Chapter Three

My mother did not find it in herself to hold me for long. This was my first lesson. How feeble a word ‘love’ was, when Aphrodite, the embodiment of romantic love, didn’t hold a thimble of the maternal kind. I can see her before me, her hair draped on stained sheets, the red of her curls mixing with blood. The pink skin of her nose scrunched up, the scene an insult to her vanity, this greater a pain than childbirth. “Another boy,” she scoffs. My first cries were reason enough to hand me to an attendant, one of the nymphs of mount Ida of Anatolia, where I was sent to.

The rich hills and coastline that lay before mount Ida were home to a variety of minor deities. Light-footed dryads scaled the trees, curious birds picking seeds out of the palms of their hands. I remember one whose home had been a great oak tree, who often wore an aesculapian snake around her neck, the dark brown scales complimenting her olive skin. Sparkling children of sea divinities wrestled and played in the bay beneath, each one more luminous than the next, catching the great sheets of light the moon threw onto the surf. It was said that some gods had the power to draw new constellations across the heavens, to ask Selene to paint dots of silver in the dark as she drove her shining horses through the night.

A dove cooed its soft song through my window. I did not rise, so as not to scare her off. Yet when drowsiness threatened to take me back to sleep, I shuffled off my blanket. I caught a glimpse of her wing as she flew away, leaving her perch, an elm branch, swaying ever so slightly. I sat up, and folded my legs over the smooth edge of the bed. My room did not have a door, the cave’s entrance was draped off by a pair of linen curtains that diffused the light, softly swinging in the breeze. I could faintly discern the sound of chatter amidst the plashing of the spring. I peered out. The sun bathed Oenone, my adoptive aunt, in her morning rays. She was rinsing her apron on a nearby rock, talking to her sister, Hesperia. They were both naiads, daughters of Cebren, the river that looped around mount Ida’s foothills. The two nurtured all whose life was tied to the river. They coaxed roots to hold the soil in place and kept the reeds that spilled out of the banks in check. They taught kingfishers where the best vantage points were and cormorants to dry their feathers. They nursed bats with broken wings back to health. I even saw them mend a cracked egg once.

I waved to them. “Morning!”

“Good morning sweet” Hesperia replied. Oenone smiled. She wanted me to come along with her today, to show me a new stretch of the forest. It had been a handful of years since I was left to the care of my aunts, who’d always teased me about my wanting to know how long exactly. Though my years weren’t numbered, I had always loved celebrating the changing of the seasons, cataloging the moving stars. Few divinities were ever interested in the passage of time. We would never truly meet the earth. We would stay evergreen, unchanging and constant, until great Khaos enveloped us again.