Olympus Bound

by Jordanna Max Brodsky

  Theo stood at the lake’s edge. He still hadn’t entered the water. Perhaps he couldn’t.

  “Here, Theo, you take it,” she said, preparing to toss him the other key.

  “I didn’t come all this way to leave you behind,” he said tightly. “Besides, I have another way out. Flint’s going to—” His hands shot to his throat. His eyes bulged as he drew a wheezing, terrified breath.

  “Theo!”

  For an instant, his amorphous form turned solid, color flooded his cheeks—and then he disappeared.

  Chapter 26

  MNEMOSYNE

  Theo felt as if his lungs were on fire. That was nothing compared to the ache in his heart.

  Scooter loomed over him in the aisle of the mithraeum, his face contorted in desperate concentration, his hands still resting on Theo’s torso from the chest compressions. The empty syringe of antidote lay beside him on the platform.

  “You must’ve been doing something important over there,” the god gasped with a relieved grin, “because I didn’t think you wanted to come back.” His bloody teeth, stained from eating the raw heart, only added to Theo’s sense of turmoil. What world had he returned to?

  He sat up slowly, urging numb limbs to obey a numb mind’s commands. His ribs felt bruised from Scooter’s ministrations, vomit coated his bare chest, and he couldn’t bend his fingers or toes.

  A large hand grabbed him hard by the shoulder, nearly knocking him backward again. “Where’s Selene?” came Flint’s growled demand. He rounded on Scooter next. “I told you not to bring him back yet!”

  “He said five minutes,” Scooter snapped. “We gave him seven.”

  Theo blinked, willing his eyes to focus. A black husk lay beside him on the ground. Selene.

  Still dead.

  “No,” he choked.

  “Where is she?” Flint levered himself upright on the lip of the feasting platform so that he stood as straight as his bent legs would allow.

  “She was … She was right behind me.”

  “Do not fear,” Apollo told Selene as she stared dumbfounded at the spot where Theo had stood a moment before. “He has returned to the world of the living.”

  Selene took a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. “Then let’s go join him.”

  With the keys outstretched, they passed easily to the stream’s edge. But just as they bent to drink, the rainbow water at their fingertips shuddered with the force of Aion’s roar. A searing wind swept against Selene’s bare shoulder blades.

  The lion-man, his snake slung about his shoulders but not yet binding his body, rocketed toward her. His fiery breath had relit the broken ends of the Torchbearers’ reeds. With their attributes restored, they stormed toward the stream, screaming curses.

  “The lake!” Apollo leapt into the stream. “Get to the lake!”

  Selene ran upstream beside him, the hip-height water dragging at her legs. When she reached the edge of the lake, she tried to spring forward, but the ground disappeared from beneath her feet and she plummeted downward instead. A single gasped breath and the water closed over her head.

  She tried to swim for the surface, but the weight of the foot-long iron key dragged her down. She dropped it—it quickly disappeared into the murky depths. But despite her frenzied struggles, she hovered in the water, her body refusing to rise.

  She peered in vain through the darkness for any sign of her brother, wondering if he, too, had been trapped. The oxygen fled her lungs and her thrashing slowed. Finally, she opened her mouth, gasping, and swallowed the water. It was warm and sweet on her tongue.

  It’s not a lake, she decided. It’s a womb.

  She no longer needed to breathe. The first time she’d been born, Apollo had floated beside her. Now she was utterly alone.

  Not Artemis. Not Diana. All trace of Rhea gone, too.

  As the warm water sluiced down her throat, Mnemosyne—Memory herself—unrolled an intricate tapestry before her eyes. Images of her long past slid by in a single heartbeat, restoring her to herself.

  Her mother’s arms, her brother’s smile, her father’s laugh, her nymphs’ song. The leap of a stag, an arrow’s flight. The keening of maidens and the cries of men. The baying of hounds. The fall of Troy, the heights of Olympus. Thousands of women defended, thousands of men destroyed, from medieval villages to the streets of Manhattan. A hundred dogs to love, a hundred names to call her own.

  Then her mother torn away, her twin torn away, Theo still holding her in his arms above a moonlit harbor. Flint’s shoulder beneath her palm as they swayed together on a dance floor. The anger in Theo’s eyes as he stared at her across the Phrygianum.

  All in an instant.

  A sunbeam struck her closed eyes, and when she opened them, light streamed through the water, showing her the way back to the world of the living. This time, when she began paddling for the surface, her body moved effortlessly.

  I’m coming, Theo. I’ll make it up to you.

  Yet she halted once more to look for Apollo. He floated a hundred feet below her, eyes closed. He held neither lyre nor key.

  She dove, lungs bursting, and grabbed his empty hand. But when she pivoted to paddle upward again, the sunlight had disappeared. Everything returned to blackness.

  Forgive me, Theo … forgive me, she begged, knowing she’d lost her only chance of escape. She could feel Apollo’s hand in her own, but she couldn’t see his face. Then a faint glow appeared—more a softer shade of black than true illumination.

  It’s coming from the bottom of the lake, she realized, not from the surface.

  Then again, she no longer knew which way was up. She struck out toward the dim light, dragging Apollo behind her.

  After only a few strokes, she broke the surface of the water and emerged not in the lake but in a pool no more than chest-deep. She hauled her twin up beside her.

  The jagged walls of a cave rose around them. A spring fed the shallow pool, then burbled toward the faint daylight at the cave’s mouth.

  Selene lay half out of the water. Next to her, Apollo still breathed, although his eyes remained shut. He looked strangely peaceful.

  She gripped him under the arms, then almost dropped him in surprise. His flesh burned like black basalt in the noontime sun. Worried, she clenched her teeth against the pain and gently settled him on the driest patch of ground she could find before walking to the cave’s entrance.

  She stood in a cleft of rust-streaked limestone, the rock dropping twenty feet below to a narrow gorge shadowed by rustling poplar trees. Beside her, the stream arched from the cave in a narrow waterfall, disappearing beneath the canopy of trees.

  Beyond the gorge, the mountainside sloped precipitously into a wide valley carpeted in low pines. Scattered cypresses towered over the other trees like sentinels guarding the forest with their spears.

  She felt as though she stood on the edge of the world. Across the valley, more mountains marched into the distance. Rosy-fingered Dawn cast her blush upon the nearest peaks, while those farther away disappeared into a soft blue haze. Wherever this is, it certainly isn’t Rome. But it isn’t the Underworld either.

  She allowed herself to hope. We did it. We’re free.

  She felt surprisingly strong considering she’d just been burned at the stake, passed through Death, and emerged on the other side. In fact, she felt better than she had in a very long time. She flexed one bare foot against the rock and then another, noticing the ripple of strength in her legs.

  From the gorge below, the murmur of voices arose, but she couldn’t pick out any words, nor could she see the speakers through the leafy canopy. She looked down in dismay at her nude body; she didn’t intend to let a bunch of hikers see her naked. Still, she needed to find a bus, steal a car, hitch a ride—something to get herself and her twin back to Rome, where they belonged. Surely if Theo had been revived in the mithraeum under the Vatican, then he was still there—and still in danger. Flint and Scooter were still trapped, her father too. They
would need her help to escape.

  She ducked back into the cave to check on her sleeping brother. Then she cut a few stems from a chasteberry bush near the mouth of the cave and fastened the long, flexible lengths around her waist and chest. I look like a Christianized statue, she thought ruefully, sanitized with fig leaves.

  Digging her toes into the craggy limestone, she descended the rock face with practiced ease. The stone was cool beneath her fingers and toes, but already the rising sun warmed her back.

  She reached the ground moments later and darted from tree trunk to tree trunk, as fast and lithe as a dryad. She could hear the babbling of water now, the stream from the cave reappearing somewhere nearby. But the susurrus of voices nearly drowned it out, a mass of people all whispering at once. There must be a school group camping in the woods, she decided, creeping closer.

  Styx, she cursed as the crowd came into view. Forget the school group—make that an all-male skinny-dipping society.

  Twenty naked men stood around a fountain cut into the side of the limestone gorge and ornamented with marble railings and finials. Some splashed their faces and arms with the spring water from the basin. Others submerged themselves completely, emerging like newborns, glistening and pink in the dawn light. No one spoke above a whisper. More men stood waiting for their turn at the fountain; the line trailed off into the trees, making the exact number difficult to count.

  A pile of discarded sheets, white and yellow, lay between the roots of a nearby pine. Selene snatched two pieces while the men were busy at their bath and slipped back into the woods to clothe herself. Using the chasteberry stems as a belt, she wrapped the white fabric around her waist and shoulder like a chiton. The tightly woven wool felt like silk. She scrambled back up the cliff with the other piece of fabric.

  “Sunbeam.” She spoke the old nickname gently, laying a hand on her twin’s shoulder to wake him. His skin still burned, but his eyes snapped open, glowing faintly golden in the dim light. “We did it,” she told him. “We’re alive. But we have to leave.”

  “Where are we?” he asked, sitting up and squinting in the dim cave.

  “No idea. Somewhere in the countryside. Maybe south of Rome.” She helped him wrap the yellow fabric around his waist, her hands rough from urgency. “All I know is it’s going to be a long walk back to Vatican City.”

  “How did we get here?”

  “Don’t ask me. I followed you deeper into the Lake of Memory, and this is where we wound up. I thought maybe you chose this place.”

  As they emerged into the sunlight, Selene looked at her twin, impressed. For just having been dead, he looked amazing. In fact, he looked better than he had in years. The streak of white in his hair had vanished. His body gleamed as if oiled, and any hint of age had vanished from his face. He looked eighteen years old, a perfect specimen of masculine beauty.

  Selene lifted a hand to her head, wondering if her own journey through death had erased the matching white streak from her hair—and found her usual chin-length bob transformed into a black curtain brushing her waist.

  “When did my hair grow?” she demanded.

  “What do you mean?” Her brother looked confused. “It’s always been that length.”

  “No, it hasn’t,” she snapped. She hadn’t had long hair since the 1920s. “You did drink from the lake, didn’t you?”

  “The lake?”

  “The one we just swam through,” she pressed, increasingly worried.

  “I drank. I drank so much …”

  Selene had the sudden suspicion that it was possible to remember so much you remembered nothing at all. “We need to get you back to civilization.”

  She messily bound her long tresses into a loose chignon with another stem of chasteberry, then led the way back down the cliff to the fountain.

  “Autobus a Roma?” she called to the crowd in her best attempt at Italian. “Veloximente!”

  The men turned to stare, their faces at first uncomprehending, then ashen. One by one, they fell to their knees and bowed their heads.

  One man raised his arms high in the air and called out in perfect Ancient Greek:

  “Khairete o pythie Apollon kai iokheaira Artemi.”

  Hail to Pythian Apollo and his arrow-showering sister Artemis.

  “Ummmm. Sunbeam?” Selene whispered, her heart sinking as she looked ahead through an opening in the trees to the countryside beyond. From her new vantage point, she could see the line of men stretching all the way back to a wide road that hugged the mountain. Those closest to the spring had already disrobed, but the rest wore Greek chitons. Many held laurel branches or libation bowls. Others clutched small terra-cotta figurines of bulls, goats, or rams.

  On the sunbright limestone cliffs to the west, below a mountain with a distinctive double peak, perched a sanctuary cluttered with columned buildings of marble and bronze. A long temple, the statues on its pediments painted in bright shades of turquoise and carnelian, dominated the center. Next to it loomed a sixty-foot-tall statue. Completely covered in gold, it burned so brightly in the newly risen sun that Selene had to shield her eyes to see it better. A young god, his perfect beauty revealed by his nakedness. In one bent arm, he clutched his most famous attribute: a golden lyre.

  Selene knew in that moment that they could only be in one place:

  Delphi. The sanctuary of Apollo on the slopes of Mount Parnassos north of Athens, where the most famous oracle in the history of the world granted prophecies to the masses.

  And since I know that statue was melted down long ago, we can only be in one time, she realized with a start.

  The fifth century BC.

  “Remember when I said it’d be a long trip back to the Vatican?” she asked her brother from the corner of her mouth, uncomfortably aware of the staring crowd. “I think that’s putting it mildly.”

  Chapter 27

  PYTHIAN GOD

  Apollo, god of the Delphic oracle, strode forward toward the waiting crowd of worshipers without a backward glance. Only when he drew close to them did Selene realize that her brother now stood at least ten feet tall.

  And so did she.

  She followed Apollo’s lead, ignoring the gathered supplicants entirely and walking toward the road. Bent on one knee, the already tiny mortals seemed even more insignificant. Few dared raise their eyes to the passing gods. The legends were clear, although exaggerated: Anyone who looked upon the undisguised glory of an Athanatos would be reduced to ashes. A faint yellow glow surrounded her twin. At first, she’d taken it for the morning sun streaming through the dew-filled air. Now she knew better. Apollo had regained his divine aura.

  She looked at her own arms, noticing for the first time the pale silver light emanating from her flesh.

  Mortals lined the road, but the surrounding woods held worshipers of another sort. The leaves rustled as Selene passed; her very presence had summoned her acolytes. Deer and hare, jackal and lynx, all gathered at the forest’s edge to bow before the Mistress of Beasts. She could imagine her chariot waiting for her among the trees, her wide-antlered stags yoked to the reins. If I asked, would they carry me to the Moon and back? she wondered.

  As if in answer, a black hawk keened overhead. She watched it float in lazy circles, its presence a reminder that if she joined it on high, she could see the whole world. All the helpless confusion of her half-mortal life, the futile wandering into dead ends, the struggle for understanding, the constant battle to survive, would mean nothing to an omnipotent goddess.

  But she turned back to the dirt path ahead. If she went to the Moon, she would never return to Theo and the others.

  “I hope you know where we’re going,” she said to her twin, confident that the worshipers would be unable to understand English. They’d probably think it a secret language of the gods.

  “Home,” Apollo replied, the English sounding suddenly strange coming from lips so divine.

  “New York? That’s an even longer trip, Sunbeam.”

  He c
ast her a mildly curious glance, as if he had no idea what she was talking about and didn’t much care. He pointed one long finger at the brightly painted temple on the hill. “Home,” he said again.

  The line of men curved back on itself as those who’d already purified themselves at the spring awaited their turn to enter the sacred precinct and consult the oracle. Delphi only permitted such consultations on the seventh day of every month, so the crowds had likely accumulated for weeks.

  As the gods passed by, men lowered their heads in reverence, but beside the sanctuary’s gate, they lowered them more slowly. These were the richer folk, those privileged enough to be granted places at the head of the line. Many were accompanied by slaves holding goats and honey cakes for sacrifice. Others carried more permanent votive offerings: not terra-cotta figures like the poorer men, but finely wrought sculptures in gold or silver, tripods of bronze, reliefs of carven ivory, helmets and shields, the spoils of war.

  Apollo nodded beatifically as he passed some men, frowned as he walked by others. Occasionally he would offer a simple yes or no: “Nai” or “Ou.” At first, Selene didn’t understand, then she realized that he answered their questions before they even asked them. The God of Prophecy plying his trade.

  At the front of the line, the gate to the sacred precinct remained closed. The oracle had not yet started business for the day. A single boy—he seemed a mere toddler from Selene’s lofty height—scurried ahead and pounded frantically on the gate.

  “Apollo and Artemis are here! Open! Open!” he called in Ancient Greek.

  Apollo didn’t slow his step; the portal just opened before him as if by the magic of his presence. The bearded priest on the other side, garbed in a long purple himation, stepped backward and raised his arms high.

  “Phoibon, Khrysokomes,” he chanted. Soon the whole crowd took up the hymn:

  Bright One, Golden Haired,

  Who on the split-cragged seat of Parnassos

  Arrives at Delphi, the prophetic hill,

  And shines forth prophecies to all the mortals.