Olympus Bound

by Jordanna Max Brodsky

  “The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus in Turkey.” Theo’s broad grin brought out the dimples on both cheeks and sent Selene’s heart skittering. She never thought he’d smile at her again. “You weren’t wrong, Selene. The prophecy just holds multiple meanings at once. The Wise Virgin’s seat is the place where the Chaste One is wealthy—”

  “And also where Athena is tall—”

  “Because that’s where your sister is living today.”

  They stared at each other for a long moment, the thrill of discovery coursing between them like an electric current.

  “Aegean Air flight fifty-four to Athens, now boarding through gate fifteen.”

  Theo started visibly. He glanced down at his watch, then at Selene, then back at his watch.

  Selene looked at the departure board. For once, she felt as if the Fates were on her side. “There’s a flight in forty-five minutes to Izmir, Turkey. That’s the closest city to ancient Ephesus. We have a day to find her and a day to get back. I’m going. Now.”

  “Athens passengers, please have your boarding passes and passports out.”

  Theo pulled out his boarding pass and stared at it for a moment before he blew out a loud breath. “I’m going to come with you, aren’t I? I’m going to help you find Athena and convince her to come to Olympus.”

  Selene just smiled.

  Theo crumpled the boarding pass in his fist. “But that doesn’t mean we’re partners in any other sense, okay? If we need a hotel, you get your own room, and we don’t talk about us. I’m coming as a scholar—is that clear?”

  Her smile drained away, but she nodded. She’d never begged a lover, a worshiper, or any other man to want her.

  She wasn’t about to start now.

  Chapter 34

  INTERMISSIO: THE TETRACTYS

  A cacophony. A discordant clamor to shatter the ears.

  At least that’s how it must have sounded to the others in the mithraeum below the Vatican.

  But shortly before the hidden temple descended into bloody carnage, the long months of tailing Theo Schultz had finally paid off: The Tetractys had reunited with the Father he’d lost months before. And despite everything that had happened since, despite the killings and the terror and his own frenzied escape, he finally heard the melody line above the chaos. Sharp and clear, ringing through his mind like a trumpet call the moment he’d looked upon the Father’s face.

  A face more ravaged than he remembered, battle-scarred and aged, but imbued with great power nonetheless. Nothing will stop us, the Tetractys had thought, his heart leaping at the sight.

  “No matter what happens to me,” the Father had assured him long before. “No matter how weak I appear, have faith in our plan.”

  But the Tetractys no longer felt quite so confident. After overhearing the professor’s conversation in the Pantheon, he’d decided he could finally stop his chase—Schultz was on the right path. The end was in sight. But now it almost seemed that the professor was following him. At the airport, he’d spotted Schultz boarding a plane to Turkey with Selene Neomenia.

  The Tetractys had ducked behind a kiosk selling miniature plastic Coliseums just before they noticed him. He’d crouched there, frozen with indecision.

  I could easily get them stopped by the Italian authorities, he reasoned. A gun planted in their carry-on luggage would do the trick. Then again, he couldn’t risk the professor getting stuck for too long in Italy. In two days, Schultz needed to be in his appointed place. The entire plan depended on it.

  So the Tetractys had let him go. He’d boarded his own flight, trusting Schultz’s word that he’d be present at the gathering on Mount Olympus. Surely his curiosity would draw him there, even if the Huntress had temporarily lured him off on some mysterious errand.

  The thought of the conclave gave him a shivering thrill. All of them in one place, just as the Father always wanted. He truly has foreseen everything. He took a swig from his tiny bottle of whiskey and reclined his first-class seat a little further. They’re playing right into our hands, no matter how dire things seem right now.

  Still, he couldn’t repress a thread of anxiety. He pushed the call button to summon more whiskey from the flight attendant. Two days, he thought. Two days to accomplish so much.

  He wanted more time. And, at the same time, he wished it was already done. The new Age would be so much better than this one—he could barely stand the wait. It would be glorious to behold. Too bad Schultz won’t live to see it. He forced down a pang of regret. There was nothing he could do about the professor’s fate.

  He stared out the window of the plane. His own reflection stared back. “I will be forgiven, in the end,” he murmured, trying to convince himself. The reflection grimaced—even his own face didn’t believe his words.

  He looked past himself, to the landscape below—to the task at hand. The mountains here didn’t look that different from those in Greece. Their slopes were covered with green, their peaks sharp and barren. But these mountains are silent, he reminded himself. Mount Olympus will sing.

  “We just need the musicians to play their parts,” he said aloud. Then he focused once more on his reflection and smirked. “And one damn fine conductor to keep them in tune.”

  Chapter 35

  THE BLESSED VIRGIN

  Selene watched while Theo slept through the flight to Turkey. He slept through the wait at baggage claim. He slept through the long cab ride from Izmir. Either he got no sleep last night, she surmised, or he just doesn’t want to talk to me. Probably both.

  She would’ve appreciated a nap herself. Yet the thought of her father lying close to death left her too agitated to rest.

  An hour after they left the airport, the taxi’s hum finally lulled her into a light doze. She popped back into wakefulness as they made an especially sharp turn on a hillside. The red roofs of modern Selçuk spread across the valley below her. The blue Aegean gleamed in the distance. Farther inland, she could see a large archaeological site. Broad marble streets, a wealth of crumbled buildings, a massive Roman amphitheater.

  “Is that Ephesus?” she asked the cabdriver.

  “Yes,” he replied. “You must see. Very beautiful.” He slowed the car and pulled into an overlook.

  She considered waking Theo, but decided he needed sleep more than sightseeing. She stepped into the glaring heat and stared down at the ruined city below. A memory pricked at her consciousness, but the town had changed too much over the millennia to evoke anything specific. Yet there was something about the theater especially that looked familiar. She stared at it a moment longer.

  “Artemis.”

  She spun at the whisper of her old name. But Theo was still asleep, and the cabdriver had eyes only for his cell phone.

  “Artemis! Artemis! Artemis!” Not just one voice. Thousands. Their gathered cries both a furious roar and a barely heard murmur. The chant came from within her own mind, yet as she turned back to the view, Selene felt sure it rose from the theater far below, the sound climbing up the mountainside like fog lifted with the sun.

  The voices dissipated. She returned to the taxi. When she closed the door, Theo finally awoke.

  “Where are we?” he asked groggily.

  “Almost there.”

  He straightened his glasses and peered at her. “You okay?”

  “Yeah. I’m fine.” She was surprised he noticed her distress—even more surprised he seemed to care. Unsure how to deal with it, she leaned forward to speak to the cabbie instead. “Drop us off at the Artemision.” She turned back to Theo. “The Temple of Artemis was the heart of the ancient city. That’s where we should start looking for Athena.”

  “I was there a few years back. The temple hasn’t exactly fared well,” Theo said cautiously.

  “Are you worried my feelings will be hurt?” Her words came out more disdainfully than she’d intended. “I’m used to looking at ruins.”

  Theo only shrugged and turned to stare out the window.

  The cabbie let
them out on the side of the road. A single, bedraggled souvenir vendor stood at the site’s entrance. They walked down a narrow, weed-covered path into what seemed at first glance to be a swamp.

  The great Temple of Ephesian Artemis had been one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. One hundred and twenty-seven columns, each the height of ten men, had supported a building longer than a football field.

  Theo was right to warn me, Selene realized, swallowing hard as she stood before the ruin.

  Only a single column remained erect. The broken bases of a dozen others poked above the marsh grass in a rough rectangle.

  Selene stared. “I don’t even know what I’m looking at.”

  “The standing column is from the enormous temple built in the fourth century BC,” Theo said gently. “The earlier building—the one commissioned by our favorite King Croesus—was still huge, but not quite as big. It was burned down by an arsonist the night Alexander the Great was born three hundred miles away across the Aegean. Do you remember that?”

  She shook her head. The story didn’t sound familiar.

  Theo went on. “There’s a legend that Artemis, Goddess of Childbirth, was off in Macedonia helping Alexander’s mom in her labor that night. Otherwise, she would’ve been here protecting her temple better.”

  A groan escaped her lips.

  “Selene?” There was more concern in his voice than she deserved.

  “I couldn’t protect it. I couldn’t protect anything or anyone.” She gestured helplessly at the ruins. “They abandoned me. I knew that already, but to see it …”

  “But look.” He pointed to a large nest perched atop the lone standing column. The head of a baby bird peeked over the edge, cheeping plaintively. From the west, a wide-winged stork soared toward the nest with a strip of fish in its long bill. It landed on the column and bent to feed its chick. Only then did Selene notice all the other birds in the swamp. Large orange-footed geese waddled at the column’s base; black swallows looped through the air; tiny sparrows trilled merrily in the undergrowth.

  She closed her eyes for a moment, listening. She heard a snake slithering through mud. A large turtle trundled down the footpath. Cicadas buzzed in counterpoint to the birdsong. The wind whistled among the reeds as merrily as any tune played on Hermes’ pipes.

  “Potnia Theron,” Theo said quietly. “Mistress of Beasts. Your oldest epithet. If mankind no longer worships you, at least the animals still do.”

  An ungainly bee hummed its way toward her and landed on her bare forearm. It crawled there for a moment, searching for nectar, before lumbering back into the air.

  “The bee …” she murmured, grasping at a memory fluttering just out of reach.

  “The people here embossed their coins with bees,” Theo offered. “A symbol more apt for Artemis of the Ephesians than Artemis of the Greeks.”

  Artemis! Artemis of the Ephesians! The distant chant echoed once more in her mind. And somehow, this time, the thought of the bee brought the memory flooding back.

  She placed a hand beneath her ribs and ran it down her stomach. “I had bees here, on my gown,” she said. “And a necklace of pinecones. Here.” She tapped her collarbone. “Deer. Griffins. Bulls. All standing in neat rows down the front of my skirt. Lions standing proud on my bent arms, like those that guarded the Magna Mater’s throne. Three strings of bulls’ testicles hanging pendulous like breasts around my neck.”

  Her voice grew wistful as the memory returned. “They were warm, soft, heavy against my chest. My worshipers would cut them from the bulls and throw them on the lap of my statue—just like the Magna Mater’s priests did when they castrated themselves.” She touched the top of her head. Dimly, she knew the sun had turned her black hair hot, yet she felt cool ivory beneath her fingers instead. “I wore a crown carved with more animals,” she continued. “Bordered by flowers and bees, topped by a columned temple stretching heavenward.” She remembered the crown’s weight on her skull not as a physical sensation—she wasn’t even sure she’d ever actually worn such a thing—but like a heavy dream. “The night Alexander the Great was born I couldn’t have left the temple, because I carried it always on my head. That sounds silly, but I know somehow it’s true.”

  “You’re describing the statues of Artemis made here in Ephesus,” Theo said, his voice hushed with awe. Whatever anger he still harbored toward her seemed to have dissipated with the return of his customary fascination with the ancient world. “The people of Asia Minor had an original Potnia Theron of their own—a prehistoric Earth Goddess not unlike Cybele, the Magna Mater. Then the Greeks brought Artemis the Huntress, and the two goddesses merged into one. Did you only just remember that?”

  She nodded, as confused as he was. In Greece, so Hera had explained, it was Selene’s grandmother, Rhea, who had taken the Great Mother’s worship for herself. Selene had completely forgotten that across the Aegean, Artemis had earned that honor instead. “When Saturn placed me beneath the bull’s blood, I felt the Magna Mater take root within me. But after the Underworld, her spirit left me. I didn’t remember we’d ever been joined before—I usually only remember my Greek incarnation. Occasionally the Roman one. Homer, Ovid, Aeschylus—theirs are the versions of myself I know.”

  “You were created by the poets,” he said softly. “I forget that sometimes. If the Ephesians ever wrote hymns to their goddess, they didn’t survive. Even the image of you with your animal-studded gown isn’t well-known anymore outside of Turkey—the Ephesians may have molded you of marble and silver, but their goddess was too mysterious, too bizarre, too eastern, to catch on in the rest of the world. The bulls’ balls especially were a bit much. The Greeks preferred their lithe huntress; the Romans liked their moon goddess.”

  “You said the Ephesians molded me of silver,” she said. “I remember rows and rows of silver statues, no more than three inches tall, at the silversmiths’ booths in the marketplace.”

  “You saw those?”

  She nodded. “When I came to hear a man named Paul preach.”

  “You mean Paul the Apostle?” Theo asked, his eyes bright with curiosity. She knew he could barely refrain from whipping out a pen and paper to write down her words.

  “Yes.” She understood now why the bearded Jew whom Saturn had spoken of in Ostia had seemed so familiar. She’d seen him in Ephesus, years after that fateful day on the road to Damascus. The man had taken his god’s commandments to heart. He’d spread the good news as far as Artemis’s holy city.

  “Saint Paul talks about preaching to the Ephesians in the Bible,” Theo prodded. “You were actually there?”

  “I was everywhere,” she said slowly. She started walking away from the swamp and back toward the road, letting the memory of a different walk unfurl as she went. “I traveled up the marble street from the harbor, disguised as a mortal man. A merchant, with grain to sell. It was night, and oil lamps lined the colonnade along the street, gilding the marble. A great crowd streamed ahead of me, and I followed them into the theater. Thousands, tens of thousands, filled the benches. A bearded man stood in the center of the orchestra, his face lit by torches. He looked like a madman, ranting about how I was an instrument of the devil, and Christ alone could save them.”

  “You must’ve been pissed.”

  “No … I thought it was funny. I had no idea how dangerous it was. I thought of punishing the man, of course—he shouldn’t be allowed to show such disrespect—but I didn’t have to. My people did it for me. A silversmith stood up in the middle of the theater, holding aloft his icon of me with my towering crown, and yelled, ‘Great is Artemis of the Ephesians! Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!’ The whole crowd took up the chant. All twenty thousand of them. And then they streamed down the aisles like an avalanche and descended on the preacher. They beat him half to death.”

  Theo chuckled uncomfortably. “One of the great moments of Christian persecution and you’re smirking.”

  “They didn’t actually kill him,” she retorted defensiv
ely. “The Roman soldiers stopped the riot. But they eventually sent the apostle into exile. Meanwhile, my city stayed my city.” She stood by the souvenir stand now, and the grizzled vendor stared at her blankly. To him, she was just another American tourist. “At least for a little longer.”

  “The Ephesians never really forgot about you,” Theo said. “When Christianity finally took over, they buried your cult statues; they didn’t destroy them. The one in the museum here in Selçuk is in perfect condition—temple crown, bull balls, and all—except the arms have been broken off at the elbow.” He reached for a figurine on the table, a six-inch copy in white soapstone. “Like this, see?”

  The vendor perked up. “Twenty lira, but for you, fifteen.”

  “Oh.” Theo reached into his pocket. “I only have dollars.”

  “Fifteen dollars, then, no problem.” The man grinned broadly.

  Selene thought about telling Theo that three Turkish lira were one dollar—she’d seen the exchange rate posted at the airport—but decided the vendor needed the money. Besides, a statue of Artemis should be worth at least fifteen dollars.

  While Theo paid for the figurine, Selene examined the other items on the table. “What’s that?” She pointed to a small clay model of a veiled woman standing in the exact same pose as the Ephesian Artemis statue. Even her arms had been broken at the same place.

  The vendor’s eyes brightened as he smelled another sale. “That’s a copy of the statue of the Blessed Virgin.”

  “No, it’s not,” Selene retorted. “Artemis never wears a veil.”

  “No, no, the Blessed Virgin. Mary, Mother of Jesus.”

  Selene stiffened. Could they have been interpreting the prophecy wrong? Theo turned toward her, looking alarmed, and she could hear his silent question. Was Mary the “wise virgin” who could save Zeus?

  No, I refuse to believe that, she decided. Mary isn’t even a goddess, just a long-dead mortal woman. Bringing her into my sacred shrine is nothing but an insult.