Stone Blind(51)
If Athene was annoyed by the way Poseidon shoved his way in front of her, grabbing at what she wanted, she didn’t show it. Which, let’s be quite honest, means she wasn’t all that annoyed, because she doesn’t often hide her feelings from us. Perhaps she knew she just needed to be patient. Again, not always one of her strengths but she can’t bear Poseidon and she loves to win, so she held her temper.
He made exactly the kind of tedious, showy gesture you would expect from a god who demands everything but doesn’t know why. He swept up to the acropolis, stood there for a moment to make sure everyone was looking at him, and slammed his trident into the ground.
The Olympian gods were trying to pay attention because Zeus had only just charged them with the task of deciding who should take Attica. Even Apollo and Artemis weren’t yawning and that takes some effort. But when a new sea bubbled up beneath the trident (quite a long way beneath it, naturally: it takes a sea god to decide he should try and form an ocean at the highest point on a plain. But not everyone can be gifted in the same way), the archer gods began nudging each other and sniggering. Was that it? A little sea?
We felt much the same way ourselves, truth be told.
Poseidon spread his arms and shook his trident above his head. One of us believes he shouted, ‘Behold!’ but the rest of us are choosing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Anyway, we all beheld his new pond, whether he demanded it or not. It’s just that most of us weren’t wildly impressed.
Athene usually has quite a placid expression: you’ve probably noticed it on her statues, have you? She looks so calm and patient, spear in hand, helmet tilted back at that characteristic angle. You may not know this about her, but that is how she likes to appear no matter what is going on in her heart. How do we know? How do you think we know? She tells us a lot more than she tells her human petitioners and priests. She knows we support her and besides, we are excellent listeners.
Only if you knew Athene as well as we do, and were as well-placed to observe her as we are, only then might you have seen what we saw: a tiny flicker of scorn crossed her face. She had nothing to fear from this opponent.
She watched Poseidon sink into his small waves and she turned her attention to the acropolis where he had been standing moments before. She looked at the bare dry earth, and she saw that it was lonely. She saw the animals who wanted shade, and the humans who yearned for a new crop, one they would treasure above all else. She stared at the retreating sea and she said nothing.
And then she glanced at the other Olympians, who were mildly interested to see what she would do to rival Poseidon’s bid. And all of whom were perplexed when she kneeled down to plant a tree.
How could a tree rival an ocean, they might have thought? But then, how could a god think anything so foolish? Attica was not short of oceans, but it was missing something, and Athene had seen what the land required. It needed the sound of the wind rustling slender green-silver leaves. It needed an elegant pale trunk, and it needed bright green fruit.
In short, it needed us.
Andromeda
Andromeda glanced to her left, and felt the strange sensation of seeing her own hand but not really believing it was hers. Because why would her left hand be bound to a tree? Looking to her right, she saw the same thing. A roped hand which seemed to be connected to her, but couldn’t be hers because two days earlier she had been sitting opposite her father in the palace, discussing what was wrong with her sulking mother. And up until that point she had been a highly favoured princess of a wealthy country, which had never involved being fastened to a pair of dead trees, for any reason.
She wanted to scream and cry but there were so many people watching her. She did not want to humiliate herself any further, so she breathed in slowly and decided she would walk her way through the last two days, pace by pace. She would do it silently, and above all she would not look down. No matter what.
A breath out. She tried to remember which she had heard first: the pounding of leather on stone as men came racing through the palace halls? Or the terrified screaming as the waves pursued them? Or the sound of the water itself, suddenly and inexplicably filling the land between the sea and her home? The shouts and screams, she concluded. Then the sandalled feet. Then the angry tide. She felt a matching surge of fear rush through her, and tried to maintain her composure. Perhaps it had been the sea she heard first, she thought. But she hadn’t been able to identify the deep rumbling sound – deafening and out of place – so she had not realized until afterwards.
A breath in. And then there had been the panic, the hard bright contagion that filled the palace faster than water, faster than running, screaming men. The water was briskly destructive, smashing everything it touched. And yet, when it licked her feet as she sat on the roof watching it rise with a fascinated horror, it was warm and soft. She had expected to die alongside her parents, in the moments that followed. But as quickly as it invaded her home, the water retreated again.
A breath out. It did not retreat far. The palace was left with piles of splintered wood, fractured ceramics, sodden, stinking fabric, and a thin jagged crust of salt crystallizing along the walls. But the palace was the least-affected part of their kingdom, certainly of the area that spanned Andromeda’s home to what had once been the coastline. Much of this land was now underwater. Homes, livestock, people: all had been lost to the encroaching greed of Poseidon.
A breath in. Of course, they had tried to placate him. They had rushed to his temple, which the water had not even touched (skirting round the base of the hill on which it stood). Cepheus had given his priests whatever they asked for: cattle were in short supply now, but they sacrificed ten to the sea god straightaway. The king could hardly have done anything else, given that his surviving subjects were looking upon a vast plain of water that had swallowed their loved ones alive. What does the god say? Andromeda heard the panic in her father’s voice again. A man to whom everything had come easily was not made to deal with a crisis on this scale. He was dwarfed by it, emasculated.