Wearing the lion, p.27
Wearing the Lion, page 27
Spittle flies from her cracked teeth and spatters my chin. I let it stay, and let her yell at me. “Let him be what he wants!”
“You’ve been with him. Don’t you see that I’m guiding him to what he wants? To the truth?”
“No,” she says, stamping a foot so hard one of the talons on her feet snaps off and skitters off across the marble. “You’re bragging around the world about destroying him. I know you’re spreading those lies about yourself. Lies about you as a wicked queen.”
“They’re not lies. Not really.”
“Stop being what you aren’t.”
I want to explain, and my words all seize up in my throat. They strangle me. The excuse that I’m playing the villain for Heracles’s good. That I’m righting a wrong. That I deserve to have the world hate me for what I’ve done. Self-deprecation soothes guilt, but only temporarily.
Granny can see through it. As I wrestle with my words, she gets even closer, eyes so furiously wide.
“I know what you really are. You’re better than this.”
“I’m not—” I can’t finish. Just her eyes on me chokes me up, and I’m shaking down to my ankles. That scorn from this wonderful woman whom I wronged, scorn in the shape of defending me. I don’t deserve this.
“Stop making us what we aren’t!”
I can’t stand it. I fall to my knees, landing on her broken talon. The heels of my hands press into my eyes, and tears spill down the veins of my wrists. How long have I been crying and not knowing it? I open my mouth to argue, and all I can do is sob. I’m suffocating on stupid feelings that should be beneath me. I force myself to pull it together, and just fall apart worse, clutching at my heart. Fuck. Fuck my weakness.
“Stop!”
I don’t know how. I’m blinded, I can barely hear anything over my own insipid wailing. I can’t make myself be strong anymore. I fucking killed that man’s children, and the weapon I used is telling me to be good to myself. It’s me who should be banished from Olympos. What am I doing?
“There.”
Granny’s voice again, except not at all again. One word, one syllable, calm as a dead ember in a doused fire. I don’t know what to do with it.
I don’t do anything. Is that what she wanted?
Her long talons tickle along my shoulders, and then through my hair. I’m ready for whatever she’s going to do, no matter how she attacks me, no matter how it hurts.
And I’m wrong. I’m not ready for her to hold my head to the rough skin of her chest, and to cradle me. Her chin rests atop my head, and she hums such an infectious tune that I know how everyone she’s ever possessed must feel. You can’t resist. I can’t. For this moment, I stop.
“Don’t be what you aren’t.”
My chin trembles so much it takes a while to get the words out. “Thank you, Granny.”
I missed her so badly, and now she’s studying my eyes. One murky claw comes up, and it brushes the lower lid of my right eye, like she’s gathering morning dew from a lotus.
“Granny?” I can’t stop myself from asking. “What are you now? That you choose to be?”
“Tired. Very tired. It is not easy being a bull.”
Thankfully Até sniffles, off in her eavesdropping corner, and that gives me permission to do the same. I gesture to the marble rim behind Granny. The endless bench where, once upon a time, we were inseparable.
“I am tired, too,” I tell her. “Can we be tired together? Until he gets here?”
Glowing eyes narrow, the only two sources of light in my world, threatening to go out. Studying me. Knowing that wasn’t a royal command. It was a request.
We sit together a long time, and Até joins us, and we talk about nothing, forever. This is all I could ever ask to be.
Alcides 40
Of all the impossible things I have done, finding Atlas is the easiest. I simply look where I have always seen him in the sky, and then I walk in that direction. It’s a long path, by road and field and sea. Every day of it, I can tell Logy and Boar are waiting for me to say something I’m not ready to say.
This has to be it. This is how I clear your name, Auntie Hera. How I find the end.
For such an enormous being, Atlas lives atop a still more enormous mountain. You would think one so tall could reach the sky from lower down. His mountain is too steep, from all the pieces that have broken off in the ages of adjusting his footing. I have to leave my friends behind and climb alone, feeling Purrseus pacing below, wishing he could help me.
“He was one of the most cunning generals in the war against the Olympians,” says Logy. “Be wary. Don’t let him fool you into something you’ll regret.”
Three days and two nights it takes, with the sun growing closer each dawn. Bitter rocks rake at my palms, until little skin is left on them. As I wrap strips of hide around my fingers, I catch myself wishing the climb could last longer. There’s a dread in seeing that titan grow closer in my vision. That on the second morning I can see his blue thighs and knees. And it’s not for fear of his wrath, but what he’ll enable me to do. To have to choose.
I start to pray to you, and physically jerk away from it, nearly falling back down the mountain. As though praying to you is an accidental touch of a boiling pot.
You’re innocent. Why am I afraid to ask you for help?
Then I stand before him, directly below his mighty chin. The sky has never seemed so far away as when I stand beneath Atlas, taking in the height of him, the measure of what lies between me and the heavens. And still it is too close. The skies surpass all the treasures of all the kings Papa Zeus has ever blessed, home of every star someone has ever wondered about, like uncounted jewels that fell in the wrong direction, up to a better home than mortals know. Sunless night, twinkling eternal. This close, I can see the beginnings of dawn, and of every day and night the Fates ever sewed into the fabric of our times.
Atlas has the figure of a man, made too great for any set of eyes to see the whole of him. His neck is bent so that the ceiling of creation presses down across his shoulders, his upper back, and his hair. Hands rest with familiarity on the eternity up there. Limbs thick with muscle, his body hairless and flesh gone blue, as though taking on the hues that drip down to him from the world above. Only his beard and nails differ, being the black of the deepest bruises. Only his beard and nails, and his eyes.
Those great bruise-colored eyes find me before I finish my ascent.
“Great Atlas,” I greet him, “I am a son of Zeus, once known as Heracles. I come to beg your hospitality.”
“I know you.”
His voice sounds so weary of speaking, even though I can’t imagine he’s had much conversation up here. I want to ask if I’ve bothered him, but another question falls out of my mouth first.
“How do you know me?”
“My eyes see as wide as the sky.” He says it, still sounding exhausted with having to utter any words at all. “I have seen many of your adventures. Although even if I tried to ignore you, your melee with Poseidon’s great white bull shook the earth even here. That is why night came earlier that day.”
I never thought about how earthquakes would threaten Atlas’s work.
“I’m sorry for the trouble I caused. Thank you for keeping the sky up in those circumstances.”
His bruise-colored eyes squeeze shut. “Gratitude does not belong on this mountain.”
It would be insulting to ask if he is sick. I can’t know the toll it has taken on him to do this great task for so long. Reflexively, I almost offer to take the sky from him for a moment, so he can at least rub his eyes and stretch.
He says, “I know you’ve come to me for a favor.”
“How did you guess?”
“If you were here to kill me, you would have tripped me by now.”
Well, he’s called me out. I can’t avoid it. “Great Atlas, who holds the sky aloft so all life may continue underneath it, I do need a favor. I seek to know something not meant to be known by mortal minds, knowable only through biting into the golden apples from Hera’s garden. I believe you know where it is.”
“I do. I fought there once, in the midst of other mistakes.” He opens one eye, just a crack, glimpsing toward the north. “I can see it now. No ship yet built can sail that far.”
“My wisest counsel tells me that those waters are thick with dragons and older creatures. That no hero ever blessed by Poseidon himself has survived the journey, so bitter is it.”
He closes that sliver of his eye. “I haven’t seen one do it. I can say that much.”
“I’ll do whatever you ask,” I tell him, and a cold part of me hopes he’ll ask for years of labor. “If you will simply retrieve me one apple.”
Atlas breathes. His ribs creak like the beams of a ship, and his chest expands like he might blow the whole countryside up to the north of the world. Behind his lids, his eyes move. Whatever memories he watches, his brow creases until cities could be built in them.
Eventually he speaks. “I had assumed you were you doing all of this for some great love. Some family. Was I right?”
That knot in my chest could snap, and leave my limbs loose for the rest of my life. It could break me. It takes me too long to recover my breath.
I say, “It is for family that I couldn’t protect. I need to get them justice.”
Out pours Atlas’s breath, his belly going shallow, a hissing sound like the sea draining out through the bottom of the world. I recognize that pain, because he’s recognizing mine, isn’t he?
I don’t inhale again until he does.
I tell him, “I will hold the sky for you, until you return. If Papa Zeus is angered by it, I will let him take it out on me.”
Heat wells in my cheeks saying that. There are no shackles on his ankles. There is not a single chain on Atlas’s mountain. To some measure that I don’t understand, he has to be here of his own will.
“It is heavier than it looks,” he says, “but still harder to let go of.”
That’s all he says before lowering the sky onto me. I spread my shoulders, standing at the center of the mountain, and think that all night will fall over the world and crush the birds in the valleys below.
Not a single star falls from the heavens. The world beyond Atlas’s mountain is as tranquil and conflicting as it ever was, witless that anything has shifted. Moonlight continues to paint errant ripples across the sea, illuminating tides and night fishers.
It is up here where things change. Ribbons of celestial lights tickle the hairs on my neck, and inexplicable winds chill my spine. I push my palms up into the sky, finding no hardness, nothing to grab onto, and yet nothing falls. My legs start to buckle, despite it feeling to my arms as though this could weigh nothing. It is a beautiful weight that defies brawn’s understanding.
Atlas is gone, out into the north. I can’t lift my head to follow his path, nor even to look upon the stars that rest above my scalp. It’s just me and the beautiful weight now.
When all this started, Auntie Hera, did you . . .
No.
I fidget my big toe against a pebble, something that has likely spent the last hundred years under Atlas’s heel. Something I can pay attention to. Some part of the pebble is rough but every part I can see is round.
I cannot reach for it, or look closer. The sky demands everything. I move a hint of my right shoulder, and instantly it presses down, ready to crush all the world. I strain my back to stay straight, to keep my arms wide. The chill of the world above eats at the flesh of my back.
I wonder which stars are digging into me, the ones I cannot see. Were these constellations overhead the night my sons burned?
I try not to think about it, and immediately instead wonder if they were overhead the night Megara left me. Or were they overhead the night after I met her again, in Thrace, and found her more comforted by my nephew than by my touch?
How many times have I been wanting? How little do they think of me?
How many times have these stars watched me pray to you, Auntie Hera?
I can’t help myself. I’m sorry. I want to do anything other than dwell on what the stars have seen, but there is nowhere left to walk, or sail, or climb. No monster to wrestle. No one to seek or help or consult.
The stars don’t make any noise. They make no distractions.
This is Ares’s fault, somehow, isn’t it? He had to really be behind everything, and at the last instant he fooled the orb into showing you?
It’s Apollo. It’s Artemis. It’s anybody else I offended in some way that made them come after my family.
How little do you think of me? When you hear me trying to believe it’s someone other than you?
What am I supposed to do, really? Storm Olympos with a full army, slay all your worshippers, and then break you in my father’s marble halls? In what way is that the answer to my sons never growing older? Generations of Theban heroes murdered villains in revenge and it never helped a single victim.
Then what? I say this was you and I do nothing? Am I to shackle you and stand behind you for the rest of time, until you remember that you are the protector of families? Pull on bonds of titan flesh and hair whenever you move to harm a family?
Or am I to somehow remind you that you are the one who looks after mourning parents, and who should care for the hurt? Who should follow all my labors with sympathy, and wish only to put sun on my path and wind in my sails? To remind you of all the virtues you should have?
“Give it back.”
Atlas’s words drag me out of my thought, and I bang my head against the sky hard enough that I may have knocked tomorrow’s sun loose. The titan is nearly up on the summit, crouching over me, eyes the size of fortresses staring into me. A hand reaches, empty, no golden fruit in his grasp. He wants the sky back.
“What you wanted is at your feet. Now give me back my sky.”
He pushes his way up onto the top of the mountain, hands greedily fondling along ribbons of waning evening light. The sun is nowhere to be seen, but its glow is starting to emerge somewhere in the east. Atlas cannot bend his neck fast enough to get under the ceiling and shoulder it all.
With his help to keep it all aloft, I’m able to glance down and see the golden apple between my feet. It is lustrous in the gloom, with a golden stem, and four little dimples at its base. The titan carried it here unbruised.
Rather than reach for the apple, I touch one spot on his enormous heel. “Do you want me to hold it a while longer? You’ve done this so long.”
“You know better.”
He lifts it until I cannot reach a single shred of night, adjusting his arms to spread out the burden. Everywhere he trudges, the mountain below has shallow craters. I notice that where my own feet rested, there too are worn deep footprints.
“I’m not ready to face what I’ll do when I’m done with the sky. Go. Get out of my domain before you are the same.”
I pick up the apple, cool as a metal goblet. The rind is hard, and too light. As though there is nothing inside. Knowledge might well be as baffling to brawn as the sky.
“Eat it,” Atlas says. “Learn what you want. And then act on that knowledge, before you can’t.”
I turn that tiny object in my hands. The golden apple truly feels like it doesn’t belong in our world. Like it can’t have my answer under its rind.
But the answer isn’t in the apple, is it?
Because I already know the truth, Auntie Hera.
I ask him, “Are there questions you’re afraid to answer?”
His silence tells me there are. It’s too quiet up here to avoid the sound of guilt.
Lacking anything better to use, I rub the apple on my hair. Then I set it inside one of my tiny footprints, beside all his titanic ones.
“Someday, I’ll return to you. And we’ll get your answers, like you got me mine. I’ll help you eat this apple, if that’s what it takes.”
His bruise-colored eyes are closed. He doesn’t watch me when I kiss his ankle, or when I leave. But I see those eyes watching me, when I return down to the bottom of the mountain and leave. I know Atlas is watching me.
Hera 41
You know it’s me.
You knew it before you held that apple. You’ve known it since before I hurled the Bull of Crete at you. I think you’ve known it since the first prayer you made where you didn’t mention my name.
I won’t pretend I’m worse than I am.
But I won’t pretend I’m innocent, either.
You know it’s me, and you still don’t want to go through with this. You won’t return to your wife until you’re done with me. You know your whole life is waiting for you. Every family you might create.
All the potential futures you have are waiting for you to climb my mountain. At the base of Mount Olympos, standing in the tall grasses, surrounded by gnats and sunshine, you can see the climb. It’s no taller than Atlas. It’s no taller than the sky you held aloft.
Come on.
But you can’t. Your friends ask you, and counsel you, and promise to be there in the climb.
You reach a hand to the rocks, knowing your fingers can sink right into them. There’s nothing you can’t climb. You could hurl yourself upward and be here in moments.
And you flinch, because there are things neither of us can bear to do. You flinch, and you turn away. One foot lifts, ready to step away from Olympos, to hesitate and think this over, as though you haven’t been thinking this over your whole life.
There’s something you might have heard: the only entrance to Hades’s underworld lies below Olympos. Nobody can find it because it only appears when an Olympian beckons it.
As you take that first step away from my domain, I beckon. You drop straight down into the abyss, into the domain of the dead. The hole is open for the blink of an eye, full of ash and the growling of a three-headed dog that does not like unwanted company. You’ll hate me for this, but you need to.
When you climb out of there, you won’t stop climbing. I’ll see you soon.
