Stone Blind(3)

Hera sensed she did not have his undivided attention. ‘And I was worried,’ she repeated.

‘Worried?’ He knew there must be a trap, but sometimes it was just easier to jump right into it.

‘Worried about your future, my love,’ she murmured and shifted artlessly so her dress fell open a little further. Zeus tried to assess his situation. His wife was often furious and sometimes seductive, but he couldn’t remember an occasion when she had been both at once. He moved a little closer, in case this was the right thing to do.

‘My future?’ he asked, as he reached out and pulled teasingly at one of her curls. She turned her head up to face him.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I have heard such terrible things about the offspring of Metis.’ She felt him stiffen, before his fingers went back to caressing her hair. He was trying very hard. ‘It was Metis, wasn’t it? This time?’

She could not keep the edge from her voice and Zeus quickly wrapped his hand in her curls. She knew he would wrench her hair from her scalp if she wasn’t careful. ‘I was just wondering if you can really have forgotten what she once told you about her children,’ Hera sighed. ‘That she would give birth to one who would overthrow you.’

Zeus said nothing, but she knew her barb had found its mark. How could he have been so foolish? When he had overthrown his father – with Metis’s help, no less – and his father had done the same before him? How could he have forgotten what Metis herself had once told him when they were still married? How?

‘You need to act quickly,’ Hera added. ‘She told you she would have a daughter who would exceed all but her father in wisdom. And after her, a son who would be king over gods and mortals. You cannot take that risk.’

But she was speaking to the ether, because her husband had already disappeared.

*

The second time Zeus came for her, Metis did not try to hide. She knew what was coming and she knew she could not evade him. The only thing left to her was to hope that her daughter (she would have known it was a daughter even without her prophetic gifts; she could feel it) would survive. Had she known this was how it would happen, when she’d told her husband long ago that she could bear him a daughter and then a son who could overpower his father? She knew Zeus’s fears better than anyone. He would do anything to ensure that their son was never born.

Again she found herself surrounded by the brightest light, the inside of a thunderbolt. Again she felt the pressure to become smaller and smaller: panther, snake, grasshopper. But this time, there was no pain. Only a sudden, enveloping darkness as Zeus grabbed her in his huge hand. And then a strange sensation of being inside the black cloud that follows the thunderbolt. It was a darkness that would never end. Zeus had, she realized, consumed her, swallowed her whole. Now she and her daughter were inside the king of the gods with no means of escape. And even as Metis understood this, and accepted it, she felt something within her, within Zeus, resist it.





Sthenno


Sthenno was not the older sister, because they didn’t think of time in that way. But she was the one who had been less horrified when the baby was left on the shore outside their cave. Euryale had been equal parts baffled and appalled: where had the child come from? What mortal would ever dare to approach the Gorgons’ lair to abandon it there? Sthenno had no answers to her questions, and for a while, they both stared at the creature and wondered what to do.

‘Could we eat it?’ asked Euryale. Sthenno thought for a moment.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I suppose we could. It is quite small, though.’ Her sister nodded glumly. ‘You can have it,’ Sthenno said. ‘I already . . .’ She didn’t need to finish. Her sister could see the pile of cattle bones lying beside her.

The sisters did not eat from hunger: Gorgons were immortal, they had no need for food. But their sharp tusks, their powerful wings, their strong legs: all were designed for the hunt. And if you were going to hunt, you might as well eat your kill. They looked at the baby again. It lay on its back in the sand, its head propped up on a tuft of grass. Sthenno did not need her sister to say the words out loud: it looked like a deeply unsatisfying kill. It wasn’t running away, it hadn’t even tried to hide in the longer grass.

‘Where could it have come from?’ Euryale asked again. She raised her huge head, her bulbous eyes searching the rocks above them. There was no sign of anyone.

‘It must have come from the water,’ Sthenno replied. ‘Mortals can’t find their way without divine assistance. And even if they could, they wouldn’t dare to come here. The baby was brought to us from the sea.’

Euryale nodded, beating her wings. She scanned the ocean in every direction. No vessel could have sailed out of sight in the time it had taken the two of them to find the baby. They had heard a sound and it had roused them and they had left the cave together. No ship, no swimmer could be invisible to them so quickly.

‘I don’t know,’ Sthenno said, hearing her sister’s thoughts. ‘But look.’ She pointed at the baby and now Euryale noticed the circle of damp sand beneath the child and the seaweed-strewn trail leading back to the water’s edge.

They sat in silence, thinking.

‘It couldn’t have been left there by . . .’ Euryale glanced at her sister, not wanting to feel stupid.

Sthenno shrugged her broad shoulders, her wings catching the edge of the breeze. ‘I don’t know who else could have done it,’ she replied. ‘It must have been Phorcys.’