A Thousand Ships(36)

It was perhaps this rejection, more than the prophecy, which had persuaded Zeus to act. He had insisted on Thetis, against her will and beneath her status, marrying a mortal man. Hera could not even remember his name, some Greek king from whichever island they were currently on. It was impossible to keep track of every corner of the archipelago. If they didn’t have a temple with a large, flattering statue of her inside it, Hera made no effort to remember them at all.

But the prophecy was the reason which was being murmured behind their hands: Zeus had been told, so the gods were saying, that Thetis’ son would one day be greater than his father. It was what every man should wish for, and what every god should dread. In particular, the god who occupied the highest throne on Olympus after overthrowing his own father, Cronos, who had once overthrown his father, Ouranos. Fathering a son who would be marked with such a great and alarming destiny was not a risk that the all-powerful Zeus was willing to take. So it was decided that Thetis’ son would be half-mortal, confining his greatness to be relative to that of a mere man. The risk was cauterized, and Thetis’ unhappiness with the marital arrangements made no difference to anyone but herself.

Aphrodite, on the other hand, saw every wedding as a small defeat. She prized love, but not the marital kind. Never the marital kind. What kind of love was that: companionship? The precursor to children? It was all she could do not to snort. What was companionship, when you could feel all-consuming passion? Who would not exchange a husband for a lover who would thrill rather than comfort? Who would not prefer to have her child slink unnoticed from a room if it meant her lover could sneak in through another door? It was impossible to believe that anyone would choose marital love over the kind of single-minded desire which Aphrodite called her own. People always said they prized their spouses, their offspring (indeed Aphrodite had a son of her own, whom she liked perfectly well), but she knew the truth. In the small hours of the morning, when men and women whispered their secret prayers, they were to her. They begged not for health and long life, as they did during daylight hours. They begged for the blinding, deafening force of lust to be visited upon them, and they begged for reciprocation. Everything else – wealth, power, status – was just furniture placed around the thing they truly wanted, to obstruct or disguise it. And that had nothing to do with marriage. You could see it today, in that poor fool’s face, as he gazed across at his bride-to-be, desperately trying to make eye contact and failing. He knew what it was to feel that desire. And he knew that marriage would do nothing to quench it. He would take Thetis to his bed but her disdain would corrupt any pleasure he might have felt with her. A nymph could love a mortal (Aphrodite ran through a brief mental list of nymphs who had done so: Merope, Callirhoe, Oenone . . .) but not Thetis, who showed nothing but contempt for this Greek.

For Athene, arriving late behind Aphrodite, weddings were always a source of irritation. The grey-eyed goddess was not as tall as Hera, but she usually wore a helmet tilted back on her head to give her the height she did not possess. Athene loathed standing close to Aphrodite, who made her feel like she was nothing but elbows and knees. Aphrodite’s hair flowed into perfect locks which stroked her back, her peplos clung to her body as though it were wet. Athene looked down to see her own dress – hanging shapelessly from shoulder to ankle – and wondered how Aphrodite could look so different in what was essentially the same garment. Aphrodite always seemed strangely, desirably liquid: her eyes were the dark blue-green of the sea, her skin smelled faintly of salt. She curved beneath her dress like a dolphin or a seal, arcing through the surface of water. Athene wondered how it was possible to despise someone and desire them at the same time. She longed both to edge away from the goddess who caused her such discomfort, and to be enveloped by her. She gripped her spear more tightly, reminding everyone that her passion was for the cerebral and the martial. Men and women alike prayed to her for her skills and her wisdom. They did not pray to her with their yearnings for love or children or better health. They prayed to her for advice in their wars, for her strategy, for her deftness. So she carried her spear and wore her helmet, the better to convey that she had no interest in the things which enchanted most women. Like weddings. And she dismissed the thought of the Ithacan – a clever young man with a complex destiny ahead of him – who roused in her the feelings which other women spoke of when their menfolk were absent. Odysseus had eyes only for his new bride, his Penelope, at the moment. But Athene was clever in more than just matters of war, and she knew he would roam one day. All she had to do was make sure that she was in the appropriate place at the appropriate time. In, if required, the appropriate disguise.

The three goddesses had resigned themselves to a day of boredom and irritation: every Olympian was present for the wedding, they could not slip away. But as her fellow nymphs swarmed around Thetis, and Peleus looked at the thronging immortals wondering just how far out of his depth he was, each goddess quietly cursed the marriage. The distaste was largely mutual: for her part, Thetis would have preferred none of them be present. She would have preferred not to be marrying Peleus at all, but he had struck some bargain with Zeus, and the sea-nymph knew better than to issue a flat refusal in this situation. She would take advantage of Zeus’ guilt (for surely the god must feel something like remorse, pairing her with this clod of a man) in the future, when she needed something. She would not forget.

But if she had to marry today, she could have done without the glowering face of Hera, who would look so much better if she would simply erase the perpetual expression of disapproval from her face. She could have been perfectly happy if Athene – accompanied everywhere by some squawking owl, as though she lived in some oversized nest – had chosen to absent herself. And no woman, immortal or not, wanted the sulking, pouting Aphrodite at her wedding. Every eye – even that of Thetis’ groom – was drawn in her direction. Thetis had arrived in her most beautiful sea-green peplos, and her husband-to-be had scarcely noticed, so busy had he been gazing at the foam-born goddess. Thetis longed for the three of them to disappear into the sea, but her wishes held no weight today.