Heracles and Chiron, respectively,” she said now, her eyes widening. “And your evidence for this is that . . . the mountain is burned where the chains hang. Someone with Kanmi’s abilities could have gone to that mountain and melted the rock, could they not?” She lifted her hands. “You are trying to link, through supposition, the burned mountain and the burning of Troy. It’s . . . thin. Troy is known to have burned. The ancient Hellenes were thorough, once they got through the gates.”

  Erida lifted a very old scroll out of another vault. “You spoke of Aeschylus, god-born,” she said, looking at Sigrun. “He wrote three plays about Prometheus. The first, Prometheus Bound, is a raised voice against the injustice of Zeus. The second, Prometheus Unbound, is only known in fragments, but in one of those fragments, Heracles, on releasing the titan, is surprised that the chains were so hot that they burned his flesh. ‘That is proof that you are yet mortal, and thus, worth saving,’ the titan tells him, and departs. Now, the fragment is so small, that the titan is not named there. Everyone tends to assume that it’s Prometheus hanging there. But Prometheus, again, was not known for being a fire god. And there’s the melted stone on Mount Kazbek to consider.” Erida held up the scroll in gentle hands. “This is a third or fourth-hand copy of Prometheus the Fire-Bringer, the third play in the trilogy, which was taken from the belongings of Alexander the Great and kept by the kings of Persia for centuries. It has been lost to all the libraries of the West, to include your Library of Alexandria in Egypt.”

  Sigrun was sitting bolt upright now, her eyes fixed on Erida’s face. “I have read about this play,” she said, slowly. “It was said to be about how Prometheus and Zeus were reconciled, when he finally made his prophesy about Zeus’ child overthrowing him.”

  Erida shook her head, her lips curling up. “No,” she murmured. “Not at all. I’ll let you all make a transcription to take to the West, and you may have whatever experts you like come and confirm the text’s authenticity. But let me put it this way. Reconciliation isn’t often a theme in tragedies, and what did Aeschylus write?”

  “Tragedies,” Adam supplied. “He didn’t write anything else.”

  “Correct. So, in this tragedy, Prometheus has escaped from his chains, and wanders the mortal lands like a beggar, and hears of the terrible fighting at Troy. He goes there, to try to convince the gods to spare humanity, to stop whispering in the ears of mortal men. And to try to convince humans not to be so . . . stupidly stubborn, really. He appears to Patroclus and tells him not to wear Achilles’ armor on the field. He crawls over the walls of the city, and begs King Priam to surrender. To tell his spoiled and foolish son Paris to give over the woman he stole from her rightful husband, and end this senseless war. He appears to Helen, who is homesick, and wants nothing more than to go home to Menelaus, and seek forgiveness for the thousands of lives her foolish love of Paris has caused. He goes to Achilles, and Odysseus, and each time, he almost convinces them to meet. To make peace. And each time, a god intervenes, and Prometheus must hide, lest he be slain for having broken his chains. In the second act, it’s revealed that Heracles—whose bow was needed to break the siege of Troy, and who had actually died before the men of Hellas had ever set sail for Ilium, had released someone . . . but that it was not Prometheus, but a titan made of flame. A titan who had released Prometheus, years before, on the grounds that Prometheus would find a way to release him, in turn. The two titans meet outside the walls of Troy, and the titan first goes to slay Prometheus, and Prometheus asks, ‘But did I not keep my promise? I found a way to free you. I was not strong enough to break the chains, but I was clever enough to find the man who could.’”

  Erida paused. Adam found himself smiling. It was rare that he enjoyed Hellene plays. They tended to be irritating to the modern mind. “What then?” he asked, leaning back and absently catching the tail of Sigrun’s braid in his fingertips.

  “The two titans agree that they have no cause to fight, and that their quarrel is with the gods, who have turned men into their playthings. Prometheus makes one last effort to sway the battle, telling Odysseus that the plan to enter the city in the Trojan horse will succeed; Troy will fall. But that it will take him ten years to reach home, and that most of the men camped around the city will die before ever seeing their homes. They will be cursed by the very gods they serve.” Erida paused. “And that is when Zeus finds Prometheus. Takes him before the rest of the gods, and accuses him as a traitor to the gods themselves, for taking the side of mortals. And Prometheus is executed.”

  The room had gone completely silent. Sigrun cleared her throat. “And the play is called Prometheus the Fire-Bringer precisely why?”

  Erida smiled. “Because the second titan steps out and says, “You foolish, depraved children masquerading as gods, you will suffer as you have made the mortals suffer. I will take your playthings from you, petty children. I will leave nothing but ash. For today, my name is my brother’s. I am Prometheus. And I have come to bring fire to the gods.” Erida paused. “And then he burns Troy to the ground, and the gods all flee, for if his fires, in his chains, could singe Heracles, how hot must they burn, when he is unbound?”

  Trennus cleared his throat. “I’m beginning to see why this play was ‘lost,’” he murmured. “The people of Athens must have loved to see their favorite god so lauded, but the rest of Hellas? And the gods?”

  “Precisely why it’s been in Persian hands for over two thousand years,” Erida agreed, calmly. “Aeschylus, before this play, was noted as a writer who almost always lauded the gods, spoke of obedience to their will as the ultimate good, and so on. He never much questioned his gods, but this does so. Emphatically. The final scene is that of a traditional tragedy, with Prometheus’ body being presented to the audience, while his brother titan mourns and builds him a tomb, and tells the audience that this was the last act he could perform for mortal man. He would give them back their defender, if he could, but his time here on earth was at an end. The iron words of Fate decreed that he would die once he was finished building this tomb. And so he bade them to believe in themselves, and the works of their own hands, and to remember his brother in love. And the play ends there.”

  “That’s the last godslayer on record, then?” Adam asked, quietly.

  “The last that any among the Magi have been able to identify, Adam ben Maor. As far as we can tell, after the fall of Troy, the godslayers came no more.” Erida shrugged. “Perhaps because there was no more need for them. The gods of Rome are somewhat more virtuous than their Hellene counterparts. The teachings of Zoroaster are far from objectionable. The gods of Valhalla and the gods of the Gauls are relatively young, but they are not unjust. And as to the gods of Nahautl and Quecha and Tawantinsuyu . . . .” she shrugged delicately, “They were across the sea, until Rome sent its ships across the Sea of Atlas. They were unknown to the rest of the world in antiquity. And they have been quiet until quite recently. The might of Rome has been enough to awe them.”

  Adam nodded, and looked into the distance. Sigrun snorted a little. “It’s odd to say that the godslayers were ever needed,” Sigrun said. “Their notion of justice seemed to be overzealous. Destroy the entire island of Crete, because th
e religious leaders are conducting sacrifices?”

  Adam grimaced. “Have you read the Torah recently?” he asked her. “I’m just saying, zeal was a trait of all the ancients.”

  Kanmi shook his head. “All right. So where were these godslayers when my people were sacrificing children?” he asked, bluntly. “Why didn’t they cross to the new world and stop all the sacrifices in Caesaria Aquilonis and Australis?”

  “Because we’re supposed to do that ourselves,” Adam replied, before he thought.

  Sigrun still looked skeptical. “That’s assuming that they’re a force for good,” she reminded them all, sharply. “Entire cities wiped out. Volcanoes erupting. Plagues. Assassinations. This hardly sounds like good to me.” She paused. “Though I’ll give the godslayers a pass on the Hellenes. I am . . . right behind them on the subject of Troy.” She sighed.