I fought on and he grew. That is all I can say. He calmed, and that calmed me, or maybe it was the opposite. I did not stare so much, think so often of scalding myself. He smiled for the first time and began to sleep in his cradle. He went a whole morning without screaming, and I could work in my garden. Clever child, I said. You were testing me, weren’t you? He looked up from the grass at the sound of my voice and smiled again.
His mortality was always with me, constant as a second beating heart. Now that he could sit up, reach and grasp, all the ordinary objects of my house showed their hidden teeth. The boiling pots on the fire seemed to leap for his fingers. The blades slipped from the table a hairsbreadth from his head. If I set him down, a wasp would come droning, a scorpion scuttle from some hidden crevice and raise its tail. The sparks from the fire always seemed to pop in arcs towards his tender flesh. Each danger I turned aside in time, for I was never more than a step from him, but it only made me more afraid to close my eyes, to leave him for an instant. The woodpile would topple on him. A wolf who had been gentle her whole life would snap. I would wake to see a viper reared over his crib, jaws wide.
It is a sign, I think, of how addled I was with love and fear and no sleep, that it took me so long to realize: that stinging insects should not come in battalions, and ten falling pots in a morning was beyond even my tired clumsiness. To remember how, in the long agony of my labor, Eileithyia had been kept from me. To wonder if, thwarted, the god that had done it might try again.
I slung Telegonus against me and walked to the pool that lay halfway up the peak. There were frogs in it, silver minnows and water-skimmers. The weeds were thickly tangled. I could not say why it was water that I wanted at that moment. Perhaps some relic of my naiad blood.
I touched my finger to the pool’s surface. “Does a god seek to harm my son?”
The pool shivered, and an image of Telegonus formed. He lay wrapped in a wool shroud, gray and lifeless. I started back, gasping, and the vision broke to pieces. For a moment I could do nothing but breathe and press my cheek to Telegonus’ head. His faint wisps of hair were worn away at the back with endless fidgeting in his cot.
I put my trembling hand to the water again. “Who is it?”
The water showed only the sky overhead. “Please,” I begged. But no answer came, and I felt the panic climbing my throat. I had assumed it was some nymph or river-god who threatened us. Tricks of insects and fire and animals were just at the limits of a lesser divinity’s natural power. I had even wondered if it was my mother, in a fit of jealousy that I might bear new children when she could not. But this god had the strength to escape my vision. There were only a handful of such deities in all the world. My father. My grandfather, perhaps. Zeus and a few of the greater Olympians.
I clutched Telegonus against me. Moly could ward off a spell, but not a trident, not a lightning bolt. I would fall to those powers like a stalk of wheat.
I closed my eyes and fought back the strangling fear. I must be clear and clever. I must remember all the tricks that lesser gods have used against greater since the beginning of time. Had not Odysseus once told me a story about Achilles’ sea-nymph mother, who had found a way to bargain with Zeus? But he had not said what that way was. And in the end, her son had died.
My breath felt like sawblades in my chest. I must learn who it is, I told myself. That is first. I cannot guard against shadows. Give me something to face and fight.
Back at the house, I made a small fire in the hearth, though we did not need it. The night was warm, summer waxing to autumn, but I wanted the smell of cedar in the air, and the tang of my herbs which I had sprinkled over the flames. I was aware of a tingling on my skin. Any other time I would have taken it for a change in the weather, but now it seemed curdled with malice. My neck bristled. I paced the stone floor, cradling Telegonus against me until at last, exhausted from his wailing, he slept. It was what I had waited for. I laid him in his crib, then drew it close to the fire and set my lions and wolves around it. They could not stop a god, but most divinities are cowards. Claws and teeth might buy me a little time.
I stood before the hearth, my staff in my hand. The air was thick with a listening silence.
“You who would try to kill my child, come forth. Come forth, and speak to my face. Or do you only do your murdering from the shadows?”
The room was utterly still. I heard nothing but Telegonus’ breaths and the blood in my veins.
“I need no shadows.” The voice sliced the air. “And it is not for such as you to question my purposes.”
She struck the room, tall and straight and sudden-white, a talon of lightning in the midnight sky. Her horse-hair helmet brushed the ceiling. Her mirror armor threw off sparks. The spear in her hand was long and thin, its keen edge limned in firelight. She was burning certainty, and before her all the shuffling and stained dross of the world must shrink away. Zeus’ bright and favorite child, Athena.
“What I desire will come to pass. There is no mitigation.” That voice again, like shearing metal. I had stood in the presence of great gods before: my father and grandfather, Hermes, Apollo. Yet her gaze pierced me as theirs had not. Odysseus had said once she was like a blade honed to a hair’s fineness, so delicate you would not even know you had been cut, while beat by beat your blood was emptying on the floor.
She extended one immaculate hand. “Give me the child.”
All the warmth in the room had fled. Even the fire popping beside me seemed only a painting on the wall.
“No.”
Her eyes were braided silver and stone gray. “You would stand against me?”
The air had thickened. I felt as though I gasped for breath. On her chest shone her famous aigis, leather armor fringed with golden threads. It was said to be made from the skin of a Titan that she had flayed and tanned herself. Her flashing eyes promised: just so will I wear you, if you do not submit and beg for mercy. My tongue withered, and I felt myself trembling. But if there was one thing I knew in all the world, it was that there was no mercy among gods. I twisted my skin between my fingers. The sharp pain steadied me.
“I would,” I said. “Though it hardly seems a fair battle, you against an unarmed nymph.”
“Give him to me willingly, and there need not be a battle. I will make sure it is quick. He will not suffer.”
Do not listen to your enemy, Odysseus had once told me. Look at them. It will tell you everything.
I looked. Armed and armored, she was, from head to foot, helmet, spear, aigis, greaves. A terrifying vision: the goddess of war, ready for battle. But why had she assembled such a panoply against me, who knew nothing of combat? Unless there was something else she feared, something that made her feel somehow stripped and weak.
Instinct carried me forward, the thousand hours I had spent in my father’s halls, and with Odysseus polymetis, man of so many wiles.
“Great goddess, all my life I have heard the stories of your power. So I must wonder. You have wanted my child dead for some time, and yet he lives. How can that be?”
She had begun swelling like a snake, but I pressed on.
“I can only think, then, that you are not permitted. That something prevents you. The Fates, for their purposes, do not allow you to kill him outright.”
At that word, Fates, her eyes flashed. She was a goddess of argument, born from the bright, relentless mind of Zeus. If she was forbidden something, even by the three gray goddesses themselves, she would not simply submit. She would set about parsing the constraint down to its atoms, and try to eke a way through.
“So that is why you have worked as you have. With wasps and falling pots.” I regarded her. “How such low means must have galled your warrior spirit.”
Her hand glowed white on her spear-shaft. “Nothing is changed. The child must die.”
“And so he will, when he is a hundred.”
“Tell me, how long do you think your witcheries will stand against me?”