And towering above them all in her robes of scarlet and black was the queen of Heaven herself; mighty Hera whose terrible smile was the most menacing thing in the sky. Tormented pride had brought her at last to this gigantic revenge.
Far below in Tartarus, amid smoke-veiled cliffs of jet, the shackled Titans raised their ancient heads in hope of freedom, now that cruel Zeus was overthrown. Great Atlas, sunk in stone, groaned and dreamed of pardon; only Prometheus, bleeding in the Caucasian snow, was not deceived by hope; and far away, on the isle where Zeus’s last nymph had fled, a serpent laid an egg in a stream and presently, snakes in their thousands wriggled across the land and poisoned it. Already one tyranny was replacing another . . . Hera’s vengeance was as harsh as Zeus’s.
‘Which of you?’ whispered Zeus, his vast limbs straining against the thongs. He stared from one to another so that even the rebellious Olympians shuddered under his gaze. ‘Which of you?’
Hermes alone was not to be seen; for that immortal politician had not yet determined which way was his. Such was his respect and admiration for all the gods that he could not – in fairness to himself – declare his allegiance till he knew for certain who had won.
He had taken refuge under the discreet sea – even in the quiet grotto of Thetis and Eurynome; and there he waited patiently for the outcome of the great affair.
Interestedly he gazed round the rocky walls and admired the lovely trifles of Hephaestus’s childhood works. From time to time he stopped and listened – as if awaiting a summons; but there was no sound save the wild music of the water foaming through the conch shell at the grotto’s gate. He peered through the crystal window, but the green was empty and dark. All life, mortal and divine, was hiding from the revolution in the sky.
Then Thetis rose. Her glorious face was shadowed with fear. She drew her robe about her and bowed her head so none might divine her purpose from her eyes. Then, with a sudden flash of her silver sandals, which seemed to dance like two sea-creatures, she fled from the grotto.
Hermes shrugged his gleaming shoulders and returned to the crystal window and watched as the goddess, robed in her storm of bubbles, sped through the engulfing green, till at last she was lost and the underwater forests swayed back and hid the path she’d taken.
On and on rushed Thetis, her gentle spirit plunged into dismay. Dreams, terrible dreams, filled her immortal mind; memories of the dark tales told to Hephaestus, long ago. Gigantic murders and Fury-haunted nights; mad wars that scarred the heavens and smashed the stars – and Chaos creeping back like a huge black sea . . .
She reached the ocean’s edge; but still she sped on, and such was her wild haste that she seemed for a moment like an outstretched finger of the sea itself – till the joining water dropped away in the air and left her, like some speeding arrow’s tip, all silver with fear.
She fled through the grove of black poplars and drew her mantle over her head. She was entering the dread realms of Tartarus, where the gentle goddess had never been but in her dreams.
She dared not look down, and tried to shut out the tiny screams and shrieks that filled the air like the high squeaking of unseen bats.
At last she came to the most dreaded place of all. Bewildered, she saw the towering cliffs of jet where the ruined Titans hung in the chains that had once held the Cyclopes. The sweat that ran eternally off their huge confined limbs had worn deep channels in the steep black walls, from whence it had run a little way to pool and dry in hillocks of salty crusts.
But it was not for the Titans she’d voyaged so far – and she turned aside from their tremendous pleading eyes. It was for one she knew by name alone – and whose gigantic shape she now saw moving amid the vapours that rose uneasily from the depths of the ravine.
‘Briareus!’ she called. ‘Briareus! Come quickly—’
There was a whirlwind in the sky, a whirlwind with a hundred flailing arms. It had risen from beside the ocean and moved with unimagined speed across the heavens and towards the silent battlements of Olympus.
Briareus, the hundred-handed giant, had come from Tartarus at the bidding of the goddess from the sea. Older than Zeus, older far than all the gods, he turned his tangled eyes wearily towards the ramparts and then, with his thousand twining fingers, reached for the deep knots that secured the lord of the sky . . .
In the great council chamber the triumphant gods debated, and, with piercing ambition, glanced from time to time at the empty throne that stood above them all.
Then each looked to the others, and all threatened the first to move. Only Athene sat in silence; and her beloved owl crouched on her shoulder, its marvellous eyes extinguished in feathers of dismay. Beyond the casements the drifting sun and moon still wandered in the vacant sky.
Murderous Ares alone was grinning as he clashed from god to god and urged the joyous frenzy of universal war. Such was the gift of Ares that he seemed mad and savage only when he was on the other side; his hot breath in the ear was always the whisper of a divine god.
Suddenly a dangerous brightness seemed to flood the hall. Gods in mid-course stopped and stared at one another, bewildered that their radiance was dimmed.
‘Which of you?’
They turned. In the doorway, his terrible golden head scarce clearing the high, engraved lintel-piece, stood eternal Zeus, god of the all-killing thunderbolt and lord of the sky. He had been freed!
The gods shrank back, each into his little throne. They trembled, and the immortal mountain itself seemed to tremble with them as if it would crack into fragments and rush into the sea.
‘Which of you?’
The bright gilding of their limbs dulled and tarnished before the advancing blaze. Then Hera started up and met him in his path. Though her power was shattered, her great pride was not.
‘I was the one, dread Zeus. Who else but mighty Hera would have dared?’
He hung her in the sky with golden bracelets from her wrists and golden anvils to drag her ankles down. Hers was a royal fate. Her raging beauty stared down on the world, while her rich black hair flew across the face of the shaken moon. Stars pricked her fingertips, but such was the scope of her pride that she scorned to clench her hands and wore the stars like sharply splintered jewels; while in the northern sky her black and scarlet gown hung down in deep, unmoving folds. There she remained until Zeus’s anger was spent.
Poseidon and Apollo, Zeus humbled in a lesser way. He sent them as bond-slaves to the world below and condemned them to labour – Poseidon by day and Apollo by night – to build a city for a king. Yet even as they raised the first huge stones, Zeus doomed the city to destruction so they knew they laboured in vain. They built the towers and morticed the walls and engraved the bronze floors – and ever knew that they were building the ghost of ruins. The city’s name was Troy.
Such were the punishments of Zeus; the other gods he pardoned – all save one.
Hephaestus, ugly Hephaestus, stared out at the hanging lady in the sky. His scorched and sunken eyes were crinkled with looking, and his face, blackened with the heat of his forge, was furrowed with memories of pain.
He shambled back and forth, now looking out, now looking rapidly at his vast father who was brooding in an unearthly calm.
Sombrely he remembered how he had suffered from the pride of Hera – and how the lust for revenge had burned in his breast. He remembered the dark years in the grotto and how he had spent his savagery on bronze and gold, twisting it and hammering it till sweat blinded his eyes and he could do no more. Then he remembered how the object of his hatred – this same mighty lady who was stretched across the heavens – had given him her hand and helped him back, because she admired and wanted what he had done.
In that instant, anger left him and his strange heart had flooded with joy. In that instant he had become truly a god.
He hobbled to his father, squinting hideously, for Zeus’s fire ever oppressed him.
‘You are the eternal savage, great son of Cronus,’ he muttered bit
terly. ‘You alone will never change . . .’
Zeus stared down at his misshapen son. For a moment he seemed not to have heard. There was almost a smile on his lips. Then suddenly he leaned forward like some murderous flame that leaps out of a quiet fire and threatens the hearth with instant ruin.
With dreadful swiftness he seized the amazed Hephaestus by the foot.
‘Go!’ raged wild Zeus. ‘Vile, twisted thing! For a second time, begone!’
Then, with all the strength of his gigantic arm, he hurled Hephaestus out into the frightened sky.
Such was the force with which he’d been flung that his path through the sky was at first upwards, before it began to plunge, so that it seemed that some great engraver had sketched a flaming arch in the heavens with a tool that writhed and twisted as it burned its way. High birds, crossing this path, shook and toppled as their wings were wrenched by a harsh roaring that streamed up from the blazing thing below.
The god howled as he fell; but this time it was not the crying of a fiery infant, it was the wild, weird howling of the knowledge of pain. There was no gentle goddess to raise her white arms from the sea to save him; he was for the hard, stony earth.
Far, far below he saw it, whirling and rushing to meet him as he screamed. Fields, rivers, seas and mountains twisted themselves into a great round – then, as his eyes rolled wildly, all the colours flew out into separate strands and patches of brown, green and silver, as loose and aimless as the tumbled threads left by the shears of the Fates.
Hephaestus squealed with terror and beat his powerful, blackened arms as if to fly; but he only twisted faster in the air and the loose patchwork below whirled back into its plaited round, bound in at its edges by the endless, looping sea.
It was like a shield – a gigantic shield, rimmed with hammered silver in a great pattern of waves. Forgetful of his agony, the god’s mouth gaped and his starting eyes took in the intricate splendour of the design, in its spacious elements and in its glorious shape.
Here a proud river flowed, reflecting the sun till it was a fine seam of gold running between enamelled fields and through valleys of red and green bronze. Two cities of a pearly whiteness rose a hand’s breadth apart. It seemed they’d been at war, and now their differences were resolved, for a stately procession in tiny jewelled colours moved from each towards the other, under high curled pennants of peace. What were they like, these pennants? They reminded him of something, long ago. Yes . . . yes. The falling god’s eyes misted over as he remembered the patterns of sea-shells that had once delighted him in Thetis’s grotto. The pale pennants were curiously like them . . .
‘A shield,’ he muttered. ‘I must make a shield—’
Then he looked down again and saw that all had changed into a vast, engulfing green. At immense speed the world was rushing to meet him and, with a last tremendous shriek, Hephaestus struck it.
Like a flaming meteor torn from the sun, he had fallen from early morning till the edge of the night; now at last he crashed in shattered agony among the forests of the isle of Lemnos.
They found him moaning and whimpering in the ruins of a forest. The tall trees round about had been smashed by the violence of his descent, and here and there thin branches still flared and flickered.
At first, the islanders were frightened, and peered at the gleaming monstrous being from a distance; then, seeing him helpless, they approached and timidly offered him food and drink. Both his legs were broken and his immortal spirit seemed shattered beyond repair. He stared almost unseeingly at the frail creatures of Prometheus as they bothered him with their gentle care.
Like his mighty father but yesterday, he too was bound with a hundred knots of pain. What would they do with him? What would they want of him? How would they use their triumph over a fallen god?
They tried to mend his legs but, failing this, they brought straw and rushes and such soothing ointments as they knew. He was their guest, and to a guest they gave.
How long he lay there is not surely known. Certainly, it was for several days and nights; for sailors passing the island of an evening noted with bewilderment the strange rich glow that seemed to come from its heart.
Then the god departed and dragged his useless legs across the weary way back to Olympus, leaving deep channels and twisted grooves where the ground was soft enough to take the imprint of his feet.
Up and up he climbed, never pausing though the agony was intense; sometimes dragging by his fingers alone, sometimes moving more swiftly where he obtained the leverage of his powerful arms. So great Hephaestus climbed towards the sky which was his home.
‘A shield!’ he panted, as if to sustain himself with the memory. ‘I must make a shield . . . Such a shield! . . . Yes, yes—a shield . . .’
At last the ramparts of Olympus reared before him, and as before a hand reached out to help him in. The god looked up. Hermes was there.
‘Come, brother,’ murmured the god of illusion with his sideways smile. ‘Between you and me, eh? It is always between you and me.’
Hephaestus took his hand and nodded. Then he turned back and the two great brothers silently regarded the world. Their hands were still clasped, and for many minutes they remained thus, with their backs to Olympus and their faces towards mankind; the artificer in gold and bronze and the artificer in dreams.
‘The weather is better now,’ wrote Autolycus to his daughter in rocky Ithaca. ‘All is busy and prosperous again. They say a new city is being built, and that it will be the most wonderful in the world. Certainly, from what I understand, they have the best of workmen. It is to be called Troy. Perhaps, when he is a grown man, my grandson, Odysseus, may visit it . . .’
AFTERWORD
Any pair of authors who have made what they hope is a piece of fresh fiction out of some of the oldest tales in the world, often retold, should perhaps explain why they have done this, and what the relationship is between their work and those tales themselves in their original form or forms.
The desire to write this book sprang out of a conversation in which both of us discovered that, as children, we had been deeply affected by the Greek myths. It seemed to us that from those great stories we had drawn some of our earliest and most powerful impressions of the nature of human destiny, and of the quality and force of human passion. We had not, of course, known that this was happening at the time; but looking back, we could see that part of the great empty map of existence was filled in for us, in a potent and general and deeply influential fashion, by those myths. Here were love and lust; power and powerlessness; cunning and simplicity; anger and despair, and weakness and courage. In no stories that we ever heard were these passions so embodied as in the Greek myths. We could see (so our conversation went) that this must be so because not only were these tales the ancestors of most of the stories that have been written since, but there must cling to them the force and fervour of the intention with which they were invented. This intention was, if not to explain life, then to provide a pattern that would act as a vast imaginative alternative to an explanation. The pattern was designed to embrace and, in this most subtle way, to account for the origin of life; the strength and persistence of the elements as opposed to the frailty and brevity of human existence; the great tangle of human qualities; and that paradox that lies in our power to imagine, and almost at times to become part of, forces both purer and infinitely more lasting than ourselves.
It seemed to us, on the strength of our own remembered experiences as children, quite absurd to regard these myths as mere ancient romances, or agreeable fantasies, or superannuated religious fables. At best (from the point of view at which we had now arrived), those re-tellings that now have most currency among the young form a haphazard sequence of tall tales, often related in a manner which arises from certain conventions of translation from Greek poetry, and have little in them of the literary voice of our own time. We wondered if it might be possible to discover some new style of telling these stories – a language freed in some imp
ortant respects from those conventions. But more than that – we felt there was room for an attempt to tell the mythical story not as a collection of separate tales but as a continuous narrative. Clearly, with such a rich and disparate range of stories, some early and some late, all of them remoulded again and again, added to and deviously modified by the Greeks themselves as the need grew to account for their more and more complex political and social and religious life – clearly, we could not hope to fit all the pieces together as if they were part of a single jigsaw puzzle: if they had ever been that, in the form in which they survive they resist with the ferocity of Zeus himself any attempt to make continuous sense of them.
But already, before we began writing, we were aware that about the whole body of these myths there flickered a thousand possibilities of coherence: there must be many ways of weaving together a selection from them that would enable whatever story was so composed to carry the whole weight of significance the myth-makers meant their inventions to bear. It would be a matter of so exposing ourselves to these stories that we might begin to sense how, beginning here or there, and moving through the great mythical landscape from this spot to that, we could tell a total tale that, while it would miss out much, in terms of the quantity that is offered, would miss out as little as possible in terms of the entire meaning of the whole mythical structure.
This we did; and we have been deeply moved to discover ourselves borne, by some current starting up within that landscape, on a journey we could not have mapped out before we began writing. We wish to assure readers that it is one journey only among many that we believe possible. Anyone who desires to take his own course might do worse than what we did ourselves – which was to come, after much reading, to a dependence on four books. They are the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer (we used E. V. Rieu’s fine Penguin translation); the Metamorphoses of Ovid; and Robert Graves’s The Greek Myths, also published by Penguin. Homer gave us the immense size of the stories, the very air of them. Ovid provided us with touches and flashes of colour – and also with many temptations: to all of which we did not succumb, since Ovid was at times a splendid twister of received narrative. We intended to invent, certainly, but not to twist. We were resolved to invent only within the logic of the myths: that is to say, for every turn of every myth we touched on, there is a basis in the most scholarly accounts of them we could find. Which brings us to Mr Graves, to whom our debt is very great. His two volumes are the fruit of a lifetime’s study: surely among the most readable sourcebooks in any field. That aim of ours which remained among our first aims – to set down nothing that might be at odds with reputable versions of the myths a young reader might elsewhere have encountered – was possible to realise largely because we had the work of Mr Graves at our elbows.
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