by Jo Walton
The three of them had been moving through the crush and were now beside us. “Father, Aroo, Marsilia, this is Hermes,” Thetis said, beaming. He was lovely. Of course he was. He was a god. How could I not have guessed? I felt furious with myself.
We exchanged conventional wishes of joy, though my voice seemed choked in my throat. Hermes still showed no sign whatsoever of recognizing me. He did remarkably well at the Saeli sideways head-bow, which takes most people a long time to master. But then, he was a god. “I think you all know Jason?” Thee went on.
“Yes,” Aroo said, making the head-bow to Jason. “You are in charge of the boat where Marsilia and Hilfa work. Joy to you, Jason.”
“Joy to you, Aroo. And that’s right,” Jason said, making a creditable response to the head-bow. He’d been there the day Hilfa was trying to teach it to me. The memory of our shared laughter steadied me.
“So tell me about your gods?” Hermes asked Aroo, directly.
Aroo blinked her silvery inner eyelids across her eyes, and took a tiny step backwards. A tiny step was all she could take, because there was so little room, and now her back was to the wall. “We have four major religions,” she said, carefully, without unveiling her eyes. “Three of them have gods. Most of us here prefer the fourth.”
“But you’re not used to gods showing up at parties?” Hermes asked, and giggled. He couldn’t be drunk on that over-watered wine, unless he’d been here for a long time.
“Religion is for us a more private thing,” Aroo said, sounding very much like Hilfa now. “We do not have people enact the roles of gods, no, nor do we worship in public as part of civic life the way humans do. There are those who could instruct you, but I am not one of them.” She closed her eyes completely now, lowering the colored outer lids.
“But—” Hermes began.
“Enough,” Dad said, sternly. “You’re making Aroo uncomfortable, and she is a guest here.”
I wouldn’t have cared to refuse Dad when he spoke in that tone, but Hermes had another laughing objection on his lips when Aroo suddenly opened her eyes and fled, thrusting her empty cup at Porphyry and backing out through the door of the sleeping house and into the street. Porphyry took the cup, turned it in his hands with a strange gesture, then nodded to Hermes. “I see,” he said, at his most gnomic. Porphyry is my uncle, and I love him, but he can also be one of the most infuriatingly enigmatic people on the planet. “I will speak with you tomorrow.” Then he vanished, still holding the cup. Hermes kept smiling but did not speak.
At that moment, Alkippe came in from the garden and began wiggling her way across the room towards us. Hermes smiled over at the child as she approached, then paused. For the first time since I’d known him there was no smile twitching at the corners of his lips.
“Your daughter?” he asked Thetis, uncertainly.
“My niece. Your step-great-grandniece.” Thetis was smiling again, but Hermes still looked grave. I saw a family resemblance between him and Pytheas, not in feature, but in his expression as he looked down at Alkippe as she approached. I didn’t know what to do or say. I hadn’t imagined that he’d recognize his connection to her.
“Your daughter, I think,” Dad said. He sounded matter-of-fact about it. Jason’s eyebrows rose into his hair. Thee gasped.
“I think so too,” Hermes replied, not looking up from Alkippe, who had reached us. She hugged my legs, and I put down a hand to smooth her hair. Then she gave Thetis the same hug, looking up at Hermes wonderingly.
“Fate plays strange tricks sometimes,” he said. “What’s your name, little one?”
“Alkippe,” she said.
“A lovely name,” Hermes said. “And how old are you?”
“Seven and a half,” Alkippe said. “Why aren’t you wearing any clothes?”
Jason gave a bark of laughter, then choked it off.
“I’m more comfortable that way,” Hermes said, smoothly.
“But aren’t you cold? Outside I mean?” I could see the gap in her teeth as she spoke.
“No, I didn’t feel cold. I was flying and that kept me warm.”
“Oh.” She didn’t seem surprised at all. “You can fly, like Aunt Arete? You must be a god.”
“Yes, Alkippe, this is Hermes,” Thetis said.
“Hermes! Then you’re an Olympian? I’ve been to your temple. You’re different from how I imagined. Why are you here?”
Thetis took Alkippe’s hand. “I think Grandma has some quince paste left for us. Let’s go and see.”
“But I want to talk to Hermes,” Alkippe protested, not at all mollified by the thought of the treat.
“Later,” Hermes said. “I think I should speak to your mother now.”
“You should have spoken to her before,” Neleus said, as Thetis led Alkippe, still protesting vociferously, across the room. “It’s a bit late now.”
“You mistake me,” Hermes said, meeting my eyes for the first time. “I’ve never been on this wandering world before today. That is my daughter, true, but Necessity has caught me, for I have never met her mother until now. So I shall set this as straight as I may, but this is as early as I can begin it.”
It explained why he hadn’t recognized me, at least. “Never been here?” I asked. I don’t think I’d ever experienced so many conflicting emotions in such a short time.
“Your past encounter lies in my future,” Hermes confirmed.
I suppose this kind of thing happens to gods, but it was quite outside my experience. “Perhaps we should have this conversation somewhere quieter,” I suggested.
He looked at Dad, who was frowning. “But this is—well, yes. Let’s go outside.”
Jason put his hand on my arm. “Will you be all right on your own, Marsilia?”
“Yes,” I said, though I appreciated his offer. “Thank you.”
“Let her go,” Dad said, and Jason stepped back. I followed Hermes through the crush, which parted before us.
The fountain room was as full as the sleeping room, but there was nobody over ten in the garden. It was far too cold to linger out of doors unless you were young enough to hurtle around in a chasing game. Hermes turned to me as I was snicking my jacket closed. The clouds had parted and the winter stars shone clear and cold above us. Hermes didn’t seem to feel the cold at all, though he was naked. I was almost knocked over by two of my young cousins, who dashed past me racing to be first to slap their palms on the herm. Hermes looked at them wryly. “I take it I don’t have any other children here. That you know of?”
“Not that I know of, no,” I said, flustered by the question.
“Only Alkippe?” The hurtling children broke around us as a wave breaks on a rock, and re-formed on the other side of us.
“Yes.” The affirmation came out much too quietly. I felt slightly sick and a little lightheaded. I took a deep breath and swallowed, which helped.
“I didn’t know she existed until now.” He frowned, staring over at the herm where the children were still dodging and squealing. “This is all terribly awkward. I was intending to pay court to your sister.”
Plato has extremely harsh things to say about jealousy, which I repeated to myself. I was struggling hard with this in my soul, as well as feeling all the physical symptoms, heat flushing my cheeks and hands and my stomach tightening. Then Pytheas appeared beside me. One instant he wasn’t there, the next he was, as if he’d taken a step from nowhere. He didn’t look the way he did in his statues—he was dressed normally, for one thing—but he didn’t look like the old man he’d been when I saw him a few days before. He looked not so much young as ageless. Yet I recognized him immediately as my grandfather.
“I thought you were in Alexandria,” he said, frowning at Hermes.
“Moving rapidly is my specialty,” Hermes said, with a teasing smile.
“Yes, but—”
“I’m here now,” Hermes said.
Pytheas was still frowning. “Well, it’s good that you came, you can test something for me. I
was going to find Porphyry, but you’ll be better.”
“Let me finish with this first.”
“No, it’s important,” Pytheas said.
“So is this.”
“What, dallying with my granddaughter? Surely that can wait.” Pytheas smiled at me.
“We weren’t dallying,” I protested. My voice sounded strange in my ears.
“Necessity has me by the foot,” Hermes said.
I instinctively looked down at his feet. He had wings on his sandals. He hadn’t had those when I’d met him before. As I was looking down, the children noticed Pytheas and came running up, crowding round him asking questions.
“Joy to you, yes, I’m here, yes, but go inside now. You can tell everyone I’m here and I’ll come in and talk to them, but I need to speak to my brother first.”
They protested, of course, but Pytheas shooed them inside, some laughing and some crying. He closed the door and turned back to us. The garden seemed very dark and quiet without the children and the bar of light from the door. I realized that Pytheas was much better lit than anything else, as if the starlight were concentrating itself on him.
“Necessity?” Pytheas said to Hermes, as if there had been no interruption.
“Your step-granddaughter Marsilia is the mother of my daughter Alkippe, but I’ve never been here before today. So I need to discover how this came to be and set it straight.”
Pytheas winced. “I appreciate how uncomfortable this is, but—” he began.
“No, wait,” I said, wanting to clarify things. “You died, and you’re here, and that’s not the most important thing that’s happened today. I’ve found out the father of my daughter is the god Hermes, and that’s not the most important thing that’s happened today either. Even this time loop, disconcerting as it is, isn’t the most important. You have to know, there’s a human ship in orbit.”
Both gods looked at me with the same infuriating lack of expression, the same air of fathomless calm indifference.
“A human ship!” I repeated. “Recontact with the wider universe! A chance to rejoin the human mainstream and influence it!”
“Yes,” Pytheas said, with a wave of his hand. “But you can deal with that perfectly well yourself.” I gasped. “You’re a Gold of the Just City, you can deal with it, or what have we been doing here? Hermes, I can’t find Athene.”
“Can’t find her?” Hermes looked down shiftily.
“Try reaching for her.”
“Can’t I sort out this mess first?” He gestured towards me, sounding petulant.
“It’ll take less time than arguing. If you can find her, then—”
Hermes shook his head. “Nothing.”
“Go outside time and try.”
“Look, let me talk to Marsilia for five minutes and then stay here for two heartbeats while I sort this out, and I’ll do all the running around looking for Athene you want,” Hermes said.
“She’s missing?” I asked. I had a really bad feeling about this. “Lost?”
Suddenly I had all of their attention. Hermes seemed particularly intent.
“It seems so. Have you seen her?” Pytheas asked.
“About two years ago, after the Panathenaic Festival, she came to me and Thetis in the sanctuary when we were putting the new cloak on her statue.” I could remember it clearly. She’d come into the room carrying her owl, and it turned its head to watch us as she moved. She was much taller than any human. There are lots of stories about Athene in the City, some good, some not so good. Thetis had clutched my hand so tightly I’d had marks for days. “She said we were her worshippers, and this was her city. I was a priest that year, remember?”
“Priesthood is a civic function here, like in Rome,” Pytheas put in. Hermes nodded dismissively.
“She gave us a kind of woven box to look after,” I went on, remembering the weight of it in my arms and the strange weave, and the tilt of her head as she spoke. “She told us not to open it unless we heard she was lost, and then we had to both be together. And she asked us not to tell you until that happened.”
“So which one of you opened it, and how long did it take?” Pytheas asked. “And why in all the worlds didn’t you tell me?”
“How did you know we already opened it?” I asked.
“Human nature,” Pytheas said. “What was in it?”
“Hilfa,” I admitted.
“Hilfa!” Pytheas repeated. I had never seen him look so taken aback.
“Who’s Hilfa?” Hermes asked. “And where is he?”
“He’s a Sael,” Pytheas said. “One of the aliens. I’ve met him a time or two. He seems perfectly normal for one of the Saeli, which is to say very peculiar indeed.”
“We didn’t expect it would be a living being,” I said. “We thought we could look to see what it was and close it again until it was necessary. Or if it was something dangerous to the Republic we could tell somebody. Athene hasn’t always been our friend.”
“And don’t you know the story of Pandora?” Hermes asked.
I looked at him blankly.
“No, that’s one of the stories they left out,” Pytheas said. “Not a good example, and Plato didn’t believe people learned excellence from awful warnings. So what did you do when you opened it and it turned out to be Hilfa?”
It was my turn to look down guiltily. “We arranged for him to have somewhere to live and a job and education, as if he were any Sael who had decided to stay behind.” I glanced at Hermes. “That’s always happening. The Saeli like Plato, and lots of them stay, though usually they live in pods, not individually. But it was easy.”
“And you didn’t tell anyone?” Pytheas demanded.
“I’m not completely irresponsible. It was two years ago. I told Dad and Klymene.” They had been consuls that year.
“And Neleus and Klymene didn’t tell anyone? Didn’t tell me?” He sounded aggrieved.
“Evidently not. I don’t know if they told anyone else.”
“I can’t believe you all kept it from me!” Pytheas said.
I shifted guiltily. “Athene specified that we shouldn’t tell you. So we decided to wait and see what happened, and keep an eye on Hilfa, which we have been doing. I started working on the boat with him. He hasn’t done anything unusual.”
“Let’s go and find him,” Hermes suggested.
“Why would she choose a Sael?” Pytheas asked, ignoring Hermes. “The Saeli have a strange relationship with their gods. Why would Athene have had one in a box? And why would she leave it here with Neleus’s daughters in case she was lost? And what use could it be, in that case? And did she expect to get lost?”
“She must have, if she took measures against it,” Hermes said; and then after a moment, “How strange.”
“If she was here on Plato, why didn’t she simply come to me and explain? And where is she, anyway? She must have known Thetis would open the box.”
“I didn’t say it was Thetis who opened it! And it wasn’t. We did it together.” Though if I hadn’t agreed, she would have done it anyway. When we first opened it, for a second it looked like a snake coiled tightly around a human baby. Then it resolved into an egg, which immediately hatched into Hilfa, much as he was now: curious, earnest, alien. “I don’t think he’s a god.”
“We should go and talk to him immediately,” Hermes said. “Though can I please sort out this mess with Necessity first?”
Pytheas’s eyes widened and he swayed back a little, then he waved his hand, giving permission.
“Marsilia,” Hermes began. “Tell me the circumstances in which Alkippe was conceived.”
I took a breath and gathered the information concisely. “She was conceived at the end-of-summer Festival of Hera eight years ago. You were calling yourself Poimandros, and you said you were from Psyche.”
Hermes smiled.
“Psyche is one of the other Platonic Cities,” Pytheas put in. “It’s not as much fun as you might imagine.”
“We were dra
wn together—our names drawn out of the lots together—and we went off to be married for the day.”
“You really are doing Plato’s Republic,” Hermes said.
“Participation in the Festival of Hera is voluntary,” Pytheas said. “Well, here it is. In Psyche and Athenia it’s compulsory for citizens. But nobody has to stay in Psyche or Athenia if they don’t like it.”
“It’s all right, you don’t need to be so defensive, I think it’s charming,” Hermes said, smiling again. “Eight years ago, end of summer, fix the lots to be drawn, spend the night in bed, got it. And you’ll put in a word of recommendation for me with the beautiful Thetis?”
I was opening my mouth to say calmly that what Hermes and Thetis did was their own affair, when Pytheas interrupted.
“Wait,” Pytheas said. “I know how hard it is to resist Necessity. But if Athene is truly lost, and if she knew ahead of time that she was going into danger, and if we have to rescue her, then having you bound by Necessity might be a safeguard.”
“A safeguard?” Hermes asked. He looked astonished. “You think Necessity might protect me?”
“I think if there’s a serious risk, it might,” Pytheas said.
“But—you know what it feels like!” Hermes protested.
“You’re strong enough to bear it,” Pytheas said. “Who knows what might happen to Athene otherwise?”
“Gods can’t die,” I protested.
“They can’t ordinarily get lost either,” Pytheas said. “And I think that since Necessity has given us this unexpected aegis, we might be meant to use it.”
“But if gods can die, or get lost, or—” I stopped, realizing my voice was rising. I took a breath from my stomach and began again. “What happens to Alkippe if something should happen to Hermes before he goes back to conceive her?”
They looked at each other a moment in silence, then at me. “It’s impossible,” Pytheas said. “He has to survive to do that, and therefore he will, and know he is safe until it is done.”
“Look, Alkippe’s my daughter, I really care about her. I can’t risk her never having existed. Hermes needs to go and do whatever he needs to do about it now, before going into danger.” They were listening to me, but they didn’t seem to understand the importance of what I was saying.
