Cronos assembled a hunting party of Titans. He ordered out his pack of hounds. Specially bred to serve him on the chase, they were white as arctic wolves but with golden manes and plumed golden tails. They were swift enough to overtake a stag, powerful enough to pull it down in mid-stride, and had noses keen enough to follow a track three weeks old.
Horses had not yet been created, but Cronos and his Titans could run tirelessly all day long, and almost as swiftly as their hounds.
Indeed, this hunt lasted for a day and a night, and into a second day. Cronos made his party search every copse, every grove, every stand of river reed. They foraged up every slope of every hill on the Olympian range and entered every cave, but they found no trace of the boy. Cronos was in a savage mood when he returned to his palace.
He was very weary after the hunt, but he could not sleep. He tossed and turned, then finally realized what was keeping him awake. It was the silence. The howling had stopped. For the first time since he had caged the Cyclopes and trapped the giants, he did not hear their shrieking as it rose through layers of rock and drifted faintly on the wind to Olympus. It must be understood that screams of pain are a tyrant’s lullaby.
“Why don’t I hear them?” he muttered to himself. “Can they have broken out? No … impossible! They must simply have grown so weak that they can utter no sound. Or, perhaps, since they are given no food, they have devoured each other and there is no one left.”
He kept trying to comfort himself. Nevertheless, he could not sleep. He arose and began to prowl the corridors of the cloud castle. He was boiling with unfocused rage. He needed to hurt someone and he knew who that someone was. This was the night to punish his wife for all the unwanted infants she had borne, especially that last one who still lay like a stone in his belly.
He ran to the wall where his sickle hung. He lifted it down and swung it lightly, smiling. “A bit rusty,” he said to himself, “but sharp enough to slice that pestiferous wife of mine into as many pieces as it did my father.”
Holding the sickle, he strode toward the far wing of the castle where Rhea slept. But living with a murderous husband had taught her to be a light sleeper. She had trained herself to pick up the vibrations of his wrath even as she slept. Now, when she heard his heavy footsteps and the clank of iron, she knew it was time to leave.
She slipped out of her bed, ran into the garden, and slid like a shadow through the trees and down the slope. She listened for sounds of pursuit but heard nothing.
“Mother … mother,” she she called softly. She didn’t dare raise her voice, nor did she have to. Gaia fledged herself out of the darkness. She came in the form of an enormous crone. Her hair hung like the vine called silver lace, and her eyes were slits of moonlight.
“Mother … mother,” whispered Rhea. “My husband has taken up his sickle. He means me terrible harm.”
“Yes, daughter, it’s time for you to vanish for a while.”
“Where shall I go?”
“Follow your son underground.”
“Nothing would give me more joy. But he is so fiery, so proud, the little love. Would he welcome a mother trailing after him on his first adventure?”
“He will be able to use your help. He has much to do down there. He will be freeing your maimed brothers and sisters. Yes, I mean the Cyclopes, blighted first by their father’s jealousy, then imprisoned by their brother’s fear.”
“He buried them deep. How many times have I listened to him boast about locking the Cyclopes in their own cage? What can my son do? He’s only half-grown.”
“And will grow no older unless we get rid of his father.”
“But can we? How?”
“The first step is to free the Cyclopes. They will serve us well in the dreadful war that is to come. Go down to your son now; stay with him until I recall you both.”
6
Underground
Not only prophetic oaks sprouted from the murdered Uranus, whose body had been chopped into small pieces and buried in many different places. Worms gathered too. They swarmed in a great, greedy tangle to drink his blood. They tunneled into the massive shards of his bones, fed on the rich marrow, and grew huge.
As they feasted on the god who had been cut up alive, they became filled with his unspent wrath. Envenomed through every cell of their bodies, they primed themselves for murder. Clothing themselves in leather scales as tough as armor plate, they grew teeth like ivory blades and spiked tails that could knock down trees. Finally, to become utterly destructive, they sprouted great leather wings and taught themselves to blow jets of flame out of their gullets.
So it was that a generation of dragons sprang out of the butchered god and grew into the very embodiment of spite. They became a breed of monster that was to form a taste for heroes and torment humankind for the next thousand years.
Now, young Zeus, while exploring a chain of caverns, came upon a dragon den. Separate dens, really. Except for one night a year, which was set aside for mating, no two dragons could meet without trying to kill each other. When the young were hatched out of the great green eggs, mother dragons kept them away from other adults, who liked to eat their young, just like Cronos.
Zeus wedged himself into a cleft of rock and hid there, observing his first dragon. He didn’t know that these beasts had grown from the maggots that had fed themselves fat on the blood and bones of his buried grandfather. Though he felt no kinship to the scaly brutes, he studied them with great interest. He was especially struck by the way the dragons spouted flame. For some reason, this fascinated him beyond its own uniqueness. He knew this deadly trait was important to him, but he didn’t know why.
He made his way to the Cyclopes’ cage. He slipped into the chamber silently. Now, these early gods were not easily moved to sympathy. They kept their compassion for themselves and did not really feel the sufferings of anyone else. But when young Zeus looked through the bars into the cage and saw those gigantic figures standing as still as trees, their eyes blazing into the darkness—when he saw them looming there, so huge and patient, like penned cattle—he felt a strange tugging in his chest that he didn’t know was pity. Their single blazing eyes misted over and big tears welled up until they overflowed and fell hissing onto the cage floor. Zeus saw those lava-hot tears, smelled the salt steam of them, and realized that these kinfolk of his had been standing here in the darkness for many years. He felt his own eyes getting wet and realized that for the first time in his life he was weeping. Then and there he knew what he would try to do.
He turned away from the cage and entered a rocky corridor. There, he leaned against a wall and looked at the floor. He stared steadily at a pile of pebbles until they began to stir. The pile broke. Pebbles came rolling toward him. Faster and faster they rolled, leaping and turning in the air. He looked away and the pebbles dropped. He stared at a fist-sized stone. It did not move. He stared hard and saw the stone twitch. It rose into the air, fell, and came skipping toward him. He looked away and it stopped. He turned his gaze on a medium-sized rock that was half-buried. It sat there motionless. He glared at it, pouring his will along the line of his sight. He saw the rock rise from its bed of earth, tearing itself free, shedding clumps of dirt. He made it rise straight up and hang in the air, then blinked and let it fall back into its hole.
Now he was ready. Singing and shouting, he raced along the dark corridor until he came to a passageway that was blocked by boulders. He knew that beyond this place the hundred-handed giants had been trapped.
He saw that the rocks clogging the passageway were not socketed in earth, but were a kind of huge rubble; they had been wedged in together, leaning on each other. He studied the formation and selected a certain boulder—not the nearest one, not the largest one, but a rock that was central to the mass. He fixed his gaze on it and stared until he felt his eyes popping out of his head. It sat there, massive and motionless.
Zeus sent his mind back along the seedbed of ancestral memory, back to when the earth was a white
-hot coal spinning on the edge of chaos, cooling into red-hot rock. In the deep fertile crags and valleys of the young god’s mind, stone became liquid, and his gaze began to soften the rock he looked upon. It softened; it trembled like jelly. That ponderous boulder, central to the mass, quivered, shook, shifted—loosening the entire rock jam. Tons of rock came sliding out of the corridor, faster and faster, in a terrific cataract of stone.
Zeus leaped out of the way, or he would have been crushed like an insect. He watched the rocks clatter past. The passageway was clear; and the cave mouth was a black hole. Out of that hole slithered what looked like a gigantic centipede. It was one of the giants, crawling on his hands, blinking in the dusty light.
“Come out!” cried Zeus. “You are free!”
The other giants came crawling out of the cave and squatted in the passageway, blinking at the young god.
“You are free,” he said. “It is I who have ended your captivity. I, Zeus, your kinsman and your king-to-be, if you help me now.”
“Hail!” they shouted. “All hail to you, oh liberator! We shall serve you in any way you wish.”
“Come, then. A perilous task awaits. And I have need of your many strong hands.”
He led them at a run down the cavern chain. The giants were so big that they had to stoop, or their heads would have scraped the cave roofs. Startled bats wheeled in a cloud, chittering. He led the giants to the dragon den. Before entering, he gathered them about him and told them what they were to do.
They entered the den. It was littered with bones, for the dragons went up at night to hunt and dragged their kill back to their cave. A gust of blue lit the den as the dragon came to meet them, not yet spitting flame, but softly exhaling it. The many-handed ones were huge, and their wavering shadows even larger, but they looked small beside the looming beast—as small as ducks facing an alligator.
“Now!” cried Zeus.
The giants flung themselves on the dragon, which was frozen by surprise, for nothing ever attacks a dragon. Before it could recover, it was clamped by hundreds of hands with fingers stronger than baling hooks.
The giants, obeying their instructions, lofted the dragon high over their heads and held it there as they raced along the corridor. It was spitting fire, but its head was tilted firmly upward and the flame of its breath was going straight up, singeing bats on the wing.
With a mighty shout that bounced off the cave walls and redoubled, echoing, Zeus led the giants and their living torch to the place where, so many years before, they had wheeled the Cyclopes’ cage. And there in the cage towered the Cyclopes. Dragon fire lit up their great, single eyes.
The giants had their instructions. Swiftly and expertly, they handled the dragon, wielding it as a welder does his torch. Using the beast’s fiery breath, they aimed his blue flame on the bolt of the chain that bound the gate.
The big shackle grew red-hot, then white-hot, then melted away. The chain clanged to the floor, the gate slid open. The Cyclopes streamed out of the cage; they fell on their knees before Zeus.
He raised his voice and said: “Good Cyclopes, worthy giants, I who have brought you freedom now promise you vengeance. Your enemy is my enemy, and we shall fight him together. Yes, we shall wage war upon the tyrant Cronos and his Titan court. But to fight is not enough; we must also win. So we must prepare for this war. I bid you remain underground for a time. You, Cyclopes, shall search the caverns until you find a live crater to be your smithy. Stoke the volcanic flames that will be your forge fire. Swing your hammers in my service. Make an armory of weapons. But to forge these weapons you will need metal. You will need iron and copper. And this the giants will provide. They will dig and delve with their many mighty hands and tear the raw metal from the very entrails of the earth. And when the war is over and I come into my kingship, no one, I vow, will stand closer to the throne than you, my brothers and sisters. Yes, so high shall be your estate that your blemishes will be viewed as marks of privilege and everyone will regret not having been born with a single eye or a hundred hands.”
7
Family Reunion
While Zeus was underground, Gaia employed certain serpents to go down and tell her what was happening below. Upon the evening of the twenty-first day, one such serpent reported the liberation of the Cyclopes. Mother Earth shouted with joy and went to seek Cronos.
She said, “My mother’s instinct tells me that you are troubled by indigestion.”
“A feeble term for what I suffer,” said Cronos. “Something sits on my gut like a rock.”
“Something you ate, no doubt?”
“No doubt, mother. No doubt.”
“I can help you, son. A wood nymph of my acquaintance has found certain herbs that can cure the worst stomach ache.”
“Go fetch her. I’ll try anything.”
Far underground a topaz-eyed snake slithered toward Zeus, put its leathery head to the youth’s ear, and whispered dryly: “I am sent by your grandmother. Her message is: ‘We strike tomorrow!’”
All night Zeus climbed up through the cavern chain, and dawn found him with Gaia. She took him into her huge embrace and said, “Today is the day, if all goes well, that you lose a father and gain some brothers and sisters.”
“You’ve been busy,” said Zeus.
“So have you, my boy. You have done great deeds below, and now that you have provided us with such strong allies, we can open hostilities.”
“I’m ready,” said Zeus.
“Clothe yourself in these rags and put on this wig of straw. You are to transform yourself into a bumpkin who has fallen in love with a beautiful wood nymph—so violently, so helplessly in love that your poor wits are quite addled. You have gone mute and can moan only ‘Dione … Dione,’ which is her name, and follow her about, begging with your eyes.”
“An undignified role, grandmother.”
“You’ll be able to afford dignity after you gain your throne, grandson. Now hearken. Disguised as this love-sodden swain, you shall attend the nymph when I bring her to meet Cronos. You shall remain in the background, but stand ready to act when I give the word.”
“Instruct me, Earth.”
Clad in rags and wearing a wig of straw, the tall young god listened carefully as Gaia told him what to do.
Now it is known that those who are most careful about themselves are precisely those who will submit to the most brutal treatment as long as it is recommended by someone who supposedly knows something about health. This has been going on since the beginning of time, and started with Cronos and his bellyache. The king of the gods had a completely suspicious nature. He mistrusted everyone, especially his family. He also loathed strangers. He surrounded himself with Titan guards and never ate until a slave had tasted the food, lest it be poisoned. He imprisoned and executed anyone who looked at him the wrong way. And yet, he was ready to believe his mother, whom he mistrusted even more than he did his wife, when she told him that a wood nymph had mixed certain herbs that would cure the griping pain in his gut.
He stood now on a sunny meadow, waiting. He saw his enormous mother trundling toward him over the grass, followed by two figures. One was a wood nymph clad only in leaves. Behind her came a shambling, slack-mouthed fellow with a thatch of straw-colored hair. He carried a keg and a flagon, and Cronos took him for a servant.
“All hail, king of the gods!” cried Gaia. “This is the dryad, Dione, come to ease your pain.”
“Glory, glory,” murmured the nymph in a voice that was like the west wind sighing through the treetops. “If by my poor woodland skills I am privileged to serve our beloved king, I shall count myself the proudest, happiest dryad in the entire forest.”
And she smiled at him so sweetly, and looked so long-legged and lovely in her brief costume, that Cronos was charmed and quite forgot that he had meant to have one of his Titans taste her potion first to make sure it wasn’t poisoned.
“Come, pour!” said Gaia.
Whereupon the nymph’s servant swung
the keg from his shoulder and poured purple wine into the flagon. Cronos was amazed by the lad’s strength. He handled the heavy keg one-handed, as if it were a pitcher. He passed the flagon to the dryad, who took a pouch from her girdle and dusted some powder into the wine. Kneeling, she offered the great flagon to Cronos, holding it out with both hands. He took it and lifted it to his lips.
Sun-ripened Attic grapes had been pressed for this wine, which was then aged in oak for a hundred years. Such a wine was always mixed with water, but this was undiluted. It was so strong that it quite hid the flavor of what the nymph had put into it—mustard and salt, mashed up with putrefying frogs’ eggs.
Cronos drank down the entire flask in one gulp.
The earth tilted. Cronos braced himself between two trees and began to heave, a terrible, dry retching.
“The medicine is trying to work, my lord,” said Dione. “It needs a bit of assistance.”
“Now!” cried Gaia.
Zeus hiked his tunic, baring a long, sinewy thigh. He pivoted on his heel and, with all the terrific leverage of his immortally powerful young body, kicked his father in the belly.
Cronos doubled over and began to vomit. He spewed up first the stone he had swallowed, then each of his five children, who, being gods, were undigested and still alive. They came out in reverse order of the way they had been swallowed—the youngest first. This was a girl, Hera. Next came a boy, Poseidon. Then another girl, Demeter. Then another boy, Hades. And finally the eldest child, a daughter named Hestia.
Monsters of Greek Mythology, Volume One Page 28
