Hestia/Vesta: Goddess of the Hearth and Home. Eldest daughter of Kronos and Rhea. Sister of Zeus. Virgin. Once one of the Twelve Olympians, but gave up her throne to Dionysus. She tended the sacred fire at the center of Mount Olympus. Called “The Eldest.” Attributes: veil, kettle.
Isis: Egyptian Goddess of Motherhood, Magic, and Nature, later adopted by the Greco-Roman world. Temples to Isis were often built on the sites of earlier sanctuaries dedicated to Diana or Ceres. Attribute: throne headdress.
Khaos: Primeval embodiment of Chaos. From the same root as “chasm,” the name means the void from which all other primeval divinities sprang.
Kronos/Saturn : A Titan. With the help of his mother, Gaia (the Earth), he overthrew his father, Ouranos (the Sky), to become King of the Gods until overthrown in turn by Zeus, his son. Father/grandfather of the Olympians. Also identified as the God of Time. Called “the Wily.” In Roman mythology, Saturn is also an ancient agricultural god who guarantees good harvests. He was thought to preside over Elysium, the home of the blessed dead. His yearly festival, Saturnalia, held from December 17 to 23, involved public feasting and revelry. Attribute: sickle.
Leto/Latona: Goddess of Motherhood and Modesty. Daughter of the Titans Phoibe and Koios. Lover of Zeus. Mother of Artemis and Apollo. Called “neat-ankled,” Gentle Goddess, Mother of Twins. Attributes: veil, date palm. Modern alias: Leticia Delos.
Mithras: God worshiped by a Mystery Cult during the late Roman era, especially popular with soldiers in the Roman legion. Epithets include Sol Invictus. Attributes: Phrygian cap, Persian pants, bull.
Morpheus: God of Dreams. As a messenger of the gods, he sends prophetic dreams to mortals. Attributes: wings, poppy crown.
Orion: Son of Poseidon and a mortal woman. Artemis’s only male hunting companion. Some tales describe him as blinded and exiled after raping Merope, a king’s daughter. Other myths say he raped one of Artemis’s nymphs and was killed either by a scorpion or by Artemis’s arrows. Placed as a constellation in the sky. Called the Hunter. Modern alias: Everett Halloran.
Ouranos/Uranus: Primeval Sky Divinity. Father of the Titans. Castrated by his son Kronos/Saturn.
Persephone/Proserpina: Goddess of Spring and the Underworld. Daughter of Demeter and Zeus. Wife of Hades. Called Kore (“Maiden”), Discreet, Lovely. Attributes: wheat sheaves, torch. Modern alias: Cora McKelvey.
Poseidon/Neptune: God of the Sea, Earthquakes, and Horses. One of the Twelve Olympians. Son of Kronos and Rhea. Brother of Zeus. Father of Orion, Theseus, and other heroes. Called “blue-haired,” Earth-Shaker, Horse-Tender. Attribute: trident.
Prometheus: A Titan. His name translates literally as “Forethought.” After molding mankind from clay and granting them life, he gave them fire—despite Zeus’s prohibition. As punishment, the Olympians chained him to a rock and sent an eagle to eat his liver every day for eternity. Later, he was freed from his torment by the hero Heracles. Called Fire-Bringer, Lofty-Minded, Chained One. Attribute: fennel stalk of fire.
Rhea/Ops: A Titan. Goddess of Female Fertility. Queen of the Gods in the Age of Titans. Helped Zeus, her youngest son, overthrow his father, Kronos.
Selene/Luna : Goddess and embodiment of the Moon. While Artemis has dominion over the moon, Selene is the Moon incarnate.
Serapis: Greco-Egyptian God of Fertility and the Afterlife, later adopted by the Romans. Attribute: basket crown.
Zeus/Jupiter : King and Father of the Gods. God of the Sky, Lightning, Weather, Law, and Fate. One of the Twelve Olympians. Youngest son of Kronos and Rhea. After Kronos swallowed his first five children, Rhea hid baby Zeus in the Cave of Psychro. After coming to manhood, Zeus cut his siblings from his father’s gullet, defeated the Titans, and began the reign of the Olympians. He divided the world with his two brothers, taking the Sky for himself. Husband (and brother) of Hera, but lover of many. Father of untold gods, goddesses, and heroes, including Artemis, Apollo, Hermes, Ares, Dionysus, and Athena. Attributes: lightning bolt, eagle, royal scepter.
GLOSSARY OF GREEK AND LATIN TERMS
Athanatos (pl. Athanatoi): “One Who Does Not Die” (an immortal)
Caduceus: a snake-twined staff, the symbol of Hermes/Mercury
Corvus: a crow or raven
Haruspex: one who performs haruspicy, the art of reading omens in animal entrails
Heliodromus (pl. Heliodromi): Sun-Runner
Hemitheos (pl. hemitheoi): a half god, half mortal
Leo (pl. Leones): a lion
Makarites (pl. Makaritai): “Blessed One”
Miles (pl. Milites): a soldier
Mithraeum (pl. mithraea): a sanctuary dedicated to Mithras
Nymphus: a male bride
Pater Patrum: Father of Fathers
Perses (pl. Persae): a Persian
Pneuma: breath, air, or spirit
Praenuntius: harbinger, omen-bringer
Syndexios (pl. syndexioi): “joining of the right hands” (one who knows the secret handshake)
Thanatos (pl. thanatoi): “one who dies” (a mortal)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
When asked to write the second book of Olympus Bound in less than a year, I almost had a heart attack. Only through the support of so many wonderful friends and colleagues did I manage what was, to an inveterate procrastinator, a feat of Herculean proportions.
Helen Shaw, the great friend to whom this book is dedicated, first introduced me to Mithraism, and her ideas continued to shape the book until the very last draft. There is no authorial conundrum too great or too small that she can’t solve it on a thirty-minute train ride from Westchester. Tegan Tigani, my role model for selflessness and dedication for the past thirty years, provided not only invaluable feedback but also much-needed enthusiasm throughout the process. Sharing my writing with her is one of the giddiest joys of my life. John Wray and Madeleine Osborn both scoured every line, sharing their advice and ideas with unstinting generosity. The brilliant Chad Mills contributed his keen eye to proofreading.
Perennial thanks to Devi Pillai at Orbit for her excellent editorial insights and for shepherding the entire Olympus Bound series forward with such care. To everyone else at Orbit, including Lindsey Hall, Kelly O’Connor, Ellen Wright, Kirk Benshoff, Alex Lencicki, Andy Swist, Anne Clarke, and Tim Holman, thanks as always for your talent, humor, and hard work. I owe a special debt to Tommy Harron for trusting me with the audiobook and making its recording such an unalloyed pleasure.
My career as a novelist would not be possible without the faith of my agent, Jennifer Joel, who has stuck with me for more years than I care to admit. She has my undying gratitude.
Dr. Anne Shaw and Dr. Michael Shaw once more graciously provided invaluable help with Greek and Latin usage throughout the book. Mike Shaver of the National Park Service confirmed that, yes, the nineteenth-century cannon on Governors Island could hit the Statue of Liberty (or Washington Square Park, for that matter). Eliot Schrefer and Eric Zahler kindly checked over Philippe’s French, and Matthew Anderson helped out with the more prurient Latin. Any errors in the book are fully of my own making, not theirs. A heartfelt thank-you to Yvonne Rathbone, who allowed me to excerpt her beautiful translation of Callimachus’s Hymn to Artemis.
To my friends and family, who put up with a year’s worth of authorial obsession, thank you for your patience and support. Venturing into this new world was only possible because I had the Brodskys, the Millses, Jac, Jake, Emily, Ben, Dusty, and Jim at my back. If this book gives you even the smallest fraction of the enjoyment that you have brought to my life over the years, I will consider it a success.
And to Jason Mills, my husband, who read the entire manuscript more times than any one man should have to bear (never failing to offer both advice and admiration at just the right time), who scoured the museums of Rome with his camera in tow, who carried me over mountains both literal and figurative, and who patiently sweated through every mithraeum in Ostia Antica: Thank you. Yours is the song stitched across my heart.
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meet the author
Photo Credit: Ben Arons
JORDANNA MAX BRODSKY hails from Virginia, where she made it through a science and technology high school by pretending it was a theater conservatory. She holds a degree in history and literature from Harvard University. She lives with her husband in Manhattan, where she is working on the next book in the Olympus Bound trilogy. She often sees goddesses in Central Park and wishes she were one.
if you enjoyed
WINTER OF THE GODS
look out for
OLYMPUS BOUND
Olympus Bound: Book 3
by
Jordanna Max Brodsky
Manhattan has many secrets. Some are older than the city itself.
Summer in New York: a golden hour on the city streets, but a dark time for Selene DiSilva.
Her father has been kidnapped and her friends are being targeted by a murderous cult hungry for an ancient power. If she wants to save the ones she loves, Selene must finally face the past she’s been running from—a past centuries longer than most, stretching all the way back to when her name was Artemis and her family ruled from atop Mount Olympus.
Chapter 1
SHE WHO LOVES THE CHASE
Just outside the walls of ancient Ostia, on the banks of the River Tiber, the Huntress stalked her prey down the street of the dead with only the moon to light her way.
She walked with silent tread on wide basalt paving stones still warm from the unrelenting summer heat. Her stealth felt superfluous: Even if her boots scuffed the street, the piercing drone of cicadas would drown out any sound, and the man she hunted seemed oblivious to everything but the mausoleums around him.
She followed his gaze, noting the niches that pockmarked the older buildings, each just big enough to hold an urn brimming with ashes. The more recent mausoleums housed grand sarcophagi instead, the scenes of myth and history carved so deeply into their marble sides that even the passage of centuries wouldn’t erase them.
The Huntress’s prey paused before one of the stone coffins, tracing the depictions of Sun and Moon, Birth and Death, with a reverent finger. Then the man quickly crossed himself. The Huntress shuddered: In this pagan city, the Christian gesture seemed a harbinger of things to come. Once, she’d watched with pleasure as pious Romans sent their loved ones skyward on the smoke of funeral pyres. The smoke would reach the very summit of Mount Olympus and swirl about the feet of the gods themselves. But more and more, the Romans chose to bury their dead within these marble tombs so the corpses might lie in wait for bodily resurrection. A sign, she knew, that soon the empire would abandon the Olympians entirely, its citizens praying only for their promised reunion with the Christ.
The Huntress imagined the richly bedecked corpses in their cold tombs. Meat turned to rot turned to dust, she thought with disgust. They waited in vain for a resurrection that would never occur and a god who did not exist. She felt no pity. A bitter smirk lifted the corner of her mouth. It serves them right.
At least for now, the Olympian Goddess of War and Wisdom still guarded Ostia’s main gate with her stern gaze: Minerva, whom the Greeks called Athena, carved in stone with upswept wings and a regal helmet. The sight gave the Huntress a measure of comfort. We’re not completely forgotten. Not yet. She hid in Minerva’s moonshadow and watched her prey leave the necropolis behind and continue into the city itself. He strode down the wide avenue of the Decumanus Maximus, past empty taverns and shops, guild halls and warehouses. The man wore all black as camouflage in the darkened town, but he took few other precautions, walking boldly down the middle of the deserted thoroughfare. He clearly hadn’t counted on Minerva’s vengeful half sister following in his wake.
He passed the public baths, bedecked with mosaics of Neptune, and the amphitheater with its grotesque marble masks before finally turning off the avenue to wander deeper into the sleeping city. Only then did the Huntress emerge from behind her marble sibling like a statue come to life—as tall and imperious as Minerva herself, moving with such grace and speed she seemed to float on wings of her own.
As she passed the darkened buildings, she could imagine how they’d appear when full of life. Vendors and merchants would clamor for attention, the perfume of their leeks and lemons fighting the stench of the human urine that produced such brilliant blues and reds in the nearby dye vats. The warehouses would bulge with foreign grain and local salt. Shopkeepers would hawk elephant ivory from the colonies in Africa, fish from the nearby Mare Nostrum, and purple-veined marble from Phrygia in the east, all destined to sate the appetites of Rome, twenty miles away. Great crowds of toga-clad men and modestly veiled women would bustle down the Decumanus Maximus, pushing their way past ragged children begging for scraps. While some headed for the theater’s worldly pleasures, others processed to the grand temples to offer sacrifices to Vulcan or Venus—or even to the Huntress herself.
But as she followed the man down an alley bordered by tall brick tenements, she knew he sought a very different sanctuary. Of the dozens of temples in Ostia, a full fifteen were dedicated to the same god. He did not number himself among the Olympians, and he would never have as many followers as the Christ, yet he held the power to ruin her life, nonetheless.
Mithras.
The most famous of his cult’s sanctuaries lay at the end of the alley: the Mithraeum of the Seven Spheres. Unlike the temples to the Olympians, graceful public buildings with open colonnades and wide entrances, Mithras’s shrines lay tucked into caves or small, closed buildings, his rites held secret from all but the men initiated into the mysteries of his cult. Harmless rituals honoring a harmless god—or so the Olympians had once thought. Now the Huntress knew better.
Fire scorching my flesh. Water flooding my lungs. Torture of both body and soul. The memories came back as sharp and fast as a cracking whip. She forced them aside, turning her attention to the temple before her.
From the outside, the mithraeum seemed no more than an unadorned shed of layered brick. Locked iron grates sealed off the single small window and narrow doorway.
The man in black fished out a pair of lockpicks from his pack. The gate squealed open. He didn’t look behind him like a thief nor dash inside like a vandal. He strode forward slowly with a gasp of reverence, a worshiper entering the Holy of Holies for the first time.
Slipping to the side of the barred window, the Huntress peered inside. The cramped shrine gave no indication of its true purpose—or its hidden horrors. Low platforms bordered a central aisle so the cult’s initiates could recline during their ceremonial feasts. Black-and-white mosaics covered the platforms and floor, their designs faded and chipped; though her night vision rivaled a wolf’s, she couldn’t decipher the images in the darkness. But when the man pulled a small lamp from his bag, she saw the signs of the zodiac adorning the feasting platforms: a fish for Pisces, scales for Libra, two men for Gemini.
Along the length of the aisle, seven black arches marked the seven celestial spheres that gave the mithraeum its name. On the platforms’ sides, the mosaics formed crude representations of the Olympians—or rather, of the heavenly bodies that bore their names. A woman holding an arcing veil above her head for the planet Venus, a man with a lance and helmet for Mars. The Huntress saw herself there too: a woman holding an arrow and a crescent. To the men who once worshipped in this sanctuary, she was Luna, the Moon. Most of the city’s ancient citizens had called her Diana. Across the Aegean, the Greeks named her Huntress, Mistress of Beasts, Goddess of the Wild, and, above all—Artemis.
What name would this man use if he turned around and saw me? she wondered. Pretender? Pagan? Likely, he’d dispense with such niceties and just slice out my heart.
At the far end of the aisle hung an oval relief with an entire religion encompassed in its single carven image: the “tauroctony”—the bull killing. Mithras, handsome in his pointed Phrygian cap, perched on the bull’s back, one knee bent and his other foot resting on a rear hoof. He plunged his knife into the beast
’s neck, completing the sacrifice. A dog and a snake licked at the pouring blood. A scorpion crawled beside the bull’s testicles. A crow sat on its hindquarters. Like everything else in Mithraism, the image contained several layers of meaning. To a woman like the Huntress, who preferred a world of starkly defined categories—night and day, female and male, immortal and mortal—such complexities provided yet another reason to despise the cult.
Each animal in the tauroctony symbolized a constellation—Canis, Hydra, Scorpius, Taurus, Corvus—their starry outlines inscribed upon the celestial spheres that rotated across the sky. Mithras, or so his followers believed, controlled those spheres, shifting the heavens themselves. To some who feasted atop the sanctuary’s platforms and offered sacrifices upon its altar, Mithras was only that: a god of stars and spheres, one more deity among the dozens worshiped by Ostia’s citizens. But not to the man in black.
In the lamp’s light, the Huntress could finally make out his face. He was young, clean-shaven, his weak chin and protruding nose accented by blond hair shorn mercilessly close to the scalp. His haircut and muscled physique proclaimed him a soldier. Another foolish mortal recruit in an ancient battle between gods.
He gazed upon the tauroctony with a fanatic’s fervor. To him, Mithraism was no mere Roman mystery cult; it was the truest form of the one religion that terrified the usually fearless Huntress: Christianity. Its teachings provided the path not only to individual salvation but to the End of Days, the “Last Age,” when Mithras-as-Jesus would walk the earth once more. The Mithraists believed that only one thing stood in the way of that resurrection: the existence of the Olympians. The cult had dedicated itself to hunting down the gods to make room for their savior’s return.
Winter of the Gods Page 45
