He seemed to love me back, that was the greater wonder. Circe was the first word he ever spoke, and the second was sister. My mother might have been jealous, if she had noticed. Perses and Pasipha? eyed us, to see if we would start a war. A war? We did not care for that. Ae?tes got permission from Father to leave the halls and found us a deserted seaside. The beach was small and pale and the trees barely scrub, but to me it seemed a great, lush wilderness.
In a wink he was grown and taller than I was, but still we would walk arm in arm. Pasipha? jeered that we looked like lovers, would we be those types of gods, who coupled with their siblings? I said if she thought of it, she must have done it first. It was a clumsy insult, but Ae?tes laughed, which made me feel quick as Athena, flashing god of wit.
Later, people would say that Ae?tes was strange because of me. I cannot prove it was not so. But in my memory he was strange already, different from any other god I knew. Even as a child, he seemed to understand what others did not. He could name the monsters who lived in the sea’s darkest trenches. He knew that the herbs Zeus had poured down Kronos’ throat were called pharmaka. They could work wonders upon the world, and many grew from the fallen blood of gods.
I would shake my head. “How do you hear such things?”
“I listen.”
I had listened too, but I was not my father’s favored heir. Ae?tes was summoned to sit in on all his councils. My uncles had begun inviting him to their halls. I waited in my room for him to come back, so we could go together to that deserted shore and sit on the rocks, the sea spray at our feet. I would lean my cheek upon his shoulder and he would ask me questions that I had never thought of and could barely understand, like: How does your divinity feel?
“What do you mean?” I said.
“Here,” he said, “let me tell you how mine feels. Like a column of water that pours ceaselessly over itself, and is clear down to its rocks. Now, you.”
I tried answers: like breezes on a crag. Like a gull, screaming from its nest.
He shook his head. “No. You are only saying those things because of what I said. What does it really feel like? Close your eyes and think.”
I closed my eyes. If I had been a mortal, I would have heard the beating of my heart. But gods have sluggish veins, and the truth is, what I heard was nothing. Yet I hated to disappoint him. I pressed my hand to my chest, and after a little it did seem that I felt something. “A shell,” I said.
“Aha!” He shook his finger in the air. “A shell like a clam or like a conch?”
“A conch.”
“And what is in that shell? A snail?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Air.”
“Those are not the same,” he said. “Nothing is empty void, while air is what fills all else. It is breath and life and spirit, the words we speak.”
My brother, the philosopher. Do you know how many gods are such? Only one other that I had met. The blue sky arched above us, but I was in that old dark hall again, with its manacles and blood.
“I have a secret,” I said.
Ae?tes lifted his brows, amused. He thought it was a joke. I had never known anything he did not.
“It was before you were born,” I said.
Ae?tes did not look at me while I told him about Prometheus. His mind worked best, he always said, without distractions. His eyes were fixed on the horizon. They were sharp as the eagle he was named for, and could pry into all the cracks of things, like water pricking at a leaky hull.
When I was finished, he was silent a long time. At last he said: “Prometheus was a god of prophecy. He would have known he would be punished, and how. Yet he did it anyway.”
I had not thought of that. How even as Prometheus took up the flame for mankind, he would have known he was walking towards the eagle and that desolate, eternal crag.
Well enough, he had answered, when I had asked how he would be.
“Who else knows this?”
“No one.”
“You are sure?” His voice had an urgency to it I was not used to. “You did not tell anyone?”
“No,” I said. “Who else is there? Who would have believed me?”
“True.” He nodded once. “You must tell no one else. You should not talk about it again, even with me. You are lucky Father did not find out.”
“You think he would be so angry? Prometheus is his cousin.”
He snorted. “We are all cousins, including the Olympians. You would make Father look like a fool who cannot control his offspring. He would throw you to the crows.”
I felt my stomach clench with dread, and my brother laughed at the look on my face. “Exactly,” he said. “And for what? Prometheus is punished anyway. Let me give you some advice. Next time you’re going to defy the gods, do it for a better reason. I’d hate to see my sister turned to cinders for nothing.”
Pasipha? was contracted in marriage. She had been angling for it a long time, sitting in my father’s lap and purring of how she longed to bear a good lord children. My brother Perses had been enlisted to help her, lifting goblets to toast her nubility at every meal.
“Minos,” my father said from his feasting couch. “A son of Zeus and king of Crete.”
“A mortal?” My mother sat up. “You said it would be a god.”
“I said he would be an eternal son of Zeus, and so he is.”
Perses sneered. “Prophecy talk. Does he die or not?”
A flash in the room, searing as the fire’s heart. “Enough! Minos will rule all the other mortal souls in the afterlife. His name will go on through the centuries. It is done.”
My brother dared say no more, nor my mother. Ae?tes caught my eye, and I heard his words as if he spoke them. See? Not a good enough reason.
I expected my sister to weep over her demotion. But when I looked, she was smiling. What that meant I could not say; my mind was following a different thread. A flush had spread over my skin. If Minos were there, so would his family be, his court, his advisers, his vassals and astronomers, his cupbearers, his servants and underservants. All those creatures Prometheus had given his eternity for. Mortals.
On the wedding day, my father carried us across the sea in his golden chariot. The feast was to be held on Crete, in Minos’ great palace at Knossos. The walls were new-plastered and every surface hung with bright flowers; the tapestries glowed with richest saffron. Not only Titans would attend. Minos was a son of Zeus, and all the boot-licking Olympians would also come to pay their homage. The long colonnades filled up quickly with gods in their glory, clattering their adornments, laughing, casting glances to see who else had been invited. The thickest knot was around my father, immortals of every sort pressing in to congratulate him on his brilliant alliance. My uncles were especially pleased: Zeus was unlikely to move against us as long as the marriage held.
From her bridal dais Pasipha? glowed lush as ripe fruit. Her skin was gold, and her hair the color of sun on polished bronze. Around her crowded a hundred eager nymphs, each more desperate than the last to tell her how beautiful she looked.
I stood back, out of the crush. Titans passed before me: my aunt Selene; my uncle Nereus trailing seaweed; Mnemosyne, mother of memories, and her nine light-footed daughters. My eyes skimmed over, searching.